A month went by and Finn’s mother came home and his father left.
A few days later, the word went around that Jack Penney, the baker, had gone too, gone west to be a big machinery mechanic, and that, before he did, he used up every ingredient he had making dozens and dozens of pies and tarts and muffins and breads and buns and had left them all out in his shop with a note on the door that said:
Please Help Yourselves.
Pretty much everyone on the island came to the bakery after that. It was like a party; people came from miles away, mostly on foot, boats or trucks, but some even on horses. There were more voices and people in the same space than Finn could ever remember. Martha carried home two dark loaves, one big and one small, a partridgeberry tart and a bag of crescent rolls; Cora carried six oat-and-cranberry cookies, three white baguettes and a box of cinnamon buns; and Finn carried a blueberry pie, six dinner buns and one of each of the four kinds of cookies. After everyone had gone, they left the bakery door open so animals and birds could come in and finish the leftovers.
• • •
Cora spent most of her time in their neighbors’ empty house, reading travel books from the library boat or making up slow songs on her violin. Finn wasn’t allowed in, but he liked to sit on the front step and listen. Usually Cora left the sitting-room window open a little bit so he could talk to her through it. Sometimes he brought his accordion too, if it wasn’t raining, in case she wanted to play together, but she never played songs he knew.
What are you reading about today? Finn hooked his fingers over the windowsill’s lip; there was just enough space for them.
Mexico, said Cora. She pressed the book up to the glass so Finn could see.
Happy Backpacker Guides Presents:
MEXICO!
1967 EDITION
There were some laughing people in old-fashioned clothes dancing on a sand beach on the cover.
They sometimes eat chocolate on chicken there, she said.
Wow, said Finn.
Yep, said Cora. It’s way better than here.
Is it?
Yep. I hate it here, said Cora.
You do?
Yep.
Not everything. Not all of it, said Finn. You like the empty houses.
I like them better than ours. That doesn’t mean I really like them.
You like rock jumping. And copying pans. And summer swimming, and—
I only like doing those things with people, said Cora. With friends.
But I— said Finn, then stopped. Anyway, he said, they’ll be back.
They won’t.
They will.
I bet you they won’t.
I bet they will.
They put five dollars on it, even though neither of them had five dollars.
How long till they’re back? asked Cora.
A year, said Finn.
Hm, said Cora.
They shook hands through the open window, then Cora went back to the neighbors’ sofa and opened her book.
Want to play “The Fish of the Sea”? asked Finn.
Not right now.
OK.
Finn sat on the step, watching the road to see if anyone would come by. He decided he’d stay there until after ten blue cars had passed. But only one did, and it was white.
Well, I guess I’m going to look for caribou.
OK. She didn’t look up from her book. She had her fingers holding several places in the pages.
You want to come?
No thanks.
• • •
Finn wore rubber boots so he could walk right through the bogs, but he still had to be careful not to get sucked down or stuck. There was a cairn about two miles out that he was aiming for. He had constructed it the last time he was there, carefully balanced on a raised plateau of red rock, and he wanted to see if it was still intact. The southern half of the island had trees, clumps of dark, skinny tamaracks and firs, but the northern half, where they lived, was too windy, so it was just rocks and lichen and bog and more rocks. If Finn stood up beside his cairn he could see out for miles. Miles and miles of bumpy orange and gray. And sometimes caribou, too, in heavy brown clusters, or less often just one at a time. As long as he didn’t get too close, they would pay him no attention, just carry on eating or, if it was autumn, calling or, most often, just standing. They could stand perfectly still for minutes and minutes, like cairns. Finn would watch them while picking and piling rocks, counting out their stillness in seconds under his breath.
On his way back he watched the ground for any early cranberries, anything to add to one more family dinner of just-starting-to-get-stale bread and soup. Cora joined him halfway and they walked home together.
They’ll be back, said Finn.
They won’t.
They will.
• • •
Their time was mostly their own now. The Canadian Maritimes Distance Communities Homeschool work they had to do was easy; they’d do their week’s worth on Sunday between lunch and supper and then Finn and Cora were free to do what they wanted for the rest of the week, so long as they did some music practice and didn’t drown. This meant that Cora would go to the neighbors, where she’d started to keep the blinds closed so Finn couldn’t look in. I’m making you a surprise, she said, that’s why. Even so, Finn stopped to check each time he passed, just in case she’d left them open that day.
After checking, Finn would go south to build cairns with the caribou, or north to the shore, where he’d take his shoes and socks off and practice standing in the freezing water for as long as he could, or row himself east, across to accordion lessons with Mrs. Callaghan.
Martha would work nets. Nobody needed them for fish anymore, but sometimes she’d sell one as something to throw over garbage to keep it from blowing away on collection day.
• • •
Two weeks and one day before Aidan came home and Martha left again, it was Finn’s eleventh birthday. Martha made bunting and hung it over his bed in the night while he was sleeping and Cora played “Happy Birthday” on her fiddle as an alarm clock. Because they were all sick of bread and sweet things, they had birthday crab cakes, with one of their emergency power-outage candles stuck in Finn’s. Did you make a wish? asked his father over the phone, which they had hooked onto a bowl on the table with the cable stretching between them.
Cora gave Finn a small rectangular package wrapped in last month’s Island Happenings and Shipping Forecast, on which she had drawn a picture of him with his accordion and a dog.
We don’t have a dog, said Finn.
I know, but it looked lonely without it.
The dog was the black-and-white collie-type. It was very well drawn.
It’s great, said Finn.
Thanks, said Cora. Open it.
Finn was careful not to tear the picture as he unwrapped. Inside was a slim book with a plasticky cover: A Collection of Local Jigs, Reels and Airs Based on the Flora and Fauna of the Region. It was dark red.
Wow, thanks, said Finn.
I thought maybe we could learn some together, said Cora.
Yeah? said Finn.
He flipped it open to a random page. “The Northern Long-Eared Bat Reel.”
Sure, said Cora.
That’s really lovely, said Martha. Did you steal it from the library boat?
Yeah.
Still, it’s really lovely.
Don’t forget, there’s one more gift, said Aidan-on-the-phone.
Yes, yes, I’ll go get it, said Martha.
She came back with something awkwardly long covered in the quilt from their bed. She handed it to Finn.
Does he have it? asked phone-Aidan.
Almost, said Martha.
Finn struggled a little, then managed to pull the quilt off to one side. Underneath was a fishing rod. Old-fashioned.
Wow, he said.
It was mine! said phone-Aidan. My first one!
Happy birthday, said Martha.
Do you like it? asked Aidan.
I love it, said Finn.
Really?
Really.
• • •
The next day Cora went back to the neighbors’, and Finn, in his rubber boots and fish sweater, dragged their old dory down to the water with the new-old fishing rod rolling back and forth in it. Cora’s picture of him, the accordion and the dog, was in his corduroy trousers’ front right pocket. He waded through the shallows, pushing the boat out, and then, when the water was almost at the tops of his boots, he crawled up and in, rocking it a bit, but managing not to tip. He pushed off and paddled into the deeper middle water. Then he hooked and strung and weighted and baited the rod and then, with the leaded pull of water’s soft gravity, let the hook sink down and down. And then Finn waited.
Even though nobody had seen a fish off their shore all year. Although nobody had caught a fish since the year he turned nine. Finn sat, and waited. There were no other boats out. Nothing but wind and water for miles.
• • •
He went out every morning, as the days grew rainier and the daylight pulled back and the mists and fogs rose up around him. Every day. Sometimes he would bring A Collection of Local Jigs, Reels and Airs Based on the Flora and Fauna of the Region to read and sometimes he wouldn’t. The plastic library cover made it more rainproof than most books. Sometimes he brought his accordion and tried to sight-read with one hand while holding the pole in the other. Sometimes he would take a break to go to Mrs. Callaghan’s and get her help playing one of the new songs.
Have you played this one with Cora yet? she would ask.
And Finn would say, No, not yet.
• • •
It was almost the end of September and, as he always did, Finn stopped by their neighbors’ window on his way home from no-fish fishing to check on Cora through the cracks in the blinds for thirty-three seconds, but this time, he only got to eleven when Cora looked up and said, Finn?
You should come in, I want to show you something.
OK.
Finn waited for Cora to go unlock the front door, but she didn’t. Instead, she ducked under the blinds so she was between them and the pane, and pulled the window the rest of the way open. This way, she said. Then she ducked back down under the blinds and away.
Finn left his fishing rod leaning against the house and crawled up and over the sill, the unsanded wooden frame scratching along his chest and legs through his clothes. He dropped down the other side and ducked under the blinds into what should have looked like the Ryans’ front room. But it didn’t. Not anymore.
Well? said Cora. What do you think?
Everything was bright yellow and pink and blue and green and red. The walls were covered in cutout skulls, all sizes and colors, all grinning. Some of them had flowers for eyes. There were big pieces of green card cut and pasted together into cactus shapes all up the sides of the sofa and fireplace. There were bright balls and animals and skeletons hanging down off the ceiling, and a giant, fierce-looking paper eagle clutching a terrified-looking paper snake over the top of the front door. The door itself had a bunch of bright red and orange and yellow pepper shapes and green lime-slice shapes on it.
Wow, said Finn.
It’s Mexico, said Cora.
It’s amazing, said Finn. And it’s really hot.
I turned the radiators all the way up. For Mexico.
Oh yeah, of course. Wow. Finn unzipped his sweater. Where’d you get all the colored paper?
Kids’ books from the library.
Thanks. You wanna hit the piñata? We can use the fire-poker, and one of the kitchen towels for a blindfold.
Sure. Just let me take off my sweater . . . it’s really, really hot.
The average daytime temperature in Cancún in September is twenty-eight degrees Celsius.
Wow. So this is what it’s like.
This is just what it’s like.
They took turns hitting at a blue donkey piñata until Cora finally got it, on her third turn. She smashed it open at the belly and a cascade of cutout words and photos from the Mexico! book cascaded out all over them.
• • •
The next day the blinds were closed again, so Finn went back to no-fish fishing.
And the day after that.
And the day after that.
And then, the day after that, after he had been out for just over three hours and was in the middle of right-hand-only playing one of his favorite new songs, “The Ballad of the Newfoundland Black Bear,” Finn felt the smallest bit of shake shudder through his left hand, just for a second before, all at once, the fishing pole pulled fast and sharp and away from him.
He mashed the accordion’s keys as he lunged across the dory to grab it back, catching it just before it was pulled out over the side of the boat. As he did, he accidentally knocked A Collection of Local Jigs, Reels and Airs Based on the Flora and Fauna of the Region out into the water and had to stretch and grasp to get it back with one hand while holding tight to the rod with the other. The accordion on his front made him top- and front-heavy and almost pulled him over. Once the book was back in-boat, he turned back to the pulling fishing rod in his left hand. Maybe, he whispered to himself. Maybe, maybe, maybe, as he lifted, dropped, reeled the line. Maybe. Lift, drop, reel. Maybe, lift, maybe, drop, reel. Until the sun passed across a gap in the clouds and lit the water so it was clear, and, just for a moment, Finn could see what he had: not a tire or a mess of seaweed or an old lawn chair, but a back-and-forth weaving, beautiful green-gray-silver codfish, mouth opening and closing, gasping and trying and alive.
• • •
Nobody could believe it. The word spread like rain, drenching Big Running first, then out with the wind south, east and west, across the whole island. A fish? A fish! A codfish. Nobody could believe it with their ears so they had to come around, come on foot, trucks, boats and horses, to see Finn or the dory or the picture Cora had drawn of Finn with his dog and the fish, or touch the bones that Aidan had kept after they ate it, all washed and clear-white on a plate on the kitchen counter, or the guts they kept in a jar in the freezer for proof. They do look fresh, said a barely-there, thin old woman from a southeast outport.
Can we smell them? said a man who had brought his kids. You can tell age best by smell.
I can’t believe it, said his wife, her hands cupping the jar like a baby bird. I just can’t, while her husband went back outside. For a cough, he said, though his hands were to his eyes and not his mouth.
What did you use?
What time?
Was there rain?
Was it big?
Was it old?
And, most of all, Was it alone?
Were there more?
Was it alone?
Finn, whispered the thin woman, it could be you saved us.
Finn! shouted the kids. Finn! Finn!
And their parents joined in: Finn! Finn! Finn!
It could be, said the thin woman. It could be.
• • •
Their mantel filled with cards and gifts, and the cove filled with boats. Many of them had been dry for years and were barely functional anymore, and lots of people ended up doing emergency patching with gum or socks or ended up swimming and cold. Some went out in the day, because Finn had been out in the day, because he wasn’t allowed out after dark or seven p.m., whichever came first, and some went out at night, because that’s how it had always been, before. And some just stayed, day and night and day and night and day, there in the cove. They went with rods and with nets and with lights and with binoculars, with radios or with books or with nothing at all but hope and time, too much time. Finn navigated past them all as he rowed out in the morning, and back past again as he made his way home under the orange lichen sky.
• • •
Finn knocked on Cora’s bedroom door. It was late, but she was still awake; she pretty much always was. She was reading:
Happy Backpacker Guides Presents:
ENGLAND!
1965 EDITION
Yeah come in, she said.
So, said Finn, pushing her door open enough that he could share in the light of her bedside lamp, I guess this means people will be coming back, hey?
What does?
The fish I caught.
If there are more.
Yeah, if there are more. But if there are, it means everyone will come back and you’ll owe me five dollars, right?
I guess so.
OK, just checking. He stepped away, started to go back to his room.
Hey, Finn?
Yeah?
You want to count boat lights? Want me to come with you to count? She swung her legs across and off her bed.
OK, said Finn. Yeah. They walked to his room, climbed up on his bed and rubbed their sleeves across the window’s condensation to get a clear view.
Wow, said Cora.
More than twelve, said Finn.
More than twelve, she said. There must be hundreds. Like upside-down stars.