Myra to Manon, on grief:
“You go make a cup of tea. You see that the water boils. You see you can still boil water. You wait. At first, the water is too hot to drink. You wait again. For a moment, just a few sips—just a moment, the swiftest of time—the tea is hot but not scalding, sweet but not sugary, lemony, but not bitter. It is perfect for a moment, so you sip your perfect tea for a moment and look out your window at the waves and see that everything is still moving, but you are perfectly still.
“It’s just a tiny accomplishment, a small thing. You realize, even as your body tries to turn itself inside out to bones and blood from grief, you realize you are still capable of making a good, strong cup of tea, that time passes, that the water cools. That life goes on. It will never be the same, but it still can be.”
A few years after Nimue’s funeral, when few people invited Manon Perle around anymore, Myra invited her over one afternoon for a chin-wag and a cup of tea. An afternoon became afternoons. One day, her wedding anniversary, a day of significance to Myra that no one remembered anymore because most of them were dead, Myra spoke to Manon, through tears, staring at the ocean.
“The tea will be good and strong even when you are not. It will steady your hands when the grief comes, and it can be your touchstone when you have a hard cry. The hard cries are good—that’s the love we had yet to give them seeking them out. When in doubt, make a cup of tea.”
Something clicked in Manon that day; a gear turned, a thought pattern reset, and that night she had a juddering hard cry that came from the bottom of her spine. Then she cleaned her kitchen and saw a clean sink for the first time in months.
Myra Kelley’s husband, Bernard Robert Kelley, died the night of their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, two days after the doctors advised Myra she should gather the family.
He was on life support, but Myra saw no life there; that gray body breathing through machines was not her Bernie anymore.
Their wedding ceremony ended at 6:24 p.m., and so began fifty-five years of marriage, fifty-five years of a true, working love. So in the hospital at 6:24 p.m. Myra wished Bernie a happy anniversary, and told him she loved him, and kissed his forehead, once again, once more. It was still warm and smelled like him. She tried to give him a final round of hell about leaving her with the chickens, but her laugh shattered into a gut-dragging sob that shook her whole body, as her earth as she knew it split and crumbled and cracked and fell into the sea.
Then she nodded and breathed because she was still breathing.
When it was over, when the steady heartbeat flatlined, and the silence and loss were paralyzing, Myra found again that she had hands, and that the right one was dominant, so she moved it. The air was thick as water, and she could swear she felt everything in the air—every molecule, every current—as she reached out to his eyelids. When she closed his eyes it was with the most profound gentleness, as if she were wiping away tears or releasing a wet-winged monarch. She buried him in his best suit but kept his favorite house shirt hung up in her closet. Myra Kelley wouldn’t tell you about it, but there was more than one occasion where she clung to that flannel, sobbing in the closet.
“What was in this, Miss Myra?”
Myra had allowed Leo to rifle through the Christmas cabinet again, as long as he was careful. The rule was that he could open anything unlocked. He liked this rule at first; he knew which drawers he wanted to try next. But the Christmas cabinet proved frustrating; he found that different doors and drawers were locked and unlocked at different times. Right now he was looking at an empty, ancient velvet pouch.
“A necklace with a green stone. It looked like the ocean. I gave it to Millie Stowe’s boy right after she died. She was an interesting woman, that Millie. Knew a lot about mermaids.”
“What do you mean, Miss Myra?”
She didn’t respond.
“What are all these?” Leo pulled open one of the thin, wide drawers of the Christmas cabinet.
“That’s a lot of maps, kid. Maps of the stars, maps of Mackerel Sky.”
“1679? 1711? Holy shit these are old. Where did you get all this stuff?”
“Ayuh, older than me. Watch your mouth. I inherited it. They came with the Christmas cabinet.”
“So you are related to Burrbank!”
“Ayuh.”
She then told Leo the story of how once Burrbank built his house on the Aerie, he brought his effects from the Bellaforte, six months before it was ultimately wrecked and sunk on its mooring by the great hurricane. Burrbank’s lockbox, an old coffer with intricate ironwork and a huge lock, sat as the middle base of Myra’s Christmas cabinet. The rest of the cabinet built up around the strongbox over generations. The safe was always locked; Leo had tried to open it multiple times. They say Esmeralda, the Piratebird, saved the coffer and what she could stuff into it from the fire that burned down his house.
“But I thought the Piratebird started the fire?” Leo asked.
“Some of them she did because the mermaids were coming for the town. Mermaids are terrified of fire.”
Leo didn’t understand and pulled out another map, this one of the Paths. He had walked these paths many times by himself, mostly alone and in the dark, but more recently he had walked them at sunset with Myra and Dog.
“You’ll find an earlier version of that map in the red book.”
“They say that Burrbank started some of the Paths himself, to get the best vantage points of the island.”
“That sounds about right—white men taking credit for something they didn’t do. No, boy. Burrbank only followed what was already there. The Wabanaki had created the Paths many, many years before.”
Energized, the boy turned his attention elsewhere and the pair walked toward the book stand. “Miss Myra, is your red book Mr. Burrbank’s book? His actual book?” Leo tried to lift the cover, but the red tome was closed fast. “It won’t open.”
“He owned it once, yes, but the Piratebird inherited it. And sometimes the book won’t open.”
Mouth full of sandwich: “Why?”
She didn’t respond. Dog began barking to someone coming up over the hill. Leo’s stomach dropped. He hoped it wasn’t his mother.
But it was Jason Perle, who called out a hello and scratched Dog under the ears. Jason had known Mrs. Myra since he was in diapers, and some of his first work had been yard and boat work for the Kelleys when he was younger than Leo. Right after Jason’s brother drowned, Bernie Kelley and his sternman Oswald always seemed to be at the boatyard exactly when Jason arrived and always stayed puttering around their boats and truck beds until after he left, so the first few years that Jason was a lobster boat captain they were always there to help him with boat issues and get him in and out of the water. Then, when Manon and Jason moved in under the hill and they became neighbors, Mrs. Myra helped with the house and then the baby, and Jason helped Bernie do work around the Kelleys’ house, especially as Bernie got older, and even more so when he got sicker. Jason visited Mrs. Myra a couple times a week, and silently did odd jobs that he saw needed doing. She always fed him, and since Jason struggled working a microwave, he was immensely grateful.
After visiting with Mrs. Myra for a bit, Jason grabbed his tools and joined a thrilled Leo. They worked together on the barn, Dog winding his way between them. Leo had never been this close to a man before without worrying about being hit. He liked the way Jason talked to him, gently, smartly, like Leo was a grown-up, like Leo wasn’t useless, like Leo had important things to say.
Sheriff Badger rode by that afternoon. He left his car parked on the side of the road and spat out sunflower-seed shells on the walk up to Myra’s front porch. Myra was knitting in her rocker watching the boy and Jason work.
The sheriff stood on the stoop and took in the ocean in silence. Myra had known the sheriff all his life, from plastic badges to metal badges, pop guns to rifles. His family was here long before Burrbank, stamping the footpaths into the ground.
“What you knitting there?”
“Hat.”
“Ayuh. Looks good. I love mine. Boy giving you trouble?”
“Not so far, but it’s early yet.”
“Ayuh.”
They paused, the sounds of knitting needles between them.
“Do you remember that time in high school Stevie and I got drunk and stole Bernie’s father’s skiff?” Sheriff Badger asked Myra, chuckling at his own stupidity.
“Ayuh.”
“We stove her up good on those rocks, didn’t we? Giant hole in the bottom, bent hull. He was some pissed. Our parents happily marched us out the door when he showed up at both our houses at four the next morning and made us start building him a new one. Hungover as all hell.”
Myra laughed.
“Sure was nice of him not to bring the police in.”
“Yessah. But you owned up and faced up to what you did, and that was really important to his father, and my Bernie.”
“All right, then. You let me know if the boy gives you any kind of trouble.”
“Will do. You take care, Sheriff. And hug that baby boy of yours.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Myra walked to the boy and Jason. “Looks good, boys. You two ready for supper?”
“That would be mighty kind of you, Mrs. Myra.” Jason wasn’t skinny like Leo was, but Myra knew he did better when he had a woman cooking for him.
“Come on in, then.”
Afterward, when Jason went back down under the hill, Leo asked to read the red book again.
“Not tonight. Red book’s closed today.”
“That’s a tragedy.”
“Life’s just one fucking tragedy after another,” said Myra Kelley.
“Whoa! Watch your mouth!”
She smirked and then laughed loudly. “Just because the red book isn’t open doesn’t mean you can’t read. I have bookshelves, Leo boy. Peruse.” When he didn’t move, she clarified. “It means look around.”
Leo began to read books each night. She taught him what some of the words meant and cooked him her husband’s old favorite meals and tapped him with her knitting needles when he bit his fingernails. Myra’s wooden recipe box, which Bernie had fashioned for her stacks of index card recipes, was always open, dusted with forgotten flour.
“It’s brightening up,” Myra would state in the morning as the sun was about to break through the fog. Leo then took his tools and got to work. Jason joined sometimes when he came back from the boat. Myra puttered around, Dog and the cursed chickens investigating Myra in the gardens or the boys at the barn.
When spring started blooming into summer, Leo and Myra took breaks on her porch like stretching cats. Myra read trash romance novels and fell asleep with honeybees for company. Leo talked and talked about things Myra knew nothing about—video games and memes and social media. Myra just listened to the boy who had never been listened to before, and chewed on her empty pipe, smiling.
When he slept in the spare room she covered him with the blanket so he stayed warm, and watched until the tension in his shoulders and his furrowed brow relaxed away, and he became a child again, deep in his dreams. The only bruises on Leo’s body were those that he had earned being a boy, playing outside with a dog who no longer slept in Myra’s bed but snored contentedly in his now-established spot at Leo’s feet.