The Language of Sand (16 page)

Luck
was a word Abigail knew a lot about
. The term was derived from the Middle English
lucke
, and from the Middle Dutch
luc
, short for
gheluc
. It meant an event, good or ill, affecting a person’s interests or happiness, which was deemed casual, occurring arbitrarily. Depending on how she chose to view it, Abigail had been short on luck of late, having lost her family, or long on it, because she survived. So she was loath to leave anything but luck to chance.

Not taking Merle up on his offer had been a mistake. Her sore arms felt as though they were going to break off at the elbows. Abigail was packing the supplies into the station wagon, ready to head back to the lighthouse, when she recalled the other errand she had to do in town.

“Lottie.”

A new note was taped to the door of the real estate agency.
Gone to the mainland
, was written in cursive. The
i
in
mainland
had a heart for a dot. Abigail ripped the note from the door and tore it to pieces as the gaggle of gnomes clustered along the front path smiled at her gleefully.

“Wipe those grins off your faces or I’ll kick you in your little gnome teeth.”

“Not very nice to threaten somebody one-tenth your size,” a male voice cautioned.

A man in an official-looking uniform was studying her from the sidewalk. He wore gold-rimmed sunglasses, and what was left of his hair had been buzzed into a brush cut.

Abigail’s cheeks went red. “That probably sounded a little…”

“Wacko?”

“Inappropriate.”

“In these parts, we take bullying small ceramic men pretty serious.”

The man’s expression was unwavering.

“I’m just pulling your leg,” he said after a moment’s pause.

“Oh. Oh, yeah. I knew that.”

“You here to see Lottie too?”

“Trying. Second day in a row.”

“She’s making herself scarce until the ink on your deal as caretaker at the lighthouse is dry.”

Abigail’s jaw genuinely dropped. “How did you…?”

“It’s not intuition. It’s the old-fashioned grapevine. Denny Meloch told me he met you.”

“No wonder everyone seems to know everything about everybody around here.”

“There’s plenty to wonder about on Chapel Isle, believe me. If you ever stop, means you haven’t been here long enough.”

Exactly what I need
, Abigail thought.
More illogical platitudes.

“Thanks for the tip.”

“I’m Caleb Larner. I’m the sheriff.”

“Abby Harker.” She shook his hand, astonished that she’d introduced herself as
Abby
. She wrote it off as a subconscious slip.

“Pleasure to meet you,” he said. “It’s nice to have somebody minding the place. The lighthouse is the closest we’ve got to a monument.”

There was that island dignity again. However, if this was how the locals maintained a landmark, historic preservation obviously wasn’t a priority. So what was? Abigail wanted to ask.

“How are you settling in so far?”

She sensed more than interest in the sheriff’s tone. He was probing. For what, she couldn’t tell.

“Fabulous. Love the place,” she lied.

“Glad to hear it.”

An awkward gap in the conversation followed. They were on to each other.

“What are you here to see Lottie about, Sheriff? Has she committed any crimes—say, swindling her tenants?”

“Hardly. I came to talk to her about the robbery a few nights ago. I have to send the serial numbers on the stolen items to the mainland. I was making sure she had hers on file.”

“The mainland? Why?”

“They check the pawnshops. See if any of the numbers pop up, people trying to sell what they stole.”

“Should I be—”

“Nervous? No. Cautious? Yes. These guys seem relatively harmless. Strictly breaking in to take property. Still, you can never be certain.”

That wasn’t reassuring coming from the town’s sheriff.

“Well,” he sighed, “I’ll be seeing you.”

“Yes, you will,” Abigail said, forcing a smile.

Sheriff Larner started to walk off, then turned back. “Hey, you should swing by bingo tonight.”

“Bingo?”

“Thursday is game night at the fire station.”

According to Abigail’s brochure, Chapel Isle was rife with must-see places and must-do activities, the verbiage emphatic. The fire station wasn’t at the top of the brochure’s list or Abigail’s. Neither was an evening of playing bingo.

“It’s fun. Most of the town’ll be there. Give you a chance to meet the natives.”

“I’ll try to stop in.”

“Hope to see you there,” he said, departing with a wave.

Despite his effort, the gesture wasn’t in sync with the sheriff’s inflection. Language was like water. It could carry meaning fluidly, be frozen solid by a change in cadence, or simmer into pure desire by a twist in tone. Abigail decided it wasn’t a coincidence that she and the sheriff had bumped into each other. He was sniffing around for something. The question was what.

On the ride home, Abigail mulled over her encounter with the law. Was it a pretense or should she take the meeting at face value? In lexicography, taking words at face value could amount to being shortchanged. Even the commonest of them could have multiple meanings, differing depending on usage. As a noun,
run
could signify a journey, a course, a sequence, or a cycle. As a verb, it meant fast movement on foot, to operate, to manage, to circulate, or to compete as a candidate. The first impression of some words was unreliable, a quality Abigail respected because it alluded to the intricacy of language. Was her first impression of Sheriff Larner reliable? Only time would tell. However, her initial impression of the lighthouse confirmed that some books can be judged by their covers.

Returning to the caretaker’s cottage, she moved all the furniture on the first floor to the center of the living room and opened the windows in preparation for painting.

“You forgot to buy drop cloths. Then again, if you get paint on anything, it’ll be an improvement.”

Abigail turned the radio on and played with the tuner, locking in on the syrupy chords of a country ballad. Another spin of the dial snagged a snippet from a news station broadcasting from the mainland. Yearning for some contact with the outside world, she spent ten minutes dragging the radio around the room and adjusting the antenna until the station came in clearly. The reception was best with the radio positioned on the stairs, the antenna pointing straight
up like a dagger. She made a mental note to move the radio once it got dark.

“God forbid you want a glass of water in the middle of the night. You could trip and get skewered. There’s a gory headline.”

Although she’d been racking up imaginary news captions, what Abigail was interested in were the real ones. While the broadcast recapped the important stories locally and across the world, the living room took its first casualty of the day. She removed the faded curtains from each window and stuffed them into a garbage bag.

“Buh-bye. Bon voyage. See ya.”

As she taped off the windowsills, she listened to details about gunfights, car wrecks, and court cases. So much trauma and tragedy; Abigail was totally out of touch. The reports were eventually replaced by a discussion program where pundits contested the merits of senatorial candidates. Abigail wasn’t paying close attention. Instead, she let the contributors’ voices fill the room with human sound as she cracked the first can of paint.

The political discourse began to get heated, but Abigail was happily going from wall to wall, rolling on the warm yellow hue she’d chosen. Another coat was a must. The walls were so thirsty for change that they sucked up the paint and the color dried too pale.

Abigail was considering a second pass around the room when the next radio program started. It was a topical phone-in chat show hosted by a gravelly-voiced man named Dr. Walter. What his degree was in wasn’t mentioned.

A woman phoned in to complain about the closing of a gun shop, saying, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

To which Dr. Walter replied, “Thank you for your highly original comment. Please do call back as soon as you’ve mastered the obvious.”

That made Abigail laugh out loud, something she hadn’t done in a while. Feeling guilty, she shut her mouth and locked her teeth together to prevent it from happening again. She was supposed to be in mourning. People in mourning didn’t laugh. Or so Abigail presumed. Bereavement was her new job, a position for which she was
unqualified and untrained. Whether this would be a lifelong career or temporary employment remained a mystery.

One after another, callers parried with Dr. Walter, who dismissed most of their comments as asinine and plowed onward with the show. Meanwhile, Abigail was reviving the windows and trim, care of a crisp coat of white, which she cut in with precision that would make her surgeon father proud. With the moldings painted, the dingy ceiling begged to be done as well. Because the chairs had proven unsteady, Abigail commandeered the table, rolling paint onto one section of ceiling at a time by standing on the table and pushing it from one side of the room to the other until she was finished.

“A first-rate job, if I do say so myself,” she pronounced, touring the space from corner to corner.

The living room had been rejuvenated. Abigail, on the other hand, was spent. She’d been painting for hours, and the smell was giving her a headache. Being cooped up inside made her long to be outdoors. She was also starving.

Choosing a picnic on the beach rather than a meal at the now footprint-splotched dining room table, Abigail packed a sandwich and grabbed her keys, which she’d placed on an end table beside the house’s old rotary-model telephone. Seeing the phone set off a spasm of guilt. Abigail had promised to contact her parents once she was settled. She’d been avoiding the call. The conversation would undoubtedly be fraught with staged questions about the island and the lighthouse, each intended to gauge her mental state, to determine if she was in immediate need of rescue. Abigail gave the big black rotary phone a final glance, opened the door, then locked it behind her.

The sun was leaning low by the time she reached the strip of shore she’d passed the day she arrived on Chapel Isle. She parked next to the boarded-up snack stand, hiked over the dune ridge, and took a seat on a sandy crest above the tide line. From her perch, Abigail ate
her sandwich and watched the waves slide up the beach languidly. The island was magnificent. She understood why Paul had loved it here. She could picture him walking along the water, holding Justin’s hand. She could almost hear the splashing of their footsteps, Justin giggling as water sloshed over his tiny legs. The images were palpable. They felt real. Abigail could see Paul and Justin anywhere if she let herself. They could appear across from her in a room, riding in the car with her, beside her in bed, everywhere and nowhere at once.

As dusk descended on the coast, it grew too cold to stay by the water. Abigail had been crying and unconsciously churning her hands through the sand, as if to dig herself out of her misery. When she stood and brushed herself off, she thought of how similar sand was to language. A single grain or a single word meant little compared to the effect it had in concert with its own kind. Millions of granules made a beach; millions of combinations of words, a language. The whole would cease to exist without its parts.
Grief
was a word, a grain, Abigail wished she could separate from the whole, but that wasn’t an option.