Left in the Sand, Found by the Sea novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Third Board

Orla reaches Gannet Cove at night with no luggage, a ferry mechanic catches her on a rotten dock board and Winnie takes her in, until the Sarno family car is idling outside at dawn.

The bus let me off at the end of the line at eleven at night, in the rain.

There was a shelter with a bench, a dark harbor, and a lighthouse turning slowly at the far end of the point.

I stood under the shelter roof and looked at it.

It was the same lighthouse as the photo in Rocco's wallet.

It was smaller in person, and the light went around and around over black water.

I had come eight hours to see it, and nobody had come with me.

My phone said I had thirty-one missed calls.

I turned it face down on my knee and thought about what I owned.

A phone, a wallet, a denim jacket, and a sundress that was now damp.

My suitcase was somewhere in a desert with a woman who deleted her texts.

A narrow street ran up from the harbor, and one window on it was lit.

A hand-painted sign hung over the door: Pratt's Rooms. Vacancy.

I picked up my bag of nothing and started down the dock to cut across to it.

The planks were wet and old.

I was looking at the window and not at my feet, and the third board gave way under my heel.

A hand caught my elbow before I hit anything.

"Easy," a man said.

He was crouched in the dark beside a ferry with its engine cover off, and a work lamp hung from the rail above him.

He stood up slowly, still holding my arm, and I had to tilt my head back to see his face.

He was broad, with dark hair going grey at the temples and grease up to both wrists.

His eyes were a steady grey.

"That board's been bad since August," he said. "I keep meaning to fix it."

"You keep meaning to?"

"I fix boats. The dock is the town's problem."

He let go of my elbow, and I felt exactly where his hand had been.

The skin there stayed warm in the cold rain.

"You're not from here," he said.

"The bus just let me off."

"That's the last bus. Do you have somewhere to be?"

"I was going to try the window with the light."

He looked up the street and almost smiled.

"Winnie keeps it on for people like you."

"People like me."

"The ones who step off the last bus in a sundress, in the rain."

I looked down at my dress, then up at him, and I laughed for the first time since the pump.

It came out cracked, and it turned into something else halfway through.

He did not say anything.

He wiped his hands on a rag and waited until I was done.

"I'm Eli," he said. "I run the ferry shed. Come on. She'll scold you first, and then she'll feed you."

He picked up my small bag, which weighed nothing, and walked me up the street with one hand held out, flat, a few inches from my back.

He never touched me again.

I noticed that he never did.

Winnie Pratt opened the door before we knocked.

She was a grey-haired woman in a fisherman's sweater, with reading glasses on a cord and a kitchen towel on her shoulder.

"Eli Donati," she said, "you've been at the dock again."

"There's a girl who nearly went through the third board."

"That board's your fault, not mine."

"It's the town's."

"It is not the town's, it is yours, and everyone knows it." She looked at me and her face changed. "Oh, sweetheart. Where is your luggage?"

"In a Jeep," I said. "In the desert."

Winnie looked at Eli.

Eli looked at the floor.

"Right," Winnie said. "Bath. Soup. Nightgown. Not one question until morning."

She pulled me in by the sleeve.

In the doorway I turned around, and Eli was still standing in the rain.

"Thank you," I said.

"Sleep," he said. "The sea is loud the first night. You'll get used to it."

He went down the street toward the dock with his hands in his pockets.

I took the bath and ate the soup and put on a flannel nightgown that smelled of cedar.

The room was small, with a white iron bed and a window facing the water.

From the bed I could see the lighthouse turning.

I put the phone on the nightstand, and it lit up again and again, three more calls and a message from a number I did not know.

I did not open it.

I fell asleep fast, and I slept hard.

When I woke up, the window was grey, the house smelled of coffee, and a car engine was idling outside.

I went to the glass and looked down.

A long black sedan, dusty to the windows, sat at the curb.

I knew the plates.

It was the Sarno family car.

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