The next morning, Joshua drove to the top of the impossibly steep hill that led to his parent’s cottage for brunch, as he did every Saturday without question. It brought them great joy, and he felt he owed them that for raising him as if he were their own son instead of the boy his natural mother left orphaned when she’d taken her own life.
The seaside cottage had deteriorated since he’d occupied it as the kings, sailors, and pirates of his youth. The gray paint had faded in patches, but Edith, the woman who had raised him, insisted it was bad luck to paint over the memories of the house. The same was true for the interior. She stubbornly refused to replace the threadbare carpet or the aging, tired kitchen appliances. It was as if by doing so she would have to move forward when she was so pitifully entrenched in the past.
It wasn’t that the Malleys didn’t have money—they did. Edgar Malley owned a fleet of ships that carried dry goods to and from the mainland and employed half the island.
A little more than twenty years ago on a dark and stormy night, Grace McKeon, Joshua’s destitute, pregnant mother, had timidly knocked on the cottage door and asked for help. Edith had hushed the crying girl, brought her inside and fed her a bowl of hot soup. She gave her warm clothes and sat with her by the fire until she fell asleep, curled up on the sofa. It was then, looking into the young girl’s face full of shattered dreams, that Edith decided she would take charge of the young woman’s destiny.
She gave Grace a job in the kitchen and guided her progression as if charting a sailboat’s course. Four months later Joshua was born, and the Malleys enveloped him as if he were their own.
But the bond between mother and son was unparalleled. From the moment the wet, crying baby fell into the world, he clung to Grace and refused to be held by another. Edith would shake her head of tight, white curls and tsk-tsk as Grace cooked and cleaned the dishes with Joshua in her arms.
“You’re going to spoil him,” she’d say, to which young Grace would only squeeze little Joshua even tighter.
When he turned five and started school, Grace would walk Joshua down the sand-covered path and wait the three kindergarten hours, keeping herself occupied under the shade of an ancient palm tree by reading or sketching pictures of the sea in her notebook. Every day when the bell sounded, Joshua would burst through the schoolhouse doors and see his mother waiting at the edge of the porch. Then he’d spread his arms like wings, close his eyes and run blindly toward the woman who was his world. After seven long strides, he’d push off the edge, and for the most infinitesimal of moments, he imagined himself a bird or an eagle that could soar unimaginable heights. Inevitably, he would land safely in his mother’s arms. It was a leap of faith. He knew without question she would be there to break his fall.
Then one day when he was five-and-a-half, the gulls stopped screaming, the ocean stopped moving, and the sand collapsed into one flat pile. His mother, while on her way to the market for groceries, ran into a truck hauling beams for the new pier being built on the west side of the island. At first the authorities assumed it was an accident, but after an investigation, they ruled it a suicide. Edith, not being a warm person to begin with, had callously told Joshua the hard details that would forever alter his life. His mother was dead. She chose to end her life and leave him with her and Edgar and he was now their son.
But Joshua stubbornly held on to the belief that his mother had sprouted wings and flown out of danger just before her car plowed into the two ton truck. He couldn’t fully comprehend the loss, which in his five-year-old mind, meant it didn’t happen.
From then on when school let out, he would burst through the door, close his eyes, spread open his arms and leap into the empty air, fully believing his mother would be there to catch him. But day after day, month after month, Joshua fell limply into nothingness, crashing instead onto the cold, unforgiving sand. And then he’d lie there, with this cheek pressed against the earth and his tears wetting the sand, until Mrs. Henderson the school principal, would pick up his broken-spirited body and help him limp home.
“Tomorrow,” he’d say through tears of denial. “I’m sure she’ll be there tomorrow.”
Mrs. Henderson, never knowing what to say, would nod and hand him over to Edith, the woman determined not to spoil him.
Eventually, he stopped flying off the old school porch and went inward, where his mother still lived. Joshua hadn’t believed she was dead and secretly planned to find her once he was old enough to ride his bicycle beyond the three blocks Edgar and Edith allowed.