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    Caleb sounded uncomfortable with the switch in roles with his sister. She had been the one to comfort him and urged him on through the special-ed classes where all kids got tossed who had learning disorders. She had defended him when schoolyard bullies tried to tease him about the resource room. But in more ways than one, he had inspired her to learn about the brain, how memory works, why trauma takes some people by the throat and other people churn through it like a slow, steady tugboat.
    Caleb had the same thick hair as Rocky, only his was lighter, nearly golden when he had been a child. His lack of facility with arranging numbers and abysmal spelling turned out to be overshadowed by his genius with color and art and a willingness to work hard. In the warm months, he painted houses; in the winter he worked in his pottery studio making clay musicians who wailed on saxophones and trumpets. Rocky took her favorite with her, a woman leaning impossibly far back, hair struck by an invisible wind, fingers spread out on the pads of a saxophone, eyes squeezed shut with ecstasy. Rocky rolled the sculpture in her comforter and put it on the passenger seat.
    “You want me to feel better and I may never be better. This is the way I am now,” she said.
    She put her hand on his sleeve and squeezed his arm. They were too close to hug all the time and besides Rocky had long sensed a discomfort in Caleb when she tried to hug him. Bob had explained it to her.
    “It’s because he probably peeked at you in the shower when he was fourteen and he couldn’t help but fantasize about you in the only way that addled fourteen-year-old boys do. He’s still a little embarrassed. He’ll get over it by the time he’s sixty.”
    Rocky let go of his arm. “I’ll call you when I get a place. I’m staying at a motel until Columbus Day, when the season is over. I promise.”
    She avoided the big roads like the Mass Pike and instead took side roads, ambling east and north to Portland. She had called ahead and made a reservation on the Casco Bay ferry. Taking a car on the ferry was an entirely different matter than just walking on. Reservations were required. She was now one of the purposeful people who drove a car on the ferry, clearly not a tourist, a day-tripper. She knew she appeared to have a reason for being, and the absurdity of her appearance felt hollow. In reality she had no reason to stay, no reason to go and felt so untethered that if she had not held tight to the railing, the breeze could have picked her up.
    She had only been to the island once, long before she met Bob, and the memory stayed with her like a beacon. Her family had driven to Nova Scotia for a vacation. While Rocky remembered little of Nova Scotia at age ten, she vividly recalled an afternoon stop in Portland and an impulsive sidetrip on the ferry to Peak’s Island. They stayed long enough for Rocky and Caleb to climb on the rocks along the shore and eat hot dogs before heading back, but long enough for Rocky to hear her mother say, “Do you think people on an island ever worry?”
    Her father answered. “They fish a lot. How much can you worry if you fish?”
    The family never returned, and Rocky didn’t know if anyone else even remembered the day the way she did, the way it stood bathed in sunlight, full of hope. It was not much to hang on to, but Rocky drove straight off the ferry and into the flicker of memory.
     
    The few weeks in the motel overlooking the ferry dock disappeared into mist. Rocky walked the beaches and the inner trails and noticed as the days went by that the crowds of tourists thinned, one by one until after Columbus Day, and a quiet settled on the island. The air, as if on command, turned cool and the mornings required a jacket. She read the local paper at Stan’s Seafood Diner. She noticed the job announcement after she heard a waitress point it out. “Animal Control Warden,” said the waitress. “We haven’t had one of those all