There is No Other
Selena Spier
The lighter sparked, but didn't catch. He cupped his hand against the wind and tried again. This time it spat forth a little shower of sparks and a flame, singeing the pad of his thumb, but as soon as he lifted it to the cigarette between his lips, it sputtered out. The man swore. Even on the back deck, shielded by the cabin, the wind and spray made it near-impossible to smoke. He tried once more, then pocketed the cigarettes and lighter. The ragged silhouette of the island was already visible on the horizon. He could make it half an hour more.
A familiar heaviness had settled in his gut. He leaned his elbows on the cold iron railing and peered down at the water below. It was a windy day, no worse than usual, but windy enough to make the boat plunge from side to side amidst the oncoming waves. The sky overhead was a pale, anemic gray. Briefly, the man imagined vaulting over the rail into the seething white-capped foam. He could do it. He wouldn't, but he could. No one would notice his absence until it was far too late. The boat lurched, kicking up a spurt of water. He wiped his face with his sleeve and went back inside. It was warm in the cabin, radiant heat, all those bodies swarming around. He picked his way through the rows of booths, past the snack bar. There was a strange odor hanging in the air ¾ wet dog, yes, and vomit, and salt, and something else, ferry-smell, nothing else like it.
He managed to reach the booth without falling. His wife, Sharon, was lying down on the slatted bench with her jacket bunched up beneath her head. She leaned up on her elbow as he settled down opposite her. She was a small woman, and all he could see over the edge of the table was the upper half of her face, crowned by a mop of tangled hair. Her eyes were blue and sinking.
“How was your cigarette?” she asked, well-meaning. He shook his head. She looked at him for a second, then laid down and went back to inspecting the clumps of chewing gum stuck to the underside of the table. She was close enough to reach out and touch his terry-cloth knees, which rose up slightly as he leaned forward in his seat.
He picked up his newspaper and found the place where he’d left off. Oil rig in the works just off the south side of the island. Tourists were complaining about the obstructed view of the skyline. Some version of the story had appeared in every issue since the summer of 2015. His attention drifted past it to the two girls occupying the adjacent booth.
“No such thing,” said the one facing him. She had long stringy hair and a white bandage wrapped around her face, the kind you wear after you’ve gotten your wisdom teeth out. Her right cheek was swollen and bruised, but both her eyes were painstakingly made-up. “You’re crazy.”
“I’m serious! The whole island is haunted.” The girl across from her, facing away from him, was just freckled shoulders and a tumble of dark brown curls. “Even the ferry.”
“This one?” Wisdom Teeth looked dubious.
“You want to hear the story?” The brunette turned sideways on her bench and he saw her profile, bird-like, and the curve of her heart-shaped mouth. She had a gold locket, also heart-shaped, on a chain around her neck. She kept fidgeting with it, opening and closing the catch as she spoke.
“Fine. Hit me.”
“Alright. So, this all happened a long time ago. Or, not that long, really—like, maybe the sixties. They still did the thing they do now, where they run a whole bunch of ferries during the summer and only one per day during the winter. So in the summer they’ve got tons of ferry captains, but in the winter there’s only one, right? And the winter captain, he’s kind of eccentric, kind of a creepy dude, but he keeps out of everyone’s way so they all just let him do his job. And his wife’s great. Everyone loves his wife.”
Sharon took deep breaths beneath the table. The ferry always made her nauseous. It wasn’t just the pitching and swaying, it was all the voices mingling together, talking over one another, children screaming, and that smell in the air, that stale-ocean smell, it made her stomach turn. She tried to zero in on the closest conversation.
“But eventually, a rumor starts going round that his wife’s fucking one of the dockhands—“
“Is she?” interjected Wisdom Teeth.
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably. Either way, he catches wind of it, and one day she’s out on the top deck, they’re both out on the top deck, and the captain just grabs her and throws her off, and then he flags down all the dockhands, screaming that she’s fallen, and he puts the boat in reverse and “accidentally” mows her down. Like, blood everywhere, chunks of wife-meat floating around. And everybody’s kind of suspicious, ‘cause they all knew about the dockhand and nobody liked the captain in the first place. But they can’t prove that it wasn’t an accident, so he gets off scot-free and keeps his job and now the wife’s ghost haunts the ferry, just wanders around messing with people and knotting up the ropes."
The boat rolled to the side. A moon-faced toddler several booths down started gurgling excitedly, and Locket's coffee cup tipped over. Both girls grabbed their cell phones off the table and slid away from the spill, laughing.
"That was her!" said Locket. "She heard us talking about her!"
"You're crazy," Wisdom Teeth repeated. "You're so weird. I love you. I love you so much. You don't even know."
Locket smiled and glanced at her phone and it was evident to everyone that she loved Wisdom Teeth a little less than Wisdom Teeth loved her, but it was alright and they were happy and nothing really bad would happen between them.
"I'm going to see if they'll give me another coffee," she said, getting up. "Can I get you anything? Soup? Yogurt?"
"No, I'm okay."
"Suit yourself." Locket got up and went to the snack bar. The man behind it was making his way through a bag of Sun Chips. He popped them into his mouth one at a time and chewed slowly, carefully, grinding each chip to a fine pulp between his molars. He swallowed quickly when she approached, stashed the bag beneath the counter.
"What can I get for you?" he asked.
"I accidentally summoned a ghost and she knocked my coffee over. Is there any way I could get a new one?"
"Ah, yes, the captain's wife," said the man. "She got me earlier, too. Coming right up. There's napkins right there, if you need them." He gestured to the plastic dispenser and turned around to pour another coffee.
"Thanks," said Locket, pulling out a few. "What's your name?"
"Stephen," he replied. "Room for cream?"
"No, that's alright." She worked her fingernail into the crease of the little heart, pried it open, clicked it shut, pried it open again.
"That's pretty," he said.
"Thank you," said Locket. "It used to be my mom's."
She made her way back to Wisdom Teeth. She was tall, willowy. Her thighs didn’t brush together when she walked. Stephen poured himself a plastic cup of gingerale, then changed his mind, dumped it out, and filled the cup with water. He'd had a Cinnabon for breakfast that morning. He could feel it clinging to the inside of his stomach. Over the rim of the cup he looked at the girl in the far left corner booth, the booth that everyone avoided because it was the only one you couldn’t see the TV from. She had a green ribbon in her hair and she was holding a paperback novel. Her lips moved, like she was reading aloud, but she wasn’t looking at the book and her words were drowned in the racket of strident voices, untethered from their origins, competing against each other to be heard. Every conversation was more important than the next. Someone’s little boy ran up and down the aisle, shrieking in delight every time a sudden jolt knocked him off course. The girl watched him for a second, then slid out of the booth, still carrying her book, and picked her way up to the foredeck for a breath of fresh air.
Stephen watched her go, watched her push open the door and stand on the threshold for a moment, steadying herself, before she let it close behind her. Through the water-beaded window her figure receded toward the edge. A young woman came up to the snack bar with a toddler in her arms and looked at him expectantly. He signaled for her to wait. Outside, the girl leaned over the railing, staring down at the white foam churned up by the movement of the boat. She thought maybe she might vomit.
The toddler started whimpering. All of a sudden, the boat pitched violently to the side. The young mother shrieked and grabbed the edge of the snack bar to steady herself. Stephen stumbled and slipped on the coffee he’d spilled earlier. When he pulled himself back up, the girl in the green ribbon was gone. “Holy shit!” he choked.
“What?” asked the young mother. “What happened?”
What happened was this: the girl had been wrenched loose from the railing and flung over the side of the boat, and now she was falling and as she fell, time slowed down to a trickle of brackish water, and she saw the great white hull of the ferry looming towards her, and was afraid, but before it could make contact the sea rose up to meet her. There was a sinking feeling. There was the feeling that she might go on sinking, just drop to the ocean floor like a stone. It was dark underwater and she closed her eyes and for a moment, everything was quiet. She could've stayed there for a long time, in the darkness and the quiet. But then her body shot upwards and she was in the air again, gasping, and all around her was noise and chaos and what sounded like wind rushing in her ears and the water was ice-cold around her, the coldest thing she’d ever felt. She realized that she was still clutching her book. The ferry towered over her, heaving, coming closer. She tried to swim away, but she could hardly move amidst the battering waves. It took all of her strength just to stay where she was. She couldn't tell if the boat was moving closer or not; it tipped far, impossibly far away, then in the space of a moment came towering over her again. She tried to lift her head. There was the stern, it was moving past her, they were leaving her behind. She coughed up a mouthful of salt. She might’ve been sobbing.
“Hey!” A voice, small and reedy, emerged from the tumult. It was so faint that she could hardly distinguish it from the howling of the wind. It came again. “Hey! Miss!” She turned her head toward the source of the sound, but she couldn’t see anything. Just white-foam waves and the ferry’s hull surging past. Then a head emerged from the waves, head, shoulders, approaching, and he grabbed her in his arms. It was the concessions man, the chubby friendly one.
“Hold on!” he shouted. “They’re about to throw us a rope!”
A wave rose up behind him; she started to shout a warning, but before she could get the words out it was upon them, salt water filled her mouth. They surfaced, spluttering. He was still holding her. She was still clinging to the book, waterlogged now, probably unreadable.
“They’re going to throw us a rope!” he said again, and she saw it slap against the water behind him. She gestured and he released one arm to grab it. She gasped at the cold water that rose up in its place. He held her by the waist and hung onto the rope with his other hand as the dockhands hauled them back up to the stern. It felt like hours. The girl kicked her legs in a half-hearted effort to help. And then, finally, it was over. The dockhands grabbed their arms and dragged them onto the lower deck and they let go of one another and hunched over on the fiberglass, hacking up salt water.
“Wow,” said Stephen. “Wow. Wow. Oh my god. Wow. That was—wow.”
The girl didn’t respond. She looked pitifully small crouched there on the rolling deck, dark hair plastered to her neck. She’d lost her green ribbon but she was clutching the book against her chest. “You alright?” he asked. “Hey, hey. Come here. It’s alright.” He scooted over and enfolded the girl in his arms. “Come on. Let’s get you back to your stuff. We’re almost there.” He looped an arm beneath her knees and picked her up, started carrying her back inside. A cluster of dockhands trailed behind them. Everyone murmured as the waterlogged procession made its way through the cabin, back up to the corner booth, where the girl's things were still untouched atop her table.
“I thought I was going to get sucked up by the motor,” the girl mumbled into his shoulder.
“Come again?”
“I thought I was going to get sucked up by the motor. I thought that’s what happened when you fall off the side of the boat. When I was little my mom told me she once saw a guy get chopped up into a thousand tiny little pieces by the ferry.”
Stephen laughed. She could feel his stomach quake against her side. “The propellers don’t work like that,” he said. “They push water outward, they’re not a vacuum. Your mom was pulling your leg.”
“Oh,” the girl said.
“Alright, here we are.” With exquisite gentleness, he deposited her sodden body on the seat. One of the dockhands had produced a wool blanket from the hold, and he handed it to her. She wrapped it around her shoulders.
“Can I—do you need anything else?” asked Stephen. He looked a little awkward, now that they weren't touching anymore.
“No.” She smiled. “I’m okay.”
“Okay,” he said. “Alright. I’ll, uh, I’ll be—” He gestured toward the snack bar. There was a line of people waiting, murmuring impatiently to one another.
“I’ll let you know,” said the girl. She ducked her head and he hurried back to the snack bar. Every few minutes he glanced over at her. The boat had turned, and a thick mote of sunlight streamed through the window onto her booth. She put the wet book on the sill with its pages splayed out so that it would dry before the ink bled any more. Then she laid her forehead on the table and spread her hair out all around it. As soon as they passed the breakwall, the waves subsided. The boat stopped pitching and people started surging onto the upper deck to see what they'd come to see: the big loading dock, long rows of fishing boats, and beyond them the town, looking just a little lonely with its street signs and big white clapboard buildings. The air was filled with the cries of seagulls. It smelled like fish and salt and wind.
"Look, baby," said the young mother, holding the toddler up to see. "We're home!"
The little girl's coin-purse lips opened and closed. "Home," she warbled finally, with visible effort. The mother gasped and turned her around so that the two were face-to-face. "Say it again! Baby, we're home! Home!"
But baby just looked at her. In the convex glass of her mother's corneas, she could see another little girl, a little girl with big eyes and a big nose and a big round head on top of that tiny little body. When she smiled, a trickle of drool seeped out from the corner of her mouth.
A familiar heaviness had settled in his gut. He leaned his elbows on the cold iron railing and peered down at the water below. It was a windy day, no worse than usual, but windy enough to make the boat plunge from side to side amidst the oncoming waves. The sky overhead was a pale, anemic gray. Briefly, the man imagined vaulting over the rail into the seething white-capped foam. He could do it. He wouldn't, but he could. No one would notice his absence until it was far too late. The boat lurched, kicking up a spurt of water. He wiped his face with his sleeve and went back inside. It was warm in the cabin, radiant heat, all those bodies swarming around. He picked his way through the rows of booths, past the snack bar. There was a strange odor hanging in the air ¾ wet dog, yes, and vomit, and salt, and something else, ferry-smell, nothing else like it.
He managed to reach the booth without falling. His wife, Sharon, was lying down on the slatted bench with her jacket bunched up beneath her head. She leaned up on her elbow as he settled down opposite her. She was a small woman, and all he could see over the edge of the table was the upper half of her face, crowned by a mop of tangled hair. Her eyes were blue and sinking.
“How was your cigarette?” she asked, well-meaning. He shook his head. She looked at him for a second, then laid down and went back to inspecting the clumps of chewing gum stuck to the underside of the table. She was close enough to reach out and touch his terry-cloth knees, which rose up slightly as he leaned forward in his seat.
He picked up his newspaper and found the place where he’d left off. Oil rig in the works just off the south side of the island. Tourists were complaining about the obstructed view of the skyline. Some version of the story had appeared in every issue since the summer of 2015. His attention drifted past it to the two girls occupying the adjacent booth.
“No such thing,” said the one facing him. She had long stringy hair and a white bandage wrapped around her face, the kind you wear after you’ve gotten your wisdom teeth out. Her right cheek was swollen and bruised, but both her eyes were painstakingly made-up. “You’re crazy.”
“I’m serious! The whole island is haunted.” The girl across from her, facing away from him, was just freckled shoulders and a tumble of dark brown curls. “Even the ferry.”
“This one?” Wisdom Teeth looked dubious.
“You want to hear the story?” The brunette turned sideways on her bench and he saw her profile, bird-like, and the curve of her heart-shaped mouth. She had a gold locket, also heart-shaped, on a chain around her neck. She kept fidgeting with it, opening and closing the catch as she spoke.
“Fine. Hit me.”
“Alright. So, this all happened a long time ago. Or, not that long, really—like, maybe the sixties. They still did the thing they do now, where they run a whole bunch of ferries during the summer and only one per day during the winter. So in the summer they’ve got tons of ferry captains, but in the winter there’s only one, right? And the winter captain, he’s kind of eccentric, kind of a creepy dude, but he keeps out of everyone’s way so they all just let him do his job. And his wife’s great. Everyone loves his wife.”
Sharon took deep breaths beneath the table. The ferry always made her nauseous. It wasn’t just the pitching and swaying, it was all the voices mingling together, talking over one another, children screaming, and that smell in the air, that stale-ocean smell, it made her stomach turn. She tried to zero in on the closest conversation.
“But eventually, a rumor starts going round that his wife’s fucking one of the dockhands—“
“Is she?” interjected Wisdom Teeth.
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably. Either way, he catches wind of it, and one day she’s out on the top deck, they’re both out on the top deck, and the captain just grabs her and throws her off, and then he flags down all the dockhands, screaming that she’s fallen, and he puts the boat in reverse and “accidentally” mows her down. Like, blood everywhere, chunks of wife-meat floating around. And everybody’s kind of suspicious, ‘cause they all knew about the dockhand and nobody liked the captain in the first place. But they can’t prove that it wasn’t an accident, so he gets off scot-free and keeps his job and now the wife’s ghost haunts the ferry, just wanders around messing with people and knotting up the ropes."
The boat rolled to the side. A moon-faced toddler several booths down started gurgling excitedly, and Locket's coffee cup tipped over. Both girls grabbed their cell phones off the table and slid away from the spill, laughing.
"That was her!" said Locket. "She heard us talking about her!"
"You're crazy," Wisdom Teeth repeated. "You're so weird. I love you. I love you so much. You don't even know."
Locket smiled and glanced at her phone and it was evident to everyone that she loved Wisdom Teeth a little less than Wisdom Teeth loved her, but it was alright and they were happy and nothing really bad would happen between them.
"I'm going to see if they'll give me another coffee," she said, getting up. "Can I get you anything? Soup? Yogurt?"
"No, I'm okay."
"Suit yourself." Locket got up and went to the snack bar. The man behind it was making his way through a bag of Sun Chips. He popped them into his mouth one at a time and chewed slowly, carefully, grinding each chip to a fine pulp between his molars. He swallowed quickly when she approached, stashed the bag beneath the counter.
"What can I get for you?" he asked.
"I accidentally summoned a ghost and she knocked my coffee over. Is there any way I could get a new one?"
"Ah, yes, the captain's wife," said the man. "She got me earlier, too. Coming right up. There's napkins right there, if you need them." He gestured to the plastic dispenser and turned around to pour another coffee.
"Thanks," said Locket, pulling out a few. "What's your name?"
"Stephen," he replied. "Room for cream?"
"No, that's alright." She worked her fingernail into the crease of the little heart, pried it open, clicked it shut, pried it open again.
"That's pretty," he said.
"Thank you," said Locket. "It used to be my mom's."
She made her way back to Wisdom Teeth. She was tall, willowy. Her thighs didn’t brush together when she walked. Stephen poured himself a plastic cup of gingerale, then changed his mind, dumped it out, and filled the cup with water. He'd had a Cinnabon for breakfast that morning. He could feel it clinging to the inside of his stomach. Over the rim of the cup he looked at the girl in the far left corner booth, the booth that everyone avoided because it was the only one you couldn’t see the TV from. She had a green ribbon in her hair and she was holding a paperback novel. Her lips moved, like she was reading aloud, but she wasn’t looking at the book and her words were drowned in the racket of strident voices, untethered from their origins, competing against each other to be heard. Every conversation was more important than the next. Someone’s little boy ran up and down the aisle, shrieking in delight every time a sudden jolt knocked him off course. The girl watched him for a second, then slid out of the booth, still carrying her book, and picked her way up to the foredeck for a breath of fresh air.
Stephen watched her go, watched her push open the door and stand on the threshold for a moment, steadying herself, before she let it close behind her. Through the water-beaded window her figure receded toward the edge. A young woman came up to the snack bar with a toddler in her arms and looked at him expectantly. He signaled for her to wait. Outside, the girl leaned over the railing, staring down at the white foam churned up by the movement of the boat. She thought maybe she might vomit.
The toddler started whimpering. All of a sudden, the boat pitched violently to the side. The young mother shrieked and grabbed the edge of the snack bar to steady herself. Stephen stumbled and slipped on the coffee he’d spilled earlier. When he pulled himself back up, the girl in the green ribbon was gone. “Holy shit!” he choked.
“What?” asked the young mother. “What happened?”
What happened was this: the girl had been wrenched loose from the railing and flung over the side of the boat, and now she was falling and as she fell, time slowed down to a trickle of brackish water, and she saw the great white hull of the ferry looming towards her, and was afraid, but before it could make contact the sea rose up to meet her. There was a sinking feeling. There was the feeling that she might go on sinking, just drop to the ocean floor like a stone. It was dark underwater and she closed her eyes and for a moment, everything was quiet. She could've stayed there for a long time, in the darkness and the quiet. But then her body shot upwards and she was in the air again, gasping, and all around her was noise and chaos and what sounded like wind rushing in her ears and the water was ice-cold around her, the coldest thing she’d ever felt. She realized that she was still clutching her book. The ferry towered over her, heaving, coming closer. She tried to swim away, but she could hardly move amidst the battering waves. It took all of her strength just to stay where she was. She couldn't tell if the boat was moving closer or not; it tipped far, impossibly far away, then in the space of a moment came towering over her again. She tried to lift her head. There was the stern, it was moving past her, they were leaving her behind. She coughed up a mouthful of salt. She might’ve been sobbing.
“Hey!” A voice, small and reedy, emerged from the tumult. It was so faint that she could hardly distinguish it from the howling of the wind. It came again. “Hey! Miss!” She turned her head toward the source of the sound, but she couldn’t see anything. Just white-foam waves and the ferry’s hull surging past. Then a head emerged from the waves, head, shoulders, approaching, and he grabbed her in his arms. It was the concessions man, the chubby friendly one.
“Hold on!” he shouted. “They’re about to throw us a rope!”
A wave rose up behind him; she started to shout a warning, but before she could get the words out it was upon them, salt water filled her mouth. They surfaced, spluttering. He was still holding her. She was still clinging to the book, waterlogged now, probably unreadable.
“They’re going to throw us a rope!” he said again, and she saw it slap against the water behind him. She gestured and he released one arm to grab it. She gasped at the cold water that rose up in its place. He held her by the waist and hung onto the rope with his other hand as the dockhands hauled them back up to the stern. It felt like hours. The girl kicked her legs in a half-hearted effort to help. And then, finally, it was over. The dockhands grabbed their arms and dragged them onto the lower deck and they let go of one another and hunched over on the fiberglass, hacking up salt water.
“Wow,” said Stephen. “Wow. Wow. Oh my god. Wow. That was—wow.”
The girl didn’t respond. She looked pitifully small crouched there on the rolling deck, dark hair plastered to her neck. She’d lost her green ribbon but she was clutching the book against her chest. “You alright?” he asked. “Hey, hey. Come here. It’s alright.” He scooted over and enfolded the girl in his arms. “Come on. Let’s get you back to your stuff. We’re almost there.” He looped an arm beneath her knees and picked her up, started carrying her back inside. A cluster of dockhands trailed behind them. Everyone murmured as the waterlogged procession made its way through the cabin, back up to the corner booth, where the girl's things were still untouched atop her table.
“I thought I was going to get sucked up by the motor,” the girl mumbled into his shoulder.
“Come again?”
“I thought I was going to get sucked up by the motor. I thought that’s what happened when you fall off the side of the boat. When I was little my mom told me she once saw a guy get chopped up into a thousand tiny little pieces by the ferry.”
Stephen laughed. She could feel his stomach quake against her side. “The propellers don’t work like that,” he said. “They push water outward, they’re not a vacuum. Your mom was pulling your leg.”
“Oh,” the girl said.
“Alright, here we are.” With exquisite gentleness, he deposited her sodden body on the seat. One of the dockhands had produced a wool blanket from the hold, and he handed it to her. She wrapped it around her shoulders.
“Can I—do you need anything else?” asked Stephen. He looked a little awkward, now that they weren't touching anymore.
“No.” She smiled. “I’m okay.”
“Okay,” he said. “Alright. I’ll, uh, I’ll be—” He gestured toward the snack bar. There was a line of people waiting, murmuring impatiently to one another.
“I’ll let you know,” said the girl. She ducked her head and he hurried back to the snack bar. Every few minutes he glanced over at her. The boat had turned, and a thick mote of sunlight streamed through the window onto her booth. She put the wet book on the sill with its pages splayed out so that it would dry before the ink bled any more. Then she laid her forehead on the table and spread her hair out all around it. As soon as they passed the breakwall, the waves subsided. The boat stopped pitching and people started surging onto the upper deck to see what they'd come to see: the big loading dock, long rows of fishing boats, and beyond them the town, looking just a little lonely with its street signs and big white clapboard buildings. The air was filled with the cries of seagulls. It smelled like fish and salt and wind.
"Look, baby," said the young mother, holding the toddler up to see. "We're home!"
The little girl's coin-purse lips opened and closed. "Home," she warbled finally, with visible effort. The mother gasped and turned her around so that the two were face-to-face. "Say it again! Baby, we're home! Home!"
But baby just looked at her. In the convex glass of her mother's corneas, she could see another little girl, a little girl with big eyes and a big nose and a big round head on top of that tiny little body. When she smiled, a trickle of drool seeped out from the corner of her mouth.