Point of Direction. Rachel Weaver

of a bird?” he says seemingly to himself as he looks over the rest of the contents of the shed. “I wonder what else is hidden in here.”

      I carefully fold the towel around the bones and tuck it back into the space where I found it. “Didn’t the Coast Guard guy say the guy who lived here before disappeared? Have you heard any stories about him?”

      “I don’t know,” Kyle mutters, still scanning the shed.

      “You never heard anything around town? Or in Juneau?”

      “Just that he disappeared.”

      I look down at the bird in the dark corner and wonder if I should get rid of it. But someone took so much care with it, it seems wrong to throw it in the ocean. Kyle goes back to digging through crates and shelves without another word.

      We don’t find a winch. I find a tattered rope. I cannot imagine how it will be helpful, but I bring it along anyway.

      Down on the beach, low tide looks better, but not by much. There is fifty feet of water between us and the skiff instead of seventy-five. The wind has slowed, a cold rain taps lightly on the hood of my rain jacket. The early evening has the same quality of light that noon had, it won’t be dark until somewhere around 11pm. We watch the bow of the skiff along with the buoy it’s tied to, break the surface of the water every so often.

      “It’s not that far.” Kyle keeps his eyes on the sloshing water.

      “You can’t make it.”

      “Anna, we can’t be out here with no skiff. And besides that, I can’t have the fishing fleet going by seeing our skiff hanging from the buoy like that.”

      “Let’s try to pull it one more time,” I say.

      We line up on the haulout rope and pull. It feels like we are trying to move a brick wall. My feet slip on the small flat rocks. I fall, feel a sharp rock gash my knee through my pants. Kyle drops the rope behind me. “It’s too heavy with the outboard still on,” he says.

      “Let me think,” I say, walking toward a rock up by the path that is big enough to sit down on. Blood from my knee trickles down my shin and soaks into my sock.

      I hear the splash and then the rhythmic pound of his bare arms against the surface of the water as he swims fast and hard toward the skiff.

      “Kyle!” I scream. His clothes are in a pile under his raingear on the beach, his boots folded over so that rain won’t get into them. It takes him two minutes to get out to the skiff. I start to pace, hear the sound of wind against ice, feel the weight of a pack, see the way glaciers open, their dark insides exposed.

      “Kyle!” I scream again. He is at the skiff. He takes a big breath and disappears under the water. Three minutes. The bow of the boat shakes violently. He comes back up, dives again. Four minutes, five minutes. I am not breathing. There is the sound of the rain and nothing else.

      He surfaces between the skiff and the beach, swimming much slower. Six minutes. I watch his stroke, too many seconds between the slap of each arm.

      I pull off my raingear, my boots. He switches to a breast stroke/dog paddle, is no longer lifting his head. I wade in to my waist, mussels cutting my feet. He gets his feet under him and stumbles toward me and the shore. His lips are blue, the skin of his arms, chest and legs, grayish-white. “We have to get inside right now,” I say struggling to get my boots back on over soaked socks and pants while Kyle slowly stands up. “You’re an idiot,” I add.

      He bends for his clothes, but can’t hold on to the bundle.

      I tuck in under his arm, balance his naked body against mine. “I’ll come back for the clothes.”

      Inside, he sits in the rocking chair while I run up the stairs and grab the wool blanket. While Kyle wraps himself, I find a roll of paper towels in the curtained off area beneath the stairs, throw the whole thing in the woodstove and light it. I run out to the shed, feet squishing in wet boots, and grab the shortest pieces of two by fours I can find. They don’t fit in the woodstove. I leave the door open with three or four sticking out into the room. Kyle’s lips are still blue and he’s begun to shiver. He raises his eyebrows at me.

      “A concrete room is not going to catch fire,” I say in response.

      He scoots the rocking chair closer to the woodstove. “Your pants are wet. You n-n-need to warm up,” he says, stumbling through the sentence.