Lost Children of the Far Islands Read Free

asked.
    Their father stopped smiling. Three fishing boats had been lost in the Gulf of Maine since April. All three had gone down during freak storms that had risen out of the sea with no warning and then vanished as quickly as they had come. No traces of the boats, or of the fishermen who had been aboard them, had been found.
    “Nothing,” he said very quietly.
    “But fishing accidents have always happened, right, Dad?” Gus said.
    Their father nodded, but his expression was grim.“Yes, but not like this. Maybe two, three incidents a year, but not three boats in one spring. That’s nine men missing now.”
    Their mother stood up abruptly, her chair squeaking as she shoved it away from the table. “I’m going back to bed,” she said. “Peter?”
    Their father got up quickly and took her arm, helping her to the stairs as if she were an old woman. As they went upstairs, the children could just hear their mother’s voice.
    “You’ll only frighten them,” she was saying.
    “I’m not scared,” Leo said. “Are you, Ila?”
    Ila shook her head firmly, her red curls bouncing against her cheeks.
    “But Mom is,” Gus said. “It probably reminds her …” Her voice trailed off. They all knew the story of their mother’s family, although it was never spoken about. Her parents had drowned in a boating accident when she was just seventeen. Rosemaris had been on the boat as well, but was saved when a boy, out fishing early in the morning during his vacation from college, found her clinging to a lobster buoy. She was half dead from hypothermia, but she survived. She had no other family, so the boy’s parents took her in. She waited tables at LuLu’s Diner until the boy finished college, and then they were married. A year later, they had twin babies. They named the girl Gustavia, after the boat that Peter had been driving when he found the half-drowned girl. Leo’s full namewas Leomaris, which means
lion of the sea
, something that Leo pretended to be embarrassed by but secretly thought was pretty cool.
    “Maybe,” Leo said, suddenly thoughtful. “I mean, it is kind of weird, you know, that they haven’t found any wreckage or anything, right? It’s a little freaky.”
    “Charlotte says her dad hasn’t been taking his lobster boat out,” Gus said. “Her mom won’t let him. She says they’ve been fighting like crazy about it, ’cause you know they have to pay for that special school for her little brother, and they’re going to run out of money if he doesn’t go out.”
    “Well, freak storms are, by definition, anomalies,” Leo said. He reached for the bread plate. Since there were no grown-ups at the table to stop him, he jammed two pieces into his mouth and then followed them with a spoonful of butter. “I’m thure it will all be thine,” he said.
    “Gross,” Gus said. “Gross, gross, gross.”
    “Yum,” Leo said as Ila grinned delightedly.
    But it wasn’t fine. In fact, it got worse quickly after that.

As the days went by, their mother seemed to withdraw further and further until she was no longer
there
, in some sort of indefinable way. Her face grew thinner, and her gaze more remote. Gus felt like shaking her just to see if she would notice her daughter standing in front of her. At first, Gus was angry with her mother. But by the second week of her illness, she wasn’t angry anymore. She was frightened.
    When the three children came home after school, their mother was usually in her studio. She was a quite famous painter. Her work sold all over the world. The paintings were always of the same subject, shining flat and green in sunlight, kicking up white splashes in the wind, churning with black waves in a storm. The Brennans’ backyard sloped down to rock ledges and then to the sea. Their mother’s studio had an uninterrupted view from its long windows, so that she could stand at her easel and paint the changing ocean landscape.
    But these days, although she was in her studio, she was