The Only Ones Read Free Page A

autumn, after the summer people had left, Martin celebrated his eleventh birthday. He did so by climbing up to the rock outcropping and watching the ocean. For the last time, he waited for his father.
    It was midday and the tide was high when Martin saw a smudge of white on the horizon. It was his father’s skiff, its bow pointed toward the island. A rush of pure joy grabbed Martin, and he hurried down from the outcropping, into the woods, past the cabin, to the ladder. He almost slipped on the ladder’s steps, but he made it to the rocks unscathed and just in time to see the boat floating a few hundred yards offshore.
    He waved his arms and called for his father, but there was no response. The skiff, flat-bottomed and wooden, with slats for seats, rocked back and forth on the water. There was no cabin, so Martin could see why no one waved or called back: it was empty, except for a leafy branch of a tree that was resting on the seats, as if it had broken off and fallen inside during a storm.
    Martin dove into the frigid water. The tide was on its way out, a wind was picking up, and the current was pulling the skiff back to sea. Martin couldn’t let it get away. He had to know if there was anything else inside, any clue that his father had recently been aboard. But as hard as he swam, it was not nearly hard enough. Before long, the skiff was near the horizon, disappearing almost as quickly as it had come.
    Defeated, wet, and cold, Martin returned to the cabin. He lit a fire in their wood-burning stove. Sadness didn’t sit with him. Anger did. To be teased by the skiff! His father was an experienced mariner. Was Martin to believe he had fallen overboard? As soon as Martin was dry and warm, he went to the back room, where the machine was hidden. He hoisted it onto the dollies and brought it out into the yard.
    He turned all his attention to the machine. By studying it, he hoped that he would understand what exactly his fatherwas seeking, why it was taking so long to find it, and why the skiff had appeared on Martin’s birthday in the guise of a gift when it was merely an empty box. He took the machine apart, and he put it back together. He searched the book his father had given him, underlining passages about machines, hoping they would reveal something. They revealed nothing. The blank spaces in the machine were blank spaces in his mind, and he realized the painful truth: he didn’t have the ability to know what might fill them.
    Martin fell into a deep depression. Every day he regretted his decision to stay on the island instead of leaving with George. As the winter winds blew in and then blew out, the only thing that kept him going was the knowledge that when the days got long, the boats would show up, and so too would his friend. He would have his second chance.
    “Of course I’ll go with you,” he would tell George. “My father’s not coming back. I have this machine, but I don’t care about that anymore. You were right. You’re always right about everything.”
    So he waited again, only this time he waited for George. He climbed the rock outcropping and looked for boats. He watched the horizon for a long time, but no one came. It was hot, but there was no music playing across the open water. The sun was high, but there were no families fumbling along the rocks with picnic baskets in their hands. It was summer, but the summer people just weren’t there.
    The lobster trawlers should have clued him in. He hadn’t seen them since before that horrible eleventh birthday. While his father used to tell him that “someday the lobsters will run out and the trawlers will disappear,” he’d probably meant they would trickle away, with fewer trawlers appearing everyyear, until one day there would be none left. He probably hadn’t meant it would happen all at once. But that was what happened. One day they were there. The next they weren’t.
    Now the summer people hadn’t come, and this went against everything his