Gifts from the Sea

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Authors: Natalie Kinsey-Warnock
lighthouse and ran to the cliffs.
    Seabirds screamed and circled below me, thousands of them, jostling for nesting sites on the ledges. Soon there'd be thousands of eggs, and Papa and I would have eggs for breakfast, dinner, and supper. Mama and I'd always loved spring, when the sun was bright again, the birds came back to nest, and the wild geese flew north. Their haunting cries tugged at me and made me want to fly with them.
    If Mama were here, she and I would have been combing the beach area for shells or brightly colored sea glass (“gifts from the sea,” Mama called them) or searching along the cliff edges for all the tiny wild-flowers, but I didn't have the heart to hunt for them myself. It just seemed another reminder that she was gone forever.
    Out of habit, I scanned the horizon. I was good at spotting things, had “eagle eyes,” Mama had said. That's what my name means,
eagle.
Papa had taught me how to read the water, how to tell where there were rocks just under the surface, for there were many such rocks surrounding Devils Rock, all of them dangerous, all of them waiting to bring ships to their doom. Papa had also taught me how to look for whale spouts, farout to sea, or rafts of seabirds, which indicated a school of fish. By the time I was two, I was announcing ships before Papa and Mama could see them. But on this day, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. It was as if the storm had scrubbed the sea clean.

    It wasn't until I dropped my eyes that I saw something, something dark in the white froth of the waves. At first, I thought it was a seal, but when I saw a door float by, I knew a ship must have gone down in the storm.
    Items were forever washing up against our island, items Papa managed to fish from the sea: chairs, coils of rope, barrels of salt cod and oil, shoes, and once a woman's parasol. I'd twirled that parasol on my shoulder, imagining myself strolling down a street in New York, or London, or Paris, until I'd felt an icy hand touch my shoulder and knew another ghost had come to live with us on Devils Rock. Mama may have wondered why I never asked to play with the parasol again. But we used the chairs, and cod, and coal that Papa pulled from the sea. It would have been wasteful not to.
    I knew there were places, coastal communities, where people made their living from shipwrecks. They were called “wreckers” and used lanterns at night tolure ships onto dangerous rocks so the ships would sink and scatter their cargoes where the wreckers could “harvest” them. But I couldn't imagine such a life, luring people to their deaths just for their belongings. Finding items from shipwrecks only made me sad, and I always thought of those poor people and what their last moments were like. What did it feel like to drown, to scream and know no one could save you, to disappear beneath the waves, unable to breathe? … I shuddered and hoped I'd never find out.
    I picked my way down the steep stone steps that some lighthouse keeper had chipped out of the cliff face. The object was a few feet offshore. I picked up a piece of driftwood and tried to fish it out, but it bobbed just out of reach. From what I could tell, it looked like some bedding with rope wrapped around it.
    I lifted my skirts and waded into the water. I knew I was taking a chance; currents swirled around Devils Rock, that's one of the reasons it was such a dangerous place for ships, and it was certainly no place to swim. Papa would have my head if he knew I had as much as one toe in that water, but my curiosity was stronger than the swirling tide.
    The current pushed hard against my legs. It was stronger than I'd expected; if I went down, I probably wouldn't be able to get to my feet again. I'd be swept under and Papa wouldn't know what had happened to me. I knew I should go back, but now I was close enough to see that the object was two tiny mattresses lashed together with rope. Why would someone tie two mattresses together? I took two

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