Zachary was a latecomer to the cottage on Fishers Drift. By the time he arrived as a child the place had weathered ninety summers; the rumble of foghorns had settled the angles of its wood where spiders lazed. He’d explore its corners, assemble stories from the atmosphere: shells in green ashtrays, the odor of rendered tallow in the slotted bureau, a yellow copy of The Century Magazine in a drawer with a bottle of coconut lotion from the ‘80s. 

He loved clicking his fingers along the beads between the kitchen and the deck, loved revisiting the mass of rocks at the end of the beach where he and his grandmother tried to catch a glimpse of the Long Legged Sailor who walked ashore to steal a sleeping soul to take back to sea with him each year. The beach was private. Zach’s family were members. 

The week he turned 22 Zach moved to the city. His family gave him a year’s rent for a studio on Cobble Hill to make of himself what he liked. He attempted to stir up a name for himself as a poet and failed. It was time to give up trying.

He wasn’t about to give up on poetry, but he would no longer aspire to the title of poet. Out of every hundred people writing poetry, maybe one was a poet. Zach had learned this in readings around the city, where beautiful and unbeautiful young people read one after the other and no one talked about the poetry afterward, because there wasn’t anything to talk about. There was only the obvious, the imitative, the kind of poem built on an emotion that obscures the words around it, and the kind of poem whose words go in search of emotion but never find it. He published some of his poems in magazines, and one was even scotch-taped to the window of the local poetry shop (“The Sailor Comes Ashore”), but no one talked about Zachary’s poems, no one remembered the titles; no one minded that he was a poet but no one especially wanted him to be one. 

Six weeks before his free year in the city came to an end, Zach’s grandmother died. He learned the beach house had been mortgaged to give him his year. It was too late to thank her. Zach packed a small bag and invited two friends to come down for the weekend, make the best of it. They’d take the train to New London and taxi to Fishers Drift. Hughes brought his new girlfriend Samantha and Deepak brought his snorkel, though Zachary explained it wasn’t that kind of beach, didn’t have anything below the surface he would want to look at. 

“Do you snorkel?” Deep asked.

Zachary didn’t.

“Then I’ll judge what’s worth looking at.”

Toni-Kola, Bénédictine, Cutty Sark: to the foggy bottles that had always lived at the cottage Zach added a handle of rum and a hundred White Claws. He was anxious to show the place off: the beach, the rocks alongside the beach, the tide pools, the neighborhood walk at night along planted paths where his uncle used to leap out, shouting I am the Long Legged Sailor, and I’ve come for your souls. Zach would scream and run, then collapse in his cot upstairs, unable to sleep, feeling the foghorn’s thrum in his stomach, memory of beach roses mixing as he drifted off with the smells of his grandmother’s camphor and the ghosts of perfume. 

Deep was a poet, but not a poet because he didn’t aspire to it. His stuff was always written fast, always given away or forgotten—titles like “The Deep Remains Unsettled,” and “Resign Yourself to the Deep”—but there were good lines like “I’m tired because I sleep,” ending with throwaways like “cars are a kind of cave / crashed by explorers.” Deep was studying to be a consultant (never explaining precisely what kind—were you just supposed to know?) but he wrote poems in the lulls of his bartending gigs, gave them to customers. He had this kind of distracted, bespectacled way that put you at ease. He said blunt things and you forgave him. 

Hughes would say, “This is a really good poem.” And Deep would say, “Translate it to white and give me a cut.” 

Hughes, a former poet who DJ’d an EDM show, was also tall: a sleepy-eyed white guy with enormous hands. Spend the day with both Hughes and Deep and you wind up with a sore neck. Hughes’ new girlfriend Samantha was pale and moved oddly gracefully. She was a scientist of some kind, or studying to be one, nothing to do with poetry. 

“Why does that pond smell like dead people?” Deep asked, pointing at the little clam pond at the end of the dock.

Samantha had probably articulated greetings when she met Zach, but the first thing he remembered her saying was, “Living enzymes. Are there any dead bodies in beer?”

Deep said, “Sometimes.” 

“It’s plankton,” she went on. “Making sulfur. Catalyzing the process that feeds the plants and helps us breathe.” It looked as though she was gathering yarn with her fingers but she was illustrating something. “Flies like the smell and fish eat the flies and we eat the fish.”

Deep was anxious to try his snorkel so everyone but Hughes took the canoe into the clam pond and under the stone bridge that divided the inlet from the sound. Zach worked one paddle, Sam another. Deep took up position in the center, goggles in place, poised to fall backward like a diver. 

“You bail out here you’ll break your neck,” Zach said. “It’s shallow muck and guppies.”

Muck and guppies had a euphony. So did the birdsong all around them, louder now, as though the song were emerging from inside the boat. 

“Is that a kind of whistle?” Deep asked Samantha. It was hard for Zach to see her face with all three of them crowded into the canoe, but she seemed to be making the bird noise, a weird little whistle through her teeth. It was like the words weep weep, but abrupt, sharp like wait up wait up!

“How do you do that?” Deep asked, experimentally blowing air through his teeth. 

Slowly, Samantha brought a finger to her lips. Her concentration made the boys concentrate too. 

Then the first visitation: a brown and white killdeer with long legs fluttered near the boat,      black band around his neck like a scarf. Had she called him?      

Weep weep. 

Wait up wait up!

It landed on the stern before taking off into the gray sky. Samantha had her finger up again. A different call. This one had more attitude, chin up. Pip! Pip!

A pair of piping plovers announced themselves and circled. 

Deep pointed toward where the water shone darker blue. He made gull sounds. 

Some kind of biologist, Samantha must be. A solid future.

Reaches of sky revealed themselves where birds marked them out. Whirls of creatures appeared. 

“You don’t see what the bird call summons,” Deep said. You only see what comes.”

     “Help,” Zach said, “I’m being kidnapped.” 

Before bed that night, stowing his few things in his grandmother’s bureau, Zach found the hollow bulldog head with the slot where he used to save wheat pennies. He inherited it from a boy his age across the street—a boy he hardly knew—who died when Zach was six or seven. Zach at first thought the Long Legged Sailor had taken the boy, but no: a stranger hit him with her car. The boy’s family didn’t keep up their house after that, the porch rotting, downstairs windows cracked like a spider web. That same year his friend Jessica’s sister died. But that wasn’t the Long Legged Sailor either; it was cancer everyone blamed on the fission plant. The nuclear towers rose one town over, but you could see two of the plant’s radio lights after sunset, past the spit between the pond and the sound. Did the sailor rely on those lights?

The next morning at the beach was still overcast but they stripped to their swimsuits to try the water like sports. Zach caught a glimpse of Deep’s face as they waded in, followed Deep’s startled eyes to Samantha’s body. She was wearing a two-piece suit and she was shockingly athletic: sinew in her arms, cut midriff. Deep said, “Hughes, this one looks dangerous.” 

Samantha asked him if he always commented on women’s bodies. 

“Only if they’re ripped.”

Hughes woke up at this. “Yo, yo, do a trick,” he told her.

She said, “Okay, I’ll do a trick. I’ve been objectified worse.”

One second she was ankle-deep in water, the next she was upside-down in midair. Then on her feet—she’d cartwheeled without using her hands.

“Snap!” Hughes was proud of her. 

“That’s an aerial,” she said. “Here’s a butterfly.” The butterfly was like the aerial except that she kicked out as she spun. 

As they waded and reclined in the chilly water, moving their arms and legs to stay warm, Zach drew out Samantha. She was a molecular biologist, one who’d grown up not far from a beach like this one, but further south, on the Chesapeake. 

Deep surfaced as they talked to hand them all seashells, then to hand them live crabs. Hughes hollered and dropped his because he’d been pinched. Zach and Sam pretended to make theirs fight. Later, after Zach broke out the standing paddle boards, Sam did a headstand on hers and a backward handspring into the water.

Though he liked watching Sam’s tricks, Zach couldn’t help but feel a little small beside her. This stranger knew about how enzymes catalyze marsh grass, knew acrobatic tricks, knew how to summon birds. 

What were Zachary’s hidden gifts? Or even his obvious gifts? The beach house was a kind of gift, but it was leaving. Living rent-free in New York was an unsurpassable gift, but that was leaving too. Zach was an only child: if he wanted more family he’d have to find them in the wild, find a real job and pull his weight. He was charming, but he could tell there were any number of people to whom his charm felt false. He could write poems, but Deep could write better poems and in less time.  

When the beach started filling with locals and monster hunters Zach led Sam and Hughes onto the high rocks that overlooked the water. He didn’t want to run into anyone he’d known in childhood, learn what they’d done with their lives and how storms or the sailor had battered them. The precipice of the rocks rose high enough to make out the whole of the beach and village, but not so high they couldn’t make out Deep rising with his goggles and snorkel, his frantic waving. He waded out holding a box. 

“It’s dry inside,” he said when they’d climbed back down to check it out. “It’s full of flares. Maybe a shipwreck?” 

The box looked new. It might have fallen overboard that morning.

 “If it was a shipwreck,” Sam said, “wouldn’t they have used the flares?”

Deep pointed at a seagull. He said, “Sam, ask your friends if they saw a shipwreck.”

They’d all had a few White Claws by then, so it didn’t feel as strange as it probably looked when they chased the gulls and cawed at them. Deep leapt off the lifeguard stand to try to catch one midair. After they cut open the watermelon at the house Zack rinsed himself in the outdoor shower but couldn’t convince the others to try it. Deep and Hughes leaned from an upstairs window to douse him with the rest of the Bénédictine, then the Toni-Kola.

Things had quieted down by the time he came inside. Hughes’ own music filled up the room: itches crawling on metal. They sat around in his grandmother’s robes watching the sun sink, then watching the play of the darks: shallow water, island, horizon, lights from planes in the aerosphere, blinking nuclear tower. 

“I wrote a little poem,” Deep said, “about our boat excursion.” Poems by Deep were always a pleasure. It was called “Deep Time,” and it was weightless and lovely in the way you expected of Deep, beginning “I know that before the mountains / and the sea foam and the suns / there was a morning / when everything was dirty.” 

Zach wanted to mark the change, the end of his relationship with Fishers Drift and the end of his struggle to be a poet. He wanted to talk, but knew he’d lose their attention if he started by talking about his poetry.

“We have a local ghost,” he said. They turned their heads. The light was almost gone. He tried to memorize the moment, the end of Part One of his life. He told them all about the Long Legged Sailor, how he used to make Zach afraid as a boy, but also excited, because the Sailor’s proximity made Zach feel as though he was inside the glow, inside a mystery. Poetry had done this for a while. 

“A lot of my poems are actually about the Sailor mythology,” he said. “I mean not forcefully, but I wondered if someone might ever trace it—some stories I heard around here as a kid, some things I found.” 

 “A searing evocation of today’s concerns,” Deep said.

“My grandmother saw him once,” Zach went on, as though Deep weren’t making fun of him. “It was during the storm of ’38. She was just a kid. Just a shape in the storm. Moving from house to house.”

But he’d lost them by then. Hughes fussed with the music, turning up the volume. Deep danced and Samantha joined him. As Zach could have predicted, Samantha was the life of it. It wasn’t the agility of her whole-body ass shake so much as the way you could tell she felt each note of the music. 

Hours later, Zach sat on the porch with Sam while Hughes and Deep set off Deep’s flares on the beach. 

“I’m almost embarrassed to share it,” she said, “but I wrote a poem on the boat too.” A red pop from the flares. “I don’t usually do that. It’s just a thank you for letting me come here with Hughes.” 

She handed him the lighted screen on which she’d written:

Goodbye to a House
— for Zach

Home is a card you turn & turn
& one day it’s a new face. 
Your house was huge, then it was medium-sized,

& now the world you made
inside those walls
is barely taller than the sea.

What will change? The clouds 
of childhood. What will stay 
the same? The clouds of age.

First the lawn, then the porch, at last 
the rooms overlooking waves 
fill with strangers. 

Zach took a sleeping pill that night. Otherwise he knew he’d lie awake, worrying over this thing he’d been working at so long—this idea of poetry. It didn’t sit right that Sam could write a poem nearly as good as Zach’s own when she admitted to being a novice. He only just managed to drift off when he woke to a growl and shriek from the yard, late, maybe 3 am, as though the muskrat who lived in the garden was murdered lingeringly. He fell asleep mouthing barely taller than the sea.

Then he was watching the curtains fill with the bleached white of late dawn. Lines for a poem began to articulate themselves until Deep and Hughes appeared to tell him what had happened. Deep looked frightened. Hughes, for once, seemed wide awake. 

That cry they’d heard in the night hadn’t come from the garden. Samantha was gone. 

Hughes, who’d fallen asleep on the couch downstairs, discovered the windows of their room flung open, all the glass cracked in spiderwebs, even the mirror. A tangle of bedsheets spilled to the lawn. It ran down the side of the house and into the murk of the pond. There were more blankets than anyone remembered seeing in the house, interlaced and filling with the wind. 

Zach knew it was the Long Legged Sailor. Hughes and Deep regarded him as though he were malicious. But it might just as well have been their fault: maybe Sam’s weird calls in the boat woke the thing from its slumbers, or maybe Hughes’ music, or the flares from Deep’s shipwreck. Twenty minutes they talked—Zach up and pacing now, asking “okay, what else could it have possibly been?”—until, despite himself, Deep began to grow afraid (“Can we please get out of this cottage, please?”). Hughes grew near-catatonic with worry. 

They never did find a body. 

+

Twenty summers later Zach waited for his daughter in the cold blast of his Subaru’s AC outside Pepper Tree Square. She was late out of ballet class at Olga’s, which was fine because it meant she was goofing with the other kids. She was close with her group, but not cliquish. Zach was proud of her. She didn’t even remember New York City anymore—she’d have been too young when they left. El Paso was the home she knew. 

  Picking her up was Zach’s job, since he left the office half an hour before class ended and since North Mesa was the obvious way back, past clusters of chain shops and short-lived boutiques. They’d get takeout from Taco Cabana, maybe eat in the backyard if the mosquitos weren’t out. Then a stroll along the irrigation ditches as far as Lindbergh. 

Sometimes, walking at night, a habit he kept, he’d think about evenings on Fishers Drift. Sometimes he even remembered his uncle jumping out of the shadows, I’ve come for your souls. Lights from the nuclear plant. But the air was so different here. The mountains at the end of his street turned black when the night came on. You could only tell they were there from the absence of stars.

But he didn’t like waiting in the car outside Olga’s, because only there was he reminded of that weekend, and of Samantha. There was a bridal shop in Pepper Tree Square and an Italian Restaurant and a bookstore. It was called “Literarity,” presumably to keep people from flooding in. Zach arrived at Olga’s early one afternoon and finally wandered in the bookstore and browsed. He mostly read crime novels now, but they might have some Patricia Highsmith or Tana French—they were literary. 

Instead he flipped through an anthology, New New York Poets. In a moment of hard shock he realized he knew about a third of the contributors, had drunk with them, slept with some of them. They’d been struggling poets too. Sometimes it seemed as though no one cared about their work. He read their biographies: Jenny was a professor at Dartmouth, Zia won a Pulitzer for her second collection Breaking and Mending. Even Deep was in there with two poems—even Deep, who tried to dive from the boat without looking. 

That’s when he thought about Sam. Would she still be a researcher somewhere now, maybe with a family? Would she write poetry? Had the sailor even come for her or was it an elaborate joke? The police went through the place. Why hadn’t they heard the mirrors crack? Zach acquired the reputation of someone who gets in the way of things—he kept insisting on this supernatural, obviously nonsensical explanation. But what made sense? 

He walked back into the sunlight, got back into his car. 

The girls came out of class in Russian costumes and makeup out of Ballets Russes. They were so successfully disguised, so suddenly alike, he didn’t see his own daughter until she knocked on the glass.

+++

John Cotter is the author of Losing Music: A Memoir of Art, Pain, and Transformation, and Under the Small Lights, a novel. He lives in New England.