She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,205

Jack Thatch. My Pip.”

I pulled her close. I held her so tight.

“Dance with me?” she whispered, burying her head in my shoulder.

And we did.

We danced at the edge of that cliff, we danced to a song only we heard.

I honestly couldn’t say if five minutes passed or an hour; time was lost in that moment. When she finally whispered we should go, I could only nod. If I spoke, I knew the tears would come. I followed her from the water’s edge back to the car, where she curled up with her copy of Great Expectations in the passenger seat.

Hobson continued to stare from the back.

We left the Cowlitz River behind us.

Three and a half hours to Whidbey.

Stella drifted off again about an hour outside of Longview. Her seat back, she had pulled her knees up close to her chest. Her dark hair obscured her face. She looked so small, so vulnerable. I’m not sure when she started shivering. I imagine it began about thirty minutes from our destination, because I had been watching her closely and I hadn’t noticed until then.

When the sun started to rise, I saw the dark sweat stains on her clothes. I pulled the sleeve of my shirt down over my fingers and used the material to brush the matted errant strands of hair from her face. The newborn sunlight seemed to bother her. She buried her eyes in the crook of her elbow with a soft sigh.

We left I-5 for WA-525 North, which became Mukilteo Speedway, and followed signs for Whidbey and the Clinton-Mukilteo ferry terminal. While traffic leaving the island on this Monday morning appeared heavy, very few seemed to be heading from the mainland back to the island. I imagined the opposite was true in the afternoons, when the businesses in Seattle shuttered for the day.

At a small tollbooth, a pleasant woman in her mid-fifties took our fare and told me to follow the car in front of me into row two and pull up to the front. The next ferry would be arriving in under five minutes.

“How long is the ferry ride?”

“Fifteen to twenty minutes, depending on the waters.”

I considered waking Stella, but figured it was best to let her sleep. I had no idea what waited for us on the other end.

Six other cars waited with us, only one of which was white. A mid-seventies Ford pickup truck with an elderly man behind the wheel, wearing a navy blue down jacket and a Seahawks cap. He was reading the newspaper with a cup of coffee perched precariously on his dash. When he caught me watching him, he smiled, nodded, and went back to his paper.

I had never been on a ferry before, and when the Kittitas arrived, I couldn’t believe how many cars disembarked. I had no idea the vessel would be so large. When the last vehicle finally disappeared back down Mukilteo Speedway in the direction of Seattle, the row of cars beside us was ushered onboard. A man in an orange vest motioned for me to follow. We parked on the lower level. I shut down the engine. When we pulled away from the dock a few minutes later, I finally closed my eyes, allowing the exhaustion to wash over me.

PART 5

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

1

If I slept, I did not dream, and for that I was grateful.

My eyes snapped open with the quick yelp of a horn behind me.

“Jack? Is this Whidbey?”

Stella was awake, too, sitting up and leaning forward in her seat to get a better view.

The ferry had butted up against the dock. The row of cars beside us had already disembarked. Another man in an orange vest waved impatiently at me, gesturing toward the dock.

The horn behind me yelped again. Longer this time.

I started the car, put it in gear, and followed the taillights of the last car to leave the ferry off the edge of the boat and back onto solid ground. A large sign read:

CLINTON FERRY TERMINAL

WELCOME TO WHIDBEY ISLAND

To my left sat a squat gray building with a green roof and a sign that simply said WELCOME CENTER; I pulled into one of the empty spaces beside it. The rest of the terminal was nothing more than a large parking lot with at least three dozen vehicles lined up ready to board the ferry back to the mainland. The moment the cars from