Every evening at six, Etta unlocked the room above the tide.
It was upstairs in the old ferry office, where the windows looked across the harbour and the floorboards lifted whenever a boat passed close to shore. The council had closed the building years ago, but the key still fitted the door. Etta had inherited it from her aunt, who had once sold tickets there and later claimed that the office was the only place in town where a person could hear the sea thinking.
Etta did not believe the sea thought. She did believe that the room had a good view of the ferry ramp, and that the last ferry arrived at six-twenty with a blue stripe along its hull. Her brother Colm had once said that if he came home, he would take it.
He had been gone four years, first for work, then for a silence neither of them had named. Their mother called it a quarrel. Colm called it “a pause”, in a message sent from an airport. Etta had read that word so many times it had lost its shape.
The quarrel had begun with a practical question. Their mother needed someone to take her to an appointment. Etta said she could do Thursday. Colm said Thursday was impossible, then asked why she always decided before he could answer. Etta told him he could choose another day. He said he was tired of being assigned a place in plans that were already finished. They both remembered the call as a different thing. Neither remembered the exact last sentence.
Afterwards, Colm sent photographs from stations: a paper cup on a ledge, a platform with no train, the blur of a name on a departure board. Etta sent him a picture of their mother's garden after the wind had broken a fence. Neither asked when they would see each other again.
In the first winter after he left, their mother fell on the back step. Nothing broke, but she could not put weight on her ankle for a week. Etta took time off work, moved a chair into the kitchen and made a list of what needed doing. When Colm rang, she read him the list. He asked to speak to their mother; Etta said she was asleep and carried on. Later, when she offered to bring the phone upstairs, their mother said, “He’s already called me.”
Etta had been relieved that the shopping was done and the bins were out. She had also been annoyed that her mother had not told her about the call. She could remember standing at the sink with a dishcloth in her hands, unable to say which feeling had come first.
The ferry office gave Etta somewhere to wait without admitting she was waiting. She told herself she was only keeping the room from being forgotten. The council planned to sell the building in spring. Each evening Etta climbed the stairs and turned on the lamp. She checked the clock, although she knew what it would say.
That evening, at six, she turned the key.
The office smelled of old paper and salt. A brass bell sat on the counter. The ticket printer had no ribbon. Above the door, the clock had stopped at ten past four.
A strip of paper was caught beneath the bell. Etta pulled it free: an old crossing timetable, folded where her aunt had marked the school holidays in pencil. Beside one date was a crooked star. She remembered sitting on the counter that afternoon, small enough for her feet to clear the floor, while her aunt counted tickets into a tin. Colm had been outside with their father, trying to skip stones across the harbour. He came in wet to the knees and asked Etta to say he had fallen. She had refused, then changed her mind when she saw how his face closed. Her aunt had looked from one child to the other and handed him a cloth without asking.
Etta smoothed the timetable against the counter. The crossing times had changed since then. She folded it along the same crease and put it back beneath the bell, leaving the star visible.
The harbour below kept moving. A gull dropped a shell onto the car park and took off again. The ferry sounded its horn once.
Etta waited. Her phone vibrated. Their mother had sent a picture of the soup she was making, a pot with a wooden spoon across it like a bridge. No message accompanied it. Etta started to reply, stopped, and put the phone away.
At six-twenty-three, the ferry doors opened. Two cyclists came out, then a child carrying a plastic bucket. A woman with a red scarf stopped to tie her shoe. Colm did not appear.
Etta went downstairs anyway. She stood by the ramp until the crew began closing the doors. One of them recognised her and raised a hand. She raised hers in return, then stepped aside for a man pulling a suitcase over the uneven paving. The wheels caught; he tilted the case and carried it the last few metres to the road.
She took out her phone and found her mother’s number. She could ask whether Colm had called her, as he had that winter. Her thumb hovered over the call button. Then she put the phone away and climbed the stairs.
Back upstairs, she looked at the stopped clock and took out her phone. She scrolled back to the photograph of the departures board Colm had sent from the airport. Underneath it he had written “pause”. She typed, “Mum’s making soup. I’m going over. If you want to come, you can. You don’t have to answer tonight.” She read it once, then sent it before she could turn the invitation into a schedule.
No reply came while she locked the office. She walked to her mother’s house with empty hands. The soup would be ready by now.
At the door, she knocked once. Her mother opened it with the wooden spoon still in her hand.
“I sent Colm a message,” Etta said.
Her mother moved aside.
Behind her, the kitchen window looked towards the harbour. The ferry was a blue mark on the dark water, already turning back.
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