Rituals by Mary Anna Evans

small battle. Faye’s chest tightened at the sight of the long bandage running below her child’s right collarbone. The words, “What in the hell happened?” spilled out of her mouth.
    She knew Joe hated it when she cursed.
    Faye would have ached at the look of helpless misery on her husband’s face, if she hadn’t been so angry. It had been a long time since she saw that look. When they’d met, his self-esteem had been buried under a lifetime of the kind of failures that come with learning disabilities the size of boulders.
    Joe had worked for years to make up for lost time, and Faye had helped him. She’d taught him to drive. She’d tutored him for his GED, then bullied the university into giving him the accommodations his disabilities required. He’d learned to recognize his own undeniable intelligence. Then they’d built a business together and a life and a family.
    It seemed so long ago, but the misery on his face brought it all back. Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how terrified Joe was that he would someday let her down.
    She had already asked, ‘What in the hell happened?” The best thing to do now would be to hold her tongue and wait for his answer.
    â€œHe saw me spear-fishing and—“
    â€œFish!”
    â€œYes, son, we caught some fish.” He put a hand on Michael’s back to quiet him. “I didn’t take him out there with me, Faye, and I never let him touch the spear. I gave him some rocks to play with on the beach and I stayed close in, so I could make sure he stayed out of the water. And he did. He stayed on the beach like a good boy.”
    â€œYes. No water. Daddy said!”
    Faye could see how much it hurt Joe to tell this story, so she tried to help. “You were a good boy to do what Daddy said.”
    Michael reached for the computer screen, trying to touch her face. The action jostled his wounded shoulder and he winced a little. The child was tougher than beef jerky, so he must really be hurting.
    â€œI told him he could play in the tide pools. You know the ones.”
    She did. They were two inches deep, tops. She had let him play there less than a month ago.
    â€œWell, he found a sharp stick, almost as long as he is. He was pretending like he was spear-fishing, too, stabbing make-believe fish in the tide pool. I didn’t like the looks of the stick and I thought he was being too rambunctious, so I came up on the beach to take the stick away. Honest, Faye. I was hardly ten feet away when he fell. The stick broke under him, and it jabbed up into his shoulder.”
    Faye told the truth when she said, “You didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done myself.” Then she listened to Joe describe a sequence of events she’d imagined a thousand times.
    Medical crises assume a new level of significance for island dwellers. Miles of water stand between them and help. Joe had done what she’d always known she might someday have to do: he’d stanched the bleeding and bandaged the wound, while assessing whether this was an ambulance-level situation or a trip-to-the-emergency-room situation. Nixing the ambulance, which would have been a helicopter or boat, he had loaded their son into one of their own boats and headed for shore.
    Joe told the story calmly, rationally, but Faye got a sense of his level of terror when he said, “On our way in, I called Sheriff Mike. Magda and him met me at the dock and went with us to the hospital.”
    Joe only asked for help in matters of life and death. Faye could see that Michael had been in no such danger, so Joe must have been at the end of his emotional rope to have made that call. She said, “Thank God for friends. I’m so glad they were there for you.” Then she casually asked the question that had been festering since she saw the bandage. “When did this happen?”
    It could be easy to lose track of time on an island, so