I’ve walked South Road alone on nights when the cloud cover’s thin enough so you can almost see the moon, and I’ve explored the houses with their rotten stink from the fish that swim in during high tide and get stuck in the cabinets. In one of those houses was a boy’s room. He had a Spiderman poster on the wall, and in a drawer I found a box with a Swiss Army knife, which I kept. But outside of that, there wasn’t much to do except look out the windows at the empty island, everything looking haunted, and I realized how alone we were—just me and Dad and somewhere far down island, George drunk in his shack.

The rain is a fine mist, everything foggy and damp as Dad parks the truck. Down along the shoreline he shows me the small boathouse of an abandoned home, where a motorboat bobs on the tide. I can’t believe he knew about this and never told me. We load the bags in. Dad fills the tank with new gas, pulls the cord until the motor coughs out smoke and catches, and he navigates us far from our truck, as though we’ll never return to land.

“I’m going to introduce you to someone new today,” he says after we’ve been chugging along for a while. “She lives across the sea. Her name’s Dalia and she’s got a little girl. They’re also survivors. I want you to be polite to them.”

Emerging from the mist like the bow of a ship is a house on a small hill on another of the tiny islands that were once part of our township. It looks like there’s a totem pole with massive wings in the front yard, but when we get closer I see it’s a tall metal rod with blades attached, spinning slowly in the mist. Dad cuts the motor, guiding us toward a makeshift harbor. I splash out and help him pull our boat onto the shore and tie it to the base of the structure.

“What is this thing?” I ask.

“Wind turbine,” Dad says. “Makes enough electricity to help them get through a day.” He carries the bags along the flagstones toward the house where a woman stands in the doorway in a faded blue dress.

“Hey there, Josh,” she says when we climb the steps. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” She extends her hand to me, and I wonder why she knows my name. Behind her is a little girl, holding on to her leg. “Her name’s Fiona,” the woman says.

“Hi,” I say to the girl, but she just puts her face against her mom’s dress.