by Lydia Millet
Then they spent the rest of the afternoon getting ready for beach camping, which Jax solemnly informed them was against the law. Or at least Park Service rules. They’d have to be stealthy and sneak down after dark, and just hope that no rangers would come driving along the beach in their Park Service jeeps to notice them.
The gear needed to be ready and stowed in their big, external-frame backpacks before Lolly got there to make dinner so there was no chance of her noticing anything.
“Why don’t we set the tent up under the trees on the cliffs, overlooking the beach?” suggested Cara. “Not far from the parking lot, so it’s easy to get to in the dark. And it’s not right at the water, in fact it’s a long way up, so that makes it harder for him to get to us.”
The three of them were in the garage digging up camping gear from previous years, when the family had made road trips out West to hike in the red-rock country of Utah and near the Grand Canyon. Cara remembered her mother laughing as the wind tossed one of their picnics into the air—running, as she held Cara’s hand, through a high alpine meadow where there were purple lupines.…
This summer, of course, there’d been no road trips.
“From up on the bluffs we’ll definitely have a view of the water,” she pressed. “A better view. We can see way further out from up there. So if the glow’s all the way out at the shipwreck, say?—and doesn’t come up to the waterline, we’ll still be able to spot it. And there’ll be less chance anyone will catch us.”
Human or otherwise, she thought.
Max was rolling up sleeping bags and pads and stowing them in the back of the car. He thought they should take those along in case their friends got bored and wanted to crash; the four-person tent had a clear-mesh door flap, so the others could just lie down while Cara or Max kept a lookout.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “Plus, if we hit paydirt, and we have to call Zee to bring the boat out, we get better cell coverage up there, too.”
“’Course the downside,” said Jax, “is you’ll have more mosquitoes.”
“Note to self: pack bug juice,” said Max.
The garage was dusty, with cobwebs clinging to the boxes of battery-powered lanterns and lightweight cooking equipment. Cara brushed them off and wiped her hands on her jeans.
“So, here’s how we’ll do it,” said Max. “I’ll drive over early and pitch the tent, OK? I’ll leave the bags and pads in there, flashlights and lantern, drinks, insect repellent”—he looked down at the pile of gear, nodding as he took stock of what they’d need—“and some snacks. Also extra batteries for the lantern, cause we wouldn’t want to run out of light. After I set it all up, I come back and we all have dinner with Lolly and act like normal kids.”
“Act like,” said Cara.
“Then, as soon as Lolly goes home, you and Hayley take off on the bikes. Me and the guys’ll come relieve you at one in the morning, in the car. We’ll do the rest of the night shift. It’s no problem. Keat wants to play poker with nickels. But we all gotta sync up our watches. And charge our phones.”
“I’ll man the home base,” said Jax. “Even if I can’t go with you, I can still stay up and help. You’re not giving me a curfew now, are you Max?”
“No curfew, little dude.”
“So you can text me any questions. And report back hourly, just to check in.”
“Especially if it’s raining,” said Cara. “Because if it rains….”
“Exactly. Is this thing waterproof?” asked Jax, and lifted a corner of their family’s old red tent.
“Used to be,” said Max. “Not so sure anymore. But it’s not like we’re camping out for days on end or anything.”
“I mean, because of him,” said Jax. “Night and rain. Those are his favorite things.”
“His?” asked Max.
“Pouring man,” said Jax.
“The man who walks in water,” Cara said with a nod.
“As opposed to on water,” added Jax.
“Wait. On water, as in Jesus?” asked Max.
“In water,” said Jax.
“He sure isn’t Jesus,” said Cara. “Way too creepy.”
Jax shook his head. “And no beard.”
But a slow, steady drizzle began after Max drove off to pitch the tent, telling Lolly he had to pick up his paycheck at the restaurant.
“Great,” whispered Cara to Jax, helping to set the table. “Rain, like you forecasted.”
“I still wish I was going with you,” said Jax.
“Going where, dear?” asked Lolly, bustling in with a basket of bread.
“To-to-to …,” he stammered.
“To school with me in the fall,” broke in Cara, grabbing at straws. “See, they were going to skip him ahead some grades, but Mom and Dad said he was ‘developmentally inappropriate’ for my grade. He’s kind of disappointed.”
“Oh, dear,” said Lolly and patted Jax’s head as though he were Rufus. “Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up. It’s more fun being a kid.”
“Yeah, right,” said Jax.
After she went back into the kitchen they stood staring over the table at the windows beyond, a stack of place mats and napkins in front of them. Cara could see through the trees in their backyard to the rain falling over the bay, freshwater joining the salt ocean in a million minuscule pinpricks on the surface. Soon you wouldn’t be able to see out there at all; already dusk was coming on, and with all the dark clouds overhead it seemed even later.
The branches of the pines dipped and swayed, and beyond them the gray of water and sky seemed to combine without a line between them, into a vague mist.
“Is that what they really said?” he asked after a minute. “I’m not mature enough?”
Cara looked at his hurt face and was surprised, then felt a pang of shame that she hadn’t thought of his feelings.
“I was just making it up, mostly,” she said.
This was one of those times she needed him to keep his promise—his promise not to ping her.
“I mean,” she said, scratching a bite on her arm to give the impression she wasn’t focused on fibbing, “they did think you should be with kids your own age, though. They said you’d have no fun if you were with thirteen-year-olds. That it would be too weird.”
“But I get along with you,” he said. “You’re thirteen.”
“Come on, Jax,” she said gently. “That’s different. You know what I mean.”
He shrugged defensively and turned back to the window.
“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly. She didn’t want to make him as nervous as she was about tonight, but she felt so unsure.… They had no idea what they were doing, after all. It was a giant shot in the dark. They were trusting that all this meant something. That it was real—not just a figment of her and Jax’s imagination, which it sometimes seemed to be—and that the signs they were finding were meant for them. “We’re going to be out there at night, with the rain and the lightning, and we’re taking the others, Hayley and Keat and Cory or whoever, without telling them what we’re there to do—maybe putting them in danger, even. And we don’t even know why, exactly….”
“We do know,” said Jax firmly. “We’re doing it for her. And not only that, either. We know there’s something bigger. We know there’s a pattern behind it. We just don’t quite see what the pattern is. Not yet. But we are supposed to do this, Car. We’ve been spoken to—you with the letters on the driftwood, the message from the sea. Me with the sea turtle.”
“And don’t forget him,” said Cara, picking up a napkin ring and twisting the yellow cotton napkin inside it.
“No,” said Jax, and shook his head. “How could I? He spoke to us too. There are two sides to this fight, and we’ve been approached by both of them.”
“That message,” said Cara, laying forks around the places. “It said ‘three,’ which you think means us, and then called those three the ‘interpreter, arbiter and visionary.’ Right? Well, I can see how you’d be the visio
nary. But Max and I don’t exactly seem like interpreters or judges. That’s what arbiter means, right?”
“One who weighs both sides,” said Jax, nodding. “An impartial decision-maker, in this case.”
“So how can it be us, then?”
“Just be patient,” said Jax. “Don’t think you have to understand everything at once. Sometimes it takes a while. You have to wait and see. You have to believe it’ll be clear one day, as long as you keep watching.”
After dinner they were impatient for Lolly to leave, but she seemed to think it was her job to clear and wash every last dish and then tuck the kids in—despite the fact that Max didn’t typically go to bed till midnight even on school nights.
So all four of them, including Hayley, pretended to be tired, yawning and rubbing their eyes sleepily. By 8:30 Lolly apparently believed they were down for the count. She set the dishwasher churning and sloshing, turned out all the lights downstairs, and called up her good-nights to each of them before she headed out the front door toward her car, running with a magazine held over her head to keep dry, and drove off up the street.
They watched from Max’s window to be sure she was safely gone.
“You’re lucky,” said Hayley enviously. “I wouldn’t be left alone ever. My mom won’t even let me walk to the store by myself. She says stuff like ‘ten thousand children are abducted in this country.’ ”
“You’re what, fourteen, and she doesn’t let you walk to the store?” asked Max.
He was wearing a faded T-shirt that said KNOW YOUR RIGHTS; apparently his right was to pick his ear, which he was rooting around in with a pinky.
Cara was grossed out, but Hayley didn’t look any less lovestruck. Cara couldn’t help pulling a face.
“She’s thirteen, like me,” she said.
“Fourteen really soon, though,” put in Hayley.
“What’s she gonna do, hide in your closet when you go to college?”
“I know, right?” said Hayley. “It’s embarrassing.”
“Come on, Hay, we should go,” said Cara, and tugged her friend’s arm to get her away from Max, a/k/a the Ear-picking Heartthrob. “It’s already dark. We could be missing it.”
“You got a really great brother and sister here,” said Hayley to Jax as they went out Max’s door. Mostly to kiss up to Max, obviously. “All this for a science project!”
Hayley wasn’t used to riding a bike at night, so Cara took the lead and went slowly. They crossed Route 6 with no headlights in sight, only the rain pattering down on the hoods of their jackets and the tires making soft whishing sounds over the wet pavement. When they got to the Marconi parking lot, they walked their bikes up out of the lot and onto the cliffside, taking a narrow, bumpy trail over the bluffs to where the tent was pitched, hidden by low pines.
And sure enough, Cara found the tent in the dark by hearing instead of sight: the drops hitting its sides made a sound that was different from the rain on the trees and the sandy grass.
While Hayley laid Max’s bike down and scrambled to get inside and get dry, Cara stood for a minute looking out over the ocean. It was invisible—a huge, black abyss. Her eyes would adjust, she figured, if they didn’t turn the lantern on inside the tent; but if they kept a light on the whole time, she’d definitely have trouble seeing what she was supposed to be here to see.
She followed Hayley into the tent, where blankets were piled on top of the sleeping bags. Hayley flicked a flashlight on, and Cara realized she wouldn’t be able to see anything from inside anyway—it was impossible to know whether, looking out the mesh of the door flap, she was seeing the black sky or the black sea. She could easily miss whatever phosphorescence appeared in the water, and she wouldn’t even know she wasn’t looking in the right place.
But the tent was safer. From him.
The tent was dry and well lit.
Still, if she stayed safe inside the tent she really could miss seeing the fires. Then she would fail the test.
And she couldn’t stand that. Because finally, she realized, it was a test of whether she cared enough, and was strong enough, to bring her mother back.
At least, if the Pouring Man came, she could hide from him in the tent. It was dry, after all, and he couldn’t come in unless she let him, Jax had said.
“I have to stand outside, I think,” she told Hayley. “But you can bundle up and keep warm, right? There’s snacks somewhere in here, too. Max left them.”
“You’re going to stand out in the rain?” asked Hayley.
“Sorry. But I have to,” said Cara.
Hayley shook her head. “I may be an only child and all? But if I did have a brother, I’m really not sure I would go through all this just so he could, like, look at slimy bugs through a microscope.”
“They’re not exactly bugs,” said Cara. “They’re dinoflagellates. Phytoplankton that are bioluminescent.”
She could hardly believe she’d got all the syllables in the right order. She felt almost as smart as Jax.
“Whatev,” said Hayley.
Cara moved away from the tent and stood under one of the taller pines. The longer she stood still, staring out to a sea that didn’t even seem to be there, the more she wished she had a folding chair.
Huddled with her cell phone sheltered inside her raised jacket collar—and partly to distract herself from her nervousness—she dialed Jax.
“Tell Max you can’t see anything from inside the tent,” she said. “He needs to bring a lawn chair or something for the person who’s keeping watch. Even though it’s raining. So, Max’ll have to watch for him the whole time, too. He’ll have to watch the sea and watch for the Pouring Man. And even if he’s going to end up getting soaked, he probably still won’t want to just have to stand out here for five hours.”
She finally found a tree branch to sit on, a short way along the edge of the cliff. To her left was the red glow of the lantern from inside the tent, as Hayley read a magazine about celebrities—her main provision for the evening, which she’d brought a whole stack of. To Cara’s right there were no lights at all unless she looked out to sea, where a cruise ship was sitting with its swooping strings of yellow-white lights like Christmas decorations.
No lights nearby. Except the tent’s lantern.
Her fingers were getting cold, slick with rainwater where they stuck out of the end of her sleeves. She tried hopping from one foot to another to keep her toes warm, realizing she should have worn thick wool socks instead of thin ones beneath her Pumas. It was surprisingly cold for August, standing out here at night with the light rain falling. She listened to the waves crash below and the drizzle patter down on the leaves around her and thought of her mother. The lines in the message—the poem that supposedly told them what they needed to do—her mother had to have left that in the shell box for them, right? Because who else could have gone in and put it there? So, did that mean her mother was the one who had scratched the message on driftwood, too?
It was a strange thought, the idea that her mother might possibly have been watching her—watching her and Rufus on their morning walk, making their way down the sand road a short time after dawn, and never showed herself.
And when had her mother had a chance to put the message in the mother-of-pearl box—just a few days ago? Weeks? If she’d put it there recently, as in this summer—if she could come and go as she liked—why hadn’t she let them know she was safe? And why communicate in complicated language instead of just saying right out what they were supposed to do?
She felt a surge of resentment. First her mother had left them without warning, now she was making them do hard things—jump through these crazy hoops without even explaining why.
At least, Cara hoped it was her. Because if it was someone else, that was scarier still.
She thought she heard a faint rustle in the trees behind her. Was it him?
She tensed, ready to dash back into the tent. Then she looked to her left and noticed there was no red light emanating from
the tent anymore. It was dark all around her. She should have told Hayley to keep the light on, she should have made that clear! She could take a break, couldn’t she? Five minutes. The red tide couldn’t come and go that quickly.
She had to get the light on again. She had to be able to see.
She edged toward the tent, not wanting to use her flashlight, and felt panicky when, kneeling down in front of the opening, she fumbled with the zipper on the door and couldn’t get it to unzip—a panic as though there was something right there at her back, something unknown bending down.…
Then the zipper gave, and she slipped inside, her heart beating fast.
Hands shaking, she zipped it up again.
“Hey, Car,” came Hayley’s tired voice beside her in the dark as she turned over and her sleeping bag made its swishing sound. “Did you find any of those dinoflatulence?”
“Not yet,” said Cara, and flicked the lantern on. “Sorry, but we really need to keep the light on. We have to.”
“Mmm,” murmured Hayley, not caring.
Cara pulled a blanket around herself to warm up, her teeth chattering.
Hayley’s breathing got slow and regular again—she’d fallen back to sleep. Cara told herself she could relax briefly, too—she could lie back for just five minutes, couldn’t she? Before she went outside again. Just five minutes.
In the dream, her mother was in the tent with her. Cara could almost smell her clean, lemony skin, a saltiness in her long, dark hair.
“Cara,” sighed her mother. “Cara. Cara.”
Her hair was flowing like a mermaid’s. Was that soft water around them? Or just the plain old air?