by Jessi Kirby
I look around at the boat, then at him as he does the same, and when our eyes meet, I feel a little flutter of something in my chest. “And we . . . worked together?”
He laughs in a way that sends a wave of nervousness all through me. “Kind of. I worked. You mostly took pictures.”
“Of what?”
“The boat, the water, the sunset. Whatever caught your eye.”
Pay attention to your attention.
“You?” I ask.
The question sends a wave of heat to my face.
Walker looks at me for a long moment, his eyes unreadable. “Sometimes.”
My mouth goes dry, and my heart pounds in my chest, and for just a second I picture us, here together on this boat. “So we . . . ?”
I don’t need to finish for him to know what I’m asking. Walker’s eyes run over my face, and he leans closer. Close enough so that I can see the little flecks of gold in his eyes. “No,” he says. “You had your boyfriend, and your life, and everything else.”
He pauses, and I can almost see that wall of his come back up.
“This was . . .” He shrugs. “Just a place you came to get away from it sometimes.”
He doesn’t look at me when he says it, and I know it’s not true. I know that, just like everyone else, he’s not telling me everything. So I risk trusting myself. I reach into my back pocket for the picture of me, and I unfold it between us.
“You took this picture, didn’t you?”
He looks at it but doesn’t say anything, and that’s how I know I’m right. “I was really happy when you took it, wasn’t I?”
His eyes linger on the image of me for a moment longer, and then he looks at me. “Yeah. We both were.”
“Why?”
“Because we’d finished the boat, and we took it out for a sail.”
“Do I know how to sail?” I ask. “Did you teach me?”
Walker laughs. “I tried.”
“And we went to Vista Island together.”
Hope rushes into his face. “Wait, you—”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t remember it. There was another picture. With this one.”
It leaves just as quickly.
We’re both quiet a moment, but I have another question I need to ask.
“When did you take this picture?”
Walker stands up and paces, like he doesn’t want to answer.
“When?” I ask softly.
He stops. “On the day of the accident.”
“We were together that day?”
His jaw tightens before he answers. “Yeah.”
He walks to the bow, and I’m starting to get a knot in my stomach, but I have to know what happened.
“Was I with you when Matt called me to come get him?”
Walker is quiet, like he’s thinking about what to say. Then he takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly before he answers.
“Yeah. Sort of.”
“What do you mean?”
He comes back over and sits down next to me. “When we brought the boat in, you said you wanted to go back to your house to get something you’d been working on to show me.” He pauses. “You said it was important. So you left. Said you’d be quick.”
I feel nervous as he talks, knowing that we’re getting closer and closer to the accident, and to him having to save me.
“And you were,” he says. “You came back, and you were walking down the dock smiling, carrying this big portfolio, and then you stopped to answer your phone. Your whole face changed, and you said something back like you were arguing, and I figured it was Matt.”
“He broke up with me the day before that,” I say. I tense at the memory of our conversation earlier.
“I know. That’s why I thought . . .” He shakes his head.
“What did you think?”
He looks at me for a long moment. “I thought we . . . I don’t know. Anyway. You hung up and came over to the boat with your stuff and said you had to go. I didn’t ask where or why, but I knew it was him because you were so upset.”
“Did you . . .”
He looks at me. “I didn’t try to stop you. Wasn’t my place.”
“And then what? Did I say anything else? Did we . . . I just left?” I’m trying to piece it together in my mind, trying to match up Matt’s story with Walker’s story.
“You said you’d come back,” he says. “And then you left your stuff here.”
We sit there quiet for a long time, and I add Matt’s story to where Walker’s leaves off. I left here to pick him up, put him in my car, and that’s how we were on the bridge, in the path of that truck when it lost control. The video footage tells the next part of the story. I see it in my mind, from its shaky beginning to those last words before it cuts out. “There’s no way that girl’s gonna live.”
I look at Walker. “Did you know it was me when you dove in?”
“When I saw him yelling like that, I knew.”
I think of him dragging my body onto the boat and doing CPR while Matt panicked. I think of the punch, and the interview, and the way he’d acted toward me after, and now I understand.
“You came to the hospital, didn’t you?” I ask. “You brought my camera.”
He nods.
“Why?”
“It was important to you.”
I try and sort it all out in my head, try to fit everything together so it makes sense. “And then you said yes to the interview?”
Walker exhales slowly. “That reporter told me that you did.”
“And then Matt and I showed up together, and . . .” Puzzle pieces are locking into place almost too fast for me to keep up. “You thought . . .”
“That you’d changed your mind.”
The boat bumps gently against the dock, and a buoy clinks from somewhere in the inky darkness of the harbor, and Walker and I sit there next to each other, not saying what we both know. That that’s the end of the story. The end of our story.
I look at Walker. “I wish I could remember being out on the boat with you that day.”
He smiles, but it’s sad. “Yeah. Me too.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be,” he answers.
We look at each other, and I think for a second that he might lean in, might bring his lips to mine and kiss me like he didn’t get the chance to do before. And I know that if he does, I will bring my hands to his hair, and kiss him back the way I want to now, in this moment.
But he doesn’t, and neither do I, and I understand why.
Our moment has passed.
I don’t remember him.
I don’t remember us, or this.
It’s a story I’ve been told.
That I believe it but don’t remember is not enough, and we both know it.
TWENTY-FIVE
I SIT ON my bed the next morning, staring at the blank chalkboard wall, with no idea what comes next.
My mom knocks and tells me there’s breakfast downstairs if I’m hungry. I say I’m not and she kisses the top of my head, then leaves. My dad comes in with a piece of mail, sets it on my desk, and asks if I want to “taco ’bout” anything. I laugh for his benefit but say I don’t, and he puts his big hand on the back of my neck and squeezes before he goes. Sam comes in to tell me that I can take the day off. I say thank you and ask him to leave. He does.
I feel drained. Heavy with the weight of the things I’ve both lost and found. And so sad.
Sad that I had this whole relationship with Walker that I don’t remember, that started with this thing we did together. Fixing a boat, of all things. And I’m sad that we missed our chance. But it’s not just that.
I’m sad that I’d found my way back to something that I’d loved doing, that I’d given up because somehow it didn’t fit into my life. And while I’m happy that I found it again, I don’t understand why I felt like I needed to keep it a secret. Or that I felt like Walker needed to be a secret.
I’m sad b
ecause out of everything I’ve found out about myself, these are the things I wish I could take back. Since the accident, I’ve been trying to be who everyone was telling me I’d been, when that wasn’t even me.
But last night felt like it could be me. Sitting there on the boat with Walker really felt like it could be.
Still. He’s as much a stranger to me as Matt was, and I can’t do the same thing I did with him. I can’t just decide to go with the story I’ve been told, or feel something because I want to, or think I should.
When Walker had dropped me off, I’d told him as much, even though I’d hated the words as I said them, and he’d nodded like he understood, and it felt like the end of something that never was.
But the photo of me from the day we sailed the boat together sits, creased and bent, on my nightstand, and when I look at it, I feel like there had been something. There had been an us. I pick it up and cross the room to my blank chalkboard wall and tuck it into the frame, like a beginning, and then stand back.
That’s when I notice the manila envelope my dad had brought in. I don’t recognize the address. When I tear the top off and pull out a copy of Coast Magazine, my first thought is that it must be another story about the accident and my rescue. There is a note card with it that says, “Your copy, before it hits the stands! Please call for more details when you are feeling up to it. We’ve been unable to reach you at the number we have.” There’s a smiley face and a phone number beneath it, and now I’m positive it’s a story about that night. These articles have been coming in here and there since I got out of the hospital. I almost just put it in my desk drawer with the others, but then I decide to give it a look. See if it says anything different or new about that night, and me, and Walker. Not that it matters anymore. I know what happened, and I’m done trying to get back the things I’ve lost. Still, I flip through, looking for whatever little human interest story is there.
But that’s not what I find at all.
With the flip of a page, I find something that knocks the breath right out of me. In big, bold letters, at the top of a two-page spread, are the words: Central Coast Young Artists’ Issue: Photo Essay Winner, Teen Category.
Beneath the words is a shot I recognize and don’t. I know the sunset light in this photo, and the glassy water of the bay beneath it. The hand on the mast.
But those things make up only a tiny piece of what’s really there. Of what I’d thought was outside the frame.
In the foreground, there’s a large patch of unfinished deck, with two sanding blocks lying off to the side—a work in progress. Walker’s silhouette faces the sunset and the open ocean. His broad shoulders look relaxed, as does the way one hand holds on to the mast. The other rests on my shoulder. We stand close, leaving barely a space between us. But we are undeniably together in this moment as we look out over the ocean and horizon and fiery sky spread out in front of us, like endless possibility.
And then there’s the title: The Secret History of Us—a photo essay by Liv Jordan.
I flip to the next page, and the story begins with a black-and-white photo of Second Chance, one that I recognize as having taken years ago, when I’d first gotten my camera and was playing around with different types of film. The next one is of the boat—how it must’ve been when Walker started working on it and I started taking photos. There are close shots of the weathered sail, the cracked wood. Our hands, working side by side. As the photos of the boat progress, so do the photos of Walker, and of us. The images tell the story of something forgotten brought back to life. Something lost, but now beautifully found.
And it feels exactly right. I don’t have to remember taking those photos to know what they capture. They came from me, from a feeling in me. They are me. And they’re Walker. And they’re us. And those are the things I know are right.
I need to show him. He needs to see.
I dress quickly, put the magazine into my purse, then head downstairs and out the door. This time I know exactly where I’m going.
I head down to the waterline, where I can walk faster. The sand is wet, and the foamy whitewater comes up to my ankles. It’s cold at first—almost bracing. But each time the waves rush up and the water washes over my feet, I notice the cold a little less. I slip into the waves’ steady rhythm as I go, and for the first time, I notice that moving like this doesn’t hurt. I take a deep breath and fill my lungs to the brim, expecting to feel the protest of my muscles, but there’s nothing. Just the absence of pain.
I take another deep breath to be sure, and I try to pay attention because maybe I’m just so used to feeling it by now that it’s become a part of me. I stop and look out over the water. Breathe in deep, again and again. And it doesn’t hurt anymore. I don’t know when, or how, it happened. It wasn’t that one breath hurt and the next didn’t. But somehow that part of me healed, without me even noticing.
I stand there for a moment, watching the whitewater roll over my feet, and something tumbling around beneath the water catches my eye. I reach for it, then hold the thing up in the sunlight and smile at what I’ve found.
It’s a sand dollar.
When we were little, Sam and I would scour the beach for them, because our dad always told us that if we found a perfect one that still rattled, with no chips or cracks, he’d pay us. He never named a price, but always hinted that the reward would be big. And so we always had an eye out for them on our walks. And there were plenty of them, depending on the tide and the season. But whole sand dollars were rare. I knew they existed because of the bleached-white, dried ones in the Embarcadero shops, but on all our walks we only ever found a few that were still intact. By the time they washed up on the beach, most of them had been tossed and broken by the waves.
I run my thumb over the small white circle in my hand. On the top side that has that little feathery design, it looks nearly perfect. I almost can’t believe it. I hold it up to my ear and give it a gentle shake, hoping to hear the quiet rattle of the three little “doves” inside, but there’s nothing. I look at it again. Turn it over so I can see the bottom side, which is chipped at the center, just enough for them to have slipped out into the ocean.
I hold in my hand this thing that’s been tossed by the ocean, and broken enough to lose part of itself, but that’s still intact, and strong. And I think maybe we’re not so different.
I set it down gently on the sand, where it belongs, and then keep going, down to the harbor, to the boat, and Walker, where I belong.
TWENTY-SIX
I DANGLE MY feet over the end of the dock, looking at the empty slip. Second Chance is gone, and Walker with it.
This isn’t right. He can’t be gone. Not now, knowing what I do. Not after I found my way to him a second time. On my own, with choices I made. Just like with taking pictures, and even with Matt. I made the same choices over again without even knowing it. This is me. It’s been me. I’ve spent this whole time trying to find myself when I was here all along. I trust it, finally.
I trust it enough to know the choice I would’ve made next, because it’s the one I make now. I stand up and I walk home, and when I get there, I show my family everything I didn’t let them see before.
TWENTY-SEVEN
A FEW DAYS later, I stand in front of the mirror, studying what I see. There, finally, is a reflection I recognize as me—one that I’m happy and proud to show today at the Harbor Festival.
“Liv,” my mom calls, “are you ready? We need to get going! The award ceremony is in half an hour.”
“Be right there!”
I take one more look in the mirror and realize something is missing, then pick up my Saint Anthony medallion, with its new chain, and fasten the clasp behind my neck. The patron saint of lost things rests on my chest, close to my heart, where he belongs. Now I’m ready.
I go downstairs, and my parents and Sam and I get into the car and make the short drive to the harbor. I try not to hope too hard that Walker might be back—that he’ll get to see this, and I’
ll get to see him. He’s been gone for three days now, and in that time I found out that he’d done something maybe even more incredible for me than saving my life.
When I’d called Coast Magazine after I told my parents everything, I found out that my entry had been hand-delivered, the day after the deadline, by a young man who was very insistent that it be accepted. He’d explained my situation, and how hard I’d worked on the project, and how much it had meant to me. And to him.
The secretary had taken it, and the editor had accepted it, and now here I am, about to receive recognition for it at my first mounted photo show.
I scan the faces of the little crowd standing under my tent. The photo editor is there, and a reporter from the local newspaper. Even Dana Whitmore is there for a follow-up interview afterward. Paige stands with my family and gives a little wave. I wave back. We are headed in different directions, which might have happened before—she’s going away to school in the fall, and I’m staying here to work an internship I was offered by the magazine. But her friendship has meant enough to me to hold on to, even as things shift and change. And Jules is there too. She stands behind everyone else, but when I catch her eye, she smiles, and I know, really, she’s standing with me.
My heart is full. Almost.
And then all of a sudden it is.
I see Walker, making his way through the festivalgoers, cutting a path straight to where I stand, looking for me, like I’ve been looking for him. And then our eyes meet.
And we find each other again.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE MORNING AIR is crisp in a way that carries a hint of fall approaching. An ending and a beginning at the same time. I breathe in deeply as we motor out of the harbor, and I can feel it. Change in the air. Sam has already gone back to school, and Paige left yesterday. I start my internship in a few days, so we’ve decided to take the boat out, because soon we’ll be busy.
Sailing has become our weekend routine, though it’s anything but. Every day out here is different. The ocean and the winds, the clouds and the sky. They all make up the ephemeral landscape that we sail through. I try to notice it all, try to capture the details and moments that are here today, but may not be tomorrow. I try to remember the things that are fleeting, but carry something lasting within them. The smell of the salt air, the feel of the wind as it blows tangles into my hair. Walker’s hands over mine on the wheel as we cut our own path through the deep blue of the ocean.