Girl at Sea

by Maureen Johnson

  “You never used to lie to me either,” he said, turning around. “A bad judge of character?”

  Clio’s mind reeled. How did he know that? Even if he’d been somewhere on the deck, there was no way he’d been close enough to hear her say that. How…?

  There was only one way, and it hit her immediately. The com on Aidan’s bedside stand. Pushing the books at it…She must have depressed the side button. It had been on. It had broadcast everything.

  “Oh my God,” she said. Her stomach felt almost exactly like it did when she drank all of that warm margarita mix two years ago.

  “So now I know what you think,” he said. “I guess I’ve always known it. I’ve just never heard it before.”

  “Dad…” She stepped closer to him, but he held up his hand.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Let’s just be clear about this. Let’s get it all out in the open. So you think I’m being conned? You think I’m foolish? I know we lost a lot of money, but we did get some. We got more money than a lot of people see in a lifetime. We had a good run, Clio. And you can’t tell me you didn’t enjoy those things we did. Half of them were your ideas.”

  “I was twelve,” Clio managed to say. “They were a twelve-year-old’s ideas.”

  “They were our ideas. Were they that bad?”

  “Maybe not bad, but—”

  “But what?” he asked.

  “Mom wasn’t happy,” Clio said. “Our life was weird. Then I got hurt—”

  “Which I guess you think is my fault. And that’s fair. I was in charge. I should never have taken you out there.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It was the guy in the boat.”

  “It was my fault,” he said. “I knew it. Your mom certainly knew it. And you knew it too. Do you know how sick I was about that? If anything had happened to you…anything more…I would have died. You got better, but you always hated the scar. I could see how much you hated it. So I let you get that tattoo. Not just any tattoo, but one drawn by a famous artist. I thought if we covered it up with something really wonderful…but I screwed that up too.”

  Guilt isn’t always a rational thing, Clio realized. Guilt is a weight that will crush you whether you deserve it or not.

  “If you don’t trust me, you don’t trust me,” he said. “I don’t want you to be stuck somewhere you don’t want to be.”

  “I want to be here,” she said. “I want to stay.”

  “You went into Julia’s room. You went through her things.”

  “Dad,” Clio said. “I was worried. You’re the one who wouldn’t trust me. You wouldn’t tell me what was going on. I care. It’s really my boat too.”

  “This is not your boat,” he said, his voice rising. “You don’t understand what this means. You don’t understand anything. You think I just left? Your mother told me to go, Clio. You think I wanted to?”

  She could hear her father’s voice cracking.

  “So why didn’t you say no?” Clio said. She could feel the tears running down her face now.

  “Because she didn’t give me any choice. She told me to go. She told me I was ruining everything for you, for us. And she was kind of right, like you said. It’s my fault we lost all the money. It’s my fault you got hurt. I didn’t want to do that anymore.”

  He seemed resigned now, and he wouldn’t look at her. It was obvious and absolutely clear that everyone on the boat could hear them or knew this was happening. Everything had blown apart.

  “It’s not working,” he went on. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. I went too far, and so did you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ll go back to land tomorrow. We have to go anyway. I’ll see you off the boat there and make sure you get safely to the airport. You’ll get on a plane and head straight to Topeka. You can go back to your mom. You’ll be away from me. Congratulations. You got your wish.”

  There was no hug. No grand reunion. He just walked away, leaving her alone. More alone than she had ever felt before.

  Mistaken Identity

  There was nowhere to go. The bedroom was locked. The bottom two floors had people floating around in them. So Clio went to the dark wheelhouse. She rested across the leather seats and stared out of the darkened windows at even more darkness.

  She cried for a while by herself, her face sticking to the leather. Then her body got tired, and there was nothing left to cry. Nobody was coming for her. So she just rested there and let herself adhere. Maybe her face would become glued to the seat. Nobody could make her leave then.

  Because that was the kicker. Now she wanted to stay on this miserable boat more than anything. She wanted to make it right with Elsa and with her dad. She wanted Aidan. She wanted Aidan so much. She had no idea when this had happened to her—this want for Aidan. It was nothing like her silly fantasies about Ollie. But who even knew where Aidan was now? Maybe in his room. Maybe in her room.

  After a while, the ambient lights on the controls came back to life, giving the room a soft techno-glow. Clio felt a sudden affection for the panels, these expensive trinkets that her father had purchased. Only her father would do something like this, on this grand scale. And the truth was, she had missed this kind of thing. Yes, it was dumb, and yes, it might ruin or kill him—but no one could fault his style.

  It could have been like a fairy tale. But fairy tales aren’t real. Things don’t work like that. There’s a price for everything.

  And now she was paying another one. Just as she had found something that she had wanted for so long, it was being taken away. And her own words had done it. What she’d said wasn’t wrong or unfair. It was just too hard to hear out loud.

  Aside from nodding off once or twice, she didn’t sleep during the night. By five, she just gave up. The dawn spread over the ocean, wide and pink, more beautiful than anything had a right to be.

  She stumbled downstairs to the living room, where her father was drinking a cup of coffee.

  “We’re heading back,” he said. “We’re just plotting course. You’ll probably want to get your stuff together.”

  “Dad—”

  “It’s done, Clio. It’s like you said, that was before. This is now.”

  Aidan stuck his head up from the stairs.

  “I think you should come look at this,” he said.

  The table in the workroom was covered in maps, images, and printouts. There were several crushed soda cans lined up along the edge. Aidan’s eyes were completely red, and he was wearing the same clothes he had been the night before.

  “I was up late last night going over some sites in the wreck database,” he said. “If we just take a little detour, we can cover this one here, S537, the steamship Pride of York.”

  “And?” her father said tiredly.

  “I don’t think this really is the York,” Aidan said, urgency or exhaustion making his voice rise. “It was seen sinking in this area, which is what led to the ID. But I pulled some info on it, and I don’t think it matches. I’d made a note of this spot before, but it wasn’t really in our search area and didn’t seem worth a special trip.”

  Clio’s father looked at him for a moment, as if not quite believing him. Aidan pushed a fuzzy picture forward.

  “Have a look. It’s pretty similar to the Bell Star. Similar kind of vessel, similar time period. But this picture, from what I can tell, shows something longer than the York was and slightly the wrong shape.”

  Clio’s father leaned in.

  “Hull’s there,” Aidan said, pointing to a blotch. “It’s been driven into the seabed a few feet. Smokestack is there. It looks almost upright, maybe listing to the left a bit. We’re in fairly shallow water here. Depth is sixty feet. The ID was done by amateur divers. They don’t have any solid proof. And if there was ever anything worth taking, it’s long gone. It’s just a curiosity wreck. A bunch of dive services use it.”

  “You think it’s worth a look?”

  “I think of anything I’ve seen, th
is is the closest. There’s nothing here that tells me this isn’t the Bell Star. It would take us maybe an hour out of the way, but it’s in the right direction.”

  “I guess it couldn’t hurt,” her dad said. “We’ll head that way. I’ll suit up and get a little footage.”

  He paused at the door.

  “Try to control yourselves while I’m gone,” he said. “Clio, please start breakfast.”

  Aidan’s face flushed red. He sat back down and stared at the fuzzy outline on the screen. Clio sat down on the floor and picked at the carpet.

  “So, I guess you heard,” Clio said.

  “I heard. Everyone heard, apparently.”

  “Sorry.” She practically whispered it.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said, wiping at the screen with his finger. “I don’t know what to say. Your dad seems to have made up his mind.”

  “Yeah,” Clio said. “He tends to get like that. Once he’s done his dive, he’s going to take me back and get me a ticket. I’ll probably be off by tonight.”

  Aidan was still staring at the pictures.

  “I don’t think you’ll be off by tonight,” he said.

  “You don’t know my dad,” she said.

  “Maybe not. But I do know what I’m looking at. I’ve been down here all night looking over the data.”

  “You were down here all night?” Clio asked.

  Not that he really would have been welcome at that point, but still…he hadn’t gone upstairs.

  “Your dad told me last night that we were turning around,” he said, not looking at her. “He didn’t look very happy with me. So I came in here. I remembered flagging something I was interested in. It seemed stupid not to take the opportunity…”

  His eyes were still on the table, so it was impossible to get any sense of what he really meant.

  “Well,” she said, getting up. “Thanks for trying. If you did.” She wanted to say more, but how could she?

  The morning wasn’t entirely cooperating. The water was choppy and the sky was full of clouds. It was almost chilly. Martin was setting up the equipment. Her father must have taken over the driving.

  “Listen,” Martin said as Clio came out into the cool, misty morning. “I heard about what happened.”

  “Who didn’t?” Clio asked.

  “Your dad gets hurt easily. He really values what you think. Your opinion matters more to him than anyone’s.”

  Clio looked down at the deck. Martin, no matter how nice he was, always sided with her dad. He never seemed to get that anyone else had gotten hurt in what happened.

  “But he bounces back too,” Martin went on. “If he dives today and there’s some kind of good news, he may forget all about it.”

  “Maybe,” Clio said. “But that’s sort of been the problem all along.”

  Martin sighed.

  “It’ll all work out,” he said. “Even if you go home. He’ll get over it.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. It wasn’t supposed to be cold out here. She sat down on the deck against the wall to get out of the wind a little.

  “When you went on your fact-finding mission,” Martin said while checking a gauge, “did you see anything about Marguerite?”

  “As in Marguerite who the stone was named after? The guy’s daughter?”

  “Right. Dr. Magwell’s daughter. The stories of her always reminded me of you.”

  “Of me?” Clio said. “What stories?”

  “Dr. Magwell considered his daughter to be his finest pupil. More than that, for a woman of her time, she was really ahead of the curve. She was brave, maybe even a little crazy. After her father’s death, she convinced the museum to send her to work at Pompeii. She lived right near where we took off from, in Sorrento. Having read that letter, I’d guess she came here to try to continue her father’s work, maybe to try to find another stone. A few years after that, she got interested in underwater archeological work, which was extremely rare at the time. She started off as a free diver, going to the bottom with nothing at all, no diving bell or suit.”

  “You mean she just jumped in?” Clio asked.

  “Yup,” Martin said with a laugh. “She was ridiculed at first, but when she started bringing objects off the ocean floor, people really got interested. She became a sort of legend. They called her the mermaid.”

  “And this reminds you of me?” Clio said.

  “Well, I think you have the same streak in you. You make your own way. You’re prepared to swim for it. And you’re your father’s daughter, whether you know it or not.”

  He patted the tank and rolled it against the side.

  “Fortunately for us,” he said, “we’ve pretty much got the diving thing figured out. Our luck is better. Now, do me a favor? Bring up those fins from downstairs? This old man has to get into a wet suit, and that takes time.”

  They reached the target spot about an hour later.

  “Okay,” her dad said. “This is a fact-finding dive. We’re going to video the ship to try to get an identifying mark and to get some sense of its condition.”

  They were loaded down with toys. He’d even brought the handheld underwater scooters with them to help them go faster. They stepped off the back platform and sank under the surface.

  Aidan came up beside Clio, a good arm’s length away. They both stood looking at the gray sky. The water looked gray as well.

  “I’m going to try to talk to Elsa,” she said quietly. “Do you want to talk to her first?”

  “Let’s see what happens,” he said. “I have a feeling this day is about to get crazy. We may have to stay out here for a few days. You never know.”

  “I guess,” Clio said. “I have to try now anyway.”

  The door to the Champagne Suite was unlocked, and Elsa wasn’t in the room. Clio looked around and felt a massive wave of sadness. It had been good, being here with Elsa. Elsa was her friend.

  She saw a strange blot on the floor, which she soon recognized as her new pastels. They’d been dumped out and stepped on, ground into the coffee-colored carpet. She sat down on the floor and picked up the remains, trying to find any that were salvageable. There were a few pieces. She put them carefully back in the box. Her throat tightened.

  Maybe Elsa really didn’t want to talk to her. Ever.

  She took what would probably be her final shower in the magnificent bathroom, dressed, and went downstairs to the galley. She put on her little paper hat and set to work making breakfast. Strangely, she wanted to hold on to this—everything about it. She had wanted off the boat for so long, she would never have thought it was possible. But she wanted this breakfast to last forever.

  She decided to make something like the first morning—a big frittata, and not overcooked. Maybe if she could come up with a really good breakfast, she could stay. Her dad would see how much she was needed, how she was still dedicated. She set to work, tearing the galley apart for ingredients. As she put the eggs into the pan, she heard someone come up behind her. Julia slid around and reached for the coffeepot.

  “Good morning,” she said. She sounded civil, even pleasant.

  “Hi,” Clio said.

  Julia leaned back against the counter and sipped at her black coffee. This morning she was wearing khaki shorts and a red polo shirt. She almost looked like a normal woman, one who was actually someone’s mom.

  “Do you know where Elsa is?” Clio asked.

  “Asleep in my room,” Julia said.

  “Oh.”

  A silence fell between them. Air bubbles in the egg casserole popped slowly.

  “What you said was correct,” Julia said. “I did meet Elsa’s father when he was sitting on a grant board. And yes, your father is funding this work. I’d never made the connection, but that’s because I’ve known people, dated people, in between them. Perhaps I have a fondness for people who support my work, but I think that’s natural. Don’t you?”

  Put like that, it made Clio seem like a true paranoid cre
tin. What was it that had first drawn her to Ollie, anyway? His love of the inks—his love of art. That he supported her love of art. Also, the jacket. And the bike. And the six-foot-fiveness. But it was the art that started it all.

  “I was just—”

  “You were looking out for your father,” Julia said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. I admire that.”

  Clio looked over. Julia’s face was still hard and bony, but the words came out fairly softly. Well, soft-ish.

  “I told your father at the time that it might be hard or unfair to bring you out here,” she said. “Elsa is long used to my dating. She’s never lived with her father, and she usually lives at school. She thinks nothing of it. But you haven’t had any time to adjust. So yes. I did think you should have been allowed to stay behind at home. I can understand your reluctance about this entire trip.”

  All the words were right. It all made sense. But there was something about this that wasn’t ringing true for Clio.

  “Aren’t you mad?” she asked. “About…the other thing?”

  “You mean Aidan?” she asked. “No. I was seventeen too. I know how that can be. Having the three of you on this boat—it was always a risk.”

  This sort of made Clio sound like a dangerous, unstable chemical. But then again, maybe that was what she was. It was starting to look that way.

  “Can I ask you something?” Clio said.

  “Please do.”

  “Do you have anything about Marguerite?” Clio said.

  “Marguerite Magwell? I have a few things. I’ll bring them up.”

  Julia left the galley, and Clio turned back to the eggs. This was all wrong now. Now Julia was being nice to her and getting her things while she attempted to impress her dad with her cooking. Her father’s daughter…what was Martin talking about?

  She carefully layered in all of the goodies she had found. They were a little short on fresh ingredients, but they had ridiculous numbers of things in jars. Good stuff, too. Italian groceries, like peppers and olives in jars. Julia returned with a plastic file containing a magazine article just as Clio was sticking her creation in the oven.