by Carrie Ryan
The scene on the TV shifts to a sprawling marina bustling with activity. The camera zooms in on the gangplank of a large US Coast Guard ship, focusing on a small group making its way toward the pier.
Senator Wells leads the pack. Even with a sunburned face he manages to appear debonair in an almost-dangerous way, the salt-and-pepper scruff of his unshaven face emphasizing the sharpness of his cheekbones. The camera pans past him and my breath catches.
It’s Grey. Alive.
It’s one thing to be told he survived, yet another to see it as truth. That same surge of relief washes through me, the sudden realization that I’m not alone. Someone else out there understands.
I devour his appearance. Grey looks much worse than his father. He clutches a thick blanket around his shoulders, his steps slow as he trails after the group. His hair sticks up from his head at odd angles and his eyes look bruised above the shadowy scraps of stubble strewn across his cheeks and chin.
Reporters rush the two en masse, shouting questions and Grey rears back, alarmed by the sudden onslaught. I press my fingers against my lips, feel them trembling. One of the coast guard men tries to push the camera away, but the Senator stops him. “We’ll answer,” he says. Grey winces and his eyes squeeze shut.
“The world deserves to know the truth of what happened to the Persephone,” the Senator explains, pulling Grey toward the reporter’s microphone. “It happened fast,” the Senator begins. I find myself nodding even though at the time it had seemed like hours. Days of gunfire. Years of blood.
“It was late and I was out on deck with my son, helping him look for his phone he’d forgotten by the pool that afternoon. There was a terrible storm and we were just about to give up and go inside.” He pauses, shakes his head. “The wave came out of nowhere. I’ve never seen anything like it. It just . . . took the whole ship out.”
Wave? I find that I can’t breathe, his words grinding my thoughts to a halt. That’s not what happened. There was no wave.
Senator Wells steps aside, leaving his son facing the microphone. Every heartbeat echoes through my water-slogged veins, causing my entire body to throb and rock as I wait to hear what he has to say. Grey blanches, but doesn’t retreat. The familiarity of his gestures is jarring. The way he holds himself with his weight slightly on his right leg, the furrow between his eyebrows as he sorts through his thoughts before speaking.
The way he unconsciously rubs his skull, just behind his ear, whenever he’s about to lie.
It’s amazing the little things you can pick up about someone in such a short amount of time when you’re falling in love. Every nuance, every sound and movement a code to understanding them.
“Like Dad said, it happened fast,” he starts, and then he clears his throat, choked up. In my head I see it all. I hear it all and taste it all. Again.
Grey pulls me against him and threads a strand of hair behind my ear. When he brings his mouth closer, I stop caring about the rain. All I care about is devouring this moment as though to imprint it into my memory forever.
Rivulets of water wash down his face, dripping from his chin and coursing along his neck. The way his shirt plasters to his chest allows me to see the outline of every muscle. I press my fingers against them, tracing the edges.
I laugh, a bubble of euphoria too large to keep contained. He kisses me right then, like he could take my laughter into himself and make it a part of him. And still, all around us the rain crashes but we don’t care.
The reporters huddling around Grey barely breathe as they wait for him to continue. “The rain was awful, and as Dad mentioned, we were . . . uh . . . out on deck by the pool.” He glances toward his father before continuing. “It was unlike . . . anything. It came out of nowhere—this massive wave. And it just was there—a wall of water. It rose higher than even the top of the ship—much higher.” He pauses as if reliving the moment, eyes haunted.
I’m trembling now. I don’t understand. Why isn’t he talking about the attack? Why isn’t he mentioning the guns?
Grey inhales slowly, his shirt lifting just enough to lay bare the strip of pale skin along the edge of his shorts. He begins to rub that spot behind his ear again. “And then . . .” His voice breaks.
And then the guns. Men slamming through the corridors, cutting off the emergency exits, and locking the ship down. Panicked passengers in robes and nightgowns run, screaming. Making it no more than a few steps before bullets tear them apart.
Water drips down my back, my hair still wet from kissing Grey in the rain. I press myself against the cold metal wall of the dumbwaiter, watching through the mirrored window as a tall, narrow man makes his way efficiently down the hallway. He kicks a broken body aside. Forces his way into a room. It takes seconds—a loud spattering of gunfire—and then he’s in the hallway again, moving on to the next.
Moving on to my family’s room directly across from where I’m hiding.
A high-pitched whine climbs its way up the back of my throat, coated in acid. I clamp my hands over my mouth, knowing without question that if they hear me, I am dead.
I’m dead either way.
As Grey speaks, the reporters hang on his every nuance and gesture. They’re enraptured by him. I wait for him to mention the armed men. The gunshots. The murder.
But he never does. “It’s like what Dad said. The wave just swallowed her whole. Like a toy in a tub. And then . . . the Persephone was gone.” He shakes his head, as though he himself couldn’t believe it. “Just gone.”
In the silence that follows, the Senator squeezes his son’s shoulder. One of the reporters shouts, “How were you able to survive?”
Grey’s eyes widen, his expression one of bewilderment. The Senator steps in. “Had to be luck, plain and simple. It was late and because of the rain everyone else was inside, probably asleep in their cabins. I was so angry at Grey for losing his phone, but if he hadn’t . . .” He inhales sharply. Grey stares at his feet. “We wouldn’t have been up on deck and thrown free when the wave hit.”
“No!” I shout, the sound raw in my throat. “That’s not how it happened!”
“Once we got to the surface and saw the wreckage . . .” Here the Senator pauses and takes a water bottle one of the rescuers holds out to him. “We tried to find other survivors, but . . .” He shakes his head and a shudder passes through Grey. “The only choice we had was to try to stay alive. We found a life raft that must have broken free and just prayed that someone would find us.”
I’m gasping for air. “But . . .” I close my eyes remembering. Libby and me dragging our arms through the water, trying to put distance between us and the burning Persephone. Flames choking out her windows, undaunted by the rain. It wasn’t until dawn that we saw the extent of it: nothing.
Not a scrap of the ship remained. No hint of other survivors. No other life rafts anywhere in sight. How had Grey and his father survived without either of us seeing them?
On TV the tenor of the reporters changes as the camera pans and zooms in on a middle-aged woman running down the pier, her perfectly coiffed blond hair loosening in the breeze. She’s wearing a skirt that hits just above her knees and she pauses briefly to kick off her heels so that she can run faster. “Alastair! Grey!” she cries, the sound primal.
The cameraman knows how to do his job and he instantly focuses in on Grey’s face, capturing the moment it crumples and he mouths the word, Mom? And then they’re hugging, sobbing, reunited. His father’s arms around them both.
The video pauses on this perfect image. The intimate snapshot of an all-American family newly reunited, their heavy grief finally lifted. A miracle. The Senator with his sunburned face and lightly tousled hair. His wife barefoot, tendrils of hair pulled loose around her tearstained face. And their beloved only son between them.
My chest tightens as though it were collapsing in on itself. Father. Mother. Child. All together.
All safe.
It becomes impossible to breathe.
I’ll never hug my parents again. My mother will never come running toward me. My father will never place his hand on my head and tell me he loves me. I’ll never feel safe ever again.
I’ve lost everything. And somehow, Grey hasn’t.
The anchorwoman’s voice cuts into my thoughts, and I listen with a mounting sense of incredulity as she continues. “News of another survivor certainly comes as a surprise. As you may recall, the coast guard called off the search for survivors last week after interviewing Senator Wells and his son and concluding that a rogue wave capsized the Persephone, sinking it before those belowdecks could escape.”
The camera switches angles and the anchor swivels, continuing. “Though they’re considered a rare occurrence, this isn’t the first time a rogue wave has been suspected in the disappearance of a ship. In fact, it’s widely believed that it was a rogue wave that took the SS Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975, and just as with the Persephone, there was no wreckage found in that case either.”
It takes a moment for this information to take shape in my mind. For the implications of it to settle in. The coast guard called off the search days ago. When Libby and I were still out there. When we both still had a chance to be rescued alive.
All because of Senator Wells and Grey. Because they lied.
I don’t even realize that I’m screaming until firm hands pull me from the TV. My fists flail at it and smears of red mar the screen, blood from where I’d ripped out my IV in my scramble from the bed.
“They’re lying,” I shout, still flailing. “The ship was attacked. There was no wave. It was men with guns—they killed everyone!”
A crewman holds me steady as the medic slips a needle into my arm. “Shh,” he murmurs. “It’s okay.”
“No,” I whimper, shaking my head. But everything feels so much heavier now. My protests, fuzzy and indistinct. “You don’t understand.” He carries me to the bed, and when he tries to leave, I fumble for his wrist, holding him. “You have to believe me. They’re lying. Please.” A tear leaks from my eye, the first since I’ve been rescued.
He gently frees himself. “It’s okay,” he says softly, pulling another blanket over me. “You’re safe now.”
But I know that’s not true. May never be true again. “They killed them all and sank the ship,” I whisper, my voice weakening. “They killed my parents.” It comes out slurred. “Please believe me.”
THREE
It’s still dark when I wake again. The yacht rides the swell of the waves, rocking me gently. And I suddenly realize how strange it is to be alone. Not just here in this room, but in life. There is no one who cares about where I am right now. No one to notice whether I come home or not.
There is no one in charge of me, to tell me what to do. Where to go. How to recover. As the breadth of my isolation yawns open ahead of me, I begin to tremble. I will no longer live in my house. Sleep in my bed. Pull clothes out of my dresser. Brush my teeth in my bathroom. Leave shoes lying at the base of the stairs.
Where will I live, I have no idea. A foster home? Do they even have orphanages anymore? The thoughts come faster and faster, tumbling over one another, inciting panic. I find myself wheezing, the room spinning.
My parents are gone. My life is gone. Everything. Everything—it’s all gone.
I pull free of the IV again and push from the bed, stumbling toward the door. I ache for anything familiar, someone to tell me it will be okay. But there’s no one left.
Greyson Wells, a voice whispers in the back of my head and an image of him from the TV flashes in my mind. My stomach roils, and if there’d been anything in it, I’d have vomited.
I shuffle down the hallway, fingertips pressed against the wall to keep myself steady. My steps are halting, pained, and I don’t even realize what I’m searching for until I’m there. Standing in the doorway.
She’s on the bed, an insignificant lump under the crumpled covers. Her back is toward me, the sharp tips of her wing bones barely visible under the stretch of her shirt.
Libby. Even dead I feel that pull to her, the connection that drew us tighter and tighter as our lives slipped through our hungry fingers and into the ocean. Her blistered cheeks are masked by a tangle of hair, and I want to tuck it behind her ear. She hated it in her face. But even as I stretch my fingers toward her temple, I know I can’t bring myself to actually touch her. Doing so would make it real.
“It should be you standing here,” I whisper, my fingertips hovering a breath away from the curve of her jaw. She had family and friends waiting for her. I have nothing.
“You remind me of her,” a quiet voice says from the doorway. My heart jumps and I stumble, spinning to press my back against the wall. Libby’s father stands just across the threshold.
“When they pulled you in,” he continues, stepping into the room, “I thought you were my Libby at first.” He sighs and gestures toward a chair. I sink into it and he takes the one facing me. “Frances Mace, right?” he asks. The words come out weary, the sound of them as heavy and thick as the bags under his eyes. I nod.
“Your family was on the Persephone as well?”
I nod again.
“And they didn’t make it?”
It’s cold in the room, the air-conditioning running full blast, and I cross my arms tightly over my chest as I shake my head.
“How old are you?
“Just turned fourteen,” I mumble.
“Where are you from?”
I tap my fingers against my thumb, nervous. “Small town south of Columbus, Ohio, sir.”
“You have family there?”
My fingers still and I stare at them, motionless, in my lap. “No, sir.” I take a sharp breath. “My parents were both only children.”
“Any siblings? Grandparents?” He’s frowning.
I shake my head. “There’s no one.” Clearing my throat I test the word out for the first time: “I’m an orphan.” It’s horrible, making my stomach churn.
His lips purse together as he ponders this.
“It wasn’t a wave,” I blurt into the silence. I lift my eyes, watching confusion flicker across his face. I lean forward, needing him to understand. “The Persephone was attacked. They killed everyone on board.” My voice breaks and I swallow, trying to hold the memories at bay.
The guns. The blood. The screaming. God, the screaming.
“The coast guard interviewed Senator Wells and his son and there hasn’t been any mention of armed men or—”
“They’re lying,” I interject bitterly.
He shakes his head. “Why would they lie about something like that?”
It’s the question I’ve been asking myself; one I don’t have an answer to. So instead I lift a shoulder and tell him the only explanation I could come up with. “Maybe they were somehow involved. The attackers weren’t wearing masks. Maybe they’re afraid that because they’re witnesses those same men will come after them.”
It sounds even more far-fetched when I say it aloud and a blush flares up my neck.
But Libby’s father doesn’t laugh. He considers the idea for a moment. “And you,” he adds. I glance up at him sharply. “If you’re also a witness,” he clarifies, “it stands to reason they’d come after you as well.” It’s not clear whether he believes it’s a possibility or is merely placating me.
A chill tightens the skin between my shoulder blades. But what I feel more than anything else is exhaustion. For the past week all I’ve done is fight to stay alive. The prospect of having to keep up that fight is overwhelming.
My eyes flick toward Libby and I find that a part of me is jealous of her. That she was able to escape. How nice it would be to slide into oblivion. “It’s not like I won’t be hard to find,” I mumble.
There’s silence for a moment, the only sound
our breathing. Confirmation that we’re alive and Libby is not. “Do you know if my wife . . . if Barbara . . .” He trails off, unable to ask the question.
My eyes flutter shut, the memory coming against my will.
The screaming doesn’t stop. Neither do the gunshots. I curl into a ball, arms over my head as though that will make it all go away. But it won’t.
All I see over and over in my mind is my mother kneeling on the floor of our room across the hall, tendrils of blood writhing like venomous snakes across the front of her shirt. Her eyes wide as she glances toward the dumbwaiter—terror not for herself but for the fact that the gunman might discover my hiding place.
And now she’s broken. She and my dad both. And I’m next if they find me. But moving is unthinkable. What if they hear me? What if they see me? What if they kill me?
The smoke billowing down the hallway grows thicker, dark tendrils coming for me in my little metal box. I choke on the terror of being trapped and press the up button, cringing at the sound of grinding gears. When it wrenches to a stop at the top I wait, hand over my mouth, for someone to find me.
Nothing happens and I force myself to run. The silence in the hallway is shrouded in cotton, thickening the air so that it feels like moving through water. It’s only a few yards to the O’Martin’s suite and I blow through the doors.
And she’s there—Libby—like she’s been waiting for me. She’s halfway into the next room, already running for the balcony.
Someone bangs on the door behind me, screaming to get inside to safety. I hesitate, not knowing what to do, but there’s panic in the woman’s voice and I open it to find Libby’s mother. In her eyes there’s that heartbeat of relief.
Then there’s a noise. And then nothing. Not even Libby’s mother.
I stare at her lifeless body sprawled across the hallway. Her chest ragged and raw, the side of her jaw nothing but shards of bone. Blood and bits of her flesh splatter down my arms and across Libby’s lovely clothes she’d let me borrow.