Second Star

by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

  The wave begins to build again, and I wonder who will take the next ride. The boat rocks jerkily from side to side.

  My parents spent their honeymoon on a yacht in the South Pacific; my father once told me that sleeping out on the open water, the waves lapping the side of the boat, was like being rocked to sleep in an enormous cradle. The memory makes me want to laugh out loud. Being on this boat is like being held in the jaws of some wild animal, the kind that whips its prey back and forth, stunning it before it kills it. I watch the wave rise and fall as though I’m possessed by it, until it feels like it’s coming from someplace deep inside of me, until I can’t remember, no matter how hard I try, what it feels like to stand on solid ground.

  Beside me, Belle is picking up her own board. “My turn now,” she says, waving at the boys to come back to the boat for her.

  “Good luck,” I shout as she jumps overboard.

  33

  Jas puts his arms around me as we watch Pete tow Belle away from the boat.

  “You must be freezing,” he says, rubbing my arms up and down with his enormous hands.

  I shake my head. Much to my surprise, I feel warm; I’m sweating. Adrenaline is pumping through my body. I wonder how many waves there will be like this one, how many times I’ll get to watch Jas surf the latest behemoth the ocean offers up.

  “I can’t wait,” I say out loud, and Jas kisses the top of my head, understanding exactly what I mean.

  As Pete pulls Belle into the wave, the sun slips behind the clouds and it begins to rain. But even from here I can see that Belle isn’t about to stop. Not when she’s so close.

  “That girl has guts,” Jas says, a hint of pride in his voice. “I can count on one hand the number of girls in the world who are strong enough to take that wave.”

  “Hey!” I say, elbowing him in the ribs. “Don’t knock girl surfers.”

  Jas shakes his head solemnly. “I’m not,” he says as he pulls the hood of my sweatshirt over my head. “Just the opposite.”

  The second that Belle lets go of the towrope, the skies open; what was a drizzle is now a downpour. I suppose the rain really doesn’t matter; we’re all so soaked already. But without the sun, visibility is all but nonexistent.

  I have to concentrate to see Belle’s blond hair streaking across the face of the wave. If the tip of the wave weren’t white with foam, I wouldn’t be able to see the moment when the water shifts, crashing down on top of her with a speed and a force that shock me, as though the wave is a living thing with a mind set on shoving Belle from its surface.

  Belle flips off of her board, head over heels. Pete tries to turn the Jet Ski, but somehow the wave is still pounding down. Pete can’t drive directly into its center, where Belle is currently getting worked. Jas and I watch in silence, keeping our eyes trained on the spot where Belle’s blond head keeps disappearing and reappearing.

  The surface of the water is completely white with foam, and Pete drives the Jet Ski dangerously close. Jas explains that a Jet Ski simply can’t drive over soup; in foamy conditions the engine isn’t able to get enough water to propel itself forward.

  “He’s going to stall if he’s not careful,” Jas says stonily. But he and I both know: nothing is going to keep him from getting to Belle. Jas leans over the bow of the boat, his feet poised to spring.

  “Wait!” I say desperately, but it’s too late, he’s already gone, swimming toward the wave. The ocean is so loud now that I don’t think he could have heard me anyway.

  Jas makes his way out to where Pete is waiting on the Jet Ski, just outside the impact zone of the wave. He climbs on just as Pete dives off of it and begins swimming toward Belle. Slowly, carefully, Jas directs the Jet Ski to follow.

  It seems like hours have passed before Pete gets to Belle and is able to pull her out of the soup and onto the Jet Ski. Jas takes off in the direction of the boat, leaving Pete behind to try to swim his way out of there.

  “Here,” Jas shouts; he barely stops the Jet Ski as he heaves Belle in my direction. I fit my hands underneath her armpits and pull her up onto the deck. She moans softly. Jas circles back for Pete, and together they scramble onto the boat, leaving the Jet Ski behind.

  “Go!” Pete shouts at the captain.

  “What about the Jet Ski?” I ask dumbly, looking out at the sea. Belle’s board is left out there somewhere, too.

  “Forget it,” Jas says, kneeling down beside Belle. It’s then that I see that the deck is covered in blood. The right leg of Belle’s wetsuit is slashed open and blood is pouring from the opening.

  “Oh my god,” I say softly.

  “The fin of her board must have sliced her,” Jas says.

  He and Pete are working together, tying towels around her leg to stanch the bleeding. Now I’m freezing; I can’t stop shaking. The motor roars and spits as the boat takes off, the captain navigating his way through the chop, desperately trying to lead us back to shore. But ten, twenty, even thirty minutes have passed, and we’ve barely moved. I can still hear the roar of Witch Tree behind us. Smaller but still massive waves rise in front of us. It feels like we’re trapped between mountains.

  Jas pulls me down onto the deck beside him and puts his arm around me. Pete shifts Belle’s leg in his lap, pressing his hands tightly over her wound. I think if he could wrap his whole body around her to apply more pressure, he would.

  “What do we do?” I whisper to Jas. Belle looks small and pale, and the pool of blood beneath her leg continues to grow; Pete’s grip and the soaked towels we tied around her haven’t made a bit of difference. Jas shakes his head.

  Belle moans; softly at first, and then louder. “Just the same,” she says. “Just the same.”

  “Shhh, Belle,” Pete murmurs. “Just hang on a little bit longer.”

  But Belle shakes her head and struggles to sit up. Her eyes flutter open and she looks right at me.

  “Just the same,” she says, and it seems that it takes every ounce of her strength to speak. There is something she’s determined to say, and I know enough about Belle to know that once she makes up her mind to do something, she will do it, even when each breath she takes is an effort. I’m surprised to realize that it’s something we have in common, that look that we get on our faces when we’re absolutely determined to do something, the look that Jas recognized when he watched me surf on my own.

  So I ask, “What’s just the same, Belle?”

  “The ocean,” she says. “Same today as it was that day.”

  “What day?” I ask.

  Belle’s gray eyes haven’t lost any of their steel; they lock with mine as she says, “The day that your brothers went missing.”

  I feel like a balloon someone has just sliced open; all of the air goes out of me and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to take a breath again.

  “I was there,” she says, struggling on every word. “Six months ago. I was there. Here. They were on dust,” she says, her eyes flickering from my face to Jas’s.

  “They surfed Witch Tree on dust?” Pete says, incredulous. “You can’t even surf Kensie on dust.”

  Belle nods weakly. “I tried to stop them,” she whispers; I can barely hear her above the wind and the rain. “I swear I tried. But they wouldn’t listen.”

  She’s crying; or maybe that’s the rain on her face. I can’t tell whether the water on my face is coming from inside of me anymore either.

  “I almost told you,” she adds. “Before you left our house, I almost told you, but I just couldn’t.” She shakes her head. “Just couldn’t,” she repeats, her unspoken apology floating in the mist between us.

  I almost laugh at the idea of this girl, this powerhouse who didn’t hesitate before she splashed into the ocean today, unable to tell me anything.

  “I watched them,” she says, desperately. “I kept my eyes on them every second, until…”

  The words she doesn’t say hang in the air; she watched them every second until she couldn’t watch them anymore. Until they disa
ppeared. I shake my head, thinking about the figures I saw on the beach last night, the voices I heard. They must have been ghosts.

  Carefully, pressing against the soaked deck and then grabbing at the side of the boat, I stand up. The boat is heaving and pitching; the captain is shouting at me from his place behind the controls.

  “Sit down, Wendy,” Jas says, reaching for me. “It’s not safe.”

  I shake my head, carefully backing away from him. I have to keep my hands gripping the edge of the boat to keep from falling as the ocean tosses us around like a wild mustang. The captain keeps shouting, pointing at something behind me. I begin to turn; a wave twice the size of any I’ve ever seen is building in front of me.

  My brothers are dead. Jas and I can search every wave around the world, we can follow every swell: we will never find them. They vanished six months ago, just like everyone said. I was wrong to believe I could find them and bring them home, more wrong than anyone has ever been about anything. More wrong than Jas was to sell them the drugs, more wrong than Pete was to lie to me, more wrong than Belle was to hide the truth.

  I let go.

  The first thing I feel is the cold. I thought I was cold on the boat, but this is something else entirely. It’s a cold that shocks me to my very bones, blinding me so that I can’t even see the boat anymore. I wonder just how far the wave flung me. For a second, before I hit the water, it felt like I was flying.

  Water is not soft on impact. It’s as hard as ice against my skin. Instinct has me struggling to stay on the surface of the water, wrestling with the waves that plunge me down deep, over and over.

  I flail my arms desperately; soon I can’t tell which way is up. Maybe I’m swimming deeper when I think I’m swimming for the surface. I open my mouth to gasp for oxygen, genuinely surprised to find that I’m underwater, and instead of air, my mouth is filling with liquid.

  I wonder how long I can hold my breath. I’ve always heard that in situations like this, you discover that you can survive without oxygen for longer than you ever imagined.

  Belle and Pete and Jas all swam in this water before me and survived; but then they had their flotation vests on and all I have is this sweatshirt that feels like it weighs a thousand pounds.

  How long did my brothers fight in this water? How long were they able to hold their breaths? Did they stay together or did the waves drive them apart? Did one of them drown first? Did the other have to watch, helpless, as the person he was closest to on the planet disappeared under the water for the last time? Are they here now, floating somewhere beneath me, waiting for me to join them?

  Suddenly, I want to swim down, down, down, into the depths of the icy water below me. There is still one way I can find my brothers, even if I can’t bring them home the way I planned. But I can join them. I throw my hands above my head, trying to propel myself deeper.

  Then someone is grabbing me, pulling me higher.

  “Hang on to me,” Jas says, his voice thick. He must have jumped in after me; of course he jumped in after me.

  He’s holding me tighter than I’ve ever been held before.

  “Hang on to me,” he says again, but I can’t seem to make my arms wind around him, can’t make my fingers hold on. Maybe they’re frozen from the cold or maybe they just don’t want to. Maybe my body has already made up its mind; it’s ready to let go.

  My head slips beneath the surface again, and Jas struggles to pull me up.

  I picture my lungs filling with water every time I go under, just a little more each time. Who knew it was possible to drown so gradually?

  I hear Jas each time I resurface.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “I love you,” he says.

  “I’ll spend the rest—”

  Then I don’t hear anything anymore.

  34

  I’ve been awake for a while now, but I haven’t opened my eyes yet. I’m not sure I want to open my eyes ever again. I try to force myself back to sleep, but it’s so noisy that I wonder how I ever slept here at all. There is the beep of some machine near my head that seems to be registering my pulse, the sound of footsteps, an echo of laughter, and, from somewhere nearby, an urgent call for a nurse.

  I’m in a hospital. That much is obvious. I can feel an IV stuck into my left arm. My entire body aches, and my neck feels so stiff that I don’t think I can turn my head; I’ll learn later that my collarbone is broken, along with several ribs.

  It’s my lungs that give me away; I try to take a deep breath and instead begin coughing violently. My lungs still feel like they’re full of water.

  I wonder just how close I came to drowning. I hear footsteps rushing in, a nurse coming to check on me.

  I open my eyes.

  “Well hello there, sleepyhead,” the nurse says in an overly cheerful voice. Her scrubs are pink with little teddy bears running down the middle. Maybe I’m in the pediatric unit.

  I open my mouth to speak, but I can’t stop coughing. The nurse hands me a plastic cup of water, and I shake my head. Water is the last thing I need. I need someone to stick their hands down my throat and wring out my water-soaked lungs. But that’s not, obviously, an option, so I reach for the cup. That’s when I discover that my arms are in restraints. Loosely, but still. I look accusingly at the nurse, sweat beading up at the back of my neck despite the fact that the room is cool.

  “I’ll untie that for you,” the nurse says obligingly, undoing the restraint around my right arm. She watches as I drink. I empty the cup slowly, scared that the minute I finish she’s going to tie me back up.

  But instead she says she’s going to get my parents. Her tone seems to imply that she’ll be back in just a minute, so it’s not worth my trying anything. I get the feeling this is some kind of test to see what I’ll do with my new freedom. So I don’t untie my other wrist.

  My parents come in, walking in step like soldiers marching into battle. They don’t rush to hug me; instead they stand at the foot of my bed, like they’re scared that if they touch me I’ll break.

  “Where am I exactly?” I ask. I don’t bother saying hello.

  The water is the last thing I remember. Jas’s arms around me. He must have gotten me back to the boat somehow; they must have made it back to the harbor and rushed us to the hospital. I must have swallowed too much water, lost consciousness.

  “You’re in the hospital,” my mother says.

  I glance at my left arm, still tightly bound by restraints. I don’t think I’m in the pediatric wing after all.

  “Where exactly in the hospital am I?” I ask.

  My mother glances at the nurse and bites her lip.

  “Mom?” I prompt.

  It’s the nurse who speaks, but by the time she does, the answer has already become clear: I’m in the psych ward. She calls it “the psychiatric unit,” but we both know that’s just a euphemism.

  I try to sit up, the loose hospital pajamas I’m wearing rustling like they’re made of paper. “Why am I tied up?”

  “You kept trying to run away,” my mother blurts out, then looks apologetically at the nurse. The nurse comes and sits on the edge of my bed and takes my hand in hers. I have to resist the urge to glance accusingly at my parents; this is their job, not some stranger’s, to sit beside me and comfort me.

  “You’ve been unconscious for days. We think you were having something like nightmares. Do you remember what you saw?”

  I shake my head.

  “You called out names, insisted that you had to go back and make sure they were okay. You kept trying to get up. We finally had to restrain you, just to help you stay put.”

  She laughs as she says the last words, like she’s trying to make the restraints seem cute. Like I was a kid falling out of bed and they didn’t want me to hurt myself.

  “Do you remember what names you called?”

  I shake my head, though I can guess. Belle is probably somewhere in this hospital, too, her leg wrapped in bandages, crisscrossed with stitches.
Maybe Jas is waiting outside; maybe they wouldn’t let him in because he’s not family.

  “Can I see them?” I ask finally.

  “See who?”

  “Belle,” I say, wincing at the memory of the bloody gash in her leg. “I’ll go to her room if she can’t be moved. And Pete and Jas.”

  The nurse cocks her head to the side, the same way Nana does when she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Evidently, the names have no meaning to her, beyond being the names I cried out in the night.

  “Come on,” I say, begging. “The people who brought me here. The people who were on the boat with me.”

  “What boat, Wendy?”

  “The boat. The only boat that was stupid enough to go out on the water.”

  My parents look desperately at the nurse, as though they believe she has all the answers. I narrow my eyes, staring at her. Nurses wear name tags, and this woman doesn’t. I don’t think she is the type to have forgotten it at home.

  I sit up, the remaining restraint tightening around my left wrist, the muscles in my back aching in protest. “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Mary,” she answers.

  “Are you a nurse?”

  She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I’m your doctor, Wendy. Your therapist.”

  I nod; I think I knew that.

  “Wendy,” Mary continues, her voice frustratingly calm, a perfectly rehearsed monotone. “You were found on the sand near Pebble Beach; you’d tried to swim out into the storm, but the water was just too rough.”

  I shake my head. “That’s not what happened,” I begin to say.

  But Mary continues. “You were found just down the beach from where the police found your brothers’ surfboards. Were you looking for John and Michael?”

  “Yes,” I say too quickly. “I mean, no. I mean, when I went there, I thought that maybe I could find them.”

  My parents exchange a look. Each time I glance their way they seem more stricken than the last.

  I shake my head. “But I know that they drowned out there. I understand that now.”