The Beautiful Lost

by Luanne Rice

  “You seemed so into it.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “And you seemed mad at me.”

  He shook his head. “I meant what I said. I act like a jerk when people go there. I’m sorry if I gave you the idea it was you.”

  His apology washed over me. But I still felt confused by his rapid change of moods.

  Outside the frogs peeped. It started to rain. I heard it tapping the roof, softly at first, then hard and steady. Somewhere in the dark room I heard a leak, a drip-drip-drip coming through a hole in the old roof. It soothed me. I closed my eyes.

  I heard Billy open a closet door. He rummaged inside, and then I felt him tuck a quilt over me. His hands lingered on my shoulders for just a second, and I tensed up. Then he settled down on the other side of the bed, on top of the cover. We lay there, facing away from each other, and my heart was racing. So were my thoughts, but I didn’t say anything out loud, and a long time later, I drifted into sleep.

  It was still dark when I woke up. Both the rain and the tree frogs had stopped. I looked for Billy next to me, but his side of the bed was empty. The room was empty. I got up from the broken bed and felt my way down the pitch-black stairs.

  The fire had died down during the night, and the living room was chilly. Billy stood at the fireplace, stirring the last coals with the poker, making sure they were out. We watched to make sure there were no sparks. We ate a few granola bars, then carried our duffel bags and the rest of the food onto the porch and closed the door behind us.

  We loaded the truck. I figured Morgane and Richard were still sleeping, but then I heard feet crunching twigs and dried leaves. Richard’s voice was low, and so was Morgane’s. They walked over to the truck holding nets and specimen jars.

  “We stayed up all night and were rewarded,” Richard said, holding up one of the jars. The water looked murky, and there were squiggly little things swimming around. “Quite a few tadpoles to study. So many, in fact, we thought we might spend the day here. Would that be cool?”

  “We don’t need to go back into the house,” Morgane said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Richard and Morgane went to the house to get their stuff. I waited till they returned to the truck to return the key to its hiding spot.

  “Maia,” Morgane said as I walked closer. “I hope you’re okay. I know how crazy it can all seem. It seemed that way to me, the first time I saw my mother speak to a spirit. I thought she was insane. But over the years the gift has come to me, and I know it’s true.”

  I thought I saw genuine concern in her brown eyes.

  “I think you’re very special,” Morgane said. “Aurelia has never done that before, carried a message from a living person. But you heard the message.”

  “Yes,” I said. Missing, waiting, child, song.

  “Hold on to the four words if times get hard,” Morgane said, hugging me tight.

  I choked up, the words running through my mind. I wondered if she had any idea what they meant to me.

  We all said good-bye. Billy pulled out of the driveway and left Morgane and Richard standing in the clearing, alone with the frogs and the ghosts.

  We drove for miles. The day’s first silver light reflected in the lake and lit our way. Morgane’s words about my mother rang in my ears.

  “You honestly didn’t believe that was real?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  Billy drove along in silence. These days together had shown me he had several variations of being quiet. Sometimes he was right there, totally present, but just not saying anything. Other times he was intensely engaged, like a person playing chess, focused on the next move.

  But there was a third way, like now, when he zoomed out and saw the whole picture, when he was wiser than any sixteen-year-old kid had any right to be. Maybe it was because of what he’d been through, who he’d lost.

  “You have to be careful, Maia,” he said finally. “Morgane was cruel to trick you that way.”

  “Trick me?”

  “Those four words could mean anything.”

  “I know what they mean,” I said. “Exactly what they say.”

  “Except Morgane pulled them out of thin air. You’re making them fit the situation with your mother, but think about it. Anyone could apply them to their own lives.”

  “No,” I said, anger building in my chest. “She feels them for me. I know it.”

  “Look,” he said. “That was bull, what happened back there. My mother’s dead, and there’s no way she can talk to me. And there’s no way to know what your mother is thinking now.”

  “Thinking now?”

  “Yeah. As opposed to before she left. That’s impossible. All you can count on is that she loved you then, loves you still. Let that be enough. She had her reasons for running out, but it wasn’t you. No one could ever want to leave you, Maia. But you can’t be sure she doesn’t want her own life, doesn’t want you to stay away. You have to be prepared for that.”

  “Well, I’m not. She wants me,” I said. I felt burning fury and stared out the window, anywhere but at him.

  He could have softened his words, said something to make me feel better. But he didn’t. I knew that wasn’t his way—he was defiantly unsentimental, and he didn’t trust anyone. He drove in silence, still on the predawn dark logging road.

  I matched his silence. There was nothing I wanted to say to him. We were back in range of radio stations, and I found one that played singer-songwriters. The very first song that came on was Gillian Welch singing “Revelator” and I took it as a sign: My mother’s name was Gillian, too.

  As mad as I was at Billy, I couldn’t shake one thing he’d said: No one could ever want to leave you, Maia.

  Had he meant my mother?

  Or had he meant himself? I thought of our almost kiss.

  The miles went by, and I had to hold on as tight as I could to the seat. Inside, my heart was jumping around, I was veering back and forth between feeling mad, feeling hurt, and hoping that I meant something to him.

  Another song came on and the radio guy said it was “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show. Billy glanced at me to see if I knew it. I didn’t, but it sounded happy, full of guitars and fiddles.

  He pulled over, shifted the truck into park, turned up the radio, and opened the door.

  “Come on,” he said.

  I hesitated. My bad mood kept me from moving. But the way he stood by the open door, and the look in his eyes, made me get out. We stood in a glade of pine trees, with brown needles underfoot, the music surrounding us. Billy gave me his hand, I took it, and suddenly we were dancing. The sun was just coming up, a line of red beneath gray clouds. It was a fast song, but our dance was slow. I felt Billy’s hand on the small of my back, his breath on my cheek. The song played.

  Rock me mama like a wagon wheel, rock me mama anyway you feel …

  My heart thumped in my chest, and I felt his beating against mine. The song ended, another began, and we kept dancing for another minute.

  What would he think if he’d known it was my first dance? What did I think?

  He let me go, and we both climbed into the truck.

  “That’s better,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You’re not mad anymore?”

  I shook my head, still feeling, just lightly, the pressure of his hand on my back. We stared at each other. I wanted to say something, but the words caught in my throat. It seemed he had something to say, too, but we sat there quietly, our unspoken words swirling in the air above our heads.

  After a minute he shifted into drive, but he kept his foot on the brake. It seemed he didn’t want to leave this spot. I didn’t, either. But once we started moving, it was okay.

  When we got to the end of the logging road, he gave me one long, last glance. Then he hit the gas and we merged onto a blacktop with actual lines in the middle and signs for Edmundston and Rivière-du-Loup.

  A thin drizzle turned into thick fog. Truc
ks barreled past, kicking up mud and spray. Now a Celtic singer came on singing in a high, sweet voice about a maiden down in the sunken garden, about the boy who’d left her there. I turned my head so Billy wouldn’t see me smile. I felt bad for the girl who’d been left, but I’d just danced with Billy, at dawn under the pines.

  After a while I reached for the small green book and opened it again. I had been so eager to start on it, but right now all I could think about was dancing with Billy and how I wanted the feeling to last forever. I forced myself to concentrate and take notes on what we would need to find my mother.

  We were getting close now. I smelled the Saint Lawrence River before I saw it: a mixture of salt and fresh water, exhaust from the stacks of passing ships, and, I was positive, krill breath from the spouts of whales. Billy could hear lobsters, and I turned down the radio because I was positive I was hearing the songs of whales.

  We pulled up to the dock in Rivière-du-Loup, where we’d catch the ferry for Saint-Siméon, just about fifty miles from Tadoussac. From there it was straight up the fjord to my mother’s cabin. A few big commercial trucks were idling in the parking lot, waiting to board. The first boat wouldn’t leave for a few hours, so Billy inched down behind the steering wheel to get comfortable. We’d gotten up so early, and the emotions of the drive had tired us out.

  My eyelids started getting heavy. Billy slept at his end of the seat. The morning chill intensified in the fog, but I felt warm inside. I curled up against the door, drifting in and out of light sleep and deep dreams of a boy and a girl slow dancing, then dreaming together at the edge of the water.

  I was glad I’d stopped taking the meds. I felt good. No hint of depression. In fact, after our dance, I felt almost high. All I wanted was to cross the Saint Lawrence River and get to the north side. I know it was strange, but I felt I could fly us there.

  The day—or at least its first moments—started out so well. I was full of excitement as we woke up in the ferryboat parking lot in Rivière-du-Loup. Fog hung low over the wide and salty water, but you could tell the sun was trying to burn through. Billy stretched.

  “Did you catch a nap?” he asked, looking over at me.

  “I did. How about you?”

  “Definitely. Ready for anything now,” he said.

  We smiled at each other, and I was surprised I didn’t feel shy or awkward after our dance. Maybe it was all the days we’d been together, the fact that I was starting to feel I knew him better than anyone else did. Better than Helen.

  The first departure was at eight a.m. We were at the head of the line. As soon as the office opened, we went inside to buy our tickets.

  “Bonjour,” the woman behind the counter said. We were in Quebec province, the French-speaking part of Canada.

  “Bonjour,” I said, happy to practice the language.

  “Do you speak English?” Billy asked.

  “Bien sûr,” the woman said, smiling at us. “Yes.”

  “We’d like to buy tickets,” Billy said.

  “How many passengers?” she asked. I loved her accent; it was different from Richard’s but somehow the same.

  “Two,” Billy said.

  “Vehicle or on foot?”

  “Vehicle,” he said. “A truck.”

  “There is a surcharge for a truck,” she said.

  “It’s just a pickup,” he said.

  “De tout façon,” she said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “‘In any case,’ ” I translated.

  “Désolée, but pickup or not, it’s still a truck,” the woman said. “Forty-five dollars for the vehicle, sixteen-dollar surcharge for the truck, and twenty-four dollars each passenger. That’s one hundred and nine dollars total.”

  “Thanks,” Billy said. He grabbed my arm, pulled me out of line.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “We don’t have it,” he said. “We’re down to fifty-five dollars.”

  “No!” I said. Our truck was right there, perfectly positioned in the very front of the loading zone, the big white ferryboat waiting for us to drive aboard.

  “I shouldn’t have bought the ice cream,” Billy said.

  “Don’t say that. I’m glad you did. But what can we do now, to get across?”

  We walked over to the ferry. The stern doors opened, and the largest trucks started rumbling aboard. Some were eighteen-wheelers, several with raucous refrigerator units pumping frost into the air. A few had fish painted on the side, probably going to pick up the catch in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. With a pang I noticed that one was emblazoned with dancing lobsters, and I remembered our good time in Maine.

  A long line of vehicles—cars and smaller trucks—had formed behind ours, and I realized we were going to lose our spot. Billy handed me the keys, and I reluctantly moved the truck to a parking lot off to the side.

  I got out to wait, feeling helpless as I watched the other vehicles starting to drive on board. Billy stood across the lot, talking to a guy in a khaki uniform. The guy was a little older than college age, very trim with a crew cut and a neatly trimmed beard. He stood absolutely straight, his expression impassive as he listened to Billy.

  A minute later, Billy ran over to a lobster truck just before it drove aboard the ferry. The driver rolled down the window, and Billy started talking, gesturing, half turning to point at me. Next thing I knew he was running toward me, calling out as he approached.

  “Remember saying ‘will work for lobster rolls’?” Billy said. “Well, this is our chance. The mate on the ferry told me that the fishing trucks sometimes hire day workers, and the lobster guy said his company on the other side needs pickers, whatever they are. We can do that for a day or so and earn enough money to get to your mother.”

  “But we still don’t have money for the ferry tickets.”

  “We do, Maia. We have enough for passenger fare, but we’ll have to leave our truck.”

  “The truck?” I asked, almost too stunned to notice he’d said “our.” It had been our transportation, our home. I loved our truck.

  “We don’t have a choice,” he said. “I’ll ask inside if we can leave it here in the lot, and we can come back for it when we have the money.”

  “I don’t want to leave it,” I said, touching its hood.

  “Maia,” he said. “We have to hurry.”

  The ferry hands had almost finished loading the hold with vehicles and cargo. Billy ran inside the office to buy the tickets, and I gathered our stuff from the truck. I had the green book, my most important belonging—even if wasn’t, officially, mine. Billy hurried back, and we grabbed our duffel bags. We locked the canned food in the toolbox.

  It was so hard to leave our sanctuary on four wheels.

  The truck had driven me away from being forced into the hospital and now had taken me to the edge of the river, the last thing that separated me from my mother. And it had let me sit close to Billy for all these days and miles. It had played the music that had led to our dance.

  “Thank you, truck,” I said. I touched the hood again. It was still warm from being driven.

  “C’mon,” Billy said. He tugged my hand, and I finally tore myself away. We bolted onto the ferry as fast as we could, just as the whistle sounded.

  “Are we sitting with the lobster guy?” I asked.

  “No,” Billy said. “We can ride across on deck, alone together, then meet up with him when we dock.”

  I loved the way that sounded: Billy and me, alone together. It was how we had gotten this far on our almost-impossible journey. We gave the deckhand our tickets, walked through the exhaust-smelling hold, and climbed some steep metal stairs to the top deck.

  We sat as far forward as possible. Maybe because of the fog and a slight chill in the air, everyone else had gone into the cabin and we were the only people on deck. We sat right next to each other on the white bench along the rail, covering our ears as the horn blasted again. The ship’s engine roared in reverse. Looking down we saw the churn of
water around the steel hull, and then a white wake foaming in a trail behind us as the ferry steamed ahead.

  The wind blew our hair back. It felt damp, salty, and wonderful. I opened my mouth to taste the sea. The fog kept me from seeing across to the far shore, but I knew cliffs were rising in the distance, that they marked the long and narrow fjord that would lead us to my mother.

  The time had come. I opened the green book, Beluga and Humpback Whales of Saguenay Fjord. I turned the pages tenderly, remembering how my mother had first shown it to me. It was a reprint, not as rare and valuable as the first edition from 1898, but still old. It was by Laurent Cartier, a descendant of Jacques Cartier, the Frenchman who had claimed Canada for France and mapped this area of Eastern Quebec. Laurent loved whales, pure and simple.

  Pre-Billy, Laurent used to be my crush. Yes, a long-dead guy. He seemed so dashing and cool, exploring the region not to rule it, but because he was obsessed with whales. The little green book was full of his field notes, descriptions of belugas like, “O, they are spry as butterflies and playful as children, their hides as smooth and iridescent as Carrara marble in the finest homes in Paris. These creatures are wonders of nature and inspire me, a non-poet, to pray for the talent to praise them in verse.”

  I used to love picturing Laurent on his knees in his ship’s cabin, praying to God to make him a poet.

  “What’s that?” Billy asked, leaning close.

  “The book,” I said. “My stolen property. I promise to return it!”

  “I know you will.”

  Aha, more trust.

  “For now, it makes me feel … so happy. We’re about to see whales!”

  “Read me something,” Billy said.

  “Okay.” I thumbed through the pages. It was hard to choose from the many perfect sections. “Here’s one. ‘This June day crackles with the promise of whales. When we first arrived in April, winter’s ice choked the fjord, but now the cold, clear water is a magnifying glass into the deep. We approach the summer solstice and the longest day of the year. In last night’s dying light I saw tantalizing shadows alongside the ship, heard the joyful exhalations of a pair of humpbacks just off the starboard bow, as if the beasts were enjoying our companionship as much as we were theirs.’ ” I looked up at Billy. “Isn’t that wonderful?” I asked. “I can’t stand how wonderful it is!”