Wild Blue Wonder

by Carlie Sorosiak

  I do what Nana says. Dad’s groggy but Mom practically jumps out of her skin. “What’s wrong?” she says immediately, so I show her the text messages and tell her Nana’s on the way. We all wait at the breakfast table, hunched around the now-cooling tea. The kitchen air is growing thin and the silence is just growing. In reality it’s twenty-two minutes, but when Nana clambers back inside with Fern, it feels like we could’ve flown halfway across the world.

  The first thing I notice is the stench. I can smell the beer on Fern’s breath—more like the beer radiating from her every pore, as if someone has baptized her in a tub of Coors Light. But she isn’t saying a word. Her arms are crossed, and she’s swaying on the spot.

  Mom leaps up to wrap her night shawl around Fern, but Fern shrugs her away. “I’m fine.” Then, like she’s seeing me for the first time, my sister calls across the kitchen, “Did you . . . did you rat on me? You absolute bitch.”

  “Fern!” Mom says. “Quinn was concerned about you. Harper seemed to think—”

  “I’m going to kill Harper,” she slurs, pointing to me. “But she doesn’t suck as much as you do.”

  Dad rises from his seat. “Now, that’s enough, Fern.”

  “And Reed! He’s just as bad as you, Quinn.” Fern shouts at the top of her lungs. “Wake up, Reed! Come join in the family fun.”

  “What does that even mean?” My voice quivers. “That he’s just as bad as me? What did he do?” Really, I’ve wondered this for six months.

  “Both of you,” she snaps. “Both of you were just laughing at me, weren’t you? Stupid little girl, right?” Her voice is doing a weird hiccupping thing. “Stop. That’s what I need—stop loving him. But the longer it is, the more it is, and the more and more. The more I miss him. Shouldn’t it be less? Shouldn’t I feel less?”

  It’s the most she’s said to me since before the accident, and I don’t know what to address first—the loving thing (ditto), the missing thing (ditto), the laughing thing (we weren’t, were we?). In her light-purple coat and faded jeans, she just looks so fragile—so small—and all I want is to make us some hot chocolate. Play Candy Land by the fireplace.

  Her eyes, though. Wooo, those eyes. Like she’s ten seconds away from gripping my shoulders and shaking me clear out of my skin.

  “Great,” she says, voice like bricks falling. “Fantastic. And now you get to be in love again.”

  My throat constricts. “I’m not in—”

  “With your boyfriend.”

  “Alexander’s not my boyfriend.”

  “That’s never stopped you before.”

  “Girls,” Mom says. “Enough!”

  Fern and I look at each other until it feels as if we’re scooping each other’s souls out with spoons.

  And then she does something I don’t expect.

  She steps a few feet toward me, raises up both of her hands, and starts yanking down the wishes in great fistfuls. “Stupid.” Rip. “Fucking.” Rip. “Stupid.” She gets in several more profanities before Mom and Nana gently tackle her to the kitchen floor, the three of them in a giant lump of wishes and tears.

  I was eleven when Mrs. Thibault discovered the whale. The Winship Gazette said it just like that—“discovered,” as if it would take a skillfully trained eye to spot a forty-ton humpback carcass washed up by the lighthouse. The town debated for five days over what to do with it. “A proper burial,” Nana suggested, but that got vetoed real quick (how far down would you have to dig to bury a whale?). Eventually they decided to keep the bones. It was cold and foggy when Fern and I sneaked down to the coast and watched the Winship Historical Society, along with Dad and a team of volunteers, hack it to bits and wrap the skeleton in plastic like a giant Thanksgiving turkey. They hung it in the crook of the museum’s tremendous ceiling, where the sunlight hit it in this creepy, illusionary way, like it was swimming.

  Fern and I named him Percy. Hollow Percy, who’d never be anything but hollow.

  And this hollowness is exactly how I feel.

  Around two thirty in the morning, Alexander texts me: I haven’t been able to sleep after we left things like that. Then, a minute later: Please talk to me.

  I shut off my phone.

  In the last five hours, I’ve not only crushed him but also failed Nana and fought with Fern—and now I’m lying in the darkness of my room, revisiting the worst choices of my life. On the living room bookshelf, Dad has a book of Socrates quotes. One page says, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but I think the examined life—the one where certain moments form a never-ending movie in your mind—is just as dangerous. Because you can’t go back. You can’t return to those moments to stop yourself from becoming a monster.

  Overexamination is how I find myself, at precisely 4:17 in the morning, grabbing the borrowed keys to our neighbor’s truck, tugging on my boots, and walking straight out the front door, the iced-over blueberries glinting ripe in the watery moon. Isabella Cogsworth III is already hitched up, so I drive directly to the sea, trailing her behind me. I’ve never been in the Chris-Craft by myself, but all I’m thinking is I want to be far, far away. Where I can’t hurt anyone. Where I’m alone, as monsters should be.

  The temperature’s lurking in negative numbers. Pinpricks of wind pierce my coat, my eyes, my skin. Hopping into the boat, I start up the engine and go—faster and faster and faster, until I’m a nautical mile away from the cove, until the ocean is an imposing, endless plane. And then I cut the engine, climb into the back seat, and lie down, palms up to the blackish sky, wondering if there’s anything up there but celestial bodies. Intellectually I can’t wrap my mind around heaven—the idea of a place where everything is always good, always calm, with sunshine and unicorns or whatever. But I do want it to be true. It would make things a hell of a lot easier.

  The boat rocks.

  I think about how it’s cold, cold, cold.

  I think about Fern and the wishes.

  I think about that summer night when Dylan dove into the water alive and came out of the water dead.

  An hour passes. Two. Three. My hands are turning purple. I imagine ice rattling around in my lungs. I imagine my cheekbones shattering with one touch. Every once in a while I sit up slightly, see fish darting under the full moon. One or two spiny dogfish—a species of shark that are actually really cool and live up to a hundred years. A hundred years. Why can’t we all get a hundred years? Hands are getting more and more purple. Why didn’t I bring gloves? Why didn’t I why didn’t I why didn’t—

  Go home before Nana realizes you’re gone.

  Scooting into the driver’s seat, I turn the key with a completely numb hand, waiting for the engine to hum. It doesn’t hum. It groans, rattles, splutters. Refuses to start again.

  You’ve got to be kidding.

  No. No! Seriously?

  If I scream out here, will anyone hear me? My cell phone is off and back at the house. Wait . . . doesn’t this thing have a walkie-talkie? I search the life jacket compartment and nope, of course not—it’s back in the barn.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  This is happening. This is really happening.

  I sink back into the seat and curl up on my side, head almost between my knees, thinking, Well, probably what I deserve, and I’m still in that position twenty or so minutes later when I hear the bumping against the boat. Naturally, my first assumption is: the exposure to the cold is distorting my grasp on reality. But then: swishing.

  Then: barking.

  Seals?

  My body’s kind of weak as I uncurl myself to peer over the side of the boat. My vision is getting blurry, but I can make out three dark shapes, a few feet in front of me. I lean closer, trying to focus my eyes. I see the slender detailing of whiskers. Deep black eyes. It’s not three shapes. No, it’s one shape, one long, massive creature. Its coat is practically glimmering in the moonlight. Slipping in and out of the water, hunching its spine.

  Wessie, I think. The sea monster is real. It’s the last thing
I think before the edges of my vision fuzz and I completely pass out.

  December

  Not Now, Not Ever

  It’s blurry.

  But I remember the Winship Harbor Patrol wrapping me in a crinkly silver blanket and hoisting me into their boat. I remember them applying hot water bottles and asking if I knew my name.

  Sawyer, I said first.

  Not sure why I didn’t say Quinn.

  And I slept. I was the kind of tired that leaves you completely drained, like you will never get enough rest, even if you sleep for the next hundred years.

  When I wake up at noon to the sound of robotic beeps and boops, Mrs. Chang is there—talking in whispers to my mom on the other side of my hospital room. Her black hair’s pinned with a giant butterfly clip. Does she work on weekends? And is this . . . is this the same room I was in last time?

  “Hey, kiddo,” Dad says, propping extra pillows behind my head.

  There’s a needle in the crook of my arm, plastered to my skin with two layers of tape. Nana gently picks up my hand and kisses it. “Welcome back, Cookie.”

  Dad fills in the rest of the details: how Nana bolted up at three fifteen in the morning with the sense that something wasn’t quite right; how, when she saw that the boat was gone, she shook Mom awake again; how Reed crept into the kitchen with a still-drunk Fern, as Mom called the Winship Harbor Patrol and then the police and then every neighbor with a working boat, until she secured a small runabout and raced out into the night. Thanks to Isabella Cogsworth III’s radar reflector, the patrol found me first, a trio of seals guarding the boat. According to Dad, “The guys said they’d never seen anything like it.”

  Seals. So it wasn’t the sea monster. It wasn’t Wessie. It was just seals.

  The only monster is me.

  Mom’s hovering over me now with a grief-stricken face.

  It’s Nana who speaks next. “You’re going home tonight, after we get your pulse rate up to normal, but you’re gonna take it easy for the next few days.” When Dad and Mom retreat into the hall, speaking low between themselves, Nana stays. “You gave us a real scare.”

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

  She takes my face in the softness of her palms. “Promise me that you won’t ever do anything like that again.”

  “Why does it . . . ?” I begin. My throat’s dry. “Why does it matter? It’s not like I’m this awesome person.”

  Every wrinkle on her face crinkles. She shakes her head violently. “Wrong. No. You are one of the best people I know. I don’t want to peddle you some everyone makes mistakes platitudes, but it’s true. You’re growing. No one pops out of the womb perfect.” Nana presses her hand over my heart. “I’ve seen what’s in here. I know.”

  She’s telling the truth—or her truth, at least. I nod, wanting to believe her.

  “Now get some rest,” she says, planting a kiss on my forehead.

  I try, closing my eyes and focusing on breathing. But after fifteen minutes, I open them again and realize Reed’s standing in the doorway. I have no idea how long he’s been there, but it’s clear he’s not planning to leave. He swallows loud enough for all of New England to hear.

  “Hey,” he finally says, making his way to the end of the hospital bed and chewing on his bottom lip. Tufts of ultrablond hair escape from the confines of his Portland Pirates cap. Dylan’s cap. “If I ask Mom and the doctor and if you’re up for it, do you think I can grab us some chowder?”

  I’m slightly worried that aliens have swapped my brother with a more civil version, because what’s happening? When’s the last time my brother asked me to hang out?

  July. Not since July.

  “Please?” he says, a tug of desperation in the corners of his mouth.

  And I say okay.

  Forty minutes later, he returns with a large takeout bag from Leo’s, pulls up a chair, and arranges the food on a small table by my bedside: a box of onion rings, two ginger brew sodas, and two clam chowders—large, with extra oyster crackers.

  Extra oyster crackers. Those are for me. He remembers.

  “Swiped a ketchup bottle from the hospital dining hall,” Reed says sheepishly, handing me a plastic spoon and squeezing no less than a cup of ketchup onto his half of the onion rings.

  “You’re still doing that?” I ask, like years have passed instead of months.

  “Am I still enjoying my onion rings as they are meant to be enjoyed? Yes. Yes, I am.” He makes a show of swirling one into the ketchup blob, chowing it down with: “Mmm, oh yeah. Oh yeah, that’s wicked good. So greasy. So salty. So good.”

  I poke him with my plastic spoon, and with his finger he pokes me back in the cheek—something he used to do all the time; he keeps poking until I smile. When he passes me the chowder, I rest it in my lap and, unwrapping five packets of crackers, crush them into the mix. The first spoonful hurts my throat. Everything hurts, actually. Manhattan clam chowder has always been my favorite, but strangely all I can think about now is how Alexander would undoubtedly make it better.

  “Mom and Dad were a mess when they couldn’t find you,” Reed says after a while, devouring another onion ring and wiping his mouth.

  I grimace and fix my eyes on the chowder. “I didn’t know the engine was going to die like that.”

  “What were you doing out there?”

  Sipping a spoonful of soup, I debate it for a good ten seconds but then decide I have nothing left to lose. “Reed, do you think I’m a monster?

  For a flicker of a moment, she stares at me like my eyes and nose have switched places. “What?”

  “A monster. Do you think I’m a monster?”

  “No,” he says, exhaling so deep that his breath bounces off the back walls. “Of course not.”

  “Did Fern ever tell you that’s what she called me?”

  Reed’s eyebrows furrow. “When?”

  “After the hospital. You know, the last time at the hospital. Right when I got back, still in the car. You were—”

  “I know how I was.” His voice isn’t angry, just tight. “Are we really talking about this?”

  “If you want to.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “No,” I tell him honestly. “But I think we should.”

  There’s an enormous pause, a gaping ever-widening hole between us, and I’m having second thoughts when Reed says, “I saw you kiss Dylan on the boat. I saw it from the shore. And I turned around and walked back to the party.”

  I shake my head. “I . . . I had no idea.”

  “Yeah, it really sucked. That maybe he’d chosen my little sister, after getting kissed by my other little sister. And it’s not like I had this image of us getting together—it wasn’t like that—but it still sucked. You knew I was in love with Dylan, didn’t you?”

  I nod.

  Reed says, “Did you tell him?”

  “No,” I say, startled. “Should I have?”

  “No, I guess I’ve just always wondered if . . . if he knew. I don’t think he knew.”

  “He was pretty oblivious about a lot of things.”

  “Tell me about it. Anyway, when I got back to the party, Fern was looking for Dylan, saying all this shit about how she wanted to kiss him goodbye, how she threw this party so he’d see her as this adult person, and I just . . . went off.”

  My heart stills. “What do you mean?”

  He twists his baseball cap back and forth on his head. “I was just going to keep it in, you know, like I always do, I always keep it in . . . but something just came over me and I started yelling at her, lying to her, telling her that we all thought it was hilarious that she kissed him. You included. I told her she looked like a stupid little girl with a crush.”

  Right before she tore down the wishes: Both of you were just laughing at me, weren’t you? Stupid little girl, right?

  He says faster now, “And I was drunk. That’s not an excuse, but I was drunk when everyone started screaming and running toward the water, and all I
kept thinking was that I didn’t want to see it—that if you two were still kissing out there, I didn’t want to go anywhere near that cove. It didn’t click, it just didn’t click until Fern was tugging at my arm and crying and saying that something happened, and I was so confused. I was so confused and angry and scared that I didn’t comfort her. I didn’t do a fucking thing. And when Nana rushed toward me and said, Come on, we’re going to the hospital, I couldn’t even move, and every day”—he turns to me—“every day, Quinn, I swear that if I could go back I’d do it differently, because I should’ve stayed on the shore and I should’ve run toward you and him and everything as fast as I could.”

  I’m stunned. It’s too much information all at once.

  “Do you know how many times I’ve just sat on that shore since July?” he continues, eyes red and pleading. “That night you caught me in the hallway? That’s where I was going. Like if I can stay on the shore, it’ll . . . I’ll . . .” He swallows. “You know why I dropped out of UMaine? I was coming home from a party, and suddenly I’d borrowed my roommate’s car and I was driving to Winship, almost three hours away. And I was—I was pissed off when I saw you with Dylan, and after the rescue crew dragged him from the water—” His words cut off with a strangled noise.

  I fill in the gap. “You knew it was impossible to forgive me.”

  He snaps to look at me again. “Is that what you think? No. After I found out that Dylan died, I couldn’t talk to you because I couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t imagine what you’d been through, didn’t want to imagine it, and I thought— I thought you knew. That I didn’t come for you at the hospital. I thought you hated me.” He released a ragged breath. “I can’t lose you. I can’t lose you, too. Last night it was like the whole thing over again. And I need you to know that it’s not your fault, Quinn. Yeah, the boat wasn’t safe, but you didn’t know that was going to happen. The way we’re collapsing? It’s all of us.”

  The onion rings are going cold in a mound of ketchup. I push my spoon around my chowder without eating any more, and then I find myself reaching out for Reed’s hand. He holds mine, squeezes. I’ve missed my big brother. I’ve missed so much.