Eddy was so into this conversation, she couldn’t just lurk. “How?” she boomed, and “How?” Sean echoed.
“By the time I talked to her about becoming a magician, she’d already chosen another passion. She—”
“Wait,” Sean croaked. “You told my mom you were her great-great-times-nine? You told her about magic and the Outer Gods and all?”
“I did. And then I took back the telling.”
“What—?”
Orne raised his left hand. “Give me a chance, Sean. I’ll finish the story. Briefly for now, but with all points covered.”
Sean clapped shut his beak.
“Kate had great magical capacity. She had curiosity, drive, and courage. But her curiosity was for this world, and her drive was to wake people up to what’s gorgeous in a pebble, if that was what she decided to paint. And for that, she had all the courage she needed.”
If Orne had never told the truth before, he was telling it now. “Since I was real young, I knew Mom could see stuff other people didn’t. She put this glow in her paintings, and they hummed. I could feel it, like they were alive, buzzing.”
“I could feel it, too,” Orne said. “From the start, in a stuttering manner, Kate put magical energy into her work. Full immersion in magic she didn’t want, but I was able to give her two gifts. First, I taught her how to consistently access and transfer energy. Second, I obliterated the memory of what I’d told her about our relationship and the magical world. All she kept was the trick of channeling magic into paint, and I imagine she thought of that as technique, not sorcery. She went to Rhode Island for school. I closed my gallery and, as far as Kate knew, moved to Prague to open another. Occasionally we’d exchange letters. Postcards. Maybe you could find me among her effects as Samuel Grimsby, and your father would recognize that name as well.”
Eddy coughed, distant thunder. A crow’s throat couldn’t get tight, obviously, or Sean would have been coughing, too. Instead he hunched his wings and tucked his beak into his breast feathers.
Orne set him on the turf. “It must be time for us to go. Eddy?”
One more roll of thunder, then “Yeah, pretty much.”
No, it couldn’t have been an hour. “But afterwards, you still watched her?”
“No. Kate had made her choice. And after you were born, I had you to watch. Say the word, Sean.”
There had to be a hundred more questions he should ask. He couldn’t put any into words, though, so he cackled: “Nevermore.”
Orne vanished.
Eddy rapped on the glass-to-her, sky-to-Sean. He shook himself, then arrowed for the palm in the crescent moon. He popped through into his own body, whose throat was tight beyond tight, almost closed, and whose face streamed fucking tears.
14
After escaping from Eddy’s solicitude, Sean spent a sleepless night trying to figure out why Orne’s story had shaken him to tears. He couldn’t remember Mom mentioning a Samuel Grimsby, but “Grimsby” had been out of her life for a while by the time Sean was born. Besides, kids didn’t care about old guys from their parents’ pasts, so even if she’d talked about him around Sean, he likely wouldn’t have paid attention. Funny. If Grimsby/Orne hadn’t helped Mom get into the Rhode Island School of Design, she probably would never have met Dad. No Mom and Dad, no Sean. At least, not the same Sean. For good or bad, that made Orne responsible for his existence a second time.
Head aching, he finally dry-swallowed aspirin and dozed through dawn. The headache followed him to breakfast, and he was ready to thank any god, Outer or otherwise, when Marvell called to cancel theory class. Helen gave Eddy the day off, and then she and Daniel decided to hang out on the beach until he went to Geldman’s at three. Sean tried to beg off. Eddy wouldn’t let him. Fresh air would be better for him than lying around. Besides, she wanted to kayak, and she needed a partner.
Well, minus his ocean phobia, Daniel could have been her partner. When they got to Arkham Harbor, Sean was glad he’d squelched the snarky comment—Daniel had to be genuinely terrified of the water or he’d be stripping down to his mandatory neck brace and jumping in like everyone else who’d ditched work this sweltering Friday. The swim beach on the south side of the jetty was a refugee camp of umbrellas, sun shelters, coolers, and folding chairs; on the north side, off the launch beach, kayakers rolled to cool off from their treks through the parking lot. With only a light breeze to drive it, the incoming tide was languid enough for Daniel to hike to the end of the jetty. Weird, if you thought about it. You’d think he’d sit on the boardwalk under a café awning, safely away from the water, tall drink in hand. Daniel Glass, preppy man of mystery.
He wasn’t close to winning Weirdo of the Day, though. While Eddy fussed with her deck rigging, an unbeatable contender slouched down the launch beach toward the waterline. The guy wore a Windbreaker zipped to his jawline, and a knit cap, and leather mittens. Seriously, mittens, the kind where you could pull back the top layer to expose fingerless gloves, but he had the top layers in place, as if a blizzard were raging and he feared frostbite. He also wore wraparound shades, probably a good thing—his freakishly flat nose, wide lipless mouth, and receding chin didn’t leave Sean eager for a look at his eyes.
The guy passed five yards away, but even at that distance he gave off such a reek that Sean had to cover his nose. The smell was a compound of dried cod, and sick sweat, and a cheap sandalwood cologne that made the whole even worse than its parts. He scrambled upwind to escape the foul wafting, and he wasn’t the only one. By the time the guy flopped down at water’s edge, he had half the launch beach to himself.
Had he passed out from heat exhaustion? No, because he lifted himself on his elbows and gazed without apparent chagrin at the way the mild surf lapped his enormous sneakered feet. In fact, he scrooched closer, so the wavelets broke to his knees, soaking his jeans.
Whoa. How about just wearing flip-flops and shorts? Or, sad to think, how about just taking his meds?
Sean pushed his kayak into the water and paddled over to Eddy, already afloat. He poked his chin toward the guy. “Crazy alert.”
“Where?” Eddy looked, and frowned. “Oh. I’ve seen him before, a bunch of times.”
“Here on the beach?”
“No, when I go to the pharmacy to meet Daniel. I call him Mr. Haddock, because of the smell. You caught it, right?”
“Hell yeah.”
“He hangs around outside Tumblebee’s. Jess, the owner? She can’t stand him—he drives away business, but she doesn’t know how to get rid of him. I mean, what are you going to say? ‘Oh, sir, could you move along, you’re gagging my customers?’ I feel bad for him, but I feel bad for her, too. I hope Daniel doesn’t see him.”
“How come?”
“A couple times we thought he was following us back to the house. Both times he turned the other way on Water Street, but it freaked us out.”
And there was Mr. Haddock again, dabbling fully clothed and staring off into the distance. Or maybe, hard to tell with his shades, he was staring specifically, creepily, at the jetty, on which Daniel had dwindled to a stick figure among the stick-figure fishermen. Damn, the guy’s feet were a size 20, easy, and that wide mouth looked like a snake’s, or a shark’s. Sean wondered what kind of teeth he might keep in there.
Eddy prodded Sean’s arm with her paddle. “Stop staring.”
“What if—?”
“We’ve got enough what-ifs in our lives already, in case you hadn’t noticed. Let’s get going.”
Yeah, they had plenty. There were the what-ifs about Orne, and about the seed world, and about Marvell and the Order, and that didn’t even begin the list of what-ifs about magic in general. Sean snuck a last look at Mr. Haddock, who still sloshed in the surf and stared, maybe, out along the jetty. Unless he had his eyes closed behind the wraparounds. And what kind of eyes—?
But Sean shut down that speculation fast and paddled seaward after Eddy.
* * *
Sean and Eddy stuck c
lose to the concrete wall of the jetty, following its long curve to the end. Daniel waved from atop a plinth that supported the jetty’s light mast—he had the prime perch to himself today, because most of the fishermen had clumped together closer to shore. “Somebody caught a big dogfish!” he yelled. “You guys better watch out.”
“Thanks!” Eddy yelled back. “Seen any great whites?”
“About fifty before you showed up. You must have scared them off.”
“Damn straight.”
Beyond the jetty were the remains of the old breakwater, most of which was underwater as high tide approached. Most, not all. The rocks closest to the jetty still protruded a few inches, and Eddy and Sean skirted them on their way to see what might be scrounging a meal on the man-made reef. Eddy spotted black sea bass and tautogs chowing down on mussels and barnacles. Sean glimpsed a sixty-pound striper; well, a thirty-pounder; okay, maybe fifteen. But still, plenty big enough.
Other kayakers joined them above the breakwater. To everyone’s excitement, so did a pod of seven harbor porpoises. They swam around and under the kayaks, now and then poking their blunt-nosed grinning heads out of the water as if they thought floating humans were as good a show as they were. More kayakers arrived, along with some Jet Skiers. Fishermen crowded against the guardrails to toss baitfish to the porpoises, jetty strollers to take pics, and the bigger their audience, the more wildly the porpoises cavorted, some leaping clear of the water, which was unusual for this smallish species. From his plinth, Daniel had the best view of anyone, and he about fell off laughing when a porpoise leap soaked Sean to sputters. Soon afterwards, as if in search of even more admirers, the pod headed toward the swimming beach. The kayakers followed them by sea, the fishermen and strollers by jetty top.
“You guys go,” Daniel called down.
“Are you coming?” Eddy called back.
“No, I can see fine from here, and if I climb down, I might lose my spot.”
Eddy started inland, swift as a porpoise herself. Sean pursued her for a few strokes, then paused to strip off his drenched T-shirt. After redonning his life vest, he turned to see if Daniel was still laughing over his soaking, but Daniel wasn’t looking at him. Or at Eddy. Or at the porpoise pod. In fact, he’d turned his back to the action and was gazing seaward, or rather, down at the breakwater. What was up with that? Something exciting, to judge by the only other person left on the end of the jetty, a boy maybe nine or ten, who stomach-balanced on top of the guardrail, feet kicking precariously in the air.
Sean paddled back toward Daniel. Rounding the jetty end, he saw what the big deal was: Two new harbor porpoises, considerably bigger than the others, loitered by the breakwater, tails down, heads thrust high into the air, and damned if they weren’t checking out Daniel. “Dude, you’ve got fans!” Sean said.
If he heard, Daniel didn’t answer. The porpoises’ beady stares seemed to have mesmerized him. The kid on the railing had also frozen in fascination, but he soon thawed sufficiently to try scaling the plinth for a better view. He was skinny enough to have shared its summit with Daniel, if his flip-flop hadn’t blown a crucial toehold. At the sound of his desperate scrabble to recover, Daniel whipped his head around and bent over to avert the danger. Too late: the kid peeled off the plinth, missed a grab at the guardrail, and plummeted headfirst onto the exposed teeth of the breakwater.
The splash and a sickening crack of skull on rock startled the two big porpoises. As Sean stroked for the fallen kid, one of them blundered against his kayak, nearly flipping it; by the time he’d recovered, the porpoises had vanished, the kid had sunk out of sight, and a woman was screaming “Brendan!” from the jetty above. He glimpsed Daniel’s white face, a fisherman skidding up beside the woman, beach-bound kayakers looking back. But Sean was the closest, so he rolled into the water, tried to dive after the kid, and was buoyed right back up by his life vest.
While he was tearing at its straps, water exploded over him. It wasn’t a porpoise this time, but backsplash from someone who’d dived from high overhead, off the jetty. Sean dashed salt out of his eyes and peered into the depths just off the breakwater. He made out frog-kicking feet, khaki shorts, a halo of dark curly hair. He looked up. Daniel wasn’t on the plinth. He wasn’t among the jostling crowd drawn back to the end of the jetty by the woman’s escalating screams. A man standing by picked up something white, familiar—a foam neck brace.
Sean squirmed free of his vest. He couldn’t toss it into his kayak, which had already drifted off. Who cared, with the kid drowning and with Daniel inexplicably in the water, already so far down that the gloom had swallowed him up. Daniel, who was too phobic to stick a toe in the baby end of a pool, forget the ocean. Daniel, who had dived like a pro, as straight and forceful as the punch of a knife.
Sean sounded like a whale with Ahab after it. The water remained warm for only the first few feet, clear and bright for only a few more. He dived belly parallel to the side of the breakwater, seaweed brushing him, a point of reference anyway, but too soon his ears popped and he could barely make out the weed he clung to. Without scuba gear, Sean couldn’t go deeper.
He pushed off the breakwater and swam for the surface. The whine of an approaching motorboat greeted him as he broke into sweet air. Harbor police? He didn’t have time to look before he dived again. It was useless, but he couldn’t float in the warm water zone, sun on his face, while Daniel and the kid were down in the dark cold.
From the murk Sean couldn’t reach, two white ovals rose. They resolved into faces, Daniel’s, Brendan’s, and they approached him fast because a blunt-nosed and grinning porpoise was on either side, the two big ones, each with a flipper locked under a human arm and flukes going like mad. Daniel kicked like mad, too, his free arm wrapped around Brendan’s torso. For Sean to try helping with the carry could only slow things down, so he got out of the way and did his own kicking back up to the sun.
The first thing he saw, with huge gratitude, was the harbor patrol motorboat nosing toward the spot where Daniel dog-paddled, supporting an unconscious Brendan. The porpoises had vanished again, and who could blame them? Up on the jetty, Brendan’s mom (had to be) stood silent now, another woman embracing her, but the rest of the crowd made a racket, including cheers as a harbor officer jumped into the water and another slipped him a backboard, onto which Daniel helped the first officer maneuver Brendan. Damn, the kid had this huge blood-streaming gash on the side of his head, and Sean thought he saw the white of bone poking from his right forearm. He swallowed bile. Daniel had blood on his cheek and neck, but it had to be Brendan’s, because Daniel seemed fine, not even out of breath after his wild dive.
And there, at last, was Eddy, several lengths ahead of the other kayakers en route to the accident scene.
A Jet Skier reached Sean first, towing his errant kayak. She steadied it while he climbed back in—shaky with reaction, he needed the help. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Yeah. Thanks for catching my yak.”
“No problem. That was crazy! But the guy who brought the kid up, he’s some kind of free diver, right?”
“I don’t know. The porpoises helped him, though.”
“Porpoises?”
“Two. Bigger than the ones you were following. They helped carry the kid.”
Eddy paddled up, red with exertion. “Where’s Daniel?” she panted.
And that was a great question. The officers had gotten Brendan aboard, and their motorboat was racing toward the harbormaster’s pier. Had Daniel gone with them?
“Daniel’s the rescue guy?” the Jet Skier said. “He swam over that way.”
She pointed toward the launch beach side of the jetty. Eddy took off without another pant. Sean thanked the Jet Skier again and gave chase.
The tide had turned, leaving more of the breakwater exposed. Eddy negotiated the jagged rocks with deft thrusts of her paddles and swivels of her hips. By the time Sean had made his slower way through the gauntlet, he saw there’d be no catching he
r. She was twenty yards ahead, churning water alongside the jetty in her race after a swimmer she had no chance of catching. Daniel was halfway to the beach, stroking like an Olympian. Two dorsal fins flanked him, the big porpoises no doubt. Sean hadn’t been joking, after all, calling them Daniel’s fans; what were they now, his bodyguards?
Sean’s arms were still a little shock-wonky when he started inland. He was just picking up speed when someone called to him off the jetty. “Hey! Hey, your friend’s stuff!”
He back-paddled, slowed, looked up to see Mr. Haddock slouched over the guardrail, weirder than ever the way he’d pulled his Windbreaker collar over his chin and his cap down over the top of his wraparound shades. Awkward in his mittens, he brandished the neck brace someone else had picked up earlier, and a pair of Top-Siders, also Daniel’s. “Your friend’s,” he called, and his voice was as weird as the rest of him, thick and slurpy. “Left them up here when he jumped in.”
“Oh, thanks.” Sean steered his kayak to the jetty and caught the brace and shoes. By the time he’d stowed them, Mr. Haddock had turned from him, shades aimed shoreward—Daniel-ward?
The smell of dried cod and sweat and cheap cologne wafted down from him.
Sean paddled in earnest to get away from the stink. Far ahead, Daniel approached the beach. His porpoise guard stuck with him until he made shallow water and started wading; then they dived out of sight. Eddy was a quarter of the jetty back, Sean a half, when Daniel ran up the sand, ignoring some onlookers who seemed to question him. He hit the parking lot still running and vanished among the close-packed cars.
Eddy deserted her kayak at the tide line to run after him. Sean took the time to haul it out of the surf and to strap both kayaks onto their carriers. A guy helped him haul the yaks to the Civic in exchange for news of the accident but was discreet enough to return to the beach when they saw that Daniel had indeed stopped at the Civic. He sat on the backseat, driver’s side, legs out the door and wet red polo wrapped like a towel around his neck. Eddy squatted beside him, saying “Daniel, are you all right?” as if for the hundredth unanswered time.
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