The Last True Poets of the Sea

by Julia Drake

  Copyright © 2019 by Julia Drake

  Cover art © 2019 by Katie Vernon

  Designed by Mary Claire Cruz

  Cover design by Jenna Stempel-Lobell

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

  ISBN 978-1-368-04941-2

  Visit www.hyperionteens.com

  For my parents, with love

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Shipwrecks as a Recessive Gene

  Part One: Wreck

  Chapter 1: You’re Just So Brave

  Chapter 2: Ask Me How I’m Saving Manatees

  Chapter 3: The Wrexpert

  Chapter 4: In Which Our Heroine Spends the Entire Next Week Attempting to Write One Measly Letter to Her Brother

  Chapter 5: Fun’s Night Out: Lyric Edition

  Chapter 6: Go-Between

  Chapter 7: Elements: Invoked

  Part Two: Search

  Chapter 8: Sapphire of the Sea

  Chapter 9: Lighthouse

  Chapter 10: Missing Pieces

  Chapter 11: Nivation Hollow Blues

  Chapter 12: Independence Day

  Chapter 13: Reprise Rejected

  Chapter 14: All Children, Except One, Grow Up

  Chapter 15: Treasures of Atlantis

  Chapter 16: Happy Families Are All Alike

  Chapter 17: Dispatches from Lyric, Never Dispatched

  Chapter 18: Anagrams

  Chapter 19: How to Find a Shipwreck: An Amateur’s Guide

  Chapter 20: The World Blooms Unexpectedly

  Chapter 21: At Oz

  Chapter 22: Good Signs

  Part Three: Survival

  Chapter 23: Portrait of a Family

  Chapter 24: Apparition

  Chapter 25: Voyage of the Apogee

  Chapter 26: After All That…

  Chapter 27: Theft

  Chapter 28: Traveling Music

  Chapter 29: Survival

  Chapter 30: And

  Chapter 31: Poetry

  Chapter 32: Stones

  Epilogue: New Found Land

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The excitement and the uncertainty of the quest is more important than the treasure itself.

  —JACQUES COUSTEAU, Diving for Sunken Treasure

  I came to explore the wreck.

  The words are purposes.

  The words are maps.

  I came to see the damage that was done

  and the treasures that prevail….

  the thing I came for:

  the wreck and not the story of the wreck

  the thing itself and not the myth.

  —ADRIENNE RICH, “Diving into the Wreck”

  What country, friends, is this?

  —VIOLA, Twelfth Night

  PROLOGUE

  SHIPWRECKS AS A RECESSIVE GENE

  Fun fact: my great-great-great-grandmother was the lone survivor of a shipwreck.

  For a long time, my parents liked to point to this story as evidence of family strength. We’re descended from survivors, they said. Making it is in our blood. We cling to planks off the coast of Maine, we don’t freeze to death, and when we wash ashore, we marry, we procreate, and we catch lobster to feed to our children. Crying? There’s no crying in shipwrecks. No need—as a family, we’re not only lucky, we’re lucky and we persevere.

  My younger brother, Sam, and I grew up loving that shipwreck. Every summer when we visited our mother’s childhood home in Maine, he and I descended to the rocky shore behind the house and imagined we were underwater explorers in search of the wreck of the Lyric. We wore goggles and carried empty glass bottles as oxygen tanks, scrambling across the rocks at low tide until we were frozen, grimy with sea scum. We dreamed of discovering the shipwreck ourselves, imagined gold coins half-buried in sand, jewels blooming in tide pools, hermit crabs fashioning shells from diamonds. We weren’t just in it for the riches: more than anything, we wanted to find the ship’s carcass, grown green with moss and flickering with fish. We wanted to see what kind of disaster our great-great-great-grandmother had escaped.

  The Lyric was more than a sunken ship—it was our family’s story, long lost to the ocean’s depths.

  At the hospital, I joked my brother’s stomach pump was his snorkel and my mother said “That’s enough, Violet” so sharply the nurse dropped his stethoscope. Later, my father caught me by the vending machines chatting a little too close with a boy a little too old (Dad [bewildered, aghast]: Your brother’s in the hospital and you’re flirting with a fully bearded man?). By the time Sam woke up later that afternoon, his teeth gritty and ghoulish with charcoal, our parents had new summer plans for all of us: counseling for them, a treatment center for my brother, Maine for me. I became a bad sister and a bad daughter in an hour; an exile in just under two.

  By comparison, the Titanic sank in two hours, forty minutes. Pretty impressive, to have sunk to the bottom even faster than the twentieth century’s greatest shipwreck. Especially considering I was only sixteen. I didn’t even have a driver’s license, but I was an expert in the art of catastrophe.

  YOU’RE JUST SO BRAVE

  The day I left for Lyric, I shaved my head. A prophylactic, if you will.

  A week had passed since the Hospital Incident, and the middle of June bloomed in New York City, perfect weather for cones from Mister Softee and imagining your brother in the psych ward. I packed light for exile, ditching my usual leggings and liquid liner for two pairs of my dad’s faded jeans, six Hanes T-shirts, one ancient tube of fragrance-free lip balm, and a heap of cotton underwear. Plane reading was Sam’s copy of Diving for Sunken Treasure, which I kept on my lap the whole flight, unopened. Inside, I’d slipped the scrap of paper on which my mom had written the address for Sam’s treatment facility in Vermont. My plan was to send him a letter, and after drafting in my head all morning, the best I had was, Dear Sam, Sorry I couldn’t keep it in my pants after you tried to kill yourself, fixing that now. STEP ONE: NO HAIR! Step two: Bad clothes! ps How’s the maple syrup?

  My work, needless to say, required some revision.

  The plane ride to Portland lasted forty-five minutes, and the flight attendant asked me how I was feeling four separate times. She put ice in my orange juice and slipped me Milanos instead of the off-brand biscuits she’d given to the rest of steerage. As I disembarked, she pulled me aside and told me, tears clinging to her thickly mascaraed lashes—purple, I noticed—that a niece of hers had gone through chemo last year.

  “You’re just so brave,” she said.

  I was so stunned all I could do was nod. She pressed two pairs of plastic wings into my hand and told me she’d keep me in her thoughts. As far as reinventing myself went, this did not bode well.

  “Your hair!” my uncle Toby bellowed when I met him at arrivals.

  He pulled me into a hug, and I bent my knees so I’d be the right height to press my face into his shoulder. Toby’s flannel smelled cozy, like cotton and flour and yeast—from the bakery, I guessed—and underneath, the faintest hint of my mom’s morning smell, before she left for the hospital (catch her after work and she smelled antibacterial, like Purell and latex). I pressed my face deeper into Toby’s shoulder and clutched the plastic wings until they pinched my palm.

  “You’re okay, kid,” Toby murmured. “I
’ve got you.”

  Eventually, he pushed me back by my shoulders and made a great show of peering at me. Toby was nearly a decade younger than my mother, but his tan face was crinkled like an ancient gnome’s, weathered and sweet. He had enough hair for the both of us, sandy, lank, gathered into a sloppy bun at the nape of his neck. He studied me until I looked down, uneasy with the attention.

  “Nice kicks,” I said. His plaid Converse high-tops were busted along the seams and splattered with coffee, the perfect match for my equally grubby white ones.

  “Bad arch support. Save your plantar fascia while there’s still time, kid.”

  I rolled my eyes. My plantar fascia was the least of my worries.

  “I like the new ’do,” Toby went on. “I like this whole new look, but the ’do, especially. The last time I saw you, you looked like—what’s the word? A celebutante?” I grimaced. “Now, though, you look like a seal pup.”

  “I look like an ogress with alopecia.”

  “There’s that Violet wit. Have you been practicing your scowl?”

  “Thirty minutes in the mirror every day.”

  “Hm. Well. Practice makes perfect, I suppose. Which is exactly why my meringues always collapse. Listen, kid, at the risk of sounding very old,” Toby said, “stand up straight.”

  I winced. The truth was that since the Hospital Incident, I’d been perfecting not my scowl but my slouch: step three of my master plan, after the hair and the clothes. I wanted to take up less space, or just be less: muted, quiet. Shrinking. Not my usual self. I had a lot of height to contend with, but if I hunched, I could pass for five foot eleven, maybe even five foot ten, instead of my real six feet.

  Fine. My real six feet and one half inch.

  At 72.5 inches, I represented less than 1 percent of the American female population. Growing up, I’d been every basketball, swimming, and volleyball coach’s dream until they realized I had zero interest in athletics and zero talent to boot. I was interested only in theater—nay, the theatre, preferably of the musical variety. I tap-danced and soft-shoed and sang, dreamed of Broadway in my future. Not that it mattered now. My theater career had gone the way of the dinosaur long ago.

  “C’mon, don’t waste that height! You got the good genes!”

  I straightened up and loomed over my uncle. As if to emphasize the difference in our statures, he stood on tiptoes to rub the fine layer of fuzz on my skull.

  I shook him off. “I’m not a dog, Toby.”

  “But if you were, you’d be a Great Dane.”

  Count on my uncle to know just what to say.

  Lyric was four hours north, and we inched along the Maine Turnpike through tourist traffic and construction. I cracked a window and inhaled: it’d been three years since our last family visit to Maine, but that briny, sharp sea smell was exactly the same as I remembered. So was the feeling, as we got farther north, that civilization was slowly falling away. The tourist spots became dingy fishing towns; roadside buildings grew more and more dilapidated until they were just husks. Lyric was a small town, shaggy around the edges, lost and forgotten. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my parents had sent me here for a reason.

  “Think of it not as a punishment, but as an opportunity,” my mom had insisted. “With less distraction, maybe it’ll be easier to turn off the romance channel.”

  I was already two steps ahead of her. After the vending machine debacle, I’d sworn off smooching and everything else that’d led to that moment: my wild hair, my love of tequila, my unrelenting insensitivity. My need to be at the center of all things. In Lyric, I’d be less. Maybe I’d even disappear.

  “You’re quiet, kid. I almost forgot you were here,” Toby said.

  The plan was working already.

  My phone lost service just as things started to look familiar. We passed the weather-beaten sign for the Lyric Aquarium, the fishing supply store, the harbor. Past town and then into the pines, down the long dirt driveway to my grandmother’s—now Toby’s—house. I held my breath until we reached the bottom, a habit from an old game with Sam.

  The house came into view just when I thought I’d burst. It’d been my grandparents’ home originally, a turreted Victorian framed by the boat-dotted gray sea, weathered and damp and plagued by a serious mold problem. A family of raccoons had once lived in the turret’s walls and chattered ceaselessly throughout the night. Against the water, though, the house still looked to me like Botticelli’s Venus. I exhaled, dizzy.

  “You want me to set you up a tent in the turret?” Toby asked.

  “Not if the raccoons are still there.”

  “I believe Maude and her young have finally found greener pastures,” Toby said. “You and Sam were so cute up there. Camping. Roasting marshmallows. Nearly setting the house on fire…”

  “I’ll stick with a normal bed, thanks.”

  “You’ve finally grown up, Violet. I’ll warn you: getting old is expensive and boring.”

  “Boring might be a nice change of pace,” I said.

  I got out of the car and accidentally slammed my door.

  Inside, Toby apologized for the mess, but I barely noticed, because one step over the threshold and bam, it was our last summer here. I was thirteen; Sam was twelve. For three weeks, he ate green apples and drank Earl Grey tea. I had a plastic choker that left a tan like a trellis around my neck. We shared the same room like always, but we didn’t talk at night. He’d started grinding his teeth in his sleep.

  In the kitchen, Toby poured me a lemonade and added a sprig of mint, playing a perfect host. Then he poured himself a beer. A pilsner. Light and crisp. I stirred my mint sprig like a cocktail straw.

  “What, no booze for me, Uncle Toby?”

  He shot me a look of alarm.

  “Kidding. Relax.” Beer was one thing from my former life I wouldn’t be sorry to say goodbye to. At least, not super sorry.

  “Violet…” Toby started. He had that look on his face like he wanted to capital-T Talk. Couldn’t anyone take a joke anymore?

  “I’m going outside,” I announced.

  I took off through the house, which wasn’t messy so much as stuff-y. My mom always complained that my grandmother had been a pack rat—she died when I was five, and my grandfather, way earlier—and Toby seemed to have inherited that trait. There were books everywhere, a tchotchke on every available surface, a collection of foam rollers, nesting tables topped with tea sets, a million boots beside a boot dryer (in June), some Batman Legos on the mantelpiece, so many books, a single ice skate on that coffee table, and on that couch, a stuffed guinea pig inside a disassembled blender.

  I passed through the den into the dining room, which was kind of tidy, except for a just-emptied puzzle that sprawled across the big table. The box showed a movie still from The Wizard of Oz. No place like home, I thought grimly. In the living room, a blanket of dust coated the brass telescope and the globe that I knew said USSR, not RUSSIA. I sneezed as I yanked open the sliding glass doors to the backyard.

  For the smell of pines outside, I’d put up with the dust and a whole raccoon army. The view was spectacular—my dad’s word, always. Past the overgrown grass and the weedy flower bed, the ocean stretched on endlessly. Moored boats bobbed below me and birds pinpricked the sky. Down the hill was the shore where Sam and I used to play. The boulders seemed to have shrunk, eroded, maybe, by salt water and sand. Or had the shoreline always been that small?

  Toby appeared at my side. “Remember all the plays you performed on this lawn?”

  “Don’t remind me,” I said.

  “I’ve got great memories of you singing ‘Greased Lightnin’ ’ with a croquet mallet as a microphone. Sam sang backup.”

  “The horror.” I shivered for emphasis.

  “What? You were talented! Are talented.”

  “I don’t really do that anymore,” I said. “Perform, I mean.”

  “Why not?”

  Because (a) singing only ends in disaster, and because (b) I found m
ore exciting extracurriculars.

  “No reason,” I said.

  Toby took a casual sip of his drink. “Your parents mentioned things had gotten a little wild in the city. Any connection there?”

  What a fool I’d been to think we could avoid this conversation. Of course Toby was going to bring up my former life. So, uh, Vi, what did it mean when my sister called, absolutely hysterical, and asked if I could provide you shelter for the summer? I knew Toby was being nice, but I went rigid at my uncle’s attempt to bond. Our relationship had heretofore been standard uncle-niece fare, pleasant and innocuous: trips to the zoo and belated birthday cards featuring too-slow sloths. I had no desire to talk with him about my Year of Wild, nor Sam, nor the general brokenness of my family. What was there to say, really, to him, or anyone? Sam was fucked up, and I got fucked up. The end.

  Toby was waiting.

  “I don’t know about wild. My slutting around was pretty run-of-the-mill. Sam, though. Finishing a whole three-quarters of a bottle of Tylenol? That’s wild. Especially for him.”

  Toby whistled, long and low. I imagined how all the boats on the ocean would sink. A snapping mast here. A hull can-opener’ed on a coral reef, maybe. A strangling from a giant, hungry kraken.

  “So that’s a no on talking, then,” Toby said.

  “All I want is to disappear.”

  “Good luck doing that with a head like yours in a town this small.”

  I poured the rest of my lemonade in the pachysandra.

  “Thanks for the drink.” I really meant it, though I see now that’s hard to believe.

  Upstairs, in the blue room I used to share with my brother, with the stiff twin beds and the lamps filled with sea glass I used to count to fall asleep and the whole bookcase full of Nancy Drews, my phone said it was searching….

  I’d never been great at keeping in touch. A handful of summer-program friends gave up on me eventually, and even with friends in the city, I screened calls and let texts go unanswered. Maybe that had all been practice for this very moment. Over the years, without even realizing, I’d built strong disappearing muscles.