The Last True Poets of the Sea

by Julia Drake

  Then I gave Liv Stone, Lyric Truther and Hater of Love Stories, the most goddamn romantic speech she’d ever heard in her entire life.

  I started out slow. “There’d be letters,” I said, “good ones, too.”

  Ever so slightly, so that she barely noticed, I talked a little louder. I picked up the pace. The letters would be proper, I said, like sailors used to write their beloveds from sea. I’d weather storms and gales to return to her, my soul, my only. I was finding a rhythm now, and Liv listened, rapt. I paused, a key change, and spoke again, this time a little zany. I’d pitch a tent, I said, outside her window. We’d be like Romeo and Juliet, minus all that mutually assured destruction, of course, and I’d sing to her so she would not forget me, even in the dead of night. We’d be a love out of time and space, ethereal, destined, and her dreams would take shape around my song. I’d teach the hills to say her name, and the winds and the trees and water, too, so that that the elements would love her, so that everywhere she went, no matter where, she’d hear the world crying out for her, calling over and over:

  “Liv Stone, Liv Stone, Liv Stone!”

  There was silence after I yelled her name. A moment passed. Then, one at a time, sounds began to return to the world. The ocean exhaled. Liv cracked a knuckle. A seagull took flight, and as though what I’d said had come true, his wings seemed to beat her name through the air.

  “Sounds like you’d do a bunch,” Liv breathed.

  Beneath the brim of her hat, I found her eyes.

  “You would not rest,” I said.

  I looked a little batty, I knew. Foolish. But I couldn’t help myself. I’d gotten so carried away. But I’d forgotten how much I loved being onstage, forgotten how much I loved the feeling of having to win someone over. And here’s the thing: sometimes you can be foolish, and you can still be very convincing.

  Sounds like you’d do a bunch, she said.

  I held her gaze. Her eyes were gray and darkly changing, like the back of a whale mosaicked in light. Like smooth, clacking stones on a necklace I’d once loved.

  You would not rest, I said, and I wondered what my eyes looked like to her.

  Two things then happened at the exact same time: my heart fluttered in my chest, and Liv sliced her foot on a cracked-open mussel shell.

  We limped back to the house, Liv trailing blood like bread crumbs. Half-propped against me, she barely reached my shoulder. For once, I was glad for the extra height, glad for the reach of my legs and arm as I helped her across gaps. Inside, the gas smell was weaker. Toby’d left a note about a bakery emergency. We were alone.

  “Don’t smoke,” I said to Liv. “Lest you immolate us all. Not to mention for your health.”

  “I’m injured, not brain-dead, Violet.”

  I left her scowling at the dining room table, holding a paper towel against her foot. Upstairs, I rooted through a medicine cabinet overflowing with old lipsticks and creams and potions, perfume long since turned to vinegar. Liv had smelled like smoke and grit and SweeTarts. At the aquarium, we had a small hunk of ambergris, a waxy gray substance that formed in the belly of whales, rare and sweet-smelling, earthy, used in expensive perfume. Ambergris. Gray amber. That was Liv’s smell, and also her eyes.

  She was pale by the time I returned with Neosporin, tweezers, and a box of Band-Aids from the previous century.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “I’m not great with blood,” she admitted.

  “Let me see,” I said, pulling up a chair and reaching for her ankle.

  “I try to not let anyone see my feet up close. They’re really gross.”

  I rolled my eyes. “They’re feet. They get you from point A to point B.”

  “You don’t understand. They’re…bestial.”

  “I promise you, I won’t care. Just let me see, because you look like you’re about to pass out.”

  I lifted her foot into my lap even as she protested. Her feet were, in a word, horrifying: enormous, with dead skin around the heels like snakeskin, scars of former blisters thick along the back of her ankle. Her second toe stretched way past her first, gangly and alienlike.

  “You’ve got a nice arch.” I wasn’t lying. It would have made a ballet dancer jealous, the same comma shape as her hamstring.

  “Thanks,” she said quietly.

  She stared at the puzzle, staunch and upset, while I dabbed at her foot with the damp paper towel. The mussel had slashed open the ball of her foot, drawing a razor-thin red line of blood.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Stings,” she said. “Um. Can you not tell Orion we talked about him?”

  “Sure. Can you not tell Orion the stuff I told you about my brother?”

  She nodded. She was all Neosporined and Band-Aided, and her wound had stopped bleeding, but she still looked a bit shocked.

  “You sure you’re okay?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to swoon, Violet.” She jammed on her shoe without undoing the laces.

  “I promise I won’t tell anyone about how damsel-in-distress-y you were,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said, softening. “You were very chivalrous.”

  “This same thing happened to me down there when I was a kid. Well, I stepped on a sea urchin. I should’ve warned you to be more careful,” I said. “Sam used to say I was part shellfish. Like it had absorbed into my bloodstream.”

  “That’s your brother? Sam?”

  “Sam,” I repeated, nodding. I hadn’t said his name out loud in weeks, and I thought it’d be harder, or it’d hurt more. But it came out easily. Saying his name had felt good.

  Liv was thinking, running her finger along her lips. “So if anything that’s caught in there will absorb into my bloodstream, and this happened to you, too, then we’re like blood brothers.”

  “Shellfish blood brothers.”

  “Shellfish blood-brother anagrams,” she pronounced.

  I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked the sound of it.

  That night, I was in bed drafting another letter to Sam, when Toby peeked his head in. He was holding a thick red book against his chest, like Sam, hugging his binders in the halls at school.

  “Knock, knock,” he said. “How’d the hot date go?”

  “Research inquiry.”

  “Tomayto, tomahto.”

  “The research inquiry ended in no progress forward and a minor foot injury.”

  “Oof,” Toby said.

  I toyed with the corner of my legal pad, thinking of Liv’s foot in my lap, saying Sam’s name. The Ransome-and-Fidelia truthing search wasn’t off to a roaring start, but I wouldn’t have called the afternoon a complete disaster.

  This, given my genetics, was unusual.

  “Toby, you can, like, come in,” I said.

  “Cool.” He plopped on the near edge of Sam’s empty bed, close enough that we could reach across the space and hold hands if we wanted. Toby shifted and the springs shrieked. I know, I thought, I miss him, too.

  “Sorry, again, about the gas. Though I found this in the attic, which might make it up to you.” He passed me the book. It was so heavy it hurt my wrist to take with one hand. The title was embossed gold, the cover plush, mottled leather.

  “Guide My Sleigh: A Rudolph Family History?”

  “Your grandmother went on a genealogical kick a few years before she died. I think she had visions of making a book as a Christmas surprise. Hence the theme. Take a look,” Toby said.

  The spine crackled perfectly when I opened it. The front cover showed an illustrated family tree, every relative represented by a red-nosed deer. Fidelia and Ransome’s lineage trickled all the way to Sam and me, rendered at the bottom as little fawns. Just above us, two deer labeled Margaret and Tobias Rudolph slept beside a berry bush. I felt a jolt. I’d always known Toby was my uncle, but it was different seeing their relationship spelled out in ungulates. My mother and Toby were brother and sister. They’d grown up together. In this house. Her room was just down the hall.
/>   “Bonus pics of you and Sam in there, from yours truly. And the playbill from Peter Pan, which I still regret not seeing, though I am grateful for your autograph.” My uncle was speaking to the ceiling now, with his legs thrown up over Sam’s headboard, coffee-splattered Converse against the clean wall. This never would have flown in our apartment. It was so clean that Sam and I called it the Museum, usually when we wanted to piss off our mom.

  “Are you sure you and my mom are related?” I said.

  “There’s evidence in the back.”

  I flipped to the end, pulling loose the photographs of Sam and me that he’d stuck in the binding. Pictures of my mother and Toby had been arranged on the back pages under cellophane: In one, Toby looked about eight and was wearing a too-big suit, hanging on to my eighteen-year-old mother’s arm at her high school graduation. In another, my mom passed off a white bundle to a goateed Toby. Me.

  “Toby. Why don’t you and my mom talk?”

  “We talk.”

  “You practically sprinted out of the room the other night when you were on the phone with her. Did you two have some dramatic falling-out? Did you try and steal my dad from her, or something?”

  “Violet, your dad’s a good guy, but surely you must find it hard to imagine a scenario in which he’s the linchpin of a love triangle.”

  “But you and my mom aren’t friends.”

  “I’d agree with that.”

  “So you did have a falling-out.”

  “No. Hardly. It’s more…” He clucked his tongue, searching for the right word. My mom did the same thing when she was thinking, made that little plucking sound.

  “Your mom’s not my sister like you’re Sam’s sister,” he said finally.

  “What does that mean?”

  “We’re really getting into this, I guess. That’s good. Open lines of communication and all that, just like I said.” Toby rearranged himself to sit facing me, and the directness made me a little nervous.

  “How much do you remember of your grandmother?” he asked.

  I shook my head. When I was really little, my grandmother would slather cold cream on my face and Sam’s, then dress us in her silk kimonos. She loved costume jewelry. Fake rubies, fake diamonds, the shinier and bigger the better. As a child, I confused her with Elizabeth Taylor. Cleopatra once came on TV and I shouted, “There’s Grandma!”

  “She seemed glamorous. And like…pretty baller to give her kids her last name and not her husband’s.”

  “It helped that Dad’s last name was Slerpinn.”

  “Slurping?”

  “Slerpinn, one e, two n’s. Mom would’ve been Sterling Slerpinn, which was kind of a mouthful. But yes. A champion for women, possibly, but more likely just vain. She was glamorous, though, you’ve got her fur collection in that closet right there. She also had a lot of trouble, emotionally. She’d go completely numb and lose feeling in her right side. Or she’d say it felt like there was a pane of glass between her and the world. Once, she lost her vision. Back then they called it hysterical blindness. Today—and let’s be clear, I don’t like to diagnose people and I am but a humble baker—but I’m guessing it’d be a symptom of a dissociative disorder.”

  That one was new to me, even with my doctor mom, even with all the shrink talk I’d heard over my life.

  “What’s that, exactly?” I asked.

  “As I understand it, you have episodes where you feel like your body isn’t yours. Like you’re separated from yourself.”

  “Oh, I feel that way sometimes,” I said, and all Toby said was “Huh.”

  “Did she have panic attacks?” I asked.

  “Not sure. She might’ve. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “Okay,” Toby said, like it was no big deal. I felt an overwhelming impulse to hug him, which of course I didn’t.

  “Getting back to your mom. She’s ten years older than I am. Dad died when I was three, your mom was thirteen, and with a mom like mine…I mean, your mom practically raised me, Violet. We talk, but we don’t talk the way you and Sam do. We never did. It doesn’t surprise me that this is news to you—I think it’s hard for your mom to talk about. She was basically your age and responsible for a kindergartner.”

  “My poor mom,” I said.

  “I resent that. I was a perfect child. Hey. When was the last time you talked to Sam?”

  “I said goodbye the day before I came here.”

  “And before the hospital?”

  “Oh. Um…”

  I knew the answer, but I didn’t like to think about that. The last time I talked to him, before, was right after exams. Midmorning. Mom and Dad were at work. I emerged from my room around eleven, and Sam was at the kitchen counter with orange juice and a crossword. I’d been angry then: his presence felt invasive, like he was waiting for me.

  “I can’t really remember,” I said to Toby. Had I always been this much of a liar?

  Toby sat up and clasped his hands, his face suddenly full of worry.

  “Violet. I know I joke around a lot. But after that phone call from Frieda…if you ever want to talk about your brother—or just you—I’m here.”

  I’d never seen him look so serious, and it scared me. “Okay. Thank you. I’m fine.”

  “You’re your mother’s daughter, you know that?” Toby scooped a balled-up draft on the floor and flattened it against his knee. “What’s this, your poetry?”

  “Don’t read it!” I leapt from the bed and snatched the paper away from him.

  “Sorry,” Toby said. “I should’ve known better. I’m private with my poetry, too.”

  “It’s not poetry. I’m trying to write a letter to Sam.”

  “You say poetry like it’s a bad word. Listen, I’m glad you’re writing him. Writing makes your brain think differently.”

  “Yeah, except everything I write sucks.”

  “Have you considered the telegraph as an alternative to snail mail?”

  “Ha-ha. He doesn’t like the phone.”

  “Neither do you, I suspect.” Toby kicked at another crumbled draft with his toe. “You know how to juggle?”

  “What?”

  He hopped from the bed and gathered five crumpled letters, then shimmied his shoulders like an Olympic swimmer getting loose. “Ready for this?” and before my neurons had even fired, all five balls were in the air. For a second, time froze, and crumpled legal pad stars hung against a white ceiling. He couldn’t possibly catch all of them—he didn’t have enough hands. I sucked in my breath, waiting for the trick—

  Quick as they were up, they’d fallen, scattering across the floor.

  “Me neither. But that doesn’t stop me from trying. I’m here if you ever want to talk, okay?”

  He kissed me on the top of my head on his way out. Without hair, the feeling was new, but it wasn’t strange.

  In bed, I took a closer look at Guide My Sleigh’s family tree. We were descended from Ransome and Fidelia’s son Sterling, whose son Edward had had our grandmother Sterling. Sterling sandwich, one male, one female. The book glossed over Ransome and Fidelia—so much for helping Liv—so I flipped through the rest of the generations. The first Sterling had won some science award at Columbia, and his son Edward had married a girl he met at Coney Island, according to the New York Times announcement (I did the math and she was definitely pregnant). I didn’t know that our family had New York history, too, and that my grandmother and grandfather were the ones to move back to Lyric.

  I’d come now to us. My parents’ wedding. Violet and Sam with deep-sea-diver glass bottles. The four of us on a boat, then the same with Toby replacing my dad. They must have traded off being photographer. The Peter Pan playbill, signed Violet Larkin, i’s dotted with stars.

  I think Sam had been waiting for me that morning back in June.

  “Have you gotten forty-three down yet?” he’d asked me as I made my way for the door. I tried to make our exchange as quick as possible; my friends were waiting for me i
n the park and I was already late. I didn’t want to talk to Sam. I just wanted to leave.

  “I don’t do the crossword anymore,” I lied.

  “Oh. I thought you did. Sorry.”

  I considered him then, with his finished puzzle and his full glass of orange juice. Was he going to leave the apartment at all today? He was probably lonely, it occurred to me, and I felt a rush of sympathy.

  “Are you glad school’s out?” I asked, starting over.

  “Are you?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, because I was a normal human being. Who’d admit in summer’s first week that they were already stressed out by their phone, their friends, the free time? I hadn’t tried that hard yet to get a job, despite my parents’ insistence, but now I wished I had. I almost wished I could just go away all summer, to Lyric, maybe. I’d always liked it there.

  “I hate summer,” Sam said.

  “Because you spend all day inside. It’s a beautiful world out there, Sam! Get outside! Have an experience!” I sounded sarcastic, but I also meant it.

  “It’s too hot,” he said.

  “When does nerd camp start?” I said. He was going away, just for a week, to do an intensive course in ancient Greek and Latin, which he loved. I really thought he was going to have a good time.

  “Two weeks. I don’t want to go anymore,” Sam said. “I’m just going to get homesick.”

  “Maybe you’ll like it. Maybe more people will play Magic! Like Tim!”

  “His name’s Theo,” Sam said. “It’s going to be horrible.”

  “Yup, okay, you’re right. Horrible, horrible, horrible. Everything will only ever be horrible. I’m going to the park, okay? See you later. If you leave, turn the air-conditioning off, or Dad’ll freak.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Sam said. He hadn’t even touched his orange juice.