The Last True Poets of the Sea

by Julia Drake

  She passed me two drawings, pen and ink on yellowed paper. The first was a deer, the second a black bear cub. The drawings weren’t great—the animals were oddly proportioned, kind of lumpy—but even in their wrongness, there was a certain softness to them, a kind of care and affection in the line. Both were signed RR in spiky crab letters.

  “Oh,” Liv cried. “OOOH!!!”

  “What? What is it?!”

  “I’ve never seen a picture before! Look!”

  She rushed to my side with a newspaper Xerox. The picture in question was blurry, ink-blotted, but showed two men standing in an empty wrought-iron cage. The accompanying story read:

  LYRIC RESIDENTS TO EXPAND TOWN MENAGERIE

  For the past few years, Ransome Rudolph and his wife, Mrs. Fidelia Rudolph, have sought to build a public menagerie for the residents of Lyric. Already in their custody is an orphaned black bear cub named Nanny, who famously eats from Mrs. Rudolph’s palm, as well as two white deer, and Ruby, the scarlet parrot. Their first exotic addition, an Indian tiger, will arrive this fall. Mr. Rudolph hopes the tiger will have the same fondness for his wife as Nanny does.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but what the fuck?”

  “You don’t know about the zoo?” Liv said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “No, I do not know about the zoo.”

  She squinted at the photograph. “I wonder if that’s one of their sons. Hold on. I know there’s a magnifying glass here somewhere….”

  Across the room, there was a metal cabinet that seemed entirely composed of tiny drawers, and she left my side to open them, one by one. I had the feeling we could be here awhile.

  “Can you please explain about the zoo?” I said.

  “Oh, yes. Sorry. That was the precursor to the aquarium. Short-lived, though.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “Did they get the tiger?”

  “To my knowledge, yes.”

  “And?”

  “Well,” she said reluctantly, “as I understand it, he didn’t adapt well to a new land.”

  “What happened?” I asked, but part of me already knew.

  “Well,” Liv said. “Supposedly, that winter was very cold….”

  I felt suddenly nauseated. Porous, like Sam. The cold, homesick tiger cub. These drawings, still in my hand: had they died that winter, too, the bear cub and a deer? How had no one told me about this, this fat blemish on our family history? Why didn’t we talk about anything? Why couldn’t I figure out how to start with Sam?

  I put the heels of my hands to my eyes and pressed so hard that a purple pink aurora bloomed beneath my lids.

  “Violet?”

  “I didn’t know,” I croaked.

  “It was a long time ago,” Liv said quietly. “In those days, it was a common status symbol to have a wide array of animals. William Randolph Hearst had zebras. They at least were trying to make theirs public…and Fidelia and Ransome really loved the animals, I think, the story is the bear cub was wounded and kept in their house for a while….”

  I’d taken my hands from my eyes, but the splotches were still swimming in my vision.

  “Maybe I’m misremembering the whole thing,” Liv said. “I’m probably wrong.”

  “You’re never wrong,” I said. I could hear myself getting worked up. I wanted to know, yes, but I also just couldn’t see the point. The more I learned, the worse I felt. And Sam knew plenty, more than plenty, and he still couldn’t figure out how to fucking live.

  Liv squinted through the magnifying glass at the Xerox. “Okay, so, that’s definitely Ransome, and they had three boys, Sterling, James, and Llewyn. Did you know you’re part Welsh, on Ransome’s side? The Welsh have some really interesting mythologies….”

  “Who cares! Who cares if I’m Welsh, or Irish or Martian? What’s the point of knowing any of this? My brother knows tons of shit, too, I bet he can tell me what sartorial means and who William Randolph Hearst was and why it matters that he had zebras, but he still can’t do anything. Like, what good is getting an A on some translation of Caesar if he still wants to jump off a bridge?”

  I was yelling, I realized. She had frozen.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not mad at you.”

  “Okay,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

  “Sorry. Really. My brother hates yelling, too. When my parents and I yell, he hides.”

  “Your parents yell?” she said.

  “Is that weird?”

  “No. Probably not. I’ve literally never seen my parents fight,” Liv said. “Not even after Will died.”

  “God, I wish we were that way,” I said without thinking. “I mean—I’m so sorry. I don’t wish—I mean—”

  “You don’t wish your brother were dead? Let’s just say it, okay? My brother’s dead. Yours is alive. It’s a fact.”

  She crossed her arms and we let this fact hang between us. The silence was so deep I swore I heard the air sacs in my lungs expand and contract. I didn’t know what to say. I’d just have to wait, agonizing as it was.

  “Sometimes I wish we yelled,” Liv said slowly. “After Will died…like—Sorry, I don’t like ‘passed away.’ It’s what my parents say, like bike accidents are this gentle, floating thing…but that’s just it. They don’t like to look at things.”

  I’d barely even thought of Liv as having parents. I imagined her springing from her father’s head fully formed, like Athena.

  “So—last year, right after I got my license,” Liv said, “I drove down to Portland for the day. I just wanted to be in a bigger place where no one knew me, where no one knew Will either, or what had happened. It was so nice to be in a city that I went back the next day, and the next day, too, and by the third night I was so tired from all the driving, I stayed down there overnight. I told my parents I was at Mariah’s. But not a single person knew where I was.”

  “Where’d you sleep?”

  “In my car,” she said, and I ached for her. “Anyway, by that point, I’d missed half a week of school, and so my dad called, worried sick. On the way back, I had these visions of the fight we’d have. I’d tell them I’d been in Portland and—then they’d, like, finally fly off the handle? We have this china cake stand in our kitchen, the kind with a glass dome, and I had this image in my head that I would hurl it against the wall. I wanted to hurl it against the wall.

  “But when I got home…they were both so quiet. They had this pot of tea in the living room, and my dad did all the talking while my mom just sat there not looking at me, and he said they loved me and this wasn’t me and I just felt horrible, because here I’d been, thinking about throwing a cake stand, and here were my parents, just so sad, so worried, in so much agony.”

  “Your mom really didn’t say anything?”

  “No. For the week after, too, she was so quiet and I just slinked around her, like I didn’t belong—and I left her these little offerings like a cat—like these jam cookies she likes, or this paper on Oliver Cromwell I’d done well on—but nothing. Eventually, things just went back to normal. But we never talked about it. She never even said it was okay.”

  “That’s fucked,” I said, and when she stiffened, I added, “I don’t know your mom, obviously.”

  “It’s just how they are,” Liv said protectively. “Yours yell, mine don’t. I don’t even know why I told that story. The grass is always greener, or whatever.”

  “Well, yelling’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” I assured her. “And, like, when I think of talking to Sam next…it’s, like, all the websites say I shouldn’t be mad at him. Just understanding. But he tried—let’s just say it, right? He tried to kill himself.”

  I said it again, thick voiced: “He tried to kill himself.”

  What if he hadn’t just tried? What if he’d succeeded?

  My throat was suddenly swollen. It was the feeling I got whenever I tried to write him, like I’d swallowed a pomegranate whole, a fruit like a grenade, and now with the dea
d tiger and Liv alone in her car—

  I felt like I had by the hospital vending machines, so cold, so blurry, so away—

  “Violet?”

  I didn’t want this to happen again, I’d already had one I didn’t need another please not two please not two my throat was like a python middigestion I was wheezing I hated this no—

  I imagined Orion’s hand between my shoulder blades, and the pomegranate eased, slightly, but the world was punching black—

  “Violet, I think you should lie down.”

  Liv’s voice. I listened. I starfished across her grid of documents, and somehow she was next to me, on the ground, breathing big exaggerated breaths. The ceiling above us was white with heavy wooden beams. I was so upset about the vending machines. I remembered trying to lie on the floor of a pool, pushing air out my belly, bubbles puckering surface-ward. I stayed on the ground. I matched my breathing with hers.

  “It’s good to be on the ground sometimes,” Liv said.

  “I hit on a grown man while Sam was in the hospital,” I said miserably, through my pomegranate throat.

  “I kissed Orion two days after Will died.”

  “I’m so mean to my brother, Liv.”

  “I bet you’re not.”

  “I am.”

  “You can change.”

  “I’m not sure I can.”

  “You can,” she said. “You know, I once put a fish behind Will’s dresser.”

  I didn’t expect to giggle, but I did. “A fish?”

  “Well, not a whole fish. A tuna fish sandwich in a Ziploc.”

  “That’s…serial killer behavior, Liv.”

  “It was genius. He couldn’t figure it out for a month. His room reeked. He was being a jerk. He could be a jerk sometimes. He changed a lot, though. Would’ve changed more, probably. Wanna sit up?”

  “Okay,” I said, and we pulled ourselves upright. The room didn’t feel normal—it was possible a room wouldn’t feel normal ever again—but I at least knew where I was, and who I was with.

  “You all right?” she said. The gray of her eyes looked heavier than usual.

  “My brain goes bananas sometimes,” I said.

  She nodded. “I think too much, too. Neurons fire, overwhelm. Racing thoughts. That kind of thing.”

  “Who’s William Randolph Hearst?”

  “It really doesn’t matter,” she said. Her neck had gotten splotchy, taken on the shape of countries.

  “Your tour was really good,” I said, and I imagined pushing back her braid and tracing my fingers, slowly, across the outlines of those countries.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Oh my God.”

  “What? Did I do something wrong?”

  “No, no, not at all. That expression. When you looked at me just now, I…” She looked back at the Xerox, then back to me, her wintry eyes puzzled, then flashing. “Look at the person on the right.”

  She handed me the magnifying glass and the Xerox. I peered through the glass. A nose, a mouth, eyes, cheeks, and suddenly, the other face clicked. The supposed son’s. His face was my own.

  “I think that’s Fidelia,” Liv said.

  “She didn’t look like me in the other picture,” I said.

  “Wedding-day makeup, maybe. Or like—here she’s in profile, and the other was head-on.”

  “But she was in disguise before they got married,” I said.

  “This suggests she was in disguise for much, much longer. Or maybe she wasn’t in disguise at all! Curiouser and curiouser!”

  “Maybe she just liked pants,” I said. I took a second look: it wasn’t just my face I saw, but Sam’s and Toby’s, too. From the side, she was all three of us.

  “Point taken. Even so: this is something. Honestly, I never find anything, I’ve been working on this for years, and this is so exciting—calm down. Organize.” She hopped to her feet. “Schedule work time first. Where’s my planner?”

  “How about we just block off Saturday afternoons for research?”

  “‘We’? You’re interested in this?”

  “It’s kinda fun. If you don’t mind…”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m going to tell Mariah and Felix every single day that you said this was ‘kinda fun.’” She grinned at me. “Saturdays will be for wreck hunting from now on. Standing date, okay?”

  My heart swelled. Saturdays were for wreck hunting. I had a standing date with Professor Stone.

  I biked home still thinking of the wreck. The Lyric wasn’t an idea. It was real. A ship. Hands had made it, used rivets and bolts and sheets of metal to build a thing meant to last. For a time, like magic, it had floated. Then it sank. It couldn’t be lost for good. It was somewhere on this earth, lying on the ocean floor, and I wanted to see it, suddenly, fiercely: what Fidelia had escaped. I didn’t just want to—I needed to. For us.

  A wedge had been driven between Sam and me, that was true. A wedge that I’d helped put there. Maybe I’d never be able to make up for it. But if I could do something big for him, to show that I cared…I imagined handing Sam a screw from the Lyric’s deck when we finally saw each other next, its ridges filled with salt and sea gunk, the size of a flimsy key chain with triple the weight. I’d say, Here, have this. I could give him proof that he mattered. That we mattered. If I could find our wreck, maybe I could start to put us back together again.

  I’d find the wreck, and I’d make us whole.

  That day I wrote him a letter, the very first one I sent:

  Sammy:

  Here’s my new summer goal: track down the wreck of the Lyric. Seven-year-old you would be so proud of me.

  I love you and I miss you.

  Vi

  I shoved my extra aquarium T-shirt in a box and sent that along for good measure.

  MISSING PIECES

  The next morning I was up before eight to set up wreck-searching camp at the Mola Mola, Toby’s bakery. He’d named it after his favorite fish—the “goofiest fish in the sea,” he claimed—and even that early, its mismatched wooden tables were filled with locals and tourists thirsty for coffee and hungry for baked goods. I spotted Joan in the far corner reading the paper with her husband, and I gave her a tiny wave as I hunted for a seat. It was starting to feel sort of nice, the feeling that in Lyric I might always run into a familiar face.

  I tucked into the last available table, partially shielded by a plaster bust of a Greek goddess in a metallic-purple party hat. Here, in this secluded magical corner, I would track down the Lyric. I had a blueberry oat bar. I had Diving for Sunken Treasure. Most important, I had the ability to google how to find a shipwreck.

  Scratch that.

  “Do you seriously not have Wi-Fi?” I asked Toby at the counter.

  “Converse with me,” he said. “Have an espresso. Better yet, how ’bout you take a shift at ye olde register? I gave too many employees off and we’re about to be overrun with the midmorning rush. I’ve never seen so many tourists in my life.”

  “Toby, I’m trying to find a shipwreck.”

  “Ambitious.”

  “Just be grateful I’m not out getting pregnant.”

  “Are those really your only options? C’mon! Service will broaden your horizons in ways you’ve never anticipated!”

  “Fine,” I said, suspecting I’d regret it.

  “Steel yourself for the onslaught,” Toby said. “The good news is, everyone knows being a barista makes you infinitely cooler.”

  If by infinitely cooler he meant homicidal, he’d nailed it. The majority of patrons were painfully picky, forever on their phones, ordering the most complicated drinks I’d ever heard of. One woman asked if I could scrape the icing off a shark cookie because she “only ate sugar that had been baked.” Toby, meanwhile, was like an octopus-wizard hybrid on the espresso machine, steaming milk with one hand, slicing bagels with the other, and somehow, still finding time to sing along to the Clash and have conversations with everyone he knew. No wonder he fell asleep by seven.

  When we final
ly reached a lull, he shook his wrist out, and his bones crackled. “I need a more ergonomic profession.”

  “Why don’t you take a break?” I offered. “Just, like, twenty minutes. Power nap.”

  “What a foreign concept. Just you up here?” He hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Sure. You can handle it.”

  He gave me a crash course in how to pull thick, chocolaty espresso shots and foam milk to the consistency of paint. After five practice cappuccinos, he declared my drinks “passable,” and retreated to his office. “Though I’m probably too amped up from your B-minus espresso now to actually fall asleep,” he called on his way.

  I had to remake my first few drinks—too thin and watery—but when I finally handed over a well-pulled latte, I practically glowed. Handing someone a warm paper cup was a nice feeling, even if they were a needy tourist.

  Then the door swung open, and in came Frieda from the Lyric Pub.

  In daylight, she seemed monolithic and unmovable. Black jeans and a Ramones T-shirt, aviators, a black bandanna holding back her hair. I couldn’t envision her being anywhere, doing anything she didn’t want.

  I hoped I looked like her when I grew up, and I hoped she didn’t remember me.

  “Hey, boozehound,” she said, pulling off her shades. “I was wondering when I’d see you again.”

  Well. There was that.

  “You work here now?”

  “Just today. Um. Look. I’m really sorry about your glass,” I said, hoping to hurry her along.

  “I don’t give a shit about the glass. How are you?”

  “Fine. What can I get for you?”

  She drummed her fingers on the countertop, taking her sweet time. She was really savoring this moment. Payback.

  “I’ll have a small mint lemonade, please,” she said finally.

  I was expecting black coffee, tough and acidic. She’d brought her own plastic cup, which I filled to the brim, taking care to add extra ice.

  “Thank you,” she said. She slurped from the rim and made no moves toward the door. I prayed for someone else to come through and order a drink so complicated it’d take me centuries to make.