by Julia Drake
The door flew open. Orion was holding a gold trumpet in his left hand, and his cheeks were bright red, rosy as apples. His mouth was on fire, the skin around it angry and inflamed, like he’d just spent hours kissing someone with a beard.
“What’re you doing here?” he said.
“I got your address from your license,” I said, and I held up his wallet. I’d snooped, of course, but the most scandalous thing he had in there was a Seafood Watch Do Not Eat card.
“Oh. I’m an idiot. Thanks.” He glanced over his shoulder. “You want to, like, come in?”
I knew I should leave. I sensed the romance channel got great reception in the shed. I should leave, I should leave, I should leave….
“Sure,” I said.
The shed’s floor was crowded with gardening junk and coated with sawdust, plus a record player and a few music stands. Over a mint-green canning table, a map had been covered in a few pushpins—the Caribbean. It hit me: this was the shed where they’d started building the boat.
There was a window in the back corner. Through it, I spied a blue plastic tarp, thrown over something the size—well, something the size of a small rowboat. I thought the boat hadn’t been finished, but whatever was beneath that tarp looked solid. Real. Seaworthy.
We stood there awkwardly for a second. It was weird to hang out not at the aquarium. I suddenly understood why people made lists of things to talk about.
“Okay, so you’ve heard me play twice now,” he said, settling onto a stool. “Your turn. Serenade me. I want to hear your voice, for real.”
“You’ve heard me sing,” I said.
“Singing ‘Twist and Trout’ with Andy does not count.”
“But…” I didn’t really want to sing. But I also didn’t want to get locked into an argument where I eventually capitulated. That would have been too much buildup for the voice that I actually had. I was not a belter. My singing voice was low and a little husky. I always sounded a little sad. Haunting was the word that my choir director used. My voice wouldn’t have lived up to the hype.
And part of me had been missing singing ever since I’d sung “Lobster Moon River.”
So I sang the first song that came into my head: “Happy birthday to you…”
Orion pulled one hand over his mouth. Was he laughing? I searched for a smile but found none. On the contrary: he was taking me seriously. Really seriously. Because alone, without music, this song sounded sad. Way more emotional than I intended. I could have picked anything else.…I could have picked “Mean Mr. Mustard” or “We Welcome You to Munchkinland”…
“Happy birthday to you…”
Because wasn’t this a sort of weirdly sexy song, too, thanks to Marilyn Monroe and JFK? I tried to look as platonic as possible. More than platonic: undesirable. I had a gnarly zit on my cheek and I turned that side of my face toward Orion.
“Happy birthday…”
I glued my gaze to a garbage pail filled with hockey sticks.
“Dear Orion…”
On a pile of tangled Christmas lights.
“Happy birthday to you.”
I went to tuck my hair behind my ear and rubbed my head instead. I felt like the exposed nerve of a tooth.
“You’ve got a really nice voice,” Orion said.
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious. The timbre of your voice…it’s melancholy. You know what a dying fall is?”
“Orion. Oh my God.”
“It’s, like, an emotional swoon in music. A sad one, where you have to sort of sigh and drop to hit a certain note. Like, ‘Greensleeves.’ You’d be good on that.”
“Are we done here?”
“Or, ‘It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth…’”
“‘The minor fall, the major lift,’” I quoted back.
“That’s you. That line, I mean. If that line were a person, it’d be you.”
The air around us turned needle sharp. Orion looked shocked at himself. I think it was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me. I tucked my arms into Marine Mingle and nodded toward the window.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Oh. Remember the boat I mentioned?”
“I thought you said building the boat was just an idea.”
“It was. But then…I finished it. I had a lot of trouble sleeping for a while.”
I gaped back at the tarp. “You built a boat?”
“It’s not much. Just a dinghy. A rowboat. Well, it’s got an outboard motor, but still. The original plan had been a sailboat, but I couldn’t hack it, at least not by myself and not the first time around. Liv’s dad helped a lot. It’s really not a big deal.”
“Orion. Shut up. This is not the time for modesty. You murder on the trumpet, and you built a freaking boat. Does Liv know you finished this?”
He shook his head. “I’m not even sure I’m going to tell her.”
“You’re not going to tell her? As your official go-between, I feel this boat could be your ultimate wooing move. Few girls would be able to resist a boat. Play the trumpet for her, too, and she’s all yours.”
“Would you be able to resist a boat?”
“I’m off-limits, I remind you.”
“Not mine. Just…someone’s.”
I hesitated. I could keep the romance channel firmly switched to off.
“My powers of resistance are legendary.”
Resisted!
“But it’s possible they might bend to a boat. Not your boat, of course.”
So much for growing out of the shipwreck gene.
“Of course,” Orion said. “I can show you something else, though. Requires a walk. Want to see?”
“Yes,” I said, perhaps overenthusiastically.
Orion’s house was farther inland than Toby’s, more deeply set in the woods.
We walked along a well-trodden dirt path through the woods. Trees closed above us and light grew dim. Far off, I could make out the sound of water. The hiking wasn’t terribly tough: the ground was flat, but it was a hot, humid day, overcast with clouds, and buggy as we walked deeper into the woods.
“We won’t go too far,” Orion said.
Suddenly, like a typhoon, I missed New York. I missed things I’d never thought I’d miss: noise, traffic, the subway in the summer. I missed my parents. My brother. I was supposed to be finding the wreck today, and look where I was now: in the middle of the woods with some boy. I had terrible follow-through. This was Rus and the Karaoke Disaster all over again, just without the booze. Soon a whole summer would pass, and I’d have nothing to show to Sam but a new sweatshirt.
“Just up here,” Orion said, pointing.
Set into the side of the hill was a gaping hole formed by enormous boulders: a stone crevasse like an opening to the underworld.
“It’s really cool inside,” he assured me, striding toward the opening.
“You want me to go in there?” I said. “What about bears?”
Orion just laughed and shimmied sideways through the gap in the rock. Not feeling reassured, I wedged myself through behind him. At least it wasn’t a true cave, so my voice would carry if I were mauled. The tops of trees were still visible as we walked deeper into the split between the boulders, a wedge of humid gray sky always visible, ten, fifteen, twenty feet below the opening. It was cold down here.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” Orion said.
He pointed to a rocky shelf where the split ended, set in shadow. There, even in the July heat, was a stripe of bright white snow.
“Welcome to the Nivation Hollow,” he said.
I knew Orion meant for me to be amazed. Dazzled. Snow in July in a hole in the world: What was that, if not treasure?
But I missed home. I missed my brother. I felt like a fuckup. Why was I here in a hole in the ground with this boy, instead of checking in with Sam every single day?
Orion, meanwhile, was explaining geology. “It’s also called a snow niche, and its formation is a periglacial process.
Basically, this snow freezes and never fully thaws—so it’s been around for centuries.”
A bit of wall crumbled off in my hand. Little shards of shale clung to my fingertips, and I rubbed them against my thighs so they scratched.
“There used to be way more snow, actually. I used to come up here with a lunch box and pack it full in the summer. Put it in the freezer. I wanted to have snow in August.”
Names had been scratched into the rock across the rest of the hollow: John and Loretta, 1999. You are beautiful. Marie was here. Some of the graffiti was even older—one was dated 1884, the year before the Lyric sank, the year before the town had been made official. I couldn’t even believe that people had been coming here that long. There must’ve been so much snow there. What would I write? Violet: Descendant of Fidelia and eternal fuckup.
Something wet and cold slid down my back. I yelped and wriggled. A chip of ice fell from the hem of my sweatshirt.
“Couldn’t resist,” Orion said.
He packed a scratchy snowball, then tossed it my way. I caught it and whipped it back so hard it burst on the wall behind him. Orion dodged just in time.
“Could’ve broken my nose, Babe Ruth!” he said, laughing.
I wasn’t in the mood. “I thought he was a hitter.”
“Started out pitching.”
“What time is it? I’m starving.” My hands were red and rough, raw from the cold. I blew on my fingers to warm them.
“Here,” Orion said. He stepped toward me and took my hands, then tucked them inside his shirt and flattened them against his stomach. Yes. On his stomach. His warm stomach that made my fingers tingle as they touched skin and a wiry happy trail that ran from his belly button to the lip of his jeans.
“I run pretty hot,” he said.
I would’ve made a crack if I could—would’ve been a fucking layup—but I could barely open my mouth. Because I was touching Orion Lewis’s stomach with my wet-snow hands—sad, homesick hands, hands that lost everything, hands that should’ve been googling how to find a shipwreck—but hands that were still connected to a person with a body. The romance channel came in loud and clear, playing yes yes yes….
He leaned toward me. My heart pounded. His mouth was still red from the trumpet. He put cold fingers to my face; traced them over my lips. Instinctively, I shut my eyes. His lips brushed mine, just a little bit, so soft they might have been snowflakes.
I opened my left eye a sliver, just enough to see the ratty cuffs of my new sweatshirt on Orion’s stomach.
I am sorry to report that was as hot as it got.
Because let’s not forget my shipwreck gene.
When he put his mouth to mine, I spoke: “Liv.”
Yes. That’s right. Orion Lewis, Eyebrow God, the Certifiable Smokeshow, Dreamboat Builder of Boats, Player of the Trumpet, Serenader of Lobsters, tried to kiss me in a magical nivation hollow, and I said the name of his longtime lady love INTO HIS MOUTH.
I mean—not kissing was the original goal. So we can consider that a win.
Except it was not a win. Not at all. BECAUSE I COULD HAVE HAD PASSIONATE SEX IN A NIVATION HOLLOW WITH A GAP-TOOTHED EYEBROW GOD.
The walk back to his house was awkward. Orion was silent, pulling leaves from trees, shredding them from their veins. The situation grew even more awkward when I had to ask for a ride home. We rode in the Apogee in silence. I counted the empty bottles in the front seat: nine.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “I’m really sorry, Violet. I mean, there’s Liv, and we work together, you know?”
Here is what I wanted to say: Do that again! I’ll kiss you back, I promise! You just caught me in a weird, melancholy moment!
Here is what I said: “It’s no big deal.”
I couldn’t believe myself. I had never turned down a kiss, not even if the guy had a soul patch or wore exclusively ironic T-shirts or if the girl had been smoking all night. But the second a nice, sweet boy made the moves on me: nope, no, shut it down, think of Liv, say Liv, Liv, Liv Liv Liv Liv!
Fuck the shipwreck gene.
Perhaps, said a feeble voice that didn’t even sound like my own, this wasn’t a shipwreck gene, but a choice, that follow-through you so longed for, and now you’re actually making good on…
“You won’t tell Liv, right?”
“I won’t,” I promised.
“Will this be weird?” Orion asked. “I really don’t want it to be weird.”
“It won’t be weird,” I assured him. That was one good thing to come out of the Year of Wild. Situations that required grace, nuance, and a proper empathetic response (see: that’s enough, Violet) were a challenge, but pretending like a nonkiss in a magical hollow with my coworker had never happened?
That was totally in my repertoire.
INDEPENDENCE DAY
The next day, I celebrated our great nation’s independence by not thinking about sex, and reading the letters of my great-great-great-grandparents. While googling how to find a shipwreck had gotten me nowhere besides demoralizing websites that talked about grants from NOAA, the letters had been easy to find: in a trunk in the attic, a whole bundle of them.
“How do you just have documents from the 1900s up there?” I asked Toby. “Shouldn’t these be in temperature-controlled vaults? Or at least, like, plastic?”
Toby was unperturbed. “Some people have Caravaggios in the attic. This strikes me as fairly tame in comparison.”
Finding the letters might have been easy, but reading them was a challenge. Toby had assembled nearly all of the Emerald City while I tried to make sense of Fidelia’s craggy, cramped handwriting and Ransome’s indecipherable scrawl. There weren’t even that many letters between Ransome and Fidelia. Most of the letters seemed to have been written to their sons at college. The ones that did exist made heavy use of my darling, but mostly they were humdrum accounts of their daily life, descriptions of milk deliveries and what they’d seen on walks. Their marriage seemed dull. Normal. Certainly not doing a whole lot to support Liv’s theory that their love was a whole lot weirder than people are willing to admit—mostly it just seemed that they’d really liked each other.
Reading through these was a waste of time. I should have been wreck-hunting harder. At the very least, I should have been spending some quality time with Cousteau and Diving for Sunken Treasure. I cracked the book open and sighed, determined to finally understand the principles of marine archaeology and not just look at the pictures.
“Shouldn’t you be off shooting illegal fireworks?” Toby asked, not looking up from the puzzle. He kept complaining that his back hurt.
“Shouldn’t you not encourage dangerous behavior?”
“What happened to those kids you’ve been hanging out with?”
“Why do you care so much?”
“It’s my job to care,” Toby said. “You should at least call home. Your mom would love to hear from you.”
“You call her. I’m busy.” I waved the stack of letters at him.
“Make you a deal,” he said. “You call, and I’ll read the last of those letters.”
I considered this. It was four in the afternoon, and she’d have the day off—she’d probably finished the crossword long ago, and was now trying to be productive, reorganizing the bookshelf or making the kitchen “more efficient.” Her inability to sit still had always bothered me, but now the thought of her trying to find the best place for the pepper mill made my heart pang.
“Fine,” I said.
“What am I looking for exactly?”
“Anything that shows their love was weirder than people were willing to admit, or any mention of where the wreck of the Lyric might be.”
“So a needle in the haystack,” he said.
“Essentially, yes.”
“VisweetieI’msogladyoucalled!”
At the sound of my mom’s voice, the pressure in my chest lifted. My heart unsnarled. I love my mom, I thought dumbly. It was that easy.
“We miss you!�
� she said.
“I miss you, too. I’m in your room, actually.” I’d wandered into her childhood bedroom on the cordless phone, curled up in her blue canopy bed with her stuffed cat collection, and missing her barely covered it. I wanted to teleport into my mom’s lap and never leave.
“How’s Dad?” I asked.
“He’s okay,” she said. “Grilling.”
Leave it to my parents to grill, even on the most fucked-up Fourth of July in family history. Perseverance, indeed.
“How’s Toby?” Mom asked.
“Terrible at puzzles.”
“Some things never change. He sent me your picture from the Lighthouse Museum’s website. I can’t believe you finally made it there! How was it? That lipstick made you look so grown-up.”
“It was yours. Or, I found it in your room.”
“Wow. I’m surprised it hadn’t gone bad.”
We both knew the next question. Neither of us wanted to ask it.
“I spoke to Sam,” she said at last. “They’re off to fireworks tonight. The whole group is, I mean. He’s gained some weight, so that’s good. He has privileges now to go into town, which means he’s made progress.”
“I sent him a letter. And an aquarium shirt.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
Another pause. I pictured my mom fiddling with the back of her earring. I took a raggedy white cat with ice-blue marble eyes into my arms.
“Your father and I are thinking of spending the last couple of weeks of August together in Maine as a family. You two are actually not that far apart, it turns out.”
I was quiet. The last time we were all together as a family…
“It won’t be Spain,” she said cautiously.
“That sounds good.”
“Good,” she said.
We breathed. I tapped on the kitty’s eyes with my fingernail. How did my mom and I have so little to say to one another, after all that had happened? This was the woman who used to tuck me into the folds of her coat and call me her koala.
“Mom, am I here because of the vending machines? Or because of what I said about the snorkel? Because I’m sorry for that, I didn’t mean it, you have to know, I think I was just upset—you were so mad—”