The Last True Poets of the Sea

by Julia Drake

  “Were your parents upset?” she asked.

  “Upset? No. We hardly even talked about it,” I said, watching my yacht grow larger. “What about you?” I asked.

  “Me?”

  “No, her.” I pointed at the wooden mermaid.

  “I do wonder how mermaids procreate.”

  “I always assumed they laid eggs. Though that makes them less sexy. Though maybe not! There’s some weird shit out there. Tentacle porn.”

  Liv laughed. “I’m not whatever. Only boys. Definitely no tentacles. Not that any of that matters, compared to school. Oxford.”

  “Eyes on the prize.”

  “Can I ask you a dumb question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why didn’t you just say so?”

  “Show up and scream, ‘Come one, come all’?”

  “Violet, give me a break, okay? Seriously. Why?”

  I looked at Liv and I thought of that idiot in seventh grade who’d said, You’re gay or straight and everyone else is just desperate, to a chorus of laughs; of the raven-haired girl who’d called me her “Litmus Test” after we’d hooked up last summer. How, after I’d gotten in trouble for pot, the principal sang the praises of the queer student union, convinced she’d handed me the psychoanalytic eureka moment I’d been searching for my whole life.

  I looked at Liv and thought, I just wanted this part to be folded in gently with the rest of me, like egg whites.

  “I didn’t want it to be the only thing you heard,” I said.

  “I get that.” Liv returned to her lamps, all now at right angles, all facing the same way. “So, I go to church every Sunday with my parents,” she said. “I know church is messed up. But I like it. Ours anyway. The ritual. I spend a lot of time looking at people’s faces, how bored they are…I mean, I’ll probably get struck by lightning for saying this, but I’m on the fence about God anyway, and I’d definitely never say this to my parents, but…the faces. Sometimes I think that’s what church is about, not whoever’s running the show, but just seeing other people and imagining what they’re thinking. Or maybe Felix is right about the universe, and energy, and that’s why the church burned witches, because they were taking out the competition. Classic capitalism. Because it’s all the same idea. Some net beneath us. I probably sound crazy. I should just stop talking.”

  “You’re not crazy,” I said, “and you should never stop talking.”

  “You’d get sick of me,” she said, but she was pulling the corners of her mouth down to keep herself from smiling. I wish she’d let herself.

  “Why wouldn’t you say any of that to your parents?” I said.

  “I don’t know. My mom teaches fifth-grade social studies, and my dad’s a contractor. They’re just very concrete, I guess.”

  The question bubbled up in my throat: Liv, are you very concrete?

  Before I could ask, the kettle whistled loudly from the back room, beckoning us toward our future.

  “Tasseography,” Felix announced, “or the art of reading tea leaves.”

  “You’re doing this from your phone?” Liv said, aghast.

  We were in the shop’s tiny back office clustered around a small table. Felix had lowered the lights and lit a stick of jasmine incense. I coughed.

  “Clairvoyants live in the digital age, too. Get with the program.” He passed me a steaming plastic travel mug of tea; it bore an illustration of Elvis crooning into a microphone.

  “‘I’ve Been to Graceland’?” I read from the mug. “I do not consider this auspicious.”

  “The vessel has no bearing on the reading,” he assured me. “Drink.”

  I drank and immediately spat my tea onto the floor.

  “Really?” Felix said. He started riffling through drawers for a rag.

  “That tastes,” I said, “like bark.”

  I passed the mug to Liv for confirmation. Our fingers brushed. I tried not to think about it. I tried not to think about the fact that her mouth sipped from the exact same spot mine had sipped from. I tried not to think of this as a purposeful, by-proxy lip-lock. Especially since I had her answer: Only boys. Not whatever.

  “No sharing! You’re probably scrambling your destinies together,” Felix scolded. He consulted his screen. “Violet, you can rip the bag into the shape of a cross. To represent the four elements. Strictly pagan.”

  I glanced at Liv, thinking about faces and church and boredom, and in spite of everything—the Elvis mug, the phone—I felt a little thrill deep in my stomach as the herbs slipped through my fingers, hot and foresty. Elemental.

  “Oh, shit. You were supposed to be thinking of a question that whole time,” Felix said.

  “Amateur hour,” Liv said.

  “Not all of us can be professors-in-training,” Felix said. “Just think of one now. About your future.”

  “My future?” I’d spent the past few weeks so buried in the past that it had barely occurred to me that I had a future. Me. Violet. I was a person moving through the world. This summer would end; I’d go home. Back to New York. To our apartment. To school. The same binders, the same hallways, the same bathroom with the too-bright fluorescents that Sam avoided. The same people I’d dropped at the beginning of the summer.

  How could we possibly just resume our lives, after everything that had happened? How could we move forward?

  “Ready?” Felix asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  He peered into the murk, then covered his glass eye with one hand.

  “I guess that looks like a ring,” Felix said. He scrolled through his phone. “The ring means marriage.”

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “Maybe it’s an O,” Liv said. “Orion.”

  My heart stopped. What was she trying to say? Did she know about the nonkiss? No. She couldn’t. He made me promise not to tell anyone; no way he would have told her.

  “Maybe you’ll marry him, since Felix accused our destinies of being scrambled,” I said.

  “Don’t make me repeat myself on that subject.”

  “What if it’s a donut?” Felix said, forging fearlessly onward.

  “Or a black hole,” I said.

  “How optimistic,” Felix said.

  “The moon, then,” I said.

  “The sun,” Liv said.

  “Both.” I looked at her, and she blushed. What were we talking about?

  “We messed it up,” Felix said. “Here’s the thing that’s important to remember: things only have meaning if we grant them meaning.”

  “What a takeaway,” Liv said.

  “You’re worse than Mariah,” Felix said. “Shall we move on to the watch?”

  He pulled it from his pocket, wrapped now in a strip of velvet. “The first thing I will say about this piece,” he said, “is that it’s got an incredibly strange energy.”

  “My uncle said it was lucky.”

  “I’d go more with haunted.”

  “Oh, fantastic.”

  “But look,” Felix said.

  He’d buffed the watch to a shine, lifting enough tarnish to reveal an engraved tree etched into the silver face. The tree was covered in tiny circles—not leaves, but the most basically rendered fruit.

  “Wow,” I said, “that’s beautiful. Thanks, Felix.”

  “Second thing I will say: have you checked for watch papers?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Most clockmakers put a piece of paper in the back case to protect the inner mechanisms from the elements. Back in the day, it doubled as free advertising.” He flipped the watch over, twisted loose the back cover. A circle of paper fluttered out, yellow with age and crisp as a potato chip.

  “Bingo,” Felix said. He held the paper out in his palm. There, printed with an ink drawing of an elaborate Celtic knot, we read in rolling, curlicued script: Crane’s Clockmakers, London, England. He tipped the paper into my palm, and Liv leaned in toward me for a closer look. The brim of her cap caught me on the side of my face.

  “Sorry,”
she muttered. She pulled her braid across her mouth.

  “There’s actually an inscription on the back, too,” Felix said. He squirted some more silver polish onto the rag and buffed the back of the watch. “Jeepers, this is tiny.” He squinted. “Do you know an S?”

  “My brother. Sam. Also my grandmother was Sterling, and her father…”

  “Her grandfather,” Liv corrected me.

  “Were any of those people around in January of 1884?”

  Felix passed me the watch. The tiny inscription read:

  F.

  MY APPLE, CLEFT IN TWO

  S.

  FEBRUARY 1884

  My mouth fell open. First the emerald, now this? The watch papers put us in England, and 1884 put us in the right year, and the F…

  “This is Fidelia’s watch?”

  “Unless you know another British F from 1884 whose antique jewels would be lying around your house,” Felix said.

  “That means she was wearing this on the ship,” I said.

  “You’re the definition of flabbergasted right now, Violet.”

  Liv, as usual, was already three steps ahead of us.

  “Someone gave this watch to Fidelia right before she left England on the Lyric,” she said. “Maybe this S has to do with why she left. Maybe this watch was a going-away present. A romantic gesture!” She slapped the table in excitement. “I knew there was some weird reason she didn’t write.”

  “I’m sorry. How did we get to a romantic gesture?”

  “February, obviously. Valentine’s Day. And the apple! The engraving must be an apple tree. A reference to Adam and Eve. Temptation. Forbidden fruit!”

  “Isn’t the apple knowledge?” Felix asked.

  “Biblical knowledge,” Liv said. She waggled her eyebrows suggestively. “But even without that part—cleft in two. They were clearly being split apart when she boarded the boat. How painful is that language? Could it mean anything other than heartbreak? Two lovers being wrenched apart?”

  “Their Love Story Was Actually Someone Else’s Tragic Breakup,” Felix said.

  “Say whatever you want,” Liv said. “This engraving is so tiny! It wasn’t meant to be seen. That seems highly suspect.”

  “Look out, Professor Stone’s off and running,” said Felix. She was, indeed. You practically see the cartoon lightbulb over Liv’s head.

  “Maybe she was pregnant with S’s baby,” Liv said. “The apple is fruit, after all. And maybe that’s why she got married so quickly to Ransome!” She looked to me hungrily. “When did she give birth to their first child? Let’s figure that out, stat.”

  “Your anti–love story is nearly as absurd as the actual love story, Liv,” I said. “Let’s back up for a second. Who else could S be? What do we know about Fidelia before she left England?”

  Liv’s face fell.

  “Well, that’s a problem. There’s not that much on her, at least not in public records. Her whole history is sort of a blank.” Her eyes grew wide. “But if she was having some torrid affair and then she was shipped off because of a shameful pregnancy, the whole thing would make sense. Her disguise here and her relationship with Ransome could be tied to erasure of her past. Maybe the earring is even part of it. The emerald,” Liv went on. “Maybe she gave the other earring to someone else in England as a love token. Some people gave a lock of hair, but she was probably more aristocratic than that.”

  “The earring was just tangled with the watch,” I said. “No evidence that it was Fidelia’s.”

  “There’s no stamp or mark on the earring,” Felix agreed. “I checked.”

  “See, Liv? They’re not related.”

  “That you know of,” she said.

  “And you think tarot is ridiculous,” said Felix. “This is so far-fetched!”

  “I’m theorizing, not reading things in a crystal ball!”

  “For the last time, you know I think crystal-ball gazers are a racket.”

  “Violet. What do you think?” Liv said, turning toward me, eyes glittering. It was amazing, how quickly she’d jungle-gymmed her way to a full-blown theory. But also…

  “It’s kind of sad how much we don’t know about her. Like…who’s her mom? Why doesn’t anyone care about that?”

  “If it makes you feel any better, no one will care about us someday either.”

  “That does not make me feel better,” I said.

  “I know, but—what I mean is we should look, right? Carpe diem. You know that poem? Horace. Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi…”

  I’d never met anyone like her.

  “Mariah calls me the show-off,” Felix scoffed.

  Hard to say which was more unlikely: that Liv would debunk the love story of my great-great-great-grandparents, or that I would find a shipwreck in the middle of the Atlantic. But Liv had the letter S, and now a theory. I had a beach. Felix had a metal detector.

  “We have a start,” I said.

  I couldn’t wait to tell Sam.

  “Felix!”

  “Shit. That’s my dad.”

  “You better be tied up by robbers back there! I just watched two paying customers walk out the door!” The voice came closer and Felix, in a frenzy, hurried us to the back door and shoved us into the alley with the trash cans.

  “Goodbye, thanks for coming, next time we’ll do tarot!” he said, and shut the door abruptly.

  Liv and I blinked. A lifetime had passed in the Wonder Emporium, but it was still daylight in the real world, shadowy-bright in the space between two buildings. From cracks in the asphalt, a rash of little purple and yellow flowers stretched up toward the sun.

  “Did you ever do this?” I picked a buttercup and held it beneath her chin. The petals were so shiny and yellow they looked plastic, but a glow caught on the underside of Liv’s skin, like a buttercup torch.

  “You like butter,” I announced.

  “Oh my God, yes! Where does that butter thing even come from?” Liv asked.

  “Who knows. Some secret girl network.” I tucked the flower into her braid, taking longer than I needed. Her hair looked brittle like straw but it was as soft as the petals. Church bells chimed: 6:00 p.m.

  “Hey, d’you want to come to dinner?” Liv asked. “I mean, unless you have other plans. I know I said my parents are concrete, or whatever, but they’re actually super nice. They love having people over.”

  “I’m starving,” I admitted. “Okay. Sure. Just…” I plucked a few flowers—weeds, really, dandelions and buttercups—and dropped them in an empty Campbell’s Chunky Soup can that’d been licked clean by some rodent. “My mom would be really mad if I showed up empty-handed.”

  “You’re so annoying. My mom is going to adore you.” She plucked a fresh dandelion from my arrangement. “Did you ever do this?”

  She scored the stem with her fingernail, and then, like a split end, she peeled the edges apart, revealing the flower’s pale green insides.

  “No. What’s that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not a thing. I always just liked the way it felt. Feels.”

  I reached for one end of the flayed dandelion and ran it between my fingers. The insides were sticky with glucose, the stem already browning in places. We held it like a wishbone three days past Thanksgiving, thoroughly dried and ready to crack. I wanted to know what she was wishing for, but I wasn’t brave enough to ask.

  HAPPY FAMILIES ARE ALL ALIKE

  I’d wished for Liv’s parents to like me.

  I knew it was just dinner, but I had the feeling in my stomach like I used to get before an audition. Wanting to nail it, suspecting that I could, and knowing, in all likelihood, that things could go horribly, horribly wrong.

  “Hi, Livvy!” I heard as soon as we walked into the mudroom. The house smelled of basil and garlic; radio babble wafted from the kitchen. I’d never been in the house of parents who’d lost a child before, and I’d expected—I don’t know. Coldness and severity, like a medieval church, an emptiness
so vast it felt like fear.

  Instead, I followed Liv into a cozy sunlit kitchen where her mom was slicing tomatoes into thick red slabs on a wooden cutting board. She was even shorter than her daughter, in a light blue T-shirt and cheap black flip-flops, a salt-and-pepper bob held back from her face with two tortoiseshell barrettes. Her earrings matched her necklace, purple glass beads, the sort of jewelry made at camp. I wondered if Liv or Will had made them for her.

  “Dad’s drowning in shucking duties. I got way too much corn, but it looked so good, I hope you’re hungry….”

  “Mom, this is Violet. She’s going to eat with us, okay?”

  Liv’s mom’s eyes drifted from the tomatoes to me, and I worried about my hair, my height, the coffee grounds and fish juice on my jean shorts. This woman lost a kid, I thought, don’t say the wrong thing.

  “Of course, of course!” Liv’s mom said, with a smile so wide it made me feel like she’d been waiting for me her whole life. “Hi, Violet, I’m Ann, no e, I’d shake your hand, but I’m covered in tomato juice. We can bump elbows. That’s what we do with the kids during flu season, anyway.”

  We bumped elbows, mine scabbed and pale where hers was soft and tan. I bet, at school, she was the kind of teacher who developed a cult following, who kids hoped all summer they’d get next year.

  “These are for you,” I said, offering her my Campbell’s soup can, feeling a little shy. The flowers were browning in places; there was some lingering soup gunk I hadn’t noticed before.

  “Love this,” Ann declared. “We don’t have a centerpiece yet for dinner. Go help your dad, will you, Livvy? There’re cheese and crackers out there, too—help yourself to anything, Violet, and don’t let him take you on the garden tour if you don’t want to.”

  Their house was larger than it looked from the front, with a more complicated layout than I expected, and slightly treacherous—an unexpected step down here, an exposed beam there. Each room seemed to have secret little nooks or a windowsill for curling up with a book and a blanket. I felt a bit like I was walking through a very nice person’s brain, labyrinthine and warm. Had I been alone, I would’ve gone around knocking on the walls for secret passageways.