The Last True Poets of the Sea

by Julia Drake

  Outside on a slate patio, Liv’s dad was in an Adirondack chair pulling corn from its squeaky leather husk, the ground around him like the end of a day at a blondes-only hair salon. He was completely bald, with bright orange Crocs and Liv’s eyes.

  “Dad, I brought a victim for your garden tour,” she said.

  “I’m sure that’s the last thing your guest wants to do,” he said. He was soft-spoken and mild mannered; his T-shirt was tucked into elastic-waist shorts. “Tom Stone. How do you do.” His hand in mine was warm and dry.

  “I’d like to see the garden, actually,” I said. I honestly did.

  “Well, in that case,” he said, looking like Liv when she had an idea, “my delphiniums are doing rather well.”

  We walked along the plots, and he pointed out bugbane, Russian sage, day lilies. Little treats were hidden among the plants, too: a family of stone rabbits, a warbling fountain shaped like a spouting fish. I’d learned that he’d designed the house himself, and the garden, and he explained to me about shade and water and light, so much thought and care behind where plants lived. Through the window into the kitchen, I saw Liv hug her mom, long and rocking, and somehow still casual, everyday. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d hugged my mom that way.

  “Try this,” said Tom, handing me a tiny ruby of a strawberry from a bush. It was even sweeter than Toby’s pies.

  Liv and I set the table for dinner, ferrying a green glass pitcher and a stack of cloth napkins from the kitchen. Ann lit peppermint candles, which, she claimed, smelled better than citronella and still kept the bugs away.

  “But if we get really desperate, I’ve got the napalm,” she said, and she winked at me, like we were in on a secret.

  “Cheers,” she said when we finally sat down, and Tom said, “Clink,” when we hit every glass. We passed around corn, green beans, a salad of tomatoes and avocado, chicken with pesto. Toby made a strong showing on the dessert front, but with all this color in front of me, I felt like I had scurvy. I heaped green beans onto my plate.

  “Violet, we hear you’re from New York,” Ann said. “What brings you to Lyric?”

  “Her uncle owns the Mola Mola, remember?” Liv said gently.

  “New York’s a long way away. I bet your parents miss you,” Tom said.

  “Oh, they’re thrilled I’m gone,” I said.

  “Trust me,” he said, “they’re thinking about you every second of every day.”

  “Gosh, New York.” Ann sighed. “We went once for Christmas, remember, Tom? Back when we were just married, I must’ve been twenty-three, I was so excited, I thought it was going to be like the movies: skating, hot chocolate…”

  “We had to leave early,” Tom said. “The crowds.”

  “I’m not a city girl. Neither is this one,” Ann said, wrapping her hand around Liv’s, and I saw Liv give her a squeeze back in agreement.

  “What about Oxford?” I said.

  “Oxford?” Ann said, quizzical. “What’s in Oxford?”

  “Felix told me I probably lived there in a past life,” Liv said, and the lie rolled from her easy as a marble. “Supposedly I was a countess.”

  “And I was—what was it?” I said, picking up where she left off.

  “You were Amelia Earhart,” Liv said, and even though it wasn’t true, her words dropped into my chest, fist-size and muscle heavy.

  Tom chuckled and helped himself to more beans. “Felix. That boy is certainly something else, isn’t he?”

  He said it fondly, but still. Certainly something else jammed between my ribs, right next to my new aviator heart.

  “I did like the Met, though,” Ann said. “In New York. That Egyptian room! It was so quiet and contemplative, full of grace, and we’d just gotten married, and I felt awful, of course I must’ve been pregnant with Will, I just didn’t know it then, that’s why…why…”

  She faltered and reached for her necklace, worrying the beads between her fingers. I watched her search for words, and then watched her go elsewhere, somewhere I couldn’t follow. Like that, the night turned brittle as spun sugar.

  “Mom?” Liv said cautiously.

  Ann played with her necklace, staring off at someplace over my left shoulder. I looked to Tom, willed him to help her, but he was concentrating on his green beans. My teeth chattered once, twice, and I gripped my jaw with both hands.

  Tenderly, with great practice, Liv drew her mother’s hand into her own.

  “Mom,” she said, “should we go inside?”

  “What was I saying?” she said softly, looking only at Liv.

  “The Egyptian room. Full of grace.”

  “Yes,” Ann said, coming back more fully now. “It really was.”

  “Wonderful beans, darling,” said Tom.

  “They are,” I said, just to chime in.

  “They’re the same old thing,” Ann said, and with that, we kept on like nothing had happened. We talked about Ann’s unit on the ancient Maya and Tom’s concern over a tree that was losing limbs; her childhood in New Hampshire and his in Minnesota. How they’d met in college, and she’d followed him to Lyric after graduation. “It was the craziest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she said. “We were so young. But I’m telling you girls: when you meet the one, whoever he is, you’ll know.”

  Or she, or they, or ones, I didn’t say, because who was I to say that right now to this woman?

  “And who knows,” Ann said, “maybe you’ve already met.”

  Liv, in response to her parents’ love story, was totally, completely without barbs. The night stayed as glassy smooth as the sea had been that day at the lighthouse.

  After dinner, Liv led me up a sneaky back staircase, two plastic bowls of homemade blueberry ice cream in hand. Her room was compact, like her, with citrus-colored walls covered in pictures of her friends, a little white desk stuck with half-peeled-off stickers, a framed print from Alice in Wonderland. On her twin bed, a battered stuffed bunny had been tucked into a pink patchwork quilt so un-Liv-like I almost couldn’t picture her sleeping there.

  “So those are my parents,” she said slowly.

  “They’re nice,” I said, because they were. “How often does your mom—?”

  “Go away like that? I don’t know. Enough that I know what to say.”

  I nodded and traced a finger over the stitching of her quilt. “I’ve got to admit, Liv, I thought your room would be more of an intellectual monastery.”

  “Is that really what you think of me? That in my free time I just twiddle away on my abacus?”

  “No,” I said, laughing a little.

  “Here, this’ll blow your mind, too: I love TV,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes! Why is that so hard to believe? You wouldn’t believe how much TV I watch! I think as a species we may have evolved to develop a genetic predisposition toward TV, and I am going to donate my body to science to isolate the TV gene.”

  “See, saying shit like that is what makes me think abacus.”

  “Just look.” She opened her closet, walked into her clothes, and—this I didn’t expect—took a left, where I thought there was a wall. I poked my head in. The closet smelled overwhelmingly of Liv, smoky and salty and slightly like SweeTarts, and went farther back than I realized. In the back corner, where the ceiling sloped, she cuddled herself into a neat raft of pillows around a black-and-white TV, smaller than one of Toby’s nine-inch cakes.

  “We weren’t allowed to watch TV during weekdays growing up—I mean, I’m still not, technically—but they would set this up when Will or I got sick. I think they think it’s lost. We don’t get a lot of channels, but there’s probably a movie on now.”

  “Does Mariah know about this?” My head brushed the ceiling as I stooped toward her.

  “Of course. What do you think she and I do when we hang out? Ooh, Thelma and Louise. You seen this?”

  I shook my head no and curled up on the pillows, taking care not to touch her. My heart was beating fast.
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  “We missed the beginning, but that’s fine,” she said. “Sorry it’s so crowded.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said. My knee brushed hers accidentally and I thought about apologizing, but chose not to.

  We watched. Our spoons made little clicking noises against the plastic like miniature pony hooves. Liv stirred her ice cream to milkshake consistency, like I used to do as a kid, and the whole thing was platonic, I told myself, very platonic.

  “Brad Pitt’s in this,” Liv said, eyes glued to the screen.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He gives Thelma her first orgasm,” she said, and I swear she inched toward me.

  The volume was low; you had to strain to hear. My breathing was very loud. She smelled so good, and I had a sudden urge to kiss the back of her arm, the one that was holding her ice cream spoon. The nonkiss with Orion had made me insane, I decided. My arm brushed her arm, and my blood was replaced with pins and needles.

  On-screen, Thelma gasped and gasped, and here, beside Liv, every inch of me was on fire. The stuffy air between us pulsed like a heartbeat. I looked at her, but her face was impassive. We were watching a sex scene. How could this be platonic?

  “Seems like that went well for her,” I said. I wasn’t used to being this nervous.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “You have corn silk on your dress,” I said.

  I plucked a thread from her skirt, my fingers light as a dandelion cloud. Our eyes met, and there was a flickering in my body, an unfolding, a ladybug’s secret wings taking flight. I wanted to bat her bowl of ice cream from her hand, feel her weight on top of me, reach a hand up her dress, wanted to know if she was as wet as I was, she looked like she wasn’t breathing—

  She’d called me Amelia Earhart—

  She was straight—

  Downstairs, I heard Ann call to Tom about Tupperware—

  “This next part’s really good,” Liv said, head tipped toward the TV. “We should watch.”

  “Sure,” I said, dry-mouthed. She was straight enough to not even realize what was going on. Which was better, anyway. I really liked being her friend. Orion’s, too. I didn’t want to be a hitch between them.

  “Hey,” I said, “I’m sorry I brought up Oxford.”

  “What?”

  “At dinner. Oxford. Your parents. I’d just assumed they knew.”

  “Oh. That’s okay.” She pulled her knees up to her chest. We weren’t touching now, and I knew we wouldn’t, and that knowledge made me feel safer, like I could say anything without fear of ruining my chances with her.

  “It’s just that we haven’t really talked about college,” she said. “They both went to the University of Maine. It’s like two hours away. I could come home on weekends. Tuition is cheap.”

  “But you want to go to Oxford.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but it hurts me less to go to the University of Maine than it hurts them for me to go to Oxford.”

  “I don’t know. I think there’s probably a world where you can have what you want, too. Don’t they just want you to be happy?”

  “Maybe,” she said. She rocked her chin on her knees, and I knew we were both thinking of Will. How different would her life be if he were still alive? Would I even be here?

  “Can I tell you an actual secret?” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, nervous for what was to come.

  “I really hate being called Professor Stone.”

  That I wasn’t expecting. The left turn felt like a welcome relief, as if she’d thrown open a secret window in this tiny space.

  “Really? Why?”

  “It makes me feel like a know-it-all. Obnoxious. Pretentious.”

  “You are a know-it-all.”

  “Thanks a lot, Violet.”

  “You didn’t let me finish! I like that about you best of all. Seriously. You’ve got, like, an acrobat brain. But I get it. I’ll stop.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “That’s, um—extraordinarily nice. What you just said about my brain.”

  “Not nice so much as true,” I told her.

  I stayed even after the movie ended. For the next hour, while another movie played, she made me guess how Thelma and Louise had started, and I dreamed up different beginnings, each one more outrageous and convoluted than the next. The night was the best kind of boring, and making her laugh felt even better than being onstage.

  DISPATCHES FROM LYRIC, NEVER DISPATCHED

  July 13

  Wednesday

  Dear Sam,

  Hard to believe I’ve been in Lyric over a month. Not sure if you’ve been getting my letters, but I wanted to give you some Wreck Hunting Updates. Last weekend we made good progress, all thanks to an old watch of Mom’s that’s maybe haunted, maybe lucky. And get this: this weekend, we’re going to Seal Cove to sweep the beach with a metal detector. It’s possible the wreck’s been there all along, right in front of our eyes, where we used to swim.

  Meanwhile, this girl I met is developing a theory about Fidelia’s potentially sordid past: A love affair! A hidden pregnancy! It’s all very scandalous.

  This girl—the one with the theory—lost a brother a few years back. Her name’s Liv. She knows how lighthouses work. My friend Orion described her as bright, which is accurate. She sparkles. Her brother died in an accident. Suddenly, is my understanding. I think, for her, it must’ve been one of those moments where you just can’t believe what you’re hearing.

  Did you know, I wrote, that I used to imagine you dying?

  I had never told anyone this, ever. I could barely admit it to myself.

  There’s this scene in Nancy Drew where she’s being held hostage and signals for help with a lantern through a window. That’s how I thought of you. A blinking light. SOS. Ever since I was little, I’ve imagined your funeral. I’d play this sick game, imagining the world without you, seeing if I could get myself to cry. Your funeral was very glamorous. I wore a black velvet gown and Mom was in a fur coat and Dad was in a tuxedo. We buried you in Central Park, spread your ashes from a rowboat in the lake. By the time I imagined that part, I was usually teary.

  A drop splashed on the page, smearing my ink.

  We got older. We heard stories in the news. Kids younger than me, than you, even, jumping in front of trains, taking their dads’ guns. Once or twice, someone we sort of knew, someone from a different school, maybe, or a friend of a friend. One day there, the next day, gone. You and me, in a parallel universe. Every time I heard about someone, I’d turn this thought over in my head: Would Sam ever…? Would I…?

  Where did he end and I begin? Was thinking the same thing as wanting? Trying?

  When Mom called that day to tell me about you, my first thought wasn’t surprise. I just asked, “Which hospital?”

  I had no trouble understanding that you’d tried to kill yourself.

  I saw it coming and I didn’t do a thing.

  I ripped the letter into tiny pieces, then shredded them in the blender for good measure. I sent him a dumb Weeki Wachee postcard instead.

  ANAGRAMS

  Seal Cove was a wide, flat beach bookended by rock formations ideal for cliff jumping and (I hoped) snagging ships and drawing them into ocean depths where they’d stay hidden for centuries. When I arrived there Saturday afternoon to metal detect, the beach was clearing out, families struggling over the dunes with umbrellas and picnic baskets in tow. Some straggling sunbathers still lounged on towels, and the water lapped calmly at the shore. My heart fell. This beach was so tame and well-populated, it was hard to believe that a wreck could have been hiding here for years.

  A girl at the beach’s far end was waving her arms in my direction. She looked like she was flagging me down, but I didn’t recognize her. She yelled louder. A fire was blazing in the pit behind her. Was she all right? I jogged toward her, trying to make out what she was saying.

  “Violet! Violet!”

  Holy shit. I did know her. Only I didn’t. Because I was seeing, for the fir
st time, Liv without her hat.

  Allow me, for a moment, a tangent on The Face.

  My dad wore the same wire-framed glasses every day of our childhood: gold-rimmed scholarly specs, dignified, simple. I had never seen him without them, and I believed they were literally part of him—attached to his body as much as his kneecaps or the hairs on his toes. The first time I saw him without his glasses, I couldn’t have been more than five or six, and legend has it, I burst into tears. Without his glasses, my dad was a stranger. His eyes were sunken and beady; his cheeks gaunt. His face looked watery, as though his features might slip off. Those glasses were glue, and without them, the pieces of his face went slipshod.

  Seeing Liv without her hat was nothing like seeing my dad without his glasses.

  It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen her face before. A hat can only hide so much. I knew she had gray eyes and straight ash-blond eyebrows. I knew that she had a thin red mouth; that her cheeks grew flushed when she was excited. I knew that she had acne along her cheek, in particular on the right side of her face. I knew she had a forehead. I assumed she had a hairline.

  What I didn’t know before I saw Hat-Free Liv was that foreheads and hairlines could announce themselves, say Hey, look at me, I’m gorgeous! I’d always assumed that she’d parted her hair in the middle, but in fact she parted it on the left, revealing a fine pale line of scalp. I thought her hair might have been dull after being hidden from the sun, but it was brighter than I expected, threaded with copper. And of course her braids were French braids, woven behind her ears and framing her face. Hers was the sort of face you wanted to look at, no matter what the owner was doing, whether she was smearing concealer under her eyes, or eating egg salad.

  I would not have predicted that one could be so attracted to a hairline.

  “Hello,” she said when I finally reached her. She spoke in her museum voice, professional, precise. Then she brought one braid across her mouth. A small thrill coursed through me. This gesture was a habit. I wanted to know her other habits. I wanted her to know mine.