by Julia Drake
You say you want to be like me. Here’s the thing: I want to be like you. You have an endless well of patience, goodness, and love. You’re kind. You have a sensitivity that can’t be taught. You should have been the older brother. If you were older, you would have taken care of me.
I should have done more to protect you. I’m so grateful you’re alive. I’m so, so grateful you’re my brother.
Love,
Vi
ps—the search is going okay. A few minor hiccups. I wish you were here, too. In the meantime, I’ll try my best for both of us.
HOW TO FIND A SHIPWRECK: AN AMATEUR’S GUIDE
First things first: blast your relationships to smithereens. You may feel lonely, but loneliness is good. Loneliness means you can focus.
Loneliness is the natural state of the wreck hunter.
Focus. The weekend you destroy your relationships, review your primary source documents: a pocket watch engraved with a tree, an emerald earring frustratingly tangled in its chain; a letter describing whales and a blinding wall of white; a newly found set of opera specs. Examine the binoculars and cross-reference the maker’s stamp; discover that the business did not exist until 1920. Understand these binoculars were not on the Lyric. Don’t worry. Every wreck hunter experiences setbacks.
Sit on the floor and arrange your clues in a circle around you. Wait for an epiphany. Consider holding a séance to ask your great-great-great-grandmother, Hey, Fidelia, where were you wrecked?
Sleep with the pocket watch under your pillow. Perhaps, as if by osmosis, the wreck will present itself to you in a dream.
At work that week, be grateful for the spate of thunderstorms that drive thick crowds indoors, demanding your attention and your quick fingers on the cash register. Always toilet paper to replace, always someone to ring up; there is no time for music chatter. At the end of a shift, you feel scrubbed. Days pass. If the boy asks what happened between you and the girl that night (which he will, he’s always so freaking nice and interested), point to the line at the gift shop, say you’d love to chat, but you’ve really got to ring these folks up.
When he drifts away, hurt, stay the course. Remember: loneliness.
Nights, surrender to the internet vortex. Note that wreck hunters do not have very advanced websites. They favor clip art and neon buttons that encourage you to “click here!” And yet: they are highly technological. They are not teenagers with zany plots. They are oceanographers, physical geologists, marine archaeologists, and they say finding a wreck requires a boat, GPS, and sonar. Cameras and floodlights. Scuba certifications. Underwater submersibles. Robots that swim.
Discover a blog called The Adventures of Wreck Bros. These are your closest friends: Steve and Trent, who go for sick dives. It’s fun to hate them for a while, but then you start liking them, really wanting them to succeed. Trent’s got a background in oceanography. Steve quotes a lot of poetry. They go up to Fabian’s Bluff to see that Revolutionary War ship the Fresnel Lens Girl mentioned. Close the window.
Seek a quainter approach. Turn to Diving for Sunken Treasure for inspiration. Read three pages before you are overwhelmed by the cost, the gear, the effort that goes into finding a wreck—even one with a known location and see-through water.
Mr. Cousteau says nothing of pocket watches and whale migration.
Begin to despair.
One day after work, make a visit to the library. The librarian helps, contagiously eager and excited, sets you up with microfiche and a dusty machine in a hot, cramped side room. You find an article that describes an 1885 blizzard as the storm of the year, but discusses the resulting effect on fishing more than conditions on the water. Compare maps of the bay against the wreck’s trajectory, a bay in which there are over three hundred unidentified islands. Three hundred islands to check, and that’s assuming the ship is near land.
Suspect you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
That afternoon, wander the coast in your backyard. Stare blankly at the sea, your eyes humming against the bands of blue. There are over three million wrecks in the ocean, but from where you stand, you can’t see a single one.
Get sidetracked. Spend that night drafting a musical, tentatively titled Cousteau! Set it partially in a submarine. Include a singing whale. Singing whales are crucial to the wreck-hunting process.
After a week of searching, and writing one half of a terrible musical, face facts: You are a selfish sixteen-year-old with a broken pocket watch and a family history of mental illness. Your strengths are jazz hands, parody songs involving crustaceans, and DIY hairstyles. You have no friends. You wanted to give your brother proof the two of you mattered? Yeah, right.
Know it once and for all: wrecks, not discoveries, are in your blood.
THE WORLD BLOOMS UNEXPECTEDLY
A week passed without Liv, a week where I’d hardly spoken to Orion, or anyone, for that matter. At the end of the workday, Boris got tangled under my feet, and I hit the ground hard. Boris, contrite, attempted to lick my face. I shoved him away with two hands and said, louder than I needed to, “Stupid dog!”
He gave a piercing, wounded whine and split for Andy’s comforting arms. From the touch tank, a mom and her son stared at me.
“That lady was mean,” the boy said.
“She sure was,” her mother said. “Does she work here?”
Orion helped me to my feet. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.”
“No—I mean—are you okay? You’ve seemed a little off today.”
A little off was generous. I was a terrible sister, and a terrible wreck hunter. A failure, through and through.
“I’m super,” I said, my voice cracking.
“Very convincing. Why don’t you take a break? It’s almost the end of the day, anyway.”
Upstairs I slouched into the fat maroon sofa, trying to forget every single detail of my life. I pulled a pillow over my face, listing ways to improve myself. Stop causing so much trouble. Stop fighting with people. Stop ignoring your brother. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Stop being so pathetic. Perseverance.
A half hour later, Orion plopped down next to me and tap-tapped at the screen of his phone.
“I’m sorry I made such a scene. I know we’re hurting for patrons. You can leave me alone, though. I promise I’ll behave better.”
“Just watch,” he said, holding the phone between us. “But more important, listen.”
A humpback whale appeared on the screen, barrel-rolling in deep waters. At first I heard just water gurgling, but then another sound emerged: A creaking. A keening. A strange and ugly noise.
“They’re whale songs,” Orion said. “They’re supposed to calm you down.”
“These do not sound very soothing.”
“The grief counselor I saw recommended them. Definitely not for everyone, but…they’re kind of comforting after a while. I thought you’d be into them. There’s a pattern there, if you listen long enough.”
“You saw a grief counselor?”
“Sure. After Will passed away? We all did. I would have kept going, if it weren’t so expensive.” The humpback rolled again; another whale creak filled the silence. “They remind me of you. Of your voice. Sorry, I know singing only ends in disaster, or whatever. I won’t bring up your voice again. I’m sorry I made you sing the other night, too. I know you fought with Liv, and I’m worried it’s my fault.”
The whale groaned.
“It’s not,” I assured him. “Should I take that comparison to my voice as a compliment?”
“Yes. Just listen.”
I closed my eyes, listening to the echoes and creaks of this strange new music. Slowly, the ugliness loosened. Orion was right: a pattern emerged, and the whale’s song, as unfamiliar as it was, became recognizable though ancient, like language before language. Like the voice of someone who hadn’t spoken in a while, but now they were cleaning the rust from their instrument.
“I feel like I’m failing at life,” I said to Orion. “I fuck up ever
y time I turn around. I fuck up in New York, I fuck up here…”
“Violet, all you did was get angry at Boris. It’s okay. He’ll forgive you.”
I shook my head. Boris might forgive me, but Liv would never, and I doubted Sam would either. Orion didn’t know just how badly I’d screwed up with my family, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. The whole story was so long, so complicated. But I could start somewhere.
“Broadway was a disaster,” I said. “Not a total disaster. I also got to fly.”
“Uh-huh,” said Orion.
“I didn’t kill Tinker Bell. It’s just hard for me to think about singing, though, because singing reminds me of Broadway, and parts of it were great, but parts of it were so hard. I don’t know how two opposite things can be true at once. You know?”
“You can like two things at once,” Orion said slowly.
“No, this isn’t like liking two people. It’s like hating and loving the same thing. Or, like, different parts of the same thing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I have all this research to tell Liv about. I, like, miss her. Is that weird?”
“Yeah, Violet, it’s really weird to miss your friends after you fight. No, it’s not weird. You should tell Liv you’re sorry. I bet she’s sorry, too. She’s not good with conflict. That’s what my mom says, at least.”
The whale song creaked. I thought of what he’d said the other day: when I sang, I came alive. Singing had always made me so happy. Even this past week…
“I started writing a musical called Cousteau! It’s really goony and ridiculous right now. But what if we did that instead of the concert series? Performed part of it?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Alas, I am not.”
“Can I hear a song from it?”
“The melody’s not perfect yet, but…”
I adopted my best French accent and sang:
“Zere is nothing quite so très jolie
As a sparkling dive beneath ze sea,
You hold your breath, and one, two, three,
Ze world blooms unexpectedly…”
Orion looked appalled, and I buried my face in the couch.
“It’s horrible! I knew it! I can’t even read music!”
“No—Violet. This sounds awesome. I’m so in. We can build props and I’ll talk to Joan about opening up the space at night, we can make it an event—Wait,” he said. “I don’t want to distract you from the wreck.”
“I’m still working on the wreck. You can like two things at once, right?”
The door of the break room edged open. I saw a black nose, a gray snout, a set of woebegone eyes, and wiry, mangled eyebrows. Honey dog.
“Boris,” I said, getting on the floor and opening my arms wide. “C’mere, baby.”
On the ground, he was the perfect height for a hug. I wrapped my arms around his dog body, threading my fingers through his coarse coat. “I’m sorry,” I whispered into his ear. He rumbled, wanting more. “I’m sorry to Sam, too.” Whether it was the whale songs or saying the words out loud, I already felt lighter.
Arrghghrhghr, went Boris, and struggled beneath my grasp.
“Okay, you’re over it,” I said, and released him. “Sorry. Orion. What were you going to say?”
“Don’t even remember,” Orion said slowly. On the floor and covered in dog hair, I must’ve looked like a total weirdo, because that’s how Orion was staring at me. Fair. I had just given Boris an extremely aggressive hug.
“You sure? What we were talking about? Props?”
“Nah,” he said. “Gone completely.”
“It’ll come to you,” I assured him.
AT OZ
Joan greenlit Cousteau!, set a performance date three weeks away, and announced the event on the website. Overnight, the musical was real and the pressure was on. During the day, Andy helped us build paper-plate tambourines and Kleenex-box guitars, a cardboard submarine, papier-mâché fish. Nights, I worked on lyrics while Toby worked on the puzzle. Dorothy was really coming together, minus a wormhole in her cheek, the puzzle lines across her forehead like sloppy Frankenstein stitches.
“Ann Stone’s daughter came into the coffee shop today,” Toby said. “She was there all afternoon until we closed.”
“Hmm,” I said. It’d been pouring all day, and I was scratching away at a particularly annoying crossword, taking a break from a rhyme I couldn’t work out about Cousteau’s diving saucer. I wondered if Liv was still working on the wreck, or the motto, or if like me, she’d quit.
“I can’t believe Ann lets her smoke.” Toby sighed.
“Ann doesn’t know. Wait, how do you know that?”
Toby’s face looked more disappointed than when he’d dropped me off at Club Tentacle. “She smells like a chimney, kid. You really think people don’t notice?”
I didn’t know what I thought about Liv anymore.
“This cheek piece is driving me nuts,” Toby said. “You haven’t been stealing pieces, have you? That’s what your mom used to do, that way she could always finish the puzzle.”
“That’s so mean,” I said.
“Older sisters,” Toby said.
I plucked at my necklace and stared at the crossword. I didn’t wear the watch outside the house anymore, for fear of losing the emerald, which I couldn’t untangle, even though I’d tried everything: needles, mineral oil, baby powder. A website I’d looked at said I’d also need “patience (not pictured!),” which I found extremely condescending.
“What the heck is atoz?” I said. I’d been staring at that word for what felt like hours. It made no sense, but I couldn’t figure out which letter was wrong.
“What’s the clue?” asked Toby.
“‘The whole ball of wax.’”
“Oh,” he said. “Not atoz. A to Z. Three separate words. A phrase.”
I stared back at my own letters. Atoz. A to Z. What had been one word fractured into three. A different way of reading, seeing. Atoz. At Oz. Emerald City: a city of prisms so luminous you’d have to shield your eyes against it.
My brain skitter-stepped, crab-walked backward across an ocean floor, and surfaced to radiant, dazzling daylight.
“The blinding wall of white,” I said.
“Is that a lyric?” Toby said.
“No. Toby. Oh my God. Fidelia. The blinding wall of white. I thought she was talking about the blizzard, like, she was speaking metaphorically. Like, snow. But maybe she meant something else?”
“I don’t follow.”
I scrambled in my heap of crosswords and legal pads for her letter. Why was I so careless? Where was it? Why hadn’t I put it in a safer place—
Blinding wall of white
The whale
I watched his tail
The watch—2:48—not necessarily night—
“What if she was just talking about the sun? Or the sun on the water, or glare from snow, how bright it was…”
“So annoying when you leave your sunglasses behind on a sinking ship.”
“Oh my God. Steve and Trent. Steve and Trent!”
“Who? Are you having a stroke?”
I threw the printout ineffectually to Toby.
“‘Epic trip. Thank God we remembered our shades hashtag-brotime hashtag-theroadlesstraveledby hashtag-frostisdope?’ Who are these people, why are they dumb enough to be kayaking by Fabian’s Bluff, and why are they misquoting Robert Frost?”
“Fabian’s Bluff,” I repeated. “Fabian’s Bluff…”
Old Sow Whirlpool. The Desert of Maine. I scrambled for the training manual, flipping wildly to the section of Maine’s natural wonders. Fabian’s Bluff, limestone cliffs known to locals as “The Little Cliffs of Dover,” extend over a mile and rise nearly one hundred fifty feet above the ocean.
“We’ve been looking in the wrong place!”
“Why are you yelling?”
“Toby! The wreck! It’s not here! It’s there!” I said, pointing frantically at the printout.
“I don’t want to crush your dreams,” Toby said, “but Fabian’s Bluff is really far north of here. Those cliffs are up in Aguecheek Bay.”
“Where that Revolutionary War ship is?!”
“Again with the yelling.”
“It’s just too perfect! Of course the wreck is there! Oh my God, Toby! The whales! The feeding ground!”
“Ah, yes,” Toby said slowly, “the whales.”
“Toby,” I said. My voice was steady. “I know this makes no sense to you. It barely makes any sense to me. But just—look, could you give me a ride? I need to go to office hours.”
“Office hours? What professor have you been bothering?’
“No professor. Sorry. That’s not what I meant. I just need…I need to go talk to Liv.”
Ann Stone was happy to see me. She gave me a towel to blot at my rain-soaked clothes, and handed me a mug of golden tea to take upstairs to Liv, so spicy-sweet-smelling that even I wanted to drink it after I’d declined a cup.
Upstairs, Liv was tucked into bed with a copy of Charlotte’s Web, red hoodie up so that she was all face. She was wearing glasses, and beneath the lenses, her eyes seemed magnified. The warmth from the mug in my hands spread to places I’d never been aware of before, like where my neck met my brain, or the shallow beside my anklebone.
“I didn’t know you wore glasses,” I said.
She looked up, her eyes vacant, then scared. “What’re you doing here?”
“Bringing you tea. Can I sit with you?”
“Okay,” she said uneasily.
I perched on the edge of her twin bed, feet on the floor, feeling oddly like I was tucking her in. She set her book beside her and reached for a braid, but there was none.
“Who’s your favorite?” I asked.
“Charlotte. Yours?”
“Templeton.”
“He’s good, too.”
I handed her the tea, and our fingers brushed. I knew why we’d fought, I thought, but maybe I didn’t know everything.
“Liv, I’m so sorry,” I said.
“No, Violet, please. I was so mean. I keep replaying the things I said, and I was so drunk, and I was wrong. Of course you know what an anagram is! I mean, that’s not the point, obviously. Felix was so mad at me, too, that wasn’t my story to tell, I like used him, and it’s not a competition for who’s saddest….”