The Last True Poets of the Sea

by Julia Drake

  “You were upset,” I said. “Not to mention right. I wrote to Sam. A real letter. I am—ungrateful.”

  At that word, she winced, but I shook my head.

  “I needed to hear it,” I said.

  “I’m still sorry,” she said.

  I took a deep breath, considering whether I wanted to say more. It didn’t matter what I said, I decided.

  “I think you’re great, Liv.”

  “I think you’re great, too.”

  We stared at each other, the tea unspooling steam between us. My body was humming a low melody, familiar, like a song I’d maybe heard once. Only, I hadn’t heard this particular melody before. This wasn’t the romance channel. This was a new station with music so lovely, so frightening, so foreign, I hadn’t even known to search for its signal.

  “We’re friends, right?” she said, and the music was over.

  “If that’s what you want,” I said.

  She nodded too quick and my heart broke.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, actually,” she said, propping herself up against her headboard. I pretzeled my legs, feeling a whole lot less maternal. “I’ve been thinking so much about the apple. Cleft in two. It’s a little far-fetched, but I’ve been reading about these hidden orchards in London, a lot of them beneath hospital grounds, or psychiatric institutes from like that exact time period, so maybe Fidelia had an affair with the orchard owner….”

  “Liv, as much as I hate to crush your dreams, I really think their love might have just been love. Their letters are so boring.”

  “You found letters?”

  “A while ago,” I admitted.

  “You could’ve told me!”

  “I know! I’m telling you now! Liv. I think I know where the wreck is.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I do! I do! Listen. In her letters, Fidelia mentions a blinding wall of white. At first I thought she was talking about the blizzard, like being metaphoric. But what if she was speaking literally?”

  “I’m listening,” said Liv.

  “Okay. So I found this blog by these two dudes, and it got me thinking. Maybe the ship veered off course to avoid the blizzard, and wound up far north, near Aguecheek, near that Revolutionary War ship. And the white wasn’t snow, but limestone cliffs, Fabian’s Bluff, and it was too bright, like February, too, imagine the glare off the snow, so…I don’t know…it blinded the captain and he ran aground. Or not, the ship just sank in daylight for whatever reason, but still, Fidelia couldn’t see because it was so sunny!”

  “The cliffs as reverse lighthouse,” Liv murmured, and I wanted to kiss her, taste nicotine, bad breath, the aftertaste of tea I’d never tried.

  “It’s certainly poetic,” she admitted.

  “I think we should go up there,” I told her.

  “And what? Metal detect? I don’t think I have to remind you what happened the last time we tried to metal detect. Besides, it’s, like, weird up there. We used to camp there as kids. We stopped going because Will was convinced there were ghosts and he got so freaked out. Every year there’s some story about someone getting lost or drowning in the fog.”

  “The peculiar haze! How did you not mention this before?!”

  “Because you didn’t tell me about the letter! And didn’t you hear a word I said? People die. And what about the porthole at Seal Cove?”

  “Maybe everyone was just looking in the wrong spot,” I argued. “We should still go!”

  “Violet, your evidence hinges largely on a blog.”

  “So what! Why are you so obsessed with evidence anyway? People find stuff every day! There’s a sunken ship in Lake Michigan, d’you know that? A passenger galleon under a jetty on the Jersey Shore. A boat in the Connecticut River! Just this past week, there was this diver in Florida, nearby where my dad used to go with his parents, the guy found treasure from Spain from the 1700s! There’s all this stuff out there!”

  “Yes, and don’t forget THE FOURTEEN HUMAN FEET that have washed up in the Pacific Northwest over the past few years! There are bodies, Violet, people hacked up into tiny pieces! Not everything you find in the ocean is sparkles and rainbows!”

  I was breathing very hard. So was she. Downstairs I heard a sink running, Ann calling to Tom over the noise of water. I wondered what Will’s voice had sounded like, calling from room to room.

  “Rationally speaking,” Liv said, and I wanted to punch rationality in its stupid fucking face, “even if the ship were there, you think Fidelia would’ve made it all the way from Aguecheek to Lyric, post-shipwreck, frozen, 1895, no roads, all wilderness? People get hypothermic from this weather.”

  I stared out the window at the pelting rain. Liv slurped her tea. She was so frustrating. This whole thing was so frustrating. Why did I even care about a shipwreck, anyway?

  “You know what? Fuck Fidelia,” I said.

  “That escalated quickly,” said Liv.

  “I don’t even understand why she felt compelled to tell people she survived this wreck! She was planning on hiding. But she didn’t. She could have just lived her whole life as someone else, and then her descendants could have been totally normal. Instead of cursed with a shipwreck gene.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a bit dramatic?”

  “I think I should quit.”

  “Violet, this is research. It’s boring a lot of the time. Walls and giving up are part of it. Then you reroute. You try a new approach. Do you think Orion built that boat in a day? Do you think he knew what he was doing every step of the way? Definitely not. But he chose to keep going.”

  “Orion showed you the boat?” I said.

  Liv shrank a little, hiding behind her mug. “We went out in the boat, actually.”

  I pictured them, Little Mermaid–style, floating in a blue lagoon. Knowing Orion, he’d probably conjured four fruit-colored moons for the occasion and trained a team of eels in matching swim caps to perform a water ballet. Few girls, a moron once said, would be able to resist a boat.

  “It was nice,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “I’m—I’m trying to think of how to say this to you, Violet. Orion and I are friends. More than friends. I know I spent a lot of time saying I didn’t want him…”

  Well. Shit.

  “…and I still don’t…”

  Oh my God. Ohmigod.

  “…so if there’s anything going on…”

  This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t happening. Could it be happening?

  “…between you and him, you should let that happen. I don’t mind, at all. I want him to be happy. You too. And I think he likes you.”

  “Oh.” That was how she felt toward me: apathetic.

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “Don’t quit looking for the wreck,” Liv said. “Not if you’re invested. Choosing to try is all there is sometimes.”

  “But you won’t try,” I said.

  “I need more to go on before I get in a car and spend money on gas and drive into the wilderness,” Liv said. “Plus, I promised my parents I’d help them clean this weekend.”

  There were so many things I could say. Please. It’ll be fun. It’s not that dangerous, it’s not that far. We might find something cool. Hadn’t you felt what I felt, in that closet, looking at that strand of corn silk? I want to grow clammy and sweaty and panting with you on this bed, broad daylight, touch you, taste you, then tuck us in and read to you from Charlotte’s Web with your head on my chest, and I’ll even do the characters’ voices.

  “Cleaning can be really satisfying,” I said carefully.

  “It is,” she said, and I swore I caught a hint of ruefulness in her voice. “You can still go, you know. Without me. I bet Orion would take you.”

  “You know I want to find the wreck for Sam,” I said weakly.

  “I don’t think you need to find a shipwreck to show your brother you care about him,” she said. “But keep at it. If you have something real, the universe will start givin
g you gifts.”

  “You sound like Felix.”

  “That’s because it’s some dumb thing he told me once. But dumb things are comforting. Like, here, take this. Felix gave it to me once upon a time. Maybe it’ll bring you luck.”

  She twisted the purple ring off her finger and handed it to me, like a fashionable consolation prize.

  The first thing Orion said to me the next day was: “Liv said you found the ship!”

  I was up in the break room, putting finishing touches on the cardboard submarine. I’d gotten there super early, and made good progress—I’d started painting on an intricate control panel, red buttons, and levers. I’d tried to make it clumsy, like Ransome’s drawings, but more likely it’d just look sloppy. I hoped no one would come to the show.

  “Holy shit,” said Orion, “you’re almost done with the sub! You’re like me with the boat!”

  “Ha,” I said weakly. Liv’s ring was clunky on my finger, and it hurt to look at, but I couldn’t take it off. He didn’t know what we had in common.

  “So this means you’re friends again, right? And we’re gonna go up there?” said Orion.

  “Liv has to help her parents clean. And I’m not even sure I found it.”

  “Yeah, her parents need her around sometimes. But we can still go, you and I. And Felix and Mariah. We can take the boat, even—that was the whole point of building the boat. For adventure times. We can think of it as like a musical brainstorming retreat….”

  “I dunno, Orion. My theory’s pretty shaky. Plus, Liv told me all this stuff about severed feet….”

  “I mean, we don’t even need to look for the wreck if you don’t want. You’ve barely seen anything besides Lyric. Aguecheek’s so cool, it’s like wild, and edge-of-the-earthy….”

  “Liv made it sound kind of creepy,” I said.

  “Liv is terrified of anything that doesn’t involve TV or books,” Orion said, and I really liked that about her, I realized. “Seriously. Why not? Isn’t this what you wanted the whole time? To find this wreck?”

  He was so game, so eager. I twisted the ring on my finger, looked at the ring on his inner arm. He had a point. Why was I making this so hard? What had Felix said? These things only have meaning if we grant them meaning. I wanted to find the ship for Sam, and that was that.

  What did it matter how I got there?

  “Sure. We’ll go,” I said simply, and Orion smiled like I’d just solved climate change.

  to: samuel.alan.larkin@mail.com

  from: violet.rudolph.larkin@mail.com

  Sam,

  I thought I’d be more excited to write this. Basically: I think I found the Lyric. And we’re going, this weekend. Mariah’s got a plan to get pirate rum, and Felix’s threatening to make us glitter eye patches, and Orion’s been working on a secret mixtape all week. It has all the makings of a Cousteau-ian deep-sea-diver ADVENTURE.

  But Liv’s not coming. Neither are you.

  I’m still excited, I guess, and I’m trying not be ungrateful. This is what I wanted all along. But, I don’t know. I just wish you were here. Wreck hunting’s ours. It always has been. I don’t think that’ll ever change.

  I miss you a lot.

  Violet

  GOOD SIGNS

  July turned to August, and those first days of the new month spooled away in a haze of fish songs and wreck dreams. The Friday night before we left for Aguecheek Bay was cold, but I was down on the dock texting my mom. I was wearing Marine Mingle, Toby’s windbreaker, and I’d brought a blanket down from inside, but it was the only place I got service. We’d added my dad to the thread, and I was just about to add Sam when a new number popped up: Where r u Im at ur house its Liv Orion gave me ur number

  Backyard dock, I typed. Why was she here?

  She came over the hill carrying a milk crate, flip-flops smacking on her heels, arms and legs totally bare. She must have been freezing.

  “You text worse than my mom,” I called, standing up.

  “I found you, didn’t I?” she said.

  “Aren’t you cold?”

  “Not really.” Her flip-flops were fuchsia, with a big cloth sunflower where plastic ribbons met over her toes.

  “I like your shoes,” I said.

  “They’re my mom’s,” she said, and set the crate down between us. “Okay, so you’re not going to believe this, but I went to the Missing Piece with my dad today, and look at all the shit we found.”

  She pulled out a pair of tattered wet suits, an enormous floodlight, and a few sets of extra-long snorkels.

  “This is an underwater floodlight, it was broken, but my dad got it working again, and this is an underwater camera—the only thing I could think was that someone gave up free-diving recently. I mean, we’re not qualified to free-dive, obviously, but maybe one day…”

  What was she doing here?

  “Wait,” I said, “you’re coming now?”

  “Yeah. If that’s okay? It just seemed like a sign.”

  I more tackled her than hugged her, wrapping the scratchy-soft blanket around us both. Maybe this was a sign for her, and it was a sign for me, too, and I’d count them…five seemed like a good number. Five, and then I’d tell her.

  “Ow, yes, hi, thank you, ow.” She extracted an arm and patted me gingerly, passionlessly on the shoulder.

  “One more thing. I got you this, too.”

  Good sign one: a present.

  She handed me a photograph from her pocket where she usually kept her cigarette butts. I looked at a woman in black and white. She was in the ocean, wearing a sort of white hazmat or space suit, holding on to a barrel.

  “Ama pearl divers, Japan, you see, earliest recorded in 700. Literally it means ‘women of the sea.’ We have to go visit, one day….”

  Good sign two: a trip being planned years in advance.

  “They hunt on the sea ground for abalone and seaweed and urchins in order to feed their villages. Women supposedly did it because they have a higher percentage of body fat that kept them warm, and they used to dive naked….”

  Nudity was definitely good sign three. They’d piled up so quickly. We were almost there.

  “They started using wet suits in 1964, all because of this pearl tycoon, but that’s a different story. They learn to dive when they’re fifteen. Isn’t that incredible? They reminded me of you. Well, us, I guess.”

  Good sign four. What would I say, though? I’d use my words, like a grown-up. I like you. I’d like to kiss you, but I’m afraid that’s not what you want. The woman in the photograph was smiling so big. Fireflies were twinkling around us. Could that be the fifth good sign? No. That was cheating.

  “How do you retain all that?” I asked.

  “That’s just reading. What you do? Singing. Dancing. I can’t stop thinking about you singing the other night. I know I flipped out, but you have a really good voice, Violet.” She paused. “Orion won’t stop talking about you.”

  It would have been the last good sign, but her mentioning Orion felt like a setback. I’d have to subtract one. So we were at what now? Four? Or three?

  “Liv,” I said, “can we not talk about Orion for one minute?”

  “Okay. I’ll time us.”

  She looked at her watch. It had a plain black band and a white face. How had I never noticed this watch before? It was a good cheap watch. Two black hands quietly ticked round and round. The watch was a little big for her; there was space between her wrist and the plastic. Space enough for me to slip two fingers there, and hook them around the band of the watch. Which is exactly what I did.

  Her pulse quickened.

  My pulse quickened.

  I kept my fingers there, hooked around her watch.

  Fuck the signs.

  I pulled her toward me, and then, finally, finally: I kissed her.

  Kissed. Kissed, kissed, kissed.

  I kissed her kissed her and I thought I’m kissing her and then I realized she was kissing me, like, OH MY GOD SHE WAS KISSING ME BA
CK, the fullness of her lips, the slight taste of cigarettes, smoke and fire catching in my ankles, her hand pressed against my jaw, so I pressed my hand against her jaw and her skin bumped like the seafloor under my fingers, what was this, what were we, an eel that’d just grown legs, walked on land after spending our whole life in a dark reef? A mermaid who’d traded her voice and soul for this? For the scrape of her teeth on my lower lip and the slight push of her tongue, worth it, holy fuck, so worth it, no voice for her mouth, her mouth, her mouth, we were bacteria crawling from primordial ooze, now we had soft blanket bee fur, just like I wanted this whole time and knew but I didn’t, not even a little bit—just as long as it never stopped—

  A foghorn blared far off. The ocean lapped at the rocks; a ghost crab scuttled across the sand yards away. Clams breathed bubbles beneath the sand, and I swear I heard a firefly shuffle his wings. Liv pulled away and tectonic plates moved beneath us; under miles of ocean, the seafloor split.

  My fingers were still threaded through her watch and her skin, and I was only now realizing that her hand was wrapped hot around my hip, it was a wonder my hip bone didn’t blast to smithereens from the shock, and this close up, I couldn’t tell if I was looking at her nose or my nose or both our noses layered together. She moved back and her face sharpened into focus, and I looked into the world’s only satisfying fun-house mirror. Liv. Mine.

  How has this taken so long? I thought.

  “How has this taken so long?” she said.

  I ran my fingers over her lips. I thought of the arch of her foot and the zip of her thigh and her smell. I thought about kissing her again, and kissing her just now. Liv stared at me, quaking and gentle and bewildered and dumbstruck. She tucked her fingers through my belt loops and tugged, nervous.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I thought you liked Orion.” She laughed. “I’m so stupid! That’s all. Just. Very. Very. Stupid.”