by Julia Drake
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I just feel confused,” Orion said. “Like I told you all about Liv…and Will…and Louise and whale songs…and love…I mean, Jesus, Violet, you know practically everything about me. Do you think I have those conversations with everyone I meet? I mean—you’re special, obviously.”
I looked quickly at the ground. I wasn’t special. I was lying to him. There was an oil splash on the pavement by my feet: iridescent, amorphous. If I touched it with my toe, maybe I’d mutate, hideous, repellent. He’d see what I really was.
“Look, I’m not trying to pressure you into sharing your deepest, darkest secrets. Sometimes I just feel like…you keep me on the outside on purpose. You obviously have all this stuff going on…like, your panic attack, and freaking out that day at the aquarium…You can tell me. Didn’t you think we were getting close? Or was that just me?”
“Not just you,” I said dumbly. Maybe I didn’t want to kiss Orion anymore, but he was right: we had gotten close. Or he’d gotten close to me. I’d gotten close to Liv.
“Violet, I really didn’t have plans to say this to you now, here….”
That tone of voice: it was the death knell.
“But sometimes I think you should just say these things when you feel them….”
Stop. No.
“I really like you.”
My heart fell from my body and hit the pavement hard. The muscle, beating outside my body, meaty and gross, more beautiful than the oil spill. Electrical. Liv’s.
“I freaked you out in the nivation hollow, I know. I freaked myself out. But this is different. And I know this is a lot, and not the right time, it smells like gasoline and we’re about to get back in the van, but I had to say something before I exploded.”
“I know the feeling,” I said, because I did.
“You do,” he said, altogether too-relieved, and what could I do, correct him? He was my musical soul mate. I didn’t want to hurt him.
Liv and Sam emerged from the store wearing new hats, practically skipping with good fortune. Hers was a teal beanie embroidered with a pink moose and topped with a pink pom-pom, and his was a foam trucker hat that said THE PINE TREE STATE. The neediest, most scrabbling part of me hoped they’d gotten one for me.
“I know you don’t want to be with anyone right now,” Orion said, “so I really don’t expect anything, really, but…do you think you and I could ever…?”
They posed by the bait-and-tackle sign with their new hats, and Sam snapped picture after picture. How hard was it to say no to Orion? I want to be your friend, nothing more. Why did people have to get hurt? Why did I have to hurt him?
“I’m not sure I can think about this right now,” I said.
He nodded, falsely stoic. I’d softened my answer, but I still hadn’t said what he wanted to hear. I watched Sam and Liv horse around and I just wanted everyone to have a silly new hat and a fucking happy ending, Orion included.
“But maybe when I’m a gnarled old hag,” I said.
“I’ll carve you a cane,” he said back, so warmly that I knew instantly I’d made a mistake.
I couldn’t blame him and I couldn’t blame the shipwreck gene either. This looming disaster was all mine.
Our campground was deserted, at the end of a ribboned, unmarked gravel road and on the edge of the pine-dense, definitely haunted forest. The ocean lay just through the woods, but the fog was so thick we could barely see two feet in front of us. Birds sounded through the trees, and I imagined them fanged, the size of koalas. I felt the way I’d felt at my first six sleepovers, when I’d cried so hard that my parents had to come pick me up in the middle of the night. I wanted the aquarium and Toby and my own bed. I wished we were doing the puzzle with Liv and Sam. Why did adventures have to happen away from home? Couldn’t the puzzle be an adventure, too?
“It’s so peaceful here with the fog,” said Sam.
“You’re a forest bather, aren’t you?” said Felix. “Oooooh, we should go skinny-dipping later.”
I stole a glance at Liv, but she was looking at the trees.
“God, it’s bizarre being back here,” said Liv. Of course: she was thinking of her brother. What was wrong with me, that I didn’t know that?
“I think Will’d be happy we came back, don’t you? You’re, like, conquering his fears for him,” said Orion, and I was amazed how he could do that, just let him into the woods with us.
A cave cleared in the fog, revealing a pair of middle-aged white folks, already set up with tents and a Coleman stove and two kayaks leaning against trees. The woman waved brusquely, but the man just glared. They were clearly not happy about the company of six teenagers.
“Should we tell them we’re mellow?” Felix whispered.
“Mellow but rowdy,” Mariah said, waving a bottle of rum in our direction. “Yo, ho, ho.”
“Yolo, ho,” Felix said, and Mariah kicked him in the calf.
I turned my phone on, just to see. No service. It was just a weekend. We’d be back tomorrow. These were my friends. I missed my parents. I felt so homesick. I understood Sam’s impulse to run, to just get away.
Liv pointed toward an opening in the trees past the kayakers’ camp.
“You can’t see it now, but there’s a path. Take it to the right, and you’ll follow a trail that’ll take you to the good lookout spot. You’ll finally be able to see that Revolutionary War ship, Violet.”
I tried to cling to this perk: a pebble, I thought, this Halley’s Comet ship, this hike with Liv and Sam.
“You’re going to come with us, right?” Sam asked Liv.
She shook her head. “I’ve seen them. And you’ve seen me hike, Violet, I’m a nightmare.”
She didn’t want to come. Had she changed her mind about me? She said it’d been real, but maybe she was lying. I lied all the time.…Maybe she’d seen I was a liar, and saw now that I was near tears for no reason, she saw what a baby I was, that I was ugly, a bad kisser, too much too fast—
“Lemme pee first,” Sam said.
“Don’t wander off,” I called as he trekked off into the woods, and he flipped me the bird.
“You two are so cute,” Mariah said, going to help Orion and Felix with the tents.
The fog thickened again, so densely that I was alone with Liv. She doesn’t like you. You’re a bad sister. A bad friend. The voices of the Ghost Coast were so mean.
“You’re really not coming?” I said.
“You two should go. He came here to see you.”
“I know…but…”
“Violet? You’re so sad. What’s going on? Don’t you think it’d be good for the two of you to have some together time?”
She furrowed her brow. She smelled like smoke, even though I hadn’t seen her light up all day.
“I do,” I said. “But…”
“But?”
“But this morning was a nightmare before you got there. Plus…”
“Plus what?”
“He likes you more,” I said, barely able to say it.
“Violet,” Liv said. “He came here to see you.”
“I know…but…you have matching hats.”
She took the hat from her head and fixed it on mine, one hand lingering on my cheek, the other tugging on the zip of Toby’s windbreaker. A charm of hummingbirds beat their wings against my throat.
“Violet. It’s just a hat. It’s easy for me because I’m new, so I don’t know him the way you do. But you’re his sister. We’re all on the same team. This isn’t a competition,” she said. “Love isn’t finite.”
I nodded. The hat was cozy and smelled like her hair, and muffled the voices of the ghosts.
“Just go with him,” she said. “Trust me, he wants you right now. It’s a short walk, and I’ll be here when you get back, promise.”
In the fog, she kissed me once, very quickly, and it felt like courage.
In the forest, the air was wet and the trees were giants. The higher Sam and I climbed
, the more the path became a cliff walk: the land on our left fell completely away, a sheer drop to the ocean. The path was steep, but it’d be worth it, I knew, to see the Revolutionary War ship, the ship that came and went like an eclipse.
“Are you and Liv in love?” Sam asked suddenly. “Sorry. Is that too personal?”
I gulped pine air. Here, among the trees, it was easier not to bristle. “It’s different with Liv. We talk, for starters.”
“I like her.”
“Thanks.”
We were quiet again. Sam’s breathing was labored. Had he eaten anything today besides sugar and coffee? I should have been keeping better track.
“I read your musical,” Sam said, slightly winded. “Cousteau!”
“I told you not to!”
“Um, no, you said I could, remember? Anyway, you were never going to show me. You’re so private.”
“I’m not private.”
“Yes, you are, Violet. You don’t say half the stuff you’re thinking. You’re so introverted. You’ve got all these secrets.”
“I’m not introverted. Mom says I take up space.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Think about how tired and weird and sad you are right now after being trapped in a car with your loud friends. We’re more alike than you think, you know.”
Had Sam always been this perceptive, or was I just that obvious?
“You should keep working on Cousteau! It was funny,” he said.
“You should help me. You’ve actually finished Diving for Sunken Treasure.”
“You didn’t finish it?”
“When have I ever finished anything?”
“I don’t understand how you passed ninth-grade English,” he said.
“Do they find any treasure?”
“Not really. Mostly junk.” Classic.
The trees thinned, and the trail opened up to a lookout over the bay. At the edge of the clearing, there was a bench made of great stone slabs, and Sam and I stood there to look out over the water. The fog was clearing, revealing a stretch of islands that peppered the bay, each with its own set of cliffs and craggy coastline. Across bands and bands of blue water, way off in the distance, rose the white limestone cliffs of Fabian’s Bluff.
My heart sank. This bay was enormous. There were so many islands, so many hiding spots. There was no way we’d find the Lyric in all this ocean.
“Are those the wrecks Liv was talking about?” Sam said, pointing down the beach to an old tugboat, a dirty red-rusted thing sprayed with pink graffiti. Even this beach had so many hiding spots—the coastline curled and dipped, disappeared into pockets of rocks, and unfurled, creating a series of hidden coves and inlets.
“Revolutionary War era, remember?”
“Not the tugboat. In front.”
“Next to the driftwood?”
“No—I’m saying the boat is the driftwood.”
I pulled out the opera specs from my pocket, the ones I’d found that night at Seal Cove. The picture was cloudy, the glass badly scratched. It didn’t look like a ship. It looked like a set of stumps, rising from the sand like a huge set of rotting, gaping teeth. Time had worn the vessel down to its nubbins.
I’m not sure what I’d been imagining. Maybe in the back of my brain I thought the ships would move: like after all this time, they’d plow through the sand, like great ghost ships.
I felt so silly.
Of course these wrecks weren’t magic. Of course the Lyric wouldn’t be, either.
Finding the Lyric wouldn’t fix Sam and me. We were going to take more than that. I’d known it all along, hadn’t I? I was just afraid to really know what that meant. Afraid to know, because knowing meant work.
“Kind of a letdown,” I said.
“Really? I think they’re cool,” Sam said, taking the binoculars from me.
“On the way back into town, we can ask Orion to stop up close,” I said.
At the mention of town, Sam hopped from the bench. Long grasses grew on the edge of the outcropping and he picked a few, then began to braid the sticky threads together. The wind blew and ruffled his hair. His skin was pink from the hike. My parents told us they loved us all the time, but I didn’t know if Sam and I had ever said it to each other. I love you, Sam. Why did that feel so hard?
“Wrist, please,” Sam said. He tied the grass braid in a gentle, loose knot around my wrist. A tiny beetle crawled along one of the fronds, then toward the crook of my elbow.
“Make one for yourself, too,” I said.
When he finished the second one, I helped tie the bracelet around his wrist. His veins were exceptionally blue under his skin. I shivered, thinking about how thin his skin was there.
“Perfect,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” Sam said, twirling his bracelet. “I know we’re both pretending it’s fine. I’m fine. But everything’s a mess. Everything will only ever be a mess.”
“It’ll be okay, Sam.”
“No. No, it won’t. Stop saying that. You don’t understand, Violet. You’re good at things. You’re funny and tall. You make friends wherever you go! I couldn’t even make friends with the other lunatics.”
“You’re not a lunatic.”
“You just pull it off. Living. Two months here and you have a girlfriend.”
“Dating doesn’t matter.”
“Dating does matter! It’s insulting to say it doesn’t. Normal people date. Normal people go to high school. Normal people grow up. Can you even imagine me as an adult? What would I even be like?”
“No one knows what they’ll be like.”
“It’s different.” He shook his head. “All I see in my future is being this way. Forever.”
My heart went weak and heavy. For the first time, I felt the weight of my brother’s sadness in my own chest. He was a jellyfish being asked to float on land. Maybe life, for him, would always be hard. Maybe I couldn’t argue.
“Sometimes I wish Fidelia hadn’t made it,” he said. “Maybe if she’d drowned, everyone would have been saved a lot of trouble.”
“Sam.” I wouldn’t say the right thing. I couldn’t ever say the right thing, because the right thing didn’t exist. All that mattered was that I said something. That I kept trying.
“I used to think shipwrecks were a recessive gene. Like Mom and Dad were always talking about making it and perseverance.”
“We’re descended from survivors,” Sam said, pitching his voice in a perfect imitation of Dad’s. For a second, he was him, minus the glasses. We were all so painfully, beautifully related.
“Thanks, Finance,” I said. “I never saw it that way, though. I thought we’d inherited disaster. That we were cursed.”
“And this summer showed you that we weren’t?”
“No, I think maybe we are cursed! Seriously. But, like, maybe a curse doesn’t always have to be bad? Maybe it’s, like, a promise in disguise. Because that other stuff—luck, perseverance—that’s in there, too.”
Neither of us spoke. Maybe that was okay. Maybe listening was a way of trying.
“Everyone has thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents,” said Sam at last.
“What?”
“It’s exponential growth. Four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen, thirty-two. Fidelia’s just one of thirty-two great-great-greats.”
I tried to branch out the tree in my head, splitting and splitting from both our parents. Who knows what our great-great-great-grandparents on Dad’s side were like? We were made up of so many people.
“That’s insane,” I said eventually.
“It is,” Sam agreed.
There was quiet again. I tried to listen for the voices of the Ghost Coast, but I heard nothing. Just me and Sam breathing, and the sounds of waves. Fidelia had heard these same sounds. She’d pulled herself from this very ocean on this very beach and then walked, in the cold, all the way to Lyric.
“Sometimes,” I said, “I think what’s amazing is not that Fidelia survived, but that s
he chose to tell people.”
Sam said nothing.
“I think she was intending on keeping it a secret. But then—she changed her mind. Who knows what it was, or why, but she chose. She didn’t want to be a normal person. She wanted to be a person who survived a shipwreck. She chose: that was the story she wanted. You’re a person who can choose.”
“I don’t just get to pick to feel better,” Sam said.
“Of course not. We’re all sorts of DNA and bad genetics and scrambled shit in there, too. But I’m saying our choices matter. Choosing to try…that’s not a small thing.” I grabbed him by the shoulder, strange and strained, but necessary.
“Sam, the world is a big place. There’s space for you in it.”
He gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. He’d been crying. We both had.
“I’m glad you survived. Now you just have to keep surviving.”
It was the first time I’d said survival aloud. Sam had survived. He’d survived, and I’d survived, too. Now we would survive together.
The fog had rolled back in, obscuring the bay with clouds.
“You think we’ll find the Lyric?” I asked.
Sam pursed his lips. “Well. Our equipment seems a bit out-of-date.”
I couldn’t help laughing. He’d answered me seriously, but the whole idea was so incredibly absurd: that our floodlight and pocket watch and snorkels would successfully guide us beneath the ocean to a wreck that’d been hidden for more than a century. So I laughed, and then he did, too: a beautiful, looping cursive of a laugh. I loved that noise. So much time had passed since I’d heard it. We laughed until we were punchy and our stomachs hurt. A moment passed where we were just breathing, inhaling and exhaling together, hiccuping, wiping our eyes with the backs of our hands.
“You asked earlier about Cousteau,” Sam said finally. “What they find.”
“Go on.”
“He’s not even interested in the treasure. The whole point is the adventure. At least, for his crew, that’s the point. The last true poets of the sea, he calls them. People for whom discovery—like, the concept of the journey—is the treasure itself.”
“The quest,” I said.
“If you want to be dramatic about it.”