by Julia Drake
“I’ll go with you,” she said, putting her hand in mine. “Orion,” she called. “Orion. Orion.”
Orion turned his gaze toward me and Liv, and she didn’t let go of my hand.
“We need to take the boat,” Liv said. “Sam’s gone. To the ocean.”
Orion’s gaze flicked between the two of us, down to our gripped hands, back to our faces. His expression went from puzzled to blank, and then, in the flat light of the moon, I watched a wave of understanding wash over him. The hurt on his face made me think of newly unpeeled fruit, raw and tender.
He opened his mouth—and then, simply, he nodded.
“I’ll go with you. The boat’s still on the beach. Liv, get the floodlight and the life vests from the van. Violet, help me with these oars. We’ll bring them just in case. We’ll lift on three and then through the woods, okay? One…”
The man was shaking his head violently. “You kids can’t go out there—it’s dark, and dangerous—”
“Two…”
“What’s going on?” said Mariah, pulling off her sleep mask.
“Three,” he said.
Of all the ways I’d imagined Orion learning that Liv and I were together, I’d never predicted this. I’d underestimated him, and I was ashamed.
He was a good person. A good friend. I’d been ungrateful for that friendship, and now there was no time to explain.
The wind had picked up during the night, and the bay had turned so angry that the dinghy threatened to tip at any moment. Waves socked the sides of the boat. We were soaked in an instant. I held the floodlight in front, and its beam faltered through the gray light. We could hardly see for the wind and the spray. Liv shivered beside me, but I hardly felt the cold. The three of us had life jackets, but I wasn’t sure Sam did. He was a good swimmer, but the ocean was unfathomably large, the water beneath us blacker than black. If the kayak tipped…
Liv put her hand on my shoulder. Her face frozen with worry, braids undone, hair plastered against her forehead. She yelled to me over the noise of motor and surf. I understood that her mouth was forming the words, that she was telling me he’d be okay, but I felt only fear.
A horrible thought occurred to me: What if Sam wasn’t just looking for the wreck? What if he was trying to join it?
“Can we go any faster?” I shouted, turning back toward Orion.
“We don’t know what’s out here,” Orion called from the stern. “Plenty of rocks to snag us.”
“We’ll get there,” Liv said. “We are getting there. Look.”
She pointed. The whale-shaped rock was closer than it’d been just moments ago, stretching taller and taller into the lightening sky. I craned my neck to see its full reach. The binoculars hadn’t even begun to convey just how formidable these rocks were, this backward moat: in the pockets between the boulders, waves crashed and churned, forming a series of aqua eddies hungry for small ships. Getting past them would require deft navigation, and once we passed the rock barrier, we were in open ocean. In a dinghy that was filling up quickly with salt water.
To find the wreck of the Lyric was to invite another.
A wave crashed into us, and the boat pitched wildly; Orion grabbed the straps of Liv’s life vest to keep her from tumbling out. There was a horrible sound that sounded like scraping. The early morning smelled like gasoline. The spray from the rocks and wind lashed my face, and I strained to see beyond the whale-shaped rock, to the ocean, to just ocean.
“Keep going. We’ve got to get past those rocks.”
Orion kept one hand on the motor, trying to steady us in the waves. “Vi. What you’re seeing—that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many rocks you can’t see below us. We’ll get snagged for sure.”
“We don’t even know he’s here,” Liv said. Her voice was as gentle as it could be against the noise. “We don’t even know he took the kayak.”
“If he did he probably got scared and turned around,” Orion said.
“We’ve got to go back,” Liv said, and I could hear how her voice had changed, turned pleading, desperate. “It’s not safe.”
“Violet,” Orion said. “The boat’s not meant for this.”
No one understood: Sam wanted to undo all the surviving we’d managed, all the way back to Fidelia. I held the underwater floodlight steady, and traced my eyes along the length of its beam, scanning the black ocean beyond the rocks. They needed to go back. But I couldn’t. My feet were anchors.
“Violet,” Liv called.
“Violet,” Orion repeated, louder.
“Stop saying my name like that! What if my brother’s there? What if—”
That’s when I spotted it, in the beam of light: a vessel floating beyond the rock barrier. A flash of yellow. Then it disappeared, subsumed by the waves. The stolen kayak had tipped, emptied of its thief.
Without even deciding to jump, I was in the air. Then the water went over my head with a cold, sharp slap.
Underwater, I was blind. The current wrenched me in every direction, tumbled me under and up and over. I was a strong swimmer, I’d escaped riptides, I had a life vest, but I had no breath, and which way was up, and all I could do was hug the light to my chest and hope. My shin was sliced; my head was knocked, banged, split; my forehead burst with pain. I flailed and surfaced and gasped, before a huge swell swept me under again.
How had Fidelia survived this? How would Sam?
Beneath the waves, my ears filled with black noise, horrible engines of water in a torment around me. The world had turned all to water, loud, angry water—
Then there was a different noise, small but distinct. I could scarcely hear it at first: it whined and scratched across an underwater frequency, piercing the rush. It was a voice. Not human, but a whale song of a voice that spoke to me through the water, ancient and creaking and primal. It wasn’t language, exactly, but the meaning was as clear as if I’d thought of it myself:
Kick, the voice said.
I kicked. My feet were flippers, and I imagined I was Fidelia, pulling herself through the cold. I kicked, and kicked, and kicked, and then, even though I hadn’t known which direction was up, I surfaced.
The water was calmer, here, and it took me a moment to realize why—I’d passed beyond the rock barrier. I was on the other side of the whale-shaped rock.
I squinted against the salt, searching for my friends, but I couldn’t see beyond the rocks anymore.
There was nothing to do now but kick, swim away from the rocks, toward where I’d last seen the kayak. In all this ocean, I hardly even knew where that was.
I swam.
My body stung with cold. My lungs felt squeezed in an enormous fist, and I kicked uselessly. The water was deepening below me, I felt it, and I knew the continental shelf had fallen off. My heart took flight, battered its wings against my throat. As a child, I never swam out too far for fear that a fish or worse was lurking out there, waiting to gobble me up, and that same sensation swept through me now.
My body understood before I did. Something was there. A presence. Solid.
I ducked below the surface and shone the light below me. Through the heavy curtain of salt and dark I saw a slow, ominous form take shape.
The wreck.
I’d have to swim down there to find Sam.
My life jacket buoyed me back to the surface. I’d have to take it off to get deeper.
I unbuckled it and shimmied my shoulders loose. The jacket bobbed slowly away from me, and as I watched it ebb, I grew tiny and scrabbling, feeble and squeaking. My legs pedaled furiously below the surface.
I took a deep, deep breath, and ducked back beneath the waves.
Don’t, I heard.
The water was crushing, dark, dangerously cold. I ignored the whale-song voice and swam deeper. The currents seemed to help pull me down. They rushed together like a great slide, shuttling me deeper and deeper to the shape that I’d seen. It was coming into focus in the beam of my floodlight: a mast, cracked in half, an
d beneath that, a mossy deck.
Sam, Sam, are you here? I wanted to scream, to cry out—
My vision was blackening—the pressure was cracking my head open, there was a whining between my ears—how did these currents rush me so deep so quickly?—I couldn’t swim toward the surface, now, if I tried….
The whale-song voice was speaking again: Forget the wreck. Look up.
I fought against the current, corkscrewed the whole of me, shone the beam toward the surface. Above me, a form slipped like a seal, and in the beam of my light, there was a radiant sparkle of silver.
The pocket watch. Fidelia’s. Sam’s. He’d been wearing it.
Swim up, said the whale-song voice.
I tried, but the current was dragging me toward the wreck. There was no way out: I was trapped in an underwater vortex and running out of air. The ocean was too much. The wreck wanted me. I didn’t have the strength to try.
Drop the light. Swim up.
The light.
Drop it.
Swim!
I let the light fall, and struggled against the rush—
I was so tired, my body was giving out, my lungs were collapsing, the pull was too strong, everything around me squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until a single word vibrated within me:
Up.
I kicked with all my might, and popped free of the current. I was loose, suddenly, swimming up, toward the silver glimmer in the water. Was it Sam? Everything was spangled now, spots dancing in front of my eyes—was I drowning?—I needed to breathe so badly, but something else was coming into view and I was so close to the surface—
UP.
I was so near to the surface, and the shape looked almost human—was it someone I knew? They looked so familiar—I reached out my hand—
The whale-song voice overtook me, until there was only buzzing.
I was coughing. More than coughing. Vomiting. Heaving. Salt water tore at my throat. A hand pummeled me on the back; something long and black, like a bootlace, slithered up my throat. I coughed onto the sand, and I swear an eye looked back at me, white and jellied as a pearl onion.
“Oh God,” someone was saying, “oh God, oh God, oh God.”
I hacked up bile and salt and sand. My throat burned. I was alive. Was I dying? I’d died. This was how people died. There was a pile of sea stuff in front of me. Sea stuff that had been inside my stomach, now on the black sand. My face hurt. My body hurt. The tide rushed beneath me and I retched again. Someone thumped a hand between my shoulder blades.
“Violet, Violet—” the voice said. “Are you okay? Can you sit up? I just wanted to see it for myself—I thought I could make it back before morning—I thought I could give the kayak back, but it was so windy, and so dark, I forgot the light, so I thought I’d just stay by the rocks—I’m so, so sorry, I just wasn’t thinking—”
Sam, leaning over me, eyes rimmed with salt, skin angry from the thrashing waves. Sam, alive. I touched the side of his head, and he touched mine. When he pulled away, his fingers were dark with blood. He hid them, like he didn’t want me to see.
I spoke. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know. A sandbar. I saw you, out in the water, and you floated this way—I just swam to you, I still had the life vest on—”
“I heard a voice. A whale song. Speaking.”
Sam nodded. “Telling you to swim up?”
“How did you…”
“I heard the same thing. Why weren’t you wearing a life vest? Why aren’t you?”
Fog closed around my brother’s wet face: or was that just me, drifting away? The world spangled. God, I was so dizzy. Everything was buzzing, and shapes were going cloudy. I heard a voice again, words buzzing not from the ocean, but from deep inside me: Him, her, a whale, you, what does it matter? You both saw the wreck, and you both swam up.
TRAVELING MUSIC
A show in progress. A story unfolding. The theater goes dark for a scene change.
The orchestra, though, continues to play. A riff on the show’s dominant melody fills the house—somber or suspenseful or sweepingly romantic—and the tone of the next scene starts there, with the music. In the dark, the crew storms the stage, scurrying to place props and flip panels with the authority of blind, tunnel-dwelling mammals, creatures that know their way home by feel. Even without light, there is complete control. The music swells and leads the audience by the nose—the very sound tells you what comes next, what you should expect.
Here is the music I woke to, frenzied, dissonant, unknown voices:
“He’s still freezing—”
“She’s like ice—”
“Luckiest kids alive—”
“More like dumbest. No one’s safe yet.”
“Is she still bleeding?”
“Less.”
“He’s not getting warmer—”
“Another blanket, here—”
“We’ve got a while till harbor, yet…”
“Never thought I’d say it, but thank God we were lost—”
“Sam?”
I recognized that last voice. It was my own.
“She’s up.”
“Keep her awake. Talk to her.”
A woman’s face was before mine, suddenly—white-haired, round, wet brown eyes—and her hot, hot hand was on my forehead.
“Hon?” she said. “We’ve got you.”
The room took shape around me. I was in a dark-wood nook, creaky and damp. There was humming—was it the voice again, a whale song, speaking to me? No—it was mechanical, sputtering, and that gasoline smell was back. An engine. I was in the belly of a boat, I realized, lying down in a tight bunk. I tried to move but couldn’t: I’d been burrito-wrapped in a blanket, arms pinned by my sides. I smelled cedar and wet wool. A kettle shrieked from another room, and I raised my head slightly. Through the door, I could make out a tiny galley of a kitchen, and lying horizontal on a cushioned bench, being tended to by a baseball-capped man, was Sam. He wasn’t moving.
“Keep her awake, Pat,” the man called.
The kettle was still screaming on the heat.
“My brother,” I said, but I was foggy, marble-mouthed. My throat burned.
“Easy, there. Try to stay awake, now….”
I tried, but the world around me flickered. I heard the static of the radio and the man’s voice from the other room. A sip of burning-hot tea nearly split my throat in half. The woman clapped her hands inches from my face, like cracking, angry applause. I wanted desperately to sleep.
“Focus, dear. Stay awake. Talk to me, if you can.”
I tried. I know I did. I remember trying. But my memory of the boat is patchy, moth-eaten. What comes back to me now in wincing, lurid detail is the summer afternoon of Sam’s suicide attempt, when I was a little bit high—daytime high, nothing too aggressive—but just high enough that the world became super saturated, doubly memorable.
I was lolling in Central Park with friends, playing round after round of Fuck, Marry, Kill when my mom called. Our conversation lasted less than a minute. I left my friends without saying goodbye and I hailed the first open cab: Taxi 7N25. I memorized numbers because I lost things in cabs so often. The driver, according to his medallion, was Edward Rhee. The cab had squeaky brakes. On the sidewalk, a dog was yapping. A song I hated was on the radio, and I thought of traveling music then, how shitty this song was, how this couldn’t possibly be the song that began our next scene.
“Pretty day,” Edward said.
“Yup,” I said.
We squeaked to a stop sooner than I would’ve liked. I paid Edward Rhee twelve dollars. The bills were sweaty from my pocket, crumpled, but I was grateful to have cash; I never did. With my hands, I broke the seal of sweat that’d glued my thighs to the leather seat. I did not get out of the car.
“You okay?” Edward asked.
No response. I didn’t know the answer.
“You want me to wait?” he said.
Maybe.
“My brother
tried to kill himself,” I said.
Edward Rhee sucked in his breath.
“I can wait.” His voice was so kind, so careful. “No trouble at all.”
“That’s okay,” I said finally.
Edward Rhee, of Taxi 7N25. I should write him a thank-you note.
Rather than go straight into the hospital, I looped around the block. I passed a deli, a nail salon, a bagel shop. That dumb song from the radio was stuck in my head. I couldn’t go in the hospital with a song that I hated stuck in my head. I needed a different song, comforting, before I went inside the hospital. A better song for me, and for Sam. That song would be my own version of a prayer.
I took another loop and willed the words to come. A deli, a nail salon, a bagel shop. My mind went blank. Nothing came. I knew hundreds of songs, but my mind was wiped clean. I was so afraid, dumb and stoned, alone and scared. I missed Edward Rhee’s cab with its squeaky brakes. The sidewalk was littered with dark polka dots that I realized, suddenly, like a fool, was chewing gum, turned black with dirt. Sixteen years in the city, and my brain had chosen now for this epiphany? I couldn’t even do traveling music right.
The man in the boat was speaking.
“He doesn’t look good, he doesn’t look good at all—”
The music on this boat—these fearful voices, this buzzing radio, these clapping hands—this music was no good for our next scene. Sam and I needed a different tune. Through my own fog, I tried to hum. The song hadn’t come to me that afternoon in the city, but I had it now, lying here in this boat. This song was a good offering. The Emerald City glitters on the horizon, and four friends and a dog sprint across the poppy field, and before there’s snow, before there’s sleep, there are voices in celebratory chorus, high, trilling, bright.
There was only air at first, breathy and catching in the back of my throat, stinging where I’d retched. I tried again and managed a few feeble peeps—an animal dying, an animal in bliss. The notes weren’t audible, but if I kept trying, they formed a weak heartbeat in the back of my throat. I couldn’t remember what the song was called, but everything else, I knew. The lyrics were about holding on: to breath, to heart, to hope.