The Last True Poets of the Sea

by Julia Drake

  SURVIVAL

  I was warmer when I woke next. My index finger was in the alligator mouth of a heart monitor, and the noises from the boat were gone, replaced with sterile beeps and jangling carts. I was tucked tight in a bed, but bright midday sun spilled through the window, and the world sharpened when I blinked. Midday. Sunny. A window. My mom was in a chair beside me, eyes closed, cardigan draped over her like a blanket. She looked exactly the same: a stubby brown ponytail, tiny gold studs, no makeup. She was so little. Had she always been that small? My mom was here. But where…

  “Where’s Sam?”

  “Vi,” my mom gasped, eyes springing open. She shot from her seat and wrapped her arms around me. I’d dwarfed her since I was twelve, but her hug still made me feel small. Taken care of. I hooked my nose into the crook of her elbow and breathed. We were in a hospital—I’d figured that much out—but my mom still smelled sweet and bready, like her morning self.

  “Mom. What’s going on? Where’s Sam?”

  “You’re back in Lyric, Violet—oh God, we were so worried….”

  She clutched me so tight I could barely breathe.

  “Sam, Mom,” I said. She wasn’t answering fast enough, and my teeth started to chatter. It wasn’t enough. It hadn’t been enough. Maybe we had everything we needed—luck and perseverance and heart and hope—and maybe that still hadn’t been enough, maybe we weren’t as strong as Fidelia, or maybe we were—but there were no guarantees in life, it was all so incredibly arbitrary, a piano could fall on us tomorrow, and where was Sam, why wasn’t she answering, where was he—

  “There,” my mom said, pointing.

  My dad and Sam were in the doorway, holding hands. Sam had a black eye and a sliced-open cheek, but he was there, standing.

  My family was here in this room.

  “Hi,” I said to everyone.

  My dad had gotten new glasses.

  That’s when I started crying. Like I hadn’t cried since I was a kid, snot everywhere, spit flying from my mouth, tears coming hard and fast. The weight of living poured out of me: the Year of Wild and Spain and Rus/Gus, Peter Pan and the rays and my tea leaves, finding Sam and Orion’s stunned face and the love of Liv. Life could be so very much.

  “I’ve got you,” my mom said.

  “Where’s Liv? Where’s Orion?”

  “They’re fine,” Sam said.

  “A little freaked out,” said my dad.

  “Understatement of the century,” my mom said. “They were severely hypothermic and traumatized, clinically. You too. All of us.”

  “What happened?” I said, running the back of my hand across my wet face. I remembered a shrieking kettle and someone clapping, and poppies, but beyond that, everything was fuzzy.

  “The couple from the campground—they had a satellite phone,” my dad said. “After you went out to sea, they called the Coast Guard, who put your disappearance out on the radio to any boats at sea. A couple found you guys on a sandbar—they’d been out fishing, gotten turned around. If they hadn’t been there…”

  “I thought you…” I looked at my brother. The boat came back to me, and the song I’d sung like a prayer, and then, like that, I had it, the knowledge that’d escaped me—

  “‘Optimistic Voices’!” I cried. “That’s what that song is called. ‘Optimistic Voices.’”

  “She’s still confused, I think,” my dad said.

  “I’m not. I’m good. I just…remembered.”

  “We’re so lucky they were lost,” my mom said, almost to herself.

  “We owe them a kayak,” Sam said. “The couple from the campsite, I mean.”

  “We owe them a little more than that,” my dad said, rubbing Sam’s back. “I’ll tell you, though, it’s sort of a miracle you both found that sandbar. That couple, too. All that ocean, and just that one spot…”

  Sam and I glanced at each other. Everything before the boat rushed back: the whale-song voice, the wreck. Swim up. The sandbar. Had it been there all along?

  “How?” my dad said simply. We were all thinking it.

  “I just swam,” Sam said finally. “One stroke at a time, and then I saw Violet, and then we swam, together. Until we found the sandbar.”

  “I don’t even remember swimming,” I said.

  “You did,” said Sam. “You kicked like crazy.”

  “So lucky,” my dad repeated. “So stupid…”

  “Years of swim lessons,” my mom said.

  “Strong, too,” I said.

  “Both. All. Stupid, strong, swim lessons,” Sam said.

  I was so grateful to have them. So grateful that we were all here together.

  Except—

  “Where’s Toby?” I said. “Oh my God, Mom, did you kill him? It’s not his fault. Promise me you’re not going to blame him. Blame me.”

  “Toby’s fine, Violet. He wanted to give us a minute. And believe me when I tell you that we’ve moved very far beyond blame. What we’re dealing with in this family, it’s just…altogether too complicated for blame. There will be no blame, okay? We’ll have to just…”

  She struggled to finish, and glanced to my dad for help. I wondered, too, what we’d have to do.

  “Persevere?” I suggested.

  “Fuck perseverance,” my dad said.

  “Alan!” my mom squawked. Sam laughed through his fingers.

  “Jesus, Dad, tell us how you really feel.”

  “I am telling you how I really feel,” my dad said. “We’ll get to perseverance, I’m sure. But today, fuck perseverance, and fuck it tomorrow, too. Fuck it for the whole next week. The next year even. We’ll talk about perseverance until the cows come home, I promise you. But today, I think we should just be, and have that be enough. That’s all we’re gonna do, okay? Be. Together. Here.”

  In the silence that followed, my dad looked a little shocked. I didn’t blame him: it was the most adamant I’d ever heard him. My mom gaped, openmouthed. But she didn’t say he was wrong.

  “Being works,” Sam said. He flopped next to me on the bed.

  “Being sounds really good, actually,” I said, scooching to make more space.

  My mom picked up the remote from my bedside table and held it out to my dad, an olive branch for our time. “I guess we should start with terrible hospital TV?”

  My parents gathered on my bed, too, altogether too cramped and too hot, but not wanting it any other way. During a commercial break, Sam and my dad fetched us coffee and Oreos. Together, we grimaced through sips of vile coffee and shouted the wrong answers at Jeopardy! until our collective volume rose so loud a nurse popped in to ask if all was well.

  “We’re great,” I said. And so for the moment, we were.

  We finished Jeopardy! and then, even though my mom can’t stand Pat Sajak, we worked together to solve the puzzles on Wheel of Fortune.

  In this very boring way, we began a long and difficult survival.

  Later that afternoon, my mom showed me her research.

  My family had decided to eat dinner in shifts so that no one would have to be alone. Sam and my dad had been gone only a few minutes when my mom said she needed to show me something.

  Almost shyly, she pulled a thick manila folder from her bag. “After we talked on the phone last time, and you were telling me what you were finding out about the family, I got inspired. I did one of those website things, but that wasn’t much use, so then I contacted a genealogist.” She passed me the folder. Inside was a thick stack of paper: photocopied newspaper clippings from the library archives. A copy of the Lyric’s ship manifest, and there she was, her name highlighted, Fidelia Hathaway, and right below her…

  “Septimus?”

  “Fidelia was a twin,” my mom said.

  It all made such sudden, crashing sense. My apple, cleft in two. Not temptation. Not knowledge. An apple: the fruit of a shared seed. Split down the middle into identical parts.

  “They grew up in a foundling hospital,” my mom said. “An orphanage, sort of.
For abandoned children. That’s why it’s so hard to find any information on them—they were adopted, eventually, and I didn’t learn much, but their life seemed okay. Says a lot that the parents wanted to take in both children, I think. Or I like to think.”

  “The hospital was an orchard,” I said.

  “Yes,” my mom said. “Did you just—guess that—or…?”

  “And he…” I said, looking back at the manifest, my heart pounding. “He was coming over with her.”

  “They were eighteen. Around there. They didn’t quite know her real age.”

  “He didn’t make it,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

  “No,” my mom said, “he drowned.”

  “Maybe that’s…”

  The names on the manifest were small and blurred. Fidelia Hathaway, Septimus Hathaway. The letters swam before my eyes and their names bent to ours. A life without Sam: I didn’t want to imagine it, but it was possible. A life without me: possible, too. My favorite possible was both of us, timeworn, bickering on a long-distance phone call. Who knew? The not-knowing hurt, but there was wonder coiled there, too: in a snail’s shell, or in a grass bracelet.

  “Maybe that’s what?” my mom asked.

  “Maybe that’s why Fidelia didn’t write to her family,” I said. “Maybe it was too hard to tell them. That she’d lived, and he hadn’t. Maybe it was easier to just…disappear.”

  I closed the folder. My mom was wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. Through everything—Peter Pan and our fights and her long nights in the hospital, worrying about her patients, her own kids—I’d never seen her cry. Her tears didn’t scare me. They felt like a relief.

  “Mom, I’m so sorry. I’ve done so many bad things. I’m a bad daughter.”

  “Violet, no. None of this is your fault.”

  “I had a panic attack in June. I worry all the time. I see catastrophe everywhere. Sometimes my mind just goes and goes and goes and I can’t stop it. I’m so scared, always. Is that normal?”

  “You get that from me,” she said. “Try not to worry.”

  “I can’t. I worry all the time. I didn’t know you had such a hard time growing up. I didn’t know about your mom, and everything you did for Toby, that must have been so hard—”

  “Shhhh,” she said. “We’ll talk about it. But we’re just being today, remember?”

  She brushed my bangs back from my forehead. Her hand was warm—maybe the only doctor of which this was true.

  “I’m liking the short hair,” she said.

  “I might grow it out.”

  “So contrary.”

  My mom smiled, then glanced over her shoulder.

  “Violet,” she said, nodding toward the hall, “do you know that person?”

  I looked. Liv was pacing the hallway, sneaking a look in my room each time she passed. She was holding a vase of bright blue hydrangeas.

  “I do,” I said. “You ready to meet someone important?”

  My mom glanced between me and the nervous, flower-wielding girl.

  “That’s a thing I’ve never heard you say before,” she said.

  “Just don’t be weird, okay? She matters.”

  I waved to Liv, beckoning her in. She stepped over the threshold, but lingered in the doorway, unsure of herself.

  “Hello,” she said formally. She was so nervous.

  “Liv, this is my mom. And, Mom, this is Liv,” I said. “She’s the best.”

  My mom walked toward her, hand outstretched.

  “Nice to meet you, Liv. Wow, that’s a firm handshake,” she said admiringly.

  “No dead fish,” Liv said. My mom laughed.

  “Mom, can you…?” I said.

  “Can I, like, leave? Of course,” she said, in the ever-so-slightly-embarrassing voice of someone who wasn’t born yesterday. “Your dad and Sam probably miss me anyway. I’ll just wait outside like…like…”

  “A gargoyle,” Liv suggested.

  “Yes,” my mom said. “That was exactly the word I wanted.”

  She disappeared down the hall, but Liv still stayed far from me, lurking inches from the doorway. Behind her, a nurse pushed a patient in a wheelchair, and doctors buzzed down the hallways. Pagers went off and sneakers squeaked. Liv wasn’t coming closer. Maybe, with everything that had happened, she’d decided—she’d chosen—she thought things would be easier if she and I just—

  “Are you real?” I asked her.

  “Real,” she affirmed. She set the hydrangeas down on my bedside table and perched in the chair next to me, crossing her ankles and folding her hands in her lap. She was real, but she looked so far away. It was the first time she and I had been in public together, since…Could I touch her? Was I allowed? I reached for her hand just as a nurse bustled in, and Liv pulled away from me, startled.

  “Family only,” the nurse chirped.

  “She’s staying,” I said. “Please don’t argue.”

  The nurse raised his eyebrows, looking between the two of us.

  “Just this once,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Liv said to him. “Thanks,” she said to me.

  “Did you bathe in cigarettes?” I asked.

  “I was stressed.”

  “As much as I want you to quit, I actually missed that smell.”

  She smiled and my heart trilled.

  “Liv, I’m so sorry.”

  “I was so scared,” she said. “You can’t do that again.”

  “I promise I will never jump off a boat into the open ocean ever again.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.”

  “How’s Orion?” I asked.

  “Physically, fine. My mom doesn’t really understand what happened out there, so I just told her we got swept away, okay?” she said, and bit her lip. “Orion doesn’t really understand why it took so long for me to tell him. I don’t either, really.”

  “It took so long to tell him because it was hard.”

  “He feels like a fool. I don’t think he’ll come to see you. He doesn’t really do hospitals. I barely do, to tell you the truth.” She crossed and uncrossed her ankles. “I also talked to my parents. About fens. I wasn’t even planning it, I just started talking. It was like jumping out of the boat, I think, instinct took over.”

  “What’d you say? What’d they say?”

  “Wellll,” she said. “It didn’t go great.”

  She squished her mouth to a little bud. She must’ve been making that face since she was a child, thinking through the letters in Australia on a third-grade spelling quiz. I loved her. Yes. I loved her.

  “Well, I started by talking about Orion,” she said, “and then I brought in the fen part, not even about me yet, and my mom was like, ‘Mmmm, boys are complicated,’ and I was like, ‘I’m complicated.’ So then she got so nervous and started talking about feeling ‘prepared for physical intimacy’ and I was like, ‘No, Mom, I’m the fen,’ and she must have realized something was up, because she started talking about Back Bay Fens in Boston, and asked my dad whether the Red Sox had been mathematically eliminated.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Well, he was half watching golf, so he just said they were still in it.”

  “You had this conversation while they were watching golf?”

  “I was trying to be casual!” she said. I definitely loved her.

  “I’m going to have to have this conversation with them a million times, you know. I might wait a while for the next one.” She plucked at the hydrangeas, avoiding my eyes. “Part of me thinks it’ll take years.”

  “You’ve had the first one. I think it’ll get easier.”

  “I wish…” she said, trailing off.

  “I wish, too.” For her, I wished everything.

  “Later my mom—um—she, um, told me that she wasn’t sure you were a good influence?” She pulled loose a petal and arranged it over her thumbnail. “But she also sent you these, so.”

  “It’s a very nice arrangement,” I said slowly.
/>   “Good blues,” Liv agreed.

  I wanted her to crawl in bed with me. I wanted to tell her I loved her. That her parents would come around, that it wouldn’t always be this hard, this complicated. But I couldn’t say any of that for certain.

  Instead, across the thin hospital sheets, I offered her my index finger. She hooked her finger with mine. Tiny, minuscule, a grain of sand split in half, but right then, the link between our fingers was the truest thing I knew.

  AND

  “Do you care to explain why we had to make a twenty-minute detour to the nice seafood store?” Toby asked as we pulled into Orion’s driveway. It was the first place I’d asked to be taken once I got out of the hospital.

  “You have better places to be?” I asked him.

  “I should be off trying to make things right with your mother, for a start,” Toby said.

  “One day at a time,” I said, patting him on the knee. “If anything, you can thank me for bringing you two closer together.”

  “Remind me to do that later,” Toby said, rolling his eyes.

  I got out of the car with my leaky bag of shrimp. I slammed the car door shut, then rapped on the window. Toby lowered the glass.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m very glad you’re my uncle.”

  “I’m very glad you’re my niece.”

  I walked around back to Orion’s shed, following the noise of a trumpet. I stood outside and listened, letting the notes wash over me. My body hummed with the music. This mattered, this music. Whether he forgave me or not: this had mattered.

  I knocked and the door of the shed swung open. Orion poked his head out.

  “Violet,” he said, reciting my name like a stale fact.

  “Hi,” I said. “Can I come in?”

  He didn’t look thrilled at the idea, but swung the door open anyway, disappearing back inside. I followed him, keeping a fair bit of distance between us, standing while he perched on the stool.

  “How are you?” I asked finally.

  “Fine,” he said. “Liv told me you were okay. I’m sorry I didn’t come to the hospital, it’s just…”