Tink placed her bare feet on the cold deck. “What?”
“You and Len. It’s probably the better match.”
“I don’t want Len. I don’t want anybody.”
“Yeah. What’s up with that?”
“Everybody’s all…I don’t know…involved with that kind of stuff,” Tink complained. “I’m just not. And…” She hesitated. “I mean, maybe you should be less, ya know, involved. Maybe.” She expected Kimmy to jump down her throat and disagree, but instead, Kimmy nodded and said, “Probably. I feel pretty silly about it.”
“You should—” Tink wanted to say, but at the last minute, she added, not. “You shouldn’t,” she repeated. “Len should have been honest with you. That he didn’t have feelings or whatever.” She couldn’t believe she was having this conversation.
“So you, like, knew?” Kimmy asked.
“Yeah. I knew.”
“You should have told me.”
Tink was about to protest, but then she softened. She told the truth. “I didn’t want to upset you.” She suddenly realized why Len might have acted the way he did. Even if it was cruel. Maybe she was cruel in her own way. Maybe they were all cruel to one another and that’s just the way it was with them now.
“Do you think we’ll come back here, like our parents do every year?” Kimmy asked. “All of us together with our own families and kids or whatever?”
Tink wondered. “I don’t know.”
“It would be nice. If we did, right?”
Tink could hardly imagine it, but she agreed anyway. “Sure.”
Kimmy unwrapped her arms and stood up from her seat. “Come on. Let’s find our one thing.”
Tink knew what she meant. She smiled and stood up. They walked in the dark, holding on to the wiggly railing of the deck. They climbed down the steps and across the walking path over the dunes to the water. It was warmer than the air, and it felt like wet sun beneath her toes.
Kimmy bent to her knees and reached her arm into a little pool of water. She held up a large, slippery conch shell. In the dark, it shone white and pearly, and she held it up to Tink.
Tink reached out and ran her fingers across it. It was smooth and cold and strange.
They did it every year. They walked to the end of the point, a line of raised rock that stretched out into the ocean. They tiptoed beneath the moon and sat together at the edge.
Kimmy held out the shell and said what she always said, this strange prayer that just made sense to them.
“Let the stars see it,” she whispered.
Then she handed the shell to Tink, who tossed it in the water.
Tink loved the ritual. The idea that the stars in the sky might be too far away to see her. That she might not always have to look to them. That, for one brief moment, they might look down and find her instead.
They sat in silence for a bit. The silence Tink had craved from Kimmy all summer. Maybe she would miss her, after all. Maybe next summer things would be different between them. No, not maybe. They would be different. She had figured that much out. It was just a matter of what kind of different. Maybe that would be the way things were with Kimmy from then on.
Kimmy yawned and stretched her arms up to the sky. “I’m tired,” she announced. “You ready for bed?”
“I’m going to wait up for Alexis a little longer. But I’ll head back with you.” Tink dangled her legs from the rock and took one last look at the little path of moonlight reflected in the water. “It’s a good spot, don’t you think?”
“It’s always been a good one.”
They made their way back to the porch.
Kimmy paused at the sliding glass doors before heading inside, as Tink sank back into her wobbly patio chair. She expected Kimmy to say something sappy, like they were in some I’m sorry scene of an after-school special on television, but instead, she just said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Shelter Island,” Tink confirmed.
“It’ll be fun.”
As Kimmy slipped inside, Tink allowed herself to believe that it actually might be fun.
She leaned back in her chair and saw the lights of a car swing around in the pebbled driveway, flashing across the side of the house.
It was Coop’s rattling old Jeep, which sputtered and stopped. The lights faded to black as the engine turned off.
The door slammed, and she waited for Alexis’s pitter-patter across the deck, but instead, another door slammed and Tink heard the crunch of heels against the pebbles, two people walking toward the steps, and Tink felt herself shrink in the darkness. Even if she was a flight above them, hovering on the deck, she remembered the way Alexis and Coop had nestled against one another at the arcade.
She was about to go inside, not wanting to have to sit through some terrible kissing and slurping goodbye, but there was also something about the anticipation of it that made her insides flutter. The idea that it wasn’t her, but it could be, someday, and it made her face turn flush in the dark of the night as she waited for the sound of them, embarrassed for them, for herself, for someone she wasn’t yet.
When Alexis giggled, Tink stood up and made her way to the glass doors. As she opened them, their squeak seemed to stop whatever had been set into motion for all three of them. She heard their murmured conversation turn louder, and it was Coop’s voice that said, “It’s too dark.”
“Come ooo-on.” Alexis’s voice was singsong, urging him, in her bored way, the way she had wanted Tink to set off the fireworks that night on the beach, like she couldn’t care less, and somehow, that made Tink care more.
“You’ve been drinking,” Tink heard Coop say, his voice flat.
Tink felt a little sick, thinking of Alexis drinking. She remembered Alexis sneaking jugs of their grandfather’s wine from the downstairs refrigerator at their house when she was supposed to be babysitting Tink last school year.
Alexis’s lips and teeth had been stained red, and she started laughing a little too hard as she continued tipping back the glass bottle. The label read CARLO ROSSI. Cheap wine that old Italian men drink, Alexis had said with a hiccup-y laugh.
Tink stood at the glass doors and listened as Alexis and Coop took off beneath the deck. She heard their feet thunk over the boarded path to the beach. She guessed they’d go swimming, the two of them. Not with Tink, of course, and she felt silly for thinking it might have ended up that way.
Alexis had said it was their last night. That meant her and Coop’s. Alexis wouldn’t want her little sister ruining it, with some floaty midnight swim to talk about Tink’s dumb, little-kid problems in the Len and Kimmy soap opera.
From the height of the deck, Tink watched them run toward the water below. Alexis was a full sprint ahead, making some kind of whooping sound. Coop was behind, slower, even if his gargantuan legs were longer, and Tink could tell, by the way he stopped at the water, like a line had been drawn, that he wasn’t excited at all by what was happening.
But Alexis plunged in, her knees crushing the waves as she pushed over the surf into the black of the ocean.
Tink stepped inside, about to close the door, not knowing, never knowing, what made her turn around, except maybe the moon’s light, disappearing. The chill of that as it slipped over her.
Before she knew it, she was across and down and over, her feet at the water. It was warm and freezing, both at the same time, and Coop was there, beside her, shouting Alexis’s name. She could see the break in the tide. The way the waves crashed into one another. But she could not see Alexis.
I rush the water, coursing through the force of each wave. I push against the ocean when it pulls me. I chase after it when it slips away. I have to get to where she is.
Alexis.
I know it’s up to me.
“She can swim,” Tink called out over the waves. She was farther
than she’d ever gone in the ocean, and there was no touching the bottom. There was no sense of where she was, especially as she felt the rift in the tide, and she couldn’t tell where Alexis had gone. Only that Coop was somewhere near, calling both of their names.
Still, she believed it all was okay, that everything would be okay. “She was born to swim,” she whispered.
The whisper’s at my heart, even as the water slips over my head, and I’m above it and below it, above it and below it, waves crashing over me in the dark, as I try to see what I cannot see, as I feel the water battering at my insides, memories rushing at my dreams.
If I could just get to her, wherever she is, if I could swim a little farther, then it would all be okay, everything would be okay, just like Tink knew.
I feel a hand at my wrist and swing my head around.
“Coop?”
“It’s okay, Tink, I’ve got her,” he says in between huge gulping breaths, and he turns to her, to the girl in my dreams, and I see her, for the first time. Tink.
I close my eyes and surrender.
My chest heaves as I take big, long, painful breaths. I feel the wet sand at my back.
I open my eyes. Jeremiah’s dad and Lindy sit over me on the shore.
“Where’s Alexis?” I manage to ask, my throat scratchy and sore.
Lindy’s eyes grow large. “Alexis?”
“She was there. She was—”
Lindy brings a finger to her lips. “Shhh. It’s okay.” Her other hand is in mine, so small and slender, it almost feels like I’m the one comforting her. “Let’s get you up.”
I have so many questions as I look from Jeremiah’s dad to Lindy, as I feel the weight of Alexis, gone from my dreams, gone from here. I twist over to my side and see Jeremiah running toward me, wiping his eyes and nose like he’s been crying.
“You were like a wild thing,” he tells me in between snot and breaths. “You just took off, in the water, just swimming farther and farther, and then I got my dad. And Lindy, I don’t know, Lindy was just…”
“…here,” I finish for him. Because, Lindy is always right here.
“I was dreaming,” I tell him.
Lindy shushes me again and helps me stand. My legs are wobbly at first, but soon I’m up and the ground is sturdy beneath me as I find my balance.
I look between Lindy and Jeremiah’s dad again. I feel them, in the ocean with me, in my dreams, all of us, trying to swim toward someone, toward her, and a wave of familiarity hits me so hard, I can barely find my breath.
Tink smoking cigarettes for the first time, Coop and his poems, a room full of books, a riptide so strong, it tore them apart and brought us all here. My breath quickens, my heart a metal knocker against my chest. The dreams were mine, but they were also theirs.
“You’re Coop,” I whisper at Jeremiah’s dad.
He nods yes and his brow furrows, confused.
Then I take a long look at Lindy. “Tink.”
“Thanks for outing me, Coop.” She laughs. “I haven’t been called that in a very long time.”
“No, no.” I shake my head. I don’t know how to tell them that I’ve known them beyond this moment here and now. Then I realize the only way for them to understand. “Alexis,” I say. I’m about to ask it, but instead, I state it, because I just know. “We couldn’t save her,” I whisper. “She didn’t make it.”
Lindy swallows hard, shaking her head, trying to understand. “How could you possibly know about that?”
“I dreamed it,” I say. “I dreamed you all.” Then I tell them everything, like it’s the biggest confession I’ve ever made in my life.
I tell them about swallowing the ocean, about a story wrapping itself up inside my dreams, the firecrackers, Len and Kimmy, rainbow bracelets, and Skee-Ball. There’s the painted canoe. Adventure Park. Kimmy and Tink’s end-of-summer ritual. I tell them as much as I can remember from each dream. It spills from me.
I bring us all toward now, when we met in the ocean and crashed, like waves, into one another’s lives.
“It was your summer,” I tell Lindy and Coop. “I dreamed it.”
Jeremiah is nodding away. “It was the before.” His voice has this celebration whoop in it. He waves his arm to the ocean. “It’s got a whole history. Like the remains of the Titanic. You can track it.” Then he lifts his finger and twirls it around. “The swirl.”
“The swirl.” I smile.
Lindy’s hand grips mine tight. I can see her processing everything I’ve said. “I’d almost forgotten about the painted canoe,” she marvels. “And the dud firecracker.”
“You and Coop, you talked outside Adventure Park. You shared a cigarette,” I say.
She and Coop look between each other. “My first one. I remember that.”
He laughs. “Me too.”
She shakes her head. “How could you know this?”
“I swallowed your memories,” I say. “The ocean let me dream them. I don’t know how, but it did.”
She shakes her head again. “I never told her,” Lindy says to Coop. “I erased that day. I thought I erased everything. It’s not possible for her to…” Her voice fades. “It’s not possible to know.” She grips my hand tighter. “But…you know.”
I nod.
Jeremiah’s dad has been listening, intent, letting it all sink in. “I felt like I had to come here, like something terrible was about to happen,” he confesses. “I didn’t want Jeremiah around you, Summer.”
I remember what Jeremiah said. That bad feeling. My dreams and his premonitions, all leading us to a giant tear in the ocean, leading him to Jeremiah and to me, leading all of us to each other.
Coop’s focus is at my neck. He points at it. “That necklace. Where did you get it?”
“I’ve always had it,” I answer.
Lindy nods. “She had it when I found her.”
“Moon snail shells,” I say.
“I gave one just like it to Alexis. On our last night together. When we found her…” He hesitates. “It was gone.”
Lindy’s grip is still a force around my palm. She and Coop share a sad smile as the ocean swells and falls.
As Jeremiah and his dad head back to Gramzy’s, Lindy and I sit in the bunker, the two of us with our backs against the weathered wood.
“She was my sister,” Lindy tells me. “And she was gone. And then, nothing was the same again. We didn’t come back here.”
“Never?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Nope. My parents became like, I don’t know, the shells you collect. Hard and empty, and impossible to get inside.”
“Did you see Len and Kimmy again?”
Her voice is sad. “No. I think about them sometimes. I know it was painful for them, too. That night. And after.”
“What made you come back?”
“I never thought I would. And then…” She looks out, extends her arm toward the shore. “I just drove straight here one day. All the way from Delaware. And I never left.”
“Why?”
“I wanted answers. I stayed at the Beachcomber Motel and bought the first house to go on sale on the ocean side. It was just two houses away from where it all ended, and I came out to the water every night and I woke every morning waiting for something to, just, happen.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. A different outcome to that awful night. And then it did.”
“What did?” I ask.
“You.”
“And that’s how you knew…,” I realize.
“…that you were mine.” She finishes the words I’ve heard over and over and, for the first time, I understand.
“You should have told me about her,” I say.
“Maybe. But I wanted to break free of that. I never told anybody who I was to t
his place. Who I was to that day. I had spent so much time just trying to figure out a way to move forward. And then you came. And I could.”
“What about Jeremiah’s dad?” I ask. “Coop.” I still can’t believe it. “Did you keep in touch?”
She shakes her head. “By the time I got here, he was long gone.”
“It wasn’t right, what he did. Leaving Jeremiah and all. But maybe I get it.”
She nods. “First Alexis…then Jeremiah’s mom…” Her voice trails off. She twirls her fingers around my wet and salty hair, then sighs deeply.
I lean into her arm, the crook of her elbow cradling my neck.
“It makes sense that your dreams would lead us all back here.”
I grip the moon snail necklace and hold it out to her. “How is it possible?” I ask. “That I would have the same necklace?”
“The ocean takes a lot of things,” she tells me. “Sometimes, it gives them back. I’ve always thought that you came from her.”
“Alexis?”
She nods. “Alexis. The ocean. You were born from that summer.”
Maybe I was. It doesn’t seem so strange. My entire body sinks into the sand, the exhaustion of the night finally settling in.
“Does Elder know about all this?” I ask.
Lindy shakes her head.
I can’t believe I’m about to say what I do. “You should tell him.”
“It’s become this terrible secret,” Lindy says. “The bad luck Jeremiah’s dad feels…I understand that.”
“The night you and Alexis went swimming. You and Kimmy making wishes. The way you tried to save her. It’s not all terrible. You should tell him,” I repeat. “I mean, you let him into our house. Now let him in, like, for real.”
She nods, then laughs. “I could say the same to you. You could get to know him, Summer. You might like him.”
I groan. “I guess.”
“But you’re right. It’s a big part of my life to just erase.”
“I wish you had told me,” I say. “But there’s something about learning it like this…” I nestle deeper into her shoulder. “It’s what I always wanted. Ever since you found me.”
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