You, Me, and the Sea

by Meg Donohue

  The sliding door at the back of the house was locked. I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered through the glass. On a round white table there was a bowl of fat cherries with skin so shiny that I knew they were perfectly ripe. I imagined their taut skin bursting as easily as a strained seam.

  When I pulled back from the glass door, I noticed a window at the far corner of the house. It slid open silently. Amir climbed through first. His hands held mine as I stepped through the window and then straightened. I felt his thumbs run over my skin. A presence beside me made me turn with a start, but it was only our reflection. We were in a bathroom: black tiled floor, bathtub surprisingly deep and round.

  In the mirror: a line of dried blood above Amir’s eyebrow from the wall that Bear had shoved him against that morning. As I’d helped Amir clean the cut, I’d felt as though it were my own skin that had split open, my own bright blood that ran down his face. His cut was my cut; his blood, mine.

  Now, Amir studied the wound. Anger transformed his face, making his languid eyes glitter. He was always controlled around Bear, infuriating my brother with his measured voice and the detached expression that communicated that he was better than Bear. But I knew that Amir’s hands tightened into fists when he saw Bear approaching. Amir seemed to get a little taller every day, and I wondered what would happen when he stopped having to look up at Bear and instead met his bleary gaze straight on.

  “You know not to listen to him, right?” I put my hand on his. “You’re not nobody. You’re the opposite of nobody.”

  “I’m everybody?” Amir’s smile was sad. I ached to run my fingers over his long black eyelashes, to cup his face in my hands.

  “You are to me.” I would do anything for him. And he would do anything for me. The intensity of this realization made me feel jittery. I looked around the room. “Check out the size of that tub. Whoever owns this house is a giant.”

  Amir smiled, and the anger in his face disappeared. “Giants eat a lot.” He went off in search of the kitchen.

  There was a bottle of something called rose water on the countertop beside a strange-looking toothbrush. I stuck my pinkie into the bottle and then dragged my pinkie up and down my arm. The scent was a thick floral smell that I loved. It made me think of Rei, who always smelled of sweet things. For a moment, I considered taking the bottle as a gift for Rei, but I knew I would never be able to explain how I came to have it.

  In the bedroom, a large white bed seemed to float over the pale floor. A few photographs of the beach near Osha were framed on the walls, and a tall bookcase lined with books stood next to a large chest.

  It was a quiet house. The boards below my feet did not creak and the sides of the house did not complain when the wind blew. I heard only the sounds of cabinets and drawers opening and closing as Amir looked for food. I remembered the cherries on the table that I’d seen through the window and was about to walk out of the bedroom when the chest caught my eye again. Inside, below a stack of neatly folded blankets, was a box.

  It was big enough to hold a quilt and decorated with shells and thin gray stones. The beach at Horseshoe Cliff was rife with those stones, round as coins and veined with delicate white lines. Amir and I would have contests to see who could stack them higher and I always lost, stacking my stones too quickly so they wobbled and fell, while Amir took his time building a tower that reached his waist. I liked to sneak glances at Amir while he stacked those stones; his face grew still, the curves of his cheekbones hardening, his eyes steady with concentration. He held each stone in his palm as though warming it before placing it at the top of the stack. His long fingers never shook. I thought that Amir’s hands, as calloused and scarred as they were, were easily the most elegant things at Horseshoe Cliff.

  Whoever owned the box was careful, too. An artist. The stones formed a pattern of cresting waves. Sea froth was made from gold-flecked sand, a beach of perfect shells below. I ran my fingers over the pattern, wondering if I dared to take the box with me when I left, if its owner could possibly miss it as much as I would cherish it. My fingers found the small latch hidden in the waves.

  Inside, there was money. Stack upon stack of hundred-dollar bills tied with red string. I stared. I reached out to touch the money and started when I realized Amir was calling my name. His voice had a strange catch in it.

  “Mer—” he said, appearing in the doorway. His eyes widened when he saw the money. Quickly, before I could think better of it, I picked up a thick pad of bills. I looked at Amir. The sight of the cut curving above his black eyebrow caused my heart to pound.

  “Amir,” I said. I knew he already knew what I was thinking, that I didn’t have to say a word more. A sort of breathless excitement took hold of me as I cradled that money. “We could leave. We could go anywhere we wanted. We could go to San Francisco! We could stay in a hotel and order room service.” It was something I’d wanted to do since reading Eloise as a child. “We could buy luggage and fill it with new clothes. We could leave right now, just start hitching rides until we’re far away from here.”

  I stopped talking only when I saw the funny look on Amir’s face.

  “We can’t take that money,” he said.

  “But listen—”

  “It’s Rei’s.”

  I stared at him, confused.

  “This is Rei’s house,” Amir said. “She’s in the photographs in the living room. There’s a grocery list in her handwriting in the kitchen.”

  I sat back on my heels, gripping the money with both hands now. Rei had distinctive handwriting, as quietly precise as embroidery. I thought it was very sophisticated, and I had shaped my own handwriting after Rei’s, tracing her letters for most of my life. We knew Rei’s handwriting; we would recognize it anywhere.

  This was Rei’s house.

  We knew she lived near Osha, but we had never been to her house. It was funny, but I wasn’t sure I had even ever wondered about Rei’s home . . . Rei’s life outside of Horseshoe Cliff. I glanced at the closed closet door, knowing the colors and materials of the dresses that were hanging inside, the overalls that were folded within the bureau, the assortment of bracelets that would be stacked carefully somewhere, the collection of wide-brimmed hats. I breathed in and smelled Rei. I ran my fingers over the money. Rei’s money.

  “There’s something else,” Amir said.

  I followed him out of the bedroom. Amir’s brow furrowed, but I could not bring myself to leave the money behind.

  On the shelves of the living room, amid photographs of Rei and my father and me and Amir and Bear and other people I did not know, were my father’s houses, each and every one of the tiny wood houses that he had made over the course of so many years. Amir’s animals, too, were there, sanded perfectly smooth.

  We stood very still. The house echoed our stillness. It felt as though time were frozen, waiting for us to understand.

  “There are no craft fairs,” I said at last.

  “I guess not.”

  “She just bought them all herself. Rei is rich.”

  Amir looked around the room. “Richer than us. That’s for sure.”

  My father would never have accepted the money from Rei if he’d known it was charity. She had been very clever to find a way to help us without offending him. It was strange to feel our world shifting, to see everything in a different way. To know a truth that my father had never known. I felt no animosity toward Rei for her duplicity. I felt only gratitude. She had been watching over us, all of us, for so many years.

  I looked around. I imagined Rei stretched on the cream-colored sofa, reading a book. The lovely scent on Rei’s skin was rose water—now it had a name. I imagined Rei settling into her deep bathtub at night when she returned home from Horseshoe Cliff, how the bubbles might turn brown with the dirt she’d carried from her visit to the farm. I imagined her stepping out of the bath and pressing rose water to her newly clean wrists.

  What if all those years ago when Rei had asked if Bear was hurting us, we ha
d told her the truth? Would she have found a way to keep us together? Would she have brought us to this beautiful house where we might have grown up the way the kids on Bear’s television grew up instead of the way we actually had, perpetually swinging from fear to our wild, wonderful kind of freedom to fear again? If I had ignored Amir’s pleas in the shed that night and instead blurted out just once to Rei the extent of Bear’s cruelty, everything might have been different.

  But of course, there was no way to know just how different it would have been. My life was tied to Amir’s, and if we had been separated, there was no amount of clean sheets and jeweled sandals that would have been worth his absence.

  “We need to thank her,” I said. “We need to thank her for everything she’s done for us.”

  “How can we? She can’t ever know that we were here.”

  Of course he was right—there was no way we could thank Rei without her learning that we’d broken into her home. This would be another secret we would have to keep.

  I turned the stack of money in my hand sadly. The weight of it surprised me. It was so light, all that money. A soft wind could blow it far away. This was the image that for months would come to me at strange moments of my day: money that floated and looped through the air, forming first the lines of Rei’s beautiful handwriting and then the thin outline of a path I could never reach, a road that narrowed and disappeared from view before I could set foot on it.

  Chapter Ten

  We felt chastened after breaking into Rei’s home, and for a spell we stayed close to home. I missed the pleasure of trying on other people’s lives and the sense of freedom Amir and I experienced when we were away from Horseshoe Cliff. So I felt a thrill when Amir suggested that we venture out to just one more house, one final press of our luck.

  “Your pick,” he said. I had passed the GED, and this was his gift to me.

  Amir’s eyes widened when I stopped in front of the house I’d chosen. Separated from the road by a stone wall, it was larger than any of the homes we’d previously explored. A locked gate—a rare sight in Osha—spanned the driveway.

  “This one?” Amir shook his head. “There’s no way we’ll get inside.”

  “But wouldn’t you love to see it?”

  “I’d love to not get arrested. This place definitely has an alarm. Pick another.”

  I peered through the gate. The driveway was a long stretch of sleek black pavement, empty of cars. Though it was dusk, none of the lights in the house were lit.

  I stuck out my hand and said, “I bet you a million bucks there’s no alarm.”

  Amir looked skeptical, but he shook my hand. “A million bucks. Don’t forget it. I’m going to need that money to buy toothpaste in prison.”

  I laughed. He helped me scramble to the top of the wall, and the feeling of his hands on my legs made my breath catch in my chest.

  Amir, who was much taller than me and still as skinny as a sapling, managed to grab hold of the top of the wall and pull himself up beside me. The house was new but made to look old with a stone tower at one corner and thick black porch columns.

  “How many bedrooms do you think it has?” I asked. “Ten?”

  “It’s ugly. It looks like an insane asylum.”

  “What are you talking about? It looks like a castle.”

  “You say potato, I say po-tah-to.”

  I smiled. “Well, I’m dying to see the inside of this potato.”

  We hopped down from the wall. The moment our feet hit the driveway, light flooded the air. We froze.

  “Let’s go,” Amir said in a low voice. “Now.”

  He turned, but I stood still. The house was quiet. We were so close. The thought of giving up filled me with disappointment. “The lights are probably on motion sensors,” I whispered. “I don’t think anyone is home. I’m just going to peek in the window.”

  Amir’s hand encircled my wrist. I felt a charge where his skin touched mine. I knew every shade of brown that existed within his irises and knew that they seemed to darken when he was worried.

  “Merrow.”

  I gently shook my wrist free from his hand. “I’ll be right back.” I ran toward the house.

  I’d only made it a few feet when enraged barking filled the air like a siren. I skidded to a stop and in that instant saw the dog that raced toward me in a blur of fur and teeth. I spun and ran, but the dog’s nails clawed my back, knocking me to the pavement. His teeth ripped through my jeans and into my calf. I cried out at the pain that coursed through me. The dog held tight as I tried to kick free.

  “Hey! No! Get off!” Amir hollered. I twisted to see him pulling at the dog’s collar, but the dog would not loosen his grip on me.

  I heard a woman’s voice. “No, Tiger! No!”

  And then the dog was gone. I rolled into a ball, moaning and clutching my leg. My hands came away from the wound covered in blood.

  Amir was beside me. “Merrow—”

  “Oh my god,” said a man in a horrified voice.

  I struggled to sit up. Behind Amir, a man and an older woman looked down at me with stunned expressions. The dog, still quivering with excitement, sat beside the woman and stared at me hungrily.

  “Your dog bit me!” I managed to say. I couldn’t quite believe it.

  The man knelt in front of me. There was a golden light that seemed to emanate from him, brightening the sky that was otherwise as matte and purple and gray as a dusty plum. I had never seen someone so beautiful in all my life. His blond hair curled gently at his forehead, and his eyes were a shade of blue that was soft and deeply comforting. The pain in my leg momentarily ebbed; the man’s presence overwhelmed me.

  “You’re bleeding.” His brows were knit with concern. I wondered if he was an actor from television. “Can you stand? We have a first aid kit in the house.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “But your dog could clearly use more to eat.”

  He sat back on his heels and laughed, surprised.

  I looked over at Amir. “Let’s go,” I said shakily. I had no idea how I was going to move.

  “Now, wait a minute,” said the woman. “What were you doing, hopping over the fence like that?”

  I tried to stand but putting weight on my injured leg triggered a stabbing sensation that made me stumble. Amir took my elbow and steadied me. And then, startling me, the blue-eyed man took my other elbow. Despite the pain I was in, I felt a shiver at his touch. So it wasn’t just Amir who did this to me. His hand was very soft. His skin was a beautiful cream color. His hair was a golden blond. Even his eyebrows were blond. How must I have looked compared to what he saw in the mirror every day? Filthy, I thought. My eyes were a murky green brown, my skin a dusky shade of tan, my hair a mix of blond and brown, my eyebrows as dark as the dirt under my fingernails.

  “Take it easy,” the man said. “I think you’re more hurt than you realize.”

  I had been trying to ignore the warm gush of blood that I felt trailing down my leg and pooling in my sneaker, but at his words, I looked down and then quickly away. Amir’s grip tightened on my elbow.

  “Merrow,” he said, worried.

  “Please, come inside and let me give you a bandage,” the man said. “It’s the least we can do.”

  “Is it?” the woman asked. “I’m wondering why I’m not on the phone with the police right now.”

  “Because look at her, Mom. Your dog is—”

  “Deranged,” I said, yanking my elbow from the man’s hand.

  “To be fair,” the woman said coolly, “Tiger was only doing his job.”

  The man turned to her. “You’re not helping.”

  “Is that the goal, William?”

  “Yes.”

  “We should go,” Amir said. He tugged at my elbow. “Come on, Merrow.”

  “Merrow? That’s a lovely name. My name is Will Langford. This is my mother, Rosalie.”

  “We’re leaving.” Amir’s voice was deeper than usual.

  Will held up his hands,
conceding. “Can I at least help you to your car?”

  This made me laugh, and my laughter made the pain in my calf surge. I gritted my teeth and leaned into Amir, putting my weight on my uninjured leg. “We don’t have a car.”

  “Oh.” Will frowned. “I’d offer to drive you home, but we’re stranded here without a car at the moment. We all drove from San Francisco together, and now my father is off with the car on a fishing trip.”

  “You’re bleeding quite a lot,” said Rosalie. It was the first time I heard a note of concern in her voice.

  I looked down again, and when I did, my balance faltered. In an instant, Will scooped me into his arms and began walking toward the house. I stared at his face, suddenly so close to my own.

  “Please follow us,” he called over his shoulder to Amir.

  Since I’d learned that it hurt to laugh, I now tried not to, but it was actually very funny to be carried in the arms of this handsome stranger as though I were a damsel in distress, or one of the ladies in the soap operas I had loved so much for a time. I felt entirely unlike myself—my leg throbbed and my surroundings were looking more unfamiliar by the moment. I rested my chin on Will’s shoulder. When I caught Amir’s unhappy gaze, I fluttered my eyes and lolled my head as though I’d succumbed to womanly weakness. Amir looked away and did not smile.

  Rosalie strode past us and opened the front door, that terrible dog at her heels. We stepped into a space that seemed to have no purpose except to be beautiful. Below Will’s feet lay an Oriental carpet that did not seem like the kind you were supposed to wipe your shoes on.

  “I don’t want to bleed all over your rug,” I said. My voice sounded strangely quiet. Something was making my chest feel tight. The throbbing pain in my calf. The beautiful house. The closeness of Will’s face. He had no scent, I realized. If I climbed to the top of a mountain at daybreak and stuck my nose into a newly formed cloud, it would have smelled like Will Langford.