Black Wave

by Devon Glenn

  Ahoy, Emily from Orbies,

  I’m the cruise director for the SS Escape. Our psychic bailed at the last minute, and I’m told by some of the Orbiters that you’re the best medium in the Mid-Atlantic region. I’d love to have you on board as an entertainer. The details are attached in a PDF. Please read them carefully. If you’re still interested, please fill out the paperwork and send it back to me. I’ll rush this through HR and give you instructions from there.

  Emily slipped back into bed, feeling warm with excitement. How silly she felt for being so paranoid about the people on Orbies. What she thought was a nuisance might have been her ticket out of her parents’ house all along. As soon as Elerick woke up, she would find a way to tell him about her job offer. Unfortunately, she slipped into a second sleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Out of the corner of her eye, the gray shadow of a man appeared beside her bed.

  “Emily, where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

  Emily couldn’t answer. She tried to turn her head to get a look at the person talking to her, but her sleeping body was dead weight. The man was just beyond her reach and—still—just out of sight.

  When she finally woke up, Emily was drenched in sweat. And Elerick was already gone.

  CHAPTER 34

  Antibacterial soap

  Elerick zipped up his fleece hoodie and jogged across the street to the beach. The icy peak of the winter season was moving in rapidly, the clouds gathering in the skies and the snow gathering on the sand.

  The season he’d spent with Emily was filled with some of the happiest moments he’d ever had, and this was after traveling the world for year. He knew a good thing when he had it, and hopefully so did she.

  Elerick straightened his back and started practicing the conversation he was about to have with her. If Emily had gotten the note he’d left on her door, she should be on the beach any minute now.

  “I want you to be my girlfriend,” he said to the waves.

  “The ocean is a lucky girl,” Emily said, sneaking up behind him. Elerick put his arms around Emily and laughed into her hair.

  “I meant to say: I want you, Emily, to be my girlfriend,” he said to her, relieved to have gotten the hard part out of the way. “And since my Luddite beliefs don’t allow me to make it Facebook official, I got you this.” He pulled a small box from his pocket and handed it to Emily. Inside was a ring made of white gold with an enormous stone in the center that was cut like a round diamond and as clear as glass.

  Emily slipped the ring on and wiggled her fingers, watching the facets of the stone sparkle in the sunlight. It looked perfect on her hand.

  “I found it in a consignment shop down the street,” Elerick continued. “That’s quartz in the center. The salesperson told me that the members of the Kechemeche tribe who used to live in this area carried these stones around for protection. And some European settler must have polished one up and tried to pass it off as a diamond. It seemed like something you should have.”

  “We call these Cape May Diamonds,” she said. “I used to collect these stones all the time on Sunset Beach. It’s beautiful.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “So you agree?” Elerick asked. “Please say yes.”

  Emily shook her head. “Elerick, I have something to tell you.”

  “What is it?”

  “The cruise director from your ship contacted me out of nowhere and offered me a job as a medium. I thought it would be the perfect way to get out of here—I would have talked to you first, but I had no idea you felt this way. I mean, I’ve already submitted the forms.”

  Elerick’s heart sank. His mother had told him to give Emily wiggle room. In a sense, she had found her ticket out of Cape May all on her own, just by being herself. He would love to be hearing this news if he didn’t know for sure that she was the person he wanted most in the whole world. But there was something else—a niggling worry that had burrowed in his head and refused to be ignored. “Emily, what do you mean he contacted you ‘out of nowhere’? Did he call the hotel? Did a friend recommend you?”

  “He found me on Orbies,” Emily admitted, her face turning red. “I know how that must sound, but everyone on Orbies can’t be as bad as Edgar. Maybe this is what your mom meant when she said to focus on the good people.”

  “Edgar has basically hijacked the app,” Elerick argued. “He’s going to know you’re leaving, and he’s going to try and stop you.”

  “Oh, he’s all ‘boo’ and no bite. Why are you so worried about this?”

  “Sometimes things aren’t as bad as they seem, Emily: sometimes they’re much, much worse. And I’m not enough to stop him. I can’t go through that again.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not enough to stop him?” she asked, confused. “And what are you going through again?”

  “You know how my mom died, Emily,” Elerick said. He sank to the ground and poked a hole into the sand with his finger while he spoke. “I didn’t do the best job of taking care of her. I could have helped her, but I didn’t.”

  Emily sat beside him, lightly scratching his back with her fingernails. He saw her reach an arm around him but then pull it away, fighting the urge to hug him in the event that one or both of them cried. She knew the rules about hugging and crying. “Because you didn’t give her a massage?” she asked lightly. “Most sons would go out of their way to avoid the full-body mom experience. You don’t have to feel guilty about that.”

  Elerick smiled and pulled Emily to him, rules be damned. Once again, her weirdness in the face of tragedy had given him life. “Actually, I did give her a massage,” he admitted. “Well, energy work, anyway.” His words came out like a piece of gum he had worked hard to scratch off the bottom of his desk, only to realize that he now had gum stuck under his fingernails. “She died two weeks later.”

  Elerick sounded so small, so defeated, that Emily strongly doubted that voicing his fear at that decibel would be enough to exorcise it from his head. “Go on.”

  “Her surgeons attacked the parts of her body where the cancer had spread, leaving her with pain and swelling. So I thought it would help her to clear out all the bad energy and make way for her body to heal. I don’t know, maybe energy healing is more like antibiotics, where you can accidentally kill all the good germs while you’re killing the bad ones.”

  Emily was not a doctor, but she had spent her entire life talking to people postmortem. If Katherine blamed Elerick for her death, she wouldn’t have wasted time showing him a cruise ship floating on a calm sea with calypso music playing in the background; she would have pulled the sheets off his massage table every night until he quit his job and begged for mercy. Emily went through the files of her memory to find the one uplifting message that would work in this situation. It took a while, as the life advice imparted by spirits could fill the greeting card racks in every convenience store in the tristate area. But Emily was determined to lift Elerick’s spirits if it killed her and she had to come back to haunt him to finish the job.

  But she soon realized that the answer wasn’t in the spirit world; it was sitting right in front of her, begging her to put it in her own words. In the séance, Katherine said she was glad to have died with everyone telling her how brave she was. Emily didn’t need to ask her what she meant, because she already knew.

  “You made her feel brave,” Emily explained. “You couldn’t cure her cancer, but you took away her fear of dying. That’s why everyone thought she would beat the cancer like she did before, because she must have seemed so optimistic. But really, she was just making peace with it.”

  “I wish that were true.”

  “It is true. I know it is because you helped me feel braver, too.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “Sort of,” Emily said, and her hesitation gave Elerick room t
o fill in the blanks.

  “What are you afraid of? The Gray Man?”

  Elerick’s face told her what she was hoping he wouldn’t say out loud: that it was too dangerous for her to try and leave now, and especially without him. It was hard to explain why running away with ghosts at her heels seemed less frightening than living at home forever. Elerick wasn’t that much older than Emily, but he seemed to have forgotten that the fun part of being young was taking risks and letting experience be its own reward. “I was afraid that I was missing out on everything, and that I’d never be able to find a way out. That I’ll be stuck with my parents forever.”

  “Is that really so terrible? You have a good thing going here,” he argued. “You have a private room, a flexible schedule, tons of clients, and a nice neighborhood to live in. You won’t get all that on a cruise ship. I know you’d rather be in the dorms, but your parents really aren’t so bad that you need to run away from them.”

  “Maybe not,” Emily said, shaking her head, “but I still have to sneak around with you like I’m in high school. Having you here has really opened my eyes to what I’m missing by staying here. My parents may not have been the reason I’m not in school now, but they didn’t exactly try to fight the school’s decision to rescind my acceptance letter.”

  “It’s Edgar who doesn’t want you to go. I know you don’t want to hear that, Emily, but it’s true. It has to be. He’s going to try to stop you.”

  “Maybe I can’t get on the ship without a fight,” Emily said, “but my freedom is worth it.”

  Elerick laced his fingers in hers. “I like your fighting spirit,” he said. “But there is one more problem.”

  Emily furrowed her brow. “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to miss you,” he said. “I should never have let myself get this attached to you after such a short amount of time. I can’t ask you to cancel the trip, and I can’t ask you to have a long-distance relationship with me.”

  “Why not?” She was going on the cruise with Elerick’s blessing, but it didn’t mean that they were on the same page. “I won’t be on the ship forever, you know.”

  “I don’t want to be your substitute college experience. I want to be the person you still want to be with after you’ve had a few adventures on your own. That’s who you are for me.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?”

  Elerick took her hand, the one still wearing his ring. “This is a promise ring,” Elerick said. “While you’re on the ship, learning how to fold towels into the shape of an animal, you can look at your ring and think of me, back at your parents’ house, hiding in your stuffed animals like ET in case you ever want to come home and claim me as your boyfriend.”

  “You know about my stuffed animals? I thought I hid those.”

  “Not very well.”

  “Damn it.”

  “So we have a deal?”

  “Yes,” Emily agreed. “But don’t say a word to my parents until I’ve had a chance to break the news.”

  CHAPTER 35

  A lighthouse and

  a pile of clothes

  On the morning of Emily’s departure, there were so many ghosts filling her room with excess energy that the light bulbs had crackled and blackened out in response. The candles she lit had then set off the fire alarm, forcing an entire building full of unhappy guests to trudge down the stairs and wait on the lawn outside.

  Emily tried her best to play it cool at the breakfast table. “These are the best poached eggs in the entire world,” she told the chef. Not that she had eaten poached eggs anywhere outside the state of New Jersey.

  Burt chewed his bite thoughtfully. “The homemade biscuits are a lot tastier than an English muffin, and I’ll take sausage gravy over Hollandaise sauce any day,” he said. “Let’s keep this one on the menu.”

  Pleased, the chef headed to the kitchen and was nearly clipped by Joan as she marched toward the family’s table, waving a stack of papers in the air. “When were you planning on telling us about this, Emily?”

  Thing is, she wasn’t.

  “Tell us about what?” Burt asked, turning to Emily with wide-eyed curiosity.

  “These are employment forms,” Joan snapped. “Emily is going on the cruise as a professional psychic.”

  Emily couldn’t believe that the cruise director had sent copies of her paperwork by fax instead of sending an attachment by email. Were fax machines the only reliable form of communication on the open seas? “It’s just an idea, Mom,” Emily said nervously. “I haven’t really made up my mind yet.”

  Joan rolled her eyes. “Everything is signed and dated, Emily. I can see that you’re leaving later today.”

  Emily suppressed a groan. She had gone over this morning many times in her head. She knew what she was supposed to say—“Mom and Dad, I got a job, and I’m leaving home for a year”—but the words were so devastating and final. It seemed easier to tell them that she was going for a bike ride and never come back until next spring. She’d even leave her bags behind. After all, what did she really need on a cruise ship other than a couple of sundresses and a pair of flip-flops? By the time they figured out what was happening, it would be too late to stop her.

  Burt dropped his fork, looking at Emily with a wounded expression. “You’d really just leave us like that, without saying goodbye?”

  This, Emily wasn’t quite prepared for. “No, Dad. It’s not like that. I…” Emily took a deep breath. “It’s just that I’m supposed to be in college right now, and all you ever talk about is how proud you are of the leather couches and the jetted tubs, and how much you’re going to charge for my next séance. Did you ever think that maybe I’m not ready to settle down and work at the hotel for the rest of my life?”

  Joan’s nostrils flared. “That’s ridiculous. We’re trying to leave you with a family business—an inheritance—which is more than most kids get from their parents.” She smoothed her hair and took a deep breath. “You have a home base for your séances. You have a beautiful hotel room with an ocean view. You have a housekeeper and a chef. Do you not realize how valuable these things are? Or did Elerick somehow convince you that working for minimum wage on a cruise ship would be a better deal?”

  “No, he said more or less the same thing,” Emily said glumly. She hated that Elerick agreed with her parents, but she was also grateful for his insight, because it had given her time to formulate her argument. “Look, I know you and Dad have done a lot for me, but I don’t know who I am outside of Cape May. I thought college would give me a chance to spread my wings before I settled down here, but the admissions office got in the way. The cruise ship is the best offer I have.”

  “Your father and I are going to have a long talk about whether or not this cruise will be allowed.” Joan glared at Emily. “We should have been included in this discussion.”

  Emily bristled. “No, Mom, I don’t need your permission to go somewhere. I am twenty-one years old, and I am going to do what is best for me. I’m sorry that you saw some paperwork that you don’t like, but if I felt I needed to discuss it with you, I would have.” She looked at Burt, adding more gently, “I was going to tell you; I just didn’t know how.”

  Burt nodded, still looking bewildered, and got up to comfort his wife, who had handed the paperwork to Emily without looking at her and started crying.

  Emily ducked her head as she left the restaurant, feeling the eyes of the other patrons and who knows how many ghosts on her back as she made her way to her bedroom. This was much harder than she thought it would be.

  Emily didn’t have to be psychic to know that if she didn’t finish packing and grab the last rental bike off the rack before sundown, she’d never make it; she had to take a ferry to reach the cruise ship terminal—which was on the other side of the Delaware Bay. The SS Escape left the dock at 6:00 p.m. sharp, and the ship would be even less forgiving than the
bike shop. Emily threw a few changes of clothing into an overnight bag, since she had already let the cat out.

  She blew the dust off her Ouija board and forced it into the bag, nearly spearing a hole with a corner. The board didn’t fit very well, but it was the only communication tool she owned that wasn’t connected to Edgar’s horrible tracking device. If she had to, she could use it to reach out to Finn or Beth to see what was happening back home.

  Sadie had nearly beaten down her door after getting a frantic phone call from Joan. “Don’t you want to stay at least one more day and hang out with me?” Sadie pleaded. “My winter break ends tomorrow, remember?”

  Emily shook her head firmly. “The cruise ship leaves tonight. You know that.”

  Sadie sighed, took her phone out of her pocket, and started sending a text.

  Emily rolled her eyes. “It’s not going to help,” she told Sadie. “You can text my parents all you want, but I’m still going. I’ll rely on my spirit guides to help me through it.”

  “What spirit guides?” Sadie held up her hands. “The dead pirate? The dead opium addict?”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I don’t think you’re taking advice from the right people is my point.”

  All her life, Sadie had been Emily’s confidante and her greatest advocate in a living situation that wasn’t exactly normal and wouldn’t have been normal even without the house full of ghosts. Emily felt a twinge of guilt for being so forceful with Sadie. Patience was not her strong suit.

  But Sadie wasn’t done with her yet. “Just tell me one thing, Emily,” she said. “Why would you leave Elerick when it’s so obvious he’s in love with you?”

  Emily sighed with relief. If Sadie thought Elerick loved her, it must be true. “I need to leave home at least once before I settle down. Elerick seemed sad about me going when I brought it up, but he understands.”