The Rattled Bones(37)

“My family is the real reason I’m here.”

“Are they from Maine?”

He laughs. “No, no. Nothing like that. It’s complicated and kind of wrapped up in my one private thing, so . . .”

“So . . .”

We let the ocean stretch and pool and breathe around us while we kick our feet in the cold tide. We let the starlight watch us. We guard all our private things under the moon’s steady gaze. Something about the quiet night brings me peace. I don’t need to think about Dad or Malaga or school or the wound at my wrist. Right here, right now is all that matters. Tomorrow can cram its worry into me. But tonight I allow calm to reach inside of me.

*

My eyes open to the dark just before my alarm clock has a chance to bleat its five a.m. call. I feel Reed behind me, his limbs tucked against all my curves. I bask in his heat. I’m sorry for lying to him, and I press my weight into his frame, enough to feel his warmth spread against mine but not enough to wake him. Not yet. No part of me wants to separate from his rest just yet. In a few minutes we’ll both need to get up, get out on the water.

I close my eyes to his breathing, its steady rise and fall. In and out. The warmth of his lungs expelling and falling into my hair. In and out. Push and pull. I focus on it so singularly that his breathing is the only sound that fills my ears until his breathing becomes louder. Deeper. It’s not a snore, but something fuller, greater. As if the very room expands with his breath, retreats with his inhale. I dart open my eyes. The white noise of his breathing crams my ears. Reed’s snoring is never this loud. No one’s breathing can be this loud. I reach my hand down to his arm slung over my waist and want to shake him awake. Stop the noise. Quiet the room, my head. But my hand slips over his skin and feels the cold of him. The shocking, blinding cold. Cold in the way no living skin has the right. I turn in my bed to face him, shake him, wake him. But it’s not Reed who lies against me.

Her eyes dart open as if I’ve woken her, as if I’m the one who startled her. The girl is next to me. The one from the shore, the one from the deep. Her black eyes stare at me, asking a question I can’t answer. She smells of the sea, this girl. Her coarse black braids hold the sweet scent of the wind, the salt of the ocean. My heart thuds in my chest and my brain struggles to make sense of my room, my bed, this girl here with me. My fingers rake at the sheets, trying to find the edges, trying to free me from the bed. My legs kick. My frantic arms push distance between us. Then she speaks.

“I’m here,” she tells me. Her voice is gravel and water. It holds a slippery hoarseness that shakes the words she pushes over her full pink lips. In her breath is something more, the dank earth, the smell of rooted plants. She opens her mouth wide and on her tongue sits the perfect blinding orange cup of a Flame Freesia.

I scramble out of bed, throwing my covers over her as I rip free from my sheets. The scream in my chest won’t rise or gather sound. Because something about me trusts her. Wants to know why she’s here. Wants to know: why me? I press my back to the corner of my room, the windows and the sea behind me, the lump of this strange girl in my bed. Her body and face are hidden by the mess of my blankets, but her dark braids swim over the stark white of my pillowcase. They are seaweed and earth and hair, plaited together.

“Who are you?” I whisper, daring her to speak again. Daring my brain to make this real. I press a hand to my head, try to keep my mind from slipping. As if it is that easy.

Questions race as I wait in the silence for her response. Nothing comes. I fill the quiet with a mantra, the repeated youarenotreal, youarenotreal, youarenotreal. Is this how it happened for my mother? Uninvited, persistent hallucinations that grew into something bigger, harder to push away?

I shove the heels of my palms into my eyes, pushing away the vision of the girl in my bed, pushing away any connection to my mother’s lost grip on reality. This has to be a dream. I just need to wake up. I stand, force my dream self to press harder against the wall, my fingers clawing at the plaster, as if I can escape this room and this nightmare by sheer force. The room quiets. The house quiets. The only breath is my own, so I squeeze closed my eyes. I open them. Slowly, carefully.

The girl is gone. I force a small step toward the bed and hover my hand over the impression her body made. My heartbeat thunders under every inch of my skin. I slip my hand along the comforter, the places where her outline still shows. The quilt is cold. Winter cold, and I shiver. I rip the cover off my bed, let it collapse into a heap on the floor.

I step back. My hands reach behind me, feel for the lip of the window seat, and I lean against its dependable wood. I force my breathing to calm, try to pull myself back to reality. It was another dream. It had to be a dream. I grab harder to the seat’s sill, trying to ground myself in the now, wake myself from a nightmare.

I pull in my breath, force it out. Pull it in, out. I listen to the waves, the tide rolling and receding, rolling and receding. I match my breath to that of the sea. I pull the wet air into my lungs, remind myself that this is home and I am okay.

Behind me the sea calls, its force beating at the shore.

It was nothing but a dream.

Light begins to stream into my room from the rising sun. Just a soft wink of pale yellow at first. The waves grow louder, churning harder. I turn to see the whitecaps pounding into the shore and then I tumble back.

The girl is here.

In my window.

Perched on the trellis the way Reed has done so many times. She is all head and shoulders, her legs unseeable on the rungs of the ladder. My heart thumps loud as the exploding waves, but I don’t move.