The Ones We're Meant to Find(10)

The pep talk fails. I let out a strangled chuckle, self-pity tears leaking from my eyes. Who am I kidding? I spent months digging through rusted piles of junk, looking for a single propeller. There’s no workable metal left. Not enough for a whole boat.

Wiping my eyes, I look up, in the direction of the house.

No metal?

No problem.

“Strongly disagree,” intones U-me when she finds me crouched by the porch, prying at the wooden steps with my bare hands. “Strongly disagree. Strongly disagree.”

“For Joules’ sake, shut up.”

U-me goes silent.

I cover my face and exhale into my palms. “Sorry.” It’s an apology to U-me and to the porch. After everything M.M. has given me, this can’t be how I repay her. “I’m sorry.”

U-me doesn’t say anything, just rolls close.

Uncovering my face, I rise. “Stay,” I order, heading across the beach. U-me follows. “Really, stay! I’ll be back this time.”

But when I make it to the end of the sunken pier on the west side of the coast, I’m not so sure if I want to go back. Everything’s still gray, including the water lapping over the pier planks. I’ve stepped off the end before to swim. I don’t want to swim anymore. I want to sink. The memory of pain returns to my lungs, and I can almost feel them filling again. It’ll suck. A lot. But then things will go still. Tranquil. Easier than this.

Megajoules. What am I thinking?

I get to my knees and dunk my head into the water. The salt stings my lips. I part them to scream.

Nothing comes out.

No point in screaming if there’s no one to hear.

I say her name instead. Kay. I ask if she’s out there. If she knows I tried—really, really tried—to find her.

And if she’d forgive me if I don’t try again.



* * *



In the end, I don’t bury Hubert. Feels wrong to trap a part of him on this island when at least one of us can be free.

“Goodbye, Bert,” I say, releasing him.

The waves carry him out. For a second, regret fills me like wind in a sail. It blows me deeper into the water, after Hubert. I’ve changed my mind. I want to bury him. Keep him near, in case his other pieces wash up.

The ocean reclaims him before I can.

I stumble to a stop. Foam rises around my knees, pulls away. Sand slips out from under my feet. I keep my footing. I stay until the gulls circling me lose interest. They go home and I do too.

The fifty strides from shore to house feel closer to a hundred. My calves burn as I climb the sandy steps to M.M.’s porch, and as I clutch the rail for support, I find myself eye level with the tally marks, all 1,112 of them.

Now 1,113. I gouge it in with the metal scrap, drop it. It plinks onto the porch.

1,113 days.

Three years, and then some, on this island.

Now back to square one.

“This calls for a renaming of an era,” I say as U-me joins me. But life-after-life-after-Hubert sounds uninspiring, and frankly, not much has changed. The kitchen is the way I left it: empty jar on the counter, broken taro biscuits on the scuffed floor. I pick up the pieces, de-fluff them of mold, and begin refilling the jar. Don’t know why—pretty sure I can sicken and die from eating mold just as easily as not eating, but it’s something to do, and when I’m done refilling the jar, I wipe down the dust covering the countertops and check the water tank. The pipes run under the house and draw salt water from the sea, which is then passed through a solar-powered boiler that traps the steam and condenses it to fresh water. The system failing would seriously throw a wrench in my whole I-will-survive thing, so I’m relieved, as always, to find it still working. I turn on the valves and head to the bathroom to run a bath, shrug out of my sand-caked sweater and cargos as I wait for the porcelain tub to fill.

The water isn’t hot, but it’s warmer than the sea. Sighing, I slide under. My hair lifts from my scalp, buoyed. My thoughts jellify, and in the clear, semisolid silence, I find a memory.

“We shouldn’t,” Kay says under her breath. We’re standing in a glass elevator, facing forward, sandwiched between six other people. Light—dark—light—it flickers over our faces as we sink through the ground of one neighborhood and into the sky of the next. At each level, we stop, the curved doors hiss open, and people trickle off.

After a certain point, no one gets on.

People don’t know what they’re missing. As for the ones still on the elevator, I bet they’re all in their heads, reading the news in their minds’ eye or messaging colleagues. What’s the point of traveling somewhere in person if your brain is elsewhere?

But I shouldn’t judge so harshly. I know Kay would be devastated without her Intraface. I turn to her now that the elevator is emptier. “You’ve got to see it, love.”

She’s still in her school uniform, hair bobbed and unstyled. Freckles spangle her cheeks. Her mind is a diamond—unbreakable, and dazzling from every angle. Unlike me, she doesn’t need sequins to shine. Doesn’t need people or places to entertain her.

And now I can tell, from the slight wrinkle of her nose, that she doesn’t need this adventure, either. “I’ve seen the stratum,” she says.

“No, the ocean,” I quickly correct, then add, “Up close. It makes a world of difference.”