The Book of Speculation

29 JULY 24TH

With morning comes pounding. We survived the night. Alice is at the front door, knocking on the glass with her forearm. She is in tall green rubber boots, practical as ever.

Enola rouses when I shake her. She smacks Doyle awake.

“Come on,” I say. “Help me move the coats so we can let Alice in.”

“She’s here? I thought we were leaving her the keys.”

“She probably just wanted to check in.” We move the chairs and throw the coats and sweaters aside, each landing with a saturated thud on the wet carpet. Outside, Alice is bouncing on her toes. Something is very wrong. We open the door.

“Oh God,” she says. “It flooded in here? How bad is it?”

The books. Of course, she’s here for the books. I didn’t know I’d wanted her worried about me until I’d been supplanted by books. “Downstairs got the worst of it. I kept whatever I could dry. I stopped the back door, but there wasn’t much we could do. I’m sorry. The whaling archive is safe, though.”

“Of course it is. In the archive we trust.” The words are joyless. She looks me up and down. “Are you all right?”

“Sure,” I say. Then her arms are around me in a quick hug, warm and good. She’s still in her pajama bottoms. “Are you okay?”

She takes a breath and holds it. In middle school the girls used to have contests to see who could hold their breath the longest; Alice once held it until she fainted. Her words shoot out all at once. “You have to come with me. Your house is going over and you need to get whatever you can out of it now.”

She says something else, but I can’t hear it because Enola is saying, “Shit, shit, shit.”

“It’s bad?” I ask.

“It’s bad. The roads are still flooded. My dad told me to get you. He kept calling and calling, and I didn’t want to pick up but I thought it could be my mother.” She tugs on her hair, wringing it out. “I’m really sorry. Look, I brought the truck. If you follow me I’ll take you back where the roads are good. You can put anything from the house in the truck.”

The water is more than ankle deep through the lot. We pile into my car and slowly move through the flooding, with Alice leading in Frank’s flatbed. She must have picked it up from him, which means she’s seen the house. She leads us nearly to the center of the island. Port must still be closed off.

Enola continues quietly swearing.

“You have a chance to get stuff,” Doyle says. “That’s good.”

We follow Alice’s taillights up Middle Country Road. Cars are stranded on either side — a ghost town of vehicles. She turns us toward the water, heading north, taking side roads around downed trees. When we reach Till Road, Enola starts to cry.

Alice pulls into Frank’s driveway and I park alongside her. I tell myself not to look until we get out of the car and can stare it in the face.

* * *

The house is in silhouette, hanging off the cliff’s edge, tilting like an Irishman’s cap. We stand beside it, four tiny figures, no more than paper dolls, two huddled together, the smallest spark dancing between their bodies. Children at the gates of our history.

“Throw whatever you can get in the truck and come back to my place,” Alice says. “You can stay with me.”

“Thanks,” I say. “It won’t be forever.”

“We’ll work it out.” She gives my hand a squeeze. “I need to talk to my mom.” She walks toward the house where she grew up, and for a minute I don’t know who has it worse, and then I do. It’s Alice.

Enola tells Doyle to wait by the car. “This is excavation. Watsons only.”

Though he says cool, he conveys be careful.

* * *

The door hangs off its hinges and the hole in the living room floor has become a pit. A wide split spiders up the wall between the kitchen and living room. I can see Mom’s hand wrapping around the corner, laughing as she ran down the hallway. We walk around the edge of the room, balancing against things — the couch — I can remember Enola hiding behind it, giggling — my desk, anything that will take weight. Enola sees me limping and offers her shoulder.

“Get that picture,” she says, pointing. “The one of me and Mom.”

“Frank took that.”

“Get over it.” She yanks it from the wall. My grown sister hands me her child self. “You’re going to want it.”

“You don’t want anything?”

She shakes her head. “You know I never asked you to stay, right? When it’s gone I think you should just forget it was ever here. Be happy, okay?”

A sharp whining screams down the hallway. We tense. Her fingers dig into my shoulder. The sound deepens to a low howl, then crashing. I clap my hands over my ears, but it’s too late. Enola mouths something—what the fuck. Plaster showers over us. I yell, “Run,” as the floor begins to roll. I tuck my head to my knees. Tossed against the front wall, back slammed into the desk. A sucking spasm. Emptied out. A great tearing sound. A chair topples. Glass shatters. Papers and books tumble onto me. Air, air pushes up from under.

The sound dies and the floor stops moving. My ears buzz. The room is thick with dust. Enola is huddled in the corner by the sofa, covered in papers, shaking.

“Fuck! Are you all right? Everybody all right?” Doyle is in the doorway, streaming nervous chatter. Daylight comes from the hall through the dirt and debris. Tentacled arms lift Enola, me, pulling us onto what’s left of the lawn and into the whipping grass; his grip has the bite of electricity.

* * *

We wind up on the hood of my car. The damage is incredible. The side of the house collapsed, spilling the contents of my parents’ bedroom across the cliff, along with bits and pieces of the stone foundation. The bed traveled farthest, mattress hidden among the beach grass, headboard kissing the remnants of the bulkhead, and Dad’s shoes toppled down the bluff until they bounced their way into the water. I wanted to throw them out, but I could never bring myself to.

The crabs are still here. They should be gone. They should have left after I’d burned Frank’s things and the book. Or rolled out with the tide as the storm that took my house pulled back. It’s stronger now, the feeling that I’ve missed something. Papers are scattered everywhere — leaves or snowflakes — pieces of my family thrown to the wind. Why are the crabs here? Was burning not enough?

“Is that Mom’s typewriter?” Enola asks. It is, banked against a scrub pine along with what must be manuals. A piece of chimney falls. Down the cliff, Dad’s tools dig themselves into the sand. It’s gone. All of it.

Enola takes her cards from her pocket. In the light of day they’re brown and worn, edges rounded out until there’s almost nothing left at all. They’re nearly pulp, worn by skin oils — hers, Mom’s, other people’s. They smell like dust, paper, and women. She sets them beside her on the hood of the car. Doyle hops down and begins pacing.

“Put those away, Little Bird.”

“No.” To me she says, “Cut.”

“Fine,” Doyle replies. “I’ve gotta walk. I need to walk.” He twitches his hand in the air and heads up the street.

I touch the cards, these things that were my mother’s. I try to feel her, but there is nothing except soft paper, fibers decayed beyond repair. I cut the deck deep. A thought takes root. It couldn’t be. They can’t be the cards.

“Three piles,” she says. She watches intently, as if expecting something to happen, then moves fast, shuffling, flying through paper and setting cards on the hood.

It’s a spread I haven’t seen before, not the Cross or the Six Rows; it’s seven cards in a V shape. Enola coughs and takes the cards before I can get a good look at them. “No good. Cut again.” She shuffles and spreads the cards faster. Before she clears the spread away I glimpse swords, a sea of them, and what might have once been a woman. Enola sweeps up the cards, taps the deck. She twitches. “Again.” I cut; she shuffles, spreads, then snatches the cards back. This time I catch a card that might have once been black. The Devil or the Tower, maybe. “It’s always the same,” she says and shuffles again, then sets the cards down to cut. I tell her to stop. She grabs my hand and forces me to cut the deck. When she tries to take the cards away again I catch her wrist.

I say, “Don’t.”

“Fuck,” she says. A perfect V of seven cards. The Devil, the Tower, the Queen of Swords, Three of Swords, a Hanged Man, and a card too worn to read. She tells me it’s the King of Swords. When I ask what it means she shakes her head and picks each card up, returning it to the deck and finally to her skirt. She flops back on the car, flat like a dead man. “They’re our cards,” she says, almost too quiet to hear.

“What?”

“It’s the same stuff over and over again.” She digs her index finger hard into her forehead. “They keep coming up in places they have no reason to be. Like if I’m reading some woman about having kids — bang, there they are. Tower. Devil. Death. And water. Shit, there’s water everywhere.”

A sick feeling comes, followed by a shadow. Yes, these cards are very old. This is what Churchwarry and I missed, the cards themselves.

“What did Frank tell you about the cards?”

“They were Mom’s and had been her mother’s before. I don’t know. It’s been more than six years. I don’t remember stuff like you do.”

The satisfaction in solving a riddle is the flash of insight that triggers a tiny burst of dopamine. This does not happen. This is cold sweat. The pictures in the book were Madame Ryzhkova’s cards, Amos’s, Evangeline’s. Enola tore them out because she’d seen them in her deck, Mom’s deck. The book found Churchwarry, a Ryzhkova, as if leading her back to Amos. Bringing us together to undo it. And I burned it. “You tore pictures of these cards out of my book. These cards. Why?”

“I had to, okay?”

I ask why, but she stays silent. “Enola, put the cards away.”

She won’t look at me. “No.”

“Give them to me.”

“No.” She gets to her feet. Enola with sea, sand, and shore. She’s tight and fierce, with no excess to her sinew and muscle, bones and bright burning like Blake’s tyger. She knows. Part of her believes she’s going to die.

A dresser drawer slides down the cliff, smashing into a bulkhead. That one had Dad’s watch that he wound long past the days when everyone else had switched to batteries. “I’ll fix it. I’m fixing it,” I say.

“There’s nothing to fix. This is just what happens.” Sick. Sick. Sick. A sour taste.

I hug her. She’s too old to piggyback, but I want to take us both away. “We’re going to leave. I’ll go with you. Anywhere you want. I don’t care. Let’s go. Wherever. You, me, Doyle, and Alice.”

“Brother mine, I love you some, but you’re a very bad liar.”

“I promise.” Mom must have been trying to get rid of the cards and Frank didn’t understand. A bookshelf careens down the bluff.

Enola looks out at the water. “It’s pretty here. I forgot that.”

“Can I see the cards?”

“Nope.”

“We don’t all die,” I tell her. “There’s me, and you don’t swim anymore.” I tell her we’ll go somewhere else, anywhere she thinks is pretty. I tell her there are libraries all over. I can work anywhere. We’ll be good again, she and I. I won’t parent her, I promise. I say I can teach her about books and she laughs.

Somewhere a part of us does this, leaves and gets right. We climb into her car and let the tires roll, counting one-eyed cars. We toss the cards in a river and it’s like Enola said, oysters up the sides like ruffles on panties. We rent a house, freshly painted and new. We start again.

This is not what happens.

There is a roaring sound when the foundation under the hallway breaks, followed by the kitchen, the refrigerator, cabinets, all toppling down. Frank runs out of his house, shouting. Shingles spring down the bluff. It is done. The house is destroyed.

Doyle jogs toward us from up the street. When he reaches us he picks up Enola in a hard, rocking squeeze. He puts her down when she smacks his side.

Frank has walked to the bluff. His hat lies behind him, discarded. He’s smaller, empty.

I walk toward him.

“She did love this house,” he says when I approach, as though it’s his life spilling down the cliff, not mine. Creaking gives way to a sharp snap and Frank shoves me back. Enola’s bed scrapes down the broken boards, coming to rest on a partially collapsed wall. “It’s all my fault.”

“I need to know about the cards you gave my sister. Did my mother tell you anything about them?”

“Your dad was going to move you. I told her it would kill me if she left. I couldn’t help it. Then she gave me her cards and told me to hang on to them. They were her mother’s and grandmother’s. I figured if she gave me something like that she’d be back.” He looks away from the rubble, back to me. Eyes bloodshot like beets, like my father’s dead eyes. “They passed those things down like they were jewelry.”

My skin feels too tight, like I might rupture. My mother must have read the end, the cards Enola keeps reading, the same thing Verona Bonn read, all the way back to Ryzhkova. They passed the cards to each other creating history, fingers touching paper, imbuing it with hope and fears, fear like a curse. Of course they wouldn’t clear their cards, they were talking to their mothers, and isn’t that part of why I’ve stayed here? The book noted a falling out between Ryzhkova and her apprentice, a falling out over the mermaid. Enola said that cards build history — what a perfect way to wound someone. The cards were hers, Ryzhkova’s, then Amos and Evangeline’s on down the line, each leaving themselves in the ink, each pulling from the deck, pulling in fears that work like poison.

The wind blows a sheet of paper across a split board. The only paper of consequence was never in my possession — it was in Enola’s.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He waits for me to answer.

“I’m sorry about the house,” I tell him. I’m not.

I leave him at the bluff, grieving the house. I hear him shuffling through bits and pieces, looking for her in the rubble. He’s lost her twice now. I only lost her once.

I see Enola dig her hand deep into her pocket, each shuffle working a hex into her skin. Doyle watches me, craning over the top of Enola’s head. He asks after Frank and looks at me with wariness, too alert. He’s touched the cards, Doyle who my sister lies to because she’s scared, because she loves him.

Alice emerges from the McAvoy house and trudges toward her father. It hurts to watch her put a hand on his shoulder when she’d rather do anything but. But that’s who she is — a daughter, a practical woman, the responsible kind. It hurts to see her pull him away from what was my house, toward the place I once wished I’d lived.

I ask Enola if she’ll talk to Frank. “Alice shouldn’t be alone with him and Leah won’t kill him as long as you’re there.” The look she gives me is dark.

“Thought you’d be happy to see him dead.”

“Alice wouldn’t be. She’s mad now, but she won’t be forever.”

Enola glances at the tattooed man beside her, then back at me. “What the hell am I supposed to say to him?”

Doyle rubs her hair, possessive, comforting. She chews her lower lip.

“Please,” I say. “For me.”

“Fine.”

When Doyle starts to go with her, I ask him to hang around. He shrugs. We both watch her head toward Frank. With each step I whisper a refrain: Be good. Be good. Please be good.

“You put a lot on her, you know,” Doyle says beside me.

“Maybe.” I start for the bluff, a slow limp. He follows. Again the wary look. “They’ll be fine. She’ll be all right.”

We walk to where the sand sharply dips, where Dad’s nightstand emptied its contents: pill bottles, magazines, keys to locks that don’t exist anymore. Off to the west a quiet horn signals the ferry’s slow trek. I ask, “Where did you say your family’s from?”

“Mom is out in Ohio.”

Ohio is good. It sounds like somewhere I would never go. It sounds dry, like there might be dry places.

“Why did you come here? What did she tell you?”

He shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his cargo pants. They bulge out. He breathes in, then lets out a prolonged hiss. “She told me you’re sick; she thinks you’re going to do something, something maybe like your mom did. I thought she shouldn’t be alone. Man, I don’t know. I heard about the mermaids and I saw you hold your breath, but I don’t know.”

“She lied.”

He turns quiet. Thoughtful maybe. “Enola doesn’t lie to me.”

“Yes, she does. I taught Enola how to hold her breath. She’s better than I am, or she was. Tell me, what’s worse than her brother being sick? Worse to you. Something she would lie about.”

His answer is pure reflex. “If she was sick.”

I say nothing.

He grunts and drops his head down. He kicks a pebble with his bare foot and it caroms off a shattered mirror, vanishing into the crabs. The tentacle tattoo extends down, twisting around his ankles, stretching out to his toes. “Damn.”

“You know some about my family. I’ll tell you about some other things, about the cards, specifically the cards.”

The sun is high, a bright bullet above the water. I tell him about the menagerie, about a Russian woman and a deck of orange cards, and how when you touch them you leave a piece of yourself behind, how these pieces work like a curse and the thoughts they contain seep into you like venom, how sometimes you hold on to things because you’re searching for someone in them, someone you want desperately to love you. How the very best intentions kill us.

We watch as Enola and Alice take Frank back to his house. The tide moves out, thick with horseshoe crabs. After a long time he speaks.

“Do you want me to get the cards from her?”

“I should take them so you don’t have to. I think we’ll be fine once they’re gone.”

“I can pick her pocket,” he says, quietly. “I used to, you know.” Of course he did. “She’s got this box for them. You want that, too?”

“Sure.” I look at him, this boy. He twitches his fingers to imaginary music. “Can I ask you something?”

A shrug.

“Why the octopi?”

He blushes, a dark stain under the ink. “My pop was in the navy. It’s an old sailor thing. Wards off evil.”

“Can I ask you something else?”

“The electricity?”

I nod.

His mouth quirks up. “A doctor told me there’s too much salt in me, that it makes me super conductive. I don’t think he really knew what it was. Maybe I just touched a light switch and it lit me up instead of the lamp. Is it really important to know why?”

“You love my sister.”

“I’m going to steal from her for you.”

Across the water the ferry has passed the Middle Ground Light. The tide is past peak, the tops of boulders just breaking water. Doyle looks at me, squint-eyed, head tilted. He turns and jogs the distance to Frank’s house and I watch his loose-limbed gait, the slow questing of tentacles. At the door he calls her name, then vanishes inside.

I wait, watching the remnants of the house. It’s alive with crumbling plaster, blowing papers. It was a house before there was an us. After we die there will be nothing to say that we ever were, no house left to speak of us, we’ll have all vanished into the water. But that will be later, much later. Not today.

Just now Doyle’s hand must be reaching into a pocket, maybe as he brushes her back, maybe as he leans over her. When he lifts the cards it will be almost like the tentacles are sucking on them. I feel hope. With the cards gone, it will stop.

Not more than a quarter hour and he returns, bounding through the grass, box in hand. I ask if she noticed. He shakes his head no.

“She’ll be pissed,” he says. But she’ll be alive to be angry.

“I’m sorry you had to touch them.” He should go back to Enola before he’s missed. Doyle cracks his neck. He wears guilt like another tattoo. Moments later he disappears back into the house across the street.

The box is smaller than I’d thought; I can hold it with one hand, rounded edges pressing into my palm. Dark red wood shows through layers of damaged paint. The top is covered with dulled illustrations — a man with a moustache, a faded bird with a tail made of flames. Oh, I remember you. I lift the lid and shock zips up my fingers. Maybe this is what it feels like when Doyle touches a light. Inside, the paper is orange faded to yellow, soft and ragged from my family’s touch. I snap the lid closed.

* * *

My right foot hits the beach and a horseshoe crab walks over it. There is hardly a place to stand for the winding and writhing of the crabs.

Simon.

The crabs have dragged the buoys out, pulled them far below the water so that not even the anchor buoys show; I’d need to walk for hours to find them. I take the box from under my arm. I’ll need sand, rocks, anything for weight. Quartz pebbles and ground-down bricks mark the high-tide line. As if knowing my intent, the crabs clear a path. I take as many rocks as I think will fit, but the box is so small that pebbles may not be enough. I’ll need to bury it, to make sure that when I leave they won’t come back. To give the Sound time to do its work.

The water is frigid, like April rather than July, and the first step strikes out cold. But even in the water the box feels hot like flame. Clawed feet swarm, and crab shells slow my walk to a shuffle. They circle, churning sand, tails switching and whipping my heels. As my bad foot moves forward they begin pushing, urging me along. Sharp feet pinch on my pant leg and the crabs begin to climb, clinging like a child to its parent, hanging on as if at any moment I might run. I dust off one and another grabs on.

As when taking out the anchors, I have to move slowly. With each step crabs grip higher, weighing me down. As the water reaches my chest, they’ve managed to dig into my shirt. I squeeze the box tight to my side. Now. Air out. A quick breath out that sucks in the stomach. Diaphragm up, like a tight drum. Navel to spine. One. Two. Three. Then in, quick breath, spread each rib. The trick is to breathe wide and not let go. The trick is to breathe like you’re thirsty. A crab loses its grip, falls to the sandy bottom. I am under.

Simon.

My mother’s voice lives in the waves as it always has, as though she never left. Each step is heavy, aching. The light from above fades, lost in the seaweed and the growing horde of crabs. If I look up I can see faint rays spiraling through the salt. I have to get farther out. I can’t chance they’ll wash up. A sharp tail pricks under my arm, tapping at the box. I pass a bicycle half buried in sand and rock, encased in barnacles and covered with crabs, now part of the Sound. My stomach flutters. A hiccup of air escapes. I walk.

A clawed leg digs at my neck then burrows into my hair. Skin crawls, electric. Stop. Hit it away. It scuttles down my back, clicking over others. More hooking, clawing. Twitch. Shake them off.

Simon, she whispers. Hush. Hush, I have work to do.

More scratching, pricking. The weight. Another hiccup. Pull them off. The box drops. One moment, falling slow to the ground, lid open. Cards scatter, drifting. Horseshoe crabs swarm the box. Prince Ivan clawed. Firebird drowned. A hiccup. More air gone. I reach for it, but my arms won’t lift. Horseshoe crabs hang on my sleeves. Back up my neck they pile on. The Tower floats, then is flicked away by a crab. I kick. Scuffle them away. The bad ankle rolls. I fall, sag, to the bottom. Crabs move in. Ah, god. A thousand legs, a hundred tails. Onto my stomach, my rib cage, shoving me back. I look up. A beam of light, weak, clouded with algae and brine.

Simon. Sweetly, she says it, calling me home. I can hear her tell me I’m a good son, can feel the eggshells of that last morning beneath my fingernails.

My legs will not lift. My chest won’t rise. More breath is pushed away under the weight. On the shore they might look for me. My fingers brush something smooth. A card. A small thing, simple. Water and salt will eat the ink, wipe away its face. Good. Burning was too quick. A slow curse demands slow breaking. The orange will bleed into the Sound. The oil from our fingers will wash away and the paper will soften and dissolve into the sand, into the water’s mouth. As the cards break away, so will we.

Octopi for good luck. That’s fine. They’ll pull the trailer along to Ohio. Enola will lean an arm out the window, her hand flying over the wind. His family will be wide and warm.

I have saved her.

There is a woman with my sister’s eyes, and hair long and black like ink — my mother, but not — a silent man beside her — then the mermaid girls, the diving queens, the fortune-tellers and magician’s assistants, a sea of black-haired women with odd eyes, chests made wide for swimming and breath-holding, with laughs that sound like shattering plates. There are little girl hands, and scraped legs that I bandaged, knobby knees on my shoulders when I carried her down a cliff, the girl who left me because she wanted to live.

Ah, and now among the black hair and breath-holding, the fortunes and drowning, a single long red braid. Beside me, a pair of freckled hands digs into the beach with mine, French conjugations, cursing my family when I could not, the sweetest taste at the base of the neck, the curve of an arm reaching to the top of a library shelf. A life lived beside mine. I have not been alone. I can feel her now. I was never alone.

There. The last air. The crash of water around me. I am drowned, but it feels like being lifted — the sky’s hands on me, pulled up from the sea as I am swallowed by it. Light. Brine. And here, a voice.

You are home.

The fingers on my wrists are hot, almost burning. Though it might be the fire from skin being cold. There’s a tear in the black, a pinprick of light. It stabs deeper than the touch.

My name in a thousand voices.

A sharp electric snap, frigid. Bright.

Gagging.

Breath.

A soft voice. Two voices. Far back, distant smudges moving closer. My back hurts, itches, can’t get warm. Louder. My name again. Two sounds, a hiss and a mumble. One voice now.

Simon.

My lungs, my guts, pushing out water — not coughing but turning — outside in and inside out, forcing me dry. Dry. Dry, just once I want to be dry. There are arms around my back, pounding my shoulders, beating my spine, clutching and holding. They’re wet. Soaking.

A patch of skin worn hard and smooth by a fishing rod.

When light bleeds in again it’s forgiving and comes as dots that fuzz and fade into more light, then grains of sand, then dots again, brownish pink. Alice’s arms, pied like the shore.

I vomit a deluge onto the sand. Saltwater, algae. Once, as a child, I fell from the monkey bars on the elementary school playground and had the wind knocked from me. I lay on the pavement, diaphragm fluttering, gasping, waiting for the empty to fill. Undrowning is that in reverse. What’s full is emptying to again take in life. My lips move. A word forms, a scratchy “Hey.”

Enola answers, tiny, angry as I’ve ever heard her. “You asshole.”

And then I’m smiling.

* * *

On the sofa in the McAvoys’ living room I run my finger over the edge of Alice’s thumbnail, though I know that drives her crazy. There’s a solid sureness to fingernails, the shell over the tenderest parts of us. I tap on the tip of her nail and she flinches. Instead of pulling away, she tightens her hold. I stare at the scratches on my skin from the crabs’ feet, and the fresh black bruises that line the inside of my arms. It wasn’t easy to pull me up. I could tell her about her hands, and of all the women around me — all the water, the drowning, the voices — that it’s been her hands, always. But it hurts to talk. The Sound has left my throat raw.

Doyle is talking, pacing, telling Enola and Alice what I told him. Littered with nuances and tipped phrasing, he makes my words sound a little like wind. I watch his long toes bend against the living room floor and remember the bite of a spark on my skin. At some point, when I was fresh from the water, he must have touched me.

“I didn’t think he was gonna do that, Little Bird,” he says. “I swear I thought he was gonna torch the cards or I wouldn’t have swiped them.”

“It’s not your fault,” she says. “He’s always been like that.”

I let them talk about me as if I’m not there. I’m tired. I look at the room from across Alice’s shoulder, the slight bump of her vertebra, the still damp weight of her braid. I can see Frank in the kitchen, hunched over, shaken. Leah moving about, making tea. She walks with purpose, calmly sliding a cup into my sister’s hands, as though her entire world hasn’t shattered. Enola might not even notice where the cup came from, but she drinks. I look up at Alice’s mother, and catch the corner of a smile. Subtle, as if to say, let them talk.

Alice’s voice is soft but forceful. The angry librarian. “He’s worked himself to death for you, you know. Worried about you, wondered if you were ever coming back. Simon’s been killing himself over you for years.”

Enola says quietly, “Don’t you think I know?”

It’s Doyle who asks, “Shit, what’s he gonna do? He can’t swim at Rose’s.”

“Shit,” Enola says.

The deepest shame is the one that comes from looking my family in the eye after having died and woken up. They’ve imagined me drowning again, dying three times nightly in Thom Rose’s dunk tank. I can see them piecing together what to do with me, figuring out whether or not I need to be watched. I’m not used to being carried, but there are obligations that come with family, letting them care for you when they need to. Not one of them seems to notice that Enola’s hands aren’t twitching anymore, or that Doyle’s stopped quietly checking in on her. The nervousness has leeched from her, leaving behind someone closer to the Enola I knew when she was a little girl. That lifts the shame. I won. Let them worry a little while. Watching me keeps them from noticing the shift in the air, in the way the salt smells, and the turning that has happened inside us.

“He can stay with me,” Alice says. Enola starts asking questions about what I’m going to do, where I’ll work. I stop listening. I picture the mobile in Alice’s bedroom with its tiny horseshoe crab, and the photograph of her that her father took.

We carry our families like anchors, rooting us in storms, making sure we never drift from where and who we are. We carry our families within us the way we carry our breath underwater, keeping us afloat, keeping us alive. I’ve been lifting anchors since I was eighteen. I’ve been holding my breath since before I was born.

“No.” No one hears me, so I say it a second time. When silence at last descends I say, “I’m not staying here. I have to be somewhere.”

Enola’s eyes get round. Alice lets go of my hand.