Lightning cracks so close Willa can feel it snap through the air and she takes off across the deck, back to Lane and the safety of the cabin. She doesn’t account for how slippery the deck is under her sneakers and how wildly the boat is tossing. A wave rears up, the wind pushes against her, and Willa loses her footing, falling like a cartoon character on a banana peel, legs flying out in front of her, the world going sideways. She hears Lane call her name, faint and faraway, just before she comes down hard.
Her head hurts and then it doesn’t.
She can see the sky, patches of blue peeking out from heavy black clouds, and then she can’t see anything.
Lane is there and then she’s not.
When Willa opens her eyes, she’s flat on her back, only she’s somehow at the skating rink. She’s seven. She’s fallen, again, and all of her classmates are gathered around.
“I thought you were good,” one of them says.
“Yeah, can you even skate?” another demands.
A disco ball twirls above her, and the skating rink DJ is spinning NSYNC. “Bye, bye, bye,” Justin Timberlake croons, and Willa sits up. Her head is killing her.
“I can skate,” she protests. Her voice sounds weird, grown-up.
“Yeah, right,” says another classmate, and then they all skate away, the whole group huddled together like a pack of baby chicks. Willa is never part of that group and she’s only now beginning to understand why.
When her mom picks her up in their old, ugly car, Willa, face burning, climbs into the back and doesn’t answer her mom when she asks how it went.
“Just go,” Willa says in her weird grown-up voice. She doesn’t talk to her mom at all on the drive to the ferry, doesn’t get out when her mom asks if she wants to come, even though that’s her favorite part, standing at the rails on the upper deck and watching the ocean go by. When they get home, Willa goes right to her room, sits on her bed, and scowls down at her yard-sale dress and the hand-me-down shoes from her mom’s co-worker’s daughter, who is one year older than Willa, who got the shoes already used from her older sister.
Most of her classmates wear new clothes and shoes no one else has worn. They have shiny cars and huge houses and someone they call Nanny to take them places and pick them up after school. Willa walks home, by herself, and goes into her small house by herself. She doesn’t know anyone called Nanny.
“What’s wrong, baby?” Willa’s mom asks again over dinner. It’s mac and cheese in the little blue boxes, not the name brand but the store brand, which is Willa’s favorite, and so she has never wondered why they have it so often.
“I can’t skate,” is all Willa can say when she wants to ask why she had to rent the ugly brown skates at the rink instead of bringing the ones with wheels all in a row that are neon pink and neon green and have buckles that make a cool sound when you tighten them. Why has she never gone skating like her classmates, who have gone “a million times,” or so they say.
“You just have to try again, sweet pea.” Her mom is in her cleaning uniform, the brown polyester shirt and pants, the ones that Willa will soon forbid her mom from wearing in public when they’re together.
In middle school she has to take the ferry every morning to a town all the way across the sound, where she and her classmates become a handful of students in a population of hundreds. There are more people in her graduating class in high school than there are on her whole island. She can be someone else there and she is. Her parents own a chain of hotels, she tells people, a small one. It sounds more humble to say that, she thinks. Her dad works so hard and is gone so much, but he loves them a whole lot, oh, he just hates to be away, she insists. It’s her most desperate wish, come to life as a lie. In high school, in a town where she doesn’t live, Willa is cooler, smarter, better. This is the person Bodhi meets, who asks her if she likes to sail when they sit together on the ferry after school, who wonders if she needs a job, who led her here, adrift on the ocean in a storm.
If she had learned to roller skate, maybe none of that would have happened.
If she hadn’t been ashamed of her mom, who worked so hard to put food on the table and gas in their crappy old car, maybe Willa would be a better person.
If she had just been honest—
If.
If…
She’s back at the skating rink, in a grown-up body to match her grown-up voice. Her classmates aren’t there, just her, in the center of the rink with spots of light swirling and swirling around her.
“We’re so proud of you!” calls a voice from the crowd. It’s Jenn, standing outside the rink on the carnival-bright carpet.
“You can win this!” adds Robin.
There are other skaters now, but they’re in boats. It seems like an unfair advantage.
“I can’t.” She tries to explain. She doesn’t know how to roller skate; she doesn’t have a boat; she doesn’t even know how she got here.
“Can you even sail?” Asks Bodhi, who is standing next to Willa’s mom, who is wearing her brown polyester cleaning uniform. A spotlight blasts on, blinding her. Her head pounds, and someone is calling her name, over and over.
“Willa! Willa, please! Can you hear me? Willa!”
When Willa opens her eyes she’s in a hospital room.
Ch. 27
Bewildered and alone, Willa gathers details like a spider monitoring its web. Her head hurts. She fell. She was on the boat and now she’s not. Her arm hurts, too, because there’s an IV pushed into her elbow; the medical tape keeping it in place itches. There’s a blanket over her body and under her arms; it’s blue and thin and scratchy. The ceiling is gray; the walls and floor are white. A curtain is pulled closed to her right, cutting the room in half. It has a hideous floral pattern. A machine beeps behind it. She’s not alone then, yet she is. Where is Lane? Her family? A doctor or nurse? How long has she been here? How did she get here? What happened? Where is Lane?
She takes a deep breath to push back against the wave of panic. She gathers more details. There’s a small, square window. It’s sunny outside. There is a counter next to the bed; on the counter is a vase filled with purple flowers. Her phone is… Where is her phone?
When Willa tries to sit up, she finds that she can, though it makes her head throb and the room spin. There’s a remote sitting on her bed, white and attached to a cable; it has a red button. She pushes the button, just to see what will happen.
What happens is, a nurse comes in. She’s wearing scrubs printed with colorful cartoon cats; her hair is in long braids dyed bright red, and she wears lipstick that matches. She asks Willa a bunch of weird questions, shines a light in her eyes, takes her blood pressure, and tests her reflexes. Then she calls in a doctor, who does all of the same things.
“What’s your name?” The doctor asks again. She has short gray hair and half-glasses perched on her nose and thin, serious lips.
“Willa.” Don’t they know that already? She scowls with frustration. “Where’s Lane? What happened to us?”
But everyone who comes in her room wearing scrubs or a white coat has a million dumb questions and no answers. When they finally leave, Willa scoots to the edge of her bed and swings her legs off the side. She waits for the blinding pain and wave of nausea to subside. She needs to find her clothes and then get someone to take this itchy, irritating IV out. Then she can check out and go find Lane. Only, when she goes to stand, her stomach lurches, and stars swim across her vision.
“Whoa, hey.” It’s Lane. Lane’s on crutches with her ankle wrapped in a peach-colored bandage, but otherwise she’s okay. “I don’t think you should be getting out of bed,” Lane says—Lane is here—hobbling over to Willa’s bed and gently pushing her shoulder back.
“You’re okay,” Willa says, going wherever Lane wants her to, back into the stack of thin pillows and under the scratchy blue blanket.
“I’m okay,” L
ane confirms. “Are you okay?”
Willa shakes her head, it makes tears well up in her eyes from the pain. “I don’t know; they won’t tell me. They won’t tell me anything.” She sounds whiny and small, like Amelia when she wouldn’t take a nap until Mom found her stuffed bunny.
Lane sits gingerly on the edge of the bed. “Okay,” she says in a soothing voice. “You’re okay.” Willa nods miserably, and Lane pushes sticky-damp strands of hair from Willa’s forehead. “You fell after you ran up to fix the sails, remember?” She waits for Willa to search her addled mind and continues when Willa nods carefully. “Well, they said you got a concussion and you blacked out. I got you down to the cabin and radioed for help, but by then the storm had mostly passed, so I was able to use the remaining lower sails that you got up and make it back to land.”
She remembers. The storm, the boat, her phone dropping into the ocean, Lane jumping on board. “The mast broke. The mainsail fell. I fixed— I did it?” She fixed something?
Lane’s smile is fond and wide. “You fixed it. You saved us.”
Willa smiles, though it sort of hurts to do that, too, and Lane grins back. Though Willa missed the storm passing and the sun coming out, Lane’s face is close enough.
“Anyway,” Lane says, clearing her throat. “The coastguard met us as we came on shore and transported you here. Which is Nags Head by the way. We drifted up pretty far.”
Willa lets this all sink in. “And you?” She glances down at Lane’s dangling feet.
“Just a sprained ankle from jumping onto the boat. And a little humiliation since I was in my underwear when they found us. That was horrible.” She blushes and looks at her knees.
“I mean, someone seeing you in your underwear is definitely worse than getting a concussion,” Willa snarks.
Lane’s eyes narrow; her tone is playful. “I’m glad you can see that. Absolutely worse.” Her smiles slips though, and she fixes her gaze on the wall. “I was so worried about you.”
Willa takes Lane’s hand; her skin is smooth and warm under Willa’s cold, dry fingers. “I’m okay,” she repeats. “I’m sorry for… Well, all of this.”
Lane squeezes Willa’s hand. Her thumb comes up to stroke Willa’s knuckles. She finally looks away from the wall, nervously settling first on Willa’s eyes then Willa’s mouth and then their joined hands. “The thing is I—”
“Willa!” The door clanks open, the sound like a stake through Willa’s head, and her mom rushes in, immediately coming around the other side of her bed and engulfing Willa in a hug. “Oh, thank god, thank god, oh, my god.” She pulls away, squashes Willa’s cheeks in her hands and puts her cry-smiling face centimeters away from Willa’s. “If you ever,” she says, in the same joyfully relieved voice, “Pull a stunt like that again, I swear to god I will—”
“Well, I should go,” Lane pipes up. She snags her crutches from their resting place against the counter. “I, um. I’m glad you’re…” She nods.
“Wait,” Willa says, but her mom interrupts, “Thank you again, Lane. I’m so grateful that someone level-headed was there to save her. What would she have done without you? Oh, I can’t even think of it!”
It’s stupid and irrational, but Willa goes tense with irritation at her mom’s gushing over superhero Lane saving the day. Maybe Lane finds something intriguing about Willa’s stupidly impulsive nature, but she’s the only one. Lane sends Willa a look that seems to be an apology, or pity more likely, then she swings out on her crutches. What was Lane trying to say, the thing is I— What? She what? And on the boat, before the mast snapped, weren’t they about to—
“There are some people here to see you,” Christina says, standing to fuss with the blanket and plump the pillows. “They’ve been very worried about you too.” She’s trying to smile, to look as if she’s perfectly fine, happy even, but Willa’s seen that look on her face, the one she had when Willa would catch her at the table, crying, with bills spread across the surface. It was how she’d look after working two overnight shifts, then still somehow muster the energy to take Willa to the beach or the park. Or, when Willa was older, how she would look when Willa told her not to come to school for career day.
“Mama,” Willa says, a term she hasn’t used in a decade. “I’m sorry.”
Her mom flutters her hands in dismissal, then starts crying in earnest. Her mom’s life has changed so much—new husband, new kids, new city—that Willa forgot it wasn’t so long ago when they were each other’s whole entire world.
Christina pulls Willa to her again; her lilac perfume and soft chest are home for Willa more than any cottage or island will ever be. “I love you,” her mom says, voice thick and tears wet on Willa’s hair. “All of you, just as you are. I hope you know that, sweet pea. I always will, no matter what.” Willa nods against her chest and releases a long, trembling breath.
Then the door bangs open again.
Ch. 28
“Willa, you absolute legend!”
Bodhi bursts into the room; she’s tan and sun-bleached blonde and the smattering of freckles on her face has expanded into constellations. Bathing suit straps peek from her tank top and above the waistband of her low-slung shorts. Bodhi in the summertime is Bodhi in her best, sand-speckled form. “Everyone is taking about how you sailed off into a storm and almost died trying to save the boat and how you and Lane, uh—” She glances at Willa’s mom, who is still sitting at the end of Willa’s hospital bed. “Well anyway, everyone is talking about it.”
“Great,” Willa says. “Super.”
Bodhi frowns at Willa’s flat tone. There was a time when Willa would have been thrilled to be “an absolute legend” and even more stoked that everyone was getting the details wrong, believing that she went off in a storm on purpose, that she didn’t just slip and hit her head but nearly died while saving the day, and that she and Lane, found in her underwear, did more than just kiss briefly. And it’s not just because everyone found out the truth about her sailing abilities in the most humiliating way, but because, on that boat with Lane, before the mast broke and everything went sideways, she had a glimpse of being liked and wanted just for herself. She wanted that. No bullshit, no lies, no perfectly filtered alternate reality. Just her.
“Bodhi,” Willa says, pushing herself up off the pillows until it hurts too much. “I need to tell you what really happened. Like, all of it.”
Christina stands, wipes her eyes, and smooths out her sundress. “Well, I’ll go let Tim and the kids know you’re okay and check on your discharge status, Willa.” She nods to Bodhi, and the look they exchange makes Willa wonder what they’ve said to each other, what they may have talked about while sitting in a hospital waiting for Willa to wake up.
“First of all,” Willa says, twisting the scratchy blanket covering her lap. “I am sorry for lying to you. It honestly started when—”
“Wills.” Bodhi chops a hand through the air. “It’s cool; it doesn’t matter.”
“It does though.” It matters that she comes clean and starts fresh. Maybe it’s just the bump on the head talking, but she can’t understand how she did it for so long or why it mattered to her, juggling all of the lies, desperately needing to be some idealized version of herself. It was exhausting. “I let you think that I was someone I’m not. And if you don’t want to be friends anymore, I understand.” Willa stares down at the folds of blanket clenched in her hands while Bodhi stands silently. It would break her heart to lose Bodhi; there’s nothing fake about how much she means to Willa.
After what feels like forever, the mattress dips next to her. “Willa,” Bodhi says, with so much kindness that Willa can’t look up. “I was upset at first, okay, and yeah, you told us some stuff that wasn’t true and that put you in danger, which was stupid.” Willa nods miserably. It was stupid and dangerous. She starts to apologize again, but Bodhi cuts her off. “But I’m over it. It’s all good, dude.”
Bodhi coils one long, tanned leg beneath her and tucks her hair behind her ears. It reminds Willa of so many late-night talks: the two of them piled into Willa’s bed curled up together, talking about everything and nothing for hours on end. Why didn’t she say something then? Why did she let everything go on for so long?
“Wills, listen. Maybe you’re right that I need the truth about some stuff, but I do know you. I know your heart.” Willa shakes her head, but Bodhi continues. “I know that if there’s only enough coffee for one cup left in the pantry, you’ll save it for me. I know that you’ll always cover a shift for me at the shop, no questions asked. I know that whenever you pick up food from somewhere, you’ll always get something that I like so we can share it. I know that you can’t hold your liquor, and when you’re drunk that you like to cuddle.” Willa smiles a little, and Bodhi knocks their knees together. “I know that you always remember my birthday and my moms’ birthdays and their anniversary. I know that you are always up for anything, no matter what hare-brained idea I come up with, because you are seriously the bravest, most balls-out person I have ever known. Who else would enter a fucking intense professional regatta after learning how to sail like, a couple months before? No one but you, Willa.”
Willa grins. “That was pretty wild of me, wasn’t it?”
“Hell yeah, it was.”
Tack & Jibe Page 12
