“There was a rope swing in your backyard, tied to a tree. Do you remember?” she asks.
My lips part, a soft sound escapes them.
“Yes…”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Naida
I picture the swing, the honeysuckle vines that grew up one side, then turn to Celia. “Do your sisters think you’re with Jude right now?” I ask. Everything feels light and perfect, like the weight of billions of drops of water has been hoisted from my mind, and that asking about Jude, living a little vicariously through Celia, will remove the tiny weight that remains.
She smiles, looks almost relieved by my question. “I think they do. I told them I was going for a walk alone, but they weren’t buying it. Oh well. It’ll mess with their heads, drive them crazy….” She smiles but sighs a little.
“Are they both older than you, then?”
“Technically they are, by a few minutes. We’re triplets.”
“My sister was three years older,” I say, leaning my head back against the church. I close my eyes, inhale, and words emerge from my mouth as easily as if I were reading a book aloud. “She was the smart one, the pretty one, the perfect one. It was like no matter what I did, I wasn’t her.” I stop, inhale. How did I know all that? I look at Celia, who smiles as thunder rolls overhead—a storm is sweeping in from farther out in the ocean.
“You remembered that on your own,” she says.
“How, though?”
“The memories are still there, just buried. And I haven’t seen much of your sister in your memories, so I know I didn’t tell you any of that. Maybe talking like this triggers them, forces them out of hiding.”
I pause, my lips part, I search for the book in my mind, the hidden recess where my old life lurks—I find it easier than the last time I met with Celia. “She… she had long brown hair, and she used this vanilla body wash, and we had to share this little room with a triangle ceiling that got hot in the summer. And her name—” I stop suddenly, like someone slammed a door shut in my head. The name is right there on the other side, but I can’t grab it—
“It’ll come,” Celia says gently. “And if talking doesn’t work, I can always try to read them for you.”
I swallow hard, over the thickness in my throat—how can I not remember her name? Thunder again—a few drops start to fall. I watch the way they splash against my skin. I see Celia jump when lightning cracks through the clouds above.
“Come on,” Celia says, and grabs the door of the church. It sticks, so she yanks harder—paint flutters off the frame when it finally gives. I follow her inside, turning back to look at the trail of blood I’ve left from the door. She props the door open, then sits down just inside the entryway. I take a seat beside her, sigh as the pressure against my feet is relieved. The back of the church is filled with pews that are tossed together like toys, the ground is dusted with sand and dried sea grass, and it smells of the salt I’m sure the wooden floor has absorbed. As the wind picks up, the walls creak and the light fixture over the pulpit sways, but we’re dry—at least we’re dry. Celia looks at me a little nervously as I stare at the waves chewing at the shore.
“I don’t know what changed. Do you?” Celia asks. I turn to look at her, and she continues, face in shadow. “Why you’re like this now? How you can live in the water?”
I shake my head. “All I remembered before I met you was a man bringing me to the water, showing me how to find the other girls, but at that point I was already different, I wasn’t really like you anymore. And the water…” I look back to the waves, and the sound of the thunderstorm pounding on the roof intensifies. “I’m not sure. Right now it seems crazy that I’d come out of or go back into it. But then when I’m there, it makes sense.” I smile a little, though it feels fake. “As much sense as a girl who can read your past does, anyway.”
“Fair point,” Celia says. “I was just wondering… maybe that scream in your head… maybe the reason it’s clouding everything is it was the change. I think the screaming happened when Lo was created. Do you remember who the man was? Maybe he knows what changed before he helped you.”
I feel Lo thumping in my head as I answer. “I don’t know his name. They say he was an angel. That he’ll come back for us when we grow old.”
There’s a long pause. Lightning crashes somewhere outside, barely audible over the roar of the waves. Celia looks at me strangely. “Naida. You’re Naida right now, aren’t you?”
“I think so. Yes. But Lo is always there. And I’m always here when Lo is… here. It’s like I’m asleep and dreaming about Lo’s life, and then I wake up and I’m me again.”
She waits a long time before speaking. “Do you remember anything about the man who brought you here? Maybe I can find him.”
I close my eyes, try to think back. “Scars,” I say. “He had scars on his chest, thick ones. But that’s all I remember.”
“Then why do you—why does Lo believe he’s an angel?” she asks.
I pause, smile a little at how stupid my words are going to sound. “Why do you believe in angels here on shore? Because they have to, I guess. They have to believe in something, or it means we’re all just sea foam when it’s over—” No, no. That’s Lo talking, winding her way back into my head. I close my eyes, smother her voice.
“That’s true,” Celia says, apparently not noticing Lo’s voice interrupting mine—a fact that bothers me. “But I haven’t seen anything like angels in your memories.”
“He didn’t have wings….” I explain slowly. This memory is half Lo’s, and it’s hard to see, but I don’t dare let her rise back up to give a full answer. “He didn’t look anything like an angel, I don’t think. But whatever happened with the screaming, he made the pain go away when he brought me here.” I turn to her. “Is it that horrible? The screaming?”
Celia inhales. “Yes. It scared me, the first time I touched you.”
“You can stop. If you need to,” I say, but I can’t look at her as I do.
“No,” Celia says swiftly, and then, as if to convince herself, “No. I want to help. You’re the first person I’ve been able to help with my power.”
“Are your sisters like you?” I ask. “Can they read the past?”
Celia pauses, long enough that I can tell she’s debating something important. “No. They have other… talents.”
“But you don’t want to tell me what those are,” I say.
She shakes her head. “They’re not mine to tell.”
I nod. “It’s good that you don’t tell me. They’re your sisters, they’re important. You only get so many.” I only had one. One, and I can’t remember her name. I have others now, under the water, but it’s not the same, is it? Down there, it feels like they’re as good as blood, but now, they’re nothing more than fellow victims of some mysterious, scream-inducing force. “You should tell them about me, though. Don’t keep secrets.”
“They’d never believe me,” she says, laughing a little.
I drag my toe along the wooden floor, leaving a crescent shape in the sand. Would I tell my sister something like this, if I could remember her name?
If I could remember anything about her? I shake off the misery that’s ebbing around my mind.
“Keep talking,” I say. “Maybe we can trigger another memory.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lo
Are we not good enough?
A night or two later, that’s all I think over and over and over. Aren’t my sisters good enough? I think about my past as a human, my future as an angel, like they’re two great lights and I’m currently in darkness. But I’m happy with my sisters. I love my sisters. Aren’t they good enough for me? I should stay away from the shore, stay away from Naida. When Naida is talking to Celia, when she’s in the forefront of our shared mind, I feel weak, dizzy. I ache to return to the water—she resists me more and more each time, till the pain is so intense I almost can’t bear it. And yet… I want to remember her. I want her to remembe
r her life. I want us to… I want to stop feeling like us, start feeling like one girl, with a past as Naida and a present as Lo.
To do that, I have to be able to surface as Lo. Stay myself instead of letting Naida take over every time. I grimace and push off the ocean floor, swimming diagonally in the direction of the pier.
I break the surface of the water swiftly just after crossing the sandbar. I punch out of the waves so hard that water splashes in a halo around my body. The wind sweeps around me. It hurts, it hurts badly; the water lapping around my shoulders is sweet relief in comparison. I wait for the memories to come back as the wind whistles around my ears.
Nothing.
Nothing at all. I rise a little farther out of the water, but it doesn’t help. The pier is empty—it’s late, I can tell by the tide. I look at the church ahead. Maybe if I go there…
At night, you can’t see the red of the blood in the water, but I can feel it. It’s warm compared with the waves, a slicker liquid. The shoes Celia gave me will help, but I have to make it to the church first. The tide isn’t entirely out, but it’s still a long distance. I squeeze my eyes shut and run.
Swords shoot through my heels, lodge themselves in my legs, stick into my knees. I collapse in front of the church, let tears flow for a few moments while I watch the white sand by my feet absorb the blood. It looks black in the moonlight, thick like the oil boats sometimes leave behind in the water. I reach into the church and pull out the shoes, the dress. Re-create everything just like it was before, try to remember. The shoes hurt my sliced feet, and the dress clings to the water on my skin. I don’t remember it feeling this strange before, I don’t remember it hurting so badly. I look over to where Celia was sitting, remember what she said. What color was the dog?
Nothing. Nothing at all. I can’t even remember how big the dog was now. I only remember the dog existed because I can’t remember what it looked like.
I can’t do this alone. I try to stifle the tears that flow faster now, pull my knees to my chest and try to ignore the throbbing in my feet. It would have been easier if I’d never come back. If I’d let Naida go. Even if I remember the dog, I won’t have a soul. I won’t have my old life. I won’t ever be Naida again.
“Are you all right?”
I jump—or rather, I jump the way I would if I were in the water. When there’s air where the ocean should be, I tumble to the side and fall into the sand. I hear the voice calling to me, but all I can think about is how clumsy I am here, how it’s hard to move when the space around you can’t hold you up like the ocean does. I finally lie still, panting, feet aching from pressing into the ground as I tried to escape.
“Relax, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” the voice says. A male voice, I realize. I turn around to look.
The moon catches on the boy’s cheekbones, his shoulders, his chest, but can’t quite make it to his eyes. He’s holding his hands up so I can see them; the left is dotted in calluses along the tip of each finger, like Molly’s.
“I’m fine,” I say. My voice sounds garbled. I sit up, try to act normal, even though I want so badly to run for the waves and dive deep. I can’t let him see that, though; I have to wait till he leaves….
“Do I know you?” he asks, voice rising a little.
“No.”
“Are you sure? You look familiar,” he says. He doesn’t sound certain; he sounds hopeful. Like he wants me to say yes but knows I won’t. He kneels in the sand, keeping his hands where I can see them. The new angle means the moonlight just catches his eyes—yes.
I know him. And he knows me, in a way.
“My name’s Jude,” he says slowly. “Maybe you just have a familiar face.”
Jude, the boy I saved. The boy Molly sang to, but the boy I pulled from the waves. He’s looking at me intently, the same way he looked at me when he was in Molly’s arms. Like he needs me, like I can save him even though we’re not in the water anymore.
Jude, the boy Celia loves, even if she doesn’t realize it yet. Jealousy flares up in me, but I force it down.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks again.
“I’m fine. You just startled me,” I answer swiftly. I try to make my voice sound like Celia’s, but it doesn’t work—I still sound like the other ocean girls, almost like I’m speaking a different language than Jude is.
“It’s almost one in the morning. I can understand not expecting someone,” Jude agrees, nodding. “You’re crying, though. You’re not about to run into the ocean and end it all, are you?”
I laugh at the truth behind his statement, though I doubt he’d recognize the expression as laughter. “No,” I answer. “I just came here to… think.”
“So did I,” he says, leaning back against the church. “I almost drowned here. I’m trying to get over it.”
“Are you afraid of the water?” I ask, looking at him. He’s staring out at the black waves, eyes intense.
“Yes,” he admits. “I was always sort of afraid of it, though. I can’t really swim, and then I fell off the pier…. It was horrible. I needed to breathe, and there was nothing, just more water. I felt myself dying—” He stops short. “Sorry, person-I-just-met-whose-name-I-don’t-even-know. Yes. I’m afraid of the water.”
“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” I say fondly. “You just have to remember that it doesn’t care. It doesn’t want to kill you, but it doesn’t love you, either. That makes it dangerous, but it also makes it reliable. You can trust the ocean because it’s always the same.”
“That was beautiful. Like a song,” Jude says, looking a little surprised. “I wish I had my guitar—it’s at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, since I was wearing it when I fell.”
“You can’t get another?”
“I can,” he says, “but I’d had that one for ages. Every song I’ve ever written, I wrote on it.”
We wait a long time in the silence. I keep waiting for him to notice that my skin’s the wrong color, that I look strange, but it’s so dark that I guess he thinks it’s just the moonlight. He thinks I’m human. The idea makes something burn in my chest, a light that spirals up through my heart.
He sighs. “Anyway, I’ll leave you alone,” he says, smiling at me. He starts to rise.
“You don’t have to,” I say quickly. “You weren’t bothering me.”
He stops, pauses for a few beats, then lowers himself back into the sand. “Can I know your name, then, if we’re going to be late-night beach partners?”
“Lo.” I say it fast, easily—should I have said Naida?
“Lo. Nice to meet you.” I like the way it sounds when he says my name.
And then it’s quiet again. I can tell he wants to ask why I’m crying, what I’m doing here, where I came from, but he doesn’t. He sits, staring at the water, his hands, the water again. I want to answer the questions he isn’t asking, but I can’t. I can’t tell him about my sisters, I can’t tell him what I am. But even though I want to answer him, I also don’t want to reveal the truth. He thinks I’m human, and I can’t bear the thought of changing that.
“I haven’t written anything since the accident,” he says, fast, like he had to spit the words out. “I used to have this rule for myself, that I wrote a song every day. But ever since I fell, I haven’t been inspired. Well, until just now, when you said that about the ocean.” He looks at me, guilty almost, like he feels bad for confessing that. I look away, out over the water.
“I sing,” I say quietly. “Or, I do now, anyhow.”
“What types of songs?”
“Love songs, mostly,” I say. “The sad kind.”
“The best kind,” Jude says, smiling a little. “When I was in the water, I remember someone singing to me. The nurse at the hospital tried to convince me it was an angel.”
“It wasn’t,” I say.
“How do you know?”
I smile a tiny bit. “Because angels can’t live underwater.”
“Then how did I survive?” he asks. He
’s teasing me, joking with me. It feels strange. His voice is so different from mine; it varies with each word, each letter. Mine is always the same.
I would like to tell this boy that I saved him. I’d like to tell him I’m the angel, that I stopped Molly, that it was her singing but that it was deadly. I even want to tell him that I pulled him out before Celia even got involved. Would he joke with me and laugh the way Celia says he does? Would he be able to love me?
Something shoots up in my chest, something hungry, something starving. If he loves me, I could…
I’d be Naida again. For the first time, that bothers me—Naida doesn’t feel sparked when Jude looks at her; Naida isn’t the one who pulled him out of the water. I am. But his soul, if I persuaded him to want me… the ocean is so close. It’d be easy to pull him in. Naida would get her soul back, Lo would be… gone, I guess. But there’d be no more floating along, pulled by the water, forced into the air, unable to control any of it. Naida could go back to her old life, make her own decisions, be her own person….
Would she forget me, the same way I’ve forgotten her?
Jude speaks, startling me. “I shouldn’t say all that. I survived because this girl pulled me out of the water and gave me CPR. Maybe she is the angel.”
Celia. “Maybe,” I answer.
“I keep thinking about her. Her sisters think it’s just because she saved me, and maybe they’re right, but I just—”
“I have to go,” I interrupt. I have to go. Part of me—Naida, I guess—wants this boy’s soul, part of me wants the boy, and all of me knows this is wrong. He’s Celia’s. He’s innocent.
He’s human.
Jude hurries to his feet, and before I can stop him, he leans down and offers me a hand.
“I’ll…” I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to stand in front of him for fear he’ll see how it hurts me. But I can’t just not take his hand. I exhale and slide my fingers into his. He pulls me to standing, then lets go.
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