by Sara Ella
“Did you ask him about it? Did you look into it at all?”
That wasn’t the point. “Don’t do this. Don’t make him out to be something he isn’t.”
She turned to him again, sadness gone. Replaced with something else—resolve. Certainty. “I’m not. He knows who he is. And so do I. We’re not good for each other anymore, but he’s taken care of me. He’s been faithful despite the numerous opportunities he’s had to do otherwise.” Her hand over Merrick’s, she squeezed gently. “He’s never hit me. Or you. Or Maya. The night we went to the hospital wasn’t the first time she cut. It was just the first time you knew about it.”
He backed away. His hands found his head, held it there to keep it from spinning. “No.”
“The summer two years ago when you went on that school trip? The one you begged to go on? That was when we found her cutting. Your father hired the best counselors and doctors. Maya didn’t want her big brother to know.”
“Dance lessons?” His head wouldn’t stop shaking. “Piano? Violin?”
His mom’s downcast gaze confirmed his worst fear. “Counseling. Group sessions. Doctor visits.”
Everything Coral and Grim and even Nikki had been trying to get him to see came crashing down. “Amaya isn’t okay, Mom. She needs you.”
Lyn shook her head again. “I can’t. I’m not strong enough to watch her go through that. I never was. She needs your father.” She squeezed his hand again. “And so do you.”
He jerked away. The last thing in this life or the next that Merrick wanted to do was go crawling back to that man. “Mom. You have to come see her. Please.” He resorted to begging, but so be it. “You’re our mom. We need you. Both of us.”
“I’m sorry.” Lyn wasn’t there anymore. She was far away. Lost. She’d made her decision. No amount of pleading would convince her.
Grim’s words hit him like lightning, burning from the outside in. “All the money in the world can’t make a mom stop being a mom . . .”
Coral’s warning rolled through him. Thunderous as it was true. “If your mom wanted you, she’d search land and sea until she found you . . .”
His mom had been here, twenty minutes away all this time, and she never once tried to find them. She didn’t want to know what had happened. Not to Maya. Or Merrick. She couldn’t handle it.
What kind of love was that?
“I’m glad to know you’re both okay.” She faced the wind, an odd sort of peace wrapping her in a bubble where Merrick couldn’t reach.
How would he forgive her for this? For abandoning them?
“Good-bye,” he said, refusing to call her Mom because that wasn’t what she was. Not anymore.
When he reached Grim’s car, Merrick sat with his hands and forehead resting on the wheel. How could he tell Maya their mother didn’t want them?
He couldn’t process it.
When he turned the key in the ignition, he let the car idle and pulled out his phone. Merrick had three missed calls from Coral and a series of texts.
His heart pounded.
He didn’t see anything but where he needed to meet her.
The hospital. She was at the hospital. With Maya.
Merrick pulled out of the parking lot and hoped he wouldn’t get pulled over for ignoring the speed limit. When he sat at a stoplight, waiting to get on the freeway, he resorted to his new plan B.
He hated this plan.
Loathed it.
But what else did he have left?
Hiroshi picked up on the first ring.
Merrick swallowed. He couldn’t hide the defeat in his voice when he said, “Dad?”
Forty-Three
Coral
The nothing began much like her first journey into the Abyss.
It was dark.
It was cold.
It was nothing.
Coral was numb. Everywhere. Things that should have bothered her didn’t.
When school started in August and some of the boys came too close for comfort, she escaped into the nothing until they let her alone.
She sat in English, usually her favorite class, and stared out the window. A blank sheet of paper lay on the desk before her. While the other students had been writing feverishly for ten minutes, Coral hadn’t even bothered to take out her pencil.
When the bell rang and everyone headed to the next class, Coral’s teacher stopped her at the door. “Miss Brandes tells me I can look forward to some beautiful writing from you this year,” he said.
She shrugged and checked her phone. Five texts from Merrick. She deleted them without reading them.
“I assume you know that means you actually have to write something.” He held up the blank page she’d turned in.
“How do you know it’s mine?”
“Everyone else’s has a name. Yours is the only one missing.”
She shrugged again.
“Of course, a blank page sometimes says a lot more than a full one.”
“Such as?”
“Such as perhaps you have more to say than anyone. So much, in fact, that a single page isn’t enough to get it all out.”
“Is that all?” She was going to be late for her next class. Not that she cared, but still. It was better than standing here listening to Mr. What’s-His-Name analyze her reasons for skipping the assignment.
“Miss Brandes showed me your writing from last year. She says you submitted it to the district writing contest. You were even a state finalist.”
Why did he have to bring that up? “And?”
“And I wanted to offer any help or guidance you might need before you turn in your final entry in December.”
Coral hadn’t told her counselor there would be no final entry. She’d spent every extra moment of the summer trying to finish the first draft of that stupid novel. Come to find out, she had no ending. The story simply stopped. Sure, her first chapter had placed her as a finalist. But the rest?
The rest were words. They were nothing.
She was nothing.
“Thanks,” she said to get him off her back. “I’ll think about it.”
He nodded and she left. But Coral didn’t go to her next class. She wouldn’t be going to her first after-school session with that new therapist Miss Brandes had recommended either.
None of it matters. None of it makes any difference. My sister died. Merrick’s sister . . . died.
Coral couldn’t face him. Not after she hadn’t been able to save Amaya. She relived that day until it was forever seared in her mind.
The blaring sirens.
The blood and the water and the stains.
Stains on Coral’s hands and clothes.
A faceless girl lying lifeless in her arms.
The nurse at the hospital explaining they were doing everything they could.
In the end, it hadn’t been enough. Coral had watched as Merrick sobbed into another girl’s arms at the hospital that day. Whoever the girl was didn’t matter. But the pain on Merrick’s face?
That was something Coral couldn’t erase.
And all this time she’d believed men—human or otherwise—were incapable of emotion.
Wrong. Everything feels wrong.
How could she write the ending to her story? She’d seen too many endings, and no one wanted a tragedy. She would be disqualified from the contest when she inevitably failed to turn in a completed manuscript. Her deadline would come and go. She wasn’t a real writer. She was a fake, an imposter.
I’m a failure. I am everything Father and Jordan ever said.
When she walked past her next class and straight off campus, she made her way as far from the beach and the ocean as she could.
She wouldn’t go to the meetings at the library.
She wouldn’t answer Merrick’s calls or texts. She couldn’t bear to hear him tell her it was truly over. Of course it was. If she’d been anyone else there that day, maybe Amaya would have lived.
With each step toward town, emptiness consumed Co
ral. She felt less. Hollow.
Nothing.
She floated outside herself. Watched life pass her by.
And why wouldn’t it?
Life never waited. She’d once written that time was a ribbon. Her time had been knotted and lost and cut. She would never piece it together the way it was before.
She and Merrick would never be as they had once been.
Coral could never get him back. And even if she could, she’d forever question his true intentions. She would keep him at arm’s length, doubting if she could trust. Forever second-guessing his reasons for being with her. Pity? Guilt? Shame?
Who needed the ocean when life was plenty devoid of oxygen on its own?
There is more than one way to drown. I’m drowning and no one even notices.
No. Merrick was not part of her after.
Without him, things would never be the same.
Interstitial
Forty-Four
Brooke
After
Seeing Merrick again. Now. I’m reliving that day from a hundred years ago.
I find refuge in the trees as I make my way outside. The fresh air quenches a thirst and I find myself drinking it in with each step away from the church and closer to the sea. It’s too far out to walk, though. I’m not dressed for a hike. There is no escape from this. I close my eyes and press my back against a tree trunk.
Hope was Amaya all along. I see her there, in a bathtub filling with her own blood.
Red Tide, I think. I’ve never been able to say the word.
“Suicide,” I say now.
One word. Three syllables. The definition of pain.
Hope didn’t slit her wrists as she had the last two times. She could never bring herself to cut deep enough to end it before she was revived. This time there was no blood, I’m told. But the goal remained the same. The outcome one she didn’t return from.
Now I see the forest for the trees. They’ve surrounded me on all sides, closing in, making it impossible for me to see anything else but my own version of this story. That’s the problem with one point of view. It stands alone in its limitations, unable to recognize the details until the end.
I’m there. In the hospital. Waiting for him to come. But I’m no longer Coral, the character I created as a way of coping with my own demons. I’m me. I am Brooke. And I’m watching the scene unfold with new eyes.
* * *
I wander the hospital halls because I can’t stand to sit in the waiting room, waiting for news they’ll never give because I’m not family. All I see is blood and a little girl tangled in a mass of hair and lifeless limbs.
I never even saw her face.
The hospital windows let in light on all sides. Even so, the place feels dark. Depressing. This is where you wait for good news, hoping you’ll be part of the small percentage who walk away from these walls smiling.
When they asked me how I knew Amaya, I didn’t even know what to say.
She’s my boyfriend’s sister?
Boyfriend. Another word that seems wrong. What is Merrick to me?
Who am I to him?
I grab a cup of tea from the cafeteria and find the elevator that leads to her floor. Every sound is heightened, every detail playing forward in slow motion.
The ding of the elevator as the doors scrape open.
The sound of my bare feet slapping linoleum.
The rush of bleach and cleaner and lemon mixing with the sterile hospital air.
The swish of a doctor’s white coat as he pursues a destination down the hall.
And there. Merrick. Sitting alone on a chair, head hanging between his knees. He’s been in this position before. The day his mom left. Just before my sister took her life. So many horrific things pushing and pulling us together.
Merrick once called it fate.
I labeled it chance. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Now I’m not so sure.
Relief and heartbreak take over. We’ve both seen too much of this. Will it never end?
I move toward him, then I stop, back away, retreat out of sight behind a vending machine.
A girl approaches him. Tall and lean and perfect. Her back toward me. A day of faceless girls, it seems. When Merrick sees her, his eyes fill with an emotion I can’t name. He stands and wraps his arms around her.
They don’t release each other for a long time.
“Are you with the Princes?”
I blink. Start. What did the nurse say?
“The Princes?” I swallow.
The nurse points toward Merrick and the girl. Neither have seen me yet.
“The Prince family,” she says. “Amaya Prince? The paramedics said you came in with her. You’re the one who called 911?”
Merrick Prince. His name triggers a memory. My sister’s voice rises from the depths.
“My prince never loved me. He never will.”
My Prince does not love me. So I tell the nurse that no, I am not with them.
And I walk out the door.
* * *
Had I waited before rushing out, I would have seen Nikki’s boyfriend and Merrick’s best friend and the same boy who came to my rescue at school. Nigel and Grim are one and the same.
Merrick would have introduced me to his friends and I would have met Amaya. I would have known who she was that first day at Fathoms and then maybe I wouldn’t have run away and tried to end it. I would have spent more time with her instead of in recovery. I would have learned their last name was Prince.
Merrick became the prince who surprised me in more ways than I could ever count.
Shoulda, coulda, woulda.
“Hi,” Merrick says. Such a simple word, hi. So much meaning behind it. Does he have any idea the effect he has?
“Hi.” It sounds lame coming from me.
People file out of the church now. I catch a glimpse of Merrick and Hope’s dad. He finds their mom sitting alone on a bench by a tree. He approaches her. Holds her for a few seconds before she pushes him away.
The sight moves and unsettles and surprises.
Merrick follows my gaze and one corner of his mouth lifts. “He’ll never stop chasing her.” The way he says it, I know there’s more he wants to convey.
There’s always more with him.
His eyes find mine. He searches them and for the first time ever I hear him say, “Like father, like son.” He rocks back on his heels. “Can we walk?”
I nod and fall into step beside him. We stroll through the forest in silence, the foot between us as long as a mile. I want to tell him I’m sorry about his sister, but I can’t push the cliché and not-enough words past my lips at first. Sorry seems so trivial. But what else can I say?
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Thank you. I’m sorry too.” He stops and scratches his head. His hair is longer than I remember it. He seems older. Different.
The same.
“She’d talk about you,” he says. “When she’d call. She never said your name. Only that she had a friend and my dad had been right all along. Fathoms was the right place for her. I should have seen it from the beginning.”
I set my jaw. “It didn’t change anything.”
“Yes, it did.”
“The outcome was the same. She’s gone.”
“True. But her journey was different. No matter what she chose in the end, you impacted her. Don’t ever think otherwise.”
I let his words simmer. No matter what, I know I never impacted her the way she touched me.
We talk then. I tell him about my grandmother and how she moved to assisted living after Christmas last year. “It was either go back to my dad and Jordan or settle for Fathoms. Mee-Maw set it up.”
He nods. “I’ve finally started taking college courses.”
“Do you have a major yet?”
“Counseling and family studies.”
“Good choice.” My cheeks flush and I study my shoes. “How are things with your dad?”
“As
k me again in a few months.”
“And your mom?”
He shrugs. “We don’t talk. I know she didn’t want to come today.”
“Hope—Amaya—would have wanted her here.”
“She saw the best in people,” Merrick says.
Before we know it we’re talking about her. The memories hurt and heal. We laugh until we cry, and a few people stare at us with looks of disdain.
But that’s the thing about grief. You think it looks one way. The only way. You don’t realize you can laugh through the tears until you’re living right through them.
When most of the cars have pulled away and I see Jake, Mary, and the other girls climbing into the van, I know it’s time to go. Merrick walks me to the parking lot where his dad stands, shaking hands with the pastor. Hiroshi makes eye contact with me and I want to shrink inside myself. He’s intimidating up close.
“Thank you,” he says. Then he shakes my hand in a rather formal and “princely” way. I can see why Merrick was afraid of him for so long. But I can also see why Hope adored this man with every part of her soul.
I have no words as I hold back my tears. I nod.
He compresses his lips and walks to a black car where he climbs in the back seat.
“Some things never change,” Merrick says. “I think he’ll use a chauffeur until the day he dies.”
He’s right. Some things never change.
And some things do.
We don’t ask about the future. We don’t make promises to keep in touch or reconnect.
Merrick and I stay in the now. In this lingering hug. In the moment when he picks a yellow daisy from a patch of weeds and hands it to me. In this awkward closeness where I can feel his breath on my cheek, I question if we might kiss. But we don’t. There’s a sort of silent agreement there. One that says it isn’t the time, but maybe someday.
Or maybe not.
I don’t know. Because all we have is now.
And now, I watch him drive away.
Mee-Maw appears beside me. She clutches her purple handbag in her white-gloved fingers and sighs. “What a nice young man. A real prince.”
She has no idea.
I face her and the last bit of resentment I’ve lived in for too long joins the breeze, taking flight in the wind. “Mee-Maw, I—”
