Undercurrent

by Tricia Rayburn

  “I’m sorry.” I looked down at our hands. “It was no big deal. I woke up as soon as I hit the floor.”

  “People usually don’t pass out for no reason.”

  I was vaguely aware of a bell jingling, the coffee shop door opening.

  “I was just a little tired,” I said, still focused on our hands. “School’s been busy, and this college stuff is—”

  “A piece of cake,” a familiar male voice said.

  “Parker.” Startled to see him standing right by our table, I sat back and pulled my hand from Simon’s. “What are you doing here?”

  “Pre-meet caffeine fix.” He nodded to Simon. “Hey. Parker King. I go to school with Vanessa.”

  “Simon Carmichael. Vanessa’s boyfriend.”

  Parker didn’t bat an eye as he turned toward me. “Matt said you totally killed the interview.”

  New beads of perspiration grew in the heat of Simon’s questioning gaze. “How do you know Matt?” I asked.

  “Who’s Matt?” Simon aimed this question at me. “What interview?”

  “Matt Harrison,” Parker said. “Bates class of 2000. He meets with all the Hawthorne applicants. My dad’s pretty connected to all the college happenings, so I found out about Vanessa’s meeting through him.”

  “You applied to Bates?” Simon asked quietly, like Parker wouldn’t hear him.

  I started to shake my head, but stopped when I felt Parker’s hand on my shoulder.

  “The actual application’s inconsequential,” he said. “At least it is for a very lucky few—including our lovely Vanessa here. Matt said he’s never been more impressed by such a bright, beautiful prospect.”

  “Okay,” Simon said, his eyes focused on my shoulder, “first of all, she’s not our Vanessa. Second of all—”

  “Excuse me.” I jerked away and scooted backward so fast the chair legs squawked against the floor. “Sorry. I’ll be right back.”

  I knew they both watched me walk away, but I didn’t turn around. My head was pulsating, my throat dry. My limbs felt like I was wading through pools of Jell-O. It was all I could do to get to the counter without falling to the floor and convincing Simon that something was seriously wrong.

  “Water, please,” I said, my voice no louder than a whisper. “And salt.”

  The barista hesitated, apparently puzzled by my second request, but he put down the glass and disappeared into the kitchen. I glanced behind me to see Parker had moved on and was chatting up a table of teenage girls, and Simon was absently fiddling with sugar packets.

  I turned back as the barista emerged with two glasses: one tall, the other short, like a shot glass.

  “You’re in luck,” he said. “Willa said she knew just what you needed.”

  “Willa?” I croaked.

  “Your friend. My manager.” He placed the glasses on the counter before me. “I think the green one’s wheatgrass.”

  He headed for the customers at the other end of the counter before I could ask anything else. Not that I would’ve been able to even if he’d stayed. From my chin down, it felt like sand had replaced all the liquid in my body. Talking was impossible.

  I drained the salt water in three gulps. My eyes welled as the cool sensation traveled down my throat, into my stomach. Feeling stronger immediately, I reached for the shot glass. I had no idea who Willa was, but she obviously knew me—or at least something about me. If she’d meant me harm, she wouldn’t have added salt to my iced tea without my requesting it the other day.

  So I took the shot glass, tilted my head, and threw back the green liquid. The taste was so unexpected, so unlike the fresh, mild one I’d imagined wheatgrass would have, I almost spit it out. But then I realized what it was.

  Seaweed.

  I’d had seaweed only once before, when Paige insisted I try Betty’s famous Sea Witch sandwich. Mistaking the goopy green strands for spinach, I’d swallowed a heaping forkful without hesitating—and choked so hard on the bitter plant that Louis the chef had swatted me on the back with a spatula. This green liquid tasted just like the seaweed had then, only stronger, saltier.

  How did Willa know? Was she one of them—one of us? Was this some kind of lure designed to lower my defenses?

  My heart raced, and my hands shook. I was torn between leaping over the counter and fleeing the coffee shop.

  “Is Willa in the back?” I asked the barista. “Can I talk to her?”

  “She already left,” he said, taking a broom from a narrow closet.

  “Will she back tomorrow?”

  As he swept, he tilted his head toward a nearly empty tip jar on the counter. It was labeled POOR COLLEGE STUDENT PROVISIONS.

  “This should do it.”

  I looked down at the hand on my sleeve—and at the two chubby fingers holding a fifty-dollar bill.

  “Good tips get good results,” said the man sitting on the next stool as he lightly tapped my arm. He was older, probably in his late forties, and his forehead gleamed beneath the brim of his stained Red Sox hat. When our eyes met, he winked.

  My stomach turned. I glanced at the barista, who shrugged like he could care less what I did, and then backed away. “Thanks… but I’ll just stop by and see for myself.”

  Whatever reason I’d been given, the salt water and seaweed shot must’ve been working fast, because my head was surprisingly clear as I hurried back to Simon. When I sat across from him and saw the range of emotions—concern, jealousy, love—cross his face, I started talking before worry about his reaction could stop me.

  “I saw her.”

  “Her?” His eyebrows lifted. “Her, who?”

  “Zara.”

  His chin sank toward his neck. “Vanessa—”

  “I know you think it’s impossible,” I said, leaning toward him. “You’re sure that they’re dead, that we never have to worry about them again. But Simon… I saw her. Right here, in this coffee shop. That’s why I passed out. Because she wasn’t there one second, and in the next, she was.”

  I reached for his hand. He didn’t pull away, but his fingers were still as mine slid across them.

  “I saw her another time, too. There was a bus accident, and in the news coverage that followed, I swear I saw her talking to a police officer. And there was the rowboat on the harbor, and the oar in her old bedroom, and—”

  I stopped when he slid his hand out from under mine. He reached into a leather satchel I hadn’t noticed earlier and removed a folded newspaper. As he placed the paper between us, I recognized the anchor-shaped W immediately.

  “The Herald?” I asked, my heart fluttering. Afraid of what I’d find, I hadn’t checked the Web site in days.

  The paper was like a wall between us. He didn’t make a move to cross it, and neither did I. I couldn’t even if I’d tried; I was as frozen as the covered bodies in the black-and-white photo on the front page.

  “According to the article,” Simon said, sounding tired, resigned, “two recreational deep-sea divers found a break in the ice near Chione Cliffs and followed it to an ‘underwater holding pen’—the reporter’s words, not mine.”

  “A holding pen for what?” I asked—or at least I thought I did. My thoughts were beginning to spiral again, and I wasn’t sure if the question made it through the inner cyclone in my head and out of my mouth.

  “At least eight deceased women who were embedded in the ice, and probably more. The divers’ tanks ran low, and they had to cut the swim short.”

  “And they… the women… are…? They were…?”

  “I don’t know. They haven’t been identified. Not publicly, anyway.”

  I closed my eyes, tried to process this new information. When I opened them again, the newspaper was gone. Simon’s hands were in its place, palms facing up. I placed my hands over them, and this time his fingers automatically curled around mine.

  “I love you.”

  The words were like daggers in my chest. “Simon—”

  “Please.” One corner of his mouth li
fted in a quick, sad smile. “I’ve waited so long to say that again. You don’t have to say anything back… but can we just let it linger there for a second? Without automatically brushing it aside?”

  I didn’t want to brush it aside. I wanted to say it back, because I loved him, too, more than I’d thought I could ever love any-one. I wanted us to go somewhere we couldn’t be found, and talk and laugh and kiss all day, every day, for the rest of our lives. But I couldn’t. We couldn’t. What he felt, what he thought he felt… it wasn’t real. And I cared for him too much to let him waste his life like that.

  “There was something else I wanted to talk to you about this weekend,” he said.

  I looked up from our clasped hands. Without the glasses, his brown eyes were darker, warmer.

  “Boston University has a great science department.”

  I didn’t know what I was expecting, but that wasn’t it. “Okay…?”

  “The professors are excellent, and their research is impressive.”

  This sounded like something he’d say on one of our fake campus tours. “You want me to apply to BU?”

  “Only if you want to.” He paused. “I already did.”

  His fingers tightened around mine before releasing them. He pulled a red folder from his bag and placed it where the Winter Harbor Herald had been only moments before. He flipped past brochures and pamphlets to a piece of white paper.

  “It’s a transfer application.” He watched me carefully. “My transfer application.”

  The beads of sweat burst, sending thin, salty trails trickling down my face. Beneath my clothes, my skin warmed and moistened. My throat started to close. “You love Bates,” I said, trying to declare but whispering instead.

  “I love you,” he corrected. He leaned forward and reached for my hands, which were moving on their own, inching away from his. “I’ve never been as happy as I am when I’m with you. I think about you all the time. I miss you so much when you’re gone that I can’t concentrate. I even blew a huge test last week because I forgot about it—it completely slipped my mind. That’s never happened before.”

  “So you want to transfer to keep up your GPA?” I tried to joke. It was all I could do.

  “I want to transfer so I can meet you after class. And walk you home from school. And see you on the weekend without either of us having to drive a hundred and fifty miles. I want to be with you, Vanessa, as often as possible, for as long as possible. After everything that happened last summer… I just don’t want to lose another second if I can help it. And I can. By moving to Boston.”

  A firestorm of “if only”s erupted in my head. If only I were normal. If only his feelings were genuine. If only we could plan a future like any other young, happy couple.

  If only, if only, if only.

  “I know it’s a lot to process,” he continued when I didn’t say anything, “and it probably seems to have come out of nowhere. I’m sorry for that. You know I won’t do anything you don’t want me to.”

  I nodded, blinked back tears.

  “And you don’t have to give me a definite answer now… but maybe you could give me a hint? One small, harmless hint as to what you think?”

  Hot tears spilled onto my cheeks. I brushed them away, but that only made them fall faster. Unable to meet his hopeful gaze, I looked toward the windows. Three sets of eyes burned through my clothes; I didn’t have to look to know that in addition to Simon, the Red Sox fan at the counter and Parker King watched and waited for my response.

  Focusing on the fuzzy orange leaves floating from the trees to the sidewalk, I took a deep breath and answered his question.

  “I think we should break up.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “‘EMILY DICKINSON IS wicked bad.’”

  I glanced up from my history textbook. Dad sat at the picnic table on the other side of our small backyard, squinting at his laptop screen.

  “What do you think that means?” he asked.

  “Is the student from around here?”

  “I teach at Newton Community College,” he reminded me.

  “Then ‘wicked’ doesn’t mean evil. It means very.”

  He gasped. “Very bad? How can she say that about one of the greatest American poets of all time?”

  “What’s the next sentence?”

  His eyes lowered back to the screen. “‘Her words flow like hot buttah’—b-u-t-t-a-h. Whatever that is.”

  “Butter,” I explained. “So ‘bad’ in the first sentence actually means good. She likes Emily Dickinson.”

  He leaned back, eyes wide, like the words on the screen had just formed a small army and threatened to assault his scholarly vocabulary. “Well then, why didn’t she just say so?”

  I hid my small, quick smile behind my textbook. I’d joined Dad outside because Mom was baking again and the oven made it too hot to do homework inside, but that didn’t make us study buddies.

  “I’m going to get some tea.” He stood and stretched. “Would you like anything? Maybe a sweater?”

  It was a valid question. It couldn’t be more than fifty degrees out, and while he was bundled up in a thick wool sweater and corduroy pants, I wore a thin T-shirt and jeans with the cuffs rolled to my knees.

  I was about to decline, but then I heard something click.

  His laptop. He was getting tea, which shouldn’t take longer than five minutes, including boiling time… and he’d closed his computer.

  “My blue fleece would be great.” I lowered the textbook and widened my smile. “It should be in my—Paige’s—closet.”

  He beamed like he’d just been granted tenure at Harvard. The fact that I’d asked him for anything made him so happy I almost felt guilty—especially since my blue fleece was in the laundry room waiting to be washed, not in Paige’s closet, and I knew he wouldn’t want to come back empty-handed.

  But at this point, what was one more lie?

  I watched him trudge up the steps and open the door. Several seconds later, the back stairwell window illuminated. I pretended to read as he climbed past the window, and waited another minute to give him time to reach the landing and start down the hallway.

  And then I hurled myself out of the hammock and lunged toward the picnic table.

  His computer was old and took a while to shut down so the desktop appeared right away, no password required. I guided the cursor to the start bar and then glanced over my shoulder to make sure Mom wasn’t watching from the kitchen. Her back was to me as she commandeered the stove, so I turned to the laptop and pulled down the recent documents.

  It was a short list. There was only one document, labeled W1011. I clicked on it before I lost my nerve.

  Given Dad’s attempt to hide whatever he was working on, I didn’t expect W1011 to be a student paper on Emily Dickinson. But I never would have guessed what it actually was.

  A log. Twenty pages long, with dated entries that went back weeks. Some sections consisted of a few sentences, others of several paragraphs.

  All were about me.

  I checked the windows again. Mom was rummaging through a kitchen cabinet, and the back stairwell was still lit, which meant Dad hadn’t come down yet.