The Beautiful Lost

by Luanne Rice

  I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew, I woke up with my arms around myself, shivering. The sky was turning lavender, the color just before dawn that made the stars shine brighter than ever. And I was alone. The dog was snarling and growling. I looked around, afraid to leave the truck but worried that something had happened to Billy. I made myself get out.

  “Hey,” he said, hurrying over.

  “Where were you?” I asked.

  “Getting breakfast,” he said, holding up two plastic-wrapped cranberry muffins. “There were vending machines at the gas station next door.”

  In the glow of the sky and the neon lights, I saw that in his other hand he held a dark object with wires trailing from it.

  “What’s that?”

  “A radio. I took it out of that Plymouth over there.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t steal.”

  “This is a salvage yard. Everything here is destined for the crusher, to turn into little squares of metal and sold for scrap. Besides, I’ll replace it.”

  “How?” But the dog was howling now, throwing its weight against the office door. “We should get out of here before the owner comes. That dog wants us out, too …”

  “There’s a sign on the door—it doesn’t open until eight. Let me just do this.”

  It took two seconds for him to pop the old radio out. He leaned under the dashboard, poking around with pliers and a screwdriver. I held the flashlight so he could see. His head leaned against my left knee, and his right arm was wrapped around my calf as he worked in the tight space. I was too nervous, watching the entrance, but the heat of his arm felt good after the chill of the night, and in about a thousand other ways.

  “Do you know how to splice wires?” he asked.

  “Totally,” I said. My mother had shown me; the skill was an important part of seamanship, in case of emergency repairs offshore.

  “Can you do these last two while I throw the old radio into the Plymouth?”

  “I thought you said it was just salvage,” I said, crouching down beside him in the impossibly tiny space under the dash, our faces an inch apart.

  “They do it by weight,” he said. “That’s how, if I put this one back, it isn’t stealing.”

  I nodded and stared at the tangle of wires. I saw the two unconnected pieces and twisted the bare copper ends together. We needed electrical tape to make it safe, and when Billy returned he had a sticky old piece he’d gotten from the Plymouth. He wound it around the splice.

  I remembered my camera and grabbed it just in time to snap a photo of Billy at work. He turned at the click, gave me an exaggerated smile.

  “Cheese,” he said belatedly, but then I snapped again.

  He turned the ignition, and the truck chugged and chugged, not wanting to start. He gave it another few seconds and tried it again. The battery whirred as if wanting to die, but it finally caught and sputtered. I couldn’t wait for him to turn the heat on.

  We pulled out, no heat and no radio yet, letting the battery charge. The sun had come up enough for us to leave the headlights off. I shivered as we drove in silence along the town’s main strip. Fast-food restaurants and a silver-top diner were just opening, but we made do with our muffins and what was left of our snacks from the Provvie Mart.

  When Billy finally turned on the radio, it worked. We turned to each other and smiled.

  “You’re in charge,” he said. “Find us something good.”

  The radio was old-school AM-FM. We caught a college station; I tuned it the best I could, and “Flume” by Bon Iver came on.

  “We’re in business,” I said, and Billy nodded.

  We drove out of Massachusetts, along the eighteen-mile coastline of New Hampshire. As soon as we crossed the Route 1 bridge over the Piscataqua River into Kittery, Maine, I rolled down my window and let fresh salt wind blow through the cab.

  “Ocean alert,” I said.

  “Yeah?” he asked.

  “The Atlantic’s just a couple of miles down the road.”

  “Should we stop?” he asked. “Or keep going?”

  I skimmed the atlas. Tadoussac, the fjord, and the elusive cabin were at least two days away if we stuck to back roads. I squirmed in my seat. He saw.

  “Is your back killing you?” he asked.

  “A little,” I said. “Is yours?”

  “Totally.” He patted the truck’s dash. “This baby is fine for around Black Hall, but all the way to Canada? The shocks are shot, springs are poking through the seat. Can’t you feel them?”

  “That’s what this is?” I asked, readjusting to avoid a sharp coil coming through the vinyl.

  “We should have traded her in for one of the junkyard heaps.”

  “Bite your tongue!” I said. “She’s our girl. She needs encouragement.”

  “And we need a walk on the beach. Let’s look for one.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Besides, the longer we take to get to Tadoussac, the more they might start looking somewhere else.”

  “Good thinking,” he said. “So, now …”

  “Beach time,” I said.

  He grinned, and we angled down to the coast road along wide Atlantic bays, some craggy rock cliffs, a classic white lighthouse, and finally, the perfect sandy strand. We found a parking spot on the road. One side was lined with tiny shops, restaurants, and a motel; the other was nothing but a long, broad, silver beach with crashing waves. Billy and I kicked off our shoes and walked down toward the blue water.

  It was low tide, and the air smelled of seaweed and marine life. There were channeled whelks, clumps of dried sargassum weed, and driftwood. Billy picked up shells as we walked along. Stones rattled in the waves, left behind on the hard sand, flat and smooth and perfect.

  “Hey,” Billy said, having the same idea I did. This time he placed the first stone. Then my turn. We sat next to each other on the sand, building tiny towers all around us until we were surrounded by cairns. I felt as if we were in a magic castle. Some of the stones glinted with quartz and silver-black mica, like crystal-and-black diamonds.

  I kept my eyes on the ocean, hoping to see a spout, a whale passing by. A seal’s head popped up, and I pointed. Billy saw just before it disappeared into the waves again.

  “There are lobsters out there, too,” Billy said. “I can hear them.”

  “Yes, lobsters love to sing,” I said, kidding along with him.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “My grandfather used to tell me I had an ear for them. I’d tell him where to sink his pots, and when we pulled them up the next day, they’d be filled with keepers.”

  “Keepers?”

  “Legal size, no egg-bearing females. Something happened in Long Island Sound, though. Lobsters got rare three summers ago. We talked about moving to Maine. He’d never have left Connecticut, but this was his dream.”

  He stared out to sea, every so often glancing over at me. I physically felt his gaze, a combination of prickles and warmth on my skin. The tide was coming in, each wave crashing closer to us until we felt the foamy white spindrift splashing our feet.

  “We can’t let it wash away our cairns,” I said, starting to move one.

  “It’s okay,” he said, grabbing my wrist. “We make them, and whatever happens is fine. It doesn’t matter if the waves knock them down. We’ll just make more.”

  “I want to remember these,” I said, taking a photo with my handy disposable Kodak.

  “Gimme that,” he said, and backed up, aiming the camera. It felt weird, cool, and wonderful to think he wanted to take my picture.

  A wave whooshed up just as the shutter clicked. The water smashed into us and toppled the first tower. The tide yanked at our feet, swirling around our knees. I tottered on one leg, nearly falling in. Billy’s arms shot around me, pulling me out, and I pretended to drag him into the waves. We hovered together, our faces practically touching. I felt his lips brush my forehead. Then he laughed, giving me a little shove as we stumbled back onto the hard
sand.

  I studied the breakers as they advanced, receded, came closer again, just so he couldn’t see my eyes, read my emotions.

  We stayed till all the cairns washed away and my heart stopped pounding. We kept laughing, and I wasn’t even sure why. I kept watching for my mother’s whales, and I knew Billy was listening for his grandfather’s lobsters. He cupped his hand to his ear.

  “There’s another,” he said.

  “What’s this one saying?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s a secret,” he said, giving me the most tantalizingly adorable smile, a glint in his green eyes that made my cheeks feel hot.

  The minute we started walking again, he bent down and came up with a sand dollar. I thought he was going to stick it in his pocket with the shells he’d collected, but he didn’t. He held the sand dollar carefully, pressing it into my hand so we could hold it together. He stared into my eyes, and his gaze didn’t waver.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Letting me come with you. Getting me out of there. I was dying in that place.”

  “Seeing where you grew up, I can imagine why,” I said.

  “We’re only sophomores,” he said. “I was going to be stuck there until I was eighteen, two more years. I couldn’t have done it. And I’m never going back.”

  “I don’t want to go back, either,” I said.

  “This is our pact,” he said.

  He took his hand away, and I held the sand dollar. It was small, no bigger than a quarter, pure white, incredibly fragile. I bent my head to look at the flower shape in the center. I didn’t want him to keep watching my face, to see what I was feeling.

  I closed my eyes. He was taller than me and must have lowered his head because I could feel his warm breath on the top of my head. Our closeness was even more intense than when we’d played in the waves. My legs turned to jelly, barely holding me up.

  “Promise me,” he said. “That we won’t go back. No matter what.”

  “I promise,” I whispered. “No matter what.”

  I looked up then. He tilted down so our foreheads touched; he stared into my face another minute, and I got lost in the golden green of his eyes, waiting for something more.

  The moment ended. Billy walked away. I stayed in the spot where we’d stood a few seconds more. He could have put his arms around me. I could have tipped my head back. I closed my eyes to feel what hadn’t happened. Walking back toward the truck, my mind spun with all my confused desire and possibly the strongest wish I’d ever had, for my first kiss. From Billy.

  Big secret: I’d never been kissed before. But that was going to change on this road trip. Billy wanted to kiss me, didn’t he? It had almost happened, right? Or maybe it hadn’t. Maybe it was only in my own mind.

  I held the sand dollar in my hand. It meant something. It symbolized our pact not to return home, never to go back, but it felt like something more. I just didn’t know what.

  We drove along the beautiful shore, spiky with pine trees and glistening with rock ledges sloping into the blue sea. One alt radio station faded out with Fleet Foxes, and another college station came in with Radiohead. Every so often they played a song I really liked and I’d sing low, almost under my breath.

  “Don’t keep it to yourself,” he said.

  “You might miss the lobsters if I do,” I said, to avoid having to sing in front of him.

  “I’ve heard enough from them for now. I’d rather hear you,” he said, giving me the same feeling of liquid bones I’d had on the beach.

  So I sang, and with every song I got a little surer of myself. My father liked classical music, but my mother had loved driving with the radio on or her iPod plugged in, and we’d sing and harmonize together.

  Number one on her playlist was Dar Williams, so I practically jumped out of my seat when our favorite Dar song, “Mercy of the Fallen,” came on. I sang it right out, no reservations about Billy hearing me, feeling my mother’s harmony, and knowing the fact that it had come on the radio was such a good sign.

  Not long after the song ended, my stomach growled, and Billy’s did almost at the same time. I laughed, embarrassed. Our snacks were gone. We’d gotten back on Route 1, and up ahead was a big white building with a carved green lobster on its sign.

  “This is living dangerously,” he said. “The next fill-up is going to take a lot of money, but here we are in Maine, and here’s a lobster pound. Should we do it?”

  “Definitely,” I said, already tasting the melted butter.

  We ordered at the counter. Instead of getting really expensive shore dinners, we got hot lobster rolls. I picked up a tourist brochure on the counter and we headed outside to a picnic table. We drank lemonade and took turns reading fun facts about the town out loud until they called our number.

  The rolls were toasted buns filled with claw and tail meat soaked in butter and lemon. They came with fries. I’d never had a more delicious meal. The day had warmed up after our cold night, and it felt great sitting outside in the late-afternoon sun.

  Billy went inside to get us coffees. A yellow school bus went by, and my heart skidded slightly—this was our third day on the road, and we’d just promised not to go back. Was there a high school near my mother’s cabin? Did I really care?

  That’s when I noticed: I did feel a little guilty about missing school. About making my dad worry. If there was a way to contact him and not have him find me, I’d do it. But the other thing I noticed, and it was huge: I didn’t feel depressed. Not at all. I had all these emotions, up and down, really soaring, a little dip here and there. But they passed instead of sticking to me like Velcro moods.

  It felt weird not to have my cell phone. Not just because I was dying to take a million pictures and post them all, or because I wanted to text my friends, but because of my dad. There was a pay phone at the far end of the parking lot.

  “I have to call my father,” I said when Billy came back.

  Billy lowered the cardboard coffee cup from his mouth to the table.

  “I thought we promised,” he said.

  “We did,” I said. “I won’t tell him where we are, but I have to let him know I’m okay.”

  Billy shook his head. “He’ll see the number on caller ID and figure it out from the area code. And we’re miles from any highway where he might think to look. We’d be giving up on our trip, Maia. He’d call the local police and they’d be here in two minutes.”

  “You can block numbers,” I said. “Clarissa showed me how, and we did it all the time, tricking each other for fun, pretending to be other people. You just use star sixty-seven.”

  “Not from pay phones,” he said. “My father told me when he was trying to get away.”

  “Seriously?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. I wanted to hear more about that, but Billy had walked back into the lobster pound. He returned with a local tourism map.

  “We’ll find the library,” he said. “And you can email him. Email can’t be traced the same way. He won’t know where you sent it from.”

  It was nearly five o’clock. I located the town library on the tiny map. We didn’t know what time it closed, so we quickly drove about a mile through the most postcard-perfect town I have ever seen: white churches with tall spires at either end of Main Street, ancient oak trees with spreading branches that were just starting to leaf in, and restored old houses that reminded me of Mystic. I wondered if they had belonged to sea captains and shipbuilders.

  We parked on the street outside a small stone library with curving granite steps and two white Doric columns flanking the sign: THE ELIZA HEWITT MEMORIAL LIBRARY. The library looked so small and old-fashioned, I doubted there would be computers, but as soon as we walked in we saw a special room, walled off by glass, with three computer stations. The room was empty except for two girls who were about our age.

  Seeing them reminded me of how much I missed Clarissa and Gen. I couldn’t wait to check for emails from them. But I
wasn’t ready to write my father. What would I say? I needed a few minutes to think about that, so I wandered away from Billy, into the stacks. Books surrounded me and felt so familiar and comforting. I took one randomly off the shelf: Eye of the Albatross by Carl Safina. I paged through and read about Amelia, one particular bird he studied. I read how adult albatrosses fly up to 25,000 miles across open ocean to feed their chicks.

  Feed their chicks.

  Even albatrosses cared that much about their children. My thoughts started swirling, and I thought of my mother and had to sit down, cross-legged, on the floor. The library tilted, and my heart ached so much I couldn’t catch my breath. But if my time at Turner taught me nothing else, it was how to ize: rationalize, compartmentalize, internalize.

  But I’m not a chick, I told myself. It was ridiculous to expect my mother to feed me anymore. I’m a grown girl. We’re the Whale Mavens and Construction Crew, independent women, YEAH.

  “Hello,” said a voice. I glanced up, and it was a librarian with an armful of books to reshelve. She had short sleeves and I caught sight of two tattoos: an anchor inside her left forearm and Expecto Patronum, from Harry Potter, inside the other. “Are you finding what you need?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, scrambling to get up. Maybe this library didn’t allow sitting on the floor. I held up the book.

  “Ah, Amelia,” she said. “Everyone loves her. That book has been the basis of more book reports than I can count.” She was both cool and smart, just like Ms. Rhilinger, my favorite librarian at home.

  After she walked off, I glanced around for Billy but couldn’t find him. I headed into the computer room. Amelia the albatross was still haunting me, in spite of my ability to ize. Would my mother fly 25,000 miles to feed me? Probably when I was just hatched, I told myself. Definitely then.

  I took some deep breaths to stop hyperventilating. That worked perfectly. Now I shoved my neediness, my dumb baby-chick-ness, down into the compartment where it belonged, and I started thinking of my responsibilities.