by Sarah Porter
He bounced on the balls of his feet and hopped back from the door, flapping his hand at her. She hesitated for only a second. It would probably be better if her uncle Peter came home to an empty house. He’d be angry, of course, if he checked her room and she wasn’t there. But then he’d fall asleep, and by the time he woke up he’d definitely have forgotten all about it. Luce looked into Gum’s shining eyes and sighed.
“Hold on while I get my jacket, okay?” Gum bobbled and trilled on the grass. Behind him she could see the slow roll of the meadow breaking off suddenly where the cliffs plunged down into the crashing waves. The sea was still wild from the storm, and even from here she could see how the waves arched high into the bitter air before they fell like toppling buildings. Luce shivered.
Gum couldn’t stop squeaking as she tied her sneakers and squeezed into her old silvery down jacket. She’d grown so much in the past year that the sleeves ended halfway up her forearms, but she could still get it to zip as long as she didn’t wear a sweater. She took Gum’s clammy hand in hers so he wouldn’t fall, and they walked down the path that traveled along the top of the cliff. On their other side white wooden staircases zigzagged steeply upward through the darkness of the spruce, heading to tiny-windowed board houses tucked among the trees. Cold and dark as the morning was, Luce felt her heart leap with happiness as she felt the sweet, free wind rush across her face. If she hadn't had to worry about Gum tumbling off the edge she would have started to run.
A hundred yards from her uncle's house there was an incline where, by half clambering and half sliding, they could get down to a broad pebble beach at the bottom of the rocks. Tiny avalanches skittered away under their feet, and when Gum almost lost his footing Luce made him sit down and slide with her until they reached the spot where a tangle of dead roots gave them a handhold. Luce jumped the last two feet onto the pebbles, then turned and caught Gum in her arms to help him down. The tide was about as low as it could go, which was a good thing, because the waves were enormous. Luce couldn't help feeling anxious as she looked at those iron gray walls of water and the strange lace patterns of the foam where they crashed and slid back. Any one of those waves could easily pick her up and sweep her far away. Then no one would ever see her again. The idea was frightening, but what scared her even more was that, if she was honest with herself, she was horribly attracted by the idea of drifting away with the sea.
"Gum!” He was eager to run off to the tide pools, and she had to catch him back and grab his head to make him look at her. The morning was a little brighter now. Gum's face was glossy with mist and it shone in the silver light. "Gum, you need to stay way back from the water today, okay? You understand me?” Adults never got tired of warning them how dangerous the sea was here, how fast and unpredictable the currents could be. It wasn’t even safe to wade. Just last fall a fifth grade boy had been grabbed right off the rocks by a rogue wave. He’d vanished while his friends watched helplessly, and two weeks later some fishermen had found his body in their net.
Gum squeaked and ran a few steps, then turned and hopped in place, obviously daring her to chase him. He spun around and leaped along, pounding deep hollows in the pebble beach. Luce ran after him, but she went at a deliberately lazy pace, giving him the thrill of outrunning her. She’d put on more speed later, catch him suddenly and swing him through the air. But then he veered down the steep slope of the beach: not all that close to the water, really, but close enough to make Luce nervous.
“You promised to stay back!” Luce called after him. He showed he understood her by shooting a sheepish look over his shoulder and thumping clumsily back up the grade, flopping onto one knee before he scrambled up again.
The wind cried in her ears, its whistle curling wildly up the scale. There was something disturbing in the sound of it, Luce thought: a very subtle undertone, like a voice drifting from the far side of the earth. It was too alluring, too sweet, as if that vast oblivious expanse was calling her to join it. Vaguely Luce felt the percussion in her own legs as she stepped closer to the sea. A tongue of water drenched her sneakers, so icy it stung, and Luce started.
What had she been thinking? It was terribly irresponsible to let herself space out like that while Gum raced on alone. The wind was just wind. That was obvious now. There was nothing unusual about it.
She went after him, calling his name, but he had a good start on her. He was already almost to the cliffs that closed off the far end of the beach. There were tall spiky rocks sticking out of the beach down there, forming a kind of maze, and as Luce ran, Gum dashed behind a rock and disappeared. The pebbles rattled under Luce's pounding feet and the cold wind slapped at her face.
"Gum?” she called. She'd finally reached the place where she'd seen him duck behind the rocks, but he was nowhere in sight. “"Where are you?” There were round dents in the smooth beach that showed the way he'd run, and she followed them, weaving between huge crags. The waves crashed in a little closer now. The tide was coming in. If she didn't find him soon they'd both be in danger.
"Gum, it's time to stop playing like this! You need to get back here.” Then she heard a soft sobbing sound, and turned a corner. Gum was curled in a tight ball, bobbing on his toes and crying. She couldn't see his face. A huge clump of wet brown seaweed spread out in front of him.
Luce crouched beside him and gently put her arm around his shoulders. The waves were getting much too close, and she had to soothe him enough that he would be ready to come with her. "Gum, it's okay. I'm sorry I didn't keep up with you, but it's all okay. Let's go home now.” He finally looked up at her. His eyes were red and his face was slick with tears and snot.
"Fish girl!” Gum moaned. Then he started sobbing harder than ever. Luce couldn't believe it. It was the first time she'd ever heard him say anything that made any sense at all.
“Do you mean me, Gum? Am I the fish girl?” Gum squealed and rubbed his wet cheek against her jacket. With one shaking hand he reached out and pointed across the heaps of rubbery seaweed, to the place where a pale something lay half covered in brown tangles. Luce stood up to see it better. Then she gasped and grabbed Gum, pulling him up and wrapping her arms around him protectively.
A little girl was lying completely naked in the seaweed. Her eyes were closed, her skin was a milky greenish color, and her mouth hung open. She couldn’t have been any older than two. Her bare chest didn’t move at all, and Luce knew at once, with absolute certainty, that the girl was dead.
2. The Face in the Water
Luce managed to herd Gum back up the cliff, but it wasn't easy. He kept trying to twist away from her and run back to the dead girl. When they reached the pebble slope she practically had to push him, and at the top she looked back to see the waves already encroaching on the jumble of tall rocks. They didn't have much time, Luce knew, before the waves would seize that tiny cold body and swirl it away. Now that they were safely back at the meadow, she couldn't understand why she hadn't picked the body up and carried it up the slope herself. The idea that the girl might be lost forever sickened Luce. Maybe the girl's parents didn't even know what had happened to her, and now maybe they would never find out. It would be unforgivable if that happened because Luce was too afraid to touch a corpse. She could run to Gum's house and call the police, but it was obvious that by the time they came it would be too late.
Gum suddenly feinted, trying to jerk free of her grip on his hand, but she caught him back. He was keening now, shrilling out a single high, unbroken note.
“Stop it!” Tears were pouring down his face as he gaped at her. “Gum, I’m going back for her! It’s going to be fine! But you have to let me get you home first.” Gum stared and his squeal weakened to an uncertain whimper. “If you keep fighting me it’s going to make me too late, okay? Come on!” Gum still looked confused, but he let her tow him along as she raced across the swaying grass to his lavender house with its ratty satin curtains. She was dashing so quickly that he stumbled, jerking down on her arm before he rega
ined his footing. She had to slow down, but every second of delay might be one too many.
Luce threw open the door of Gum’s house and almost propelled him inside. Mrs. Cooper gawked at her from the kitchen doorway, ashy burn marks in her scraggly blond hair and a cigarette flopping on her crackly lower lip.
“And what do you think you’re doing running off with my son at this hour?” The voice was a shriek.
“You need to call the police. Tell them to come to the beach!” Luce didn’t want to waste any more time explaining, and she slapped the door closed right in Gum’s wild face and charged back the way she’d come. At least now she could be fairly sure that Gum wouldn’t follow her, and that was something. She slid down the eroded slope on her back, not even noticing when the snarled roots tore her sleeve, and hit the beach so hard there was a sharp tweak in her ankle. The uneven ground made the pain worse, but still Luce pushed herself to run faster. From here the tall rocks at the end reminded her of a house where no one had lived for years. Gray water tumbled between its walls. The rising waves had already narrowed the beach by at least five yards.
"I have to save her,” Luce heard herself whisper between her panting breaths. "I have to make sure she gets home.” She knew the urgency that possessed her was irrational; nothing would bring back the dead. Still, the idea that the girl's parents might never hold her again while her soft small limbs were gnawed by crabs seemed impossibly cruel. She couldn't accept it, even though she could tell that water must already cover the place where they'd found the body. Luce darted around the first outcropping of rock and straight into a miniature whirlpool. It spun as high as her knees, tugging on her, before it fell back again. She was left standing on pale froth and crushed shells.
At least all the rocks here broke the full force of the waves. And she might be able to catch on to one if a wave grabbed her. As a fresh influx of icy, biting water rushed up her legs, she forced herself to calm down and try to remember the route Gum had taken. The stone walls around her were blank and gray, but she was sure she remembered that golden tuft of grass arching out of the one to her right.
She made her way between the rocks always sloping downward. Now that she was moving more slowly she had time to become aware of her fear. Each wave that lashed in twirled as high as her thighs before spilling out and sloshing ankle deep. Luce had to hold the rocks each time to keep her legs from being jerked out from under her. They were already going numb.
It was right around the next bend, Luce told herself. Only a little farther. She just had to concentrate on being brave. There was a sudden dip in the beach as she turned, and a huge swell lunged at her. There was a paler blob racing along inside it. Luce staggered as the pale shape hurled straight into her chest with a rubbery thud, and for an instant that unseeing childish face hovered just below hers. A few traces of milky hair pranced in the water. Luce just had time to scream in horror at the realization that the waves had thrown the corpse against her before the outrushing water lifted her up. Her mouth flooded with salt.
Her flailing left hand caught something soft and cold, and then her leg banged a pinnacle of rock. Somehow she managed to hook her knee around it and groped in the same direction with her right arm, clinging fiercely as the water drained away. She was gasping and trembling so violently she wasn’t sure how she could keep her grip, but she had been lucky. She was halfway up a crag of rock with angled sides and, she saw, a decent number of wide handholds. She could climb up without too much trouble. The only problem was the body dragging from her left hand. She had it by the ankle; its pale skin was too soft, like slime-filmed silk, but even so her fingers were digging into it. Luce tried not to look at it as she inched her way farther up the crag, using her knees to grip and her free hand to pull herself, the baby’s limp form flopping against her leg like some revolting and terribly heavy doll. She tugged the body higher so that it was resting on a small ledge. In the distance someone was screaming.
Luce was afraid of slipping if she turned too much, but by craning her head she managed to catch a sideways glimpse of a few figures, one of them wearing something long and golden, standing above her on the cliffs. Mrs. Cooper was up there yelling at her, Luce realized with relief, next to Gum and some other adult she didn't recognize. Awful as Mrs. Cooper was, even she would have probably called the police by now. All Luce had to do was hold on. She began shivering as the wind wrapped around her soaking clothes. The waves kept reaching up her legs, coaxing her to surrender to them again.
She felt the sharp edges of the rock digging at her thighs and face, felt her own heaving lungs and the sickening thing clutched in her hand. At one point a wave came in and knocked the small body off its perch, and Luce barely managed to keep her grip on it.
She made the mistake then of looking down at the lifeless thing she could have died to save. The dead girl's face was a blind rush of white inside the gray-green water, and between her parted lips there was the hollow, haunted darkness of a soundless moan.
Still, she'd succeeded. The girl would get back to her family, and Luce told herself that was all that mattered.
***
"I don't even know how to start with how foolish that was,” the policeman told Luce. His face was only slightly less gray than his hair, and he curled his hands on his rounded gut. She was sitting on a plastic chair in the corner of a cramped office, an old down comforter bundled around her. A foam cup of instant cocoa warmed her fingers. "I don't imagine anybody would've been too pleased about swapping a live girl for a cold one. The common-sense thing to do would've been to call us and sit tight till we got there.” No one would have cared at all if she'd vanished, Luce thought, but she didn't say it. The man talking to her had been lowered down the cliffs in a rope harness, lifting the girl’s body and then Luce back to safety, but it was really Gum who had saved her. He’d screamed and pulled on his mother until she’d followed him back to the cliffs, but it was purely chance that Luce’s crag had been visible from the particular spot where they’d been standing. That was when Mrs. Cooper had finally called the police on her cell phone.
“You couldn’t have got there in time,” Luce murmured, almost too softly for him to hear. They’d already contacted the school to excuse her for the day and then insisted, over Luce’s objections, on trying to reach her uncle at work. Peter had called in sick, but he didn’t pick up at the house either. Luce was hoping he’d unplugged the phone so he could sleep off the booze undisturbed. She couldn’t let herself even imagine what he’d do to her once he heard about this, but maybe she’d find some way to keep it a secret. “Did they find out who she is yet? Did they find her parents?” She’d asked that so many times already that the policeman raised his eyebrows.
“And why is that such a big thing to you?” Luce couldn’t answer that, even to herself. That cold little face had just looked so heartbroken. “"What they were telling me when I went for your cocoa was that no little girls even close to that age been reported missing anywhere near here. Not since last year. So my next thought was it had to be she fell off one of the cruise ships, though you’d think we’d have heard something, but that didn’t check out either. Can’t tell you any more than that.”
Luce swayed a little. She’d done something crazy to bring that girl back to the people who loved her, but maybe there wasn’t anyone like that. Maybe the girl was one of the ones no one wanted, just the way she was.
Maybe the right thing to do would have been to leave her in the sea.
The policeman had the phone in his hand again. "Wish your damned uncle would answer sometime.” He was shaking his head.
"You could let me walk home by myself,” Luce told him. "My clothes are mostly dry, even.” It was almost true. Her silvery jacket was draped over the radiator, and tufts of matted down had started leaking from the rip in its sleeve. "I am fourteen.”
He stared at her. "You come across younger than that. But I guess you're on the tall side, even for a Sourteen-year-old.” He considered her for
a minute. "All right. But I'm driving you home. Just give me a sec, here.” They headed out into the station's main room, with its wheezing coffee machine and gray benches, while the policeman found his coat.
"What do you mean, there was no water in her lungs?” Someone was yelling at Luce's back, and she jumped around. "Baby washes up on the beach, no injuries anywhere, dead an hour or two at most. She must have drowned. Only explanation there is. There's got to be water in her lungs!” It was the other, younger policeman shouting into his phone. "Would just one little thing about this please make some kind of sense?”
The gray-Saced man glanced at him nervously and caught Luce's elbow, tugging her out onto the street. Once they pulled up at her uncle's house, Luce ran to the door and turned to wave back at the gray man. He didn't leave, though. He was watching to make sure she went inside.
Luce slipped through the door as quietly as she could and waited just inside the kitchen until she heard the car pulling away. Maybe Peter wasn’t even home, but Luce didn’t feel like chancing it. He’d wake up with a blasting hangover, and then the last thing she wanted to do was explain why she wasn’t in school. The kitchen was warm and dirty, and there was a bottle out on the table that hadn’t been there when Luce had left.
After a moment she skimmed silently out the door. Her clothes were still dank and stiff with salt, but it seemed too risky to change them. She’d walk around until after school let out and then try to sneak back to her room unheard.
***
Luce followed the path along the cliffs, looking down at the crashing sea; she kept imagining tiny pale faces gazing up at her from the waves, sadness so deep you could drown in it yawning in their wide gray eyes. She sat watching the swirling patterns of foam around the rocks for a few hours, picturing drifting faces and sometimes scanning the horizon for whales, until she felt cold and sore enough that it drove her to walk on.
