by Lydia Millet
“Huh. Who knew,” said Max.
Hayley didn’t practice too hard, but she had natural speed. Freestyle was the most competitive of all.
“And who’ll be chaperoning?” asked their dad.
Ever since Max had his car accident while their dad was away at a conference, he worried more than he used to about adult supervision. Although the other kids knew it hadn’t been Max’s fault at all.
“Hayley’s mom’s taking time off the hair salon so she can go with us.”
Hayley had not been happy about that. Anyone else’s parent was a better option, according to her, even Mr. Abboud, who thought girls shouldn’t go out of their houses without scarves covering their heads. Hayley’s mom was divorced and, since Hayley was an only child, tended to focus on her a lot. Hayley had made her promise not to hover.
“Don’t be a smother mother,” she’d said severely, right in front of Cara.
Her mom smiled brightly, flecks of fuchsia-colored lipstick on her teeth.
“Don’t stress, honeypie,” she said. “If you want to flirt with the boys, I won’t get in your way. As long as there’s no kissing and you stick to the curfew, I’ll be practically invisible.”
Hayley cringed visibly at the word kissing. “You better,” she said darkly.
Later she told Cara, “Just her saying flirt and kiss makes me want to actually vom.”
Now Cara looked over at her dad, who was just putting down his fork.
“And is Jaye going, too?” he asked.
“Yeah, she’s an alternate,” said Cara.
“Good, good. Nice girl.”
Parents always liked Jaye; they rolled their eyes at Hayley, but Jaye, who had good grades and a neat, polite way about her, got smiles and pats on the back.
“So, Max, you’re on dish duty,” he went on, pushing his plate away and looking at his watch. “It’s time for me to check in with your brother.”
They skyped Jax at the Institute at the same time every night to make sure he was OK. It had taken a lot of cajoling from the Institute people to persuade her dad to let Jax go there in the first place, especially during the school year.
“I’ll make the call,” said Cara.
She often emailed Jax, but she hadn’t checked her inbox today and anyway it would be good to see him.
A few minutes later she was in front of the laptop in her bedroom, an old one of Jax’s that he’d set up for her. Her dad didn’t bother with computers except when he had to, so he pulled up a chair as she clicked on Jax’s name and waited for him to answer.
His face filled the screen, peering at them. It was blurry and a little fish-eyed.
“Good Lord, Jackson, move back,” said her dad irritably. “You’re far too close.”
Their father took technology as a personal offense. Occasionally he consented to use it, but then, when it wasn’t perfect, he acted like it was basically their fault. As far as he was concerned, they’d personally invented the microchip.
Jax moved back a little; there was a delay and his image blurred. Still, Cara could see right away that something was wrong.
“So how’s it going?” asked their dad.
“OK, I guess,” said Jax, and started to drone on instantly about some programming they were having him do, glitches in software, blah blah blah. Cara’s dad nodded but was already distracted; Cara noticed he checked his watch in record time. If there was anything the professor enjoyed less than using technology, it was hearing people talk about it.
And then she realized: this was Jax’s crafty way of getting rid of him.
“Mm-hmm, sounds good, sounds good,” said their dad when there was a pause in Jax’s monologue. “And how are the meals going? Did they feed you that boring oatmeal again today?”
Jax shrugged, nodded, and kept talking so tediously about computers that Cara was impressed. Even she had no idea what he was saying; she figured she had to wait it out.
“Well, sorry, kids,” said their dad in a fake regretful tone after about another minute of this. “I think I need to get back to the flagellants. You two go ahead though,” he said generously, flapping his hand as he stood up. “Talk for as long as you want.”
“Er, yeah, thanks, Dad,” said Cara.
He didn’t get that Skype was free.
“Jackson—same time tomorrow?”
“Sure, Dad,” said Jax, and nodded with an impatience Cara thought had to be obvious.
But their dad didn’t notice, just tipped an imaginary hat at the computer and closed Cara’s bedroom door behind him.
“Smooth, Jax,” said Cara.
“Listen,” he said, and as he looked around, his image moved slowly, then froze before it started to move again. His voice dropped to a whisper. “There’s something wrong here.”
“I can’t really hear you,” said Cara. “If you’re worried about someone hearing you, can you just email me or text or something?”
Jax’s ESP wasn’t a long-distance talent. He had to be near you to know what you were thinking.
“I can’t read them,” he went on, stage-whispering. “That’s the first thing. I mean, the other kids, I can. They’re normal kids, basically. Smart but normal. But not the people in charge. I can’t read them at all.”
“So—so what does that mean?” asked Cara.
“There are only two people I’ve met before that I couldn’t really read,” said Jax. “One’s Mom. The other was… him.”
He meant the Pouring Man—the elemental, as their mother had called him, who had come after them.
“You think the people there are—”
“No. They’re not like him,” said Jax. He was forgetting to whisper now. “They don’t feel dead, or whatever that was—non-living. They’re human and all, but I just can’t read them. It’s like there’s a barrier there. I can’t trust them, Cara. I don’t trust them”
“Well, then come homer!” said Cara, and felt pumped. She imagined their house with more lamps on, more talking, the warmth of company. “Tell Dad you want to! He’ll drive right over the bridge after class tomorrow and get you.”
“But that’s the other thing,” said Jax. “I found out something. And I think I have to stay a while longer. Because I need to find out more.”
“What? What’d you find out?”
Behind Jax, in the rectangular field that was covered by his laptop’s camera, a door opened in stop-action slow motion.
“Jax? …ight meeting…rec room,” said the small, dark head of another kid. It was too far away for the mic to pick up. Then the door closed again, and the head was gone.
“Remember that research material of Mom’s?” Jax asked. “On how the oceans are turning more acid? You know—her data that got stolen? I was doing some investigating. I mean, I don’t have the information itself or anything, but I was looking at some old work emails of hers. I got them off her iPad. And I found a conversation she was having with another scientist that suggested her info wasn’t just the pH-level data other researchers have. What it looked like to me was, Mom found a major unknown source.”
“Source of what?”
“Greenhouse gas,” whispered Jax. “Shooting into the ocean. That’s what makes the seawater acid, right? Our factories spew all those gases into the air, and they go into the ocean, among other places, and the ocean stores them. But the problem is, the more of those global-warming gases the ocean stores, the more acid the water is getting. See?”
“Sort of.”
“Most of the pollution comes from cars and planes and power plants, right? Us burning coal and oil and gas. But the point is: Mom found another source. A source that isn’t any of those. Another place the gases are coming from.”
The door opened behind him again. This time the head that stuck through the crack was larger and higher off the ground. An adult. It wore black-framed glasses.
“Jax! We’re waiting,” said the head.
“OK,” said Jax cheerfully. “Just talking to my big sister!”<
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“Talk later,” said the head sternly, and disappeared. But the door stayed open.
“Gotta go,” said Jax, dropping his cute-kid smile and sinking back to a stage whisper. “The key is this, Car: I think she did discover something unique. Something that’s not widely known. This source. And I need to find out what it is. And where.”
“OK. Well, so—but why do you have to do it there?”
“Better computing power. Faster connections, more access. I have to. Trust me. OK. Oops, gotta book.”
And then he was gone, replaced by a small icon on Cara’s empty screen.
Getting ready for bed after she finished packing for the trip, Cara decided the chaos in her room had finally gotten out of hand. These days, when she or Max or Jax did consent to tidy up, it was usually only because Lolly was threatening to use her powerful vacuum to suck their personal belongings off the floor, never to be seen again.
Lolly did a little housework, but she concentrated on the first floor and usually came into the kids’ bedrooms only when (as she put it) she was forced to.
Cara started to pick up her room by the soft orange light of her old bedside lamp, patterned with seashells and starfish. Her mother had bought it for a dollar from a motel that was going out of business. The briny smell of the ocean wafted in a half-open window, mixed in with the faint bayside odor of fishy things—probably horseshoe crabs in mid-decay. She lifted clothes off the floor, straightened her desk and closet, then decided she could even change her sheets.
Hey, once every few months, why not?
After she pulled back the flowery turquoise coverlet and the jumble composed of the top sheet and blankets, she also lifted her pillow, and there, lying on the bottom sheet, was a small, blue eye on a silver band. Her favorite ring, a good-luck charm made of blown glass that her mother had given her. A nazar, they called them in Turkey, to ward off the evil eye—a good eye to ward off evil ones. She’d been missing it since the summer, and it’d been here all the time.
Huh, she thought, and picked the ring up to slide it back onto her finger. She thought ruefully of the fairy tale about the princess who slept on a pile of twelve mattresses and could still feel the tiny pea beneath. Not much of a princess, am I?
She found she was thinking of Jax again and what he had said about their mother’s work: a source, an unknown source. Where and what could this source be? And what did it have to do with what had happened to them in August?
Her fingers still held the ring, settled now in its familiar place. Without knowing how she’d gotten there, she was lying on her bed—aware of her grimy sheets, the usual few grains of beach sand at the bottom—but she wasn’t seeing her room anymore. She was shifting through the turquoises and blues of her covers without touching anything, and in front of her was darkness, and out of the darkness came bubbling, roiling black columns of what looked like smoke.
The smoke was dispersing strangely—through water, she thought, not air. It must be water.
The black clouds were coming out of bumpy black and brown and white chimneys, not manmade but maybe mineral, she guessed—towers jutting out of rock piles on what she thought must be the seabed. The black smoke came billowing out of these rough castle-like pillars—billowing and billowing in clouds that spread and bubbled up again until she felt hypnotized watching it.
But then she was moving closer to the rocks, right up to the towers and into the dark of the smoke and then emerging from it on the other side. There were tubelike creatures capped with plumes of red; there were lit-up floating animals that reminded her of shrimp. Others looked like jellyfish, and others, yet, the single-celled organisms she’d seen in biology class. They swirled around her until she passed them, too, and went farther down, burrowing through the ocean floor. Then it was black again and she couldn’t see anything for a while—until she could.
She could see, but she couldn’t understand. There was movement here, there were spaces—caverns maybe?—and streaks of light through the darkness like rivers of fire, she thought, but it was all too surreal; she couldn’t see much beyond the blurs and flashes. She felt as though she were inside a volcano. Then she saw a line in front of her, an impossibly sharp, vertical line of gray, unlike anything else, that held her gaze. It was something recognizable, though she couldn’t put her finger on it….
But she was in her bedroom again. Her old, familiar bedroom with its cozy disorder. She was sitting upright in a pile of rumpled bed linens, feeling a little dizzy. Outside she heard the crickets, the faint rhythmic wash of the tide. A low drumbeat from Max’s room, where he was listening to music without his headphones.
She held up her finger, still faintly tanned from the summer, with its short, chewed nail and the blue-and-white nazar ring.
Definitely not a coincidence.
She’d mislaid the ring after what happened in August; now that she thought about it, she’d had no visions since then. Not a single one, at least that she remembered.
Until now.
Although…maybe the nightmares had been pieces of visions, trying to come through.
Not that she knew what she’d seen. But it had been a glimpse into something. She hadn’t made it up.
And that meant the ring had to have powers: her mother had given her a talisman, not just a good-luck charm. She’d suspected before, but she hadn’t known for sure. In a way, she thought curiously, she hadn’t wanted to know. In a way, she had ignored the evidence.
The vision had to have something to do with Jax’s theory about her mother’s discovery, the so-called source. Which she’d been thinking about when she slid the ring onto her finger. That wasn’t a coincidence, either.
It was all starting again, she thought, and felt the tiny hairs lift along her arms. She didn’t know whether to feel excited or stubbornly rooted to the ground.
It wasn’t that regular life fell away; it was that new elements appeared without warning.
It was the possible, opening up in midair.
Two
Clothing-stuffed backpack over her shoulder, Cara rang Hayley’s doorbell for her ride to school. There they would get on the charter bus that would take the team onto the mainland and finally into Boston.
It was so early it was dark out, with the first pale streaks in the sky; Cara was still rubbing the sleep from her eyes when Hayley’s mother answered the door with her lips lined in purple and her hair done up in a sixties beehive.
Hayley’s mom ran a beauty salon along Route 6, a salon with a lot of fake flowers in it where young women got their nails done and old ladies got their hair washed a lavender color and set into wavy helmets. Cara and Hayley had asked her what the reason was behind that old-lady blue hair situation, but Mrs. M never explained it too well. It seemed like a ritual from ancient times—the equivalent of a secret handshake. In any case, Mrs. Moore’s own hair was always elaborate and tacky, like a Gaga wig but maybe without the irony.
“Come on in, Cara, hon!” she enthused in her Georgia accent.
It turned on into own and in into Ian. Come own Ian!
“Thanks,” said Cara.
Hayley’s mom often made Cara feel a bit embarrassed—though not as embarrased as Hayley felt. Mrs. M. was nice, no argument there, but she was also shiny and loud and stood too near, where Cara’s mother was soft-spoken and, like a chameleon, always seemed to match wherever she found herself.
“Would you go on up and get her, sweetcakes? I’ll be waiting out in the car,” said Mrs. M, and pulled on a lumpy fur jacket Cara really hoped was fake. It had animal tails dangling.
Cara dropped her bags and took the stairs two at a time. Hayley was one of those people who always made you wait—at least, if she was involved in a momentous decision such as what to wear. In restaurants, she was the one still studying the menu when everyone else already had a plate in front of them.
“Hay! Time to go!” called Cara as she swung past the shag-carpeted landing and into the upstairs hallway.
Hay
ley’s door was open, showing a wall of celebrity collages. She cut up the gossip and fashion magazines her mom’s clients left in the salon.
“I’m coming! Geez,” said Hayley.
In fact, she wasn’t coming at all. She was posing in front of her full-length mirror, admiring herself in a leisurely fashion and rocking an eighties outfit. She had feathery earrings dangling from her ears and an asymmetrical, triangle-shaped coat that looked, to Cara, on the ugly side.
Of course, she would never say that to Hayley. It wasn’t that Hay’s feelings would be hurt or anything. Far from it. She’d just roll her eyes at Cara’s poor fashion sense and give her a lecture on glamor and trends and the importance of retro. But Cara also knew that Hay’s elaborate outfits were carefully chosen at thrift stores. They didn’t have the money for brand-new clothes.
“We have to go now,” said Cara. “It’s a bus. Not a personal taxi service.”
“So my goal is like an early Madonna, sleazy gutterslag kinda look,” said Hayley.
“Nice,” nodded Cara. “Yeah. I can see that. But let me ask you this. Did you pack your swimsuit?”
Hayley stopped popping her gum and snapped her fingers. She swished by Cara, down the hall to the bathroom (where everything was fluffy and/or made of conch shells and beach glass and a really bad poster showed two sets of footprints turning to one in the sand, along with some motto about Jesus carrying you) and grabbed a threadbare Speedo dangling off the shower rod.
“Good thought. Kudos,” she said.
By the time they were getting into the car, Hayley was already irritated with her mom, who proceeded to grill them all the way to school—driving, as usual, like she was under the influence though all she was drinking was coffee—on the names and family histories of other kids on the team. Mrs. M was what you might call an extrovert. Extreme. She was sure to talk to everyone and bustle around everywhere, Cara thought. There was no way she’d fly under the radar.
