The Secret Sea

by Barry Lyga

  “What doctor?”

  “Her name is Melinda Campbell,” Dad told him, “and maybe you’ll be willing to tell her what you wouldn’t tell your mother and me. We’re going tonight. Your mother is coming here after work, and we’ll go together. So”—he checked his watch—“get a shower and something to eat.”

  Zak grumbled his way through a shower and a late lunch, then retreated to his room again to await Mom’s arrival. What was the deal with this doctor, anyway? He retrieved the iPod from its hiding place and did a search for melinda campbell and doctor and new york city.

  The first hit showed a white woman, maybe Mom’s age, maybe a little older.

  CAMPBELL, Melinda, MD, PhD, it said.

  And under that:

  Specializing in childhood traumas and disorders. Available by appointment only. Contact Youth Psychiatric Services at …

  There was an e-mail link, as well as a phone number, but Zak had stopped reading.

  She wasn’t just a doctor. She was a psychiatrist. His parents were taking him to a head doctor.

  His parents thought he was crazy.

  FOUR

  Dr. Campbell’s office was in the Village, so they had to walk to the F train. It was August-hot, but the temperature between Zak and his parents was frosty. No one spoke except to point out when a light had changed.

  Two blocks before the subway station, Zak steeled himself. He would have to go down into the subway for the first time since the previous day’s vision of flood and death. His parents would be watching him carefully, he knew. He didn’t want to do or say anything that would make them think he was any crazier than they already did.

  It was one thing to suspect himself. It was another thing to have his parents think he was a nut job.

  As they took the first steps down into the subway, Zak forced himself not to look around. Then he wondered if that was strange, so he looked around a little bit—what he hoped was a normal amount.

  Dirty tiled walls. A sign reminding people that rat poison had been dispersed in this station recently. A slew of posters—for movies, books, TV shows, plays, college courses—some of which had been defaced with random mustaches and an assortment of body parts. People milling about, restless in the heat and humidity.

  Down on the tracks, a rat poked its nose at a crumpled Doritos bag, clearly not affected by the poison.

  Nothing strange.

  No flood.

  No voice.

  And then.

  —secrecy—

  Zak blinked and composed himself. He would not—he could not—betray any hint of hearing Tommy to his parents.

  Don’t—

  —tell—

  No kidding.

  “There’s no reason to be afraid,” Dad said suddenly.

  “She’s just going to talk to you,” Mom added.

  “I’m not afraid,” Zak said a little too quickly.

  “You looked a little tense.”

  Silence, Zak realized, was his best defense. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the rat, which by now had forced its snout into the Doritos bag and was no doubt scarfing down whatever crumbs remained.

  The F clanked and rattled into place at the station. Zak settled in.

  The train pulled out, swaying that way subway trains did, in that way Zak imagined boats did. He closed his eyes and reached out for the feel of the breeze, the creak of the masts.

  For the voice.

  He couldn’t help himself. Once, he’d scraped his arm on a rough tree in Prospect Park, tearing a patch of skin from his elbow almost up to his shoulder. It hadn’t been that bad—Mom called it a “surface abrasion”—but it had been broad and almost epically tender for a few days. And yet, he’d been unable to keep from running his fingers along his arm’s textured surface, despite admonitions to leave it alone, despite the tickle that crossed the line to pain without warning.

  He sought out the voice for the same reason, for the same unknowable reason. He couldn’t help himself. If it was Tommy …

  The subway moved to and fro, its rhythm somehow liquid. No voice, but he could swear he heard …

  The cry of a gull …

  A gull? What’s a gull? How do I know?

  A bird. A gull was a bird.

  No. That was the squeal of the brakes.

  But it wasn’t. It was a bird. Screaming and squawking as it flapped its way between the masts. The sails cracked in the wind, their snaps like whips.

  “You keep a-skylarkin’,” a voice bellowed, “and I’ll have ye keel-hauled right quick!”

  Not the voice, but a voice that filled him with a familiar dread. He flinched.

  The ship rocked to port. The mainmast creaked.

  “Trim the sails!” the voice barked. “Trim ’em, and trim ’em good, God blast yer eyes! Ye whistled for the wind, and ye got it, so trim ’em!”

  Something was in his hands. A rope, rough and thick and heavy. It burned his fingers as it slid through them.

  The ship rocked again, listing to starboard this time. Above, the clouds angered to purple, and rain lashed down from a suddenly split sky. And then the ship’s hull juddered, as though it had dragged along the ocean floor, but they were miles from land in any direction. The ship vibrated once more, shaking him, threatening to knock him down, and a voice said, “Zak. Zak, get up, we’re here,” and the ship was gone, the sea was gone, it was just him and his parents and the F train.

  “I’m okay,” he said immediately, blinking away the dream. His parents shared a significant look that Zak knew translated, roughly, to:

  Are you going to ask him?

  You ask him.

  I don’t want to ask him.

  I’m not going to ask him.

  Mom relented. “Are you getting enough sleep at night?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” he insisted, shoving his way out of the train. He wasn’t sure, though.

  Out of the subway, they emerged at Sixth Avenue and West Fourth. They crossed the avenue and passed Christopher Park on their way to Dr. Campbell’s Perry Street office.

  “It’s interesting to watch the evolution of neighborhoods,” Dad was saying. He couldn’t help himself—he always had to fill uncomfortable silences. He was so used to lecturing all the time. “It used to be that the Village was its own sort of enclave, but recently SoHo has started making inroads. When you don’t have any sort of definitive boundaries for things, history becomes the only dividing line. And people don’t pay much attention to history. So you get overlap and bleed-through. The Village was originally—”

  “Not. Now,” Mom said in a brittle tone. Dad frowned but stopped talking.

  Zak liked lower Manhattan, the Village especially. It felt like it was part of a different world from the rest of Manhattan, which was set off in a rigid grid of streets intersecting avenues. The Village was a ramble of streets that crisscrossed and ran diagonally and wound around parks and blocks—rhombuses and triangles and the occasional trapezoid, not squares and rectangles.

  Secrecy—

  Don’t tell …

  Free …

  Zak ignored the voice, concentrating on walking straight ahead. Dr. Campbell’s office was a second-floor walk-up over a flower shop. From the outside of the building, Zak expected something dark, walnutty. Baroque was the word Moira used to describe old-fashioned rooms with wood paneling and brass ornaments. Zak prepared himself for something seriously baroque.

  But Dr. Campbell’s waiting room was, instead, white-clean—sharp lines, no nonsense. Fresh white walls that gleamed. Shining black and sparkling chrome accents.

  Zak waited—alone—in the outer office while his parents went in first for a few minutes. He barely had time to pick up a weathered old iPad tethered to the coffee table, when the door opened and his parents came out. Dr. Campbell stood in the doorway, smiling.

  She wore a gray skirt with a light green shirt and an expression that was supposed to be reassuring. But Zak knew her job was to rummage around ins
ide his head. He didn’t relish the prospect. What was in his head was his, and he didn’t intend to give it away.

  “Zak?” she said. “Do you mind if we talk a little, just you and me?”

  He absolutely minded, but his parents’ faces reminded him that he had no choice in the matter. He went inside.

  The inner office was also painted white, with a glass-topped desk in one corner. There was a sofa against the opposite wall, under a window, and a comfortable chair facing it. She directed him to the sofa. He sat down and pressed himself into a corner, then folded his arms over his chest.

  Dr. Campbell sat in the chair and propped a notepad on her crossed legs. She smiled again at Zak, but the smile only reminded him of the bleached bones of the Jolly Roger, the flag pirates flew on the high seas. She was so very, very white, even in the late heat of August. Didn’t she ever go outside? At all?

  “Zak,” she said calmly, “what we have here is a dilemma. You know what that means, right?”

  He bristled. He wasn’t an idiot. “No kidding.”

  The smile again. He didn’t like it. Not at all. “You know that I’m going to talk to your parents. That’s sort of the whole point of you being here. But because you know I’m going to talk to them, you’re not inclined to tell me certain things, are you?”

  He shrugged. He hadn’t planned on telling her much of anything anyway. There was nothing to tell her.

  She went on. “So, here’s the deal: I’ll only talk to your parents in generalities. I’m not going to tell them specifics. So, for example, let’s say you’ve been thinking a lot about red apples. And you can’t stop thinking about them. I’ll tell your parents that you’re having obsessive thoughts and that it has to do with food and I’ll recommend some steps they can take to help you and some things you can do, too, but I won’t mention red apples, or even apples at all. Is that okay?”

  Zak shrugged again. Whatever.

  “Zak,” she said, tilting her head the way people did with puppies and babies, “this goes a lot better if you speak up. I’m really just here to help you.”

  “I don’t need help.” There. How did she like that for speaking up?

  Don’t tell—

  “Why do you think you’re here, then?”

  “My parents made me come here.”

  “You know why, right?”

  He heaved out the most annoyed, exasperated sigh in his arsenal.

  “It’s about what you said you saw in the subway yesterday. Why would you lie about something like that? Unless…” She paused, tapped her notepad with her pen. “Unless you did see it.”

  He had seen it. Of course he had. But he knew that only crazy people saw things that weren’t there. And he wasn’t going to let her call him crazy.

  So he said nothing. He frowned and looked out the window. Perry Street bustled below him in the early evening light.

  Dr. Campbell let the silence hang for a moment. “You have a heart condition,” she said out of nowhere. “How do you feel about that?”

  Without meaning to, Zak put a hand against his heart. It was still thumping away reliably, as usual. He hated being reminded of it.

  “I’m fine,” he told her. “I feel fine. My real doctor says I’m fine.”

  “I didn’t ask how you felt. I asked how you felt about it.”

  “Does it matter? I can’t do anything about it.”

  She actually laughed at that—a short, huffed “Ha!” that pleased him for some reason. She seemed to relax a bit, and her smile became warmer and more genuine. “This is true, Zak. Very true. You have a great perspective on it.”

  He hadn’t expected a compliment. He uncrossed his arms and put his hands palms-down on his knees. “I don’t have much of a choice. It’s my heart. It does its thing and I do mine.”

  “So, if you’ve come to terms with your heart condition, then is there something else bothering you? Talking about it doesn’t always make it go away, but it can make it better.”

  Secrecy—

  Don’t tell—

  He couldn’t tell her about the guardian angel. He wouldn’t. That was a step too far. But it was true that things were bothering him, and maybe she was right—maybe talking about them would help a little bit.

  “I’ve been having weird dreams,” he admitted. “About boats.”

  “Boats?” She said it with such incredulity that he expected her to write it on the notepad and circle it with big, overlapping loops. But she just kept tapping the pen on the pad. “What about them?”

  “Old boats,” he said, warming, leaning forward. It did feel good to talk about it.

  He told her that he’d been dreaming of boats—sailing ships from olden times—for weeks now. Sometimes the skies were clear and the dreams were just pleasant, if confusing. Other times, though, like on the subway, the sea churned and roared like a thing alive. That was when the dreams took on the character of nightmares.

  “And the weird thing”—he’d almost said crazy thing, but he wanted to avoid that word—“is that I’ve never been on a boat in my life! So how do I even know enough about them to dream so much?”

  Dr. Campbell nodded. “That’s a great question, Zak. And we’ve run out of time, so we’re going to talk about it next time, okay?”

  Zak checked the clock on the wall. To his shock, they were out of time. He’d been talking to Dr. Campbell about his dreams for almost an hour.

  She held the door for him as he exited to the outer office. His parents arranged for another appointment in a few days’ time, and then they all left together, and it felt almost normal. He even waved good-bye to Dr. Campbell on the way out.

  Zak had the feeling that things would be different now. Talking about the dreams had made him feel better. And that night, he didn’t hear the voice and he didn’t even dream about boats.

  He did, though, wake up in the middle of the night.

  Outside.

  In lower Manhattan, far from his home in Brooklyn.

  With cops surrounding him slowly.

  FIVE

  The world filtered in too slowly and too quickly at the same time; Zak was overwhelmed by the input, the noise, the sights, the smells. The feel of hard concrete under his bare feet. The warm breeze ruffling his pajamas.

  He was outside. He had gone to sleep in his bedroom, and now he was outside.

  “… seriously, kid…” someone was saying, but Zak brushed it aside, chasing something else, another voice, the voice—

  —look up—

  It was speaking to him, so clear and so strong for the first time ever, and he strove to listen, pushing past the other voices.

  “—Bellevue?”

  “Get me a car—”

  Zak flicked his eyes left and right. Three cops, arrayed around him. Moving slowly, unthreateningly. No one had drawn a gun. Not yet.

  Outside. Definitely outside. There was a chain-link fence in front of him. Construction equipment all around.

  And a sign. 9/11 MEMORIAL MUSEUM, with an arrow pointing off.

  Too much happening all at once. He staggered, and one of the cops moved forward as if to catch him, but he regained his balance and righted himself.

  “Kid, just take a deep breath and—”

  Why wouldn’t they just. Shut. Up. For a minute. A single minute. He needed to hear—

  And the gulls cried again, so loudly that Zak gasped and jerked his shoulders in shock. The sky above was black, star-speckled, but it was also—somehow, at the same time—clouded and roiling with incipient rain. The mast creaked; the sails cracked.

  It happened right here, Zak realized. This is where the boat was.

  But how was that possible? He looked around, ignoring the cops, and was stunned when he looked past the fence to find the looming, lofty height of the Freedom Tower. He had sleepwalked to lower Manhattan, to Ground Zero, to One World Trade.

  —look up—

  I was on the train going under this spot before. When I had the dream.

&nbs
p; He knew it like he knew his own heart: The boat had been here. Someone had whistled for the wind, God blast their eyes, and the wind had come and—

  Impossible. How could it be? A boat here? It was too far from shore, from both the East and Hudson Rivers. A boat couldn’t get here.

  “Kid,” a cop said, coming closer, “if you don’t start talking to us, we’re going to have to—”

  Zak ignored him, straining for the only voice he cared about.

  And it came to him. Came hard and powerful, like someone had cranked up the volume on Zak’s psychic earbuds.

  I am in darkness.

  Darkness and quiet.

  For so long.

  And then there is light.

  And then there is loud …

  Zak screamed at the sudden clap of thunder that exploded between his ears. He dropped to the sidewalk and slapped his palms to either side of his head. The world had erupted in a fountain of light and sound, roaring out of a dark silence that had been both perfect and infinite. He whimpered.

  Look up.

  Look down.

  Look all around.

  Oh, Zak.

  “That’s it,” a cop said, and Zak felt hands on him. He didn’t care.

  If only you could see, Tommy said.

  And then, Help me, Zak, and it occurred to Zak for the very first time that maybe he himself was the guardian angel.

  Wind whipped past him, and the wind had shape, had form, somehow, and it slithered more than blew, with an almost tactile, greased sensation, like having oily feathers dragged along his body. He caught a glimpse of blue, gold, and red before the colors flickered into darkness.

  “Are you Tommy?” he asked, on his knees, gazing up at an image that flickered back and forth between the Freedom Tower and a sailing ship’s crow’s nest. When he received no response, he shouted, “Is that who you are? Are you back? Is it you, Tommy?”

  Don’t tell. They’re lying—

  —secrecy—

  Only the voice didn’t say secrecy, Zak realized as the police handcuffed him. It had never been saying secrecy.

  Secrecy was a blur, two words merging.

  Secret.