But I’m not doing it for Wally. I’m not doing it for N. E. Endsley, either.
I’m doing it for the boy who’s hunched over at the waist again, the boy who—when I thought my grief would tear me in two—showed me photo after photo until the pain shrank back down to something manageable.
I’m doing it for Jenna. Because she saved Nolan first, and I must finish what she started.
The wind whistles as another crash of thunder courses through my body. I don’t say anything to Nolan as I begin to inch my way toward the lighthouse, but I can’t stop the low, guttural noise I make when a wave sweeps up to hit me, either. I have nothing to hold on to, nothing with which to brace myself, so I think heavy thoughts and wait for the lashing to pass.
Wally is barking, evidently happy that someone is coming to his rescue. I grip the rocky pathway with my toes when another wave comes, frozen just a few feet up the walkway.
Something hits my shoulder, and fear of being knocked downward races through me, but then it’s grabbing at my hand.
Nolan’s eyes are narrowed to slits, like maybe if he can’t fully see the storm, it can’t see him.
“Don’t talk about what we’re about to do,” he says through gritted teeth. “Just don’t.”
The path is barely wide enough for one person, so, in the interest of being as rooted as we can, we walk sideways. Every time a wave splashes against us, Nolan shudders, but he does not let go of my hand. It is already much easier, having his solid body as a counterweight to my swaying.
It’s not a terribly long peninsula, but it feels like an eternity passes as we creep our way along the path. Sharp rocks cut through my callused soles, but I continue to lead us in our slow crab walk.
“Almost there,” I shout to Nolan. I dare a glance back at him and the drowning look has only worsened. His eyes are almost completely shut.
We finally reach the cowering Wally, who, for the first time since I’ve met him, appears unenthusiastic about his circumstances. He barks, his tail low but wagging.
“Come on, you stupid boy.” I spit out lake water as it splashes into my mouth and grab Wally’s collar. “It’s going to be okay. We’ve made it one way, we can make it back.” I say this last bit loudly to both dog and master, but Nolan is looking back toward the shore.
“We can make it,” I say again, squeezing his hand. “But you’re going to have to lead us back.”
His breath comes too fast, his nostrils flaring in steady pulses and his chest rising up and down. He did not think this through.
“There’s this picture,” I say, and I pray to God this works, that he can hear me, “of Jenna and me at the aquarium when we were sixteen. We’re smiling in front of a tank. They had just fed the sharks and one is directly behind her head with a dead fish hanging out of its mouth. Over her shoulder, there is a little girl looking at the camera and pointing at the shark and bawling, but it looks like she’s pointing at Jenna. It’s one of my favorites.”
His breathing hasn’t slowed, but he seems to be focusing on me rather than the waves.
“You had to pick a photo with more water in it?” he asks.
If he were anyone else, if we were talking anywhere else, I would laugh.
“You can hate me for it after we get back to the shop,” I say.
He nods, squaring his shoulders and gripping my hand tighter in resolution. I resituate my hold on Wally’s collar, and Nolan begins to slowly, slowly, lead us back to the beach.
When a rogue wave crashes against us, halfway down the walk, and Nolan loses and immediately reclaims his footing, I panic. If he freezes up, there’s no way I can work around him to pull us to shore. We could be stuck out here. Quickly, I yell another photo description over the wind and rain, the first that comes to mind.
“The city cut down a tree in our park to make room for a playground. One of the trees had a family of squirrels in it that got crushed in the process, and a little boy found their bodies. He rallied five of his friends and they picketed the building of the new playground. Nobody cared or paid them any attention, except for this one guy who made a little squirrel headstone, so the kids could feel like they were heard. I walked by it one day and somebody had sprinkled the area with peanuts. There were about ten squirrels congregating around the headstone. The photo looks like I stumbled across a squirrel wake.”
Nolan yells something over the wind, without taking his eyes off the shore.
“What? I can’t hear you,” I say.
He turns his head toward me. “Another.”
When I hesitate, in search of another description worth mentioning, he adds, “Please.”
It feels as if I’m bartering tiny pieces of myself in order to reach safety. And because the situation isn’t a calm one, it feels like the descriptions have to be particularly poignant to do the job right. I don’t have time to choose carefully.
“My dad gave me my camera for my birthday. I was surprised because sometimes he forgets my birthday entirely, but it’s a really nice camera and I wanted to use it right away. I took a picture of my mom. She didn’t notice me, so in the photo she’s looking down into the sink with a blank stare. But there’s something about the curve of her back that matches the line of a hanging plant in the kitchen. It looks like she grew there. Like she will always live in the kitchen.”
I’m not sure how much he heard over the storm, and I don’t get a chance to ask. We’re only feet away from solid ground when I take my turn at losing my footing, but unlike Nolan I don’t catch myself. My legs stumble into the water, my ankle knocking against the side of the ledge with a painful thump. I let go of Wally’s collar and Nolan’s hand before I can drag them down with me, confident I can make it the last few yards to shore on my own.
Though my feet can reach the lake floor, waves bash over me, blurring my vision and rendering me immobile. I reach out to grasp the rocks of the peninsula as a guide, but my fingers curl over air. I choke as sprays of water trickle into my lungs.
When my eyes clear between waves, I look up, expecting to see Nolan frozen on the walkway, but he’s gone. He’s fallen, I know it. I kick against the floor of the lake, my foot connecting with something large and moving.
Nolan grabs my forearms, pulling me through the angry waves to his chest, a look of pure resolution plastered over the terror on his face.
“Nolan! I’m fine,” I yell, unsure if I’m lying. Everything beneath my waist aches.
Nolan doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t let go, which turns out to be necessary. My ankle begs for me to stop, with each flog of the waves. When we’re a few feet from shore, a displaced rock smashes into my injured foot and I can feel a scream vibrating up my throat, though I don’t hear it. Nolan stoops, tries to grab me behind the knees and hoist me, but another wave knocks us both into the shallow water.
Maybe Jenna and the clever wind want me to die out here, to give my last breath to Nolan and Wally and let my body float out past the chorus of whales to wherever Jenna is. Maybe this is why I’m so conflicted about my future … I’m not supposed to have one. I close my eyes and imagine never opening them, to see how it feels.
But I remember Nolan and jerk my eyes open, scrambling to find my footing in the water. He’s still half holding me, dazed.
“Are you okay?” I ask, pulling on his shirt when he doesn’t move. “Nolan, answer me!”
He remains still, one hand cradling my head and the other awkwardly cupping my elbow. Then he is looking down at me, and in a rush he says, “If they had lived, if I saved them, there would be—” He’s cut off by a wave, and once we rid our mouths of water, he finishes. “There would be no Orman.”
It’s dark, we’re both in over our heads—literally and metaphorically—and we need to dredge ourselves from the lake, but I find his eyes in the storm. I don’t know who they are or if Nolan could have truly saved them, but I know Orman has rescued countless people, in the way only powerful stories can, and that can never be a bad thing.
&n
bsp; “Just because it came from something terrible doesn’t make Orman less beautiful,” I say. “You weren’t wrong to write it, Nolan, no matter where it came from.”
This is not the time or place for a meeting of souls. More waves knock against us, their frequency and magnitude breaking our eye contact, but I must have said something right because Nolan finds it within himself to drag us to the shore, our bodies impossibly heavy as we emerge from the water.
We crawl when we reach solid ground, elbows bumping, as Wally barks and runs in mad circles around us. Nolan looks over his shoulder at the waves and shudders. His face pales and I wonder if he’ll faint. Instead, he fumbles in the back pocket of his jeans before extricating his cell phone and flipping it open.
“It must be ruined,” I say, but the screen shines through the darkness like a tiny beacon, illuminating his face as he dials Alex’s number. God bless brick phones.
Nolan tells Alex to bring his truck and then hangs up and leans forward to where I lie flat on my stomach.
“You’re okay?” he asks. His hands are shaking. I reach up and hold the one on his knee. It’s cold from the water, but I don’t think that’s why he’s shivering.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Are you okay?”
He looks out over the water before he answers, but he doesn’t move his hand from beneath mine.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
“But you did.”
“I know.”
He hesitates. “How…”
When he looks down at me, I can tell he’s not a supernova like Jenna, an old star burning its way out of this galaxy and into the next. He’s brand new, a soul still learning how to navigate this odd world of whales and clever winds. Like me.
So I tell him the truth, even though it sounds crazy.
“I heard you.”
When Alex’s headlights flash through the sheets of rain, they highlight Nolan’s silhouette and nearly blind me, but neither of us is willing to move our eyes away, still taking each other’s measure.
Alex’s car door slams. “What are you guys doing? Get out of the rain! Let’s go!”
Nolan and I don’t move.
“That’s impossible,” Nolan tells me. “There’s no way.”
I chuckle dryly, looking away as Alex nears us. “I know. If you had put a scene like this into Orman, everyone would chalk it up to magic.”
His reply is too quick. “Magic isn’t real.”
I look hard at the boy who stood by the lake and saw flying whales, the same one who took an unspeakable horror that has left him terrified of water and made Orman. He fashioned his despair into something the world could hold and admire and feel comforted by, and he doesn’t believe in magic.
It’s absurd.
“If you think of another explanation, let me know,” I say, and then Alex is hoisting me up on one side and taking me to the car.
“Come on, guys. What are you doing out here?”
Nolan fills Alex in on the way back to Val’s, the three of us, and Wally, bouncing around uncomfortably in the small cab. Nolan and I don’t say another word to each other about magic or anything else.
We don’t need to speak to feel something has changed. We can’t go back to being the same two people we were in the boathouse a few hours ago, before I answered his unspoken cry for help, before he conquered whatever fear forbade him from entering the water in order to help me. Before he confessed that he, too, has a before and an after and that it has something to do with Orman and someone he couldn’t save.
It feels rather like we just took out a giant troll in the bathroom, or fought our way to Mordor, shoulder to shoulder. It’s true: there are some things you can’t go through together without ending up friends.
chapter ten
Nolan wants Alex to drive his truck around the trees and through the sodden miniature meadow that encircles the bookstore. He wants us to bypass the parking lot entirely and pull straight up to the door.
“She can’t walk that far, Alex,” he says across me. “Her ankle is probably twisted or broken or—”
“I am not messing up the ground when the festival is only three days away,” Alex says as he puts the truck into park. His voice is quieter than Nolan’s, nearly drowned out by the rain that coats the windows.
Nolan has no such problem. He’s practically yelling. His eyes are not as wild as they were beside the lake, but they are still a tinge feral.
“Ask me how much I care about your festival right now. She’s hurt. It’s my fault. We’re pulling up to the door.”
Alex opens his mouth to respond, but my movement stops him.
I turn my body toward Nolan and—as slowly as we crept to the lighthouse—raise my hand to his cheek. I blush a little, knowing Alex is watching our every move, not knowing why this feels so inexplicably natural.
Even though it is still damp from the rain, Nolan’s cheek is warm in my hand. I watch his face closely as my fingertips, my palm, my wrist, rest against his head. His eyes soften, the untamed energy sapping from his body as he slackens his face into my hand.
“I’m okay to walk,” I tell him, my voice steady. “Really.”
There is a time to talk about what happened at the lighthouse, but it is not now.
“I don’t want … I don’t want you to be hurt anymore,” Nolan says, and—not to be outdone—he brings both of his hands up to cradle my face. “You’ve been hurt enough.”
Alex makes a funny coughing sound in the back of his throat. I can feel him trying to make the fact that he is looking out the window as obvious as possible, but it also helps when he loudly says, “I’m looking out the window.”
Nolan’s half-smile presses his cheek more firmly against my hand, and I smile in return.
“I’ll get the golf cart for you,” Nolan tells me. “I don’t want you walking on that ankle.”
“Try to keep it on the path. Alex will kill us both if you mess up his grass.”
“Thank you,” Alex mumbles. “Still looking out the window here.”
“I’m going, I’m going,” Nolan says, but he waits another six heartbeats before he drops his hands from my face.
I try to watch him race across the muddy grass, but the rain is too heavy to see much past the hood of the truck. Wally goes berserk when Nolan leaves, and Alex quickly opens his door to let him out.
“I suppose it’s safe to stop looking out the window?”
“Yes,” I say. And we turn toward each other, his eyes as startled as I feel.
Alex folds his arms. “Are you going to tell me what really happened, or am I going to have to pry it out of Nolan?”
I drop my gaze to my feet, pretending to look at my ankle. “What are you talking about? Nolan told you what happened. Wally ran out to the lighthouse and we had to bring him back.”
I glance over. He’s tightened his arms.
“Nolan doesn’t cavort around water willy-nilly. Spill.”
I make myself look directly at Alex when I tell him about Nolan and me holding hands as we worked our way to the lighthouse. His face is carefully composed as I speak, but he unfolds his arms when I say we almost got stuck when Nolan had to lead us back to shore.
“How?” Alex asks. “How did you get him to cross back?”
I shrug and look back out the window, unable to meet his gaze. “I … I distracted him.”
“How?”
A number of lies spring to mind, but none sound plausible enough to have worked. Alex would know how frantic Nolan was. He must also know why, but I don’t ask.
Maybe it’s that I’m soaked through and the truck’s heater isn’t doing much to warm me up, or maybe it’s because Alex’s silence has lapsed into the comforting kind instead of the judgmental kind, but I tell him the truth.
Eye contact is too much, so I tell it to the window. I tell the raindrops about the pictures of Jenna, my mom, and the squirrels. I tell about leaving little bread crumb
s of myself up and down the walkway to the lighthouse to lead Nolan, Wally, and me to safety.
“That’s how,” I finish.
My voice sounds small, and I guess Alex can hear it, because when I turn toward him, he finds a way to inelegantly wrap his arms around me in the small space of the cab.
“Oh,” I say, my head turned awkwardly against his shoulder. “Oh, we’re hugging now?”
“Yes.” Alex’s voice is definitive, no room for argument. “We’re hugging now.”
“Um, why?”
I’m certain this will make him pull back, but he doesn’t.
“You know why,” he says.
“Because I saved your grass from being turned into soup by a golf cart?”
He pulls back and looks toward the roof of the car like maybe the god of the whales can somehow help deal with me.
“Because you saved him.”
My heart hammers faster in my chest, and it makes me agitated.
“No, I didn’t,” I answer too quickly. “I saved Wally.”
“Don’t be stupid when you’re not,” Alex says. “Nolan could never like somebody stupid.”
This conversation is not helping my heart rate, but blessedly I can hear Nolan returning in the golf cart.
“What makes you think he likes me?”
Alex levels a look at me that reminds me so strongly of Jenna it hurts. But instead of wanting to sob, I find myself laughing and shoving him in the arm.
“Don’t give me that look!” I say.
“Then don’t be stupid,” he says, shoving me back. He’s laughing, too.
Nolan opens the door on my side while Alex and I are midshove. He stands and watches us in bemusement, which should sober the moment, but instead we laugh harder, until Nolan groans.
“It’s cool. Just have fun while I stand here in the rain.”
His hands are everywhere when he helps me slide from the tall cab of the truck, to the ground, to the cart. He brushes my waist, my arm, my back, and even though he’s just trying to keep from hurting me, I blush.
Amelia Unabridged Page 12
