She stands after a while. I take out books, showing her the titles I love, and she looks through them, carefully. ‘You’re a word convert,’ I say.
‘Maybe,’ she says, and I notice a blue bathing suit strap showing next to the neck of her dress. I touch it without thinking.
‘Will you swim with me?’ she asks.
‘I’m unprepared,’ I say.
‘I’ve seen you in your underwear before,’ she says.
‘You’ve seen me naked,’ I point out.
She stares at me, right at me, in a way that nearly knocks me over. ‘You have very large eyes,’ I tell her. I’ve always known it, but never known it before.
‘All the better to blink at you,’ she says.
We’re standing very close, and if I hadn’t kissed Amy, if I were single now, I know I would ask Rachel if I could kiss her again. I don’t believe she did kiss me to make Amy jealous. I don’t know why I believed it then. I know Rachel. As much as she’s changed. I still know her. And if she didn’t want to kiss me, she wouldn’t have.
‘What?’ she asks.
‘What what?’ I ask.
‘You’re smiling.’
‘Am I? I don’t know. I guess I just worked something out.’
Before I can speak, she points and says with wonder in her voice, ‘You’re holding a Walcott.’
I hadn’t even noticed it was in my hands.
We eat at a café in town. We order and stare at the Walcott. ‘I feel like it’s a sign,’ I say.
‘I do, too,’ Rachel says, but neither of us says what we think it’s a sign of. We keep smiling at each other and smiling at the book and I can’t stop thinking about kissing her.
‘We should ask questions we always wanted to ask,’ I say while we’re eating.
‘About?’ she asks.
‘About each other.’
‘I know everything about you,’ she says.
‘Impossible. There are always more things to be known. I’ll prove it. I will ask questions of myself, and you will answer them, and we’ll see if you get them right.’
‘And shall we call the game Narcissism?’
‘We shall call the game Henry. Question one: Who was my first kiss?’
‘Amy,’ she says.
‘Incorrect.’
‘Who?’
‘You. I kissed you on the mouth in Year 4.’
‘Really?’
‘Kiss-chasey. You don’t remember?’
‘I have no recollection,’ she says. ‘But trauma will do that to a person.’
‘Question two: What is my favourite colour?’
‘Red. The colour of Amy’s hair.’
‘Incorrect. It was red, and now it’s blue,’ I say, looking at her eyes. Closely followed by lemon. She looks right back at me. It doesn’t get weird. It doesn’t get awkward. This is Rachel. She throws a piece of bread at me when it’s time to stop staring.
‘Should we play the game of Rachel?’ I ask.
She looks out of the window, in the direction of the ocean. She says, yes. But the game of Rachel really needs to be played on a beach.
Rachel
holding the dead here with their stories
I keep telling myself that there’s some other way to interpret the game that Henry’s playing with me, some other way to read the way he looked at me in the bookstore. But it’s my eyes that are blue. My dress that is lemon. Me who was his first kiss. It’s the last night of the world and Amy is far, far away. The Walcott, both of us are thinking, is some kind of sign.
‘Should we play the game of Rachel?’ he says, and when I think about that game, I know that it really needs to be played on a beach.
We’re on the peninsula, less than two hours out of the city, the opposite direction from Sea Ridge. The ocean will look different and smell different. It will be called by a different name. But it will be the same unpredictable thing.
‘Are you sure you want to go?’ Henry asks, and I’m sure and not sure.
I’ve been thinking about it since we got out of the car. I’ve been away from it for too long. I thought about it in the bookshop before lunch as I watched Henry run his hands over the spines of books, hovering over the ones he loved. I thought about him living a life without the bookstore, and at the same time I thought about me, living a life without the ocean. A dry, bookless world. It’s too bleak even to imagine.
I hear the water as we get closer, the hush of it, circling and flattening out. When it appears, I’m ready. It’s long and achingly flat, not like the rough waves that heap over themselves continually back home.
Henry and I sit on the beach and stare at it for a long time. This is the water of my dreams and nightmares. Sometimes it’s the thing that takes Cal away, dragging him out in currents, and sometimes it’s the thing that brings him back, bleached like that beaked whale. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, he’s alive, and grabbing at those silver fish.
I tell Henry about the three layers to the ocean: the sunlight layer, the twilight zone, and the midnight zone, each named for the amount of sun in them. In the midnight zone, creatures have to make their own light. Before Cal died, the midnight zone was my favourite. The idea of no light fascinated me.
‘I wanted to dive, do you remember?’ I ask, and Henry says he couldn’t understand how I could be that brave.
Bravery had nothing to do with it. I hadn’t imagined that anything terrible would ever happen. To me, or to the people I loved. I assumed we’d always be safe.
I think about the things I wanted to see – killer whales, hatchet fish, and vampire squid. I think about how I pored over books: fascinated by dragon fish, metal and frill, teeth and eye; fascinated by beautiful creatures, too, in colours that I’ve never seen in the surface world, both electric and pale, creatures glowing like fresh snow in the darkness.
‘It scares me, but I want it again,’ I tell Henry.
‘You shouldn’t feel guilty about that,’ he says, and I wonder if that’s what I’ve been waiting to hear, that I’m allowed to love it again.
‘You want to swim?’ he asks.
‘Yes, but I’m not ready yet.’
We sit for another hour. I watch the ocean and Henry. He makes a sandcastle and puts a ring of shells around the battlements. Before we leave, he walks to the edge to wash his hands. I think he does it deliberately, so that he can come back and splash me, and I can feel the water on my skin.
There’s a soft pink glow in the sky by the time Henry drops me at the warehouse so that I can get ready for tonight. I remember something that Gus said to me once. ‘It’ll just arrive. A feeling of being okay. If you do all the things we’ve talked about, it’ll arrive.’ He spoke as though it was a physical thing, something as real as a package that would come to me in the mail.
As I step out of the van, I catch a glimpse of myself in the window. I’m not the old me or the me I’ve been for the last eleven months. I’m another me. I still don’t quite recognise her. She looks, if I had to describe her, expectant.
By the time I get back to the bookstore the sky has clouded over. ‘It’ll rain by the end of the night,’ I tell Henry.