I want you to imagine that when you were very young, you were taken from your home. Really imagine it. You’re barely old enough to be able to recall a home, a family, an unparalleled warmth and deep-down knowledge that you belong. You can’t remember too many things about your home or the people who were there, but you can remember just enough—just enough of a feeling about the place—that you know it is your one and only home, and the place you are now is not your home. And then imagine living your whole life with the soft sadness of being so far away from that home—and the less soft sadness of not being able to tell anyone about how you hurt, because even if you could, they wouldn’t understand—but also with the hope and trust that, one day, in some better future, you’ll be able to return to that home again. And then when that day finally comes, when you can finally go back to that home that’s been the one bright beacon in a life that is otherwise filled with a lot of murky, lonely darkness, you’re so happy. And then you get there, and the people you were born with get there too, and you’re so happy. But then it’s gone. In the worst way possible, it’s gone. And now it’s worse than before, because that little bit of hope that makes all the pain maybe tolerable has been snuffed out. And you know you’ll spend your whole life trying to understand this, to understand yourself, trying to tell anyone at all why it is that you hurt, but you’re scared because you’ve never been able to before, and you’re pretty sure you’ll never be able to now. Now that your home is gone for good and there is no place in this world that you belong.
Really. Imagine it. You are a person who hurts. Deep down and forever. Because something, when you were very young, was taken from you. And there’s nothing you can do about it. And you dream of that home you can just barely recall every single night. You wake up sweating so hard, like your whole body is crying, like every single inch of you is wracked with sobs, and you can barely stand to move, and you lay there like that, not wanting to sleep, because when you sleep all you see is the home you’ll never get to see again. But at the same time you’re terrified of never seeing it again, and you hate yourself for not wanting to sleep, for not wanting to see it. And then, slowly, after years and years of this, you just sort of stop dreaming about home. You sleep more easily, you wake up every morning and feel emptier than you thought possible, in ways you can’t even begin to articulate to yourself, let alone to another person. And you start the whole process over again, of trying to tell people, in the right words, the right tone of voice, the right body language, what it is that hurts you, what it is that pains you, what it is that feels so unrelentingly absent from your life, why you don’t ever feel like anything resembling whole.
But you can’t.
You can’t ever get the words out. The people in your life, they’re there every day, and while you know they care about you because of the looks they give you and the way they keep poking you to get up and join them even when you’re so sad you can’t even move, they’ll never be anything but strangers. You can’t ever seem to know them, and they can’t ever seem to know you.
It’s the same for everyone you meet. Even when you get a glimpse of some kind of connection between you and someone else, you can’t figure out what it is, what made the spark, or how to hold on to it. And they can’t seem to do this with you either, and you’re more or less completely alone.
And then one day you start dreaming of home again.
You don’t sweat, you don’t cry out, and it doesn’t hurt. You’re floating over it. It’s not the vicious, gut-cutting sensation of being able to see things from your eyes, from your memories. It’s like you’re above everything, floating there, seeing where you came from, where you belong, and you can feel, somewhere deep down, that your family is there. That people who understand you are there, and they’re waiting for you.
And then you wake up.
You wake up, and you can remember the dream of home, but you can’t do anything about it. But you still try. Every day you try to find a way to get back there. And every night you dream of it more clearly than before. You dream bigger. You dream like the movies. You zoom in, you zoom out, you focus on specific details so that you capture their essence exactly as it’s meant to be captured. You see boats, and trees, and gardens, and mountains, and lions and tigers and bears. And you also see where you live now, where this life you’re stuck in has stuck you, and how far away it is from where you need to be. But because you can see all of this, you can see how to finally get home.
And then you do! You get home! You get home, and you see your family, and you see the land that made your life possible, and the whole world comes rising up to greet you. And your heart feels full up with everything. I mean everything. You can hardly stand how alive you feel right now, how connected to all of this you feel, to life, to the lives of others, to the whole entire world.
I want you to imagine having gone through all of this.
And then I want you to imagine watching it burn to the ground.
Your aching heart, your fallen face looking back at you in the mirror: That’s what my sister looks like right now.
TWENTY-SIX
WE’RE FIVE DAYS out. Ted’s below deck, and it doesn’t look good. His breathing is ragged and shallow—when he’s even breathing at all. His skin is paper-white, past pale. Like the life’s being drained out of it. His hair’s turning yellow and brittle at the edges and crumbling up and away and off. When Stan goes down to see him, everyone else leaves, even the Icelings. Like they know. I try to look at him, but he doesn’t want to look at me. Not now, anyway.
Stan is working with an average of maybe four hours of sleep a night. And that’s spaced out throughout the night, too, in increments of fifteen to thirty minutes. He doesn’t want us to get off-course, and he still won’t teach anyone how to do anything without him. But Emily and I just let him. There’s nothing else we can do. I think he’s putting everything he has into this, into having a skill that might be able to get us somewhere. I think it’s all he can think to do, all he can do, right now. He needs to be needed. He needs to feel he has a purpose. He needs to keep going.