“Nobody else knows this. My assistants, my students, I don’t know what happened to them. I can’t. I don’t think about it—that’s how I live with it. Your mom knows. Now you. Jane doesn’t know. The main way I know your mom still loves me is that Jane still doesn’t know. She loves me enough not to go to her. Lorna, I love you, and I’m sorry.” His voice quivers a bit, and I find I don’t even want to say anything to him. I just want to get off the phone.
“After that, Lorna,” he goes on. “After the plants came up, those perfect little infants nestled in the mouths of those pods . . . the things we saw were just—”
And the phone call ends.
I don’t know how or why it was allowed to last that long.
I know my dad. I know he thought he was being a good person. I know he thought he was doing the right thing. And I don’t know what happened after that. I don’t know what happened to my dad. I don’t know if the dad I know is just his story of who he thought he was going to be before that day.
His voice was so strange on the phone. My mouth is moving and moving, trying to tell Stan and Emily what happened, and I can’t make a sound. I can’t. I can hardly breathe, and there is this weight, like my heart is a rock that just dropped into my stomach, and I just want to throw it up, to just get it out of me and breathe, and I can’t. I can’t. I don’t know how right now.
I run up above the deck, and I fling the phone into the sea. I want so badly to hear Dad’s voice again, to have him tell me that everything is okay. But I don’t know who else was listening. As much as Dad may believe that he and Bobby are the only ones who know about the phone, there’s no way to prove it. Someone could have been tracking it—and us. I throw my regular phone overboard too, because it might still be pinging out a signal. Then I put my face in my hands. I put my face in my hands, and I stay like that for a while, not wanting to see or hear anything else.
I hear a sound like a whisper, near my ear. Callie’s holding me. I know it’s Callie because she smells like Callie, because I have smelled Callie every day for almost every day of her life. She peels my hands from my face slowly, like she’s unwrapping a present. She wipes my tears away, and I just make new ones. She looks at me. She makes her face look like mine. She sits there with me and makes her face look like mine, and I have my first funny thought in a while, which is: If that’s what I look like, I should stop that. So I try to. And she smiles at me.
We sit there like that all night, watching the sea. Dolphins do this thing where they have to breathe, but they also have to sleep, so they sort of float there like logs, turning and breathing and turning and breathing. The water’s mostly calm. The wind has been getting warmer over the past several days. The air smells like it always smells: wet, and salty, and like fish living and dying and breeding all around us.
THE SUN’S COMING up. It’s dawn, and the sky is anything but clear, and a fog is rising and settling all around us. I’m wracked and ragged from last night, from this whole life, which is, I am now realizing, mine. So here I am. On the deck of this boat, and my sister is here, holding my hand and watching the sea with me. Our feet are dangling over the edge, getting damp in the foggy mist. Callie reaches into her pocket and pulls out two crackers. She puts one in her mouth, and she puts the other in mine.
I don’t know what comes next, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine it without screwing it up, but whatever it is, it’s my sister and me. Here. Now. And with this—with this—I say, Fine. I can take it. I dare you.