She kneels over me, where I lie thick and bloated, unable to get air, a useless thing.
Please, do something, I beg the man sitting next to me.
All we can do is pray for mercy, he says.
I don’t know how. Mom never taught us.
The man grasps my hand and starts mumbling words I don’t understand.
But then I see Henry’s distraught profile, and I know I shouldn’t pray for myself—I should pray for those I care about, and how my light winking out will affect them.
Mine shouldn’t be the second bad death in one night for Henry. The first was enough. He is going to need help finding his brother, too, and I already messed up on that score.
So I start praying.
Please, I beg the beautiful woman who is bending over my body, give me mercy. I know I should’ve helped Grant more. I need time to atone for my mistake. And Henry needs my help. That’s what I do. I find lost things.
The man sitting next to me squeezes my hand. Stay strong, Marilyn, he says. The Sea is known for her compassion. You might have a fighting chance.
The beautiful woman is crouched over my body the way she was with Lyudmila’s. She taps my heart with the fishing float, but no light emerges from me.
She leans in closer and whispers one word in my ear that I cannot hear and will spend what will seem like an eternity trying to catch. It will roll toward me like foam, and roll away from me the same way.
I know I have been granted a reprieve, but with it I am being ripped away from this place as if I’m on a current.
No! Not yet! I say. I try to clutch the man’s hand, but it is slipping away from me.
Take heart, Marilyn. You have a difficult path to walk. But know that I walk with you.
I wake with a jolt to the heart.
I gasp for air.
Henry is rocking me, saying it’s going to be all right, but he doesn’t know what’s coming.
ten
HENRY
The sun was coming up behind us on Monday morning as Dad and I sat on the patio and answered questions. Meredith hovered, trying to get Dad to come inside. “Please, at least get warmed up and have a cup of coffee. Hannah’s made a fresh pot.”
“No thanks,” Dad said. “I need to see this through.”
“This” meant Lyudmila’s body being carted away on a backboard.
Joyce hovered, too, talking into her headset. “Good news, Rupe,” she told Dad. “There’s a vacant plot in the cemetery where Jimi Hendrix is buried. Do you want marble or granite for the headstone?”
I failed to see how this was good news.
Dad stared blankly beyond her to the lapping waves. “You decide,” he said.
“Marble, then,” Joyce said. “Granite’s more for kitchen counters. Do you want a particular poem or a line from a song engraved along with her name?”
Dad looked at her without really seeing her.
“Maybe something with a firebird in it,” I suggested. “That was her signature dance.”
“Excellent choice,” Joyce said, as if I’d picked out a vintage wine. She walked off to make the arrangements.
Me? I stayed outside with Dad, almost wishing I could be as numb as he was.
Lyudmila’s story may have been over, but we still had no idea what had happened to Grant, and that worried me.
There were five round scars on the palms of my hands. They were old and thick and didn’t fade. Sometimes when I was under stress, like now, I picked at them. I had to content myself with levering up the skin around the edges, but if I could, I would pull back full sheets of skin and leave my hands completely raw.
Where was Grant?
It was around seven, the tide was out, and there was still no sign of my little brother. Where Dad and I sat on the patio, we were protected from the rain but not the wind. We watched people comb the beach for something worse than sand dollars.
I felt lower than the waterline.
After Lyudmila’s body was taken away, we stayed there.
I tried to remind Dad that Grant had run away under worse circumstances and that we’d always gotten him back.
“Remember the boy soldiers in Sudan? Remember them? And what about that cartel in Venezuela? The fried guinea pig on a stick?”
If Dad needed cheering up, this wasn’t the way to go about it. Not with his dead wife being carted away to the coroner’s. He couldn’t take another tragedy.
But Grant wasn’t a tragedy yet, just a ticking clock. “The first few hours are critical,” people in uniform kept saying, but it was a sliding scale as to what “few” meant. The last time anyone had seen Grant was when Pixie had rowed him out to the bay the day before, around eleven A.M. When we mentioned this fact to law enforcement officials, they started acting squirrelly and telling us not to give up hope.
They asked us what shoes he was wearing, as if he were a toddler swiped at Disneyland. That didn’t sound right to me. Grant was ten years old and an active boy. If he were kidnapped, it wasn’t going to be by someone who wanted to raise him as their own. It would be by someone who wanted lots of cash.
I thought of Lyudmila.