Beyond the Rising Tide Page 3

  I unfurl my fingers to reveal Charles’s ring. It looks similar to my wristband—silverish metal with a stone inlay—yet serves an entirely different purpose. And even though it’s smaller than my wristband, it feels heavier. Maybe it’s the weight of guilt, of something stolen.

  Only, it’s not stolen. It’s borrowed. I’m not a thief.

  I’ll have it back to Charles before he even notices it’s gone. I hope, anyway. If I’m going to help Avery, I’ll need at least a couple weeks. Charles shouldn’t need his ring before then, but I hope that if he notices it missing, he’ll forgive me. That he’ll understand.

  Brushing aside the guilt, I hold the ring over the tip of my finger and hesitate only a second before sliding it on.

  For a long moment, I wait to feel something or see a change, but nothing happens. Maybe it’s that easy. Maybe I materialized without realizing it. To test, I reach for a wooden post.

  My hand sweeps right through it.

  A wave of disappointment washes over me as I consider that maybe the ring only works for Charles.

  I’m about to take the ring off when a light mist begins to rise from the sand at my feet. I watch with wide eyes as it thickens into a cloud of dust, like dry dirt in a gust of wind. It swirls around me and starts clinging to me. I hold perfectly still, partly because I’m a bit terrified at what’s happening, and partly because, if this is how a materialized body is formed, I don’t want to mess it up.

  I feel something moving inside of me, rapid bursts of energy darting from the center of my chest to my limbs. Like a rush of adrenaline, only more electric, and it cycles through me over and over. I’m on the verge of crying out in pain when it abruptly stops.

  I look around, and the mist is gone. With apprehension I hold up my hand, and it looks the same as it did before. But then I notice something else.

  I can smell the rain. And the ocean. The wet sand and salt, ancient things that have been turned over in the surf again and again. I’m still under the pier, so I step over to where the rain is falling. Slowly, I stretch out my open hand, terrified that I’m not really solid.

  And then I feel the rain. Not falling through my hand, but hitting it. Gathering in my palm. It’s cold and wet and tangible. I step out into the open and raise my face to the sky, letting the rain sprinkle my face. For just a minute I’m a kid again, carefree in a summer rainstorm, wet sneakers splashing through puddles and leaves racing down overfilled gutters. And then for the first time in months, I shiver from being cold.

  In this moment, I know two things. One, I need to see Avery. And two—which maybe should have been number one—I need to find some different clothes. If I’d planned this out a little better, I would have materialized in Macy’s or the Goodwill or something. My pants and shirt are the shade and brilliance of the moon and cut like a karate gi. Standard apparel in the afterlife, but here I look like some sort of extraterrestrial white ninja screaming for attention.

  I try to quicken to the shops lining the beachfront. But that doesn’t work with this body, so I start treading through the sand. After months of quickening, walking feels tedious. So I run instead. The sand feels gritty on the soles of my feet, and the night air is cool as it fills my lungs. The muscles in my thighs and calves contract and expand with each stride. It may not be as fast as quickening, but it feels amazing.

  The shops are dark and empty. Preferable, seeing how I’m about to commit burglary. I wish crime didn’t have to be my first act as a materialized being, but my options are pretty limited. I don’t have any money, and even if I did, strolling through a store when I’m dressed like a radioactive Luke Skywalker would attract way too much attention.

  I can always find a way to pay for the damages later.

  If I have a later.

  It doesn’t take long to scope out the shops and decide on one bordering an alleyway. I slip down the alley as stealthily as my luminous clothes allow, then peer through the windowed side door, scanning the walls and ceiling to make sure they’re free of security cameras. To cushion my fist, I pull off my shirt and wrap it around my hand.

  As I turn back to the glass door, I’m met with my own reflection. I barely recognize myself. My hair has always been sandy blond, but now it’s really blond. Like, white blond. Charles’s hair is always white when he materializes, but I thought that was just because he’s old. My eyebrows are still dark, but my skin looks smoother, the edges of my face more defined. And my eyes are less shadowed, like someone with a clean conscience.

  Not for long.

  I make a fist beneath my shirt, cock my hand back, and then slam it into the glass. The glass cracks, and something cracks inside of me too. The recently acquired conviction that I’m a good person.

  It’s for Avery, I tell myself, but it doesn’t lessen the sting or tremors that are starting to rock this new body. I reach through the jagged break, unlocking the door and pushing it open. As I pull my hand back, I feel a sharp burn on my forearm. I’ve cut myself, but don’t have time to worry about that now.

  I hurtle into the shop and grab a Rip Curl tee. Cargo shorts. Canvas flip-flops. As I’m about to exit, I see a display of pocketknives. I slide to a stop and grab one. You never know when you’ll need a sharp blade. Then I book it out of there.

  I guess I’m a thief after all.

  I sprint up the street and into the posh neighborhood perched on a hill above the beach. Avery’s neighborhood. At least during the weekdays when she stays with her dad. But it’s the weekend, so she’s probably at her mom’s.

  Behind a big flowering bush on the side of someone’s yard, I strip off the rest of the Skywalker clothes. As soon as they hit the ground, they lose their luminosity like an unplugged lamp, as though I was the power source making them glow. I dress in the new clothes and slide on the flip-flops. The knife goes in my front pocket, my afterlife clothes get tossed in a trash bin, and then I continue up the road, slowing my pace to a casual stroll. An innocent stroll. From the corner of my eye, I see the flashing of blue and red lights down by the beach. I turn and watch for a measured minute, because if there’s one way to label yourself guilty, it’s to look away from the crime.

  When I’m confident I won’t be pegged as a suspect, I turn and follow the street’s incline, passing colorful stucco houses with flowering vines and clay tile roofs. The sky is still blotchy with rain clouds, but the rain is tapering off. I close my eyes and inhale deeply, savoring the earthy scents I’ve been deprived of for so long. The air is cool and damp, and all of the hair on my body stands on end as though the atmosphere is charged with electricity.

  The sting on my forearm returns, and I look to see where the glass cut it, expecting to see blood. But it’s clean. I look closer. There’s an opening in my skin, a long, jagged gash, but no blood. Just a bit of shimmery clear liquid oozing out. I shudder and thrust my hand in my pocket so I don’t have to look at it.

  As I suspected, Avery’s car isn’t in her dad’s driveway. And I realize now that since I’ve never been to her mom’s without quickening there, I’m not sure how to get there by walking.

  No matter, because as I think about Avery, I feel a tug inside my chest, the same magnetism that brings me to people when I quicken without a body. So I follow the pull. It leads me out of the neighborhood and onto a highway. I focus on her face, on the desire to go where she is, and surrender to the current leading to her.

  he rain is coming at me in two directions. Pelting down from the sky, and then splashing up as it hits the surface of the ocean. Between the water in the air and the salt in my eyes, the beach has all but vanished. But even though I’m out here in the waves with nothing but a surfboard keeping me from the bottom of the ocean, and even though a current is tugging me farther and farther from land, I feel strangely serene. Because the boy sharing my surfboard just saved me from drowning, and fate wouldn’t be so cruel as to deal me a death sentence right after delivering me from one.

  He’s on the opposite side of my board, half-tu
rned toward shore, one arm stroking wide circles in the water, the other stretched across my board. His skin is warm against my arm, his muscles taut with the effort of holding on. On his back, a long, white scar stretches across his shoulder blade, like someone once laid a curling iron on him.

  He shouts a question, but the wind tears his words away. He turns to me for an answer, and I think, Finally. I can see his face. But then I can’t see at all. The sea and sky are conspiring, hurling so much water in my eyes that I’m blinded.

  I’m shivering when I awake from the dream, curled with my knees pulled to my chest. My blankets are everywhere but on me, and the smell of rain and the morning light seep through my open window. In the distance, I hear the sound of the waves on the beach, like the static of mom’s broken car radio.

  Somewhere out there, far from Avila Beach, the boy who drowned probably has a family. A mother and father, maybe brothers and sisters and grandparents. They must not have known he was at the beach that day, or even in the area, because no one came forward to help us connect the drowned boy to a missing person. Which means they don’t know he’s dead. They must wonder where he is, must have sleepless nights and nightmares like I do. Maybe they scour the Internet regularly for his whereabouts or have even hired a private detective to find him. But until I remember what he looked like, until I can find out his name, they’ll never know what became of him. Because it’s impossible to identify someone when their body is still missing.

  I sit up and reach for my cell on the nightstand, and I realize I’m still wearing my clothes from the night before. There’s sand in my bed, and my ankles are raw from grating against it. I lean back on the headboard and pull up a browser, going directly to the tab for the missing persons database that the sheriff’s detective referred me to. He thinks that maybe if I see a picture of the boy, it will jog my memory and I’ll be able to identify him.

  I type in the information I do know, which isn’t much.

  Age: 17–22

  Race: Caucasian

  Last seen: December of last year

  Hometown: Unknown

  We ruled out the possibility that he was a local, because no locals went missing that day. And he must have been at the beach alone, because no one reported a missing member of their party. The other information—height, weight, and eye color—I don’t have either. So I leave those fields blank and hit search.

  A few dozen profiles pop up, and I scroll through them, squinting at each photo, trying to project the face onto the boy who briefly shared my surfboard that stormy afternoon. But none of them seem to fit. And in truth, all of them seem to fit. I simply don’t remember.

  A text from Paige pops up. One simple line:

  Thanks for ditching me.

  I don’t blame her for being mad. I haven’t exactly been the ideal friend lately. But I don’t have the energy to try to mend things at the moment, so I don’t text her back.

  I check the time—just past ten—and then shut off my phone and set it back on the nightstand. It’s then that I realize how quiet Mom’s condo is. Usually I can hear her scuttling around dusting imaginary things, or typing furiously on her keyboard, or talking to herself.

  “Mom?” I call.

  No answer.

  I get out of bed and shuffle into the hall, glancing into her bedroom. Her bed is unmade, but she’s not in it. So I go to her office, and she’s not there either. Her desk is a disaster of open books and coffee-stained, scribbled-on scraps of paper. An oversized whiteboard on the wall is congested with notes and scene outlines, and the dry-erase marker extends onto the wall in a few places where she ran out of room. Multiple pairs of mismatched socks are strewn on the floor by her chair, peeled off absentmindedly during brainstorming sessions. Mom is a screenwriter who specializes in romantic period dramas. But from the look of her house, you’d think she wrote slasher films.

  She’s not in the kitchen or living room either, and I don’t find a note. Though it could easily be hiding under all the clutter on her kitchen counters. I call her cell from the landline and then follow a distinct buzzing to her phone, buried under a pile of mail on the dining table. Maybe she ran to the store and couldn’t find her phone. But when I check the garage, her vintage Impala is snug in its tight spot, still sleeping in. And the cruiser bicycle Dad got her for one Christmas hangs above it, collecting dust.

  Assuming she went for a morning walk, I eat breakfast and straighten up the kitchen, then go to the bathroom where I splash some water on my face. My eyelids are swollen from all my crying the night before, and my smeared mascara makes me look like I’m the one who should be penning slasher films.

  After rummaging through my bag and realizing I must have left my makeup remover at Dad’s, I open Mom’s medicine cabinet to find some. But all I see are shelves lined with prescription bottles. She can’t be on this many meds. I turn the bottles to read the labels, and sure enough, most of them are empty or expired, remnants of failed trial runs. I do her a favor and dump the empty and expired containers in the trash, then hop in the shower.

  As I’m getting dressed, I notice another prescription container on the counter—this one open and empty. When I turn it to read the label, my hands go cold. It’s the same sleep aid she took too much of last winter before sleepwalking down to the beach. We found her the next morning, curled up in a rocky alcove, her temperature dropping and the tide rising.

  I’m out the door in five seconds, hair still damp and sneakers untied. Mom’s condo sits on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and I head for the stairway that leads down to the beach. Dread rises inside me as I get closer, as though the stairs are imaginary and I’m about to take a fifty-foot plunge. I can hear the ocean slamming against rocks below. Shattering. Breaking. Like a china cabinet plummeting from a three-story building and hitting the pavement.

  Although the stairway is solid beneath my feet, my stomach thinks I’m falling toward the rocky beach. My feet trill down the steps, and my heart beats even faster. Please let her be okay. Let her be conscious and beachcombing, or swimming, or chatting the ears off of strangers. I can’t even think the alternative.

  When my feet hit the sand, I scan the beach to my left and right for a woman with wild curls. It’s a Sunday morning, and the tide is low. The sand gives way to rock slabs that resemble petrified tree bark, and the shoreline is speckled with people exploring the tide pools. If Mom is in trouble, no doubt someone would have already seen her. Unless she was swept away in the middle of the night.

  Shaking the image from my mind, I force my feet to move south toward the place we found her last time. My eyes search figures in the distance and faces as I pass them, but there’s no sign of Mom’s red scarf or her bright-green shawl or the polka dot pajamas she wore to bed last night. My hands are cold and clammy, and my breakfast is not feeling too welcome in my stomach. The water is a good thirty feet away, but I feel trapped between it and the cliffs, like it’s a bully pushing me against the wall. I hug the cliffs as I move along, bending and peering into every alcove and crevice. They’re full of shadows, decorated by algae and clumps of mussels, but void of human life. My steps are careful, as though I’m passing through a minefield. Because, at any moment, my worst fears might detonate.

  Something stings my forearm, and I glance down to see my fingernails digging into my skin. I loosen my grip.

  Down the shoreline, something catches my eye: a thin woman kneeling on a stretch of black rock, her curly auburn hair blowing in the breeze and a bright-green shawl around her shoulders.

  “Mom!” My voice sounds strangled because my throat is so tight. Her head snaps up to look at me, and I exhale a sigh of relief as I jog over. I kneel beside her and drop an arm across her back, pulling her close. “Are you okay?”

  “The sun is finally out,” she says brightly, oblivious to my distress. “I’m only a tick away from happiness.” She’s crouched over a tide pool, holding a scrap of fishing net. “Now if I can only get this little guy free, this could be
the perfect day.”

  Finally I see what she’s fussing over. There’s a crab the size of her hand tangled in the net. Its legs are moving, like it’s trying to break free.

  “I was worried about you.” I’m panting, but not from my jog. “You didn’t leave a note.”

  “I left at sunrise, and you were dead asleep. I didn’t think I’d be gone for long. I just needed to clear my head, and …” She shrugs. “I lost track of time. And then I found Sebastian here. I’ve gotten most of his legs untangled, but there are a couple tight spots I can’t get to.”

  I put a hand on hers. “Mom, it’s almost lunch. Let’s go back to the condo.”

  She shakes her head. “Not until I free this little guy. Would you want someone to leave you tangled in a net?”

  I exhale quietly, reminding myself to be patient with her. She needs to eat. When she doesn’t, things get bad. “Why don’t you go back up to the house and get something to eat, and I’ll take over?”

  She lowers the crab and leans back, considering. “Good idea. And if you’re not back by the time I’m done eating, I’ll bring down some pliers and scissors.” She gathers her feet under her and stands, then adds, “Promise me you won’t just toss him back in the water still tangled in the net.”

  I give her a you-know-me-better-than-that look. “You have my word.”

  My word must be good, because she nods and turns to leave.

  “Okay, Sebastian,” I say to the crab, “let’s get you free so you can grow up and become a seagull’s lunch.” I’m in a sundress, so it’s not easy getting comfortable on the rock. I end up sitting on one hip with my legs folded to one side. The netting is wound tightly around the crab’s pincers and legs, and after a few minutes of trying to unravel it, I haven’t gotten anywhere. The surf seems to be growing louder, hissing in my ear.