Aaron and I went over the plan with Mandy one last time as we walked to Deep Blue Bay.
“So, remember, if you come in late, you say you lost your shoes at Sandy Bay and had to go back for them,” Mandy said.
“And I went with her so I could help her over the rocks at the top of the beach,” Aaron suggested.
I gave him a Really? kind of look.
“What?” Aaron held his arms out in a helpless shrug. “It’s rough ground over there, and if you had no shoes on, you’d need some help.”
I laughed and decided not to point out that I’d already walked pretty much the length of the island without shoes on.
“Besides, I need some kind of excuse to be with you,” he insisted. “And anyway, we’ll probably be back by then.”
“OK, whatever. We’ll go with that,” I conceded.
We’d reached Deep Blue Bay. Mandy pointed out to sea.
“Look — there they are.”
Shona and Seth had popped up from under the water and were waving at us from the middle of the bay.
“See you soon, Seth!” Mandy called to them, waving back. “Good luck with Neptune!”
Seth gave Mandy a salute, and Shona beckoned us to join them. “It’s high tide in fifteen minutes,” she called up. “We’d better get going.”
I turned to Mandy. “Thank you — for everything.”
She waved off my thanks. “OK, I’m heading back to the cabin. See you later. Just be careful, OK?”
“We will,” I promised.
We piled up our shoes behind a rock. We’d already put our swimwear on underneath our clothes.
“Ready?” Aaron asked as we walked to the edge of the bay and prepared to dive in.
My stomach did a tiny twirl. Yes, it was spooky. Yes, the ship was surrounded by more question marks than portholes. And yes, the mysterious woman had haunted my thoughts ever since I’d seen her.
But this was an adventure. No matter what else happened, I was pretty sure we could guarantee it would be a hundred times more exciting than anything that had ever happened on any other Brightport geography field trip.
“You bet.” I smiled. “Let’s go.”
We’d been swimming for about ten minutes. It was nearly high tide, and we’d reached the channel where I’d seen the boat yesterday.
“This is definitely where you were last time?” Aaron asked.
“Yeah, I think so, although, to be honest, with all the twists and turns, it looks pretty similar all the way along.”
Shona pointed at a bunch of rocks heaped into a dome that looked like an underwater igloo. “It’s the same place,” she said. “I remember that.”
A moment later, everything fell still — just as it had the day before. Fish stopped moving; seaweed stopped swaying.
“Slack tide,” Seth said quietly.
“Slack tide? What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s the time in between the tide coming in and turning around to go back out. It happens at high tide.”
“Or the other way around,” Shona added. “You get slack tide at low tide, too. It’s basically the period where the sea pauses between doing one thing and turning around to do the opposite.”
“I’ve never felt it like this before, though,” Seth went on. “This still. It’s as if the whole world has stopped, not just the tide.”
Seth was right. It did feel like that — and it had felt exactly the same way the day before, too.
I was about to respond when something stopped me. Two things, actually. The first was Aaron tugging on my arm and saying, “Emily, look.” The second was what I saw when I turned to see what he was pointing at.
The ship.
Right there in front of us, just like before — only something was different. Then it had been as real as anything — so real that I couldn’t believe Shona hadn’t seen it. Now it was barely visible — a pale, faded, watered-down version of the same ship. It was almost transparent. I felt I could swim through it.
Together, we swam toward the ship. At least, we tried to. One moment, it was there; the next, it had faded so much that it was barely a shadow.
I reached a hand out as we approached the disappearing ship and tried to touch it. With a tingling, buzzing feeling in the ends of my fingers, my hand went right through the ship’s hull.
I gasped and jumped back, my tail flicking so hard to get me away from there that it created a cloud of bubbles.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
“Was it like this yesterday?” Aaron asked.
“No. It was absolutely solid. It was alive — a ship with sails and decks and people and — wait!” I pulled Aaron to the side of the ship, and we snaked along the edge of the channel. “The woman, she was in a porthole somewhere around the middle. Let’s see if she’s still there.”
We swam past the portholes. Yesterday, I’d seen inside them — small cabins, each with a bed and a closet. Today, all we could see was darkness inside every one.
We came to the one where I’d seen the woman. “This was it,” I said, flicking my tail to hold me back. I nudged Aaron forward. “You first.”
Aaron swam up to the porthole and looked inside. “Just darkness, like the others,” he said.
I swam alongside him, and we peered through the glass together. Aaron was right. There was only darkness. Except . . . as I stared into the darkness, shapes began to emerge.
“Aaron, look over there!” I jabbed a finger at the glass, careful not to touch it.
“What am I looking at?” Aaron scrunched up his face and stared into the room. “It’s just murky gloom, like the others.”
“Right at the back,” I insisted.
“The back of what? I can’t see anything. I can hardly even see the ship.”
“The back of the room,” I said, less confidently. Why couldn’t he see it? Yes, it was dark and murky and the sight was fading as I watched, but I could still see it clearly enough. Was I imagining it? “The bed . . . the . . .”
I stopped. I couldn’t say anything else. Couldn’t speak. She was there. The woman. Sitting on the side of the bed, her head in her hands, slumped as if she’d given up.
I wanted to swim as far away as I could — and yet I was transfixed. “The woman,” I whispered without taking my eyes off her. “Over there on the bed.”
In that moment, as if she had heard me, the woman raised her head. Almost lifeless, almost ghostlike, she left her bed and seemed to float toward the porthole.
“I can’t see anything,” Aaron insisted, his voice starting to sound agitated. “Even the ship is disappearing. It’s almost gone.”
I could still see the ship. It was fading rapidly, but it was still there — just. And so was she. She met my eyes and reached out a hand toward me. I held my hand up to the porthole, for some reason no longer afraid to touch it. My fingers tingled so hard, it felt as if they were being prodded by a hundred needles. I ignored the feeling and flattened my hand so I was holding my palm against the window. The woman did the same.
This time I didn’t feel glass. I felt a hand: flesh and bone, warm against my palm. I stared as her eyes met mine.
And then, a second later, it had changed. In an instant, as if they had never been there at all, the window, the woman, and the ship were gone.
“What happened?” Aaron was spinning around in a circle like a shoal of hungry fish, his tail flapping frantically. “Where did it go?”
I looked around, too. We were still in the channel, but it was now empty. The stillness had been replaced by a soft current. Seaweed stroked the tip of my tail. Fish darted by in small groups, like commuters just off work and hurrying home.
“It’s gone,” I said. It wasn’t the most helpful reply in the world, but what else did I have?
“There you are!” Shona rounded a corner and swam toward us. “Are you OK?”
“Did we disappear?” Aaron asked her.
Shona scowled. “Not exactly.”
“What d
o you mean?” I said.
Seth was beside her. “Well, you were there, but sort of not really there,” he told us. “It’s hard to explain. It was as though you were in another dimension or something.”
“It was weird,” Shona added — as if we didn’t already know that.
“Look. I’m really sorry, but I have to go,” Seth said. “I don’t want to risk Neptune’s temper if I’m late.”
He had my sympathy. I’d been on the receiving end of Neptune’s bad moods enough times to know that it wasn’t fun.
“I’ll see if I can find out anything that could help and will send word with a messenger if I do,” Seth went on. “I hate to leave you like this, but . . .”
“It’s fine,” Aaron said. “We understand.”
We said our good-byes to Seth and tried not to watch or listen as he and Shona said theirs — except for one bit that I couldn’t help overhearing.
“I hope everything’s OK with Neptune,” Shona said. “And he doesn’t give you a hard time for having had a couple of days away.”
“He won’t,” Seth assured her. “And if he does, I’ll tell him I’m entitled to a couple of days off . . . with my girlfriend.”
Then Seth was gone, and the three of us turned back to the island.
“We saw it again,” I told Shona. I didn’t really want to pull her out of the happy glow that she suddenly had around her now that Seth had called her his girlfriend, but this was what we’d come out here for — and I couldn’t really focus on anything else.
“The ship?” Shona asked. I nodded. “What about the woman? Did you see her again, too?”
“Yes.”
“No,” Aaron said at the same moment. He looked at me. “Emily saw her. I was looking in the exact same place, but I couldn’t see her. Emily could see the ship for longer than I could, too.”
“Wow, that’s . . .” Shona’s voice trailed away. I didn’t blame her. I mean, what exactly could she say? That’s completely freaky? That’s impossible? That’s absolutely beyond ever explaining in a million years?
It didn’t matter what she thought. Whatever else was going on, I knew one thing: we weren’t going to figure it out by hanging around in a deserted channel out at sea.
“Come on,” I said, starting to swim back the way we’d come. “If we go now, we’ll probably get back in time for dinner.” And then, because Shona was my best friend and I wanted her to be happy even if I was a bag of anxious confusion, I gave her a hug and said, “And you can talk about your boyfriend all the way back.”
I even managed to half listen as Shona happily talked about Seth while the three of us swam back to the island, to the others, and to a meal that my stomach was way too jittery for me to even think about eating.
Aaron and I filed out of the dining room with everyone else. He’d insisted I eat, so I’d forced some food down my throat and tried my best to chitchat with the others about any old thing. But I’d had enough now.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, pulling him outside with me.
We made our way onto the road and started walking toward the woods. I’d have been happy just to go and sit in the middle of the trees and stare into space, not talking to anyone or thinking about anything, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen. And I knew that we weren’t really heading for the woods, either. We were heading toward the house in front of us: Lyle’s house.
We stopped walking. We were almost directly in front of Lyle’s front door. I looked at Aaron. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”
We walked up the path in silence.
Aaron turned to me. “Ready?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I replied, and knocked on the door.
We heard shuffling sounds inside. A few moments later, Lyle opened the door. He looked dreadful — even by his standards. His eyes were like black holes, his shirt was hanging out of his pants, and his hair was ruffled and messy.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Um, well,” I began, “we don’t want to bother you —”
“Well, don’t, then.” Lyle turned to go back inside.
“But we have come to talk to you,” I added firmly.
Lyle paused for a moment, and then he looked right at me and nodded — as if he knew what we wanted to talk about, as if he’d been expecting it even though he’d pretended he hadn’t. Then he turned away and went inside. Leaving the door open for us, he called over his shoulder, “You’d better come in, then. And close the door behind you.”
We did both.
“Take a seat.” Lyle waved a hand carelessly across his living room.
I tried not to look at the dirty plates piled everywhere with half-eaten meals going moldy on them. Lyle must have seen me trying not to look, because he scrambled around, picking up the dishes and taking them into the kitchen.
“I wasn’t expecting visitors,” he said by way of explanation.
“It’s fine,” Aaron said brightly. “We didn’t even notice, did we, Em?”
“Not at all,” I lied as I stared around the room and wondered briefly if he might have been the victim of a burglary.
Aaron and I found a relatively untouched spot on the sofa and sat down. As I sat, my eyes fell on the dresser at the side of the room — and I no longer cared about or noticed anything else.
I stood up, walked over to the dresser, and picked up a framed photo as Lyle came back into the room.
It was a wedding picture — a smiling couple. On the left, dressed in a crisp white suit, was Lyle. He had such a huge smile that I could barely recognize him as the man in front of me now. The woman — also smiling brightly, her long red hair flowing over her shoulders and touching the top of a beautiful white wedding dress — was the woman whose face had barely left my thoughts for two days.
I put the photo down and turned to Lyle. “I’ve seen her,” I said before I could stop myself.
“You’ve what?”
“I . . . I’ve seen her,” I repeated, realizing, somewhat belatedly, that perhaps I should have tried to think of a gentle way of breaking the news to him.
“Lowenna?” His voice broke as he said the word, as if the word itself broke him. He cleared his throat. “You saw Lowenna?” he asked again, his words like splintered glass.
As he said her name, I had a vision of her the first time I’d seen her, fists pounding against the porthole. “I’m a winner,” I’d thought she was calling, and couldn’t understand why she’d be saying that. Now I realized that she hadn’t been saying “I’m a winner” at all. Suddenly, it was blindingly obvious what she’d been trying to tell me: “I’m Lowenna.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure I could trust myself to speak.
Lyle stared at me. His face was so white, I wondered if he was going to be sick. His eyes were dark like the deepest caves in the sea. He held my gaze for . . . I don’t know how long. It felt like forever. The room seemed to close around us, keeping everything else on the outside and leaving the three of us alone in this new world that made no sense and that none of us knew how to explore.
Eventually, Lyle spoke. In a voice like gravel, he slowly said, “You’d better tell me everything.”
And so, between us, we did. We told him all of it — even the parts that we were nervous about, in case we were in trouble.
“We didn’t mean to trespass,” Aaron stressed when we told him about finding the chair. “We fell, we got lost, and —”
“It doesn’t matter.” Lyle brushed aside the interruption. “Go on.”
I told him about seeing Lowenna the first time.
“How did she look? How did she seem?” he asked, his voice breaking with urgency.
“She . . .” I hesitated. Should I tell him the truth? That she looked as filled with pain and fear as he did now? “She looked OK,” I mumbled eventually.
Lyle let out a breath and his body relaxed a tiny bit. “Oh, thank goodness,” he said, and I knew that for once telling
a white lie had been the right thing to do.
We told him about going back again; we described the ship, the way it had been almost transparent.
“The weird thing was that only Emily could see Lowenna,” Aaron said. “I couldn’t see her at all.”
“The ship seemed much less real today, too,” I added.
Lyle nodded, as if this made some sort of sense to him. “Go on.”
“That’s about it,” I finished off. “We’ve told you everything.”
Lyle didn’t respond. He just sat there, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his face pulled into a tight frown, his eyes moving from side to side, as if chasing thoughts around his mind.
Then, abruptly, he stood up and turned away from us. Was that it? Now that we’d told him our story, were we being dismissed?
“Are you throwing us out?” Aaron asked.
Lyle spun back around. His gaze was like a dark tunnel that would trap us forever in its depths if we weren’t careful.
“Quite the opposite,” he said. “I’m going to take a few deep breaths. Then I’m going to make a hot chocolate for each of us. And then I’m going to come back and sit down and we’ll keep talking.”
“I . . . I don’t know what else there is to say,” I blurted out. “We’ve told you everything.”
Lyle nodded slowly. “Yes, I know you have. And believe me, you will never know how grateful I am to you for your bravery and your honesty in doing that.”
“So what else do you want us to tell you?” Aaron asked.
Lyle paused for a moment. Then in a voice as steady as the horizon, he said, “I don’t want you to tell me anything. Now it’s my turn. I’m going to tell you my story.”
Aaron and I sat together on the sofa, listening to the sounds of Lyle puttering around in the kitchen — a kettle coming to boil, the chink of jars and cups and spoons.
We didn’t talk. My mouth was too dry to speak, even if I had a clue of what I might say. I had a hunch that Aaron felt the same.
Instead, we sat in silence and held each other’s hands so tightly they could have been our lifelines. Maybe they were.
Eventually, after what felt like ages but was probably less than five minutes, Lyle came back into the room. He handed us our drinks, and I held mine with both hands. My nerves had made my body shiver, and the hot drink warmed me.