Lyn shook her head again. “I can’t. I’m not strong enough to watch her go through that. I never was. She needs your father.” She squeezed his hand again. “And so do you.”
He jerked away. The last thing in this life or the next that Merrick wanted to do was go crawling back to that man. “Mom. You have to come see her. Please.” He resorted to begging, but so be it. “You’re our mom. We need you. Both of us.”
“I’m sorry.” Lyn wasn’t there anymore. She was far away. Lost. She’d made her decision. No amount of pleading would convince her.
Grim’s words hit him like lightning, burning from the outside in. “All the money in the world can’t make a mom stop being a mom . . .”
Coral’s warning rolled through him. Thunderous as it was true. “If your mom wanted you, she’d search land and sea until she found you . . .”
His mom had been here, twenty minutes away all this time, and she never once tried to find them. She didn’t want to know what had happened. Not to Maya. Or Merrick. She couldn’t handle it.
What kind of love was that?
“I’m glad to know you’re both okay.” She faced the wind, an odd sort of peace wrapping her in a bubble where Merrick couldn’t reach.
How would he forgive her for this? For abandoning them?
“Good-bye,” he said, refusing to call her Mom because that wasn’t what she was. Not anymore.
When he reached Grim’s car, Merrick sat with his hands and forehead resting on the wheel. How could he tell Maya their mother didn’t want them?
He couldn’t process it.
When he turned the key in the ignition, he let the car idle and pulled out his phone. Merrick had three missed calls from Coral and a series of texts.
His heart pounded.
He didn’t see anything but where he needed to meet her.
The hospital. She was at the hospital. With Maya.
Merrick pulled out of the parking lot and hoped he wouldn’t get pulled over for ignoring the speed limit. When he sat at a stoplight, waiting to get on the freeway, he resorted to his new plan B.
He hated this plan.
Loathed it.
But what else did he have left?
Hiroshi picked up on the first ring.
Merrick swallowed. He couldn’t hide the defeat in his voice when he said, “Dad?”
Forty-Three
Coral
The nothing began much like her first journey into the Abyss.
It was dark.
It was cold.
It was nothing.
Coral was numb. Everywhere. Things that should have bothered her didn’t.
When school started in August and some of the boys came too close for comfort, she escaped into the nothing until they let her alone.
She sat in English, usually her favorite class, and stared out the window. A blank sheet of paper lay on the desk before her. While the other students had been writing feverishly for ten minutes, Coral hadn’t even bothered to take out her pencil.
When the bell rang and everyone headed to the next class, Coral’s teacher stopped her at the door. “Miss Brandes tells me I can look forward to some beautiful writing from you this year,” he said.
She shrugged and checked her phone. Five texts from Merrick. She deleted them without reading them.
“I assume you know that means you actually have to write something.” He held up the blank page she’d turned in.
“How do you know it’s mine?”
“Everyone else’s has a name. Yours is the only one missing.”
She shrugged again.
“Of course, a blank page sometimes says a lot more than a full one.”
“Such as?”
“Such as perhaps you have more to say than anyone. So much, in fact, that a single page isn’t enough to get it all out.”
“Is that all?” She was going to be late for her next class. Not that she cared, but still. It was better than standing here listening to Mr. What’s-His-Name analyze her reasons for skipping the assignment.
“Miss Brandes showed me your writing from last year. She says you submitted it to the district writing contest. You were even a state finalist.”
Why did he have to bring that up? “And?”
“And I wanted to offer any help or guidance you might need before you turn in your final entry in December.”
Coral hadn’t told her counselor there would be no final entry. She’d spent every extra moment of the summer trying to finish the first draft of that stupid novel. Come to find out, she had no ending. The story simply stopped. Sure, her first chapter had placed her as a finalist. But the rest?
The rest were words. They were nothing.
She was nothing.
“Thanks,” she said to get him off her back. “I’ll think about it.”
He nodded and she left. But Coral didn’t go to her next class. She wouldn’t be going to her first after-school session with that new therapist Miss Brandes had recommended either.
None of it matters. None of it makes any difference. My sister died. Merrick’s sister . . . died.
Coral couldn’t face him. Not after she hadn’t been able to save Amaya. She relived that day until it was forever seared in her mind.
The blaring sirens.
The blood and the water and the stains.
Stains on Coral’s hands and clothes.
A faceless girl lying lifeless in her arms.
The nurse at the hospital explaining they were doing everything they could.
In the end, it hadn’t been enough. Coral had watched as Merrick sobbed into another girl’s arms at the hospital that day. Whoever the girl was didn’t matter. But the pain on Merrick’s face?
That was something Coral couldn’t erase.
And all this time she’d believed men—human or otherwise—were incapable of emotion.
Wrong. Everything feels wrong.
How could she write the ending to her story? She’d seen too many endings, and no one wanted a tragedy. She would be disqualified from the contest when she inevitably failed to turn in a completed manuscript. Her deadline would come and go. She wasn’t a real writer. She was a fake, an imposter.
I’m a failure. I am everything Father and Jordan ever said.
When she walked past her next class and straight off campus, she made her way as far from the beach and the ocean as she could.
She wouldn’t go to the meetings at the library.
She wouldn’t answer Merrick’s calls or texts. She couldn’t bear to hear him tell her it was truly over. Of course it was. If she’d been anyone else there that day, maybe Amaya would have lived.
With each step toward town, emptiness consumed Coral. She felt less. Hollow.
Nothing.
She floated outside herself. Watched life pass her by.
And why wouldn’t it?
Life never waited. She’d once written that time was a ribbon. Her time had been knotted and lost and cut. She would never piece it together the way it was before.
She and Merrick would never be as they had once been.
Coral could never get him back. And even if she could, she’d forever question his true intentions. She would keep him at arm’s length, doubting if she could trust. Forever second-guessing his reasons for being with her. Pity? Guilt? Shame?
Who needed the ocean when life was plenty devoid of oxygen on its own?