Dare doesn’t miss a beat. “No. Because that’s an odd thing to know.”
I feel the laughter bubbling up in me, threatening to erupt.
“I agree. It is.” It’s something my brother shared with me yesterday.
Dare smiles. “I’ll be sure to work that in at the next party I attend.”
I can’t help but smile now. “I’m sure it’ll go over well.”
He chuckles. “Well, it’s a conversation starter, for sure.”
I don’t move because I sort of want to stay here forever, even though the dampness of the sand has leached into my jeans and now my butt is wet.
But even though I don’t want this to end, the darkness is so black now that it swallows us up. It’s getting late.
I sigh.
“I’ve got to go back.”
“Okay,” Dare answers, his voice low in the night, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think I detected regret in it. Maybe he wants to stay here longer, too.
He helps me to my feet, and then keeps his hand on my elbow as we walk over the driftwood and through the tidal pools and up the trail. It’s that thing that real men do, the guiding a woman across the room thing. It’s gentlemanly and chivalrous and my ovaries might explode from it because it’s intimate and familiar and sexy.
When we get to the house, he removes his hand and I immediately feel the absence of his warmth.
He looks down at me, a thousand things in his eyes that I can’t define but want to.
“Good night, Calla. I hope you feel better now.”
“I do,” I murmur.
And as I pad up the stairs, I realize that I actually do.
For the first time in weeks.
I dream about him again, and he’s so familiar and warm, his dark eyes sparkling as he looks into mine. “You’re better than I deserve,” he tells me, and that startles me, because I think it’s quite the opposite. I tell him so and he smiles knowingly, as though I’m wrong and I’ll realize it. When I wake up, I still feel warm.
As the weeks go by, I feel better and better, even if my brother seems to feel worse.
Each day he sinks deeper, and I grow more and more helpless because I don’t know how to reach him.
“Come with Dare and I to see the Iredale,” I plead with him one rainy morning. Finn looks out the window, finally lifting his nose from his journal.
“No thanks,” he says woodenly. “I’m not into being a third wheel.”
“You aren’t,” I tell him, but he won’t listen and I go with Dare alone.
“The Iredale ran aground in 1906,” I explain to him as we walk down the beach, to where the remains of the old wreck rise out of the mist. Its weathered bones look at once ghostly and impressive, skeletal and freaky. “No one died, thank goodness. They waited for weeks for the weather to clear enough to tow her back out to sea, but she got so entrenched in the sand, that they couldn’t. She’s been in this spot ever since.”
We’re standing in front of her now, her masts and ribs poking out from the sand and arching toward the sky. Dare reaches out and runs a hand along one of her ribs, calm and reverent.
I swallow hard.
“It’s a rite of passage around here,” I tell him. “To skip school and come out here with your friends.”
Except I never had any friends, other than Finn.
“So you and Finn came here a lot?” Dare asks, as though he read my mind, and his question isn’t condescending, he’s just curious.
I nod. “Yeah. We like to stop and get coffee and come sit. It’s a good way to kill the time.”
“So show me,” Dare says quietly, taking my hand and pulling me inside the sparse shell. We sit on the damp sand, and stare through the corpse of the ship toward the ocean, where the waves rise and fall and the seagulls fly in loops.
“This must’ve been a good place to grow up,” Dare muses as he takes in the horizon.
I nod. “Yeah. I can’t complain. Fresh air, open water… I guess it could only have been better if I didn’t live in a funeral home.”
I laugh at that, but Dare looks at me sharply.
“Was it really hard?” he asks, half concerned, half curious.
I pause. Because was it? Was it the fact that I lived in a funeral home that made my life hard, or the fact that my brother was crazy and so we were ostracized?
I shrug. “I don’t know. I think it was everything combined.”
Dare nods, accepting that, because sometimes that’s how life is. A puzzle made up of a million pieces, and when one piece doesn’t exactly fit, it throws the rest of them off.
“Have you ever thought of moving away?” he asks after a few minutes. “I mean, especially now, I think maybe getting a break from…death might be healthy.”
I swallow hard because obviously, over the years, that’s been a recurring fantasy of mine. To live somewhere else, far from a funeral home. But there’s Finn, and so of course I would have never left here before. And now there’s college and my brother wants to go alone.
“I’m going away to college in the Fall,” I remind him, not mentioning anything else.
“Ah, that’s right,” he says, leaning back in the sand, his back pressed against a splintered rib. “Do you feel up to it? After everything, I mean.”
After your mom died, he means.
“I have to be up to it,” I tell him. “Life doesn’t stop because someone dies. That’s something that living in a funeral home has taught me.” And having my mother die and the world kept turning.
He nods again. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. But sometimes, we wish it could. I mean, I know I did. It didn’t seem fair that my mom was just gone, and everyone kept acting like nothing had changed. The stores kept their doors open and selling trivial things, airplanes kept flying, boats kept sailing… it was like I was the only one who cared that the world lost an amazing person.” His vulnerability is showing, and it touches me deep down, in a place I didn’t know I had.
I turn to him, willing to share something, too. It’s only fair. You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.
“I was mad at old people for a while,” I admit sheepishly. “I know it’s stupid, but whenever I would see an elderly person out and about with their walker and oxygen tank, I was furious that Death didn’t decide to take them instead of my mom.”
Dare smiles, a grin that lights up the beach.
“I see the reasoning behind that,” he tells me. “It’s not stupid. Your mom was too young. And they say anger is one of the stages of grief.”
“But not anger at random old people,” I point out with a barky laugh.
Dare laughs with me and it feels really good, because he’s not laughing at me, he’s laughing with me, and there’s a difference.
“This feels good,” I admit finally, playing with the sand in front of me. Dare glances at me.
“I think you need to get off that mountain more,” he decides. “For real. Being secluded in a funeral home? That’s not healthy, Calla.”
I suddenly feel defensive. “I’m not secluded,” I point out. “I have Finn and my dad. And now you’re there, too.”
Dare blinks. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
“And we’re not in the funeral home right now,” I also point out. We take a pause and gaze out at the vast, endless ocean because the huge grayness of it is inspiring at the same time that it makes me feel small.
“You’re right,” Dare concedes. “We’re not.” He pulls his finger through the sand, drawing a line, then intersecting it with another. “We should do this more often.”
Those last words impale me and I freeze.
Is he saying what I think he’s saying?
“You want to come to the beach more often?” I ask hesitantly. Dare smiles.
“No, I’m saying we should get out more often. Together.”
That’s what I thought he was saying.
My heart pounds and I nod. “Sure. That’d be fine. Do you care if Finn comes sometimes, too?” Because I feel too guilty to leave him behind all the time.
Dare nods. “Of course not. I want to spend time with you, however you want to give it to me.”