I dream I’m drifting someplace up higher than the sky. The earth is a foggy blue-and-white thing, round and inconsequential. It holds no draw to me; nothing does. There’s not a word for the disconnectedness. I’m not aware of having a body, but it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing outside of this exact moment, no past or future, and it’s clear and pure and devoid of emotion or even thought.
A sharp sound shoots up from the mass of blue and white. A whistle pierces through what shreds of me still exist, and suddenly I remember it all. A child. My child. Down in that frigid, shimmering night, she’s calling me, and I need to go. I need to disconnect from this place, this state, whatever it is.
At first it’s floating. Then it’s falling.
I fall and fall and fall and I’m burning up as I tear through the atmosphere. Then everything’s freezing as I plummet into sky and crystallized air. It’s too fast. I can’t slow down. There’s a hook of land jutting out into the ocean, but I’m shooting farther away from it by the second. Mountains and ice loom closer and closer, and I can’t stop. I have a body again, and it’s filled with adrenaline and terror and regret.
I can’t stop.
I wake with a gasp, pulse pounding. My bed is empty; my mother is gone. We were supposed to talk about everything, but instead she snuck away. It still feels like I’m falling, falling, falling. Queasy and sore, I creak out of bed and peer out my window. Yesterday’s fog is gone, the sunlight bright and cold. Iris’s truck isn’t in her driveway, and my dad’s car is gone too.
Are you still at Herring Cove? I text him.
Dad: At Indian Neck now. Dealing with a weird situation. Home soon, I promise.
I’m still wearing my clothes from yesterday, so I pull on a coat and shoes and step outside. The wind carries splinters of ice, and my car is diamond-crusted with frost, just like my mother’s fingernails. There’s nothing in the holly bush, and I still can’t shake that sickening sensation of falling.
As I wind through the neighborhood streets, heading for the main road that leads to Indian Neck, I wonder what the weird situation at the beach could be. I wonder if it has anything to do with my mother disappearing or her plan to fix things, however impossible that seems.
Down, down, down I tumble every time I blink. Opening the window, I suck in icy air and try to focus on what’s here and real. My hands clenching the steering wheel, the backs of my legs pressing against the seat. I’m not falling. I’m here.
A tired-looking cop stands in the middle of the road just before the beach parking lot, gesturing for me to turn around. Beside him, a sign says ROAD CLOSED. I poke my head out the window.
“Is everything okay?”
“The parking lot is flooded,” he says. “Tide came way up, and the beach is closed.”
“My dad is there. He’s a scientist,” I add, as if this somehow makes it okay for me to be there too.
“You have to turn around,” says the officer.
“Can I walk?”
He looks over his shoulder, grumbles, and shrugs. “Fine, but you can’t park here.”
I turn around and find a quiet street full of summer houses to leave my car on, then jog back down the road, past the officer, and into the parking lot. The gray ocean has come swirling up around the low dunes, gushing through the footpaths and crawling across the pavement. The waterline cuts the parking lot exactly in half. Overhead, gulls float in the roaring wind, which whips my clothing and stings my cheeks.
My dad’s car sits in the dry back corner, his trunk wide open. He stands beside it, gesticulating wildly at a bearded man I recognize from the oceanographic institute.
“Dad!” I call, and he beckons me over. His colleague waves and heads off to his own car.
“What’s going on?” I say. “Where are the whales?”
“Seven of them were released at Herring Cove. And one disappeared into thin air.” He lets out a funny, frantic little laugh. “Or thin water.”
“What?”
“Some volunteers carried the dead whale up to the parking lot. Joseph and I took a few quick tissue samples and were waiting for the truck so we could take it to the lab for a full necropsy. We wanted to figure out if it was sick, find some explanation for why the pod came all the way down here.”
Some explanation, like a sad, motherless girl who wished the universe upside-down.
“Could be any number of things,” he continues. “Global warming, higher ocean temperatures, or unusual currents.” He pinches the bridge of his chapped nose with his fingers. “It might have something to do with the Northern Lights.”
Sour nausea fills the back of my throat.
“If the solar storms were strong enough, they could disrupt the earth’s magnetic field, maybe throw off a whale’s internal compass.” My dad’s eyes have taken on a manic sort of gleam. “It’s entirely possible, combined with an old or sick leader who led the pod astray.”
I want to scream at him that it’s irresponsible to ignore what’s happening to us. I want to fill his shoes with meteorites so he can’t keep walking away. I want to grab him by the front of his dry suit and drag him to my mother and force him to see her. If only I knew where she was.
“Anyway, we were tired and freezing after spending the night in the water,” he says. “So we left the whale here and went to grab a coffee. It was five in the morning, and we figured nobody would touch it. The tide was out, and we can’t have been gone more than twenty minutes.” He rakes his fingers over his bald scalp. “But the water must have come up as soon as we left, and the whale just . . . vanished. At first I thought Dave came back with the truck and took it, but when I called, everybody was still at Herring Cove.”
“Do you think it managed to swim away?” I say, wondering if my mother somehow resuscitated the animal and brought it into deeper water.
He scoffs. “That thing was deader than a doornail.”
I flinch. That beautiful creature is now that thing.
“Somebody must have stolen it.” His left eye is twitching visibly. “But I can’t figure out how. They must have had a boat.”
“But why would anybody steal a whale?” I say.
He ponders this for a moment. “Probably for the tusk. It’s not legal to sell them, but you could make good money on the black market.”
“So they made the tide come up, brought their boat over, and dragged the whale away?” I want to scream. It used to be like a game, hiding everything from him. Now I wonder how much of his not knowing was sheer willfulness.
He squints at the swirling, sandy water. “They could have brought a truck in right before the cops closed the parking lot.”
“But you were here twenty minutes before and the tide was still out,” I say. “Have you ever heard of it coming up that fast? With no storm or tsunami or anything?”
He rubs the back of his neck and mutters something about moon phases and spring equinoxes.
“Dad, seriously?”
“I need to go home and take a shower,” he says, backing away from the lapping water. “And sleep for a couple of hours . . . or days.”
A flutter of movement from across the beach catches my eye. On the top of a nearly submerged dune, a girl in a cloak stands facing the ocean, her black hair swirling like smoke.
“Where’s your car?” says my dad.
I point vaguely behind me. “Down on one of the side roads.”
“Want a ride?”
“No, thanks.” Water laps against the toes of my shoes, and I can’t drag my eyes away from that girl. “I think I’ll hang out here for a little while. Maybe I’ll look for some clues for you.”
He lets out a roar of a yawn. “I really need to eat something and go to bed.”
“That’s fine. I’ll be okay by myself.”
“You sure?” He’s already in the car, buckling his seat belt. “You’re going to stay out of the water this time, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “You should shut your trunk before you go.”
Sheepishly, he gets out and closes his trunk.
“I’ll leave some pancakes in the oven for you,” he promises. “Don’t stay too long.”
As his car leaves the parking lot, I skirt along the waterline toward the girl. She turns, and her mouth slithers into a grin.
“You’re not supposed to climb on the dunes,” I say. “It makes the sand erode and destroys them.”
She tosses her wild hair. “This tide will wash away far more sand than my feet ever will.”
“Did you do this?” I say.
“No.” Her sapphire eyes gleam. “Your mother did. What’s left of her, anyway.”
I hate this girl with every electron in my body. “Have you found any more secret things to ruin my life with?”
Her mouth turns up, a wry slash. “We’re not ruining anything. We’re setting you free. Like your mother did for us.”
“I don’t want you to set me free.” Frigid water sloshes around my ankles. Somehow I’ve stepped into the sea, or it’s risen up over my feet. “I want you to leave me alone.”
She bends low and whispers. “You don’t get to tell us what to do. Nobody does.”
Her words buzz inside my ear, and I take a splashing step backward. There’s some kind of promise in the girl’s stare; I don’t understand it but it fills me with ice.
She straightens, brushing the sand from her cloak. “Anyway, your mother’s gone, and your boring little friend is leaving, so you’re much closer to freedom. Do you feel any lighter?”
“My mother isn’t gone,” I say. “I just saw her a few hours ago.”
The look she gives me is somewhere between pity and amusement.
“She wouldn’t leave me again.” I feel like a petulant child, insisting things are true because I want them to be.
She raises her eyebrows in mock innocence. “Didn’t you ask her to fix everything?”
I jolt, wondering how she heard our conversation, but these are girls who steal secret scraps of people’s diaries out of the wind. “That’s none of your business.”
She shrugs. “Well, it’s your fault she’s gone. Or maybe it’s her fault. It doesn’t really matter now that it’s done. One day you’ll see it all clearly.”
Turning away, the girl pulls up her hood. She steps off the dune and disappears into the water without making a single ripple.