40

EVERLY

Present day

The colors of sunset, golds and pinks, streaked the sky like fingerpaintings. I sensed the rocking of the boat, the hum of the engine, the slip-slap of water against the hull.

The men had been treating me as gently as they did the treasure they’d brought up that afternoon. Nitrogen narcosis it was called—narking. It hits when and how it will. No one could have predicted it would strike me; no one could have avoided it. To me, it was as if I’d burst through a veil into another world.

Through my sleep I’d heard phrases and words that didn’t hold together but I understood they were about me. Hallucination. Narked. Ignored her wrist computer. Thank God. Safe. Scared.

Now awake, I faced Maddox on the scuffed bench, his expression blank, his hands gripping the edges of the seat so hard his knuckles blanched. “I could have stopped you.”

“No,” I said. “This isn’t your fault. And I’m fine. In fact, I’m better than ever. Maddox, I saw it down there. In one moment I saw it—I want to live.”

Writ large in Maddox’s eyes I saw the story that had worried him from the very beginning—the story of loss. He’d lost someone who’d insisted on diving and it had almost happened again. He was deeply shaken.

Oliver ascended from the hull of the boat carrying a glass of whiskey and handed it to Maddox. Maddox took it without comment and shot it back.

I leaned forward and patted his leg. “I. Am. Fine.”

He shook his head and gazed off to the sea while Ben took special care at the wheel in guiding the boat back to Wrightsville Beach. At Oliver’s urging, I slept for a bit and when I awoke the moon was high and the hull clunked against the dock, shifting as the men jumped off and tied the boat to the pier cleats. I stood and stretched, looked about the boat, as unlikely a place for salvation as could be—dirty and wet, its treasure wrapped in towels and blankets.

When we were docked securely, Ben told me, “You know we found our most significant piece today—the anchor; it’s a major find. We’ll take special equipment out there after the coming storm passes and bring it up.” He paused and looked at Oliver. “Did you tell her?”

Maddox addressed Oliver. “You can show her later.”

“Now,” I said. “What is it?”

Oliver tossed Ben a side-eye glance and then sat next to me. Maddox reached into a bag on the deck and handed a piece of iron to Oliver, who handed it to me. A four-by-five-inch rectangle of iron covered in crustaceans and white barnacles that looked like worms. I ran my fingers over the curves and bumps of the piece. I lifted my gaze to Oliver. “What is this?”

“It is a piece they found today.”

I searched my misty mind. Yes. I had grabbed on to a piece of iron that seemed to reach up from the sand. “Oh.” I ran my fingers over its edges. “What do you think it is?”

“We have a few others. It’s an iron label for a finer trunk or valise. Almost like a luggage tag of today.”

“You have others. Why would you not want me to see this?” I glanced up, confused.

“Turn it over,” Oliver said softly.

I flipped it over to more of the same. I stared at the barnacles and thick-as-concrete muck for a few breaths until I spied a letter. I focused and ran my finger over the engraving that hid below the hundred and eighty years of sea life that had hardened on its surface.

A. Longstreet.

I gasped. “Oh, my God.” Tingles that weren’t of cold or fear raced across my arms and legs, up the back of my neck and over my scalp. “This is Augusta Longstreet’s luggage tag. This is . . .”

“Yes,” Maddox said.

Oliver made a small noise of agreement.

Tears filled my eyes and an expanded feeling of integrity and goodness swelled inside my chest. I stood and noticed the crew confused and staring at me as if I were as delusional as I’d been with the hallucinations below. “I’ve been researching this woman for months now. I’ve been researching her family, her life and trying to find her records and story. This is . . .”

“Astonishing,” Oliver said.

“Yes.” I shivered with recognition and something otherworldly. “Astonishing. As if she’s saying ‘do not give up.’”

A reverential silence washed over the boat as everyone stood and took turns holding it in their hands. Of all the passengers—the hundred and fifty-five or more of them—it was her luggage tag I had grasped.

With that mystical awareness, I stepped off the boat and said good-bye to the men. “I promise to give the artifacts you’ve brought up the most beautiful display I am able. What you’re doing is important. I’ll make sure people hear about it.”

Oliver stood at my side. “I’m going to help them clean up, then I’ll find you. Go get some rest.”

I nodded without answering. Sometimes when there were too many words to say it was best to say none at all.

I walked away, my duffel slung over my shoulder. I’d already booked a room at the inn.

Maddox strode after me and caught my hand as I reached for the door handle of the inn. The two of us looked as if we’d been washed up from a wreck of our own—damp and tangled, me in a bathing suit and coverup and he in a stained T-shirt over his swimming trunks. “Wait.”

We stood under the darkening sky: stars sparking one by two.

“I feel like I’m supposed to say something important, but I don’t know what,” he said, his voice low.

“Me, too.”

He took me by the shoulders and looked me square in the eye. I breathed in the aroma of sweat and sea. “You scared me to death, Everly.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“What happened down there?”

“Maddox, I thought I saw Mora, and a passenger and child. I know the truth of it—I was hallucinating—but it felt as real as you standing in front of me now.”

“That’s the scary part.” His lips drew together. “I should have been watching you. Noticed earlier. It was too close a call.”

“You were right there! You noticed and I am here. And I realize this now—anyone who is engaged in life at all is brave. It’s so much easier to stay in the dream, in the hallucination, in the wishing. But today, down there, I chose to live a full life. Or something in me chose it.”

He nodded. “Was there ever any other choice to make?”

“Yes. Many. I could do as I have been—living without really living. Nothing is safe, but that’s got to be okay. Nothing is certain and the constant trying to make things certain only causes more heartache.” I paused. “She’s gone, but she’s also here with me. I know that now.”

He nodded with a look of sorrow furrowing his mouth and cheeks, his gaze falling from mine.

“You know, don’t you?” I asked quietly, brushing the tangled hair from my face. “You’ve had to make the same choice.”

“Yes, I have.”

Silence echoed and stretched as we faced each other. Then finally he opened the door and motioned for me to enter the small foyer where a young woman sat at the front desk scrolling through her phone and chomping with the vigor of a gum-chewing athlete. We squinted into the fluorescent light.

“I did like it down there, Maddox.” I stopped and faced him again. “I thought I might want to stay, but I realize that all that talk from Mom—about being born in water—this time she was right. But this time I was reborn in that water where all the others perished. I . . .”

“You can go back down,” he assured me. “We will. But here is where you belong. Up here with the living.”

I took his hand and squeezed it. “We carry the same broken pieces inside.”

“I do believe so. It’s a privilege to share this life with you, Everly Winthrop.”

As he left me and I heard the door close, I sent the love I felt for him, for life, for choices made under the waves, out the door with him.

---

My sleep was deep and dreamless until I awoke to the pressure of a gentle hand on my forehead. Everly. Everly. My name uttered so softly as if under water, as if Mora spoke my name.

The bed swayed beneath me as if the sea heaved and fell, as if the waters were still buoying me. My eyes didn’t want to open. Some part of me understood that both the peace and wild determination I’d found in the sea would dissipate, and I wanted to hold on to them as long as possible.

Everly.

I opened my eyes to Oliver sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes and face engraved in concern. I slowly sat, resting against the padded headboard adorned with sailboat fabric.

“I needed to check on you.” He scooted a few inches away and gazed at me with soft concern. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“I’m fine.” My voice cracked on sleep. I cleared my throat. “Honestly, I’m fine. You didn’t have to come.” The room fizzled with morning light and I squinted, glanced around. “What time is it?”

“Ten.”

“How did you get in here?” I partially smiled with closed lips. “Don’t tell me—some smooth talking.”

He ran his hands through my hair, gently parting the tangles; my scalp tingled with the touch. “I’m not quite capable of smooth talk right now. You were with Maddox when you checked in and they know him really well so he told them I was your . . . husband.” He blushed. Even in the bright light I saw the reddening of his cheeks and around his eyes. “Scoot over,” he said.

I did and he settled next to me, leaning against the headboard. “Tell me what happened down there, Everly.”

“I was narked. No one did anything wrong.”

“I know that part. What happened to you?”

“I saw her, Oliver. I saw Mora. She was right there next to me, smiling, her hair wild about her like a mermaid. She was . . . happy. Then she turned into another woman, a ghost and a child . . . they were all so real. And I wanted to be with them, to stay where I didn’t feel anything but a kind of detached pleasure.” I paused as he dropped his chin to his chest in a motion of defeat. I reached for his hand. “But I didn’t. I chose life, Oliver.”

“If you had . . . I would not have been able to . . .” His voice held the fear I rarely heard.

I put my fingers over his lips. “Shhh.” I paused. “You know, I think I just wanted more from those boxes, and then I thought I’d find it by diving down there.”

“Boxes?”

“The dusty boxes still cluttering my house. I wanted them to hold answers. When I discovered the link between Beatrice and the silver . . . I don’t know, I thought . . . maybe . . . the treasure would tell me more.”

“Ev . . .”

He’d never called me Ev before and I sensed a naming, a particular belonging in the new moniker.

This was ours. This moment. This name. The dive.

I tried again to explain what had happened to me. “It was suddenly as if nothing mattered . . . and everything mattered. Oliver . . . I know that Mora was the adventure of my life.”

Oliver shook his head. “The adventure was always in you, Ev. Why do you think it belonged to her?”

“Since we were kids, she was the bright light. I was always and forever along for the ride. And that’s okay. I wanted it that way. So did you.”

“That’s not how I saw it. You were wild and full of life yourself; Mora followed your lead. She might have taken it a step or two further sometimes, but you initiated.”

“No.”

“Who organized the camping trip to the secluded island on the summer solstice with wish lanterns? Who decided we should dive to the bottom of the haunted lake? Who convinced us to sneak into the graveyard on Halloween? I don’t understand how you think it all came from Mora.”

“Those were just ideas. She made them adventures.”

“So did you. Why are you giving yourself such short shrift?”

I slipped my legs out from beneath the covers. The soft fabric of my silk drawstring pants slipped against my legs. I sat cross-legged and faced Oliver. “I didn’t just lose her. I lost part of myself and my zeal. I lost you. I lost the sense of a quest. It would be simpler if I’d just lost her.”

“You didn’t lose those things. They might be in hiding, but you didn’t lose them.”

“Down there, where the remnants of the Pulaski have sat waiting for a hundred and eighty years, I saw that.”

“And you damn sure didn’t lose me.” He took both my hands in his and squeezed them. He brought me near and dropped his forehead to mine. “You never lost me. I am right here.”

A moment passed, a slice of time when I could lean forward into his kiss, into his touch, into comfort. But I wouldn’t do it. No. I lifted my head from his and scooted back.

“Ev . . .”

“No. It would be terrible if something happened between us. I am so glad you’re here. I need you. But . . . no.”

“Nothing is going to happen that you don’t want to happen. Our friendship is important. She loved us both.”

A bite of disappointment clipped the inside of my heart—friendship—and yet I smiled at him. “Yes.”

“I have missed you so much. Let’s not do that again—stop speaking.”

“No, let’s not.” I paused and reality flooded past the padded feeling of our touch, of the isolation of us in a bed alone. “Oh, my God, I must look such a wreck.” My hand went to my tangled hair.

“Not a mess—more like a mermaid.”

“Or a Selkie?” I teased.

He laughed and leaned across the space I had created to hug me. “Well, you look like it for sure.”

I let him go and slid from the far side of the bed to stand and gaze down at him. He stood to stand in a patch of sunlight on the gold and blue carpet. I watched him and thought of the old stories of the Pulaski, of what Papa had told me.

“Oliver, long ago when Papa told me the story of the Pulaski, he said, ‘Some people didn’t die and some people lived.’ I’ve thought about that line so many times through the years, trying to understand all it meant. But down there I understood it. I didn’t die that day but I am damn sure not living. I wanted a reason why everything happened as it did. But there isn’t one and never will be.”

“Yet you have reasons to live.” Oliver slid open the curtains and sunlight changed him into a silhouette, his voice strong and sure. “Because there are birds that sail on the wind with two-tone wings. There are dolphins with liquid eyes and permanent smiles. There are mushrooms the size of dinner plates that grow from bark. There are crickets and fireflies and sunlight on waxy leaves. There are wildflowers stubborn enough to grow between cracks in stone.” His eyes shone so brightly they might have been ablaze. “And there is wind in the palm leaves, singing a song.”

“Oliver,” I said. “That was beautiful.” My chest swelled and opened and I took in one shaky breath and held it. My thoughts sat in waiting for his next words. Something elemental and true moved toward me like a bird slow in flight, swooping near.

“Once, Mora recited her favorite poem to me,” he said.

“‘You Reading This, Be Ready.’” I recalled. “William Stafford.”

“And there’s a line I’ll never forget. After she died I tried to memorize the whole poem, but it keeps slipping from me except for this one line: ‘What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?’”

I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I held. “Greater than now.”

He stepped out of the sunlight, his face alive with something near hope. “I had to find reasons to live, too,” he said. “We’ll join her soon enough—in whatever way that means—but for now we have to decide: Do we merely survive that horrific morning in Lafayette Square or embrace life with all we’ve got?” He came to me and pulled me into his arms; he held me there in my ragged pj’s and mussed hair.

“With all we’ve got,” I repeated into his shoulder. And in that moment, I might not have felt safe in all the old ways, but I most definitely felt alive.