Quinn locked the Kalbitzers’ apartment door behind her and made her way downstairs, clutching the bannister for support. She could barely feel her feet. She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to go outside and run and run and never come back. She wanted to run to the ocean and swim out and feel the freedom of weightlessness, or maybe sink to the bottom or drown or whatever it would take so she could escape all of this noise. The still morning sea, deeply asleep . . . That’s where she wanted to be, underwater in a still morning sea, asleep. Unconscious. Alive and safe in that underwater world, or just dead. Either one.
Like her grandmother.
As she reached the downstairs hall and wondered which way to head—out the front door to take off and escape somewhere (where?) or out the back door to go home—she realized that the one thing in this world that could make her feel better was Jesse. Despite everything, she wanted Jesse so, so badly. And unless he had other plans, he’d be home from school soon. There was no energy in Quinn’s limbs to take her back upstairs. So she walked toward the rear door of the building and slid down against the wall, sitting with her knees up, in a spot where she could lean forward and see a portion of the front door, but where she wouldn’t be noticed by people who were coming in.
The hallway was cold and dingy. Quinn squeezed her knees against her body and tried to think of anything other than all of the hideous words that everyone out there had been hearing and reading while she’d been in her protective cocoon, oblivious. “A still morning sea, deeply asleep. ’Til warmed by the sun it rolls up the beach.” She whispered the words over and over. Finally, she heard the building door open. She leaned forward and peeked past the stairwell—just an old man. But as soon as she’d sat back, the door squealed again, and it was Jesse, thank god.
She was about to stand up when she noticed there was someone with him. Caroline. Quinn leaned back and closed her eyes. If I can’t see you, you can’t see me.
“Hello?” Jesse’s voice echoed through the space. “Did you hear something?” he asked Caroline. Quinn must have made a noise without noticing it. She eased her way up to stand, then took a silent step toward the back door.
“Hello?” Caroline’s voice this time.
Quinn opened the back door as quietly as possible, but it still emitted a wheezy groan. Once she was out, she ran.
“Quinn, wait!”
She kept going. Almost tripped over a cinder block at the back of his yard.
“Quinn!”
“Shhh!” She stopped and turned, and Jesse was on her already, his hand on her shoulder. “People will hear you.”
“Well, just wait, then,” he said, catching his breath. “Just wait a second. What were you doing in there? What’s wrong?”
She stared into his worried eyes and couldn’t even speak.
“What’s wrong?” he repeated. “Why were you hiding in there?”
“I was . . . I was waiting for you. I just wanted to talk to you.”
“So talk. You didn’t have to leave. Or hide. Why are you so upset?”
She couldn’t bring herself to say anything. Her jaw just hung a bit open. The voices of Preston Brown’s “experts” and the words from all those articles and comments filled her brain. She imagined Jesse watching and reading and wondering . . .
A look of recognition passed across his face. “You went online,” he said. “Didn’t you?”
She nodded. “That show . . .”
“Oh, god, Quinn. I . . . I . . . God.”
“You know . . . you know it’s not . . .”
“Of course,” he said. But he had hesitated before saying it, and Quinn knew that he had considered that it might be true. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She shrugged and pressed her lips together to keep them from trembling. They stood silently for a moment. She didn’t know what she’d expected Jesse to say or do to make it better. There was nothing.
“I should go home,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be out. Someone will notice.”
“I’m coming with you.” His hand was still on her shoulder.
“What about Caroline?”
“Don’t worry about her. Matt was just locking his bike. He’ll be there already.”
They went in through the kitchen door using Jesse’s alarm code; when her parents got the alert, they’d just think he was here bringing school stuff. In Quinn’s room, Haven did her usual dance for him—pressing her side up against his legs. He reached down and patted her absentmindedly, his attention focused on Quinn, who had begun pacing.
“Do people believe it?” she asked.
“You mean people around here? At school and stuff?”
She nodded.
“No. No way. No one who knows your family would ever believe it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well . . . I mean . . .”
“Oh, god. I think I’m going to be sick again.”
She held her stomach and hung her head, eyes shut tight. She was shaking. “We should have released the results of the DNA test. If my father knew this was happening, we should have told people. We can prove that it’s impossible.”
“It’s okay, Quinn,” Jesse said. “This isn’t . . . No one believes it here. Not really. And . . . and it’s all going to blow over.” He moved closer and stroked the top of her head. “I mean, your DNA test results are no one’s business. You shouldn’t have to prove something with them. People just want a story, you know? The sicker the better. They don’t know you. It’s just a story.”
“It’s my fault,” she said. “My fault for not being able to tell what happened.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “None of this is. It’s . . . it’s people. They suck. The world is sick. Not you.”
“Do you know what I’ve done? To my family?”
He was still stroking her hair, and she concentrated on the feeling, letting it soothe her. God, she’d missed him . . . “It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s all going to be okay.” He repeated it, over and over.
After a few minutes, she opened her eyes and lifted her head, then turned so they were face-to-face. She reached her arms around his waist and hugged him tight, and he hugged her back, and she’d almost never felt anything as good as his body pressed against hers. She breathed in his smell, a little less sandalwood and a little more sweat, since it was the end of the day. And all she wanted was for him to stay with her. To never be left alone again. She pulled back from the hug, and, on impulse, rose up and touched her lips against his—hesitant, at first—both their lips a bit dry. But his were warm and soft and . . . Jesse.
Everything else disappeared. The world was just this—the touch, the connection, the love and safety and desire . . . All of the need and want from weeks without him surging inside her like a tsunami, swelling until it felt too big to fit inside her body. Her legs trembled underneath her. Blood shush-shushed in her ears.
Shush-shush. Shush-shush.
The rhythmic crashing of waves.
The shaking of her legs.
That other impulsive kiss, that night on Southaven . . .
The dock shook when the waves crashed against it. It made her legs shake, like they were shaking now. The dock shook as the waves crashed against it.
The waves had been crashing against it.
The waves had been crashing against it.
Quinn and Jesse pulled back from each other at the same time.
“Wait,” he said. “This . . . this isn’t . . .”
She held her hand against her chest to keep her heart from beating out of it. “Oh my god,” she said.
“I know. That shouldn’t . . . we shouldn’t—”
“No,” she said. “Jess . . . That night. That night in Maine. I couldn’t have been swimming. I couldn’t have been swimming at all.”
Quinn stayed in her room while Jesse ran home. He’d left his phone there in his bag, and he needed it to check the Southaven tide charts for the previous May online to make sure that she was right. But she already knew. She was right. She paced back and forth, like the tide itself, back and forth. She couldn’t be on both sides of the room at once. And if the waves had been crashing against the dock when she was with Marco, and the water was as high as she was picturing, then it was physically impossible she’d been swimming at Holmes Cove the way she remembered. It would have been getting near low tide, and at that beach the tide went far, far out and left a terrain of small, sharp rocks and shells interspersed with larger rocks covered with barnacles, and clumpy blankets of slimy, thin-ribbon seaweed, way too slippery to walk across. And even if you could get across all of that—next to impossible to imagine in the dark—the water was too shallow for too far out to swim in. High tide was the only possible time to swim off the rock the way she thought she remembered, lowering her body into the deeps . . .
The Deeps. A still morning sea, the Deeps all asleep . . .
That book. The Deeps. That was how it began. A still morning sea, the Deeps all asleep, ’til warmed by the sun they roll up the beach . . . But . . . Quinn shook her head to rid it of the digression. This wasn’t important.
What was important was that she couldn’t have been swimming. This detail—the impossibility of the tide—had been there the whole time in her description of that night, and she hadn’t even noticed. Such a simple, simple thing.
She kept walking around her room, Haven warm and solid in her arms. If it wasn’t true, she didn’t understand where that memory came from: that clear, vibrant memory of swimming in the ocean that night, of swimming with stars. Of the electric cold that had somehow made her feel warm. Of such a sublime, even transcendent, moment. Of feeling more alive and whole and Quinn than she ever had before.
Had she made it up completely, to cover something ugly and horrible? Had she been drugged and hallucinating? Her brain hurt so much from the realization and all the questions it brought that her head felt as if it were going to burst. And as she was pacing and worrying, Jesse called and said that yes, she was right. If they were figuring the timing correctly—which they agreed they were—the tide hadn’t been high when she was down there. She couldn’t have been swimming. She’d been down there, in the middle of the night, naked, and she hadn’t been swimming. Even though she remembered it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.
“I can’t come back over right now,” Jesse whispered into his phone. “My mom . . . Give me an hour or so. Will you be okay till then?”
“Of course,” Quinn said, although she wasn’t sure she would be.
Her feet kept tracing a back-and-forth path as her mind went back and forth over the revelations and questions. Something had definitely happened that night, down on the beach—there was no denying it now. Something had happened to her. Not that swim. Not that beautiful, ecstatic swim. The time was lost—it could be anything! And the fact that this memory was false proved one thing: It proved that nothing she thought or felt or believed could be trusted. If she couldn’t believe herself, how did she know whom to believe? Someone had to be right. And it wasn’t those people on TV or those people who said it was the devil.
Or maybe it was. Maybe Quinn knew she was bad because she was filled with some deep, primal evil. Maybe that was why she had worried that Jesse would realize something was wrong with her. Look what had happened to her family because of her. What is wrong with you?
But she felt the baby was beautiful, didn’t she? Some deep instinct had told her not to get an abortion, despite all the challenges the pregnancy would bring. Where had that instinct come from? She had heard that voice: Beautiful. It was beautiful.
Too many questions.
All she wanted was for someone to give her the answers.