It’s barely light out but I can’t sleep. Everything smells and feels different. No rocking and rolling, no wind. We’re in an Irish inn at the top of a hill, and from the window I can see the harbor, and I can just make out The Wanderer bobbing there.
Yesterday was so peculiar. I felt like I had a new body and the new body didn’t know how to work very well. It was walking funny and knocking into stuff and wanting to touch the strangest things: the floor, the pillows, dry towels.
We were all pretty hyper last night, talking away as if we’d just been given voices. I never heard Sophie talk so much. At first, I was talking so much myself that I wasn’t listening to anyone else. And then I heard Brian say, “I was sleeping when it hit, and I thought I was a goner! I’ve never been so scared in my whole life! I felt like a little puny chicken in a meat market.” He was thumping on the table and clutching at his throat, and I don’t know, he just surprised me because he could make that whole scary thing into something that was almost funny.
And then I heard Sophie tell someone, “Yep, these are my cousins”—and she pointed to me and Brian—“and we’ve been planning this trip since we were little kids—”
I was going to correct her, and then I realized she was mixing her story with my dad’s and Uncle Stew’s and Uncle Dock’s.
“Brian didn’t think we’d really do it,” she said, “but I always knew we’d do it.”
And then she was talking about The Wave, and how it rose up behind the boat. “And it was so black and tall and—”
The Wave was white.