Fantasy Life (37 page)

People. People who could help her.

She sat back in her driver’s seat, made a fist with her right hand, then slammed her fist onto the horn. The sound, loud and powerful, startled her and sent more creatures skittling off her window.

The horn wouldn’t be enough. Someone would think her car had malfunctioned. So she pounded SOS—three short, three long, three short—at least, she hoped that was SOS, and not the other way around. Not that it mattered. No one really knew the code anymore. They just knew that longs and shorts in threes meant someone was in trouble.

The more she pounded, the more the creatures fell off her car. She no longer saw feelers and the suckers and the tiny little feet making prints in the sludge. Instead she heard some chittering and squealing sounds, followed by plops and squashes.

She frowned. Could her horn be causing them to avoid her? How would that be possible—and how could she check? She really didn’t want to roll down the window.

But she kept pounding.

She thought she heard voices far away, but those voices could just be people discussing Gabriel’s announcement. The thought discouraged her, so she kept pounding.

The chittering was fading, and so were the plops. The car wasn’t rocking anymore either.

Tentatively, she reached for the door handle and pushed open the driver’s door. This time, nothing fell off. Some squashed bodies were on the pavement below her, but she wasn’t sure if that was her fault or the fault of the stampede that had been running over her vehicle.

The stench of rotted fish and sewage and brine was so palpable that she could almost see it. Her eyes watered. She stopped pounding on the steering wheel and leaned out of the car slowly.

The entire vehicle was covered in that sludge. No one looking at her Bug would be able to know that its original color was blue. The sludge dripped off, falling on the squashed bodies, making tiny plopping sounds.

She didn’t want to touch the stuff, and she didn’t want to step on the ground for fear that some of those squashed creatures might still be alive.

She put one foot on the running board and used the interior armrest to balance herself, then rose out of the car.

The stream still continued from the ocean to the parking lot, but now the creatures were giving her car a wide berth. They were going around the rear of the car, as far from the horn as possible.

A dozen people were standing at the edge of the parking lot, staring at her. Another dozen or more were watching from the school windows.

Gabriel still clutched the megaphone. He jogged toward her, stopping when he encountered the creatures.

“Lyssa?” He sounded stunned.

She nodded.

“I gotta say this,” she said with a relieved smile. “You guys sure know how to welcome a girl home.”

The Trawler

What Grandma Cassie didn’t understand was how empty Great-Aunt Roseluna was.

At first, Emily kinda liked that. Great-Aunt Roseluna was pretty and awful young to be the sister of Emily’s grandpa, and she was smart too. She had a strongness to her that Emily had never found before, and something else that took Emily a while to figure out.

During the whole meal, Emily’d been sitting with her eyes part closed, just trying to feel what Great-Aunt Roseluna was feeling. Emily could do that sometimes with some people—Mommy especially—but Emily never really thought of it like a gift, like Grandma Cassie did.

Only Grandma Cassie’s mind had touched Emily’s earlier, and when they did, Emily had got a whole bunch of stuff she hadn’t gotten before—words to describe things and ways of thinking about things and ways to understand stuff she had always felt but never really talked about.

Like how she got a sense of the house, and how she knew Cliffside House had welcomed her home. That she would’ve thought everybody could do until this morning.

Now she knew different.

She was still cuddled in Grandma Cassie’s arms, and people from all over the restaurant were staring at her—the couple at the nearby table, that nice waiter, everybody in the kitchen. In fact, when Grandma Cassie and Roseluna were fighting,
everybody from the kitchen had come out at one point or another and looked, like it was their business.

Emily wanted to tell them to go away, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything. She felt like such a baby.

Her face was still wet from tears. Crying surprised her. She hadn’t done it much at all since Daddy died, even though Mommy kept telling her to. But something about this whole talk with Grandma Cassie and then Roseluna broke something inside Emily, some worry she’d been hiding from everybody, even herself.

She meant it when she asked Grandma Cassie if Roseluna had turned evil. Because something about Roseluna felt evil. Felt wrong.

Grandma Cassie ran her hand over Emily’s face, wiping away the tears, and smoothing her hair. “Doing better, baby?”

Emily didn’t mind that Grandma Cassie had taken Mommy’s way of talking to her, calling her baby and stuff, because Grandma Cassie said it with just as much affection as Mommy did. It made Emily feel loved.

“She’s really angry, Grandma,” Emily said.

“Roseluna?”

Emily nodded. That much she was sure of. She could feel the anger coming off Roseluna in waves. For a while, Emily had even enjoyed it because she’d been so angry since Daddy had died, maybe even before. Nobody told her the truth, even when Daddy was acting weird, and everybody expected her to do what they wanted, even if it meant giving up everything she’d ever known.

The more they didn’t talk to her, the more she didn’t understand. And then it got worse. Because she didn’t understand, she went to see Daddy, and finally it all got to be clear—way too late.

At first, that was the kind of stuff she thought Roseluna was talking about. But something about Roseluna’s eyes, the
meanness in them, and the sadness in Grandma Cassie’s eyes, made Emily change her mind.

There was a place in Grandma Cassie that hurt so bad, she didn’t like to look at it. Emily understood that. She wished she could make her hurt place go away, but she couldn’t. She kept looking at it and looking at it and looking at it, trying to understand it.

And no matter how much Mommy and Grandma Cassie and the weird lawyer-lady talked to her about it, Emily still didn’t understand it. So she thought about it when she was awake and when she was asleep, and it got worse instead of better.

She thought maybe after the talk with Grandma Cassie this morning she might understand things—maybe they’d talk about it together or something—but then Roseluna had shown up, and Emily watched her instead.

What worried Emily most was beneath that anger was something else. She called it emptiness, but that wasn’t right. It was more like a not-caring. Like Roseluna didn’t care who got hurt or if people she knew died. She didn’t even really care about Grandma Cassie, but she cared about the promise her family had made to Grandpa, so she was here.

And even though Emily got a sense of everything else from Roseluna and from Grandma Cassie, she never really got a sense of Grandpa Daray. Roseluna saw him as a man who looked a lot like her, with longish black hair and pretty eyes. Grandma Cassie saw him sideways, as if she couldn’t bear to look at him full-on, as if remembering him hurt as bad as him dying had.

Emily’s body tensed.

“We should take you home,” Grandma Cassie said.

Emily shook her head. “Grandma, when you get really mad, do you lie?”

Grandma Cassie frowned down at her. At that moment,
the waiter came over. He was approaching slowly, as if afraid of the whole group.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “I’m leaving the bill. I’m assuming the other lady isn’t coming back?”

“I’ll take care of hers,” Grandma Cassie said.

“Is the little girl all right?” he asked Grandma, as if Emily couldn’t speak for herself.

“She’ll be fine,” Grandma Cassie said. “It’s been a long day. She just came in from the Midwest yesterday, and then she met an aunt she’d never seen before and got all tangled up in the family drama. It’s enough to tire anyone out.”

The waiter smiled, apparently happy for the explanation. “Don’t I know it?” he said. “Family dramas take way too much out of you.”

His eyes met Emily’s.

“You take care,” he said. “Let the grown-ups worry about their own problems, and just deal with yourself.”

She nodded, wishing she could.

He smiled at her, a secret smile, as if the two of them were alone, then he put two pieces of computer paper on the table, grabbed Roseluna’s shrimp glass, and left.

Grandma Cassie watched him. She waited until he couldn’t hear anything they said before asking, “What do you mean, do I lie?”

“When you get really mad,” Emily said, wondering if she should go this direction, “do you say stuff that’s not true just to make people mad?”

Grandma Cassie shook her head. “I want to, but I don’t. Why?”

“Because most people do,” Emily said, not sure if that was true. Surely it was true of most of her friends back in Wisconsin, but they were all ten like her. So maybe people grew out of it, like they grew out of their baby teeth or grew taller.

“Do you think Roseluna was lying?” Grandma Cassie
adjusted Emily on her lap so that she could see her face better.

“Don’t you know?” Emily asked. It bothered her that Grandma Cassie seemed to have no idea about anything with Roseluna.

“I can’t read selkies,” Grandma Cassie said. “That was always part of the attraction.”

She was talking about the attraction to Grandpa. Emily didn’t really understand it, but she didn’t ask, either, figuring that was more grown-up stuff.

“So you don’t know what she was thinking or feeling or where she came from or nothing?” Emily asked.

“I know she is who she said she is. I’m not sure about much else.”

Grandma Cassie looked out the window at the ocean. Emily looked the same way. Water still creeped her out, but she had to admit the ocean was really pretty. The way the sun sparkled on it, how blue it was, the way it looked different from last night to now, and all the sounds it made.

Emily could fall in love with it.

She wondered if that was because she had selkie blood in her, whatever that meant. She had kind of a sense of selkies, but she didn’t know a lot about them, and the way Grandma Cassie reacted, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know more.

Grandma Cassie wasn’t thinking about Emily or anything else, though. Grandma Cassie was sending her mind far away.

Emily felt it. She felt the way that Grandma Cassie’s body was here, and her mind was swimming in the ocean, searching, searching, going into the deep, dark places where there was no light.

There were lots of creatures though, and they all seemed to be heading away from Grandma Cassie. Emily wanted to look at the creatures, but Grandma Cassie didn’t seem to care.

She also didn’t seem to notice that Emily was seeing through her eyes, traveling with her. She seemed focused on her journey, on the path ahead.

Emily’d never done anything like this, at least not with her eyes open. She’d kinda done it the night before, but she hadn’t been sure then what was real and what was not.

This time, she was. She knew that she was sitting on Grandma Cassie’s lap in the restaurant. The bench was starting to make Emily’s spine hurt because there was no back to lean on, and no cushions either. Grandma Cassie’s legs had to hurt.

The couple had stopped watching them and everybody had gone into the kitchen and the waiter kept checking their water glasses as if he was afraid that without enough water Emily would start crying all over again. And the sun was shining and the ocean was blue—

And a big part of Emily was under the waves, seeing other stuff, dark stuff, covered with green hangy stuff that Emily didn’t know the name for. It wasn’t algae, like in the Northern Wisconsin lakes that Mommy and Daddy used to take her to when they were all happy, because algae floated on top of the water, at least the kind Emily’d seen. But she knew she could be wrong, and she also knew that there was stuff in this part of the water she’d never seen before, like black fish with glowing eyes, and little minnowlike fish that seemed to circle all around her like they saw her.

She didn’t feel scared of this water, because she couldn’t feel it, even though she knew it was wet and cold and dark. She could only see through it, which she probably shouldn’t have been able to do either, considering how black it all was.

It also helped that Grandma Cassie was right beside her, looking as intense as she did in the restaurant, heading someplace with a real purpose.

It took a few minutes to get there, going through water littered with junk. Emily didn’t have words for most of it: stuff growing on rocks, the rocks themselves that didn’t look like rocks, the weird animals climbing in and out of shell-like stuff.

Grandma Cassie kept going out and down until they were so far away from shore that Emily doubted people had ever been this deep in the water. She got no real sense of humans at all, although there were other things here, things Grandma Cassie and Roseluna and Great-Grandma Athena were familiar with.

Then Emily saw the bottom, all sandy and covered with more creatures, some of which she recognized, like big crabs that walked along the bottom as if there wasn’t water there at all, and snakelike things, and even a shark.

Emily winced as the shark went by, but it didn’t scare her, because most of her—almost all of her—was sitting on Grandma Cassie’s lap in the restaurant. More people had come in, and they were going to their table near the window, laughing and talking as if nothing was wrong. They didn’t even see Emily or Grandma.

Grandma Cassie finally stopped at this big lump of something on the bottom. It was covered with more of that green, floaty stuff, and lots of sand had drifted onto the sides.

Emily actually had to lean on Grandma Cassie just a bit more to know what she was looking at. It was the
Walter Aggie,
the part they’d sunk, the part with all the oil in it that Roseluna was talking about.