The Secret Sea (3 page)

No. He couldn't be. The pipe. The pipe had burst. Far from a flood, sure, but it was water from nowhere, like the flood he'd seen.

Unless it was just a coincidence. That was possible.

Maybe I
am
crazy
.

His heart pounded. He was supposed to tell his mom or dad if he felt something—
“Anything at all!”
they'd insisted—wrong in his chest. He didn't think this qualified. It was just plain old fear.

I'm not running to them like a baby. It's all in your head, Zak. That's all it is. It's all dreams and … and garbage and nonsense, like Dad says.

He left the light on and crawled back into bed. Somehow, he sensed that he was alone again, and suddenly he was very tired.

Free. God.

What did it mean?

He fell asleep wondering.

*   *   *

It's all in your head
, he'd thought. But then again, crazy people had it “all in their heads,” too, didn't they?

Zak didn't think he was going crazy, but he also thought that crazy people probably didn't think so, either.

He fidgeted with his breakfast. Dad had made huevos rancheros. The only time Zak got anything remotely Latin to eat was when Dad was cooking; Mom “refused to be a stereotype.” She made killer lasagna and chicken parm, but she didn't know an enchilada from a taquito.

Dad didn't have the cultural baggage, and he'd worked his way through college as a short-order cook in a Mexican restaurant in Greenwich Village. The huevos were particularly spicy today, just the way Zak liked them, but all he could manage was to push the eggs around in the bean sauce, thinking about the voice in his head, thinking about Tommy again for the first time in forever.

“Something wrong?” Dad asked, sliding into a seat across the table with his own plate of eggs.

Zak considered telling his father what he'd heard. But he figured after the disaster on the subway platform (or, rather, the
non-
disaster), that Dad was fed up with hearing about things Zak had “imagined.”

“Nothing,” he muttered.

Dad sighed. “You know, you can be angry at your mom and me for punishing you, or you can think about what you did wrong and maybe direct some of that energy toward not getting punished again in the future.”

Dad was big on “directing energy” to the right places. Zak was tired of it, honestly. When he'd gotten up this morning, he'd been surprised to find Dad in the apartment at all—it was Mom's turn this week. But Dad was on summer hours from the university; he could work from home. Zak's punishment was a week's grounding, so Dad would stay here, work from home, and make sure Zak went nowhere and had exactly zero fun.

Three more weeks until school started, and one-third of them was now a total waste.

Stupid guardian angel.

“Want to talk about it?” Dad asked. “Maybe tell me why you lied?”

Zak shrugged. There was no point to the talk. If he told his dad the truth, Dad wouldn't believe him anyway—he'd already proved that by punishing Zak in the first place. So his only option other than just keeping his mouth shut was to
really
lie this time and come up with some reason why he'd told the “story” about the subway flooding.

Nah. Better just to say nothing.

“You know, Mom and I are just worried—”

“You're
always
worried,” Zak snapped. “That's all you
ever
do. Well, I'm fine. My heart is fine. I'm not
dying
or anything. I'm
fine.
”

Ah, crud.
It had felt good—amazing, really—to go off on Dad like that, but there would be a price to pay. Zak managed to keep staring at Dad for a few seconds but quickly felt hot shame along his cheeks; as if controlled by some external force, his eyes drifted down to his plate. He'd stirred the huevos rancheros into a tumorous mass of black sludge.

Dad cleared his throat. “Well, fine. And if you're not going to finish those huevos, just put your dish in the sink and head to your room.”

Zak did as he was told. His bedroom was cramped and small, but it was
his
. He was surrounded by the things he loved—old books, toys that he was too old for but secretly still adored, his iPad, his Xbox. Being confined to his room for a week wasn't as big a torture as his parents liked to think it was.

A moment later Dad appeared in the doorway, arms folded over his chest. He pursed his lips, then held out a hand.

Zak sighed and handed over his Xbox controller.

“And the iPad,” Dad said.

Zak surrendered the iPad, too.

“What am I supposed to do all day?”

“Read a book,” Dad suggested, and closed the door.

Read a book
.
Yeah, right.
Usually, Zak loved reading, but he'd read every book in the house (even a few of the adult books he wasn't supposed to read), and he didn't feel like rereading anything. He could have finished up his summer reading list, but that felt less like fun and more like work. Besides, he didn't want the silence. He was petrified of the quiet, all of a sudden. Quiet meant that he would hear the voice if it came back.

When
it came back. He somehow knew that it would definitely, definitely come back. And for the first time, that frightened him. He'd thought he'd understood the voice, the guardian angel. It had made him feel not just special but also powerful. For his whole life, his parents had treated him like something made of filament, like one of those lace cookies that fell apart if you picked them up too fast.

One more reason he hated solitude: nothing to do but to think. About his parents and their coddling. About his heart.

“
You're delicate
,” they told him.
“Your heart isn't like other kids'. You have to be careful.”

Being alone sucked. When other people were around, he could sink into them, enjoy them. But when he was alone, he suffered a powerful, painful sensation that something was missing. It throbbed like a missing limb. He'd read that people who had arms or legs amputated could still feel them. That was how Zak felt when he was alone—as though something had been cut off him and stolen away, but he could still sense its weight. And he needed it back.

“
You're all we have
”
—
another one of his parents' favorite pronouncements.

He was tired of being all they had. Tired of being told to be careful. He felt fine. Sometimes he had little hiccups in his chest, but no big deal. Doctors and parents didn't know everything.

They didn't
need
to know everything.

He took his daily verapamil pill and settled in for the long, boring wait. The room was too quiet. Out in the living room, Dad would be propped up on the couch with his laptop, pecking away, his computer glasses perched comically at the end of his nose. Zak wanted to open his bedroom door just so that he could hear the occasional clack of the keys.

But then he had a better idea. He rummaged in his nightstand drawer and came up with his old iPod. It was three or four years old and didn't really hold a charge anymore. He'd stopped playing with it when he'd gotten the iPad.

But as long as he left it plugged in, it should work. He fired up the video chat app.

Zak's best friend was Khalid, and his other best friend was Moira. He hoped that he would never have to decide which one was his
best
, best friend, because that choice was impossible. He'd known Khalid longer—he couldn't remember
not
knowing Khalid, in fact—but Moira was, well, she was Moira. She was smarter than any three kids at Wellington Academy combined …
and
she had the highest Xbox Live Gamerscore of anyone he knew, under the Gamertag DeadSeriousIrishGurl.

Years ago, the first time he'd visited Moira at home, he'd asked for a glass of water. Her mom, Mrs. O'Grady, had said, “Sure, laddie,” and Zak had felt as though he'd heard English being spoke for the first time. That night, he'd asked his mother why Mrs. O'Grady spoke the way she did.

“She's from Ireland,
cariño
.” For once, the pet name from childhood hadn't bothered him; he'd been too distracted. “It's just her accent. The same way La-La has an accent.”

“La-La's from Puerto Rico, not Ireland.”

“Different island is all.” Mom had shrugged and then settled in as Zak peppered her with a million questions about Ireland, the Irish, and red hair and green eyes.

The next day, he'd overheard his mother on the phone with La-La. “Oh, it's definitely puppy love. Totally harmless at this age. It's actually sort of cute.”

His cheeks had flamed at her words. It was ridiculous.
Puppy love
. His mother was clueless. Sure, he
liked
Mrs. O'Grady. What wasn't to like? She was sweet and kind, with a cheerful smile and impossibly red hair and bright green eyes. And that lilting brogue. He couldn't help it—he just liked being around her and hearing her voice. Moms didn't know
everything
.

Moira could imitate her mom's brogue—she had lost her traces of Irish accent after a year or so in the States—and occasionally said, “Sure, laddie,” in that special way when Zak asked a question, but he was reasonably certain she was just kidding around, not outright mocking him.

If he wanted to figure out the voices in his head, Moira was the one to call, the supergenius. But if he just wanted a sympathetic ear, it had to be Khalid.

He tapped Khalid's name, and a moment later Khalid grinned out of the screen at Zak.

“Zak Attack!” Khalid hooted, and in that instant, Zak knew that he wouldn't say anything at all about the dreams, the voices, the subway.

*   *   *

Khalid's enthusiasm was like lighter fluid on kindling—once he started talking, it was impossible to be upset or melancholy. Within seconds of seeing Khalid on the tiny iPod screen, Zak had forgotten all about the previous night's “visit.” When Khalid suggested they hang out, Zak shrugged it off with a short excuse about being grounded, offering no details. And the great thing about Khalid was that he never asked for details.

“I assume you don't deserve your punishment,” Khalid said.

“Thanks for that.”

“Team Zak one-double-oh.”

Khalid was fond of saying “one-double-oh” instead of “one hundred percent.” He thought it made him cool. Sometimes Zak agreed and sometimes he didn't. Right now, he did.

“Can we Xbox it?” Khalid was saying.

“No, Dad took the controller.”

Khalid pulled a face. “Man, it sucks that your dad's a gamer, too. Otherwise, he probably wouldn't have even
thought
of that. You know what you need to do?”

“What do I need to do?”

Chortling, Khalid said, “Once you're a free man again, we'll go to the game store and buy another controller. And you hide it in your room somewhere. So the next time you're grounded, your dad will take the controller that's sitting out, and then you can use the hidden one, and we can totally gang up on Moira on Live.”

“You're an evil genius,” Zak said in awe.

“Moira may hog all the As, but I'm devious,” Khalid said with modesty. “I should be a supervillain.”

“You totally should be.”

They spent some time figuring out what kind of supervillain Khalid should be, and then Zak heard his father stirring out in the hallway. He signed off quickly and shoved the iPod under his bed just as Dad knocked on his door.

“Yeah?”

Dad opened the door and poked his head in. “What are you doing in here?”

“Nothing.” Which wasn't a lie; at that precise moment, Zak wasn't doing anything at all. Dad hadn't said, “What
were
you doing in here?”

“I thought I heard you talking.”

Zak shrugged. Not a lie because, well, no words. You couldn't lie without words, right? Let Dad draw his own conclusions.

“I know you're angry at your mom and me right now, but trust me—you're getting off easy. If you'd pulled this on your grandfather…”

Zak tuned him out. When Dad started talking about growing up in Harlem in the eighties, Zak lost interest. Whatever.

“… so this is why we had to do this. Do you understand?”

Zak shrugged again. He knew his parents hated when he did that.

“Not talking? Fine. Maybe you'll talk to the doctor.”

The
doctor
? “I'm not sick.”

“Oh, he
does
have a voice!” Dad shook his head. “Not Dr. Shamir. This is someone else. Someone to talk to about what you did yesterday.”

“What doctor?”

“Her name is Melinda Campbell,” Dad told him, “and maybe you'll be willing to tell her what you wouldn't tell your mother and me. We're going tonight. Your mother is coming here after work, and we'll go together. So”—he checked his watch—“get a shower and something to eat.”

Zak grumbled his way through a shower and a late lunch, then retreated to his room again to await Mom's arrival. What was the deal with this doctor, anyway? He retrieved the iPod from its hiding place and did a search for
melinda campbell
and
doctor
and
new york city
.

The first hit showed a white woman, maybe Mom's age, maybe a little older.

CAMPBELL, Melinda, MD, PhD
, it said.

And under that:

Specializing in childhood traumas and disorders. Available by appointment only. Contact Youth Psychiatric Services at …

There was an e-mail link, as well as a phone number, but Zak had stopped reading.

She wasn't just a doctor. She was a psychiatrist. His parents were taking him to a head doctor.