The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook (2 page)

She treaded water a bit closer, a bit closer—their eyes were still locked together, it seemed to her—and then her cold, pruney fingertips were reaching out, almost without her planning it. For just a second they touched the rough black pad of a paw.

In that second it was like someone had shuffled the world away—all of it forgotten except for the feeling she was having. It was as if the sky and sea disappeared, the beach and the cliffs faded. She felt dizzy and almost sick but also curiously warm.

She felt exhilarated.

And then it streamed through her:

TAKE CARE OF THEM FOR ME TAKE CARE OF THEM FOR ME TAKE CARE OF THEM

“
Cara!
Hey Cara! You coming out any time soon?”

It was Hayley, calling from shore. She sounded so far away, though. Cara’s eyes were open again, the sea was there, the beach, the different blues and browns of normal life, the scene of ocean and sky. She found herself shaking her head—had those been her own thoughts?

But it didn’t feel like it; it didn’t feel like she’d
chosen
to think those things, and the words left a trail behind them in her mood, a kind of glittering hope … and then the otter was flipping over so quickly she couldn’t follow the movement, and it was gone.

She stared at where it had been. Nothing but water.

She shook her head, dazed. She felt a bizarre glow, like a line of silver through the middle of her body.

It lingered.

Finally, not knowing what else to do, she swam slowly for the beach, then waded out and ran, tossing up sand, to where Hayley was lying on her towel flipping magazine pages.

“Did you see that?” she asked, breathless. “Did you see what was right next to me?”

“You’re totally dripping, Car! And there’s sand on my back now!”

“Sorry, but didn’t you—”

“Wait. Wait. Listen.
Accessorize for fall with shades of oxblood and burgundy,
” read Hayley. “There’s an actual color called oxblood? Barfo. Hey. What’s the difference between lime and chartreuse?”

“But—there was an animal! An otter! I swear, Hay. Can you believe that?”

“Otters. Uh-huh.”

Hayley nodded distractedly and turned her magazine to look at something from a different angle. It seemed to be a picture of a model’s thin wrist wearing 8,000 bangles.

Cara couldn’t pay attention to anything but that silver trace she still felt in herself, her whole being that tingled with the fleeting touch of something unknown.

“Hayley, listen. Do you realize how weird that is? We don’t have otters in the ocean here. At least, I’ve never heard of one.”

“Maybe the little guy got lost,” mused Hayley and looked up. “But they can swim, right? Is there an otter-rescue deal, like there is for beached whales?”

Cara stared at her for a second, then sighed and settled down on her own towel. Sometimes Hay could be a little clueless.

But sea otters, Cara was almost certain, lived on the West Coast. In the Pacific. Not in the Atlantic at all. It was really kind of impossible. She made a mental note to ask Jax about it. Jax or her dad.

And then, on top of that, it was as though it had talked to her without opening its mouth—as though, let’s face it, it was
delivering a message
.

She lay there for a minute, tuning out completely while Hayley chattered on about some movie star who’d had an operation to make her lips fat. After a while she turned on her side and slipped her cell out of her bag to glance at its clock. It was already time to go; she had to get home for dinner.

“Man. I wish I could take off too, but I have to wait for my mom,” said Hayley apologetically. “Otherwise I’d totally go with you. Sorry. She’s coming after work, she’s all, ‘I have to get in my tan time!’ Even though it’ll be, like, five-thirty. It’s so humiliating, she has one of those retro silver screens from the eighties? And she holds it under her chin to get more sun on her face? I go, ‘Haven’t you ever heard of skin cancer? Gross gnarly skin wrinkles?’ I’m serious, she’s gonna look like one of those orange Florida ladies.”

“My mom’s the opposite,” said Cara. “She always makes us wear sunscreen. Even when it’s gray out …”

She trailed off. Because clearly her mother wasn’t around to give advice.

Hayley shot her a look, then said, more gently than usual, “Is there—do they have any, like, new info? About what might have happened?”

Cara shook her head, her eyes downcast.

There was a lump in her throat.

And a good possibility, she added to herself, that she was experiencing some kind of hallucinations.

After a minute Hayley filled the silence.

“Yeah. Well. My mom just doesn’t get it. When I tell her she’s getting a rhino hide she just goes, ‘You have to suffer to be beautiful, Hayley.’ ”

Cara nodded and tried on a quick, tight smile.

Hayley reached over and grabbed her hand, squeezing it. After a few seconds, Cara moved her hand away, blinking.

“So anyway,” said Hayley. “Sorry I can’t ride home with you.”

“No problem,” said Cara and waved as she turned to head up the cliff staircase. “See you.”

Tonight her dad had promised to take them to the Wellfleet Drive-In, the only drive-in movie theater left on the Cape. It was a ten-minute car ride from their rambling old house on the bay, but they were planning to take their bikes instead; they didn’t need the car, since they would probably see one of the indoor movies in the multiplex part of the drive-in. After the movie, in the dark, they would coast home again along the peaceful streets, listening to the crickets. They did it every Thursday night in the summer.

Their dad was a distracted scholar type who knew Latin and wore three-piece suits and even the kind of watch you kept in a pocket on your vest and pulled out on a chain called a fob. But he did love one modern thing: movies. He would see anything that was playing, but he especially loved bad vintage movies with cheesy special effects, like
The Mummy’s Hand
and
Swamp Thing
.

She didn’t know what was at the theater tonight, but this was one time she agreed with her dad: any old movie would do. When she settled down in front of the vast screen, bright pictures flashing in front of her eyes in the dark, she could almost forget that her mother was missing and no one in the whole world seemed to have the faintest clue where she was.

She walked through the wild beach roses to the parking lot. The pink flowers had already disappeared from their low bushes along the trails, leaving the rose hips behind them. Her mother liked to gather the small fruits every fall and make tea with them, which she said helped to ward off colds. At the thought, Cara felt the usual pang.

This fall, maybe, she’d get sicker than usual. This fall there wouldn’t be the warm homemade tea, only the bare counter in the kitchen and empty oven mitts hanging on hooks, unused.

She looked up at the sky, to where the towering white clouds of the morning had flattened out and turned gray and low, and tried to push the thought of winter down and away. Unlocking her bike, she tossed her mesh bag into a saddlebag, got on and took off. With no one in the parking lot except her, she could fly; she could pedal as fast as she wanted across the pavement, through the cooling air of twilight.

She spread out her arms and felt the wind lift her hair.

As she coasted down her street toward her house the surface of the bayside water was turning black; fingers of pink and purple reached across the sky. The trees were shifting slowly from leafy green into dark silhouettes, making home seem even more welcoming.

Her family’s house was big and ramshackle on the outside but cozy within: the warm orange light from the windows reflected across the water and shone through the trees. It was built of weathered silver-gray wood and had started out as a simple box, long ago, but more and more additions had been built onto it over the years. Now it had a wraparound, covered porch overlooking the water on one side and the grassy lawn on the other, where she and Max played badminton and Jax jumped in between them, trying to bat the birdie out of the air with his grubby hand.

During the day, if you sat on the bayside terrace, you could watch boats chugging out to the oyster fields. The harbor was narrow here, and right across from her house she could see the pier with its outdoor restaurant, a fish place that always had long lines in the summer. At night the restaurant sparkled with light, and the sounds of people laughing carried over the water.

She lifted her bike up the sagging wooden steps and leaned it beside the front door, near the pile of her dad’s sea kayaks. Her dad wasn’t the sporty type—that was an understatement, actually—but he liked paddling, as he called it, and used to make the family do it, all together on the weekends.

Not recently.

As soon as she banged through the screen door into the front hall, she smelled cooking. She hung her bag on a peg, kicked off her shoes, and shoved them into a jumble of hightops and sneakers piled up against the wall. The house wasn’t so neat these days. She heard the thump of music above her head, from Max’s room. Max was really into old classics—mostly the Clash, at the moment. Since their mother had gone, he liked to shut himself up a lot and blast it really loud.

Jax was more interested in dead toads.

Rufus, their aging brown Lab, came up to her wagging his tail. She knelt down and petted his head.

“I’m home,” she called out to her dad, rising and making her way down the hall to the kitchen. Rufus followed, his nails clicking on the wood floor.

But when she reached the kitchen door, a woman she’d never seen before was standing at the stove.

“Who are
you
?” she blurted.

The woman turned. She had a broad front, a sun-weathered face, and graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a red-and-white checked apron that said IF YOU DON’T LIKE MY COOKING … LOWER YOUR STANDARDS.

“You must be Cara!” she said and wiped her hands on her apron so she could stick one out. “Call me Lolly. Your father hired me to do some housekeeping. And dinners.”

Seeing Cara’s blank face, she added quickly: “Just, you know. Till your mother gets back and can pitch in again.”

“Oh,” said Cara in a small voice. “I see. Nice to meet you.”

“With him starting back to teaching, and all,” went on Lolly, “and you three kids at two different schools, things will be getting pretty hectic. Hey. You like mac and cheese?”

“Sure, sure,” said Cara, distracted. “So, um, where
is
my dad?”

“Should be in his study.”

Cara turned and left the kitchen, making her way over the thick boards of the dining room floor to her dad’s half-open door.

“Cara, dear,” he said when she pushed it open further, looking up over the glasses that were set low on his nose. He was reading in his armchair, legs crossed. “How was the beach?”

“You hired a
housekeeper
?” she asked.

“Apparently,” said her dad.

“But what if—you know—I mean she could come home any day, couldn’t she?”

“When your mother comes home, Lolly will go,” he said gently. “She needed to pick up a few hours. She has a two-year-old grandson she takes care of. I’m sure you’ll like her cooking.”

Cara nodded, the tense feeling in her stomach growing a little less.

Her dad was sad, she thought. Just like her.

“Very good, then,” he said, and went back to his reading. When he was reading, he was lost to the world.

Softly she walked over to the big dictionary he kept on a stand in the corner. Under the cover he’d tucked the note her mother left. She didn’t know if he’d even noticed she’d found it, but she liked to go into his study when he was out and just gaze at the note, smoothing her fingers over the scrawled words her mother had written.

Now she turned the heavy sheaf of pages over and exposed the fragment.

Have to go. Danger. Keep them safe — love

That was all.

Now, with her hand touching the worn paper, she felt tears filling her eyes. It had been two months, and there was still no sign of her mother coming back. No one was doing anything to help, either. The police hadn’t taken it seriously. Despite her mother’s note—the word danger echoed in Cara’s head when she was trying to fall asleep—the cops obviously thought her mother had left her dad. For some other guy.

They had looked at the pictures of her mother in the family albums—her mother was beautiful, with long dark hair, olive skin, and green eyes, and people often thought she was Cara’s sister—and then looked at her dad, in his glasses and vest, and decided it was a “routine domestic situation.” Cara had heard one of them say that when they didn’t think any kids were listening.

She’d felt so bad for her dad. It was like the cops didn’t think he was good enough for her mother.

But he was. They all were. They were all good enough for each other.

It wasn’t like that.

“Sweetheart,” came her dad’s gruff voice behind her, as he put a hand on her shoulder, “don’t worry. Your mother is a strong person. She can take care of herself. And she
will
come back to us.”

She wiped away the tear that had leaked out, sniffed, and turned around.

“OK,” she said stiffly, and gave a small nod. If she hugged him she would lose it.

Standing there together, they heard the low roll of thunder.

“Well, I guess we’ll be driving to the movies after all,” said her dad.