This Is the Story of You (16 page)

The ocean at dawn.
My jeans rolled to my bruised knees. The brittle snap of the sea. My bones, my teeth, my shivering skate key. I let my body soak in the freeze. Bent and washed my face. Watched the Band-Aid float away, the dark stain of blood where the skin had split. My shins, my hands turned another color.

There was no getting clean.

There was a couple down by the tide, big hats on, poking through the remnants of the storm. There were brothers or cousins, kids I'd never seen before, screaming after a bird. Far away, in the gentle break of the waves, that spotted deer stood. I could see the places where its hooves had poked into the sand and how its ears twitched, but when I turned to slosh out of the sea it ran, and now, down on South, someone hoisted a kite with a bedsheet tail.

First orange, first pink of the day.

I looked for the girl with the ladybug wings. I looked for Eva and the O'Sixteens. There were more people walking out of the haze, maybe strangers or maybe people I'd known before—Cammy Vaughn and Missy Ator and Nan Higgins, the knitting circle, the tenors from Community Arts— but I wasn't sure. They were far off, and I was walking now, drenched and cold, the sea in my hair, and the sky was more pink and more gold.

I'd left Old Carmen sleeping. I'd left Sterling guarding the walrus. I was walking.

Sometimes you hear things that aren't there. Sometimes you don't hear what is. I wasn't nearly sure of anything. Nothing was purely blue, and nothing was purely clear, and I didn't know, not anymore, what time it was, or what day.

When I heard the moan I thought it was either nothing or far out at sea. I was walking and the pink was turning gold and there was a breeze and inside the breeze was a sound or no sound, there, or not there, like that deer that maybe instead was a mirage. My body kept walking, but my mind said
Stop
. I cupped my hand to one ear like a conch shell. I waited for some kind of sign.

Nothing, or at least not at first. I stayed where I was, waiting on certain. I turned to the waves; they just kept coming. I turned in the direction of where the town used to be and where the mess still was. The sound wasn't far, and it was actual.

Very close, and very real.

“Hey,” I said, and no one answered. Nothing again, and then a quiet
thwack
. I stood. I walked. I crept ever nearer. A McCauley's crate and something trapped inside. My pulse was in my throat.

Home of the brave, I thought. Whatever it was, however bad it was, this was pure and clear: the thing inside that crate needed me. I was the one it was depending on.

I was close enough now to peer through the slats. I held my own breath. Between the splintery wood, I saw a black thing go
thwack.
I saw a furry edge, and the color cinnamon.

“Hey,” I said again. “Hey. Hey.” Lifting the crate fast but still careful now. You can do this, I was thinking.

“Almost free,” I was saying. “Gotcha, big fella.” And now the crate was off and it was Cinnamon Nose right there, but only his tail was moving. I threw my arms around his neck. I kissed his whiskery, sandpaper nose. I said his name, over and over, Deni's name, too, told him how, forevermore, he'd be Deni's good-luck news. Now, pulling back, I saw what the trouble was—how the dog's back legs were tied up with burlap string, as if he'd stepped into a trap. I could see the places where the rope had cut in, slicing the skin, leaving him festered. I could see how hard it hurt. The knot was a Chinese puzzle, and now when I reached in to see what I could do about untying him, he yelped a terrible yelp, he begged me not to. I could see something like tears in his eyes.
Don't touch,
he was begging.
Please don't.

He'd lost blood. He was trapped. He was so far from home. He tried to talk, but he couldn't, like his bark had been taken, too.

“We're going to fix you up,” I promised. “No lie, Cinnamon Nose. Worst of this is done with now, you hear? I promise you.”

He tried to stand but he couldn't. He tried to tell me something about his surviving—inside that crate, no water, no food, his legs lassoed. I couldn't tell how long he'd been there. I didn't know why he hadn't been found. I just knew that I had to get him to North and that the sand would take us, the crate would be his sled.

“You'll see,” I said, and now I worked like hell— flipping the crate upright, shredding bedsheets that I found, making do with what we had.

You can do this, Mira Banul.

We can do this, Cinnamon Nose.

We set off for North. I pulled my special parcel true—over the sand, between the ruins. The bedsheets held. The crate didn't bust. The two of us were a spectacle, a small parade that became a bigger one as the people of dawn joined in, pushing from behind, clearing a path, helping me out with the load.

“Dog needs to get home” is all I said. And everyone on Haven understood.

The sea had gnawed off most of North.
Entire chunks of land were missing, and the houses with them, the docks, the boats, and it wasn't that the lighthouse had fallen, it was that the lighthouse was leaning, its stripes at an angle and its beacon blown off.

I rounded the bend of it. I saw Chang and Mario way up ahead. I saw Taneisha, her arm full of bracelets, and the houses ripped in half, the curtains blowing in empty rooms, somebody's attic on the ground, the backyard gardens in the street and a bird at a birdfeeder hung from a lampshade.

There was the buzz of insects and the rot of food and the carcasses of dead fish, and the brigade, at last, up ahead, and now Chang saw me, and she called out, and Deni came running, fast as Deni could run—her arm in that sling, her brother's boots on, the sky on the top of her head.

“Found him,” I said. “Cinnamon Nose.” And now the parade stepped back, it gave us room, I reached into the crate, I kissed that dog on the top of his very gorgeous head.

“Look who's here for you,” I said, and Deni—Deni couldn't stop sobbing, couldn't stop thanking me, couldn't believe her good luck, because it was luck, she agreed, and it was also, she said, her dad and her brother looking down, and she hugged that dog, and at last he barked. He found a word or two, for Deni.

“He's hurt pretty bad,” she finally said, through her tears.

“He needs some food,” I said. “Some water.”

“Yeah.”

“He needs some help with his back legs.”

“I see.”

She pushed her hand through the spikes of her hair, rearranged her sunglasses. She patted her cheeks to dry her tears. She thought for a Deni minute, and she got herself a plan.

“Let's get him to the brigade,” she said.

She stood beside me. Took the bedsheets in her hand. Halved the weight of the sled. She talked to that dog the entire time, listing out the what-nexts, making sure he understood.

It was close to dusk by the time I returned to the rock, my clothes so full of dog hair and sweat salt that Sterling got suspicious in a second.
She stayed away, though I talked to her. She pretended she couldn't hear. I gave up after a while and went down to the tide. I cleaned myself up. I watched the sunset. I sacrificed my blisters to the sea.

Sterling liked me better after that and even more after I traded my furry shirt for a cleaner hoodie, and when Old Carmen disappeared somewhere, I grabbed that cat and put her on my lap and told her she'd have been real proud of me and my rescue operation, that jealousy looks good on no one, that she was better than that. I said cats and dogs have to get along. I said, “So what did you make of yourself today?” and she looked at me with her sea-glass eyes, thinking maybe I was crazy.

I served up a can of salmon. I made myself some peanut butter–marshmallow crackers. I was famished, I realized, and my bones were starting to show, and there was hardly anything between the purple bruise above my heart and my heart itself. I touched my chest. I felt my ribs. I thought of Jasper Lee, so far away. The hospital. The dark. I remembered a winter night, long ago, when it was just me and Mickey and Jasper Lee, lying side by side on the deck—the tartan blanket across us, the patchwork quilt, a pile of winter jackets. It was that cold. It was that bright. We had followed Mickey's flashlight out onto the deck, and we had lain down and covered up, and we were together, the three of us, safe, no one and no disease could touch us. There were white dwarves above our heads and black holes and red giants, and nobody cared, even I didn't care, what the stars were called. We just cared about the astronomical gleam. We said that it, like all the sky, belonged only to us.

We were greedy that way, the Banuls. We were greedy in the ways we had to be.

“Found it,” Jasper Lee said that night.

“Found what?” Mickey asked him.

“My star,” he said. He took his little hand out from beneath the blankets and pointed, but we still couldn't tell which star was his—maybe his hand was too small, maybe the stars were too thick. Mickey strained to see, then sat up quick. Felt around for her flashlight, the old doublewide. She flipped the switch. She handed it over to my brother.

“Show us,” she said, snuggling back down into the warmth with us.

Showing is what my little brother did. Six years old, and there he lay, shining his light on his favorite star, like the flashlight was the size of a Hollywood spotlight. He beamed the light up steady so that it was perfectly clear—his imperfect star, shining perfectly bright.

“Best star in the universe,” he said, and we believed, and we lay like that, waiting for the sky to burst even brighter above us.

Now, dusk fallen, Old Carmen still gone, the people of the beach pulling up their bedding for a new night, and the gulls doing their bedtime screech, I felt around on that rock and found the doublewide and flipped that switch.

I pointed it in the direction of the mainland.

I stared along the yellow ridge into the dark.

“Best star in the universe,” I whispered, to Jasper Lee.

And I waited, and I waited for him to whisper back.

I woke early the next day.
Sterling had stayed close, slept, snored tiny cat snores. She had, I knew, forgiven me. That's what we do in families.

I stretched until the ache eased from my muscles. I touched the purple place above my heart.

On her end of things Old Carmen was sharpening a knife on the face of the rock, making a nice percussion of sound. She looked up when I sat up. She said nothing for a while. She turned her head to watch the tide, the early people who were rising. Little kids running with sand in their hair. Parents shaking out blankets, rinsing out pots, unscribbling the piles they had slept with.

“You get that dog home proper?” Old Carmen asked.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“That's some good work,” she said. “Be proud of it.”

I nodded. I was. We were quiet. We let the world wake up some more and then Old Carmen spoke again. “Time is running out,” she said.

“What does the radio say?”

“The radio says ‘patience.' We're going to need more than that, though. We're going to need provisions.” It was like the saving of Mid was all on her shoulders. Like we'd voted her in charge, and maybe, somehow, we had. She looked beaten down a little, worn out, worried. She closed her eyes, put her chin on her fist, let the early sun fall against her million lines and wrinkles.

I looked south, toward the cottage, no parts of it visible in the early mist. I thought of all I'd sheltered in the room high up on stilts, the note I'd left, the creepiness I'd felt. I thought of all I'd sheltered, too, and of how Mickey and Jasper Lee would want me to use it right, to share it now, to be that kind of greedy. And brave.

“Will you keep an eye on Sterling?” I asked Old Carmen now.

“Haven't lost that cat yet.”

“Okay,” I said. “All right. I'm going.” I climbed down off the rock. Did one huge body stretch.