It’s Anda.
Her mother notices me at the same time Anda does. Everything unfreezes with a roar. Her mother raises a mass of solid water that pushes toward me with terrific speed. I barely have time to inhale before the water hits—when it doesn’t. The water pauses in a thick wall, like boiling glass only feet from me. Anda’s hand is raised in my direction. With a twist of her wrist, the wall of water dissipates into a cloud of vapor.
A piece of stained wreckage floats nearby, a newer piece of boat with the fiberglass hull still intact. I grab on to the smooth surface, trying to buy myself time to catch my breath. Over my shoulder, Anda’s tiny dark shadow of a figure continues to hover, while her mother’s vast body of wreckage and clouds tries to pummel her.
Every assault that Anda’s mother sends my way, Anda blocks, almost too easily. But she can’t stop the storm, and I can’t hold on for much longer. The waves are still high enough that they douse my head over and over again, and the burning in my forearms becomes agonizing. The cold is numbing my brain. My hands begin to slip, when I wonder. Why am I trying? What could come out of this that could possibly be worth living for? I think of my uncle, wonder if he’s still alive. Wonder if there will really be an Anda for me to ever come back to. My fingertips make helpless squeaking noises as they lose purchase on the wreckage, and Anda’s head turns toward me. Though a mile away, I can see her expression of hurt and fury.
Don’t you dare, Hector.
I understand. This life isn’t just mine to throw away anymore. She knows it, and I know it. I hyperventilate, trying to get oxygen into my limbs, then kick my legs anew to get a better hold on the piece of fiberglass. There’s a broken chunk of metal above me, and I reach for it, dragging myself higher. I have a better grip. This time, I’ll hang on for a bit longer.
I don’t know if that will be long enough, but I’m not planning that far ahead right now.
While Anda fights off another enormous rogue wave that comes my way, I hear the faint buzzing of a noise, barely above the din of the rain and roaring wind that’s buffeting my head. I think maybe it’s a helicopter, which would be madness in a storm—especially this storm. But there’s nothing overhead but gray swirls of condensation. Faintly, a single voice forces it way through the chaos.
“Gracie!”
I turn around. In the distance, a small boat is churning through the rough waters, headed toward me. It’s Mr. Selkirk, with eyes on nothing but the unstoppable force that is Anda’s mother. I scream at him when he’s only forty feet away, and he slows the motor down, just enough to scan the choppy waves. Bobbing up and down, it’s a miracle he sees me, stuck to this piece of junk. He steers closer to me, and my body sags with relief. I let my cramped hands slide off the wreckage as Mr. Selkirk draws closer.
I hold out my arm, but he doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t throw a line.
His dark blue eyes are snapping with intensity behind his wire glasses. He still wears the old wool hat that encases his white hair. I sigh with relief when he bends over to drop anchor, but to my surprise he only tosses a big orange life vest. I catch it, but my face says everything I want to. Why won’t he let me on board? My exhaustion is ten years old, my muscles cramping painfully, and even with this vest, I won’t last long in the frigid water.
Mr. Selkirk yells at me. “You tell her why.”
“What are you talking about?” I sputter lake water, clinging to the life vest.
“She won’t understand. You tell her.”
I try to yell at him to stay, to let me get on his goddamned boat, to make sense. But Mr. Selkirk drives the boat at full throttle toward the two warring elements—the mother, the daughter; the lake and the storm. He becomes a smaller spot of white and silver on the sine-like waves, appearing and disappearing between swells. He drives the boat—which wasn’t small but now looks like a tiny white dash—right between them. Anda is still just a smudge of coal in the sky, her arms conducting the air and water around her, fighting to keep her mother from sending me to my death at the bottom of the lake, where her mother believes I deserve to be.
I don’t think they even register that Mr. Selkirk is right there until it’s too late. He drives between two sailboat wrecks climbing the column of water on Anda’s mother. The angle is impossibly steep, and the boat too large to turn quickly. Anda and her mother suddenly become aware of him at the same moment.
But it’s either too late, or Mr. Selkirk knows exactly what he’s doing. The boat can’t handle the pitch of the wave, and I watch with horror as the bow of the boat climbs, climbs, climbs—until it can’t go any farther. It hesitates and begins its descent in reverse, before flipping over. Mr. Selkirk’s dot of a body falls through the air as the wall of water collapses on top of him and the craft.
Mr. Selkirk is gone.
Chapter Sixty-Two
ANDA
There is a rift torn into us.
Mother and I see it as it happens—the extinguishing of this tiny life between us, that sparks so brightly even we are blinded. A life that even we have no power to return to this world. Ever with the power to kill, neither of us has possessed the immeasurable force of sacrifice.
He has eclipsed us.
Father.
Gone.
Mother, the tower of water and swirling cloud, the shipwrecks still rotating about her in homage, shudders, as if the molecules of her being have forgotten why they clung together in the first place.
The thousands of tons of flotsam and wreckage begin to sink, forming huge eddies and whirlpools as they displace the lake water beneath them. The mountain-sized cone of water simply falls, at first in slow motion, then with the speed dictated by reality. A huge wave pushes outward in a ring, almost thirty feet high.
Mother doesn’t weep. She has only ever taken when she needed to take, has only ever given when she needed to give. And her need is so great that this offering makes no sense—in a way that makes no sense in her order of the universe, when things happen according to the seasons, and the rotations of the sun, for survival and survival only. It tears her open.
Even as my own grief paralyzes me, I sense what happens deep beneath the waters. Mother has gone to Father’s corpse. She’s forgotten all about us. That is what she has always done—crash from one passion to another, leaving behind things of beauty and brokenness, like cracked agates on the shoreline. And sometimes, a baby.