The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook - Lydia Millet (primary phonics .txt) 📗

dotted the piney woods. But the bayside water was often silty, too, and full of floating debris, while the ocean-side water was clear. The ocean side also had softer, whiter sand, bigger waves, and the tall, amazing bluffs.

“I’m going in anyway,” said Cara. “Come on. Don’t be a wuss. What if I drown because I had no swim buddy?”

“That’s like emotional blackmail,” said Hayley. “I think.”

“Call it what you want,” said Cara. “Are you a man or a mouse?”

“Mouse, chick,” said Hayley. “And Miss Mousy has a magazine. But hey, you go crazy.”

She backed up and settled down on her towel, and Cara waded in and stood in a foot of frigid water looking out at the rest of the ocean. She watched the sand beneath her feet get sucked out by the tide, felt her heels sink into the hollows. After a while she splashed out farther and then dove.

As the water closed over her she thought of swimming with her mother, who always dove right into the ocean, no matter how cold it was.

Her mother. Who was gone.

It was her mother who had taught her to trust the water; now the slow pull of the tide and the water’s buoyancy helped her forget her worries a bit. She dove in and splashed out again, floated on her back and gazed up at the sky.

Last summer it had mostly been her two brothers and her at the beach, but this summer things had changed. Since Max was sixteen he could work at restaurants, so he’d been bussing tables during the high season, and even this week—though the crowds had thinned out and tips were nothing much once the stream of tourists slowed to a trickle—he was still working the dinner shift, which began in the late afternoons. It sounded like fun, in a way—all the wait staff and kitchen staff knew each other pretty well by the end of the season and now were a kind of big, squabbling family—but if Cara wanted to do restaurant work herself she still had three years to go.

Jax, short for Jackson, had just turned ten and was off at summer camp on the wildlife sanctuary on the bay, where the counselors filled the days dragging the kids around on what they cheerfully called “nature discovery walks” and “tidal flat funhikes.” He loved spending his time outdoors and lugged home backpacks full of the big, dark-brown shells of horseshoe crabs and slimy pieces of seaweed. He set them up on a shelf over his bed till her dad noticed the smell.

Jax had always been obsessed with animals, including extinct ones like dinosaurs and trilobites; he had spent a lot of time learning about them with their mother, who was a marine biologist. Memorizing large numbers of facts about obscure subjects was her little brother’s idea of fun. Jax collected information in databases that would have been impressive for a college student, much less a kid. He was a combination of techie and nature boy, though his nature-loving was pretty scientific—more anthropology than wild child or granola. He took it upon himself to carefully record the curious habits of the natives.

But since their mother had disappeared—the 20th of June, a date they’d never forget—Jax expressed his animal interest mostly by collecting live ones in his room and forgetting they were there until it was too late. Acting out, was what Max called it. Hermit crabs, frogs, once even a foot-long dead, rotting fish with skin and meat still hanging off the bones—all kinds of things were appearing in his room that shouldn’t be there. And not always in tanks or cages, either.

Her parents had adopted Jax when he was two, and by last summer her dad used to say he was nine going on ninety. Jax was different, to say the least. Sure, he was “gifted” and all that, and sometimes talked like a tenured professor—a miniature version of their dad—but it went way further than that.

Jax had certain … abilities.

She shook her head. She didn’t want to think about that right now.

School was starting in a week or so, which was cool but was also making her feel anxious. She missed her mother even more because of it—her mother who always found the time to help her buy supplies and plan for extracurriculars. This year there would only be her dad, and he was almost as busy as he was absentminded. He taught history at 4C’s, Cape Cod Community College, and was getting ready to start back for the fall semester, doing classes in European church history—“madmen, monks, and martyrs,” as he called it fondly.

He said her mother was bound to be back any day now, and Max said so, too, but Cara knew they were saying that to make her feel better. And maybe themselves too.

She realized she was blinking up at the sky. There were more gray clouds gathering, and it was getting late.

On her way back to shore, just beyond the break, she dove under again and swam underwater for one long kick, holding her breath. Right when she was about to come up for air something brushed up against her and she practically leapt out of the water. It was something with fur. What the—?

She splashed, looking around her frantically. And there it was—something brown in the water. A small, tan-and-brown head with dark, shining eyes.

It definitely wasn’t a seal—Cara had seen them plenty of times in the water from Falmouth all the way up to P-town. There were no sea lions around here, and it wasn’t one of those anyway. Maybe some kind of large rodent?

Then it flipped onto its back and floated, like it was just lounging there, paws up on its belly right beneath the chin. Its eyes seemed to be steadily focused on her. And then she recognized what it was. Not from real life, only from nature shows.

It was an otter.

But she’d never heard of otters on the Cape. Never.

She treaded water, threads of