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

something. That it was real—not just a figment of her and Jax’s imagination, which it sometimes seemed to be—and that the signs they were finding were meant for them. “We’re going to be out there at night, with the rain and the lightning, and we’re taking the others, Hayley and Keat and Cory or whoever, without telling them what we’re there to do—maybe putting them in danger, even. And we don’t even know why, exactly….”

“We do know,” said Jax firmly. “We’re doing it for her. And not only that, either. We know there’s something bigger. We know there’s a pattern behind it. We just don’t quite see what the pattern is. Not yet. But we are supposed to do this, Car. We’ve been spoken to—you with the letters on the driftwood, the message from the sea. Me with the sea turtle.”

“And don’t forget him,” said Cara, picking up a napkin ring and twisting the yellow cotton napkin inside it.

“No,” said Jax, and shook his head. “How could I? He spoke to us too. There are two sides to this fight, and we’ve been approached by both of them.”

“That message,” said Cara, laying forks around the places. “It said ‘three,’ which you think means us, and then called those three the ‘interpreter, arbiter and visionary.’ Right? Well, I can see how you’d be the visionary. But Max and I don’t exactly seem like interpreters or judges. That’s what arbiter means, right?”

“One who weighs both sides,” said Jax, nodding. “An impartial decision-maker, in this case.”

“So how can it be us, then?”

“Just be patient,” said Jax. “Don’t think you have to understand everything at once. Sometimes it takes a while. You have to wait and see. You have to believe it’ll be clear one day, as long as you keep watching.”

After dinner they were impatient for Lolly to leave, but she seemed to think it was her job to clear and wash every last dish and then tuck the kids in—despite the fact that Max didn’t typically go to bed till midnight even on school nights.

So all four of them, including Hayley, pretended to be tired, yawning and rubbing their eyes sleepily. By 8:30 Lolly apparently believed they were down for the count. She set the dishwasher churning and sloshing, turned out all the lights downstairs, and called up her good-nights to each of them before she headed out the front door toward her car, running with a magazine held over her head to keep dry, and drove off up the street.

They watched from Max’s window to be sure she was safely gone.

“You’re lucky,” said Hayley enviously. “I wouldn’t be left alone ever. My mom won’t even let me walk to the store by myself. She says stuff like ‘ten thousand children are abducted in this country.’ ”

“You’re what, fourteen, and she doesn’t let you walk to the store?” asked Max.

He was wearing a faded T-shirt that said KNOW YOUR RIGHTS; apparently his right was to pick his ear, which he was rooting around in with a pinky.

Cara was grossed out, but Hayley didn’t look any less lovestruck. Cara couldn’t help pulling a face.

“She’s thirteen, like me,” she said.

“Fourteen really soon, though,” put in Hayley.

“What’s she gonna do, hide in your closet when you go to college?”

“I know, right?” said Hayley. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Come on, Hay, we should go,” said Cara, and tugged her friend’s arm to get her away from Max, a/k/a the Ear-picking Heartthrob. “It’s already dark. We could be missing it.”

“You got a really great brother and sister here,” said Hayley to Jax as they went out Max’s door. Mostly to kiss up to Max, obviously. “All this for a science project!”

Hayley wasn’t used to riding a bike at night, so Cara took the lead and went slowly. They crossed Route 6 with no headlights in sight, only the rain pattering down on the hoods of their jackets and the tires making soft whishing sounds over the wet pavement. When they got to the Marconi parking lot, they walked their bikes up out of the lot and onto the cliffside, taking a narrow, bumpy trail over the bluffs to where the tent was pitched, hidden by low pines.

And sure enough, Cara found the tent in the dark by hearing instead of sight: the drops hitting its sides made a sound that was different from the rain on the trees and the sandy grass.

While Hayley laid Max’s bike down and scrambled to get inside and get dry, Cara stood for a minute looking out over the ocean. It was invisible—a huge, black abyss. Her eyes would adjust, she figured, if they didn’t turn the lantern on inside the tent; but if they kept a light on the whole time, she’d definitely have trouble seeing what she was supposed to be here to see.

She followed Hayley into the tent, where blankets were piled on top of the sleeping bags. Hayley flicked a flashlight on, and Cara realized she wouldn’t be able to see anything from inside anyway—it was impossible to know whether, looking out the mesh of the door flap, she was seeing the black sky or the black sea. She could easily miss whatever phosphorescence appeared in the water, and she wouldn’t even know she wasn’t looking in the right place.

But the tent was safer. From him.

The tent was dry and well lit.

Still, if she stayed safe inside the tent she really could miss seeing the fires. Then she would fail the test.

And she couldn’t stand that. Because finally, she realized, it was a test of whether she cared enough, and was strong enough, to bring her mother back.

At least, if the Pouring Man came, she could hide from him in the tent. It was dry, after all, and he couldn’t come in unless she let him, Jax had said.

“I have to stand outside, I think,” she told Hayley. “But you can bundle up and keep warm, right? There’s snacks somewhere in here, too. Max left them.”

“You’re going to