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

not. Before their mother left, he still slept in their parents’ bed when he got scared at night. Now he crept into her own room sometimes, because he had nowhere else to go. Their dad had taken to working late most nights since their mother had left and usually fell asleep on the couch in his study, his desk light still on, a thin blanket hastily pulled over his legs. So Jax couldn’t curl up with him.

“OK, moviegoers,” said her dad, and laid down his napkin. “We have six minutes for pie-eating. Then on to swashbuckling. No disrespect to your baking skills, Lolly, but eat fast, kids.”

“Underappreciated,” said Lolly. “That’s my lot in life.”

By the time they drove home from the movie, it was raining hard, and trees were whipping around in the wind. They’d all raced to the car from the shelter of the theater lobby but got drenched anyway, and now Cara and Jax sat shivering in the back with a fleece blanket pulled over them. The wipers made a rapid thwock, thwock across the cracked windshield of their beat-up wagon as Max and their dad, in the front, argued about the star of the movie.

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” said Max. “He was supposed to be what—a French naval officer? He sounded like he was from New Jersey.”

“I didn’t think the accent was so New Jersey,” said her dad. “Maybe Normandy coast. The peasantry, of course.”

“Get out,” said Max, and cuffed him on the shoulder.

Then he put his iPod buds in his ears, sank down in the passenger seat, and turned to gaze out the window, beating the rhythm of his music on the seat cushion with one hand.

“Gimme that,” said Cara to Jax. “Hey! You stole, like, the whole blanket.”

Jax said nothing, only shivered, so she let it go. Water coursed down the glass, and for the hundredth time she ran through the brief words of the note in her head. Have to go. Danger. What could it mean? Her mother didn’t exactly live on the edge; she was a biologist, after all, not a James Bond type. She worked at the far end of the Cape, at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where she studied seals and other marine mammals. Her mother was beautiful and generous and everyone loved her. What danger could there possibly be?

Cara felt a flush of fear.

She’s totally OK, she thought. She’s fine.

But if she was fine, why wasn’t she back by now?

Their dad spun the wheel, and they turned and headed up their own street, which sloped toward the water’s edge. Suddenly their headlights swept over something out of place, and she stared out her window as they passed.

It was a tall, blurred figure, hooded. Maybe wearing a dark coat or a cape; she thought it must be a man, from the size, but she couldn’t see the face.

The figure was just standing there, facing them, arms hanging down at his sides. He didn’t move a muscle. In the night, in the rain.

But stranger than that, the strangest part of all, was that it looked like he was floating in water.

It looked like he was surrounded by it—not by raindrops but by solid water, suspended in it. Hanging.

She felt the tiny hairs on her arms prickle.

“Jax! Did you see that guy?”

Jax, teeth chattering, swiveled to look out the rear window.

“A person in a hood or something, just standing stock-still in—in the rain,” she said. “Did you see him?”

Jax turned back to face forward, his eyes glazed over and slightly dull.

“That wasn’t a person,” he said.

A few minutes later she tucked him in, as she often did after he finished reading (at the moment it was A Brief History of Time). She pulled the curtains and checked the floor for snails, frogs, and lizards. One disgusting experience involving her bare feet and a cicada had made her extra careful.

“They’re all in the tanks,” said Jax sleepily, rubbing his eyes.

She turned out every light but his favorite lamp, a scale model of the moon. Impact craters and all.

“So Jax,” she said as she sat down on the bed and pulled the blanket up to his chin, “what did you mean, that wasn’t a person? You kind of creeped me out tonight.”

Jax turned over, his eyelids heavy.

“He was the one who came to dinner. The one who was at our front door,” he murmured.

She felt a chill come over her.

“So …,” she said slowly, “what did you mean by not a person?”

“He didn’t have a signal,” Jax said, and burrowed into his pillow.

He’d tried to explain to her once, the time when she got mad at him for pinging her, that pinging was like reading the patterns of energy in people’s brains—not the kind of passive, low-level sensing he did when he first met people and decided whether he could trust them, but a more intense kind of interpreting. A kind of decoding. Jax wasn’t proud of himself when he pinged, but sometimes he couldn’t resist.

He called the energy patterns he sensed a “signal,” even though that wasn’t technically what it was, he said.

“Maybe you just couldn’t read him,” she suggested.

“Nothing to read,” he mumbled. “He was just …”

He turned onto his other side, his eyes closing.

“… not alive.”

And then he fell asleep.

Two

Cara woke up as dawn was breaking, a faint light leaking through her window blinds. To her the morning felt quiet and almost disappointed, the way it always did after a big rain, with the slow drip-drip-drip of water off branches and leaves.

She crossed the cool bedroom floor in her bare feet. Her room was at the back of the house, on the bay side, which meant she had a view—over the porch roof that sloped down beneath her window, through some feathery branches—of the water and the sky across Cape Cod Bay. If you flew straight inland, her mother had once told her, you would see Plymouth