Beyond the Rising Tide (5 page)

I’m shivering when I awake from the dream, curled with my knees pulled to my chest. My blankets are everywhere but on me, and the smell of rain and the morning light seep through my open window. In the distance, I hear the sound of the waves on the beach, like the static of mom’s broken car radio.

Somewhere out there, far from Avila Beach, the boy who drowned probably has a family. A mother and father, maybe brothers and sisters and grandparents. They must not have known he was at the beach that day, or even in the area, because no one came forward to help us connect the drowned boy to a missing person. Which means they don’t know he’s dead. They must wonder where he is, must have sleepless nights and nightmares like I do. Maybe they scour the Internet regularly for his whereabouts or have even hired a private detective to find him. But until I remember what he looked like, until I can find out his name, they’ll never know what became of him. Because it’s impossible to identify someone when their body is still missing.

I sit up and reach for my cell on the nightstand, and I realize I’m still wearing my clothes from the night before. There’s sand in my bed, and my ankles are raw from grating against it. I lean back on the headboard and pull up a browser, going directly to the tab for the missing persons database that the sheriff’s detective referred me to. He thinks that maybe if I see a picture of the boy, it will jog my memory and I’ll be able to identify him.

I type in the information I do know, which isn’t much.

Age: 17–22

Race: Caucasian

Last seen: December of last year

Hometown: Unknown

We ruled out the possibility that he was a local, because no locals went missing that day. And he must have been at the beach alone, because no one reported a missing member of their party. The other information—height, weight, and eye color—I don’t have either. So I leave those fields blank and hit search.

A few dozen profiles pop up, and I scroll through them, squinting at each photo, trying to project the face onto the boy who briefly shared my surfboard that stormy afternoon. But none of them seem to fit. And in truth, all of them seem to fit. I simply don’t remember.

A text from Paige pops up. One simple line:

Thanks for ditching me.

I don’t blame her for being mad. I haven’t exactly been the ideal friend lately. But I don’t have the energy to try to mend things at the moment, so I don’t text her back.

I check the time—just past ten—and then shut off my phone and set it back on the nightstand. It’s then that I realize how quiet Mom’s condo is. Usually I can hear her scuttling around dusting imaginary things, or typing furiously on her keyboard, or talking to herself.

“Mom?” I call.

No answer.

I get out of bed and shuffle into the hall, glancing into her bedroom. Her bed is unmade, but she’s not in it. So I go to her office, and she’s not there either. Her desk is a disaster of open books and coffee-stained, scribbled-on scraps of paper. An oversized whiteboard on the wall is congested with notes and scene outlines, and the dry-erase marker extends onto the wall in a few places where she ran out of room. Multiple pairs of mismatched socks are strewn on the floor by her chair, peeled off absentmindedly during brainstorming sessions. Mom is a screenwriter who specializes in romantic period dramas. But from the look of her house, you’d think she wrote slasher films.

She’s not in the kitchen or living room either, and I don’t find a note. Though it could easily be hiding under all the clutter on her kitchen counters. I call her cell from the landline and then follow a distinct buzzing to her phone, buried under a pile of mail on the dining table. Maybe she ran to the store and couldn’t find her phone. But when I check the garage, her vintage Impala is snug in its tight spot, still sleeping in. And the cruiser bicycle Dad got her for one Christmas hangs above it, collecting dust.

Assuming she went for a morning walk, I eat breakfast and straighten up the kitchen, then go to the bathroom where I splash some water on my face. My eyelids are swollen from all my crying the night before, and my smeared mascara makes me look like
I’m
the one who should be penning slasher films.

After rummaging through my bag and realizing I must have left my makeup remover at Dad’s, I open Mom’s medicine cabinet to find some. But all I see are shelves lined with prescription bottles. She can’t be on this many meds. I turn the bottles to read the labels, and sure enough, most of them are empty or expired, remnants of failed trial runs. I do her a favor and dump the empty and expired containers in the trash, then hop in the shower.

As I’m getting dressed, I notice another prescription container on the counter—this one open and empty. When I turn it to read the label, my hands go cold. It’s the same sleep aid she took too much of last winter before sleepwalking down to the beach. We found her the next morning, curled up in a rocky alcove, her temperature dropping and the tide rising.

I’m out the door in five seconds, hair still damp and sneakers untied. Mom’s condo sits on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and I head for the stairway that leads down to the beach. Dread rises inside me as I get closer, as though the stairs are imaginary and I’m about to take a fifty-foot plunge. I can hear the ocean slamming against rocks below. Shattering. Breaking. Like a china cabinet plummeting from a three-story building and hitting the pavement.

Although the stairway is solid beneath my feet, my stomach thinks I’m falling toward the rocky beach. My feet trill down the steps, and my heart beats even faster.
Please let her be okay. Let her be conscious and beachcombing, or swimming, or chatting the ears off of strangers.
I can’t even think the alternative.

When my feet hit the sand, I scan the beach to my left and right for a woman with wild curls. It’s a Sunday morning, and the tide is low. The sand gives way to rock slabs that resemble petrified tree bark, and the shoreline is speckled with people exploring the tide pools. If Mom is in trouble, no doubt someone would have already seen her. Unless she was swept away in the middle of the night.

Shaking the image from my mind, I force my feet to move south toward the place we found her last time. My eyes search figures in the distance and faces as I pass them, but there’s no sign of Mom’s red scarf or her bright-green shawl or the polka dot pajamas she wore to bed last night. My hands are cold and clammy, and my breakfast is not feeling too welcome in my stomach. The water is a good thirty feet away, but I feel trapped between it and the cliffs, like it’s a bully pushing me against the wall. I hug the cliffs as I move along, bending and peering into every alcove and crevice. They’re full of shadows, decorated by algae and clumps of mussels, but void of human life. My steps are careful, as though I’m passing through a minefield. Because, at any moment, my worst fears might detonate.

Something stings my forearm, and I glance down to see my fingernails digging into my skin. I loosen my grip.

Down the shoreline, something catches my eye: a thin woman kneeling on a stretch of black rock, her curly auburn hair blowing in the breeze and a bright-green shawl around her shoulders.

“Mom!” My voice sounds strangled because my throat is so tight. Her head snaps up to look at me, and I exhale a sigh of relief as I jog over. I kneel beside her and drop an arm across her back, pulling her close. “Are you okay?”

“The sun is finally out,” she says brightly, oblivious to my distress. “I’m only a tick away from happiness.” She’s crouched over a tide pool, holding a scrap of fishing net. “Now if I can only get this little guy free, this could be the perfect day.”

Finally I see what she’s fussing over. There’s a crab the size of her hand tangled in the net. Its legs are moving, like it’s trying to break free.

“I was worried about you.” I’m panting, but not from my jog. “You didn’t leave a note.”

“I left at sunrise, and you were dead asleep. I didn’t think I’d be gone for long. I just needed to clear my head, and …” She shrugs. “I lost track of time. And then I found Sebastian here. I’ve gotten most of his legs untangled, but there are a couple tight spots I can’t get to.”

I put a hand on hers. “Mom, it’s almost lunch. Let’s go back to the condo.”

She shakes her head. “Not until I free this little guy. Would you want someone to leave you tangled in a net?”

I exhale quietly, reminding myself to be patient with her. She needs to eat. When she doesn’t, things get bad. “Why don’t you go back up to the house and get something to eat, and I’ll take over?”

She lowers the crab and leans back, considering. “Good idea. And if you’re not back by the time I’m done eating, I’ll bring down some pliers and scissors.” She gathers her feet under her and stands, then adds, “Promise me you won’t just toss him back in the water still tangled in the net.”

I give her a you-know-me-better-than-that look. “You have my word.”

My word must be good, because she nods and turns to leave.

“Okay, Sebastian,” I say to the crab, “let’s get you free so you can grow up and become a seagull’s lunch.” I’m in a sundress, so it’s not easy getting comfortable on the rock. I end up sitting on one hip with my legs folded to one side. The netting is wound tightly around the crab’s pincers and legs, and after a few minutes of trying to unravel it, I haven’t gotten anywhere. The surf seems to be growing louder, hissing in my ear.

I do my best to shut it out and focus on the thin green net. The things I do for my mom. My fingers aren’t quite small enough to reach into the tiny space near the crab’s legs. I tug at the knots, but they remain stubbornly in place.

The morning sun beats down on me, yet it feels like someone’s holding an ice pack to the back of my neck. My arms and legs have more bumps than the sea cucumber in the tide pool beside me.

Hiiisssss
, the ocean whispers to me as it spills water and words onto the rocks.
In the folds of my waves he lies, forever to stay. Hiiisssss. I captured him, but you’re the one who lured him in.

My eyes are drawn to the shadowed spaces in the cliff wall. And now I’m not looking for Mom, but for
him
. It’s like an ever-present instinct, even after all this time. As though I expect to see his bones washed up by the tide and caught in a hollow of the rock. My chest feels tight as I think about how it will always be this way now. The ocean I once loved is now my tormentor. My playground and refuge have become a desolate graveyard, my joy and peace buried beneath a vast and sandy headstone.

’m not sure if I have a heart, but something in my rib cage swells at the sight of Avery. Her hair shimmers like spun gold in the sunlight, falling over her shoulder and hiding her face. She’s sitting on a sheet of black rock, head bent, and the flowery skirt of her sundress ripples in the breeze.

If she turns around, she’ll see me. If I speak, she’ll hear my voice. I open my mouth to do that, but it’s parched, hit with an unexpected drought of words.

I’ve been walking for hours, and I still don’t have a solid plan. I have an end goal, but it’s like looking up at the peak of a mountain when I’m still in the valley. I want Avery to find happiness again, but I have no idea how to get her there.