Siren's Storm (9 page)

Asia cocked her head. “Some say fish, some say birds.”

“Tomato, tomahto,” Will joked.

Asia looked at him, a smile playing at the edges of her lips. Will wasn’t sure if Asia thought his joke was amusing … or if she thought Will was an idiot.
Say something smart
, he told himself. “I like the way this wing is painted here.” He gestured to the extended wing, where every feather was rendered with precision.

Asia digested this in silence. She continued to study the painting. “I like the darkening sky,” she said at last. “The cliffs.”

Will peered closely at the cliffs in the background. The image of the bird-woman had grabbed his attention so thoroughly that he hadn’t really noticed them. But there were indeed gray-white cliffs in the distance. And, perched atop the cliffs and executed in minute detail, were three more bird-women calmly watching
the scene. Beneath their talons were several skulls. One was not quite picked clean.

Will felt his hands go cold.

“Exactly,” Asia said, watching his face.

“Have you seen the rest of the exhibit?” Will asked suddenly. He wanted to get away from that picture.

Asia seemed to understand his feelings. She moved on, taking an unhurried stroll around the gallery. Will feigned interest in a sculpture of a conch shell that was made of a thousand smaller shells, but really he was watching Asia. There was something about that girl he couldn’t figure out. The way she walked—with such confidence, but no arrogance—stood out in this small town. Will remembered the glance she had given him through the rain-spattered windshield. It had held him in place, the way her voice had the other day. It was better to stand back, watch her from a distance. Asia almost seemed like a visitor from another planet. Most of the paintings and sculptures garnered only a quick glance from Asia. One wall-sized photograph of several campy, smiling mermaids in pink wigs actually got a laugh. Finally she joined Will at the sculpture. She studied the smaller shells and the place where they joined together to swirl into one larger shell.

“The interconnection of the many and the one,” Asia said at last.

“Really?” Will cocked his head. “Because this thing just makes me want some fried clams.”

Asia laughed. It was a pretty sound, like silver bells.

“Hey, listen—do you—do you want to go get something to eat?” Will asked. “Like, some fried clams?”

Asia looked surprised, as if that was the last thing she had expected him to ask. Her voice was slow, like dragging feet, but she said, “All right. Yes.”

They stepped out into the bright sunshine, and Will pointed to the left. “There’s a really good place down near the water.”

“Dave’s?” Asia asked.

Will was surprised. Somehow he hadn’t expected Asia to know about the divey little clam shack haunted by locals. “Yeah.”

They fell into step in silence as they moved up the street. After two blocks, the rich, heady scent of fried food wafted over them. They ordered at the counter, then took their food to a picnic table on an open porch. The waves crashed on nearby rocks, and a friendly breeze blew as they arranged the red plastic baskets full of fried clams and french fries. Across the table from him, Asia seemed out of place in the mundane scene. For a moment he wondered what he was doing, bringing her here. But Asia smiled as she looked out at the sea. She didn’t seem uncomfortable at all.

Will dipped a fry into a small plastic tub of creamy tartar sauce. “So—how’d you end up working at Bella’s?”

Asia took a moment before answering, as if she was considering her words. “I wanted a job where I could get to know people,” she said finally.

“There are a lot of shops where you could have done that,” Will pointed out. “Or you could have been a camp counselor.”

“I wasn’t interested in those people,” Asia said.

“You were interested in the people at Bella’s?”

Asia smiled. “You’re very inquisitive.”

“Not usually,” Will admitted. He fought the urge to ask her about walking into the sea. It wasn’t the moment—not yet.

“I enjoy talking to people,” Asia said. “Is that so strange?”

He wanted to tell her that she didn’t act like someone who enjoyed talking to people. She wasn’t really acting like she wanted to talk to him, for example. But that would be obnoxious, he knew, so he stayed silent.

Two high school girls that Will vaguely knew sat down at a table nearby. They stared at Asia with barely disguised contempt. Will had seen girls give Gretchen that look sometimes, too. “Most people have horrible personalities,” Will said.

Asia nibbled a clam and nodded. “Many people,” she corrected. “Not most.”

“Enough,” Will said. “I see it at our farm stand all the time. People cut in line, they’re rude to each other, they talk on their cell phones and ignore whoever’s behind the counter. It drives me nuts.”

“Well do I know it.”

“Well do I know it,” Will repeated.

Asia’s green eyes lingered on his, reading the amusement on his face. “Was that strangely put?”

“Strangely put?” Will laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Asia asked.

“I don’t know … sometimes some of what you say sounds kind of old-fashioned.”

Asia popped a clam into her mouth and thought it over. “I should watch more TV, I guess.”

“No, no—it’s cool. I like it.”

“I’m glad you approve.”

“There you go again.”

Asia smiled at him, and his heart tripped a little. “So tell me more about you,” Will said.

“What would you like to know?”

Everything
, he wanted to say. But, somehow, he didn’t dare. This moment, with the air in his face and the strange, beautiful girl—it was so dreamlike that he was almost afraid to assert himself too much. He didn’t want to wake up. “Tell me anything.”

Asia shrugged.

“Okay … tell me about your family.”

Asia placed her hands on the countertop. Her long white fingers spread like tentacles, then were still. She looked at Will, and suddenly he felt as if he had slipped down a well. He was disoriented, as if he were falling … falling …

“I had a sister,” Asia said at last. Her eyes turned down to the table.

And that was all.

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

Silence.

“How did she die?”

Green eyes snapped up, met Will’s face. “In a fire.”

Will winced. He didn’t say that he was sorry again, although he wanted to. It was hard to say the words, but he forced them out: “I had a brother.”

“Yes,” Asia told him. “I know.”

He felt as if he had been stabbed in the heart—cold shock, disorienting pain. “You know?”

“Gretchen told me.”

“Ah.” Will looked to the window that opened onto the street. Someone was singing beneath a tree by the curbside. The kid had stringy hair and a tall, awkward body, and he was singing a sad song—something about the sea. It was Kirk Worstler.

The song seemed to be an old sailor’s song, but it wasn’t one that Will knew:

The song floated over them. Kirk had a surprisingly beautiful tenor voice.

“There’s something about losing a sibling, I think …,” Will said at last.

“It haunts you,” Asia said.

Haunts
. Yes, that was the word. Will felt haunted.

The hardest thing for Will to accept was that Tim would never be anything else—never anything else but dead. It didn’t comfort Will to think of him in heaven, waiting for all of his loved ones to die and join him. And it didn’t comfort him to think that God had a plan. If God had a plan, surely it wasn’t a plan to
kill off an eighteen-year-old right after his first year of college, to tear him from his mother before his life had even begun. What kind of crappy plan was that? These things that people said to Will—“Everything happens for a purpose,” “He’s with your grandfather now,” “It’s God’s will”—all of these murmurings were just words to Will. He understood that people wanted to comfort him. But the words were just pitiful attempts to distract him from the fact that Tim was gone, and that nothing in Will’s life—not a wife, not a career, not children—would ever be Tim. People spoke to him of the circle of life.
But life isn’t a circle
, Will thought.
It’s a straight line leading in one direction—like a gangplank
.

The only people who really bothered Will were the “cherish the memories” people. They kept insisting that Will should be thankful for the time that he and his brother had shared. They said that Will should always remember the good times and be on the lookout for signs of Tim everywhere. But Will didn’t want to cherish the memories. Will didn’t miss the idea of Tim—he missed Tim. The flesh-and-blood brother who had once busted Will’s nose, and who had blamed Will when he broke a window in the potato barn, and who had cried so hard at the end of
Charlotte’s Web
that he threw up.

So it was a relief, sort of, to find someone who really knew how he was feeling.
It haunts you
. “People keep telling me that I’ll get over it, but—”

“You never get over it.” Asia’s voice was a hatchet falling—sharp, fatal.

“No?”

“Never.” Asia’s eyes burned.

At the nearby table, one of the girls leaned over to whisper to the other. They both laughed, casting narrow-eyed glances at Asia. He thought about how stupid it was to envy people you didn’t even know. Sure, Asia was beautiful. But Will was certain that Asia would trade that beauty in a heartbeat to have her sister back. Those girls saw only the outside. They couldn’t possibly guess the reality.

It haunts you. You never get over it
.

“That’s what I thought,” Will said at last.

Will ran his fingers over the recorder. He sat on his bed with legs crossed, the mussed covers pushed back around him. Guernsey was beside him, her warm chin resting on his knee.

Ever since Will had taken the flute to the antiques store, it had occupied a chunk of his mind. Why hadn’t he ever heard Tim play it? Why would his brother have
an ancient recorder, anyway? Why not just a regular flute? Where had it come from? Had Tim found it, or had someone given it to him?

The night air outside was still, cut only by the sound of crickets.

He looked at the smooth bone carefully, wondering what kind of animal it had come from. The recorder was the length of his forearm, so it must have come from something large. A deer, perhaps. Or a sheep.

Will tried to recall the tune of the song Kirk had been singing earlier, but it was hopeless. Tim’s musical gift had passed over Will completely. Between Gretchen—who had a beautiful singing voice—and Tim’s guitar and perfect vocal pitch, Will figured that he should have picked up some talent by osmosis. But he hadn’t. Will had always liked it when Tim and Gretchen sang together. Sometimes Tim would play the guitar, and sometimes Johnny. Gretchen could hold down the melody while Tim carved out the low harmony. Will had always been tone-deaf, even before the accident that stole the hearing from his right ear, and the music had sounded like magic to him. It seemed greater than sound; it was a fabric Gretchen and Tim were weaving together. But it was pleasure mixed with pain. For even though Tim was his brother, not Gretchen’s, and Gretchen was his friend, not Tim’s, when they sang together Will felt the tender pain of exclusion. He knew they didn’t mean to make him feel that way. It was as if they had lost themselves so completely in the music that Will had ceased to exist for them.

He was secretly glad that Gretchen never wanted to sing in public. He was relieved that she wouldn’t join Tim’s band. Will didn’t want the world to hear them together. He knew what they would say. Gretchen with her wild beauty and Tim with the chiseled features of a movie star—everyone would think they were a couple. And even if they weren’t, Will would feel like a child watching his parents drive away, without waving, in the family sedan.

Will placed his lips at the edge of the flute and blew a note. It emerged uneven, but Will was surprised at how sweet it sounded.

“I know, I know, I’m not the brilliant musician,” Will said as Guernsey’s low growl rumbled against his knee. He stroked her soft ears, black flecked with white—evidence of her age—and she nosed his fingers.