You, Me, and the Sea Read online

  “I’m so sorry, my darlings,” she said. “Bear just called me. Your father is gone. He died an hour ago. I did not even know . . .” Her lips kept moving, but a buzzing noise in my ears drowned her words. Amir’s hands found mine. Cradled in Rei’s arms, we clung to each other.

  Chapter Seven

  My father’s death released something within Bear. He planted himself on the front porch facing the road and drank all day long. It seemed to us that he never moved far from that spot, but one evening after we watered the horses, Amir went to fetch the whittling knives and returned to the back porch empty-handed.

  “He took them,” he said. “Your father’s knives. I put them on the floor right next to my bed last night. They were there this morning. Now they’re gone. He took them.”

  The moment Amir said this, a wave of understanding passed through me. For so many years I had blamed myself for misplacing the things that I loved, for forgetting which tree pocket in the grove held my stored treasures, for misplacing Rei’s library books, for losing the pretty little doll my classmate had given me and the fairy Amir had made for me. But I understood at last that all along it had been Bear who had been taking my things.

  “THE CHILDREN NEED to go to school,” Rei told Bear. She stirred a pot of soup at the kitchen’s small white stove. “You are their guardian now, and you need to start thinking of their needs above your own. You are twenty years old. A young adult, but an adult nonetheless.”

  Bear gave no indication that he was listening. Rei passed bowls of soup around the table. Bear set upon his immediately, slurping so loudly that it unsettled a cloud of rage within me. Rei had told him that the soup was only for those who sat at the table, but I wished she’d let him eat on the porch by himself. Before I knew what I was doing, I picked up my spoon and threw it at my brother.

  “Hey!” Bear drew back his hand to strike me but suddenly Rei stood between us. Amir was so still that he nearly vibrated; his hand gripped his spoon as though he were readying to throw it, too.

  Bear glowered at us but dropped his hand down to the table, where it encircled a can of beer. It was the kind our father had drunk. In a few short weeks, Bear had adopted most of my father’s things. He even wore my father’s brown flannel shirt and his work boots. I tried not to look at Bear because each glance threatened to erase some memory of my father. It was why the sounds of my brother’s slurping had annoyed me so; it was as though Bear were demanding that I look at him and admit that he was all I had left of the family I’d been born into.

  Bear took another loud slurp of his soup. Then he said, “They’re not going to school anymore.”

  Rei shook her head. “They must go to school. It’s the law. You are their guardian. It’s you who will be held accountable.”

  This seemed to surprise Bear. “I dropped out and no one came after my father about it.”

  “You were fifteen. Merrow and Amir are ten.”

  Bear shrugged. “I’m not taking them.”

  Already, Little Earth felt like a memory. We had not been there since my father had died three weeks earlier. I still had a few books from the school’s little library hidden in my pillowcase. I longed to exchange them for new ones and to see the faces of my classmates.

  Teacher Julie had come to my father’s memorial service the week before when we poured his ashes into the sea at the bottom of the cliffs. The ocean had been strangely calm that day. Rain fell slowly, and each raindrop had landed in the water like a stone, a thousand stones, a million stones. Amir and I stood side by side up to our shins in the cold, dark ocean and watched the falling rain. Bear was a little ahead of us. I was surprised when he had walked right into the water; I’d never seen him in the ocean before. His eyes had been as cold and dark as the sea that day. He had not waited long before opening the urn and pouring out the stuff that was our father. Then he turned and walked right by us, out of the ocean and up the cliff path. Amir and I stood there until Rei touched our shoulders and urged us back to shore. Her long skirt had been gathered up in one hand, her exposed knees as pale as bone.

  Later that day, before she left Horseshoe Cliff, Teacher Julie handed me a cloth sack that held my journals. She had given me one each year I’d been at Little Earth and I’d filled them with my stories, comforted by her promise to help me keep them safe. I took the bag from her, knowing Bear would steal them and hardly caring. How could I care if I lost my stories when I had just lost my father?

  “I’ll teach them,” Rei told Bear in the kitchen now. She was still holding the soup ladle. “I’ll come as often as I can. I was a teacher once. I can arrange the papers to show that I’m in charge of the children’s schooling.”

  Bear set down his can of beer. The look on his face made me sit up in my chair. “The children?” he said. “There will only be one of them soon.”

  “What are you talking about?” Rei asked.

  “I’m sending Amir away.” He looked at me as he said this. “He never belonged here in the first place. He’s not our brother. He’s not our problem anymore.”

  “No!” I slammed my hands on the table. Bear’s beer can quivered, and he snatched it up, annoyed. Amir stared at my brother, and I saw his jaw twitch with fury. “Rei, you can’t let him do that!”

  “Bear, may I speak with you outside?” Rei asked.

  “No.”

  “This land belongs to all three of you. That’s how your father left it in his will.”

  It was the first I had heard of this. Amir and I exchanged a glance.

  “Not until they’re eighteen,” said Bear.

  “Yes, but until then your father left you in charge of both of them. You are Amir’s guardian. It’s what Jacob wanted. That is also in his will. I saw it myself.”

  “Did he put how I’m supposed to feed all of us in that will, too?”

  The garden and orchard were in as sad a state as they had ever been. Even in our grief, Amir and I were trying our best to take care of the land, but we were ten years old and our stamina only went so far. Bear knew what to do, he just didn’t want to do it. Without my father around to insist on Bear’s help, he did nothing.

  “Perhaps he meant for you to get a job,” Rei said. “Construction, maybe. House painting.”

  Bear snorted.

  “Then you must work as hard as your father did. You are his son, Bear. You have it in you to do just as he did and keep this family together. You were never hungry when he was alive.”

  “We were never hungry? Is that what he told you? And you believed him? Is that why you were always buying our piss-poor little vegetables and hauling away those stupid carvings, Rei? Is that why you were always bringing us the food you made? Because my father did such a good job providing for us?”

  Rei didn’t respond. Bear took a long drink of his beer. Then he leaned across the table toward me until he was close enough that his beer breath wet the tip of my nose. I forced myself to look right at him and not blink. “Were you never hungry when Dad was alive?” he asked. “Surprise everyone and tell the truth.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “I was never hungry,” I said. The lie came so easily, so enjoyably, that I felt a thrill in my stomach. When I glanced at Amir, I saw that he was struggling not to smile.

  Bear sat back and drank his beer. “It doesn’t matter. Rei, you know it would be easier for us without Amir.”

  Rei fell quiet. I stared at her, wondering if she would allow for this betrayal. But then she put her hands on her hips. Her cheeks were flushed with anger. I had known her my entire life, and I had never seen her look so furious.

  “Do you know how much money Amir’s carvings fetched before you took away his knife? No, I am sure you don’t. I’ll tell you this: Without Amir, you will not pay your tax bill. And that’s not all. If Amir is no longer your problem, then you will no longer be mine. I will not buy your vegetables. I will not help you sell anything made or grown here. You will be on your own.”

  I wanted to leap from the table an
d throw my arms around Rei. But I sat still, looking from Rei to my brother and back again. Amir did the same.

  Bear took a long drink from his can of beer, glowering at Rei over its rim. He did not say anything.

  “Amir stays at Horseshoe Cliff,” Rei continued. “You will give him back his knife so he can make the carvings that I will sell for you. And I will arrange to teach the children. You will watch over them in the manner your father expected. The manner that your mother would have wanted, too.”

  At this, Bear stood so abruptly that his chair fell back and hit the floor. His face was red, and he did not look at any of us. He grabbed a six-pack of beer from the fridge and strode out of the house, slamming the door behind him. As I watched him go, I had to clasp my fingers together to keep them from shaking. I was happy that Rei had spoken up for Amir—but I knew that Bear would punish us for witnessing his humiliation.

  IT DID NOT take long.

  That night, I was reading aloud in our bedroom when the door was thrown open. Bear loomed in the doorframe, swaying.

  “Get out,” he slurred. “You. Amir.” His hand slipped from the doorframe, and he stumbled forward a couple of steps before straightening. I stared at him, frozen in my bed. Across the room, Amir was frozen in his. “I said GET OUT!”

  “What do you mean?” I cried. “Where is he supposed to go?”

  “The shed.”

  “The shed?”

  “It’s freezing out there,” said Amir. He spoke in the cool voice he always used with Bear, the one that drove Bear crazy. I was never able to stay as calm as Amir, but I was working on it. If I couldn’t scare Bear the way he scared me, I could at least try to get under his skin the way that Amir managed to. Amir spoke in a way that seemed disconnected from his skinny body; it was the voice of a bigger man, made calm by the knowledge that he had the upper hand. Of course, his upper hand was only a bluff; Bear had all the power. We were children, and Bear was now the adult in charge.

  “You want to stay at Horseshoe Cliff? You’ll sleep in the toolshed,” Bear said. Spittle sat in the corners of his mouth, threatening release into the room. “You should never have been allowed in the house in the first place. From now on you can live like the other filthy pets that my father gave Merrow.” He stepped toward us. With one violent yank, Amir was on the ground. Bear towered over him. “Move.”

  Amir stood and slowly gathered his pillow and blanket into his arms.

  I scrambled to my feet, but Amir held up his hand, stopping me. He walked out of the room. When the front door opened, a blast of damp air swept through the cottage. The door shut.

  Bear looked down at me. I had learned that he loved to see me miserable, so I tried to hold my face expressionless. I couldn’t manage it. My skin felt hot with the rage that seeped up from my chest. I would never be like Amir, who so easily closed his anger into his fists, saving it. For when? I wondered when I watched Amir speak to my brother with such control. What moment was he saving up all of his anger for?

  “How could you do that to him?” I yelled at Bear. “You heard what Rei said! She’s not going to help you if you don’t let him stay.”

  Bear leaned down. I smelled his sour, unclean skin below the yeasty scent of beer. “Amir is staying,” he sneered. “In the toolshed.” On his way out of the room, Bear shoved his knee into Pal’s side, making my dog hit the floor with a pitiful yelp.

  I rushed to Pal and held him in my arms. He licked my face, reassuring me for a moment, but when he lifted himself off the ground, he would not set down one of his paws. “Poor boy,” I cried, burying my face in his warm fur.

  I thought of Amir out in the dark shed and when I did something mysterious happened: My room became the dark shed, too, and I lay on the dirt floor among the saws and shovels and picker baskets. I was Amir, without a parent, without a friend, without even a dog. A black loneliness gripped me. I dug my nails into my palm and my room became my room again.

  I could not stand to wait—Rei frequently said I was the most impatient child she had ever known—but now I did. I sat beside Pal and stroked his head and waited.

  When the tinny thump of Bear’s beer can returning to the table finally fell away, I peered into the kitchen. My brother’s head rested on the crook of his arms. His shoulders rose and fell with his deep, shuddering breaths. I grabbed my pillow and blanket and hurried outside with Pal limping along at my side. The front door closed with a hushed click behind us. The fog was so dense that I couldn’t see the shed until I was nearly upon it.

  When I opened the door, I heard Amir suck in his breath, but I couldn’t see him in the soupy blackness of the windowless room.

  “It’s me,” I whispered.

  He released a relieved choke of laughter.

  “Where are you?”

  “Here.”

  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that he’d set his blanket in the middle of the shed. Gleaming tools hung on the walls. I spread my blanket beside Amir’s and lay down. The ground was cold and damp.

  “We’ll tell Rei,” I said, pulling my blanket around me. My teeth would not stop chattering. “Rei will make Bear let you sleep inside again.”

  Amir was silent.

  “Amir?”

  “We can’t tell Rei.”

  “Why not?”

  “If she finds out how badly Bear treats us, she’ll take us both away from here. I could see she was thinking about it earlier today. She was trying to decide what to do. If she doesn’t trust Bear, she’ll take us away.”

  “Then we’ll live with Rei! And we can go to Little Earth again.”

  “Rei doesn’t get to decide if she keeps us. That’s not how it works. We’ll be sent away. Who knows where we’ll end up. Or if we’ll be allowed to stay together.”

  “Of course we’d be allowed to stay together,” I said. But I realized it was a subject Amir knew more about than I. He had been sent away from everyone and everything he knew before, when his mother died.

  “We’ll stay together if we stay here.” Amir’s voice was determined. “Even with Bear . . . even with sleeping in this shed . . .” He folded his arms behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. “I think sometimes of my friends at the orphanage and how they would love it here. The ocean. The beach. The garden and the orchard and the grove. So many places to run and explore and . . . be free. And Rei is a good person. Not everyone is like her. She watches over us. I’ll sleep in the shed if it means that we can stay here, together.”

  I didn’t have to see his face to know his expression in that moment. The fierce way that Amir spoke of Horseshoe Cliff, and his certainty that we would never be parted, thrilled me. He seemed older than me then, more confident of his ability to shape his own destiny. His bravery always seemed to me a choiceless matter; it was just who he was.

  “Fine,” I said. “We won’t tell Rei. But if you have to sleep out here, I will, too.”

  When I told Amir how Bear had kicked Pal, Amir worried over our dog in a voice so gentle that Pal burrowed himself under Amir’s arm and licked his chin repeatedly. We talked about the other children and teachers from Little Earth and what they might be doing, how strange it was that we would no longer attend the school. The fog outside must have grown thin because moonlight suddenly fell through the shed’s many cracks, brightening the room and making the teeth on the saws that lined the wall glimmer.

  “Oooooooo,” I moaned, ghostlike.

  “Spoooky,” Amir joined in, making his long fingers scramble through the air like spiders on a web.

  Our laughter excited Pal. He stood and yawned and then tugged at our blankets, growling and playful even as he limped. We shushed him, laughing, but we knew the noise didn’t really matter. Bear was passed out in the cottage and wouldn’t stir until morning. There was no one else for miles in any direction. We were alone.

  MY BROTHER NEVER said anything about me sleeping in the shed each night with Amir, but a few weeks later a silver truck rumbled down the driveway pulli
ng a horse trailer behind it. When the truck stopped in front of the cottage, a man with a beard as silver as his truck stepped out.

  “Hello,” I said, hopping down the porch steps to stand before him. Amir trailed after me more slowly, holding one of the wood animals he’d been whittling in one hand and the knife that Bear had returned to him in the other.

  “Hello, young lady,” the man said. He cocked his head and looked Amir up and down, his gaze resting for a moment on the knife in his hand. “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “You’re that Indian boy Jacob took in a few years back. I see he managed to teach you to whittle.”

  There was something in his voice that set my teeth on edge. I took a step forward. “Are you looking for Bear?”

  The man gave me an amused smile and was about to respond when he caught sight of something over my shoulder. I turned, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand, and saw Bear walking toward us with Old Mister and Guthrie on either side of him. Their lead lines encircled his hands in the way that my father had always warned us to avoid. If your hands were tangled up in a lead line, a horse could drag you with him if he spooked and galloped away. Bear had never had any interest in the horses, and it showed in the careless way he led them.

  “Hey, Lawton,” he called gruffly. He didn’t look in my direction. “Here they are.”

  My heartbeat sped up.

  “What’s going on?” asked Amir.

  Bear ignored us. The stranger walked around the horses, running his hand along their haunches, lifting each of their legs and looking at their teeth.

  “Let’s see them move. Walk them toward the truck for me,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked, but the man didn’t answer. I ran up beside Bear and tried to grab Guthrie’s lead line from him, but Bear pushed me away. I stumbled backward and fell hard against the ground.

  “Easy, Bear,” the man said sharply. He walked over to me and reached out his hand. I pushed it away.