The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,33

brothers?”

“My guess is they were all on that ferry, probably stowaways. They’d have gotten off by now, even if they made it all the way to Seattle.”

“You owe it to Martin.”

I have no idea who Martin is, but Sam does. The color drains from his cheeks. He flies into the wheelhouse and I follow close behind him.

“You know my dad?” he says, making both Dad and Uncle Gorky jump and slosh their tea. “My dad’s name is Martin; do you know him?”

Dad sets down his mug and stands up. “Sam, I knew your dad. And I know he was killed in the tsunami.”

“NO!” Sam is shouting. “He’s not dead, he’s not dead. He’s swimming with the orcas.”

He sounds like a little kid, not a sixteen-year-old boy, and I would be embarrassed for him if I hadn’t seen the way the orca had helped him, or felt the way I had when I touched that cold black nose. The minute Sam says those ridiculous words, I get it. The way he looked at me when he woke up; his disappointment at being rescued. Sam slumps onto the floor, the way you do when you’ve lost all hope and can never, ever go back.

Dad and Uncle Gorky look down at the oil marks soaked into the galley floor and out the window at the silent sea—anywhere but at Sam. I don’t know how long they plan to leave him there—maybe forever—but I can’t stand it.

I sit on the floor and wrap my arms around him while he buries his head in my shoulder and soaks me with his snot and tears. “I should probably find my brothers,” he finally says to my dad, as if the memory of them is an orange life ring—something tangible to hold on to in the midst of a storm.

Without looking away from the ocean, my dad just dips his head in acknowledgment and says, “We’ll find them.”

—

Later Sam and I are down in the fo’c’sle, and even though it’s pitch dark, I can tell he’s not asleep. I let him keep the big bunk because it seemed childish to ask for it back, so I’m in the hammock that was my bed when I was much smaller. It’s like sleeping in a mummy bag with my arms pinned to my sides.

“Sam?” I whisper.

“Hmm?”

“You know how you asked me about the whales? Well”—I pause—“I’m pretty sure the orca helped me save you.”

I can just barely hear him breathing.

“I thought so at first, too,” he says, “like he was telling me to kick off my shoes and swim with him. I felt like he was taking care of me.”

“Maybe he was.” I am thinking about the orca’s smooth nose and his eye as big and round as a giant gumball.

“I don’t think so,” Sam says, as if he’s suddenly aged a hundred years. “But thanks for not laughing.”

“You didn’t have any shoes on,” I tell him, as if this proves something, but he’s already shut the door on that thought. He doesn’t respond and I hear him turn over in the big bunk, something that is nearly impossible in my tiny hammock.

I fall asleep and dream I am a hermit crab, living squished in the toe of a brown boot at the bottom of the deep blue sea.

Remember when my mother said “You wait until your whole world falls out from under you”? It turns out the world has many bottoms.

For the next two days, Jack and I somehow make our way around the Matanuska without Sam, but we still look for him behind every corner. As minutes turn into hours, the reality that Sam is really not on this boat burns in my chest, scarring my heart and my lungs until it’s hard to take a deep breath. We find his jacket in one of the lifeboats on the side of the ferry, flapping in the wind like a detached brown wing. Now Jack sleeps with it every night, burying his face in the rough corduroy as if it has all the answers. He breathes in Sam’s smell, believing in that Jack way that Sam will still be found, that he’s out there somewhere, alive.

The only person who might have seen where Sam went got off the boat two stops back at some small port in Southeast, the rain torrential. The chicken lady hobbled down the metal off-ramp, an orange-clad ferry worker on each of her elbows, her wild hair whipping them in the face until the