and smell different. It will be called by a different name. But it will be the same unpredictable thing.
‘Are you sure you want to go?’ Henry asks, and I’m sure and not sure.
I’ve been thinking about it since we got out of the car. I’ve been away from it for too long. I thought about it in the bookshop before lunch as I watched Henry run his hands over the spines of books, hovering over the ones he loved. I thought about him living a life without the bookstore, and at the same time I thought about me, living a life without the ocean. A dry, bookless world. It’s too bleak even to imagine.
I hear the water as we get closer, the hush of it, circling and flattening out. When it appears, I’m ready. It’s long and achingly flat, not like the rough waves that heap over themselves continually back home.
Henry and I sit on the beach and stare at it for a long time. This is the water of my dreams and nightmares. Sometimes it’s the thing that takes Cal away, dragging him out in currents, and sometimes it’s the thing that brings him back, bleached like that beaked whale. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, he’s alive, and grabbing at those silver fish.
I tell Henry about the three layers to the ocean: the sunlight layer, the twilight zone, and the midnight zone, each named for the amount of sun in them. In the midnight zone, creatures have to make their own light. Before Cal died, the midnight zone was my favourite. The idea of no light fascinated me.
‘I wanted to dive, do you remember?’ I ask, and Henry says he couldn’t understand how I could be that brave.
Bravery had nothing to do with it. I hadn’t imagined that anything terrible would ever happen. To me, or to the people I loved. I assumed we’d always be safe.
I think about the things I wanted to see – killer whales, hatchet fish, and vampire squid. I think about how I pored over books: fascinated by dragon fish, metal and frill, teeth and eye; fascinated by beautiful creatures, too, in colours that I’ve never seen in the surface world, both electric and pale, creatures glowing like fresh snow in the darkness.
‘It scares me, but I want it again,’ I tell Henry.
‘You shouldn’t feel guilty about that,’ he says, and I wonder if that’s what I’ve been waiting to hear, that I’m allowed to love it again.
‘You want to swim?’ he asks.
‘Yes, but I’m not ready yet.’
We sit for another hour. I watch the ocean and Henry. He makes a sandcastle and puts a ring of shells around the battlements. Before we leave, he walks to the edge to wash his hands. I think he does it deliberately, so that he can come back and splash me, and I can feel the water on my skin.
There’s a soft pink glow in the sky by the time Henry drops me at the warehouse so that I can get ready for tonight. I remember something that Gus said to me once. ‘It’ll just arrive. A feeling of being okay. If you do all the things we’ve talked about, it’ll arrive.’ He spoke as though it was a physical thing, something as real as a package that would come to me in the mail.
As I step out of the van, I catch a glimpse of myself in the window. I’m not the old me or the me I’ve been for the last eleven months. I’m another me. I still don’t quite recognise her. She looks, if I had to describe her, expectant.
By the time I get back to the bookstore the sky has clouded over. ‘It’ll rain by the end of the night,’ I tell Henry.
‘Let’s hope not,’ he says, and smiles nervously.
We walk to Shanghai Dumplings where his parents, George, Martin and Lola are meeting us. ‘Since it’s the last night of the world, they agreed to have dinner,’ Henry says, and then we go quiet. I keep waiting for him to say something, to flirt with me again, to make things clear between us. I wonder if I should tell him that the letter I wrote three years ago wasn’t a goodbye.
Mai Li gives us some menus after we’ve walked into the restaurant, and tells Henry that his parents are fighting again. ‘I don’t know what it’s about, but it seems bad. Your mum’s crying.’
We walk up the stairs, and see that Mai Li’s right.