Words in Deep Blue

CATH CROWLEY is an award-winning author of young adult novels, including Graffiti Moon and A Little Wanting Song. She lives, writes, and teaches creative writing in Melbourne, Australia. Visit her online at CathCrowley.com.au or find her on Twitter at @CathCrowley

Rachel

I open my eyes at midnight to the sound of the ocean and my brother s breathing. It s been ten months since Cal drowned, but the dreams still escape.

I m confident in the dreams, liquid with the sea. I m breathing underwater, eyes open and unstung by salt. I see fish, a school of silver--bellied moons thrumming beneath me. Cal appears, ready to identify, but these aren t fish we know. Mackerel, he says, his words escaping in bubbles that I can hear. But the fish aren t mackerel. Not bream, not any of the names we offer. They re pure silver. An unidentified species, we say as we watch them fold and unfold around us. The water has the texture of sadness: salt and heat and memory.

Cal is in the room when I wake. He s milky--skinned in the darkness, dripping of ocean. Impossible, but so real I smell salt and apple gum. So real I see the scar on his right foot -a long--healed cut from glass on the beach. He s talking about the dream fish: pure silver, unidentified, and gone.

The room is dark except for the moonlight. I feel through the air for the dream, but instead I touch the ears of Cal s Labrador, Woof. He follows me everywhere since the funeral, a long line of black I can t shake.

Usually, he sleeps on the end of my bed or in the doorway of my room, but for the last two nights he s slept in front of my packed suitcases. I can t take him with me. You re an ocean dog. I run my finger along his nose. You d go mad in the city.

There s no sleeping after dreams of Cal, so I pull on clothes and climb out the window. The moon is three--quarters empty. The air is as hot as day. I mowed late yesterday, so I collect warm blades of grass on the soles of my feet as I move.

Woof and I get to the beach quickly. There s almost nothing between our house and the water. There s the road, a small stretch of scrub, and then dunes. The night is all tangle and smell. Salt and tree; smoke from a fire far up the beach. It s all memory, too. Summer swimming and night walks, hunts for fig shells and blennies and starfish.

Farther, toward the lighthouse, there s the spot where the beaked whale washed ashore: a giant at six meters, the right side of its face pressed against sand, its one visible eye open. There was a crowd of people around it later -scientists and locals studying and staring. But first there was Mum and Cal and me in the early cold. I was nine years old, and with its long beak it looked to me like it was half sea creature, half bird. I wanted to study the deep water it had come from, the things it might have seen. Cal and I spent the day looking through Mum s books and on the internet. The beaked whale is considered one of the least understood creatures of the sea, I copied into my journal. They live at depths so deep that the pressure could kill.

I don t believe in ghosts or past lives or time travel or any of the strange things that Cal liked to read about. But every time I stand on the beach, I wish us back -to the day of the whale, to any day before Cal died. With what I know, I d be ready. I d save him.

It s late, but there ll be people from school out, so I walk farther up to a quiet spot. I dig myself into the dunes, burying my legs past my hips, and stare at the water. It s shot with moon, silver leaking all over the surface.

I ve tried and tried to stop thinking about the day Cal drowned, but I can t. I hear his words. I hear his footsteps through the sand. I see him diving: a long, frail arc that disappears into sea.