Lux (The Nocte Trilogy 3)

As the weeks go by, I feel better and better, even if my brother seems to feel worse.

Each day he sinks deeper, and I grow more and more helpless because I don’t know how to reach him.

“Come with Dare and I to see the Iredale,” I plead with him one rainy morning. Finn looks out the window, finally lifting his nose from his journal.

“No thanks,” he says woodenly. “I’m not into being a third wheel.”

“You aren’t,” I tell him, but he won’t listen and I go with Dare alone.

“The Iredale ran aground in 1906,” I explain to him as we walk down the beach, to where the remains of the old wreck rise out of the mist. Its weathered bones look at once ghostly and impressive, skeletal and freaky. “No one died, thank goodness. They waited for weeks for the weather to clear enough to tow her back out to sea, but she got so entrenched in the sand, that they couldn’t. She’s been in this spot ever since.”

We’re standing in front of her now, her masts and ribs poking out from the sand and arching toward the sky. Dare reaches out and runs a hand along one of her ribs, calm and reverent.

I swallow hard.

“It’s a rite of passage around here,” I tell him. “To skip school and come out here with your friends.”

Except I never had any friends, other than Finn.

“So you and Finn came here a lot?” Dare asks, as though he read my mind, and his question isn’t condescending, he’s just curious.

I nod. “Yeah. We like to stop and get coffee and come sit. It’s a good way to kill the time.”

“So show me,” Dare says quietly, taking my hand and pulling me inside the sparse shell. We sit on the damp sand, and stare through the corpse of the ship toward the ocean, where the waves rise and fall and the seagulls fly in loops.

“This must’ve been a good place to grow up,” Dare muses as he takes in the horizon.

I nod. “Yeah. I can’t complain. Fresh air, open water… I guess it could only have been better if I didn’t live in a funeral home.”

I laugh at that, but Dare looks at me sharply.

“Was it really hard?” he asks, half concerned, half curious.

I pause. Because was it? Was it the fact that I lived in a funeral home that made my life hard, or the fact that my brother was crazy and so we were ostracized?

I shrug. “I don’t know. I think it was everything combined.”

Dare nods, accepting that, because sometimes that’s how life is. A puzzle made up of a million pieces, and when one piece doesn’t exactly fit, it throws the rest of them off.

“Have you ever thought of moving away?” he asks after a few minutes. “I mean, especially now, I think maybe getting a break from…death might be healthy.”

I swallow hard because obviously, over the years, that’s been a recurring fantasy of mine. To live somewhere else, far from a funeral home. But there’s Finn, and so of course I would have never left here before. And now there’s college and my brother wants to go alone.

“I’m going away to college in the Fall,” I remind him, not mentioning anything else.

“Ah, that’s right,” he says, leaning back in the sand, his back pressed against a splintered rib. “Do you feel up to it? After everything, I mean.”

After your mom died, he means.

“I have to be up to it,” I tell him. “Life doesn’t stop because someone dies. That’s something that living in a funeral home has taught me.” And having my mother die and the world kept turning.

He nods again. “Yeah, I guess that’s true. But sometimes, we wish it could. I mean, I know I did. It didn’t seem fair that my mom was just gone, and everyone kept acting like nothing had changed. The stores kept their doors open and selling trivial things, airplanes kept flying, boats kept sailing… it was like I was the only one who cared that the world lost an amazing person.” His vulnerability is showing, and it touches me deep down, in a place I didn’t know I had.

I turn to him, willing to share something, too. It’s only fair. You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.

“I was mad at old people for a while,” I admit sheepishly. “I know it’s stupid, but whenever I would see an elderly person out and about with their walker and oxygen tank, I was furious that Death didn’t decide to take them instead of my mom.”

Dare smiles, a grin that lights up the beach.