The day Skipper decides to go and find her oldest sister, Nora, all the mussels are stolen from Gull Gang Rock.
Skipper picks her way along the shore. The rocks are slick with wet seaweed and the retreating ocean tide. Everything gleams in the fading orange-yellow light. Soon it will pour, and she regrets not wearing her rain jacket. She is twenty-two and generally considers herself invulnerable to things as ordinary as weather.
Gull Gang Rock is a particularly large rock jutting out among the waves beneath a ruined wooden pier. Carmen, the middle Shimizu sister, gave it its name when they were younger, based on all the brassy-voiced laughing gulls that hang out there.
Carmen loves naming things. It’s her way of claiming ownership, and it’s annoying, but the names stick anyway.
For example, Skipper’s real name is Rosa, but it’s been many years since anyone has called her that. When they started fixing up their boat, Carmen began calling her Skipper as a tease, because it was all Skipper wanted to talk about. The more annoying Skipper found it, the more Carmen used it. But the irritation rubbed smooth over the years, and now all that’s left is the residue of affection.
Skipper is medium height and wiry, with short-cropped brown hair, thick eyebrows, and a hunch to her shoulders like she’s trying to figure out the secret of evaporating. As that is impossible, she avoids most people instead, which is one reason she is down here by the beach at this particular moment.
As the familiar stink of rotting sargassum fills her nose, something glints in a tidal pool, warm from the afternoon. A half-crushed plastic bottle is caught in the rocks. She reaches out with a long-handled pincher and wrestles it free, tossing it over her shoulder into the sack on her back. It rattles with the few other odds and ends she’s found: a comb, a sturdy aluminum bottle, and a doll missing a leg, a head, and most of its clothes. Selling a hundred pieces of garbage will cover a day of their grandma’s medication.
A truck comes every other month to haul away plastic, metal, and glass painstakingly skimmed from a giant slurried patch a half-day’s sail from the harbor. The metal and glass gets recycled, the plastic fed to vats of hungry little worms in giant factories up north in the city.
Skipper wishes she were out in the ocean, dragging her nets through gunky water, but a monster storm is on the way, and even Skipper knows better than to be caught out in it. Some people blame the government for overseeding rain clouds this season. On this point, Skipper agrees with Grandma: People should never have gotten into the business of trying to manage the weather.
She’s come down to the beach to collect mussels. Guilt pricks her: It’s Grandma’s birthday, and she should be helping Carmen assemble the meal. But lately all she feels at home is a smothering, like she can’t breathe. She doesn’t know when it started. Perhaps she’s lived her whole life this way and never noticed until now.
Skipper pries a translucent, tattered white bag free. It reads Thank you in purple letters, a polite desire transmitted across the fifty years since plastic bags were ubiquitous. Inside is a half-decomposed baby turtle. She shakes the bag until the fishy carcass tips out. All morning at home, she waited for a knock, Nora appearing in the doorway just in time for the party. Nora would apologize for not letting them know she was coming home, but she wanted to surprise them. Not that Nora is good at keeping them informed anyway. She is a terrible letter writer.
Nora moved up coast for college ten years ago. She used to come home for the holidays once or twice a year, greasy-faced from the city air and exhausted from riding in the front bucket seat of an automated commercial truck. It takes her twelve hours of sleep to recover, but it’s the cheapest way to travel: a long ten-hour drive over broken highways, with only two stops to recharge. Nora dehydrates herself and abstains from food for a day beforehand and arrives home hungry and parched. Then Grandma fusses over her for a week in a way she never fusses over Carmen or Skipper, until Nora must do the reverse trip all over again.
Nora didn’t move back home when she graduated. She got a job working for a Renewal lab testing agricultural products before they go to market. Since then, her visits home have become less frequent, and Nora has worn soft in Skipper’s mind like a much-patched denim jacket.
Skipper fantasizes about sailing to the city, is even saving money for it, but it never happens.
Over a month and a half ago in late September, they received a message from one of Nora’s colleagues—his name is John—saying Nora was gone. They hadn’t heard from her in almost two months, and her last paycheck bounced. The colleague thought she’d returned home and wanted to know if they should mail her things from the lab: a thin, silk scarf, a yellow teapot painted with sunflowers, a chipped mug with bees on it, and several boxes of books.
For a brief, excited week, Skipper prepared for Nora’s arrival. She stayed home and cleaned the house from top to bottom so thoroughly even their grandmother muttered something dangerously close to approval. She fixed the squeak to the guest room door. They planned a big meal. Except Nora never arrived. It took a week of agonizing back and forth to clarify that John-the- colleague, in fact, doesn’t know where Nora is or anything useful, despite the, PhD, included prominently in his message signature.
At first, Skipper and Carmen thought maybe Nora took a de- tour—as if there is more than just one route from the city to the town. But another two weeks came and went, and they had to assume the colleague was wrong.
All messages to Nora prompt only the frustrating automated reply she’s used for years: Hello, I do not check this inbox often, as I do not believe in sharing my personal business with corporations. If you need to reach me, you know how to reach me. Thank you!
Nora’s quaint paranoia is no longer endearing or amusing.
“She just wants to be mysterious. It’s selfish,” Carmen says. Carmen and Nora don’t get along.
This morning, as Carmen and Skipper were yanking onions in the garden for Grandma’s birthday dinner, John-the-colleague, PhD, wrote again: We’ll need to dispose of Nora’s personal property if you don’t arrange for shipping in a week. We have a new staff member starting, and as I am sure you agree, he has a right to space for his personal things.
The price he then quoted to freight her things back was enough to make Carmen’s lip curl. “It’s not worth that much,” she said, ever practical. “She wouldn’t have left the stuff if it meant anything to her.”
Except—except! It is the mention of the mug with the bees. Bees and boats. Skipper painted that mug herself back in high school art class. She gave it to Nora right before she went away. And it means something, that Nora’s kept it, sipped from it, put it where she could see it for ten years. It must be more than chipped by now, maybe glued back together. Nora wouldn’t have “just left” it.
“Do you think she’s in trouble?” Skipper asked for the thirteenth time this morning.
“She was always a little thoughtless,” Grandma said, more lucid than usual. “I’m sure she’s just gone off and forgotten to let anyone know.”
Carmen wrote to the police and an old friend she knew in the city—Carmen has friends everywhere—without satisfaction. But it is a city, and cities are places a person can get lost. No one knows where Nora is. No one is even bothering to look.
Skipper has been hoping, deep down, Carmen will fix everything. Carmen is two years younger than Nora and four years older than Skipper. And while Nora may be the one with big ideas, Carmen is the one who has woken up every day at six since she was twelve, earned a college degree and nursing license while working a full-time job, and still folds the laundry after all of that. Not much can fatigue Carmen, and Carmen’s creeping failure now makes Skipper more anxious than anything.
Skipper reaches Gull Gang Rock and pauses to balance in its shadow, bracing herself for the freezing spray. Once, this beach was covered in white sand, before rocks were dumped to slow erosion. The rocks are perfect for a certain kind of mussels.
Last year, she seeded a long rope with mussel larvae and hung it down in the ocean water in the lee of Gull Gang Rock. The mussels are minimally engineered, which means they are cheap and are more likely to die. In nature, baby mussels are born in the gills of adult mussels, and their larvae nestle in the tissue of unsuspecting fish until they’re big enough to survive. Why would a fish put up with that?
There are never a lot of fish around, but she’s recently noticed baby mussels budding beyond her rope in the cracks and crevices nearby. It’s a reason to hope: nature returning, one step at a time. Maybe a sign of something more. It’s not that Skipper believes in things like that, but she wishes she did, so she lets herself pretend, just like she pretends Nora is on her way home.
Skipper comes by this rock every so often to examine the mussels and their pretty black shells, shiny and expectant. The last time, there was maybe a bucket worth of big guys ready to collect.
Her mouth waters in anticipation, remembering how they tasted years ago: melted butter, salt, onions, and several cloves of garlic, and the soft flesh parting between her teeth. Scarcity looms following a poor harvest year due to flooding, and the mussels promise a treat before a long march of cabbage, potatoes, and beets.
When she edges around to the spot though, the mussels are gone, and not just the big ones. She balances on one leg and leans around the rock to be sure, thinking at first maybe the rope just slipped. But no, there are a few tiny ones, that’s it. Someone has been here, has taken her whole stash.
She is breathless from the violation of it. Then rage floods in, and she curses. It is enough to distract her from the danger of her surroundings. A wave comes up and slams into her, and on top of every- thing else, it’s as if the whole world means to knock her down. Only a childhood spent on boats saves her from falling.
Her canvas shoes and the legs of her pants are soaked. Her anger flows out as quickly as it came, leaving instead a vast, familiar despair that isn’t quite sadness so much as a cavity inside like she will always be hungry. She tried to explain the feeling once to Carmen, when she was foolish enough to think it was something everyone felt sometimes.
Apparently not. And Carmen, with her unfortunate hawklike perception, has learned to spot it in the vacancy of Skipper’s expression. She refers to it as Skipper’s “empty face.”
Suddenly, all Skipper wants is to be back in the kitchen drinking a hot mug of cider. She turns back to shore, overwhelmed by the distance. The thudding of her heart drowns out the rain, and her fingers tingle with the aftershock of terror. The sun sinks rapidly behind a sickly stand of palms designed to withstand mercurial weather patterns, and the rocky beach is swathed in shadows. Everyone else from town is safe at home. Skipper is alone out here, like a creature on the verge of extinction.
A bell tolls, breaking the spell. She feels more than sees the weight of sudden clouds thickening behind her, rolling in from the sea. She hurries.
Choppy waves lick her feet, nipping at her ankles as she scampers from rock to rock to rock. The faster she moves, the more fear rises inside her, until she is just a vessel in motion. She slips a couple times, cries out, but there is no one to hear, so she keeps going, a scrape on her right knee stinging from the salt.
The first fat raindrops catch her a few feet from shore, and she slows so she doesn’t fall again. She trembles in relief. A ba-ba-BOOM shakes her sternum. The sky tears open, and great sheets of rain wash down. She runs through the tall sawgrass, half-empty bag of trash dangling off one elbow, toward a cluster of red cedar trees, but she is already drenched.
She dreads the heat of Carmen’s temperamental gaze, the harsh cut of Grandma’s voice as she asks Skipper what she was thinking, as if Skipper weren’t a grown woman.
Lightning strikes behind her so close it smells like ozone.
Maybe this will be the day the ocean rises up and cleans their town off the face of the Earth. She doesn’t hope for it, so much as she’s grown up expecting it: Grandma carried off by a wave, still in her chair with a blanket over her lap and her eyebrows bent in rage, Carmen treading water, lecturing everyone how they should have prepared better for this.
Rain cuts Skipper’s cheeks, and she runs along the muddy path by memory alone, past fallow fields stained burgundy with Amaranthine, the ubiquitous two-in-one fungicide weedkiller that smells oddly like vanilla. A ghost from long ago touches her palm, Nora’s slim fingers clutched against hers, Carmen telling them to hurry up, they are going to be late for dinner again.
Skipper arrives home, shivering uncontrollably, face so wet it’s impossible to see her tears.
“Come in,” Grandma calls from her chair. “Why were you out in this weather?”
A fire crackles in the fireplace, and a small chicken sits on the table, skin glistening and bronze. And it shouldn’t be like this. It’s wrong to celebrate when Nora isn’t here.
Carmen sets the table. “What’s happened?” she asks, but Skipper’s teeth are chattering too hard to say: Don’t you hear the echo in our hollow house? There isn’t enough inside to keep the roof up; any moment it will come tumbling down. ...
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