Finn
“Save me,” I say, and my tongue feels like wood. “And I’ll save you.”
The words settle between us.
Calla sits across from me at the long table in her workroom, one hand resting beside the sheet of paper. She doesn’t touch it. She hasn’t touched it with her bare hands since she unfolded it.
Now it lies open between us…covered in my handwriting.
On Calla’s phone, propped against a jar of paintbrushes, Mack’s face has gone very still.
“That’s what it says?” she asks.
I look down again.
Serva me, servabo te.
Over and over, filling every available inch of the page. Some lines are small and controlled. Others cross over one another, the letters pressed so hard into the paper that they’ve left furrows in it. Near the bottom, the handwriting deteriorates into something frantic. The final words trail into the torn edge as though whoever wrote them ran out of room but not urgency.
I know the forward slant of the letters. The narrow loops. The way the tail of every a hooks too much to the right.
I know them because they’re mine.
“Finn?” Calla’s voice is careful.
That frightens me almost as much as the page.
Calla is rarely careful with me. She doesn’t need to be. We have spent our entire lives jabbing at each other’s bruises and trusting the other one not to press hard enough to hurt.
“What?”
“Did you write this?”
“No.”
It comes out too fast. Her eyes lift to mine.
“I didn’t,” I say again. “I’ve never seen it before.”
I have never seen this page before tonight. I have never sat somewhere writing the same sentence until my hand cramped. I have never folded a confession into a paper boat and left it in a cave beneath my parents’ property.
“It looks like yours,” Mack says quietly, from Calla’s phone.
I glance at the screen. “Thank you, forensic document examiner.”
Calla studies my face. “Maybe someone copied it.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“And why? And where did they get a sample?”
“It could’ve been anything, Finn.” Calla pauses, nibbling at her thumb nail. “Old schoolwork. A birthday card. Something you left here before college.”
“Okay. So someone found it, practiced my handwriting, filled a page with Latin, folded it into a boat, and put it in the cave for Mom to find?”
“I didn’t say it was a good explanation,” she answers limply, looking down at the page. “Do you have a better one?”
No one does.
Beyond the windows, the grounds have disappeared into darkness, turning the glass into a mirror.
My reflection sits opposite of Calla’s, its head bent over the page.
I look up.
My reflection does not.
For one terrible, impossible second, I watch myself continue staring at the handwriting.
Then my reflection slowly raises its head and meets my eyes.
I haven’t moved.
Cold spreads beneath my skin, my veins freezing with shock and I jerk back from the table.
The figure in the glass moves with me.
Perfectly.
Just like it’s supposed to, just like it always has.
“Finn?”
I turn toward Calla. “What?”
“I said I believe you.”
Her answer is immediate. Fierce. The way it was when we were kids and someone accused me of something I had absolutely done.
“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I tell her, and I watch my reflection again, waiting for it to move.
Something tightens in her expression. “Don’t say that, Finn. Of course I should.”
It should make me feel better. It doesn’t.
“Neither of you can tell Mom or Dad,” she says.
Mack’s brows rise. “I’m in Seattle, Calla.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I.” Her teasing disappears. “I won’t say anything.”
Calla looks at me. “Mom has had enough for a while.”
Mom is upstairs now, sedated by exhaustion and whatever Dad gave her after we brought her back from the cave. Neither she nor Dad know what is on this paper.
“What about Dad?” I ask.
Calla holds my gaze. “What would telling him accomplish right now?”
He would study the paper. Then he would study me.
He would ask about sleep and stress. He would soften his voice in the particular way people do when they don’t want to frighten someone they’ve already decided may be unstable.
He would think of Mom. Maybe Calla already has. They’re going to wonder if it’s hereditary. And maybe it is.
What if it is?
“Nothing would be accomplished,” I say, rubbing my arms, trying to bring my icy veins back to life.
There is a lump in my throat and a pounding in my chest because what if? What if, what if?
What if there is something wrong with me? What if Calla keeps believing me right up until the moment neither of us can anymore?
She has spent our entire lives standing between me and anything that might hurt. But she can’t stand between me and my own mind.
I can’t let her know how much that terrifies me.
She can’t know.
The voice is raspy, and it’s not mine, but it’s in my head.
It’s in my head, and Calla turns the lamp off as though this moment is ordinary, as though her brother isn’t hearing voices now.
She can never know.
God, it’s almost like the voice echoes, in my brain. I shake my head. Calla looks at me.
“We’ll keep it here tonight. Tomorrow, I’ll photograph it properly in daylight.”
“What?” I glance at the paper. Focus, Finn. “Oh. Good idea.”
She places another sheet of clean blotting paper over the page and weighs the corners down with four metal film canisters. The care she takes feels obscene. Tender, almost. As if she is putting something wounded to bed.
On the phone, Mack shifts beneath her blankets. She is wearing the faded Fleetwood Mac shirt she sleeps in, dark hair piled untidily on top of her head. If I close my eyes, I can smell the image in front of me—her soft skin, coconut shampoo, and the urban dampness of Seattle.
My chest constricts. Her room is warm, her face is soft, and I don’t know what to do with any of this.
I want to reach through the screen and touch her. I want to crawl into that ordinary room where nothing is whispering my name and lie beside her until my thoughts stop turning against me.
I cannot.
“I’m going outside,” I say.
Calla looks up sharply. “Why?”
“I’m going for a walk, Calla. I’m not enlisting.”
Her eyes flick toward the covered page.
“I’ll take Mack,” I add.
Mack lifts one hand on the screen. “Emotional-support person at your service.”
“See?” I tell Calla. “Perfectly safe.”
“That isn’t remotely what I said.”
But she lets me go. She always does… because she trusts me.
She thinks I’m her anchor and she’s free to float and that I’ll always be here to keep her tied to the ground.
That may be the problem.
The night air is cold enough to hurt my teeth, even though it's June. That's just how it is here by the sea.
I leave through the kitchen, avoiding the staircase and every light that might announce my departure to Dad.
By the time I cross the lawn, Mack has moved from the jar of paintbrushes to my hand. Her face bobs through darkness on the screen while I follow the path toward the
cliffs.
“I can see your chin,” she says.
“Lucky you.”
“And one nostril. Very intimate.”
“You’ve seen worse.”
Her eyes flick toward the edge of the screen. “True.”
The reply settles between us differently than it would if Calla were still listening.
Whatever Mack and I are, we’re careful with it. Not because it’s fragile, because it isn’t.
It has survived bad decisions, good sex, months of pretending neither of those facts mattered, and the inconvenient discovery that we liked one another better after every line blurred.
Calla knows about none of it.
She thinks Mack is hers.
She is.
But she’s also mine in a way neither of us has named.
“Turn your camera around,” Mack says.
“Why?”
“Because I’d rather look at Oregon than your nasal architecture.”
I switch the view. The path rises ahead of me, pale gravel caught in the phone’s limited light. Beyond it, the ocean is a black absence.
“Happy?”
“Overwhelmed.”
Wind whips at the microphone.
“I can’t hear you,” she says.
“That sounds like a consequence.”
At the top of the cliff stairs, I angle the phone back toward my face and start down. Repairs have been made to the broken step. Dad must have done it while Calla and I were looking for Mom, or afterward, when nobody else was paying attention. A new plank interrupts the weathered gray like a fresh scar.
The light on my phone catches something perched on the railing below.
A crow.
Another goddamned crow.
It watches me approach.
“No,” I mutter.
“No what?” Mack asks.
“Nothing.”
The crow tilts its head.
I stop two steps above it.
Its feathers shine blue-black in the phone light. One claw curls around the railing. The other is hidden beneath its body.
“Go away.”
“Charming,” Mack says.
The bird opens its beak.
“Finn.”
The sound is thin and rough, barely a voice at all.
My hand locks around the phone.
“What?” Mack asks.
I don’t answer.
The crow watches me.
“Finn?” she says again.
For a second, I can’t tell which of them said it.
Then the bird launches from the railing. Its wings beat once beside my face, close enough that I duck, and it disappears over the cliff.
“What happened?”
“It was just a bird.”
I continue down the stairs.
Tell her.
The thought arrives in my own voice.
Tell her it said your name.
I could. She would make a joke first, because she knows jokes sometimes open doors that concern slams shut. Then she would ask whether it had happened before.
I would have to tell her about the crow outside the funeral home. Then the roof. Then the voice telling me to jump.
I would hear the moment her breathing changed.
I would see the moment her opinion of me changed. She’d start being careful. Watchful.
Like we are with mom.
At the bottom of the stairs, the wind eases. I step onto damp sand and switch off the camera. Mack’s initials replace her face while I put the phone to my ear.
“Better?” she asks.
“Much. Now I can’t see how judgmental you look.”
“You can feel it, though.”
“Always.”
For a while, we walk together…me along the dark Oregon beach, Mack through the quiet of her room hundreds of miles away.
The tide is going out. Foam glows faintly along the shore, appearing and vanishing with each wave. Above the water, the clouds have broken open. Stars crowd the gaps.
I stop and look up.
When I was ten, Dad told us that some stars are so far away their light keeps traveling after they die. Calla cried because she thought the sky was full of ghosts. I told her it was only old light.
“Did it look like mine to you?” I ask.
Mack is silent for a beat. “The handwriting?”
“Yes, the handwriting.”
“Finn.”
“It’s a yes-or-no question.”
She exhales. “Yes.”
The ocean rushes forward, flattening itself across the sand near my shoes.
“Right.”
“That doesn’t mean you wrote it. It means it looks like yours.”
“Calla thinks someone copied it.”
“Calla would accuse the Pope of forgery if she thought it would protect you.”
I walk again.
“But there’s nothing to protect me from. I didn’t write it. I don’t know who did.”
The wind has dragged driftwood high onto the beach. Pale branches reach from the sand like exposed bones from old hands. Mack still hasn’t answered. I stop walking.
“You believe me, right?”
The question escapes before I can stop it.
Mack doesn’t answer immediately.
“I have no idea what to think, or why this even matters so much,” she says.
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“It’s the only honest answer I have.”
I close my eyes.
There it is. Not accusation. Not disbelief. Something worse.
Possibility.
“Are you scared?” she asks.
“No.”
“Okay. Are you lying?”
“Obviously.”
Her laugh is soft and brief. “That, I believe.”
I kick at a ridge of sand.
“Have you been sleeping?”
“Calla asked me that earlier.”
“Which isn’t an answer.”
“Some.”
“How much is some?”
“Enough to sustain life.”
“That could mean anything from eight hours to an intravenous espresso.”
“I’m fine, Mack.”
The words are automatic.
Liar.
I stop walking.
The voice is close. Not carried by the wind. Not somewhere along the beach.
It is, without a doubt, inside my head.
“Finn?”
I turn slowly.
The beach behind me is empty.
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me the truth.”
I look toward the cliffs. From here, the house is mostly hidden. Only a few upper windows show through the trees, warm squares suspended in darkness.
If I tell Mack about the last couple of days, it becomes real in a new way.
“The truth is that I found a piece of paper in a cave,” I say. “It looks like I wrote on it, and I didn’t. There isn’t anything else.”
The lie is smooth this time. Practice, apparently.
“Okay,” Mack says.“I wish I were there.”
“You’ll be here weekend after next.”
“That’s not soon enough.”
“Calla will survive without you.”
“I wasn’t talking about Calla.”
My throat tightens unexpectedly.
“You’ve gone soft,” I tell her.
“Shut up.”
“Very unattractive.”
“You’ve never complained.”
That lands exactly where she intends it to.
“You should go to sleep,” I say.
“You should go back to the house.”
“I will.”
“I’m going to see about coming this weekend. I’ll talk to Ricky.”
“It’s really not necessary. Everything is okay.”
“Finn.”
“I’m turning around for the house now.”
I’m not.
“Call me when you get back.”
“You’ll be asleep.”
“Then wake me.”
“Good night, Mack.”
“That wasn’t a yes.”
“It wasn’t a no.”
“You’re exhausting.”
“You adore me.”
A pause.
“More than is probably sensible,” she says.
The line goes quiet before I can decide what to do with that.
For one selfish second, I consider calling her back. I could tell her everything. The voice on the roof. The word jump. The crow that knew my name. I could put the whole ugly mess in her hands and let her tell me what it means.
But Mack is alone in Seattle, and Calla is already frightened, and Mom is sleeping off a night none of us understands.
They all have enough to carry.
I slide Calla’s phone into my pocket.
Without Mack’s voice, the night grows larger.
The ocean sounds closer. Louder. Each wave collapses with a low, dragging roar, then pulls stones and shells back into the dark.
I lower my phone and look up at the stars again.
Old light.
Proof that something can be gone and still reach you. I walk north instead of turning back.
The wet sand reflects the sky in broken patches. For several minutes, nothing follows me except my own footprints.
Then I hear metal scrape against stone. The sound is faint beneath the water.
I stop.
Another wave slides in. Something flashes beyond the foam.
Red.
I wait for it to surface again.
At first I think it’s a buoy or a piece of plastic catching light from somewhere along the cliffs. Then the water
retreats, and a curved strip of painted metal rolls against the stones before the next wave covers it.
I switch on my phone’s flashlight.
The beam reaches only a few feet into the dark, but the red flashes again.
“Of course,” I say aloud.
Because apparently finding ominous debris in the ocean after midnight is something we do now.
I pull off my shoes and socks. The first touch of water around my ankles is viciously cold. By the time I wade knee-deep, my legs ache with it.
The metal vanishes beneath a wave.
For one disorienting second, something pale moves below the surface beside it.
A hand.
I stumble backward.
The water clears.
There is nothing there but foam and a length of white driftwood turning in the current.
“Get a grip,” I mutter.
Finn.
I jerk my head toward the shore at the sound.
It’s empty. The voice was coming from my own head. Again. How am I doing that?
The next wave strikes above my knees. I lunge for the red object before common sense can regain control of
the situation. My fingers close around a jagged edge, and I drag it free.
It is heavier than it looked. A crumpled section of a car fender, perhaps three feet long, the metal folded inward at one end. Salt and sand have chewed through the paint in places, exposing silver and rust beneath,
but most of it is still a deep, unmistakable red.
I turn it over.
No emblem. Nothing that identifies a make or model.
Just wreckage.
Dare washed ashore days ago, half-dead and carrying nothing that explained who he was or how he got here.
Now part of a wrecked car has washed up on the same beach.
For the first time all night, the fear inside me shifts away from the paper.
This has to be something. It can’t be a coincidence.
If Dare’s car went off one of the coastal roads and entered the water, it would explain his injuries. It might explain the amnesia. There could be records of an accident, a missing driver, a vehicle no one has found yet.
Something factual. Something with an answer. Something I can fix.
Relief rushes through me so quickly it almost makes me laugh. Give me freezing water and mangled metal.
Give me an actual problem with weight and edges. I know how to carry those.
I carry the fender out of the water.
My feet are numb by the time I reach my shoes. I wipe them on the inside of my sweatshirt, put my socks back on damp, and begin the walk home with the metal tucked awkwardly beneath one arm.
Halfway to the stairs, I realize there are footprints beside mine.
They appear along the edge of the retreating water.
Bare feet. One set going north. I stop and sweep my light ahead.
The prints continue for several yards, then disappear beneath a wash of foam.
They could belong to anyone. Someone walking earlier. A swimmer.
I look behind me.
My own shoeprints mark the sand beside a second trail.
Bare feet going south. Following me home.
The wind lifts cold against the back of my neck.
I walk faster.
I don’t look again.
There is a light on in the Carriage House.
I cross the lawn without going inside the main house. The fender scrapes against my leg with every step, leaving rust-colored water on my jeans.
Dare answers on the third knock.
He is barefoot. His hair is mussed from sleep, and he wears a white T-shirt and a pair of gray sweatpants. I don’t know if they are mine or Dad’s.
He looks first at me, then at the piece of wreckage under my arm.
“Should I ask?”
“Probably.”
He steps back to let me in.
Rebecca lies facedown on the arm of the sofa, open to somewhere near the middle.
“You’re bending the spine,” I say.
“Sorry.”
I lean the fender against the wall. Water pools beneath it.
“Recognize it?”
Dare studies the twisted metal. “It appears to be part of a car.”
“I gathered that. I found it in the surf.”
The humor leaves his face.
He crouches and runs his fingers over the remaining paint, careful of the torn edge.
“Where?”
“North of the stairs. Maybe half a mile.”
“Tonight?”
“Just now.”
He looks at it more closely.
I feel a sharp, unreasonable surge of hope.
“Does it mean anything to you?” I ask.
“No.”
The hope collapses.
“Think about it.”
His eyes lift to mine. “That is generally what I do when someone asks whether I recognize something.”
“You could’ve gone off the road. There are cliffs everywhere along the coast. If the car entered the water, that could explain how you ended up on the beach.”
He looks back at the red metal.
“It would explain the injuries,” I continue. “And the head trauma. Maybe the car is still out there.”
For several seconds, he says nothing. Then his expression changes.
“No,” he says.
“No what?”
“It isn’t mine.”
“You don’t know your last name, but you know the fender isn’t yours?”
He sits back on his heels.
“I ride a motorcycle.”
The words surprise both of us.
“You remember that?”
He looks past me, seeing something that isn’t in the room. “I know it.”
“What kind?”
His brow furrows.
“Dare?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where do you ride it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you own it?”
“Presumably.”
“Presumably?”
Irritation flickers across his face. “I know what it feels like to lean into a turn. I know the weight of it beneath me. I know the sound it makes. I know I ride one. That’s all.”
He stands abruptly and drags a hand through his hair.
“It’s something,” I say.
“A motorbike and a first name. At this rate, I should have my life back sometime before death.”
“You already tried that. Didn’t take.”
He looks at me.
Then, unexpectedly, he laughs.
It changes his entire face. For a second, I understand why Calla watches him when she thinks no one notices.
I wish I didn’t.
“Maybe the police can trace the fender,” I say. “Dad will know what to do.”
I take Calla’s phone from my pocket and call my own number.
She answers on the second ring.
“Why are you calling yourself from my phone?”
“Because I have your phone and you have mine.”
“I know that. I’m asking why.”
“Is Mom still asleep?”
The humor disappears from her voice. “Yes. Why?”
I look at Dare, then at the red metal leaking seawater onto the floor.
“I found something on the beach. Bring Dad to the Carriage House.”
“What did you find?”
“I’ll show you when you get here.”
“Finn—”
“Don’t wake Mom.”
There is a pause.
“We’ll be there in a minute.”
She hangs up.
Dare looks at my damp jeans. “You went into the sea for it?”
“Only to my knees.”
“At night.”
“Yes.”
He nudges the metal gently with his bare foot.
“It may still be connected to you,” I say. “You could’ve been in someone else’s car.”
“I could have.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m not convinced of anything.”
Fair.
The door opens without a knock.
Calla comes in first, wearing an old sweatshirt over her pajamas, my phone clenched in one hand. Dad follows close behind her. He has pulled a jacket over the clothes he wore into the cave, and exhaustion sits heavily around his eyes.
His gaze moves over me in one swift assessment—wet jeans, damp hair, no visible blood—before landing on the fender.
“What happened?” he asks.
“Nothing happened to me.”
Calla gives my clothes a pointed look. “You’re soaking wet.”
“Where did that come from?” Dad asks.
“The surf. About half a mile north of the stairs.”
He crouches beside the metal. Unlike Dare, he doesn’t touch it immediately. He studies the torn edge, the scraped paint, the patches of rust.
“You think it’s from a wreck?” Calla asks.
“It looks like part of a front fender,” Dad says. “But it could have been in the water for some time.”
“Or it could be connected to Dare,” I say. “If a car went over one of the cliffs, it would explain how he ended up in the ocean.”
Dad glances at him. “Do you recognize it?”
Dare shakes his head. “No.”
“He remembered something,” I say.
Calla looks sharply at Dare. “What?”
“Apparently, I ride a motorcycle.”
For the first time since they entered, the fender stops holding everyone’s attention.
“You remembered that just now?” Dad asks.
“Not precisely remembered. I simply knew.”
Dad stands. His expression is calm, but his interest has sharpened. “Anything else? A make? A road? Someone you rode with?”
“Nothing.”
Calla’s disappointment flashes across her face before she hides it. Not disappointment in Dare. For him.
I know the feeling.
“The fender still might be connected,” I say. I don’t know whether I’m trying to convince them or myself. “He could’ve been riding with the car. Or he could’ve been inside it even if he owns a
motorcycle.”
“You’re right,” Dad says. “I’ll contact the sheriff’s office first thing in the morning. See whether there have been any reported crashes or missing vehicles along the coastal roads.”
“Should we call tonight?” Calla asks.
Dad looks again at the corrosion. “This isn’t fresh wreckage. At least, not all of the damage is. Another few hours won’t change anything.”
His eyes return to me.
“And no one is going back into the water after debris in the dark.”
“That sounds oddly specific.”
“Finn.”
“Understood.”
He knows that means I heard him. We both know it doesn’t qualify as a promise.
“How’s Mom?” I ask.
Something in Dad’s face softens. “Still asleep.”
“She didn’t hear you leave?”
“No.”
Relief loosens the knot beneath my ribs.
That is the arithmetic of our family: we measure every disaster against what Mom can bear. Tonight, at least, this one doesn’t have to belong to her.
Dad looks from the fender to the puddle spreading across the floor. “Leave it where it is. I’ll deal with it in the morning.”
“I’ll find something to put under it,” Calla says.
Of course she will. Calla can’t stand in a room with a problem without trying to keep it from spreading.
Dare glances toward the bathroom, then back at me.
“Although the motorcycle may explain something.”
“What?”
“I noticed it in the mirror earlier.”
“You noticed your motorcycle in the bathroom mirror?”
“Do make an effort, Finn.”
He turns his back to me.
Then he reaches behind his neck, catches the collar of his shirt, and pulls it over his head.
Black wings stretch across his upper back.
A raven spans his shoulders, enormous and intricately inked, every feather rendered in dark, sweeping lines. Its wings are fully extended, as though it has been caught at the exact moment it takes flight. Worked into the design beneath them are two words in heavy black
letters.
LIVE FREE.
For a moment, I only stare.
Beside me, Calla goes perfectly still.
I think of the crow on the stairs.
Finn.
The two birds are not the same. I know that. One is a raven in ink. One is a crow with bones and feathers and a voice it should not possess.
Still, something moves uneasily beneath my ribs.
Dare glances over his shoulder.
“Rather supports the motorcycle theory, wouldn’t you say?”
From the Estate
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