Calla

The stranger is heavier than he looks.

That’s the first thing I think, which is awful. A person is unconscious on our shore, half-drowned by the Pacific, and my brain offers up the same sort of useless observation it might make about luggage.

“Dad’s coming,” I say, phone pressed to my ear even though the call has already ended. My fingers don’t seem to understand that part. “He said to call 911.”

Finn doesn’t answer.

He’s kneeling in the sand beside the man, one hand hovering near his shoulder like he wants to touch him but isn’t sure the rules allow it.

“Finn.”

He blinks.

“Finn.”

This time he looks up. “What?”

His voice is wrong.

“Dad said to call 911.”

“Right.” He swallows. “Right, yeah. Do that.”

I stare at him for one extra second, because Finn is never the one who needs directions. Finn is the person who reads evacuation maps in hotel rooms. Finn is the person who knows which mushrooms kill you and what to do if we have a flat tire and where Mom keeps the extra flashlight batteries.

But the stranger coughs, a wet, horrible sound, and everything else leaves my head.

I drop to my knees.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey, can you hear me?”

His eyelids don’t move.

His skin is cold when I touch his wrist. Very cold. His pulse flutters under my fingers, quick and light, like a moth trapped in a jar.

I call 911.

The dispatcher asks questions.

Where are you?

Price Funeral Home, north cove below the property.

Is he breathing?

Yes.

Is he conscious?

No.

Is he injured?

I look at the cut near his hairline, the bruising already darkening along one cheekbone, the torn edge of his shirt clinging to his ribs.

“Yes,” I say. “I think so.”

Finn takes off his jacket and lays it over the stranger. His hands are steady, but his face isn’t. He keeps glancing over his shoulder.

Toward the black, open water.

I want to ask him what he's looking at.

But the dispatcher tells me to keep the man warm and not move him unless we have to, and I forget how to be a sister because I am too busy being a person trying very hard not to panic.

By the time Dad reaches us, the wind has turned sharp coming in off the water.

He comes down the path with a flashlight in one hand and his medical bag in the other.

Most people don't know that before he became a mortician, my father spent years as a medical examiner.

Tonight, for the first time in years, he looks like that man again. Focused, concerned, efficient.

Behind him, Mom is wrapped in a long gray cardigan, her copper hair coming loose from its clip, her face pale in the beam of Finn’s flashlight.

“Oh,” she says when she sees the stranger.

Just that.

Oh.

But there is something in the way she says it that makes me look at her.

Mom has a way of seeing things before anyone else does. Because she also talks about moon water and energy fields and ponders what is real and not real, some don’t pay attention when she notices something.

But I always do. She’s the most perceptive person I know.

I press two fingers against his radial artery, watching the seconds crawl across my phone.

Dad crouches beside him.

“One-twenty-eight,” I tell him. “Weak and thready.”

He glances at me, and his eyes soften. “Good job, Cal.”

It is ridiculous how badly I need those three words.

I draw a shaky breath... relieved that the the real adults are in charge now.

Finn stands.

I look up. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

He answers too fast.

Dad shines his flashlight over the stranger’s face. “Do we know him?”

“No,” I say.

Finn says nothing.

“Finn?” Dad asks.

Finn startles. “No. I’ve never seen him.”

The words are normal. The pause before them is not. His tone is not. I shoot him a look, which he ignores.

Sirens cut through the trees a few minutes later. Their wails echo through the rocky ledges of the cliffs, amplifed and mournful.

Red light flashes against the rocks, against the wet sand, against the stranger’s face. For one second he looks less like a man and more like some sort of strange golem the sea created.

The paramedics come down with a stretcher.

A police officer follows them, breathing hard by the time he reaches the cove. He is young, maybe thirty, and trying not to look annoyed that the cliff path exists.

The night becomes questions.

How long has he been here?

We don’t know.

Did we see anyone else?

No.

Any boat lights?

No.

Any belongings?

No.

Name?

We don’t know.

The paramedics cut open what’s left of his shirt and check his pupils, his ribs, the wound near his temple. One of them says “hypothermic.” Another says “possible concussion.” They load him onto the stretcher, and that is when the stranger’s eyes open.

Not all the way.

Just enough.

Gray, I think.

No.

Dark blue.

No.

I can’t tell in the shifting red light.

He grabs the paramedic’s wrist. Everyone freezes.

“Easy,” the paramedic says. “You’re safe. We’re taking you to the hospital.”

The stranger’s gaze moves from face to face.

Dad.

Mom.

The officer.

Finn.

Me.

For one half-second, his eyes stay on mine.

Then he says something I can’t understand.

His voice is ruined by saltwater.

“What’s your name?” the officer asks.

The stranger closes his eyes.

“Can you tell us your name?”

Nothing.

The paramedic tries again. “Do you know where you are?”

His lips part.

No sound comes out.

Finn makes a noise beside me.

Small. Sharp.

I turn.

His face has gone completely still.

“What?” I whisper.

He shakes his head once.

“Finn.”

“Did you hear that?” he asks me and I’ve never seen that expression on his face before.

“Hear what?” I ask, looking behind him.

“Nothing, I guess,” he says. “I’m fine.”

There are very few sentences in the world that mean the exact opposite of themselves.

I’m fine is one of them.

But I can’t focus on that yet because the stranger refuses the ambulance.

The paramedics tell him he needs a hospital. Dad tells him the same thing in his calm funeral-director voice,

which usually makes people listen.

The stranger does not listen.

Or maybe he can’t.

The officer asks if he knows his name.

The stranger looks at the sea.

Mom wraps her arms around herself.

“He doesn’t know,” she says quietly.

The officer sighs.

I can see the machinery of the real world trying to decide what to do with him. No identification. No phone. No wallet. No apparent crime. No clear memory. Injured, yes, but awake enough to resist being taken.

People think emergencies are clean because television makes them clean.

They are not.

They are messy and cold and full of people making decisions they are not qualified to make.

Dad speaks with the officer for several minutes. The paramedics speak with the stranger again. Mom watches him with that look on her face, the one that means she has already adopted the catastrophe in front of her.

“Laura,” Dad says.

One word.

A warning.

Mom looks at him.

“He can’t stay out here.”

“There are procedures.”

“He can’t stay out here.”

The officer shifts his weight. “Ma’am, we can take him in for evaluation if he consents, but—”

“He doesn’t even know his name,” Mom says.

“That’s why the hospital is the best—”

“He is terrified.”

No one answers that.

Because he is.

Even under the emergency blanket, even surrounded by people trying to help him, the stranger looks like an animal that will chew through its own leg to escape this.

Dad rubs the bridge of his nose.

I know that gesture.

It means he is about to lose an argument he already knows he should win.

“Not in the house,” he says finally, as though we were taking in a stray dog.

“No,” mom agrees. “The Carriage House.”

Dad looks at Finn and me. “You two will stay away from him tonight.”

I almost laugh.

“Calla,” Dad says.

“What?”

“I mean it.”

I hold up both hands. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Finn doesn’t smile.

He should. That is exactly where Finn should smile.

He doesn’t even seem to hear it.

The officer takes our statements.

Dad gives him our number. The paramedics leave instructions and enough warnings to wallpaper the carriage house. Wake him if he vomits. Watch for confusion. Watch his breathing. Hospital if anything changes. Hospital if he worsens. Hospital, hospital, hospital.

Then somehow, impossibly, the stranger comes with us.

Dad and one paramedic help him up the path. He is unsteady, wrapped in foil and Finn’s jacket, bare feet stumbling over wet sand and stone. Mom walks beside him like she can keep him alive through sheer proximity.

Finn lingers behind.

I slow down until we are side by side.

“Hey,” I say.

He looks at me.

Finally, he really looks.

For a second, my brother is there. My Finn. The one who made shadow puppets on our bedroom ceiling during thunderstorms. The one who once convinced me that swallowing watermelon seeds would grow one in my stomach, and that’s what happened to pregnant ladies. Finn, who has always, always looked at me like I am something worth keeping safe.

But his gaze slips past me, over my shoulder.

I turn.

There is only the beach.

“What do you keep looking at?” I ask.

“Nothing.”

“Then why do you keep doing it?"

His mouth twitches, but it is not a smile.

“Well, the ocean just washed a man ashore. I’m waiting to see if it has anything else planned. You know I love a good oddity.”

His words feel off.

“Finn.”

He closes his eyes for half a second. When he opens them, he looks exhausted.

“I’m just tired, Cal.”

That is reasonable. That is true.

We almost died today.

Then we found a half-drowned stranger on the beach.

Tired is allowed.

So why don’t I believe him?

We reach the Carriage House, the old building that used to house actual carriages, back when the Prices still transported bodies with black horses and polished wagon wheels.

Now it is a guest cottage in the loosest possible sense: one bedroom, a small sitting area, a bathroom, a kitchenette nobody uses, and stacks of things Mom refuses to throw away because someday she might need fourteen terracotta pots.

Dad helps the stranger sit on the bed.

Mom brings towels, blankets, a sweatshirt of Dad’s, socks, and a glass of water.

The stranger watches all of us like he is trying to solve a puzzle.

“What should we call you?” Mom asks softly.

Dad gives her a look.

“What?” she says. “We need to call him something.”

The stranger’s gaze drifts around the room.

The lamp.

The window.

The door.

Me.

A shiver goes through me that has nothing to do with the cold.

“We can wait,” Dad says.

Mom touches the stranger’s shoulder. “You’re safe here tonight.”

His eyes move to her hand.

He flinches too late, almost as if his body remembers danger slower than his mind does.

Mom pulls back immediately.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

He stares at her.

Then, very faintly, he says, “No.”

One word.

Rough.

British.

I blink.

Finn’s head snaps up.

Dad notices.

So do I.

Dad turns to the stranger. “Do you know where you’re from?”

The stranger’s brow furrows.

His mouth opens.

For a second I think he might answer.

Then pain crosses his face so sharply I almost step forward.

“I don’t…” he whispers.

He stops.

Mom’s expression crinkles.

“That’s all right,” she says. “Don’t force it. You should rest. Tomorrow will be better.”

Dad checks the bandage one more time. He tells the stranger that he will be checking on him every couple of hours, and that if he worsens, he is going to the hospital whether he likes it or not.

The stranger does not argue.

I’m not sure he understands enough to argue.

When we leave, Mom keeps the bedside lamp on.

Outside, the wind pushes at us all the way back to the house.

Inside, Mom makes hot cocoa for some reason, and dad calls the officer again because he can’t remember if he’d given him our number.

Finn stands at the kitchen window, staring at his reflection in the glass.

“Finn,” I say. I come up beside him. In the reflection, we look like pale ghosts.

“You’re scaring me a little.”

That gets him.

His eyes cut to mine in the glass.

“I’m not trying to.”

“I know.”

“I’m just…” He stops.

“What?”

He presses his fingertips against the windowsill.

“I’m unsettled, I guess. I don’t think I want to sleep tonight.”

He is allowed to be strange tonight. We all are.

I touch his arm. “I can sit up with you.”

“No," he says, too fast. He softens it. “No, Calla. You should sleep.”

“You should too.”

He looks at the window.

At our reflections.

At the darkness behind them.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

But he doesn’t move.

Later, after Mom has finally gone upstairs, after Dad has checked the locks twice, after Finn has disappeared into his room with a book I don’t think he’ll read, I lie in my bed and stare at the ceiling.

The house settles around me. It’s so old, so permanent. So loud with all the creaks and moans and snaps from the wind.

The ocean throws itself furiously against the rocks below, as though one of us has offended it.

I close my eyes.

The stranger’s face appears behind them.

Not handsome, though he is.

Not mysterious, though obviously he is that too.

It is the expression that bothers me.

The way he looked at me on the beach.

I turn onto my side.

Then onto my back.

Then onto my other side.

My room is too familiar. The books on my shelf. The sweatshirt over my chair. The framed photo of Finn and me at graduation, purple and gold cords twisted around our necks. My camera on the desk.

My camera.

I sit up.

“No,” I whisper to myself. “don’t do it.”

I get out of bed anyway.

I tell myself I am only going down to the beach to see if anything else, anything at all, washed ashore after him.

That’s all.

Not to talk to him.

Not to spy.

I pull on a sweatshirt and step into the hallway.

Downstairs, the house is dark except for the lamp Mom left burning in the foyer.

I slip out the side door.

The night is silver and wet and dark.

The grass soaks through my socks almost immediately. The moon hangs over the water, enormous and

indifferent. Mist moves low across the lawn, curling around the path.

I head for the old wooden steps to the beach. They groan beneath my weight.

The wind grows colder as I descend, carrying the sharp scent of salt and kelp. By the time my feet touch the sand, the tide has begun its slow retreat, leaving the sand slick and smooth beneath the moonlight.

I stop at the bottom of the stairs and pull my camera from its bag.

The lens finds details my eyes are too impatient to notice.

I adjust the focus and lift it toward the shoreline.

Click.

The empty stretch of beach.

Click.

The waves folding over themselves beneath the moon.

Click.

The black mouth of the cave farther down the shore.

The shutter sounds impossibly loud against the night.

Everything is exactly where it should be.

The bonfire is nothing more than a circle of blackened stones now.

The driftwood log where Finn insists on sitting every summer hasn't moved in years.

Click.

I lower the camera and sweep my flashlight across the beach.

A length of tangled seaweed.

An empty shell.

A crab freezes in the beam before disappearing sideways beneath a rock.

I walk farther.

There should be something.

A shoe.

A backpack.

Broken glasses.

A wallet.

Something.

I climb over the rocks where we found him.

The tide has already erased the places where we knelt.

No footprints.

No drag marks.

No torn fabric caught on the barnacles.

Nothing.

I kneel and photograph the rocks anyway.

Click.

Then the tide pool beside them.

Click.

The beam of my flashlight catches the ripples, scattering the stars into pieces across the surface.

I straighten and slowly turn in a circle, raising the camera one last time.

The cliff above.

Click.

The path leading back toward the house.

Click.

The sea.

Click.

I tuck the camera back into its bag and switch off the flashlight.

The moon is bright enough now.

The windows of the funeral home glow faintly above the cliffs, but another light catches my eye.

The Carriage House.

I hesitate.

If the ocean wasn't going to tell me who he was...

...maybe he would.

I start toward the path.

The carriage house window glows amber.

I step closer.

The curtains are not fully drawn.

I should turn around.

I do not.

I climb the small step beneath the window and peer inside.

The room is still.

The lamp burns on the bedside table. Dad's sweatshirt hangs loose on the stranger's shoulders. His dark hair is damp and pushed back from his forehead, the bandage stark against his skin.

He seems to be asleep.

My camera hangs against my hip.

I hesitate.

If he really doesn't know who he is...maybe someone else will.

I ease the camera into my hands and brace it against the windowsill.

No flash.

Just the soft click of the shutter.

Click.

His face.

Click.

A little closer.

Clear enough that maybe tomorrow I can run it through every reverse-image search on the internet and discover he's actually an accountant from Cleveland who made one spectacularly bad life decision.

Or maybe someone out there is looking for him.

Maybe someone is worried sick.

One hand rests on top of the blanket.

His fingers are long, scratched raw across the knuckles.

There is a ring on his middle finger.

Silver.

I zoom in.

Click.

I lower the camera and lean a little closer to the glass.

I am trying to see the ring.

That is what I tell myself.

Not his face.