Calla always says she can't sleep in moving vehicles.
This is a lie.
She's been snoring since Tacoma.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Calla Price.
Her cheek rests against the passenger window, bright copper hair escaping the knot on top of her head, one white sneaker wedged against the dashboard even though she knows I hate her feet on the dash.
For the life of me, I can't understand how she wasn't permanently traumatized the summer we were twelve, when Dad had to embalm a man whose leg came through the roof of his car like that.
Some people learn valuable life lessons from childhood trauma.
Calla is not one of those people.
The SUV smells like stale coffee. Behind us, our entire lives are crammed into boxes, duffel bags, plastic storage crates, and one unstable tower of thrift-store books Calla refused to leave behind.
Every time I tap the brakes, the oversized stack leans toward my head ominously.
I glance at it in the rearview mirror.
“If your Brontës kill me,” I tell her, “I’m haunting you first.”
She doesn’t stir.
The windshield wipers sweep back and forth, smearing rain across the glass. Seattle disappeared behind us a couple hours ago, with its gray sky and wet pavement and our tiny little apartment above the Alley Cat bar.
Calla cried when we locked the door.
She pretended she didn’t.
I also pretended she didn’t.
This is how twins survive each other.
The highway stretches and curves now, slick and bordered by evergreens so lush they look unreal. Clouds sit low over the road, voluptuous and misty, silencing the noise of the world.
I think that’s what I love the most about the pacific northwest. It’s as though everything is sheltered under a dome of fog and mist and silence.
Calla wakes somewhere past Olympia with a violent jerk, as though her soul had just been yanked from her body. She’s bleary-eyed.
“Where are we?”
“An hour from home. Ish.”
She blinks at me, then at the wet forest gliding past her window.
“I miss our apartment already.”
“Impossible. The bathroom was in the kitchen.”
“It had character.”
“It had mold,” I remind her.
“It had affordable rent.”
“I was afraid my bed was going to fall through the floor.” I’m only slightly exaggerating.
Calla smiles, sleepy and crooked, and I swear to God her eyes turn from golden hazel to green the longer she’s awake. It’s freaky and I’ve always said so.
I tell her again now.
She rolls her eyes, starts to retort, then sees her foot on the dash.
She glances at me and slowly lowers it.
“Sorry.”
“It’s ok. You can’t be held responsible for things you do when you’re asleep.”
“I can’t sleep in a moving car, Finn.”
“Oh. We’d better be careful when we open the trunk then.
There was god-awful snore coming from somewhere. There might be a wild animal back there.”
She smacks my arm, then reaches blindly into the snack bag between us.
“What did you get?” she asks as she fishes for something.
“Gummy worms. Alligator jerky. They said they shipped it in from Florida.”
She pauses. “Finn.”
“Culture lives everywhere.” I shrug, and steer around the shreds of a tire in the road.
“It was a gas station.”
“Owned by a middle-eastern couple who curated the most interesting collection of product.”
Calla stares at me, the gummy worm package crinkled in her hand. “You worked at one museum gift shop for three semesters and now you’re an expert at curated collections.”
“I did not work in the gift shop.”
“You alphabetized postcards.”
“For almost four years, and it was far more than that and you know it.”
She chuckles and pops a red worm into her mouth. “I know, big brother.”
“Older and wiser,” I remind her.
“By six minutes. And if by wiser, you mean you know more macabre trivia than I do, then you are correct.”
Calla laughs, and it is always the sound of home.
For a while, we just drive.
Talking. Not talking. Letting the miles accumulate behind us.
She tells me about the bookstore and how Mrs. Bell cried when she left, then gave her a first edition paperback that probably isn’t valuable but meant something anyway. I tell her about Dr. Ito pretending not to get emotional when I turned in my keys to the collections room.
“You’re going to miss it,” Calla says.
“Of course I am.”
“You could stay.”
“So could you.”
She looks out the window. That is answer enough.
We could stay in Seattle. We have jobs and favorite coffee places there. We know which laundromat machines steal quarters and which bus routes have the least amount of drunken strangers on them.
But Seattle was school, and it was always meant to be temporary.
Astoria is different. Astoria is the sound of the ocean throwing itself against the cliffs beneath our bedroom windows.
Astoria is home, and it is where we’ll decide what to do with the rest of our lives.
No pressure.
Calla pulls out a green gummy worm and bites its head off.
“Dad’s going to ask if we checked the tire pressure.”
“I did.”
“Of course you did.”
“Mom’s going to cry,” Calla says.
I nod. “Ugly cry.”
A logging truck passes in the opposite lane, spraying mist over the windshield. For a moment, the world vanishes in gray water.
Then the wipers clear it.
Road.
Trees.
Rain.
Calla chews thoughtfully. “Do you think it’ll feel weird being back?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t even think about that.”
“I think about everything.”
“True.”
I tap the steering wheel. “It’ll be weird for two days. Then you’ll remember where Mom hides the good coffee and I’ll remember which stairs creak outside the embalming room. I hope dad gets some interesting bodies while we’re home.”
“Finn.”
“What?”
“Normal people don’t say things like that.”
“Normal people didn’t grow up in a funeral home.”
“We didn’t grow up in it. We grew up above it.”
“Semantics.”
“Important semantics.”
The rain softens as we cross toward Longview, turning from steady drizzle into mist. The trees open in places, revealing glimpses of water, dark and restless beneath the gray sky.
Everything smells wet, even inside the car. Wet pavement.
Wet pine. Wet earth.
Calla presses her palm to the window.
“I forgot how green it gets. Remind me again…what’s the latin word for green?”
“Viridem. And it’s no greener here than in Seattle.”
“It seems like it is.”
“Just because it’s home.”
“I have to pee,” Calla announces ten minutes later.
“Can you wait?” I ask. “We’re like thirty minutes from home. Tops.”
“I cannot wait, Finn, or I wouldn’t have brought it up.”
I sigh, and pull in to the next gas station, a dingy little thing right off the highway. Calla goes inside, and I top off our gas, because there’s no reason not to.
I jam the gas nozzle into the tank, and watch rain gather on the hood in tiny beads.
The world feels ordinary, and that’s the thing I’ll remember later. That everything about today felt like any other day of my life.
Calla steps out of the building with a little white bag, and tosses it into my lap as she climbs back in.
“They had apple fritters.”
“Thank God.”
“I know.”
I fasten my seat-belt and pull toward the road.
Calla is already tearing into the bag like a hungry raccoon.
“Don’t judge me,” she says.
“Never.”
She holds half the fritter toward me. “Bite?”
She shoves it in my mouth as I look left and right.
Rain spraying from tires blurs the road.
I see headlights far away.
I press the gas, turn back onto the highway---
and the horn comes out of nowhere.
Deep, blaring, as loud as a freight train, and far too close.
“Finn!” Calla shrieks, but the semi is suddenly there, enormous and silver and impossible, its grill filling our entire field of vision.
For one second, everything becomes very sharp…and very, very clear.
Calla’s book sliding across the dash.
Her hand gripping the fritter.
The sound of my own breath.
The white line on the road.
The truck’s headlights.
I jerk the wheel, mostly out of muscle memory and instinct. The SUV skids.
Our tires spit gravel as we spin off the road. The back end swings hard. Boxes stacked in the back slam into one another. Something breaks. Calla’s shoulder hits mine.
Then we drop.
Not too far, just into the ditch, mud spraying over the windshield. It sprays up over the windshield and we come to a stop.
Silence.
Rain drops softly against the roof.
The semi roars past, horn fading into the distance.
I sit with both hands locked on the steering wheel.
Calla breathes fast beside me.
Neither of us moves.
Then after minutes or hours, she says very quietly, “Finn.”
“I know.”
“You just pulled out in front of a semi.”
“I noticed that.”
“We almost died.”
“I noticed that, too.”
I turn to look at her. Her eyes are wide and furious and scared.
“Are you hurt?” I ask.
“No. Are you?”
“No.”
“Your hand is bleeding.”
I look down. How did that happen?
There’s a thin cut across my knuckle. I don’t remember getting it.
“It’s nothing.”
“Don’t say it’s nothing.”
“It’s almost nothing.”
We sit there a minute longer.
Then Calla starts laughing.
Not because it’s funny. Because it’s not.
But because sometimes the body does the wrong thing when the mind doesn’t know what else to do.
I laugh too, a bit.
The road above us looks normal again. Cars pass. Rain falls. The world continues with offensive indifference.
Calla presses a hand to her chest.
“Mom would’ve killed you if we died before dinner.”
“That would be difficult if we’re already dead.”
“She’d find a way.”
We manage to get the SUV back onto the road with only mud on the tires and one cracked storage bin.
For the next twenty miles, Calla keeps glancing at me.
“I’m fine,” I say finally.
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were wondering. Loudly.”
“You scared me.”
“I scared me.”
She looks out the window, jaw tight.
“I don’t like it when you do that.”
“Almost die?”
“Make jokes about something serious."
I swallow.
The rain streaks sideways across the windshield.
“I don’t know what else to do with it. Besides, you were the lunatic who started laughing first.”
She reaches over and takes my right hand from the console. Her fingers are cold.
For a while, she holds on, and I let her.
By the time we reach Astoria, the clouds are breaking apart.
Not clearing, because they never truly do that on the coast. They just separate enough to let light through.
The Columbia River spreads wide and dark beside us, meeting the Pacific somewhere beyond the haze. Fishing boats bob in the distance. Gulls swoop above the water. The Astoria-Megler Bridge rises ahead, long and pale and graceful, disappearing into mist like a road built for ghosts.
Calla rolls down her window before we even cross.
Cold air rushes in.
Salt. Rain. River. Seaweed. Home.
She closes her eyes.
I don’t say anything. Some things deserve silence.
We drive through town, past old storefronts and steep streets and houses clinging to hillsides. The tires hiss over wet pavement. Everything is familiar and strange at once, the way childhood places become small when you leave and smaller when you return.
Then the road curves upward toward the cliffs.
And before long, there it is.
Home.
Our house stands above the ocean like it was carved from weather and rock and grief.
Old stone. Dark siding. Tall windows. A steep roofline pierced with narrow gables and one turret that has no practical purpose except to look dramatic against storm clouds, which I deeply respect.
The black iron fence runs along the front of the property. Hydrangeas bloom along the path, their enormous white heads bowing under the weight of water. Beyond the house, the land falls away sharply toward the sea, where waves break against black rock far below.
There’s a sign near the gate.
PRICE FUNERAL HOME
EST. 1898
The porch light is on, the parlor lamps, too.
Warmth spills through the windows, softening all that black wood and rain-dark stone.
The front door opens before I even put the car in park.
Mom comes out first, a slightly faded version of Calla, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
Dad follows behind her, tall and silver-haired and composed in the way only funeral directors can be.
Mom makes it halfway down the steps before she starts crying.
Calla points at me. “Ugly cry.”
“Called it.”
Mom reaches Calla first and folds her into a hug so tight Calla squeaks.
“My babies.”
“We’re adults,” Calla says, voice muffled against her shoulder.
“Never.”
Dad clasps my shoulder, then pulls me in.
He smells like soap, and the faint formaldehyde-adjacent cleanliness of the prep room, which would be alarming if it didn’t smell like my entire childhood.
“Good drive?” he asks.
Calla and I look at each other, then Calla smiles too brightly.
“Great drive.”
Dad narrows his eyes.
Mom pulls back immediately. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” I say.
Calla says, “Finn almost killed us with a semi.”
I stare at her. “Wow.”
“What? You did.”
Mom’s face drains of color. Dad’s hand tightens on my shoulder.
“We’re fine,” I say quickly. “We slid into a ditch. Barely. No damage.”
Dad glances at our car, which is covered in mud splatters.
Mom touches Calla’s face, then mine, as if confirming that we’re still assembled correctly.
“Inside,” she says.
“Mom—”
“Inside.”
There is no arguing with Laura Price when she uses that tone. Generals would surrender. Empires would crumble.
We go inside and the house welcomes us home with its familiarity.
Dark floors. High ceilings. The long staircase curving upward. The grandfather clock ticking on the hall. Framed photographs on the wall: weddings, family portraits, old black-and-white images of Price men in dark suits standing solemnly beside horse-drawn hearses.
To the right is the formal parlor, where families sit with their grief as my father walks them through their options.
To the left is the reception room, warm with lamps and heavy curtains and the quiet dignity Dad insists every room here should have.
Straight ahead, beyond the private hallway, the house becomes ours.
Kitchen. Bedrooms. Back stairs. The parts of the funeral home visitors never see.
Calla drops her bag by the stairs and inhales.
“Still smells like funeral lilies.”
Dad smiles faintly. “Occupational hazard.”
"And pot roast,” I say. “I’m starving.”
Dinner is a perfectly normal affair.
Mom made pot roast with carrots and potatoes because coming home requires ceremony. Dad opens a bottle of wine even though Calla and I still feel slightly illegal drinking in front of them, even though we’re twenty-three. Mom asks about the graduation parties. Calla tells the story of me tripping over an electrical cord and nearly taking out half the anthropology department.
“You said no one saw,” I tell her.
“I lied to protect your dignity.”
“I had dignity?”
“Briefly.”
Dad asks Calla about the bookstore.
She softens when she talks about it, though she tries not to. She tells them about the little old woman who came in every Thursday to buy smut and pretended they were for her sister. She tells them about the little boy who uses his allowance every week for dinosaur books.
Mom watches her with that look mothers get when they see both the child you were and the adult you’re becoming and they don’t quite know what to do with either.
Dad asks me about the museum.
So I tell him about cataloging shell beads and mislabeled bird bones and the storage drawer that may or may not have contained a cursed doll.
“It was not cursed,” Calla says, rolling her eyes as she stabs a carrot through the heart.
“You didn’t see its eyes.”
Mom sighs, but she’s smiling, and the dinner is an hour-long warm hug…candlelight on the table. Rain at the windows. My mother refilling plates.
My father pretending not to be pleased that we are both under his roof again. My sister stealing the last potato right off my fork.
After dinner, Calla finds me by the back door with my jacket already on.
She has hers too.
“The cove?” she asks.
“The cove.”
Mom looks up from the sink. “Tonight?”
“We haven’t been since last summer,” Calla says.
“It’s dark.”
“We know how night works.”
Mom gives her a look.
Calla kisses her cheek. “It's the best at night, Mom. We won’t be long.”
This is also a lie, and everyone knows it.
The path to the cove begins behind the house, beyond the old chapel and the wind-bent pines. It cuts through salal and fern, then slopes down toward the cliffs. The ground is soft and slightly slipperty from rain. The air smells like spruce and ocean and mineral and stones split wide open.
Calla walks ahead of me with her flashlight, though neither of us really needs it.
We know this path by heart.
The ocean gets louder as we descend.
When the trail opens onto the cove, the beach appears in pieces: pale sand, black rocks, silver tide pools, driftwood piled like old, faded bones.
The cliffs curve around it on three sides, making the whole place feel hidden from the rest of the world.
Calla stands still for a second.
“I missed this.”
I come up beside her. “More than Seattle?”
“A different kind of miss.”
I know exactly what she means.
We build a small bonfire in the ring we made years ago from smooth black stones. The driftwood catches slowly, then all at once, flames burning purple in the dark.
Calla puts on music from her phone. Something soft and melancholy, which is fitting for the cove at night.
We sit close to the fire, knees drawn up, watching sparks drift toward the stars, and more than anything else, this feels like home.
Clouds move fast across the moon, and between them, stars burn cold and bright. We can’t see any constellations tonight. The sea lions scream from down the beach, creepy and desolate, like grieving old women.
Calla leans back on her hands. “Do you think the ducks are still here?”
“I would be offended if they weren’t.”
“By whom?”
“The ocean.”
“The ocean doesn’t know about your duck museum.”
“The ocean supplies my duck museum.”
She laughs and gets to her feet. “Come on.”
The cave is tucked into the cliffside behind a curtain of rock and shadow. You can walk past it a hundred times and never see the opening unless you know exactly where to turn.
We know.
Inside, the air is colder. Damp. Salty. Thick.
Calla shines her flashlight along the wall, and there they are.
The ducks.
Seventeen rubber ducks lined along a natural shelf in the stone.
Yellow, mostly. A few blue. One red. One with only half a face. One dressed like a pirate, though its hat disappeared sometime around sophomore year.
Calla touches the pirate duck gently.
“Still here.”
“Of course they’re still here. Where else would they be? ”
“Did you count them?”
"Of course. There are seventeen."
“You say that like it’s normal.”
“Seventeen is a sacred number.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“It could be. Somewhere.”
She shines the light at me. “You know, most people collect shells.”
“Most people lack vision.”
We found the first duck when we were seven.
It washed ashore after a storm, bright yellow and absurd against the gray sand. Calla named it Edmund. I said ducks didn’t need names. She said everything needed a name if you intended to keep it.
So we kept it.
Then another came.
Then another.
One by one over the years, carried by currents from cargo spills or bath time tragedies or the mysterious private lives of strangers.
We lined them up here like relics, a ridiculous little altar to all the things the ocean throws back.
Calla adjusts one that has tipped over.
“There,” she says.
Back by the fire, the tide has crept closer.
The music plays softly around us. The flames snap. The ocean slides forward and pulls back, forward and back, smoothing the sand with endless patience.
Calla lies down on the blanket we brought and looks up.
I sit beside her. For a while, we don’t talk.
That is another twin thing. Silence is never empty.
Finally, she says, “Do you think it’ll be weird sleeping in our old rooms?”
“Yes.”
“You think dad has any bodies currently?”
“Probably.”
She turns her head toward me. Firelight moves over her face, turning her hair dark red.
“Are you scared?”
“Of sleeping in my room?”
“Of everything after this.”
The question sits between us.
Grad school.
Moving back home.
Moving away again.
Becoming real adults, whatever that means.
“No,” I say.
She studies me.
“Liar.” She smiles faintly and looks back at the stars.
The wind shifts. Cold air moves over the cove.
Then I hear something.
Not loud.
Not even distinct.
Just... something.
Something out of place.
I sit up.
Calla doesn’t notice at first.
The wave comes in higher than the last one, spreading white foam over the sand.
Something dark moves inside it.
I stare.
The water pulls back.
The shape remains.
For a second, my brain refuses to name it.
Driftwood, I think.
A seal.
A pile of kelp.
But then the next wave rolls in and turns it over.
Moonlight catches pale skin.
A hand.
Dark hair.
A shoulder.
“Calla,” I say.
She sits up at once.
“What?”
I don’t answer.
I’m already moving.
The sand gives under my boots as I run toward the surf. Behind me,
Calla says my name, sharp and afraid.
The body lies half in the water, half out, dressed in black, one arm thrown over the sand as if he reached for shore and almost made it.
A young man.
Dark hair plastered to his face.
He's still.
Too still.
The ocean washes over him again, gentle now, almost tender.
Like it brought him here on purpose, like it is finished with him now.
Here, take him, Price Family.
Calla reaches my side.
For one breath, neither of us moves.
Then she whispers, “Oh my God.”
The man’s lips are blue.
His eyes are closed.
"Is he dead?” Calla whispers, her cold fingers wrapping around my arm as we peer down at the body beneath us.
“I don’t know.”
Even though I don’t want to touch him, I do anyway. I feel along his cold neck with my fingers, prodding and poking until I feel the very slight throb of a pulse.
It’s weak but there.
“He’s alive,” I say. “Barely.”
Calla pulls out her phone to call dad, and I stare down at the man sprawled on the sand.
Today started out so very ordinarily, but a feeling in my bones tells me everything in my life is getting ready to change.
In your bones.
I freeze.
The words aren't loud.
They aren't even really words.
They were more a thought that doesn't feel entirely like mine.
I glance over my shoulder.
Nothing.
Just Calla.
Just the ocean.
Just a half-dead stranger on the beach.
"Finn?"
I realize Calla is staring at me.
"You okay?"
I blink.
"Yeah."
The answer comes too quickly.
Because for one strange second, I wasn't sure.
END OF EPISODE ONE
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