Finn

My sister has always said she can't sleep in moving vehicles.

She's been snoring since Tacoma.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Calla Price.

Her cheek rests against the passenger window, bright copper hair a halo in the dying light. One white sneaker is wedged against the dashboard, even though she knows I hate it when she puts her feet up there.

For the life of me, I can’t understand how she escaped permanent psychological damage the summer we were twelve, when Dad embalmed a man who’d been riding with his feet on the dashboard. The impact had driven one of his legs straight through the roof of the car.

Some people learn valuable life lessons from childhood trauma.

Calla is not one of those people.

Behind the seats, our entire lives are carefully labeled (courtesy of me) in neatly stacked boxes. Cheeto has finally stopped howling.

I try not to make eye contact with him in the mirror. He finds the indignity of the cat carrier almost too much to bear.

The windshield wipers sweep back and forth, smearing rain across the glass. Seattle disappeared behind us a couple hours ago.

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. Everything is sheltered under a dome of fog and mist and silence.

Calla wakes somewhere past Olympia with a violent jerk, like her soul had just been yanked from her body.

She’s bleary-eyed.

“Where are we?”

“An hour-ish from home.”

She blinks at me, then at the wet forest sliding past her window. She smiles, sleepy and crooked, and I swear to God her eyes turn from 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 notices 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. Well, I don’t know where the god-awful snoring was coming from, then.”

“It was Cheeto, obviously.” She glances over the seat at him. “God. He’s pissed.”

“I know. I even bought him a Slim Jim at the gas station. He didn’t even sniff it.”

“Finn, he can’t have Slim Jims.” She smacks my arm, then reaches blindly into the snack bag between us.

“What else did you get?” she asks as she fishes for something.

“Gummy worms. Alligator jerky. They shipped it in from Florida.”

She pauses. “Finn.”

“What? That’s what they said. 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. “Let a kid work at one museum for three years and then suddenly he’s an expert at curated product.”

“I mean, it was a decent museum. World-renowned.”

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 how Ricky nearly broke her ribs again, and 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 so much,” 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 food places. We know which laundromat machines steal quarters and which bus routes have the least 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 memory. Astoria is family.

Astoria is home, and it is where we’ll regroup before we proceed 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. We’ve got to tell him we did.”

“I did.”

“Of course you did.”

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. “What’s the plan for tonight?”

“I don’t know. I think Mom is making a big dinner.”

“That’s a given. I just meant…after.”

“We’ll do whatever we used to do when we lived at home. I’ll mess around in the greenhouse, you’ll stalk

locations for good lighting, we’ll do night swims in the cove. Don’t over-think it.”

“I’m not. I just don’t want to overwhelm mom. Maybe we should do dinner, and then give her some quiet time while we unpack or something?”

“Stop overthinking it,” I tell her again. “You’re catastrophizing and trying to manage a hypothetical outcome.

We don’t even know what Mom’s baseline is today. Let’s get there, assess, then adjust.”

“Jesus. Maybe you should be the psychiatrist.”

“It’s knowledge osmosis. You’ve been studying six feet away from me for four years.”

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. Wet bracken. Wet metal. Wet shoes.

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.”

She pauses, then shakes her shoulders. “Déjà vu. God. I could’ve sworn I’ve asked you that exact same question before.”

I stare at her. “You have. Many, many times. You can’t remember Latin to save your life.”

“It’s a dead language, Finn.

“You’re going to need it for medical school.”

“I remember suffixes just fine. You mind your business and I’ll mind mine.”

“That is also something you can’t do to save your life.”

“Mind my business? Are you calling me a meddler now?”

“Of course not. You’re a busybody at most.”

I now have two glaring sets of eyes focused on me. Ignoring them, I reach to turn the volume up. The Smiths.

“I have to pee,” Calla announces two minutes later.

“Can you wait?” I ask. “We’re thirty minutes from home. At most.”

“I cannot wait, Finn, or I wouldn’t have brought it up.”

When she gets anxious, a persnickety old lady assumes Calla’s body and there’s no arguing with it.

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. I tap the glass at Cheeto, he looks away, annoyed. How dare you confine me in this cage, human?

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.

“Sorry for being in banshee mode.”

“Is that a clinical term, doctor?”

“It is now.”

I fasten my seat-belt and pull toward the road. The Smiths resume singing about profound loneliness.

Calla is already tearing into the bag like a feral raccoon.

“Don’t judge me,” she says with sticky fingers.

“Impossibilis.”

“I normally don’t negotiate with terrorists, but if you stop with the Latin, I’ll feed you like a baby bird so you can have your fritter.” She tears off a piece and holds it toward me. “Bite?”

“You do realize that birds chew up the food, and then spit it into their baby’s mouth, right?”

She shoves the Danish in my mouth as I look left and right.

“I am not doing that.”

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, 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 Danish.

The sound of my own breath.

Cheeto’s alarmed howl.

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. We come to a stop.

The semi roars past, horn fading into the distance.

There's silence.

Rain drops softly against the roof.

I sit with both hands locked on the steering wheel.

Calla is breathing 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 know how I got it.

“It’s nothing.”

“Don’t say it’s nothing.”

“It’s nearly nothing.”

We sit a minute longer., while my hands stop shaking. Cheeto begins shrieking, and we see that his cat carrier has flipped onto its side.

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. I hop out, lean in the back door and flip the cat back over. He glowers, and is very, very unimpressed with my driving.

“If it makes you feel any better,” I tell Calla as I climb back in. “I’m pretty sure I’m no longer his favorite.”

The road above us looks normal again. Cars pass. Rain falls. The world continues with offensive indifference.

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.”

“That was scary. I mean, it scared me.”

“It scared me, too.”

She looks out the window, jaw tight.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her.

“For? Almost dying?”

“Are you going back into banshee mode?”

She pauses. Swallows.

“No. I am not. It was an accident, and you didn’t mean to do it. It’s hard to see in the rain. It could’ve happened to anyone.”

I swallow now and try to slow my heart-beat. It’s currently attempting to jump out of my chest.

The rain streaks sideways across the windshield.

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.

Calla's phone eventually rings.

"It's Mack."

"Of course it is."

She swipes the screen and puts her on speaker.

"Hello?"

“Hello! Where are you?"

Calla looks through the rain-streaked windshield.

"A few miles from home.”

"Excellent. Turn around."

"No."

"Finn, make her."

I glance at the phone.

"No."

I can almost hear Mack rolling her eyes.

"I just called to make sure you hadn't forgotten me."

"God, you’re needy. Did you break up with Jacob already?”

“I’m not dating Jacob anymore,” she says primly. “I’m dating Haley from the laundromat. The world is my oyster.”

"We’re all just actors on your stage,” Calla says brightly. “Anything else?”

“Yes. I want to come visit next weekend. Not this upcoming weekend, but next. Ricky will cover for me but I

have to bring back proof that ghosts are real.”

“Did you just assume our house is haunted?” I ask drily.

"Yes, your funeral home is haunted. Calla has told me the stories, Finn.”

Calla smiles.

“Yes, you can come next weekend. Unless my parents have plans we don’t know about.”

We exchange a look. Unless mom is not okay next weekend.

"Perfect. I’ll start buying road trip snacks.”

She hangs up without saying goodbye.

Typical Mack.

By the time we reach Astoria, the clouds are finally breaking apart.

The Columbia River spreads wide and dark beside us, meeting the Pacific out 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. Pines. Home.

She closes her eyes and breathes it in.

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 even smaller when you return.

The road curves upward toward the cliffs.

And before long, there it is.

Home.

Our house stands above the Pacific, a thing carved from weather and rock and grief and time.

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 in enormous white heads, bowing under the weight of the rain. Beyond the house, the land falls sharply away toward the sea, where waves break against black rock far below.

There’s a sign near the gate.

PRICE FUNERAL HOME
EST. 1898

Calla leans forward, then rolls down the window, sticking her head out like a dog.

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 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 composed in the way only funeral directors can be.

Mom makes it halfway down the steps before she starts crying. She 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.

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.

Mom looks slowly at me, then at Calla. “You know I have a recurring dream.”

Calla says, “Mom, we’re not going to die in a crash. If we were, it would’ve been today when Finn pulled out in front of a semi.”

I stare at her. “Wow.”

“What? You did. But we did not die, so mom, you can put that fear to bed.”

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.”

Mom touches Calla’s face, then mine, as if confirming that we’re still assembled correctly.

“Inside,” she says.

“Mom—”

“Inside.”

Suddenly, Calla and I are seven instead of twenty-three, and there is no arguing with Laura Price when she uses that tone. Generals would surrender. Empires would crumble.

We go inside and the house wraps around us at once.

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 grief folded in their laps.

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.” I set the cat carrier down and open it, so Cheeto can explore at his

leisure. Mom tries to lure him out, but all we see are his eyes.

“He seems… disgruntled,” she says, as she stands up.

“Always,” I tell her.

Dinner is a perfectly normal affair.

Mom made pot roast with carrots and potatoes. Dad opens a bottle of wine even though Calla and I still feel slightly illegal drinking in front of them. 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 me about the museum.

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’re both under his roof again. My sister stealing the last potato right off my fork.

It’s all so very normal.

Calla and Finn, walking to cove with flashlights .png

After dinner, I carry the first of my boxes upstairs.

The label reads BOOKS—DO NOT DROP, because experience has taught me that people will drop books unless explicitly instructed not to. Even then, the success rate is disappointing.

The hallway is the same as ever. Calla’s bedroom is on one side, mine on the other, close enough that we spent most of our childhood communicating through the wall rather than undertaking the exhausting six-foot journey between doors.

Hers is already open. Two suitcases lie on the floor, their contents spreading toward the furniture in what appears to be a hostile take-over.

Mine is still closed.

I stand with my hand on the knob longer than necessary.

The last time I slept here was Christmas. Four years of college, and I never managed to come home as often as I intended. There were classes. Work. Plans. Calla’s plans, mostly, which tended to become my plans through a process best described as annexation.

I open the door.

My room has remained largely unchanged. The anatomical drawings still cover the wall near the window. The human skeleton chart hangs over the bookcase, flanked by framed insects, old diagrams, and several artifacts that would be valuable if they were authentic.

They are not. I possess ethical standards.

A black raven watches from the top shelf, its glass eyes fixed on the room with the particular judgment shared by taxidermy and mothers. The plaster bust beside it stares toward the windows, either contemplating the ocean or the decline of Western civilization.

My guitar leans beside the amplifier, exactly where I left it.

Morrissey continues brooding above my bed, having experienced no measurable personal growth during my absence.

I find this comforting.

I find the fact that I find it comforting deeply concerning.

Someone has dusted. The books are straight. Fresh sheets cover the bed, the blanket pulled smooth and tucked beneath the mattress with military precision.

Mom.

I set the box on the floor and cross to the windows.

Beyond the glass, the land descends toward the cove. The ocean lies dark beneath the evening sky, waves breaking white against the rocks. From here, I can see the beginning of the path behind the house and, farther down, the narrow curve of beach sheltered between the cliffs.

I spent four years pretending I didn’t miss this view.

Apparently, I am an excellent liar.

This is useful information.

Rain taps softly against the window. My reflection floats over the water—pale face, dark hair, black shirt, the faintly haunted expression of a man who has recently pulled in front of a semi and would prefer never to discuss it again.

Behind me, the enormous print over my bed reads:

QUID PRO QUO

NOT ALL DEBTS ARE PAID IN COIN.

I bought it when I was eighteen because I found it atmospheric.

At twenty-three, it seems slightly melodramatic.

I continue to approve of it completely.

I crouch beside the box and peel back the tape. Books fill most of it, packed by subject because chaos is the first step toward societal collapse.

Anthropology. Archaeology. Funerary practices. Ritual and religion. Two novels I keep claiming I’ll read and have transported between residences three times without opening.

A dull thump comes from Calla’s room.

Something falls.

“Shit,” she says through the wall.

I smile despite myself.

Then, without thinking, I lift my hand and knock three times.

The sound is solid beneath my knuckles.

A pause.

Three knocks answer from the other side.

You good?

I’m good.

It is an old language, one we haven’t used since we lived here, but neither of us has forgotten it.

Apparently, it takes less than an hour beneath our parents’ roof to regress completely.

A quieter knock comes from the doorway.

Dad stands there with one shoulder against the frame, hands in his pockets.

He looks around the room. “Everything where you left it?”

“Disturbingly so. I believe Mom has established a private museum dedicated to my adolescence.”

“I’ll speak to her about charging admission.”

“Thank you.”

He smiles, but it doesn’t quite take.

I wait.

Dad has never been a man who wanders into rooms without a purpose. He enters them, assesses them, accomplishes something, and leaves. Even his casual visits have an agenda.

He glances toward the wall separating my room from Calla’s.

“So,” he says. “The near accident.”

I look at him.

“I wondered when we’d begin the postmortem.”

His eyebrow lifts.

“Un-ironic choice of word,” I acknowledge.

He steps into the room and closes the door partway behind him. Not completely. We’ve never been a family that closes doors when something difficult is being discussed. We simply lower our voices and pretend this constitutes privacy.

“How close was it?” he asks.

“Not that close.”

“Finn.”

“The semi was moving quickly. We were also moving. All parties continued moving until we were no longer in danger of occupying the same physical space.”

“Finn.”

I sigh.

“Close.”

Dad says nothing.

“The grille filled the windshield,” I admit. “I jerked the wheel, and we spun into a ditch. We didn’t roll. We didn’t hit anything. The car is fine.”

“I didn’t ask about the car.”

“Calla is fine.”

His eyes flick toward the wall again.

“When it happened, was she—”

He stops. Something changes in his face so quickly I almost miss it.

“When it nearly happened,” he corrects, “was she awake?”

“Of course, you know she can't sleep in a moving car."

That illicits a smile. "Of course not."

“She was holding half a Danish and criticizing my driving. So, normal operating conditions.”

I pause to wait for my father to smile again. He does not, so I continue.

“She hit her shoulder against mine when we spun, but she says it doesn’t hurt. She didn’t hit her head. She wasn’t cut. Nothing happened to her, I swear."

He walks to the window and looks out at the ocean. For a moment, neither of us speaks. Rain trails down the glass, dividing the ocean into glistening pieces.

“Your mother dropped a glass this afternoon,” he says.

I glance at him. This feels random.

“She was standing at the kitchen counter. She stopped, said Calla’s name, and dropped it onto the floor.”

A small chill moves over my skin.

“What time?”

Dad turns from the window.

Then he shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

It clearly matters.

“Mom has dreams,” I say carefully. “She worries. But that doesn't mean there is something to worry about.

“I know.”

His voice is quiet.

“Calla is okay, Dad. Whatever was happening in mom's mind... Calla is okay."

“I know that, too. I can hear her unpacking.”

“Everyone in the western hemisphere can hear her unpacking.”

That gets the faintest smile.

Dad reaches for my hand.

It is such an unexpected gesture that I let him take it without protest. He turns it over and examines the narrow cut across my knuckle. A scratch, really.

“And this?”

“I don’t know. I noticed it afterward.”

His thumb passes just beneath the cut.

He has spent his life examining damage. Measuring it. Cleaning it. Repairing what can be repaired and disguising what cannot. There is something unnerving about having that attention directed at me.

“It’s nothing,” I say.

He releases my hand.

I study him. “Dad, are you okay?”

The question surprises him.

Then his expression settles into the calm, composed mask I recognize. My father can deliver catastrophic news without raising his voice or shifting his posture. Families trust him because he always appears capable of surviving whatever has happened.

Tonight, for the first time, it occurs to me that being capable and feeling capable may not be the same thing.

“A parent spends years teaching his children how to leave,” he says. “How to drive. How to choose. How to survive without him. It's difficult to hear that they coudl've been killed."

His voice is heavy and gruff and I wonder if he has had a difficult body lately. Sometimes, hard cases, like a child, turn him maudlin for a while. He's human, after all.

“We’re both home,” I tell him. "We were not killed. We're safe."

Dad looks at me. For one strange second, the room feels very still.

“Yes,” he says. “You both are."

The words land oddly but I don't know why.

He clasps the back of my neck and pulls me forward, touching his forehead briefly to mine. “You did well.”

“I pulled in front of a semi.”

“But you're safe now."

His voice breaks on the last word. Only slightly.

He releases me before I can decide whether I imagined it.

“Don’t frighten your mother like that again,” he says.

“I’ll amend my schedule.”

“See that you do.”

He leaves the door open behind him.

I stand in the middle of the room, listening to his footsteps retreat down the hall.

On the other side of the wall, Calla opens a drawer. Something else falls. She swears again.

She's certainly alive. Entirely, noisily, clumsily alive.

I look down at the cut across my knuckle.

For the first time since we arrived, some tight, restless part of me begins to settle. Calla is on the other side of the wall. Mom is painting upstairs. Dad is probably checking the locks, the thermostat, the downstairs thermostat, and then the locks again.

Everything is where it belongs.

The thought should feel reassuring.

Instead, I look toward the window.

The cove is nearly lost to darkness now. I can’t see the beach from here, only the restless line of the water and the pale flash of waves against stone. I can hear the tide, crashing on the rocks, and before I think better of it, I grab my jacket and head downstairs.

Calla finds me by the back door with my jacket already on.

She has hers, too.

“The cove?” she asks. "It was calling to me, too."

“It's almost like we're twins."

The path to the beach begins behind the house, before the wind-bent pines. It cuts through salal and fern, then slopes down toward the cliffs. The ground is soft from rain. The air smells like spruce and ocean and night.

Calla walks ahead of me with her flashlight, though neither of us really need it.

We know this path by heart.

The ocean gets louder as we descend.

When the trail opens onto the cove, the beach opens up… 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?”

“It’s 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 from the salt.

Calla puts on music from her phone.

Something soft and melancholy. Cigarettes after Sex, I think.

We sit close to the fire, knees drawn up, watching sparks drift toward the sky. The salty breeze lifts our hair away from our faces. Clouds move fast across the moon, and between them, stars burn cold and bright.

We can’t see any constellations tonight.

“How old were we the summer dad taught us the constellations?” I ask Calla. She stares at me.

“He taught me the constellations. You were always hunting for oddities on the beach.”

She's not wrong.

Calla leans back on her hands. “Do you think the ducks are still here?”

"Who would've moved them?"

"Good point." 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 not see the opening unless you know i'ts there.

Inside, the air is colder. Damp. Salty. Thick. Still.

Calla shines her flashlight along the wall, and there they are.

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.”

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 collection of all the things the ocean brings us.

Calla adjusts one that has tipped over.

“There,” she says.

I shine my phone back toward the stream, and it is still full, still in motion, fluidly winding along the rock.

"Let's come back tomorrow during daylight," I suggest. "We can see what's different."

"Nothing changes around here," Calla laughs, but she accompanies me back to the beach.

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.”

She turns her head toward me. Firelight moves over her face, turning her hair dark crimson.

“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, but separately this time.

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.

It's not loud.

It's not even distinct.

It's 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.

A body.

“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.

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. Fear is a knot in my belly.

Then she whispers, “Oh my God.”

The young 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.