Either the Beginning or the End of the World (3 page)

“That's mine.” I find myself shouting at him, as if he'll pull the ring back and pocket it, too.

He tosses it, and it lands in the crevice of the rock at my feet. On my knees, I scoop it into my hands clumsy with thick mittens.

He's watching me. “Are you real?” he asks.

Somehow, this is confusing. I wrap my arms around myself. “I don't know.”

But all of a sudden, I'm aware of being a physical person. I'm aware of the ribbing of my undershirt hugging my wrists. I'm aware of my hair I wound in my fist that falls to the nape of my neck under my stocking cap. I feel the cold air as I breathe into my chest. We squint our eyes in the shard of sunlight and take each other in.

“What's your name?” I say. Did he forget the gun inside his coat?

“Luke. Lucas.”

I see the shadow of his beard. I step back.

“I'm Sofie.” I jerk Pilot, who wants to run. Then I let her go and she flies, her floppy ears thrown back like Superman capes. I wonder what color his eyes are. Maybe, like the river, they change with the angle of light. I love the feel of my ring back with me in my fist. It feels solid. I feel solid. But I can't keep it.

I open my mitten with my ring. “My father gave me this,” I say. “I'm giving it back to you. It's for good luck, wherever you're going. It's a tiger's eye.”

I come closer, balance the ring on the steel bar. But this time I stay and study the American flag high up on his sleeve and try to make out the patch beneath it. Something
Army National Guard
.
New Hampshire
. I see a patch shaped like a shield, with many stars. Nine. Beneath that, bright colored bars. Striped and starred. Why did he pin on all these badges to stand under a roaring bridge?

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Sixteen,” I say, not thinking, since I'm almost seventeen. “Seventeen,” I say, but the roar of six lanes of cars overhead flattens it.

The soldier lifts his glasses and turns his eyes on me. They are yellow-green exhausted eyes that are both terrifying and beckoning. I feel like I'm wearing nothing but the cotton undershirt and he can see every bone up my rib cage. “You need a night's sleep,” I say, and again I feel the fear in my legs and also fascination with his eyes. He looks at me with eyes that make me remember lines my father used to tell me from a Scottish nursery rhyme. It begins,
One for sorrow.
I'm stalled on the first line.

I say, “I have to go.”

He pulls back toward the river.

But he tosses something quite light toward me, and I catch it. It jangles on a silver chain that slides between my mittens. What is this? In exchange for the ring? I wrap it in my hand.

“Sofie Grear!” I hear from the trees. My dog stops tearing across the strip of beach where, at the horizon, the splotch of pink shows through the snow clouds. She listens, too. “Sofie.” Short. Abrupt. It's my father. He sees the soldier on the steel beam. I hold what the soldier tossed out of sight. Overhead, the sky has become smoke.

“Sofie, come away from there.” I hear tension in my father's voice. My father with the calmness of the sea.

“I'm not a lost dog,” I call.

Without looking, I feel the soldier—Luke—straighten.

My father drops down through the scrub brush to the rocky beach so quickly, it's as if he thought the current of the river had sucked me into her snake body. High above, angles and lines of the bridge disappear in the fog and the snow.

“Sofie,” he calls again.

“I'm here.”

“What are you, crazy?” I am still near the beam. For one second my father looks like he is going to come hard on the soldier, and I think of the silly joke we have, “You can always come home. No matter what.”
I could always come home
. What is there in the world to keep me from my father?

But the soldier and I are here in the snow. It's hard to place my father here.

It's Luke who jumps from the pier to the rocky beach. He speaks softly, and my father answers in such a way that I realize they know each other. Luke looks at my father, his face at an angle. He is deferential. He holds out his hand. He wants to shake my father's hand. My father extends his hand a short way to be done with the business of greeting, but Luke takes his hand in both of his. Then he leaps across the rocks and disappears into the snow.

I slide the silver chain into my pocket.

A MILLION SUNS

The sun had risen and bloomed for only a second in the sky. Pilot and I climb the steep path slippery with snow back up into the evergreen woods, up to the trail that follows the cyclone fence for a few yards where Luke found my ring. I try to run through the deep snow. I'm not ready to talk to my father. I imagine the school bus horn honking, a world away. Everything feels mysterious and foreign. The snow has become glitter. Glitter falls on Pilot's ears as I pound through the snow off the trail.

“What were you doing?” My father is beside me.

“You know him.” It sounds like an accusation. Why am I so angry?

“What did you think you were doing!”

“What do you mean? I wasn't doing anything.” We trudge in silence through the thorny branches, curved low under the weight of snow. Snow sticks to my clothes. Pine boughs make the woods smell like Christmas. The air is so cold, clouds of our breath rise. We can see each other's streams of smoke.

“You're stepping where you don't belong.” His face is tight with cold and something like fear. “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

“What did I do? I was talking to him.”

“Sofie, you're too young.”

“I'm sixteen. Wasn't my mother sixteen?”

“Your mother was . . .” He doesn't have the words.

“I have to go to school.”

“There is no school. This is a storm.”

This stops me and brings me back to my father. I almost drop down and hug his knees like a child. What if he'd gone out, and instead of us yelling at each other in the woods like we're doing, he'd be trying to fix the transmission or whatever broke on a boat taking on water in fifty-knot winds. I have nightmares about this. Storms are my nightmares. Fisherman's daughter dreams.

But he's here. I slow down. I stop trying to escape him.

A million tiny suns repeat on a boulder ahead from the glare of the shard of sun.

Where's the soldier? Luke. Thinking of him is like startling awake. He ran from the beach and into the snow. Someone needs to take the gun away. Maybe he has gone somewhere to sleep—his eyes were exhausted—and I will approach, careful not to crunch on the snow or scatter the beach stones underfoot. And I'll steal the gun away. I will carry it in two hands, pointing down.

All this is in my imagination while my father and I trudge through the snow, together, bits of fire coming from our breath.

“Sofie, keep away from that kid.” My father's voice is too loud.

I ask, “How do you know him?”

“He crewed for me. I know him. Just out of the service. You stay away from him.”

“You're going to Chincoteague. You're leaving me with my mother.”

“If I don't land the fish, what kind of business are you going to run?”

Important things are not said, like the secret I know about the soldier. The gun he slid maybe into a holster inside his coat.

The
you're too young
. Like my mother? Why's my mother different? Tell me what you know.

The
are you real?
The question the soldier asked me. I still feel it in my body.

Pilot and I walk ahead. I am imagining the blast of the gun.

My father has a gun. A lot of fishermen do. He taught me how to fire it. He taught me how to steady a gun. He taught me how to clasp my left hand around my firing hand holding the gun, stop breathing, and fire.

But in my mind I see this gun and the hands of the soldier in a January dawn . . . alone. The gun in his own hand.
Click click click baam
. A horrible flash—a boy's, a young man's body—his blood washing into the river. A boy who searched his pockets for peanuts for my dog.

I need to see you,
I think,
so I can take this image away.

KILIM

I tell Rosa that my father is going to Chincoteague. I don't tell her that he says my mother is coming to my house. I don't want this to happen. I have no place in my head to even talk about it. I want to talk about the boy who crews for my father, Luke, who I met by chance on my beach.

“I shouldn't see him,” I tell Rosa.

She watches me, excited, since I've never been interested in anybody. I like running cross-country with boys. I like laughing and racing through the woods and dancing rock to rock, forging streams and collapsing under trees with them. They're my friends. Sometimes Rosa tries to match me up, but I never would.

She's the party girl. She calls me driven.

“I have to see him,” I say.

“Are you looking for advice?” she asks.

“No.”

She shrugs, and the tassels on the white hat she wears swirl playfully like a child's hat. We're red-cheeked with cold, even inside our meeting place, Caffe Kilim. Each time the door opens, we shiver.
Before
the door opens, we shiver and brace ourselves.

I glance around the coffee shop. “Don't lecture,” I say, “about how I always said no boys.”

“As long as you don't lecture me.”

“You broke up? Again?”

“He didn't
get
me. I always had to finish my sentences.”

We laugh. This makes perfect sense to us.

“You want a person to
get
you,” she elaborates. “I'd never say to you, come on, Sofie, let's spend the day at Wallis Sands in the waves. You don't go in the ocean. Like I can't look down from the bridge. How could anybody jump? They'd have to get up there.”

So we agree. We're perfect. To each other.

Kilim smells like coffee beans, like our whole tourist town. Brianna behind the counter lifts the lid of the milk steamer. She pours foam over the bitter coffee in an orange and black Kilim cardboard cup. Boats at the Fisherman's Co-op are littered with orange and black cups. Brianna, silver bangles on her tattooed arms, cuts the foam in midstream. They don't make nonpaying customers leave.

“How are you going to find him?” she asks.

“I don't think I'll have to. It'll happen.” I say this without thinking.

My mind goes back to the co-op, where I had waited for Rosa. Ducks with emerald heads swarmed the pier. A new boat was berthed there,
Storm Rider
. My father wasn't there. The harbor was quiet. Not a single fisherman was out there working on his boat in the punishing, aching cold. The boats hugged the pier even while waves rolled and tossed them.

“Before you came, my eyes did funny things,” I tell Rosa. “I imagined the soldier was on
Storm Rider,
and he was thrown flat on the deck. And I got scared and didn't know if I could . . .” Rosa can't finish this one. She watches me. “If I could . . . leave. I'd want to stay.”

“I can't believe this is you talking,” she says.

I rub my arms in the cold and press my lips at the enormous mystery. Being drawn to somebody so much, he is even in the circles my breath makes on the windowpane.

Rosa buttons her coat to the tip of her chin. “Your father will lock you on board the
Karma
, even with your ocean phobia, and you'll spend your youth at sea.” A sly smile.

I want to tell her we might need to worry about how much I want to see him.

I still don't mention the gun. I lean into the window seat at Kilim, my knee on a magazine with a Dolce & Gabbana ad. I keep watch for my father approaching the door. My glance roams up the wall of postcards sent to Kilim from customers on their travels and honeymoons. A kid at the next table holds a paperback open in one hand. The name Rumi crosses the spine beside the bend of his finger.

I let myself look at Rosa again. Lipstick shimmers on her lips. I am relieved. She is real. I am real. I tell her about Pilot streaking across the riverbank. I tell about the flag on the soldier's arm. But in my mind I see the flash of glare off the gun and the gun sliding under his coat. I put my hand in my pocket and pull up the silver chain.

“What's that?”

“He gave it to me.”

I open my palm. In it are two small metal rectangles imprinted with the name
Sanna, Lucas
. I trace the bumpy letters.

“His dog tags?” she says.

My hand is wet with sweat.

I can't remember not having Rosa for a friend. When Rosa plays her guitar, for those moments, she takes me to a different world where I'm safe. She plays, I sing. Or I play and sing. We dream up fantasies about being a girl band. Since we were Fisherman's Co-op rats together as kids, she's been my friend.

My father says about me,
This one's a shore girl
. Bad luck on a boat, he means, ever since the time I nearly drowned. Rosa and I were swimming on a wave, into my father's arms. But I had stopped breathing. He thought he'd drowned me. He told me I was still as a corpse, my black hair among the tendrils of seaweed and coated in sand. He turned me on my side to expel the sea from my lungs. I gagged, and the sea came up and I started bawling and rolled into his chest. He rocked me on the beach, and it seemed like days I cried, in a ball against him under a glinting sun and Rosa patting my foot. That's how my father tells it.

“I wanted to be a seal,” I told them.

He said, “You're no seal. Stay out of the water. Best you stay off the boat. This one can go on the boat.” He meant Rosa. And from then on, I lost trust in the water.

But one summer Rosa and I painted
The Sofie & Rosa
on the
Karma
's hull. Good ring to it, Dad had said, but it's bad luck to change the name of a boat, so we had to change it back. Fishermen are superstitious. But Rosa and I liked how our names looked on the hull, and that's as close as we got so far to being a girl band.