Inland by Kat Rosenfield Page B

done my time and then some, that the sea is mine, it’s waiting for me, and I won’t be patient. I won’t. I wrench away from her touch, and snarl, “I don’t want to wait. I want to go.”
    I should throw myself into the water right now, and let it carry me away to the sea.
    Her eyes grow large as she looks at me, then downriver, as though she’s read my mind.
    “Callie,” she says, and her voice is low and urgent. “Get out of the water.”
    “No!”
    I’ve never seen her move so fast. It seems impossible, how quickly her hand snakes out to grasp my shoulder, hard enough to bruise, how strong her slender fingers are.
    “Get out of the water!” she shouts. “NOW!”
    The space inside my head—so full of the beckoning call of the ocean—seems to snap in the center, a jagged rift that splits my thoughts apart and sends them spinning away, replaced by confusion and panic.
Is this me, who’s so desperate to lose herself in the open sea? Is that my voice, demanding to go?
    Nessa pulls on my arm again, and I tread clumsily in the water, and she’s behind me, pushing me toward the dock and shouting again that I need to get out,
out
, and then something else that I don’t understand, until she says it twice more and the torpor evaporates and I flail my way toward safety.
    —
    Later that night, we stand together in the gradual dusk—accompanied by the pattering, chattering back-and-forth movements of Bee, who’d cheerfully come up behind us to announce that
duh
, of course there are alligators in the river, and that one of them had even crawled into a lot down the street last year and eaten somebody’s cat. We scan the shadowy coastline, slapping away hungry mosquitoes and looking for the telltale mottled heads of sneaking predators, while she prattles on.
    “Gators run fast,” Bee chirps. “But if you run away special, they can’t catch you. Here, see?”
    I turn to look as she flees, zigzagging on diagonals back along the dock and into the yard.
    “Like that!” she yells. I give her a weak smile and hold thumb to forefinger—
Got it—
and she waves before running the rest of the way home. Still zigzagging away from an imaginary gator, while I turn my attention back to the dense and shadowed coast across the way.
    “Do you see it?” I ask. “Was it really there?”
    Nessa is quiet and grim, the color drained from her cheeks. She stares out at the water with a taut, haunted look, and shakes her head for the hundredth time.
    “It’s gone. But it’ll come back.” She shudders. “I think I’m done swimming in this river. And you are, too.”
    —
    And she is, and so am I. Not even when, in the end, the sun goes down without illuminating the hiding place of any sharp-toothed or scaly creature. The scariest thing we see is a dead, unthreatening fish that bobs past, belly-up, on its way to the open sea.
    But whatever Nessa saw or heard—whether it was something in the water, or maybe something in me—has made her frightened. Cautious. When she looks at the river now, her face is a mask of anxiety, her eyes flitting up and down the bank and the small hairs on her neck all on end. But her hand is warm in mine, and she squeezes it reassuringly even as she gazes at the river.
    “It’s okay, baby. There are other ways to swim.”

C H A P T E R 15
    IT’S AMAZING, how quickly you can miss things. You only need to have something for a moment—just for a day, for an hour, for the length of time it takes to hold a single breath—in order to want it back when it disappears. I’ve been without my mother longer than I knew her, but the hole where she’s supposed to be still howls with echoing emptiness. I can no longer remember the placement of the rocks on the battered coast of my childhood home, but my dreams are full of the crashing sound of surf.
    And though I swam in the river only a dozen times, I ache to be back in that black, slow water.
    But I didn’t fight Nessa’s choice. The truth was, even