What We Hold In Our Hands by Kim Aubrey

crouched half-submersed in the salty water. He scraped his calf on a limestone reef, and she would never forget the sudden bruising pressure of his fingers on her forearm, his yelp of pain, or the tears that bent his lashes.
    Luke removes the screen from his window and climbs through, dropping softly to the ground. He doesn’t want Laina to know where he’s going. Luke is a boy full of secrets. His biggest secret is that he doesn’t really miss his father. It’s his mother he misses. She never wanders into his room at night anymore. He used to hear her soft footsteps, feel her hand rest on his forehead, smell her lavender hand lotion as he floated back to sleep. Lately, bereft of her hovering presence, he wakes abruptly from nightmares. Last night he was chasing her wheeled coffin, which rolled ahead of him like an old-fashioned racing car past pink and yellow houses until it was so far ahead that he knew he’d never catch it.
    Luke lets himself out the back gate, closes it behind him. Before setting off down the road, he takes a deep breath as if steeling himself for adventure. You can tell that each stride fills him with a sense of freedom and forgetting. The rain has stopped, the clouds are parting, and the asphalt sparkles in the sun. His bare arms feel warm even though it’s only two weeks until Christmas. His grandparents will be coming from the States. Maybe they can get his mother out of bed. Luke climbs onto the limestone wall that skirts the road and walks along the top of it, picking petals off hibiscus, doing battle with long flexible oleander stalks, popping acid-green cherry leaves into his mouth. At the end of the road, he jumps off to cross the busy street before following rough stone steps down to the water. Even though winter is near, it’s a fine Saturday afternoon, and a few people are boating. A warm breeze ripples across the harbour. Luke breathes in the salty air with its tang of sulphur, feeling his body soften.
    His father used to take them out in the motorboat. There it sits, glistening on the water. It’s not fair that they don’t use it anymore. All alone out there, the boat will rot or sink. Someone needs to watch it, or put it away for the winter. He climbs into the small rowboat, moored at the dock, grabs the oars and rows out to the motorboat. You can easily read its embarrassing name, “Liv and Larn,” painted on the stern in bold blue script, and understand why Luke wants to take a stone and scratch out the “Larn.” Tying up to the boat’s mooring, he pulls on the rope until he is close enough to jump aboard.
    Liv remembers the blue ribbons she won jumping horses when she was young, how her horse, Ringo, had responded to the slightest pressure of her knees as he carried her over white gates and stiff green hedges. Ringo’s love and loyalty had been exclusive and had lasted until his sudden death while Liv was away at university. She can still make herself cry by reading the letter in which her mother described his heart attack, a letter Liv received on a sunny October morning when she was planning to skip classes for a drive in the country with a tall, shy philosophy student she’d been flirting with for weeks. After spending the afternoon weeping on his shoulder, she refused to see him again because she couldn’t look into his dark, attentive eyes without thinking of Ringo.
    Luke finds a sponge under a seat. He sops up the rainwater that has collected in the stern, grimacing as he squeezes the sponge dry. He pulls a key from his pocket, another of his secrets. He’d found it in the kitchen drawer reserved for odds and ends, the place his father had always kept it. He tells himself that he only wants to see if the engine is still running, but once he hears its steady growl, he can’t resist taking the boat for a spin. That’s what his father used to say—“Hey, sport, want to go for a spin?”
    Luke