After a few minutes Max relented.
“Hey, I know something was really going on back there,” he said awkwardly. “It’s just hard to…”
“Suspend disbelief,” said Cara.
He nodded.
“And what about this—what did you call him? Foreign man?—”
“Pouring man,” said Cara.
“—who you said could get into Jax’s head? What was that all about?”
She hesitated, wondering how much to tell him. In the front seat, Jax and her dad were talking about “carbon storage” and “echinoderms”—nothing she really understood. She loved Jax and she loved her dad, but sometimes she felt like their smartclub only had room for two members. In a way she had more in common with Max, who was at least down to earth. Unlike Jax or her dad, both she and Max would rather go for a walk on the beach or to a party than, say, find a nice empty room and get cozy with a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire or Relativity: The Special and the General Theory.
She might as well give it a shot. Even if he didn’t believe her about the Pouring Man, what did she have to lose? This whole summer, when she needed him most, he’d barely been able to spare her the time of day.
So it couldn’t get much worse than it already was.
“You’re not going to believe me if I tell you,” she said.
“Yeah,” allowed Max, “you’re probably right. But tell me anyway.”
So she did.
She and Jax didn’t have any time alone during the afternoon, since her dad was taking the day to spend “quality time” with his younger son; then, right after dinner, Hayley showed up with a cake her mother had baked for them. Hayley’s mother was divorced and clearly believed that that was what was happening in Cara’s family, too.
It was annoying to Cara that Hayley’s mom thought she knew more about Cara’s own family than they did. But at least there was an upside: homemade desserts, once every week since June.
So they all hung out on the porch, Cara sitting with Hayley on the swing, the others in lawn chairs and on the front steps, eating their pieces of cake as dark descended. They talked about normal stuff—the guys fighting at the skatepark, school starting up again.
The guys went inside one by one as they finished their cake, first her dad, then Max, and finally Jax, till she and Hayley were just going back and forth slowly, listening to the swing creak. Cara figured she was stuck there, for a few minutes at least—she needed to debrief Jax, but she couldn’t just dump Hayley. She thought about telling her friend about the Pouring Man, the turtle, all of it, but she couldn’t decide.
She wanted to confide in her; on the other hand, she didn’t want to scare her. Ever since her mom and dad got divorced and her dad moved to Idaho or somewhere, Hayley got scared by strange men. So did her mom, come to think of it. Cara wasn’t sure exactly why—maybe something about the divorce itself, which had been pretty mean—but it probably wasn’t the time to delve into the subject.
And she hadn’t believed Cara about the driftwood, anyway.
After Hayley left, she climbed the stairs quickly, impatient to ask Jax what was up with the turtle. But when she knocked on his door there was no answer. She pushed open the door and saw he was fast asleep: his moon light shone down from the wall, and the stuffed giraffe lay in the crook of one arm. He was so exhausted he hadn’t even managed to change into the dreaded pajamas.
She thought about waking him up, but he looked so wiped out she couldn’t bring herself to.
Alone in her own bedroom, she took the small white box from her bag, the box she’d found in her mother’s office, and unrolled the yellowing scroll.
The night of fires beneath the sea
Among the bones of the Whydahlee
Three must visit the old selkie:
Interpreter, arbiter, and visionary.
Only then may the bonds come undone,
The fourth secure’d of fear’s venom;
The man who walks in water gone,
A path laid out for the absent one.
It sounded like some kind of prophesy, she thought. Did it have something to do with the turtle, with the driftwood message?
Was it their mother talking to them?
It wasn’t her mother’s handwriting, though, and she didn’t think her mother wrote poems; her mother was a scientist. Plus the paper looked old.
Then again, obviously, it had been in her mother’s office….
The man who walks in water. The Pouring Man. It had to be!
And this had to be meant for them.
She would show it to Jax first thing in the morning.
And Max. What about him? She wasn’t sure what he was thinking. She had told him everything; he had listened, but, though he hadn’t made fun of her openly, he made no sign of buying into what she was saying, either. When she was done he had nodded without commenting, turned away from her, and looked out at the other cars passing them.
“ ‘Three must visit the old selkie, interpreter, arbiter and visionary,’ ” she read aloud, softly.
Just then something hit the glass of her window, which was half-open. She almost jumped out of her skin. Slowly, and wishing she wasn’t alone, she got up. She walked over to where the curtains were billowing inward and then, after a long moment of held breath, jerked them apart.
She couldn’t see anything, not even the trees outside, because her eyes were adjusted to the bright, artificial lighting of her room. There was no noise from anywhere, though, and she was still curious, so she decided to dig her pen-sized flashlight out of her desk.
There were a few beads of moisture on the glass where the object had hit, and through the mesh of the screen below she could see a small dark pile of something, lying on the porch
