The Secret Sea Read online

  Yes! Yes, I can hear you!

  If you can hear me, you have to understand: You can’t trust him.

  Trust who? Who are you talking about? What’s happening?

  Look up. Look down. Look all around. The answers are hidden, but they are there.

  What? What do you—

  Whatever you do, Zak … Whatever you do, never, ever go into—

  “He’s awake!” a voice said as a burst of intense light blinded him.

  “No!” Zak screamed. “Tommy! Tommy, what were you saying! Tommy!”

  “Put him back under!” someone shouted. “Now!”

  “Tommy!” Zak thrashed against the hands that held him down. “Tommy!”

  And then the world went dark. Which was fine.

  But quiet, too.

  Which wasn’t fine.

  Tommy? Tommy, are you there?

  And then everything—even Zak himself—went away.

  TEN

  He woke and then he slept again, but the sleep was dreamless, voiceless, Tommy-less, and so it felt nothing like sleep. It was, instead, a great blank stamped into him, a void. An abyss.

  Being awake took on the character of dreams instead. Sometimes he couldn’t open his eyes, his lids too heavy to move. Voices drifted around him, snatches of sound on the air.

  La-La.

  Mom.

  Dad.

  Other people.

  Just like in a dream where no matter how fast you run, you can’t make any headway, the harder Zak tried to focus on the voices around him, the less he heard. And then he would slip again into the void.

  Sometimes his eyes fluttered open and he would glimpse a blurred snapshot of the world—a face, haloed with curls, maybe his grandmother, maybe not. His dad? Who knew? He couldn’t tell, and then the weight of his eyelids would win again and back to the void, back to the abyss.

  Maybe that was better.

  Because when he was awake, he thought of Tommy. In those brief lucid moments before sinking into the quicksand of unconsciousness, he would think of his twin, of the piece of him that had been missing without his realizing, and he wondered how he could not have known. If he’d been missing an arm, he would have known, right? And yet he’d been missing an entire person from his life and he hadn’t realized.

  Or maybe he had. Maybe that’s why there was the imaginary friend, the voice, the dreams. The aching sense of solitude when forced to be on his own.

  Sometimes when he opened his eyes, there was no one. No voices. No blurry faces peering down at him. He was alone. Again. This time, more alone than he’d ever been, which was a considerable amount. He had thought that the loneliness of an only child of divorced parents was as intense as could be experienced. But a single piece of paper had taught him otherwise. True loneliness proceeded not from being always alone but rather from being partnered … and then losing that partner.

  He hadn’t even known that Tommy had existed, but now all he wanted was his twin back.

  Every time he opened his eyes, they were wet with tears. In the abyss, in the formless void, Zak wept for his dead brother.

  That had to mean something.

  ELEVEN

  He finally opened his eyes for more than a few seconds. Enough time to clear them of sleep gunk.

  He was in a hospital room. Clean, but in that shabby way hospital rooms have—there are stains even bleach can’t completely eradicate, and the walls of Zak’s room bore their dingy ghosts. The smell of antiseptic soap and starch lingered, and the air hung paralyzed.

  The bed was too stiff in some places, too soft in others, and no matter how Zak positioned himself, he couldn’t find a spot that felt right. Add to that the wires that unspooled from stickers on his chest to a monitor, and the IV tube that kept getting caught on the bed railing, and it was impossible to be comfortable for more than two minutes at a time.

  How do they expect people to get better when they can’t even relax?

  He suffered flickering, choppy memories of doctors and nurses clustered around him, of his parents peering down at him, their faces creased with worry wrinkles, expressions desperate and terrified. Someone had, he believed, tried to explain to him what had happened—a “cardiac event.” Those words lingered in his recent memory. Cardiac event. That sounded scarily like something that happened to old people, and it had happened to him.

  “You’re going to be okay,” someone had said at some point, and he wasn’t sure he believed it.

  He put a hand over his heart. According to the monitor, it was loping along just fine, but he didn’t really believe it was still in his chest until he felt its thrum with his own fingers.

  His mouth tasted stale. Gummy. He couldn’t reach the bedside tray, where a pitcher and glass rested tantalizingly, mockingly.

  The door to his room opened, and to his surprise Dr. Campbell entered, followed by his parents. Mom and Dad had bags under their eyes and looked so much older than usual.

  He couldn’t quite believe his eyes—they were holding hands. Mom had obviously been crying, and Dad wore beard stubble.

  How long have I been here?

  Dr. Campbell stood at the foot of his bed. Mom and Dad split and took seats on either side of him; Mom took his hand, and Dad rested a palm on Zak’s shoulder. It was creepy that no one said anything.

  “Do you need anything?” Dr. Campbell asked.

  “Thirsty.” His voice croaked and cracked. His throat hurt.

  Dr. Campbell poured a glass of water and handed it to him. He drank it as quickly as his sore throat would allow, then held it up, signaling for more. She refilled and he sipped at it this time.

  “Zak, I’ve been speaking with your parents, and I’ve asked them to talk to you. I’ve asked them to be very honest with you, and they’ve agreed. They’re not going to talk about your … walkabout. Or anything like that. They just want to tell you some things. And I think maybe…” She cut her eyes left and right, taking in both of them. “I think maybe they might even want to apologize.”

  His parents nodded in miserable synchronization.

  Dr. Campbell settled into a seat in the corner of the room. Zak looked from Mom to Dad, then back. They both stared down at the floor, neither one willing to speak.

  “Someone has to talk,” Zak said at last.

  Bobbing his head, Dad said, “I don’t know what you saw or read—”

  “I know about my brother.”

  Dad blew out a trembly, shuddering sigh. “Yeah. Okay. Look, we…”

  “You were sick,” Mom said abruptly. “When you were in the womb. Both of you. You had something called TTTS.”

  “Twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome,” Dr. Campbell chimed in quietly. “It affects identical twins. Very rare.”

  “I don’t know how to explain this,” Mom said helplessly. “It’s like…” She drifted off and gave Dad the You take over look.

  “You and your brother shared everything in the womb,” Dad said. “And there was a connection between the two of you. A very special one. But what happened was…”

  “One twin begins to take blood from the other,” Dr. Campbell said very calmly. “You know about blood transfusions, right? This is similar, except it’s accidental. One twin absorbs blood from the other.”

  Zak had a mental image of two babies in a belly, one of them drawing blood from the other, growing larger as the other shrank.

  “I sucked out his blood?” he exclaimed, horrified. “Like a vampire?”

  “No!” Mom shouted, and flung her arms around him. “No, never think that! You didn’t do anything.”

  “This is why we didn’t tell you,” Dad explained. “We were worried you would blame yourself. It was an accident of nature. No one did anything. It just happened.”

  “Never, ever blame yourself for this,” Mom whispered in his ear.

  “You both had health problems when you were born,” Dad said. “Your heart condition, from too much blood in the womb. And Tommy had kidney problems from too li
ttle blood. We thought we might lose one of you, or even both of you, but we got lucky.” He looked away, his jaw trembling. “For a little while.”

  Zak was uncomfortable in his mother’s awkward embrace; he pushed her off him. “But then Tommy died. And you just pretended he never existed.”

  And then it was like Zak could rewind his life and watch it again, only this time through a different camera angle. His sixth birthday party, when he’d turned a corner at the restaurant and seen La-La sobbing in Mom’s arms for no apparent reason. His mother’s seemingly bizarre, overwrought annoyance at every mention of his imaginary friend. The way his father would turn and gaze lingeringly at dual baby carriages on the street.

  You’re all I—we—I have left, Mom had said to him.

  Have left.

  Left.

  All that remained. Zak was what was left after Tommy died. Everyone knew and everyone mourned.

  Everyone in his life had missed Tommy. Except for his own twin. Because they’d lied.

  Lied, like Tommy had promised.

  Zak had spent his life thinking he was alone. And then he wasn’t.

  And then he was.

  Don’t trust him, the voice had said.

  More like “don’t trust them.”

  Mindful of the tubes and wires attached to him, he folded his arms over his chest, wishing he could make himself disappear. He wanted to be away from his parents, probably forever. Never to see them again. He’d thought he’d been angry at them in the past, when they’d punished him or denied him something, but that was kiddie anger. This—this emotion he was feeling now—he knew that this was adult anger.

  “You’ve been lying to me. My whole life.”

  “We thought—”

  “Michael.” It was Dr. Campbell. Zak had been so wrapped up in his outrage that he’d forgotten about her. She said his father’s name again and came over to the bed. “Let me handle this part.

  “I’ve known you much longer than the past week,” she told Zak. “Your parents brought you to me soon after Tommy died. They wanted to know how it would affect you, what it would do to you.” She shook her head and opened her mouth to continue speaking, but she couldn’t. Rummaging in her purse, she produced a tissue and dabbed at her eyes.

  “I owe you an apology, too. God, Zak, I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I told them … I told them that you probably wouldn’t remember Tommy at all. That your memories of him would fade. Clearly, I was wrong. You’ve been remembering him, and it took the form of your imaginary friend, your sleepwalking … and then you learned about him the worst way possible.”

  “We really were going to tell you,” Dad said in the least convincing tone ever. “When you were older.”

  “How old do you have to be to know about your dead twin brother?” Zak asked with an acidity he’d never dared before with his parents.

  “We were worried about your heart,” Mom whispered. “About something exactly like this—”

  “I deserved to know!” Zak shouted, and the heart monitor beeped and pinged warningly. The three adults all hissed in a panicked breath, and Zak felt a surge of warm power at the thought of the terror he’d just instilled in them. “I deserved to know. You let me go around thinking I just came up with the name Tommy on my own, letting me think he was just my imaginary friend. And you all got to keep this secret to yourselves and never bothered to tell me the most important thing in my life.”

  “I understand you’re angry—” his dad began.

  Zak shook his father’s hand off his shoulder. “Angry? Are you kidding me? You’ve been lying to me my whole life, and you think you can just say you’re sorry and it’s okay?”

  When he was younger, Zak had accidentally spilled purple Kool-Aid on his mother’s favorite skirt. He’d apologized lavishly and profusely, but she’d remained upset. Eventually, after his umpteenth apology, she’d said, “Zak, it was my favorite.… Sorry doesn’t actually fix anything. Sometimes sorry isn’t enough.”

  He’d never understood that. Sorry had always been enough. Until now. His parents and Dr. Campbell could apologize until the end of time, and it wouldn’t be enough. If it wasn’t enough for a skirt, then there weren’t enough sorrys in the world to fill the hole left by his twin. Until that moment on the floor at home, that moment when he’d seen the birth certificate, he’d never realized that the gap in his life hadn’t always been there. He’d thought he just hated being alone, that it was as simple as that. But no. Something vast and important had been missing. The world had been incomplete.

  Something had been taken from him that could never, ever be returned.

  Unless.

  “Don’t tell.”

  “Zak, can you hear me?”

  Unless there was still a way to be with Tommy after all.

  TWELVE

  They left him staring at the water-stained acoustic ceiling tile above him, willing Tommy’s voice to return. His efforts, his strains, rewarded him with precisely nothing.

  He’d thought his life was a good one. A full one. But now he knew the truth—it was a life of lies, and only half a life at that. A life of fractions. He was a fraction. Exactly one-half of what he was supposed to be.

  Tears came on unexpectedly. For himself? For his brother? Probably for both. He’d never really known his brother, but the ache and the sorrow and the loss were all too real for him. Zak couldn’t shake the notion that there should be a hand to clutch, eyes to gaze into. That there was a half of him missing.

  Missing. Or taken away.

  When the door opened, he thought for sure it would be his parents again; he’d been rehearsing an agonized rant of epic proportions, eager for the moment when he could let loose on them. Instead, it was Khalid, followed steps later by Moira, and all of Zak’s anger was quenched by sheer joy and relief at the sight of his friends in the flesh. Even the hollow soreness in his chest—a pain literal or figurative or both, he couldn’t tell—lightened some.

  “Whoa!” Khalid exclaimed. “You are life-sized! I was starting to think you’d been shrunk down to fit in a video chat screen.”

  Khalid grinned broadly, his eyes no doubt dancing behind the sunglasses he wore. He’d recently started wearing them every time he left the house, no matter where he was. Even in movie theaters. He insisted it was the coolest thing in the world, and that even if it wasn’t, “I’ll make it cool.” He came close and clasped, then reclasped, Zak’s hand in a complicated ritual that was more a dance move than a handshake.

  Moira rolled her eyes, whether at Khalid’s comment, his sunglasses, or his handshake, Zak couldn’t tell. Probably all three. Her hair had been cut recently, right around her ears, with sleek, shiny strands of it flying away every time she bobbed her head. She wore a pair of heavy-framed glasses and a painfully bright T-shirt with the words 100% GEEK and 100% GIRL inscribed across it, as well as a cluster of overlapping pins on her right shoulder that looked like the beginning of a growth of multicolored plate-armor. One of the larger buttons was a new one that Zak hadn’t seen before. It read I like you ironically.

  “How did you guys get in here?” Zak asked as Moira came closer. She wasn’t much for shows of affection, but she did brush a stray hair from his forehead.

  “We used the door,” Khalid said in a tone of overwrought concern, pointing. “Did they operate on your brain, man?”

  Moira sniffed. “As usual, Khalid’s being a moron. We basically threw fits until our parents let us come to see you. The doctors didn’t want to let us in, but we guilt-tripped your parents.”

  “And then we used the door,” Khalid reminded them. “The door was important to the plan, and I don’t understand why you’re downplaying it. Without the door, we literally would not be here.”

  Moira sighed in aggravation and awkwardly crossed her arms over her chest. “How are you, Zak? Really.”

  “I’m okay. The doctors say I’m going to be fine.”

  Khalid perched with one hip on Zak’s bed. “Did you serio
usly have a heart attack?”

  “I think so. Or maybe not. They called it a ‘cardiac event.’”

  Khalid tilted his shades down and looked out over the top. “That sounds fun.”

  “Totally. Want to try one?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Is this connected to your sleepwalking?” Moira asked abruptly.

  Zak startled, and his heart monitor emitted a sharp bleat. He’d almost forgotten that Moira was there. When she wanted to, she could be so quiet and still that it was easy to overlook her, especially amid Khalid’s antics. But she stood right next to him, gazing down at him with concern.

  “What makes you think—”

  “It’s a weird coincidence,” she interrupted, “that an otherwise normal, healthy person would suddenly have two medical crises in a row. Maybe there’s a connection.”

  “Science Girl rides … again!” Khalid sang.

  Moira ignored him and touched Zak on his shoulder, where Dad had hours before. This time, Zak didn’t mind so much. “What are they saying? Have they told you anything?”

  Zak drew in a deep breath. An otherwise normal, healthy person, Moira had said. But she didn’t know.

  “Don’t tell.”

  That was fine advice for ghosts. But Zak was alive and had friends.

  “I need to tell you guys something,” he said. “Something big and serious.”

  “I live for big and serious,” Khalid said, leaning forward eagerly.

  Zak started to talk.

  * * *

  He told them everything.

  Every. Thing.

  He was tempted to hold back some of the details, some of the crazier things. But it was all connected—his brother, the World Trade Center, the ship, the sleepwalking, the “cardiac event,” the voice, the dreams. The flooded subway that suddenly wasn’t. Trying to talk about one part of it without talking about the rest of it would be like walking on a single stilt—good luck keeping your balance. And your perspective.

  As Zak spoke, Khalid paced, never taking off his sunglasses—he was deeply committed to the weird experimental theater of his own life. But Zak could tell from his cheeks and eyebrows that his eyes were growing wider and wider as the story went on. Moira stood completely still the whole time, staring through her thick lenses at Zak, her arms folded uncomfortably over her chest. I like you ironically kept flashing at Zak.