Zeke
Zeke
I lift my face to the sky. I can’t believe this is the same sun that beat down on us on the water. This one’s so much…gentler. The tame sunshine of pub gardens, SPF 50, ice creams.
Everything here is so ordinary it’s crazy. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m just blown away by all the normal stuff that’s been going on without us. Mobile phones, cars, the hum of a plane overhead…It’s so neat and controlled, as if I’m standing on a toy marina and invisible hands are arranging all the pieces.
Lexi’s off with her family, and mine are here, around me, hugging me, talking fast, all smiling wide. I realize that I love them, obviously I do, even if that’s hard, and I hold them tightly and force myself to tell them, because you don’t know when you’ll get to do that, you don’t know that you’ll get another chance.
“Love you all,” I say, choked. “I love you all.”
I look at my mum as I say it. When I last saw her, I didn’t know that she’d betrayed my father, torn our family apart, kept that secret from us all. I suspected it, but I didn’t know . It feels different to look her in the eye when I have the whole story.
She’s got smudges on her glasses and tear tracks down her cheeks. Her trademark neat bob is a fuzzy gray mess. She’s staring at me as though I’ve come back from the dead, and she looks so exhausted, so human .
A long time ago, my mum messed up. Something we have in common at last—I’ve done that plenty. As I pull her in for another hug, I feel her frail, shaking shoulders and think, I’m not letting resentment lose me another parent .
“Love you, Mum,” I whisper.
She doesn’t say it back—we’re not that kind of family, never have been—but she squeezes me even tighter.
“I am so glad,” she manages. “Just so glad.”
“You gave us quite the scare, little brother,” Lyra says. She’s got her arms around me, too, from behind. I can’t remember the last time my sister hugged me.
“Welcome back, Ezekiel,” says Jeremy. “Welcome home.”
Welcome home . I’m so relieved I might collapse under it. We did it , I think, as my mother checks me over with her hands on my upper arms, demanding answers about injuries, lifting her head to summon over a paramedic. We got home. We got Lexi home to Mae.
I’m sitting in the backseat of Jeremy’s latest fancy car, with Mum beside me, a bottle of lemonade in my hand, and Joy Williams singing out from the radio. Every part of this is wild to me. The song, the lemonade, my mother. I feel that this can’t be real. Not in an I-can’t-believe-it sort of way; more that it’s all too good to be true.
“Oh, Ezekiel,” Lyra says from the front passenger seat, breathing out slowly. “You always did love the drama, eh?”
I swallow, that vast grateful feeling in my chest shrinking slightly. How long has it taken for my sister to recast my traumatic experience as me making drama? I check the clock. An hour. Nice. All those huge emotions I felt on the pontoon have ebbed a bit. The idea of telling my family I love them already seems kind of strange again, the way it would have before I went to sea.
Jeremy’s taking me to the hospital—Mum’s insistence, even though the paramedic said there was no sign of infection in the wound on my stomach. I wish I was still with Lexi, but I think she went off somewhere for some quiet time with Mae, and I’m not surprised she’s forgotten about me for the moment. I want her to enjoy every single second of being home with Mae, and if that means the two of us have to be apart for a little while, I’m cool with that. Still, it felt wrong leaving the harbor without her, like leaving a bit of myself behind, and now that I’m here with Mum, Lyra and Jeremy, I’m feeling weirdly like…I’ve gone back in time or something. I don’t know. I just feel odd.
“We are so happy to have you back,” my mum says. “Aren’t we, Lyra?”
“Yeah,” Lyra says, checking her blunt fringe and then snapping the visor back flush to the car roof again.
At twenty-nine, she’s exactly who she was at ten: hard-edged, hard-nosed, always the first person to speak up or step forward. She would’ve done well on the water. Better than I did.
“It is great to have you back,” Jeremy says, as though he’s welcoming me home from a trip to Florida. My high-handed big brother, always in formal mode.
I’m happy. I think I’m happy. I must be happy, mustn’t I? I’m back . I just wish I’d seen Lexi again before leaving.
“You’d better take the B roads to the A1, Jeremy,” my mum says. “There was a crash near Warkworth last time I looked.”
I stare at the back of Jeremy’s head, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on in my brain. I’m feeling…scattered. Everything’s too much, even though I’m just sitting here, doing nothing.
I press my hand to the wound on my stomach, my broken nail throbbing. Somewhere back there at the marina, with Mum bossing around the paramedics and Lyra disposing of hovering news reporters as though she’d been getting rid of journalists her whole life, I started to feel the way I used to feel. Fidgety, uncomfortable, sad. Like I’m always in the wrong place.
I sag back in my seat, turning my gaze to the world outside. Sitting here among them all, the reality’s still that I don’t fit in. I guess that whole childhood fantasy about having another father was wishful thinking. An explanation for why I don’t belong. Embarrassing, really. Especially as it turns out there’s no excuse for me being the way I am—there’s nobody else to blame.
“What did you miss the most, Ezekiel?” my mum asks, with forced cheer.
I wince. She’s trying to make conversation. She did this all the time when I was a kid, because I was so quiet—she was always trying to get me to speak up when all I wanted to do was listen.
“I dunno,” I say, trying to turn my thoughts that way.
I see the slight tilt of Lyra’s chin and I know she’s rolling her eyes. She’s never had any patience for my slowness.
“You, probably,” I tell my mum after a moment.
It’s true, but the part I don’t say is, there wasn’t all that much else I missed. I had so much on that boat, and now that I’m back, seeing the huge ripple effect we left behind us…I feel kind of guilty for not thinking more about home. For me, out there, it was all about getting Lexi back to Mae. That was my focus.
My mum starts to cry.
“Oh my God,” Lyra says, without turning around. “ Don’t , Mum.”
Mum never cries. She just doesn’t hold with that sort of thing. Straight-backed, sharp-eyed, she’s a push-on kind of person. But here she is, weeping, and reaching to clutch my hand. I see it again, just a flash of it: she’s not the disapproving figure I built up in my head as a child. My mother’s a full person, as messy as I am, as messy as the version of my dad that I found in those logbooks. I grip her hand tightly in mine.
“Pull it together, Mum, he’s back now,” Lyra says, glancing over her shoulder. “Look, he’s right there, see?”
“Let her cry, Lyra,” I say sharply. “Not everyone copes the same way you do.”
The car goes very quiet. I can feel the collective shock. This is not a thing I would usually say. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever snapped back at Lyra like that before.
“All right,” Lyra says after a moment, and though I can’t see her face, I can imagine her expression: eyebrows raised, slight amusement on her lips. “I was just trying to save you the sight of what a wreck you made your family, actually, but sure, I’ll zip it.”
“You don’t have to save me from anything,” I say, turning to look out of the window again. “I can save myself these days.”
“Noted,” Lyra says.
This time, when she looks over her shoulder at me, her expression is almost…I don’t know, interested. She’s never looked at me like I’m interesting before. Maybe if I’d had the balls to stand up to Lyra before, instead of following her and Jeremy around like a lost puppy, my childhood would’ve been a bit different.
Mum sniffs, looking straight ahead, wiping her cheek with her spare hand. “I do apologize,” she says. She squeezes my hand again. “It’s just been a little bit of a stressful time.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I say, my voice rough. “ I’m sorry. You must have been so scared while I was gone.”
I hate the hurt I’ve caused her. Not just the last two weeks—she’s dealt with a whole lifetime of crap from me. I fought her whenever I could, broke the rules, disappointed her so many times she must’ve wanted to give up. Thing is, I always thought she was lying to us—and I guess I was right. She did have an affair, and she never told us that Jeremy had a different biological father from me and Lyra.
But now that I know the truth for sure, I wonder if it was really the lie that bothered me, as a kid. I remember once I told my therapist that my mum probably regretted me—the kid she shouldn’t have had, the proof she cheated. It was an offhand remark at the time, but seeing how much my mum is feeling right now, seeing the pain she’s been through since I’ve been gone…in an awful, twisted kind of way, it feels good. I can see how much she cares. And that feels new.
“We were rather worried, yes,” she says, her voice still wobbling slightly. “Was it dreadful? Was it just—was it torture? I understand if you don’t want to talk about it. But I have to ask. I’ve imagined every kind of horror you can think of.”
This time my answer comes instantly. “No,” I say. “No, it was amazing.”
The car goes silent again as Jeremy pulls onto the motorway, joining the stream of traffic. The wind thunders against the windows. I flinch. I wonder if it’ll ever stop feeling make-or-break when the breeze picks up.
“I mean,” I say, skin prickling, too aware that they’re all waiting for me to speak. “I mean, it was awful. But I fell in love. So…that bit was amazing.”
“You fell in love ?” Lyra says, incredulous, turning her whole body to look at me over the back of her seat.
The flow of traffic on both sides is starting to make me feel a bit dizzy. I see a sign for the hospital, and suddenly I can’t wait to get there.
“Of course you did,” Mum says. “What an experience to share with someone. It’s only natural that the two of you would bond.”
“It wasn’t just that,” I say, looking down.
The network of knobbly veins on the back of Mum’s hand is the color of seawater at dawn. The traffic’s the wind, not letting up. My body’s completely tense, every muscle bunched up, as if I’ve been electrocuted. I’ve got that disconnected feeling again, the one that took hold of me on the lifeboat for a while. As though I can’t believe the bad thing has really ended, or I’m just waiting for the next one to start.
“Let yourself settle back in before you think too hard about any of it,” Mum says. “A checkup from a proper doctor, a few days at home, and you’ll be back to your old self again.”
I stare down at my mother’s hand against the filthy, cracked velvet of my trouser leg. I’m not sure going back to my old self is something I want at all.
It’s not until I’m back from the hospital, bandaged, pinpricked and in possession of some strong antibiotics, that I realize I don’t have Lexi’s number.
I’m standing in my childhood bedroom in Alnwick, looking out at the street. Normally when you want to talk to someone it’s kind of an impulse to reach for your phone, but I don’t have that with her. We’ve never messaged. It feels more like I should turn over my shoulder and say, Hey , but all I see back there is the solid white bedroom wall. This house feels so massive after the houseboat, and so boxy . Why do we all choose to live in these big squarish things? Why is there so much floor space in this bedroom? What’s it all for?
I rub my chest. Lexi and I didn’t swap numbers—our phones will be at the bottom of the sea now anyway. I have no way of getting hold of her at all. The realization washes over me like ice-cold water.
“Mum,” I call down the stairs, as though it’s 2010 and I’m a kid again, wondering where Lyra and Jeremy are, whether they’ve gone out without me. I feel like all the different versions of me are clashing right now. “How can I get hold of Lexi?”
“Sorry, darling?” she calls. Mum never hears you the first time.
“Lexi.”
“The houseboat woman?” Her voice is a bit too high. “I don’t know, Ezekiel, are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“It’s not,” Jeremy says, coming up the stairs with a cup of coffee.
He hands it to me as he walks past, into my bedroom. He sits down on the edge of the bed and watches me critically, forearms resting on his knees.
“You need a bit of space, Ezekiel. This has been a traumatic experience.”
I stare back at him. “Are you actually telling me what I’ve just been through?”
“Of course, I can’t imagine it,” he says, raising his hands.
“No.” I put the coffee down on the desk. “You can’t.”
He sighs, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. “I should have known when you said you wanted to buy that houseboat back that it would all end in tears.”
End in tears? I nearly died about ten times. It’s not like I got lost on my way back from school or something.
“It was your idea for me to buy the houseboat back,” I choke out. “You said Dad always stashed his secrets, and that boat was his bolt-hole, and it was bound to have the answers.”
Jeremy frowns. “I know. I stand by that. I wanted to help. You do understand that, don’t you?”
Jeremy always wants to help. He just wades in there, helping left, right and center, and if you happen to be in his path when he’s helping, you’d better be ready to dive out of the way. I remember the truth—which of us has a dead biological father we never met—and simmer down a bit.
“Well, whatever.” I fidget with the new bandage on my finger, hating the whine in my voice. It’s this bedroom: I’m regressing to fifteen-year-old me with every minute I spend here. “I just want to see Lexi.”
“I’ve got a number for her boss, Marissa,” Jeremy says reluctantly, leaning back on the bed to pull his phone out and find the contact.
I glance out of the bedroom window at the street while I wait. There’re a few more vans out there than there were before. And men with cameras. I stare. I’m feeling less weird than I did in the car, but the world’s still so strange. People everywhere. Noise all the time. I can hear the motorway’s whoosh even with the window closed—I don’t know if I’ve ever noticed that here before. And everything smells. Not bad, just…distinct. This whole house has a scent to it that I’m not sure I ever knew was there.
One of the people below clocks me and lifts the camera to their face. It makes me think of a sniper in a film, that’s how quick it is. I yank the curtain across.
When I eventually get through to Marissa on Jeremy’s phone, I remember her voice. It’s the woman from the pub, the one who slipped out from behind the bar when she noticed me looking over. She kind of set me and Lexi up, I guess.
“Hi,” she says. There’s a guardedness to the hi that I don’t like.
“Hey. Can I speak to Lexi?”
The silence is too long. And just like that, I know the bad thing’s not over at all.
“I’m sorry,” Marissa says. “She doesn’t want to speak to you.”
My heart starts to hammer. I lower myself down in the desk chair, the seat where I tortured myself over GCSE textbooks that never made sense.
“What do you mean, she doesn’t want to speak to me?”
“I mean, she’s told us all to tell you that, if you get in touch.”
“She said that? She said she doesn’t want to…”
I trail off in the face of Marissa’s silence. No. No. I press my fingertips to my forehead. I saw Lexi a few hours ago. We held hands, gripped each other so tightly. I love you , she’d whispered, before she’d stepped off the lifeboat.
I should never have let her go. All the time out there on the water, we never split up, we never parted. I feel like I’m back on the boat, only this time, the wind’s managed to tear her from my arms.
“Did she say anything else? Is she OK? Am I allowed to know why?”
My voice is bitter and sharp. I’m so tired. I’m so—lost.
“No,” Marissa says after a moment. And then: “I’m sorry.”
“Are you kidding me?” My voice rises. “No, I’m not allowed to know, or no, she’s not OK?”
She sighs. “Look, you seem like a reasonably nice kid. So I’ll just say, think about one thing you might have done that a woman like Lexi could never forgive, and then, yeah, it’ll be about that. And she’s not OK about it. Capeesh? ”
I stare at the wall. What have I done? What could it be? There’s…nothing, I don’t think. She knows me better than anyone ever has.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I can hear the hopelessness in my voice, and maybe she can, too, because she says, “Get some sleep. You’ve been through something unspeakable. Rest. We’re looking after her.”
She hangs up. I lie on top of the duvet and stare at the familiar landscape of my old bedroom ceiling. I feel completely…I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m wiped out, blank.
Lexi doesn’t walk away from someone she cares about, not ever. So, what, she doesn’t care, then? I can’t believe that, either. I know her, I’ve held her in my arms and I’ve seen her so close to the brink and I…
I press my hands to my face. All at once it comes rushing in: the grief, fear, sadness, the loss. I’m worn out—I’ve got nothing left. It just crashes over me. I can’t survive without Lexi.
So many times on that houseboat I felt like I was living inside a nightmare. But I’d take a night in the storm over this.