Page 83 of No One Aboard
Tia tilted her head. Lila didn’t often speak about Tia’s grandparents, let alone the sister she never had. “I remember.”
Tia used to write letters to her aunt, to the little baby that never grew up. It had disturbed her as a six-year-old when she learned that her mother was missing her twin. Tia couldn’t imagine until recently what it was like to miss Rylan.
“I sometimes thought my sister would have made us complete,” Lila said. “But mostly, I think we were meant to be three.”
What was that supposed to mean? Tia leaned more on the railing. Was Lila likening Tia to her dead twin?We were meant to be three.
Is that what you think of me?Tia almost asked.Am I the thing that should have died?
Tia hadn’t considered that leaving behind her family would be ineffective, that they might not even care. She wanted to damage them in the ways she felt they damaged her. She had wanted Rylan to jump on the opportunity to leave their parents behind, wondering desperately where they went wrong. It was supposed to be revenge for a lifetime of being told she was too loud. Too angry. Too many feelings. Not the right dreams. Her every emotion was frowned upon. Her reactions were dramatic. Lila and Francis had given up on Tia long before Tia ever gave up on them.Thatwas what Rylan—who Lila always doted on, who Francis always hoped would claim the world—would never understand.
“Didn’t you hate your parents?” Tia asked instead, an arm’s length between her and her mother.
Lila’s dark eyes seemed to gloss. “Doesn’t everyone?”
Maybe that was true. Tia wasn’t the only one who hated Francis, though. Tia leaned forward. “Mom... does Dad have... enemies? Like business guys who hate him or something?”
Lila shook her head, which looked less like an answer and more like preening, her hair falling loose from its bun like cobwebs. She turned to Tia. “Can you believe where we are at this very moment?”
Tia slitted her eyes. “What?”
“We’re sharing a Marlboro on a sailboat on the Atlantic in June. You, on the eve of your eighteenth birthday.”
Tia snatched back what was apparently a Marlboro. “So?”
“Sorevelin that. Someday you’ll be married and tired and working and sad, and you’ll realize you will never be almost-eighteen smoking with your mother at the bow of a boat again. My beautiful girl, always in such a rush. Always longing for the next thing.”
“You’re always longing for a past thing,” Tia pointed out, but Lila seemed beyond her now, arms outstretched as if she could marbleize and becomeThe Old Eileen’s figurehead.
“Revel with me.”
Tia tried. What would it be like to exist in her mother’s pearlescent bubble of life? Were things really as beautiful to Lila Logan as she seemed to believe they were? Tia breathed in until her lungs were ready to pop, and she let her arms lift like wings.
Then she dropped them, feeling as stupid as her mother looked.
“Okay, can we put a pin in reveling now?”
Lila’s eyes were still shut, dark lashes flush against the pink of her cheeks. Why was she wearing mascara this late anyway? No one else was even awake on the boat except Alejandro.
“I could be anyone in moments like this,” Lila breathed. “Anyone in the world. Anyone in history.”
She sounds almost like... me.
Tia held out the cigarette. “You done with this?” she asked her mom.
The orange embers had burned it to a nub.
“I have more,” Lila said in answer.
Tia picked a spot in the water and aimed the cigarette at it. It fell, a tiny light spinning out of control in the dark. She squinted in the area where it had landed. Was she imagining things? Or was there something in the water? Something much, much bigger than a cigarette.
“Hey, Mom...” Tia tugged on Lila’s silk sleeve. “Mom, do you see that?”
She pointed, and the two of them squinted down. Something paler than the sea protruded from its surface, slicing it in half as it swam.
A fin.
“Oh my God!” Tia scream-whispered in delight at the same time as Lila mouthed the same thing and clutched her chest.
