Chapter Twelve
I drifted on a vast, brown sea. Sometimes a comforting voice reached through the haze, with words I didn’t understand. Sometimes I felt the press of a hand to my forehead or cheek.
But mostly I stayed adrift.
Out on the ocean, I was thinking, in that strange, abstract way you do in dreams. Images came to me, washed toward me on the waves. Del’s look of strained, shocked frustration after I’d tackled the val. The shop, which felt a million miles away by now, and all my friends in it: Molly, Evan, Ray. The soft way Del had looked at me when he’d christened the boat Beauty. My dad all alone, puttering sadly about our creaking farmhouse.
Del, home, Del, home… An unceasing loop, like a snake eating its own tail. And it started to seem to me that all of life was a bit like thi
