The Ninth Step

The last burning pieces sank behind the reef, and the sky held only the big moon again, and one small light, still blinking.

Hana took her hand away from Junie's eyes.

None of the children asked. She didn't tell them.

Below us, the sea kept climbing the Last Stone.

The fifth step went under.

Hana worked the wet net-knot loose from her waist, then from mine, and pulled the four children into one heap under the silver blankets.

She was shaking in her soaked gray clothes, and the heap shook with her.

I couldn't warm them. My skin runs as cool as the sea.

So I sat beside them at the edge and watched the water.

The sixth step went under.

A hand came out from under the blankets and found mine.

The right one. The torn one.

Junie's fingers were hot as a stone left all day in the sun, and they closed right over the raw place.

It hurt.

I let her.

Hana started her song, very low.

I sang it with her, gills shut.

Under the blankets, someone small hummed along, off-key, a little behind.

We kept it going like a fire, one more time and one more.

Then the seventh step went under, and the eighth.

I leaned over the edge and found the line cut for the worst tide anyone remembers, one hand below our feet.

Behind the cliffs, the sky went gray.

The sea rose another finger's width, and stopped.

Two hands below us. One hand short of the line.

The ninth step stayed dry.

All my life Grandma had told me that at the top of the Turning, the sea rests as long as it takes to sing the long song.

I had never needed it to be true before.

Hana looked at me.

I laid my palm flat above the water and held it still.

She put her forehead down on the blanket heap and kept it there.

Far off, lanterns were crossing the still water, riding low.

Grandma had put the raft in while the Turning was still tiring, so it would reach us in the rest.

I learned later how that raft got there.

Elder Imbri had stood at the water's edge from the bell until first light, with the bell in his fist, watching six ships fall and one small lantern keep burning on top of the Last Stone.

Before first light, Grandma told the beach that the bell holds only while the Turning runs strong, and not one breath longer, and she called for a raft.

Elder Imbri was the first to put his hands on it.

She sat at the front of a fishermen's net-raft, her right arm bound flat against her chest, her staff across her knees.

Elder Imbri swam behind it, pushing, with four mothers at the sides.

The raft knocked against the stone.

Grandma looked at the water, then at the line, then at me.

"Across?" she said.

"Across."

She held my wrist with her good hand, longer than steadying a raft takes.

Hana passed the children down.

The smallest, a boy who still sucked his thumb, saw Elder Imbri's face come up beside the raft and shrank back into her.

Elder Imbri found a drowned step with his feet.

He closed his gills, one side and then the other, and went still.

Then he held out his arms.

The boy looked at Hana. She nodded.

He went, and his hot little hands landed right on the old burns across Elder Imbri's shoulder.

Elder Imbri didn't move them.

Before I climbed down, I took my lantern off the top of the Last Stone.

Grandma wanted us off the deep bed before the pull remembered it was there.

So we pushed through the rest and on into the first of the ebb, while it was still only a tug at our legs.

I looked back once.

The sea lay smooth and bright over the grave beds, over the empty egg, over a pale stone ten steps from it.

It would stay there nineteen years.

The sun came up over the cliffs as the raft scraped onto the sand.

The whole Long Shore was waiting, with fifty-five children wrapped in our shawls and nets.

Then Hana's bag began to hiss.

A man's voice came out of the radio, worn thin, saying the same few words over and over.

I know them now. "Any pod that can hear this. Any pod. Please answer."

Hana pressed the side of it and answered.

She went down the line of children and knelt to each one.

The older ones said their own names into the radio. For the little ones, she said them.

"Dez Marlow," said the boy from the seventh egg, and he looked at Grandma's arm while he said it.

There were fifty-nine. It took a long time.

On the Long Shore we sing over everything: births, boats, the dead.

For as long as it took her, nobody sang.

The last name was Junie Oduya-Kerr. It was the only one her voice broke on.

The radio was quiet.

Then the voice came back, thicker, asking something.

Hana turned to Elder Imbri.

She pointed at the sky, then at the sand, and turned up her empty hand.

Where?

"The council will decide," he said.

He said it to Grandma, not to her.

Grandma didn't argue.

She took her staff in her good hand and climbed the high dunes, one slow step at a time.

At the top, above any tide, even the worst one, she drove the staff into the sand.

"Nothing that lands up here belongs to the sea," she called down.

Elder Imbri looked up at her for a long time.

He didn't say yes.

He didn't go up and pull the staff out, either.

Hana lifted the radio and spoke, pointing at the staff the whole time, so even I understood. There. Not the flat.

Junie stood beside me with the horse under one arm, watching my lantern go pale in the daylight.

I held it out to her.

She looked at her mom first. Then she took it in both hands, horse and all.

Junie carries the lantern I made for my mother now. In nineteen years, when the sea walks away again, she says she'll help me find the stone.