Three on the Rocks

You don't sleep much.

It isn't the concussion, though the medic told you to have someone wake you every few hours and you laughed at him. It's the phone. It lights up on your nightstand until almost three in the morning, and every time it does, you're already reaching for it.

Her texts come in short and strange and all lowercase, like she found the words on the bottom of the sea and rinsed them off. She asked questions you'd never thought to wonder about. You answered more of them than you meant to. When you finally put the phone face down, you lay there in the dark and realized you'd been smiling at the ceiling like an idiot, and that she still hadn't told you what her sisters want with you.

In the morning the coat is still on your kitchen table.

You stand looking at it with your coffee. Somewhere that isn't near the water, she said. Don't tell me where. You carry it upstairs, and it's heavier than it looks, and warm from the kitchen, and you fold it into the cedar chest at the foot of your bed under your mother's old quilts. You shut the lid. You feel ridiculous. You feel like you've just put something alive to bed.

Then you put a padlock on the chest, which makes you feel more ridiculous, and go down to the wharf.

"Absolutely not," Ruel says. "You're concussed."

"You have a fever."

"Had. Had a fever." He's standing on the deck of the Lady Bea, his cousin's boat, a beamy old forty-footer with a crooked wheelhouse and a smell of diesel that never quite leaves. He looks pale under his beard, but he's on his feet, in his orange bibs, with two coffees. He holds one out to you. "Big low's at one. Coast Guard said they'll come round with the pump at two, but they'll be late. They're always late. We go look at her now, we know what we need."

"Raina said to wait for the Coast Guard."

"Raina says a lot of things to you." He waggles his eyebrows. "She cried, you know. In the shack. When she thought you were gone. I'm just mentioning it."

"Don't."

"I'm just mentioning."

You take the coffee and step aboard.

The Sisters at low tide are a different animal. The water drains off them and they stand up out of the bay, four long humps of black rock streaked with weed, shining wet, with the sea sucking and gurgling in the channels between. Gulls cover them like snow. In summer the tourist boats come out from Rockland to show people the seals.

The Fair Return is on the second sister, heeled over on her port side with her starboard rail pointing at the sky. She looks smaller than she ever has. Your stomach turns over at the sight of her, and Ruel sees it, and has the decency not to say anything.

He brings the Lady Bea in as close as he dares and you both stand at the rail with the binoculars.

"Hull's not bad," Ruel says. "That's a gash, not a hole. We can patch that. Engine's drowned but engines dry out. You got lucky, Ethan."

"Lucky."

"Luckier than your old man." He winces the second it's out. "Sorry."

"It's fine."

It is, mostly. Six years. You've gotten used to fishing the water that killed him. You've gotten used to most things.

You lower the glasses, and that's when you hear it.

At first you think it's the wind in the Lady Bea's rigging, a low hum, three notes, rising and falling. Then you realize there isn't any wind. The bay is flat as a plate. And the hum is coming from the far side of the ledges, where the fourth sister breaks the water, and it's getting louder, and it's not three notes, it's three voices.

Women's voices. Humming together in a harmony so close and strange it raises the hair on your arms.

"You hear that?" you say.

Ruel doesn't answer.

You turn. He's put down his coffee on the rail, very carefully, like it matters to him that it doesn't spill. His face has gone smooth and slack and peaceful, all the worry lines gone. His eyes are fixed on the fourth sister. And he's smiling. A soft, faraway, terrible smile you've never seen on him in twenty years of friendship.

"Ruel."

He puts one boot up on the gunwale.

"Ruel!"

He steps up. The water below is forty feet deep and fifty degrees and he's wearing rubber bibs that will fill like buckets. He spreads his arms a little, like a man about to dive into a summer lake. The humming swells, sweet and patient and warm.

You don't think. You hit him at the waist with your shoulder and drive him sideways off the rail, and the two of you go down hard into the bilge water in the bottom of the boat, Ruel's elbow catching you in the ribs, your head ringing all over again. He fights you. He actually fights you, silent and strong, trying to crawl back to the rail with that smile still on his face, and you get an arm around his neck and your knee in his back and you hold him down in the fish slime and shout his name into his ear over and over.

The humming stops.

Ruel goes limp. Then he takes a huge ragged breath like a man coming up from a deep dive, and starts swearing in a voice so normal you nearly laugh.

"What," he says. "What. Why are you on me? Why am I wet? What just happened?"

You don't answer. You're looking over the rail.

There are three women sitting on the fourth sister.

They weren't there a minute ago. You'd swear to it. They're sitting on the wet black rock in a row, the way people sit on a park bench, and each one is wearing a long sealskin coat like the one in your cedar chest. One is small and dark. One has hair the red of rust on an old anchor. The one in the middle is tall, taller than the others even sitting, with hair so pale it's almost silver, and even at a hundred yards you can see she's beautiful in a way that feels like a blade.

She's looking straight at you.

Ruel comes up beside you on his knees, dripping, and grips the rail. "Oh, Christ," he whispers. "Oh, Christ, who are they?"

The silver-haired woman lifts her chin. When she speaks, she doesn't raise her voice, and she doesn't need to. It crosses a hundred yards of flat water and lands in your ear as close and clear as a whisper.

"Bring her home, Ethan."