Above Water, Below Dock

Thoughts | Lilly Stewart

above water, below dock

Illustration by Amélia Gaille

In the space below the dock, above the water, where they stood with the ocean up to their knees, their words echoed as if inside a cave. Under the wood slabs letting thin slivers of light in, they found the only spot of shade at low tide, their feet in soft sand and occasionally poked with shells and buried rocks. 

The breeze cut the heat, bringing goosebumps to her skin. Far off and sitting on a paddleboard, she watched them eagerly. Lena’s legs dangled in the green water, her black eyes focused on the siblings, as if scared to miss a single gesture from the tanned-dark arm of the brother r the freckled nose of the sister. Brown skin. She couldn’t see their eyes from here—though she knew they shone. They talked about something they were both bored of, both tired of rehashing. The brother reached his arm up to try to touch the bottom of the dock, knowing he wouldn’t succeed, knowing his sister would tease him. 

Lena, envious, watched their rapport and moments of easy laughter, followed by effortless silence. She didn’t know of the dull, exhausted anger that ran on the surface of the ocean between the siblings’ legs. She didn’t know them well enough yet to see the tension pulled taut between the water and the dock, between the pairs of arms and eyes that seemed to match so well. Twins, perhaps, Lena thinks. No, one year apart—though inseparable for most of their childhood, before puberty and shame and the hunger for individuality crept in, a resentful tide. The sister crouched down in the water, ignoring something the brother was saying, even as he arched his head down and raised his voice to regain her attention. 

She was fishing for something. She pulled up a rock stuck with seaweed and tossed it aside, the slimy green tail on the gray stone like an oceanic comet, pulled down by gravity back under the surface. Finally, she picked out a pink shell just as her brother finished speaking. Lena could see a flicker of a disagreement now, though it looked mild—like the petty things siblings fight over for an excuse to talk to each other and to hear each other's voices. Lena idealized them from her wet perch on the paddleboard, unable to see the twitching eyebrows of the sister in fear of a raised subject she didn’t want to breach—not again—or the huffing sighs of the brother at the sister’s lack of response. The sister continued to leave his words unanswered as she fished for more shells, ones that were clean and colored. Smooth on the inside. Rough on the outside. From Lena’s view, they all looked the same—pink holes in the blue sky, hovering between brown fingers, above water, below dock. 

Three shells in her cupped palm, Diana rose. She faced her brother now. His forehead beaded with sweat, his lips chapped in the heat. He looked younger than he was. Behind his dark head she saw a figure, a girl her age, sitting on a paddleboard and running her pale fingers through the water, eyes gazing into the depths. Lena had looked away just in time. Quinn waved an exasperated arm, rolling his hazel-green eyes. 

“Forget it, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“But you keep bringing it up,” Diana shot back, forgetting about the stranger for a moment, looking back at the tense muscles of Quinn’s shoulders—wider than they were last summer. He was growing and broadening before her eyes, increasing the space between them with every apathetic look. 

He stepped towards her in the water, shins splashing and pushing against the blue-green liquid. He whisper-shouted inches from her face, cold hands sticking fast to her air-dried shoulders, holding her and pinching skin. 

Lena looked up again at hearing the splashing of the brother’s legs in the water. The paddleboard had drifted closer to the dock without Lena’s steering. She saw the brother’s angry, arched back, the wincing face—even the freckles retreating—of the sister who had seemed so serene, unbothered, and calm before. Lena saw the brother’s hand on the sister’s shoulder, the firmness of his grip, and she felt the steadiness and the brightness of the afternoon darken. Lena looked around in the water, at the surface of the dock, at the beach, as if to find another to share with her in her helplessness. There was no one. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe they were just joking around. She had no idea who they were and what this moment meant.

“He’s never going to change!” Quinn said, almost shaking Diana now. She was frozen, waiting for him to let go, to finish speaking. Like all the other times, she waited for it to be over. 

“I know,” she said, finding strength and conviction in her voice while hollowness and nausea rocked in her stomach. She met her brother’s eyes squarely, flicking from one eye to the other, watching them dim out of anger and into frustration. He let go. Her shoulders felt warmer without his hands. 

Diana’s father was always the subject, in spaces of silence, in spaces of no news to share, that Quinn thrust between them like the wall of a trench, with the siblings at the bottom. Unscalable, it reached high and slick. No footholds. Slimy like the seaweed. Smooth like the inside of the shells. Slippery. Obsessed with his father because he didn’t look like him, Quinn would never stop finding faults where there were honest mistakes, and tragedy where there was everyday misery. Disappointed, disgusted—with their father, with Diana—Quinn turned his back on his sister and walked deeper into the water, eventually lowering himself so only his head bobbed above the surface as he swam towards the ladder hanging down from the dock. Diana watched him until his feet ascended the final rung and his form disappeared. She heard his disgruntled footfalls above her head. The shells were digging into her palm—she had been clenching them as if they were weapons that she could have used against the stubbornness and grudge-holding nature of her younger brother. She opened her hand and tilted her wrist, letting the shells plop back into the water and drift down into the sand. 

Now Lena could see both of them separated by the dock, the brother lying on his back in the sun, his forearm over his eyes, limbs still, and the sister standing alone under the shade of the wood slabs, staring at her empty hand.