Castaway

Ashley Duraiswamy

“Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk…By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.”

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick

* 

Rishab doesn’t mean to hit his sister. They’re on the Ohlone Bluff Trail, on a path that twists and folds like a yellowed tongue. It is a hungry place. The wind rasps over the waves, and the waves slice into the cliffs, and a California Gull wheels in the updrafts, searching.

Rishab rarely falls behind, but his sister does. His sister, who cannot walk in a straight line, who cannot see a bluff without racing to the edge, her skirts catching in rock purslane and sea drift, her hair spooling out of its plait.

Maya has always been a child of edges. At school, she claims the seat near the window so she can brush her fingers, forwards and back, over the sill. She loves the tips of pencils. The lips of pages, so sharp they cut.

Today, it’s cliffs. Maya keeps peering over ledges. Five times now, she’s veered off the path and kneeled in beaded yarrow. Normally, Rishab would keep walking. He likes to be at the front. His parents know this; if they were here, he’d be miles ahead, two steps in front of Mom, showing her the way.

But their mom is showing a house today, so the kids are with Keema Auntie. Rishab doesn’t like this. Keema Auntie doesn’t understand how things are done; the first thing she says to Rishab—before blundering after her own children, who are three in number and quick as colts—is, “Stay with your sister, paiyya.”

His sister never listens. She has stopped again, crouched, reaching for a torch lily at the cliff’s edge.

“Maya,” Rishab says, shortly.

She reaches further.  

“Maya!”

She plucks the lily, tucks it behind her ear—and her brother drags her from the cliff, panting, hating the way she twists away from him, like he’s hurting her. Rishab is not a strong boy. The boys at school have discovered this; they know that Rishab is bowlegged, off-balance, and a well-aimed kick will send him sprawling. Now, for once, Rishab is the one standing, and the sprawling thing is beneath him, crying, spitting hair out of its mouth. They are far from the cliff now, but Rishab is still dragging. 

“Let me go, let me go!”

He isn’t thinking about her. He’s thinking about those boys, with their buttercream skin, flushed cheeks, and darting fists. He doesn’t realize he’s kicking her until he feels strong arms around his chest.

Someone is pulling him back, flinging him down. For a moment, his face is inches from his sister’s, and he sees a cut above her eye, beading darkly. Then Maya is hauled up, and he’s staring at her shoes.

“What the hell was that?”

Rishab looks up and, next to his sister, sees a boy. This boy is like the ones he was picturing: a few years older, maybe, but cream-skinned and fair-haired. His eyes are dark and serious.

“She’s your sister, isn’t she?” The boy frowns. “You were doing that to your sister.”

This is all wrong, Rishab wants to say. He was saving her—but the boy turns to Maya.

“He’s done this before?”

Maya nods, once. Rishab wonders what she’s remembering. Is it the coffee table? Because he’d never meant to push her; she knows that. Or that time in the garage—but she’d fallen the wrong way, and he hadn’t seen the nails—

None of this matters to the boy. Rishab looks into his eyes, and what he sees there frightens there him more than his parents. This boy does not look angry. With quiet resolution, he draws back his foot—

“No!” Maya darts forward. “It was a mistake—he didn’t mean it—”

In that moment, Rishab loves his sister.

“What he did wasn’t fair,” the boy says.

“No,” she says, “it wasn’t.”

The boy looks down at Rishab. Rishab looks at the boy’s shoes. Then he watches those shoes move away from him, purposefully, over rock purslane and sea drift.

*

By the time Maya catches up to the boy, he’s reached the path.

“Thanks,” she says.

He nods.

The two fall into step, heading back to the trailhead. Maya doesn’t know what to say to him. He’s older—nearly grown in her eyes, though he can’t be more than twelve.  

“Why’d you do that?” he asks. He doesn’t sound angry, just curious.

Maya thinks. “Well, there’s no point kicking him. Kicking him means it’s over, see? When someone catches him, they shout. Or slap. Or send him upstairs. And that’s the end. They’ve done everything they can do, and he knows it. So he goes and does it again.”

The boy frowns. “It’s not supposed to work like that.”

“I know—it just does. Only not this time, ‘cause you know what we’ve done? We’ve left him there, on the ground, and he’s probably just waiting for you to go back and finish him.” She balls her fists gleefully, then looks up. “You won’t, will you?”

“You want me to?”

“No! Well, not really.”

“A little?”

“Alright, a little. Tell you what—he does it again, and I’ll come get you. And then you can beat him up.”

The boy frowns again.

“You don’t have to,” she says quickly. “I’m fast—he usually doesn’t catch me. I was distracted, is all.”

“Distracted by—?”

“This.” She spreads her arms, taking in the cliffs and the sea and the whitecaps in the wind.

“You got beat up for a view.”

“Not this view exactly.” She tugs at the torch lily, still tucked behind her ear. “I was looking down. I think I like looking down more than I like looking up. People don’t like looking down. They’re worried about falling, and they miss things.”

The boy looks at her. “Miss what?”

“Well, for starters, this.” Taking his hand, forgetting he is a grown-up, she draws him towards the cliff. They kneel. She leans over the edge; the wind whips the lily from her hair, and it falls into the waves. When Maya draws back, her fist is full of petals. “See? There’s a whole meadow of them, just hanging upside down.”

She sifts petals into his palm, and the boy smiles.

“Aster,” he says.

Maya knows these flowers. She’s plucked them on the beach, where they are tangled with maiden grass and lupine. But no one’s told her their name.

Later, she learns the boy’s name: Will.

* 

Will walks her home, and as she chatters about petrels and spider’s eggs and the color of rain, and he listens. Will has a way of listening that makes people keep talking, makes them discover new things in the telling. His house is never quiet. His mother, a Berkeley professor, brings people home on the weekends: people who like to speak, and speak well. Poets. String theorists. Once, there was a little old man who claimed the Earth was an ovoid instead of a sphere.

Maya reminds Will of this man. By the time they reach her door, she’s declared that humans are born, like angels, from the sea. And Will cannot stop listening. He comes back the next day, on his way home from school. And the next. And still it surprises him: how much he likes her. Will has sisters of his own, small things, underfoot. He is patient with them because he is patient with everyone, but they hold no mysteries. Maddie, age nine, is a lacrosse player. Jesse, age eight, is a ballerina.

Will has no words for Maya. She is Jesse’s age but, as far as he can tell, has no hobby. She likes books, ones with glossy paintings of snowy places, but can’t sit still and read them. As she turns a page, she will pause and forget she is reading; she will hear a gull outside, calling for its mate, and the book will be forgotten, and she will be out in the yard, wheeling, bare feet in the mud, head tipped towards sky.

Maya is clever. Will sees this, although her teachers don’t. Some admit, grudgingly, that the girl isn’t hopeless. She has a mind for words; she loves learning the names of things—juniper and rush and coffeeberry—and the scents of these things, and the way they feel when she rubs them between her palms. But if something does not interest her, she will not learn. She will sit. She will cup her chin with muddy fingers and stare at the door, waiting for someone, a stranger, the kind she’ll never meet. 

Will knows this because Maya has told him. Once, when he is at her house, on the lawn, where the green curves into the sea—while they are sipping chai and nibbling Marie biscuits and Maya is chattering about school, where she found blue robin’s eggs in the storm pipe—Will sees her mother’s face. She’s wearing an odd expression. Will, who can read any expression, adult’s or child’s, thinks it’s a sweet kind of envy.

After, he asks Maya, “Don’t you tell your mom about school?”

“Oh, she asks, but she’s not interested—not in the interesting bits. If I told her about the robin, she’d want to know why I was climbing pipes. When what she should really be asking is if the eggs were blue, and what kind of blue, and why things are blue, like shells and sky—

So Maya continues. She likes to talk, and she knows her talking annoys people, or confuses them. This last she can’t stand. When Maya talks, she must be understood, and where she is not understood, she is quiet.

She is never quiet with Will.

* 

They’re outside today. From his window, Rishab watches them. The boy comes every afternoon. Every afternoon, Rishab’s sister welcomes him, marsh grass in her hair, mouth opening in a question, and they drift out, past the porch, to the beach.  This has become their stretch of the coast. Rishab knows this. Hates it. Hates the way his sister will walk for hours with this boy.

He knows the boy doesn’t trust him. He knows the boy’s name but refuses to use it. To Rishab, Will is not one boy but many. He is the boy with the quick fists. The boy at the lockers. The boy who picks at Rishab’s skin and asks, quite innocently, if it’s a scab.

Rishab has a sculptor’s memory. It is the kind of memory that recasts and remolds, smooths and polishes. He remembers this boy, Will, kicking him. Remembers his sister laughing. His sister should not have laughed. His sister belongs to him; Rishab has known this since his mother stretched out her arms and revealed, for the first time, a child that looked like him. She had his skin. His hair, black and thick on her forehead.

Rishab’s job is to protect her. So every afternoon he sits at the window, quiet, focused, watching two children by the shore.

 *

This afternoon is not like the others. Will is taking Maya to the boathouse. Maya thinks of the words “boat” and “house,” links them, and imagines a cottage, powder-blue, with cots full of sailboats all tucked into bed. Will’s boathouse is different. It is rubbed green at the bottom, where the sea licks it clean. The walls are wood. The roof is wood. The wood smells sweet with rot.

As they cross the plank, Maya wants to take Will’s hand. She doesn’t. They are here to meet Will’s friends, and the last thing she will do is embarrass him. Will calls these friends Caz and Lyle. Maya has memorized their names, the way she memorizes everything Will says, the second he says it.

“Will,” Maya says, “tell me again. Caz and Lyle—”

“Oh, they’re brilliant. You’ll see.”

Will has said this before; Maya isn’t sure she understands. But he’s opened the door, so she follows.

 *

Inside, the boathouse is a half-finished puzzle. Instead of a floor, the children find ice-smooth water, with wooden slats on the edges. Two rowboats float in the center, unmoving.

Someone hurls a rock, and the surface shatters like glass.

Will turns. A boy stands behind him: lean, straight-backed, with hungry eyes and blackish hair. Will doesn’t have to ask why Caz threw the rock. He knows Caz is a boy who disrupts. Not as other boys do it, blindly. Caz’s chaos is methodical. When he throws a pebble, he does so after deciding, dispassionately, that it must be done. 

“Why’d you throw such a big rock?” Maya asks. “The small ones make nicer ripples.”

Someone laughs, and another boy slips next to Caz. This boy is slight, with white-blonde hair and soft, distant eyes.

“Maya,” Will says, “this is—”

“Lyle,” Maya says eagerly. “And the one who throws bad rocks is Caz.”

Will eyes Caz, then Lyle. They’ve asked about Maya. Wondered why Will is fascinated by her, a little thing barely half his age. This, Will realizes, is the problem. He cannot explain Maya to his friends, cannot explain them to Maya. He told her, once, that if Lyle is a theoretical physicist, then Caz is an experimental physicist. What one hypothesizes, the other tests. Maya, who does not understand either theoretical or experimental physics (having decided, quite early, that both are boring), simply asked, “But what do they test?”

“Anything,” Will said, without elaborating.

Whether the blood of a horseshoe crab is blue. Whether a gull can fly with half a wing. Lyle, who reads widely, has the questions. Caz, who is always hungry, runs the experiments. And Will, who is so good at listening, who knows what people want and how to get it, provides the materials. The gull. The crab.

Horseshoe crabs have blue blood. Will hasn’t mentioned this to Maya. 

 *

Maya likes Will’s friends. They lead her to a snarl of netting and sit, Caz on one side, Lyle on the other. Will stands in the corner, watching.

“You like dreams, Maya?” asks Caz.

“Oh yes,” she says happily.

“Well, Lyle’s got a good one.”

For the first time, Lyle looks up. His hair is so white, Maya thinks, like fairy’s wings. She’s never seen someone so beautiful. “You know,” he says mildly, “I don’t like repeating things.”

“Come on.”

Lyle sighs. “There was a boy in the dream. A little boy. He was lying on his back in the middle of the sea. Someone put him there, I think. The water was dark and he wasn’t—right. You could tell just by looking at him. I wanted to watch, see what happened to him, but I woke up.”

Maya is disappointed. It’s a nice dream, but— “Will says you test things. You can’t test a dream.”

Caz smiles. “Can’t you?”

Will stiffens and Maya realizes, suddenly, that she doesn’t like Caz.

“Will?” she says. She knows he’ll understand. He’ll understand she no longer wants to be here, with these boys, and he will take her home, the way he did at first, the way he does every day, when they’ve walked too far down the shore. Only Will isn’t looking at her. He’s looking at Caz.

“I should get her home,” he says. 

“Why doesn’t Maya go,” says Caz, “and you stay?”

Will turns to Maya, pleading. “You know the way back?”

She doesn’t, but she leaves. Maya is not a girl who stays when she is not wanted or answers when she is not called. She waits until she’s crossed the plank, until she’s far away from the house with no floor, before breaking into frustrated sobs.

* 

Rishab is at the dining table, drawing triangles, when he hears the door open. He opens his mouth to say they’re gone, they left biryani on the counter, when he sees his sister’s face.

He leaps up from the table and grabs her wrists.

“What is it?” he says. “What did he do?’

She pulls away from him. “It wasn’t him—”

“Then who?”

“Get off! It’s nothing. We were with his—friends.”

She looks away, but Rishab understands. “What’d they do?”

“They didn’t do anything. And neither did Will.”

“Exactly,” Rishab whispers. “He didn’t do anything.”

And Rishab is elated. Because he would have done something. He would have walked up to these boys (smooth-haired, light-eyed) and toppled them as easily as toys. After all, they’ve never met him. Rishab is only afraid of boys who know his name.

But when he tells this to Maya (the part about toppling them, not the part about names), she laughs.

“If they hurt me, Will would beat them up.”

“But I—”

“You couldn’t hurt them,” she says scornfully. “You hurt me because I’m the right size for it. Will’s friends are bigger. And they hit back.”

She runs upstairs; Rishab hunches over the table. 

*

In the boathouse, Will says no. His jaw his tight.

“But she’s perfect,” says Caz. “So—what’d you call her? Responsive.”

“Sensitive. She—feels things. I can’t explain.” 

“Don’t bother explaining,” Caz says. “That’s our job. All you need to do is—”

“No.” 

“—is bring her here. And we’ll do the rest.”

Will looks up at Caz, whom he adores and needs in a way he can’t explain. “Will it hurt her?”

“A bit.”

Will closes his eyes, as if he’s dreaming, and sees her. She is lying on her back, looking up. “No,” he says.

“He’ll come around,” says Lyle.

And they leave him in the boathouse, eyes shut.

*

Will, Maya notices, is different. For a month, he still visits. They haunt the coast, watching the waves whiten, the sky purple like bruised lips.

Maya still brings Will her questions. She wonders why the sea pauses. Why it ends. Why the water doesn’t spread, fanlike, over the streets.

Will listens. But sometimes, as she races gulls or pokes marsh grass through her hair, Maya wonders at the change in him. She used to make him laugh. She could make him laugh without meaning to, even though Maya rarely jokes and Will seldom laughs.

Once, as Maya chatters about a lost button, she sees Will’s face and realizes, quite suddenly, that she is boring him. From then on, Maya is careful about what she says.

Will has stopped mentioning his friends. Maya is secretly glad. Sometimes, she dreams of a house with no floor and a child in the shallows, floating.

 *

Rishab answers at the first knock.

“Is she outside?” Will asks.

Rishab nods but doesn’t move. Standing opposite the boy is difficult. For a moment, he wishes he’d stayed by the window. Then he steels himself.

“Would you stay away from her,” he says, “if I asked?”

Will tilts his head. “No.”

Rishab nods; he expected this. “I could make you.”

“Not really.”

Rishab nods; he knows this too. He remembers the boy’s arms around his chest, unyielding. So he says what he meant to say all along: “I don’t want your friends anywhere near her.”  

Will hesitates, and Rishab wonders if maybe, just maybe, he agrees. Then Will says, “They wouldn’t hurt her. Not like you did.”

“But would they hurt her….not like I did?” Rishab isn’t sure what he means. Only he knows his sister and knows that if she finds a cliff, she will peer over the edge, and he won’t always be there to save her.

“They—” Will looks confused. “They wouldn’t do that.”

The way he says it makes Rishab almost pity him. Then Maya pops into the doorway, grabs Will’s arm, and they’re gone.    

 *

Will is thinking about Rishab. He sits on a bench, blacktop beneath his feet and a sweep of field on his right. Across the grass, children shape forts out of pine twigs. Will is not a boy who can play. He will cross the grass, grab a stick, and he will be utterly lost. They will say,

“No, that goes here.” Or—

“Put those there.”

When Will plays, his world shrivels into twigs and shouts and mud sloshing in Sprite cans. Will is a boy who lives on listening. He does not like shouts, or rules, or the mindless breaking of branches.

Caz and Lyle do not like these things either. At the moment, they are sprawled on a table. Lyle’s lips move quickly; Caz grins, talking over him. But they are across the blacktop, and Will cannot hear them. They barely look at him. Once, every morning, they speak to him.

“Will.” Caz nods.

Lyle says, “We hate this. Don’t you?”

“If you’d help us—”

“No,” says Will, “not her.”

He watches them leave, and every morning, it gets harder to send them away.

Without Caz and Lyle, Will feels ageless. His friends are poets and professors and a girl who plucks marsh grass. Sometimes, he catches himself looking at Rishab, wondering if he’s twelve, wondering what he’s like, if he’s like Maya—only older, uncomplicated. Then Will remembers how he met Rishab and feels sick.

From his bench, he looks over at Lyle and wonders what he is saying. Will needs people cleverer than him. People who bring him their questions and theories, their impossible statements. Last month, Lyle wanted to recreate amino acids, to discover the ocean at its infancy, watch life knit itself around his fingers. But that was a month ago, and Lyle has moved on. Without meaning to, Will catches Lyle’s eye. Lyle nudges Caz. As the two walk over, Will starts to make room, then realizes they won’t be sitting down.

“So?” Caz stands over him.

Will turns to Lyle. “This was your idea.”

Lyle dips his head.

“And you think it’s…good?”

The other boy smiles gently. “I don’t know if it’s good.”

“It’s brilliant,” says Caz. “And you know it, Will.”

Will doesn’t know it. All he knows is that Caz and Lyle are brilliant to the end. If they’d threatened him, if they’d threatened her, he never would have given in. But they didn’t threaten him. They simply left.

Caz leans down kindly.

“You don’t have to stay with her,” he whispers. “You don’t even have to watch.”

And Will buries his face in his hands.

 *

Maya has never done this. She’s never slipped through the backdoor at night, but she’ll do it for Will. Quietly, she folds and unfolds the note. Be down at the water by 8. She wonders why Will didn’t tell her this. Why he came with the note and left. Why he’s still so quiet, as if blaming her for something he’s left unsaid.

But it doesn’t matter. Will wants to see her—he’s forgiven her—Maya runs to the water and finds them waiting. 

*

An hour later, Rishab answers the door.  “She’s not here, she snuck out—”

Then he realizes the boy is crying.

“I—” Will presses his knuckles to his lips. He shudders. And he tells Rishab everything.

 *

Maya feels the rocking of the boat. Caz and Lyle are talking, but she barely listens.

“Will’s coming?” she asks.

He is.  

“You sure?” she asks.

They are.

Maya doesn’t know why Will sent his friends. Why they untied a boat. Or why she stepped in. She watches the boys row in turns, hugging the beach, pushing out, until the cliffs slide between them and the bay. And still, she will not let herself be afraid. If she’s afraid, that means Will is not here, and if Will is not here—

She grips the hull, slick as picked bones.  

“Will’s in another boat?” she asks.

The boys trade oars, and Lyle settles next to her. She’s grateful for this; she prefers him to Caz. They sit shoulder-to-shoulder, watching the water. 

“This is nice,” Lyle says. “Like my dream.”

She realizes, eventually, that Caz is watching her. “So,” he says. “You like science.”

“Not really.”

“But you like asking questions. Well, that’s what this is. You, me, and Lyle, we’ve got a question. There’s an answer. And this,” he sweeps his hand over Maya, the boat, the black waves tipped with white, “is how we find it.”

At some point, they’ve stopped moving. Maya eyes Caz’s arm, still raised. “Asking questions doesn’t…hurt, does it?”

Caz bursts into laughter. “You thought—? God, no, we’re not hurting you. We’re—” He looks at Lyle. “What’re we doing?”

Gently, Lyle takes Maya’s hand. “You get to be a child in a dream.”

“Your dream?”

He nods. “I woke up too soon. I had questions.”

Maya is trying to remember. She is trying so hard. A child left at sea. “So the question is…who left the child?”

“Of course not.” Caz looks at her pityingly. “The question is what happens to her.”

*

Later, Maya will wonder when she understood. Was it when the boat stopped? When Caz spread his arms? When he wrapped those arms around her, pulling up?

In a moment, Maya finds herself dangling outside the boat, one shin in the water. Then she twists, Caz loses his grip, and they fall into the boat.

“Don’t!” She gasps. “Don’t touch me.”

Caz lunges, but Lyle catches his shoulder. “Wait. I don’t think she’s ready.”

So they give her time to get ready. Time to curl up, at the bottom of the boat, and think about the times she’s curled up as Rishab kicks her. No matter what she does, she ends up here. Now there are two boys. Bigger. And even if they were on her stretch of the coast, with the gulls and the marsh grass, even if her porch were steps away, no one would come. In the end, there is only one thing to do.

“I’m getting out,” she says.

As the boys watch, she crouches. Stands. Places one foot on the frame. At the last moment, Lyle tells her kindly, “If you want to float, you should take off your clothes.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. Then Caz steps forward, and that is enough to decide her. Angling her body away from them, Maya peels off her clothes. And then, before they can look—before they can speak—before they can come any closer—she jumps.

She expects the water to be cold, but it is better than cold. It numbs. She keeps her body below the waves and looks up. The boys are looking down, curious.

Caz says, “We’ll be back.”

“It’ll be a waste otherwise,” Lyle explains. “We know what people look like when they’re dead.”  

Maya shuts her eyes as they row away. Pretends they’re not here. When she opens her eyes, they are gone.

*

Maya lies on her back and looks up. The moon is a fingerprint on dark glass. In the blackness, horizons expand around her. The water pushes out, out, and Maya wonders if the sea has swelled. She imagines her house underwater. The cliffs underwater. Aster sways, upside down, in the dark.  

The cold is different now. It pricks. She thinks of teeth sliding up and down her leg and wonders, vaguely, what is beneath her. She is cold now. Very cold. Maya remembers a day when the wind chilled her lips and her mouth tasted like sea and her chest was so numb that she ached. She didn’t say anything then. She kept walking because Will was walking, but he noticed, like she knew he would, and zipped her into his jacket. This felt good, Maya remembers. So good.

She does not have a jacket now. She is naked, and there is something comforting about this, too—out here, where everything is bare. Soon, Maya cannot feel her body. She begins playing with words, the way a child plays with blocks. No body, she thinks. Nobody.

She is waiting, she tells the cold and its teeth. She is waiting for somebody. Somebody will be here. Somebody is coming. And he will listen when she says that she was floating through the sea—or floating in the sky—and everything was below her, and nothing above her, or everything above and nothing below.

Only she must not bore him. She started to bore him—is that why he brought her here? He’s coming, silly. Of course he’s coming. For a time, she believes it. And then she doesn’t.  This is not a place where you find people. This is a place where you lose them. And Maya realizes, slowly, that she has lost, is lost, will keep on losing, and no one will ever find her.

At some point, she stops swimming. Or maybe she never started. She wouldn’t know which way to swim: out here, there are two directions, up and down. Maya likes looking down. So, in the end, she lets her mind wander down, down to the coral insects and the unwarped primal world.

* 

An hour later, Rishab finds her. His neck is damp with sweat; his spindly arms are shaking. Will said he would find her past the cliffs, by the buoy. She has not traveled far. He was worried that she would swim, but she is floating, still, her hair an oil spill on black water.

Rishab helps her into the boat. She doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t mind; he is savoring the moment in perfect bites. He saved her. Not Will. Him. As Rishab rows his sister home, he never stops to wonder what the sea has held up, and what it carried down.

Ashley Duraiswamy is a student at Yale University majoring in English. Ashley reads for The Yale Review.

ABOUT THE ART | Nebo, Kentucky by Abigail Dixon, 2024. Abigail Dixon is a student at Yale University.