Chapter Text
Ellie’s mom dies on a Tuesday. Her dad comes back to life on Friday.
In the days between, Ellie’s stuck in the hospital drugged up on painkillers and anesthesia that makes remembering anything for more than five minutes a near impossible task. The accident that took her mother left Ellie only a little maimed: a concussion, cracked ribs, and a uniquely mangling that sliced the ring and pinky finger on her left hand clean off. People come in and hover like flies, their questions nothing but a buzzing in her ear: can you move your hand and do you have a next of kin and what’s your pain level, scale from one to ten.
She doesn’t always have an answer, but for the last one, Ellie always says eight. Her head and her hand hurt, some hours more than others, but eight seems like a good number to include the suffocating weight of grief that sits heavy in her chest.
Marlene shows up on Thursday with a worn envelope and a letter that’s been folded and refolded so many times it’s beginning to tear at the creases. It’s not mail-ready - no address, no stamp - but her name is on there in her mother’s immaculate penmanship: Eliana Williams II
She wishes she had more energy to be ticked that it had clearly been sealed, ripped open at the top with a letter-opener, but she barely has enough energy to pick up and read the letter as is.
As it turns out, that isn’t needed either. Tucked in between the pages is a poorly developed polaroid, clear enough that Ellie can tell that two of the people are her mom and Marlene. The third is a man she’s not sure she’s seen before: young, handsome, a boyish smile.
“I always had my suspicions. ” Marlene says around a sigh. “She denied it, of course.”
The needle in the back of Ellie’s hand tugs uncomfortably when she flexes her fingers to turn the photo. “Denied what?”
“That he was your father.”
Growing up, Ellie’s father felt more like a myth, than a person. Her mom never spoke poorly of him, but she never had any pictures or evidence of him, either. He was always a background character without expectations or realism. Some things were consistent: she said he was kind, charming, and brave if not reckless. Most things - like his job, where he grew up, where they met - was not. But ever - not once - did her mother tell her his name.
And never, not once, did Ellie ask.
There’s a lot she should have asked.
Ellie’s mom died on a Tuesday.
She meets her dad, Tommy Miller, on Friday.
He has a handlebar mustache.
Tommy laughs when she points it out, an awkward thing with fragments of the bright, boyish smile that’s half-faded in the polaroid. He’s got cowboy boots and a beltbuckle. He’s got a white t-shirt on with a weird crease in the middle, like he ironed it poorly and in a hurry.
He asks for permission before doing anything: sitting in the chair beside her hospital bed, asking her a personal question, leaving the room to go get an update from a nurse. When she asks him for something - just a cup of water - he says yes ma’am and gets it without argument. He’s all southern charm and manners that aren’t found in Boston.
His phone rings a lot. Every time, he checks who it is, grimaces, then hits decline before shoving it back into his pocket.
“Wife?” She guesses.
“Yeah,” he answers, quietly. When he gets up, he adjusts the pillows behind her back without asking, but she lets it slide. He definitely fluffs them up better. His gaze is a little distant before his frown deepens, landing on her bandaged hand. “That hurt?”
“Um.” What’s left of it is bruised to all hell, but in all honesty, they have her on enough pain medicine to tranquilize a giraffe. He laughs a little when she tells him this. “It’s more awkward than anything.” She lifts it, a limp effort of display. “I’m left-handed.”
Tommy looks at her like this is the worst news she could have told her. It makes her imagine what his face did when they said she existed .
His phone rings again. Ellie’s - cracked screen, chipped case, but still working - hasn’t rung once since she got here. She’d been hoping that Riley would have noticed she hadn’t been showing up at their usual meet up spots but so far - nothing.
“Maria,” he tells her, though he declines the call again.
“Ellie,” she answers. “You know. In case you already forgot.”
He laughs a third time and it finally doesn’t sound so nervous.
On day three of having a dad, he comes in with a larger-than-life grin and a red duffel bag that looks like it could be Santa’s.
He ignores her Kris Kringle jab, too excited to show her what he’s brought: a new phone to replace her busted one, a pair of noise canceling earbuds, a change of clothes - including new sneakers - and a manila envelope full of photographs.
“I had to download them off my phone, but I had someone help to make sure they weren’t so shit,” he tells her. Tommy sits himself on the end of her bed, using her tray as a makeshift table.
“This could have been an email,” she tells him when she spreads out the photos and sees that he’s included a lot of interior shots of the house - he’s lucky they’re so candid, full of people, or they’d feel more like crime scene photos.
“Sure, but,” he shrugs, eyes down as he skips through the various scenes of light blue walls and sandy-colored couch cushions and duvets. “It’s nice. To have copies to hold. Plus,” his face twists up, “It’ll be awhile before I can getcha home.”
Ellie and her mom shared a one bedroom apartment that was barely 600 square feet, only a few blocks down. She knows Tommy is staying at a hotel across the street, for now. But eventually, when she stops giving the nurses eights and the hospital finally kicks her out, she’ll have to go with him. It gives her an idea.
“Rent is due in, like, three days,” she says softly. Instead of twirling a thread around her finger, and cutting off the blood supply to yet another finger, she picks at a dent in the plastic tray. “I had - I have most of it. To pay Robert.”
Tommy’s face goes all soft and sad. “I’ll pay for it, Ellie-girl. Don’t you worry none ‘bout that. You just - you give me Mr. Robert’s number. I’ll get it all paid.”
“He’s pretty nice. Well, reasonable,” she amends as a nurse comes in. Ellie knows the drill, offering her the arm with her picc line, but she notices that Tommy’s shucking off a flannel he doesn’t need in the city heat and checking out his own veins in the crooks of his elbows. “You can negotiate for some of the month. Since we need to leave.”
“We’ll stay the month,” he says across a loud sigh. His eyes glaze over as he stares at nothing in particular on the wall adjacent to them. “Turns out it ain’t that simple smugglin’ kids over state lines.” He blinks and comes back to himself, that damn grin on his face. “Who woulda thunk.”
The nurse smiles at Tommy’s joke. They all do, whether they’re funny or not. Ellie’s pretty sure he’s what women would consider cute. “Alright, Miss Williams. I’m getting your blood for a paternity test, okay? State of Massachusetts orders.”
It doesn’t hurt when they use the picc line, it never does, but she still winces when the nurse picks up her left arm to adjust her into a better position. “I’m sorry, love,” she says sweetly, the undertones of a French accent there. “Is your hand hurting? Scale from one to ten.”
Eight, she thinks. She always says eight. It keeps the good stuff coming, keeps the worst of the pain away. But she can’t keep saying eight forever. The pain will come and go, whether she wants to deal with it or not.
“Seven,” Ellie says. “Or six.”
The nurse finishes with the vials and smiles at her. “Getting a little better, huh?”
“Yeah,” she lies, staring at the red of the blood that’s a little of her mom, a little of Tommy, and all of her wrapped up into something so small. She thinks about throwing it across the wall. She thinks about breaking it, watching it spill against the white tile floor.
“I guess so.”
Context clues lead her to believe Maria is not happy about the results of the paternity test.
Ellie doesn’t blame her. She’s only really gone through half the pictures Tommy’s printed for her, but she doesn’t need the full album to know she’s blowing up their Architectural Digest worthy life. She doesn’t know a ton of brands, but she knows a few: she’s clocked the fancy suits Maria’s worn and the red-bottoms she knows are worth about a grand. Her mom would thrift stilettos and paint the bottoms red herself, just for a laugh - just to see if anyone would ever know the difference. But Maria’s a lawyer and Tommy’s got businesses - as in plural - and their son Benjamin has khakis’ and loafers and sports coats that scream private school.
Ellie has one hair scrunchie, one winter coat, and one GED prep book because her mom started homeschooling her two years ago. She’d say she only had one pair of shoes but now she has two since Tommy bought her one. Well, maybe it’s just one. She thinks the hospital might have tossed the pair of duck-taped, once-blue-now-black converse away.
She’s not from the same stock. So. It’s no surprise that Maria was probably hoping that her mom was just lying. But the paternity test comes back a match. Marlene lets them both know that Tommy Miller is, in fact, her biological father.
Her dad’s phone keeps ringing and eventually, he can’t keep hitting decline. If he’s not on the phone with a doctor, or a social worker, or Marlene, he’s talking to Maria. He always leaves the room to take the call, which leaves her enough time to use her phone to call Riley. Again. And again.
She’s quickly learning how Maria must be feeling, because she doesn’t ever pick up.
She’s long done trying to make her attempts at contact when Tommy returns, red-faced and a little clammy, hair mused like he’s tugged it in frustration for the last twenty minutes. She asks if everything’s okay each time, and each time he sounds a little less convincing that it is.
The sevens and sixes she gives eventually go down to fives and fours, so the hospital gives her pills and physical therapy appointments then sends her on her way. Tommy spends a long time talking to Marlene. Apparently, she’s supposed to stay with a state registered foster parent until they can finalize her dad’s custody, but since Marlene is a state foster parent, Ellie gets placed with her - and is immediately handed back off to Tommy. Like she’s some under-the-table paid employee.
When they get back to the apartment, it feels like a museum. It’s dustier than she remembers, which shouldn’t surprise her, because she doesn’t think they’ve ever dusted. Usually, they just keep the windows open and hope a bird doesn’t fly in, or that Robert’s gigantic fat white cat doesn’t come in begging for food.
Immediately, Ellie says she’ll sleep on the pull-out couch, which Tommy doesn’t take too kindly.
“Ain’t the room…?” He peeks in again, confirming to see if the decorations scream kid or teenaged girl. “Ain’t that room yours, anyway? Don’t you wanna sleep in your own bed?”
She just pulls the couch out into a bed and makes up the sheets as best she can with just her right hand. “I’m fine here.”
“Baby,” he tells her, wincing at his word choice when he does. It’s weird for Ellie, too, but he’s so southern she thinks he’d call a squirrel baby, too. “I’m not here to take your bed. I can sleep on the couch.”
She lays on the lumpy cushions covered in thin, worn floral sheets and sighs. She takes a deep breath and hopes she smells the remnants of her mom’s shampoo or perfume.
But all she smells is herself. Hospital sterile, sweaty and slightly salty, Ellie Wlliams.
“Okay,” she agrees, dragging herself up and into her room. “Night.”
She doesn’t slam the door. It’s nothing but a click. But the silence that follows sure feels like she shut it so hard she rattled the building down to the studs.
Tommy says they’ll drive to Jackson Island.
“So you can take as much of y’all’s stuff as you want,” he explains when he comes back with lunch and two dozen cardboard boxes to assemble. “Your bedroom at the house is big, it’ll fit all this. If you want.”
Ellie eyes the barely standing IKEA cabinet by the cracked television. “Even that?”
He looks a little like he regrets his promise, but in the end, he sticks with it. “Yes, even that.”
She doesn’t keep it. She doesn’t keep any of the furniture, much to Tommy’s relief. They arrange for the usable furniture to be donated to a women’s shelter while Ellie takes to packing up all the art on the wall and bubble wrapping most of the knicknacks from the tables and shelves.
“I didn’t know Anna was an artist,” Tommy tells her
“She’s not - was not,” Ellie says, wiping the sweat off the front of jeans. It’s a late spring day and hot as hell, and they’ve never had a working AC. “I made that.”
Her dad’s eyes bug out of his head. “Really? Ellie, this is incredible.”
It’s one of her better ones - a seaside painting, foggy in its essence, with docks and trees and little boats that she’s only seen on tv for reference. “I was watching a documentary. I don’t know where it’s supposed to be.”
“Looks like the beach to me,” Tommy beams. “Wait ‘til you see it, kiddo. You’ll be painting for days on end.”
She flexes her left hand, the phantom feeling of something whole making her feel dizzy.
It’ll be a miracle if she can hold a brush the same way again.
It takes them four days to drive from Boston to Jackson Island.
The first two days are short in driving time, due in part to Tommy stopping at roadside attractions and attempting to make this life-changing move fun. She can’t fault him for it. Her energy levels are low and she’s trying not to lean on the side of bitchy with how much extra she aches being rattled around in a u-haul truck, so he picks up the slack in preventing the awkward silence by stopping at an antique mall, and then even an art store where he offers to buy her as many new art supplies that his credit card will let him charge.
It’s nice. Really nice, even. But she can’t muster the energy. Ellie spent the last week before they left running around town, trying to find Riley. But no one: not Marlon, not Jackie, not Travis, no one had a clue where she was. It was hard not to be sad. It was even harder not to be angry. Her mom was gone and her best-friend turned kinda-sorta-girlfriend just ghosts her.
So she doesn’t have the energy. Just enough patience to offer a shrug and compliance to listen and do whatever he wants until they get to the island.
Though visibly disappointed, he doesn’t let the art store go to waste. It’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he ends up stepping away while Ellie’s pretending to look at framing to ask a store clerk about the best type of tools for outdoor painting.
Tommy ends up shoving an easel, some canvas, a palette, and a box of watercolor paints into the u-haul with the rest of her stuff.
He forgot the brushes, but Ellie doesn’t tell him that.
The last two days are more of a straight drive. He lets her turn on the radio, and she chooses a country station - a real country station with songs so old they’d only pop up on old PBS stations or get name-dropped in trivia nights or crossword puzzles. Tommy seems to know almost all of them - he even hums along to one called Red River Valley.
“Who let you out of the rodeo, anyway?” Ellie asks, her feet up on the dash.
She half-expects him to tell her to put them down - since a car accident did just almost kill her - but he doesn’t comment on it. “You get the gold medal in bull riding five years in a row and eventually, you do the polite thing and let someone else have a chance.”
“Hmm. Doesn’t sound very true to the cowboy spirit.”
Tommy chuckles, taps his fingers on the steering wheel. He’s just behind the beat of the song. “Cowboys wander. Don’t make sense to stay in the same spot your whole life.”
That…does make sense. But she can’t let go of the fact that he admitted to bull riding. “Did you really ride a bull? Or are you talking about one of those line-dancing bars that have mechanical ones?”
“I rode a real one,” Tommy scoffs, sounding genuinely offended if not for his big smile. “But I was pretty good at the mechanical ones, too.” He winks. “You ever been on one?”
“Short supply in Boston. We only had the mechanical Paul Revere.”
“Funny, I’ve only ridden the mechanical George Washington .”
“Very similar. You have to wear a powdered wig, either way.” That sends her dad howling, so much he nearly crosses the double yellow line. When he’s calmed down and she thinks she won’t have to yank him back into the lane to prevent being in yet another accident, she pulls out her new phone and starts browsing maps. “You think they have any? Now that we’re past the Mason Dixon.”
“Mechanical bulls? Girl,” he says, tipping the brim of an imaginary stetson her way, “I bet there’s one for every McDonald’s we see on the side of the road.”
There’s definitely not one for every McDonald’s. And with the spotty cell service it takes forever to just find one place that boasts a mechanical bull. They’re early enough before there’s a real crowd or the bar enforces any age-restrictions, which is good for her. She still has her fake ID that her mom bought her last year tucked in her sad excuse of a wallet and this way, it’s still a secret for her to keep.
Tommy buys her some french fries and a cola from a glass bottle before he gets her up on the bull. She’s pretty certain he did this so he could mock her when she falls up and hurls with a full stomach that’s been shaken to near death, but he promises that won’t happen, since she won’t stay on for more than four seconds.
She lasts seven, but it doesn’t feel like much of a brag.
She asks him to take a turn, to prove his story. He does after just a smidge of heckling from her, which she can’t decide if she likes or not. Ellie and her mom were almost always on the same page, but when they thought differently, she never caved. Arguing back with Anna Williams was pointless.
Tommy Miller, though, he seems like a pushover. Well, maybe not a pushover. That might be the wrong word.
Because he definitely did stay on that bull for about forty-nine seconds.
When they’re forty-five minutes away from his house, he has them stop at a diner and orders her the biggest chocolate milkshake money can buy.
“I have to be honest, I didn’t know how to explain you to Benjamin.” Tommy wrings his hands, spinning his wedding ring around and around. “I wanted it to be clear that you are one-hundred percent part of this family from now on without…”
“...making him think you ignored me for fifteen years?”
He goes pale. “I’m sorry. She never told me.”
Ellie just nods, because really: how else are they supposed to move on from this? He’s either lying or he’s not, but either way she’s stuck with him. Believing him seems to be the better option, at least for now. “So…what am I? A long lost cousin?”
“No,” Tommy says quickly. “No, I don’t -” He stops, swallowing thickly. She can almost tell how much it hurts to try and swallow the ache in his throat that comes before crying. “I don’t expect you to ever call me dad. But I don’t want to take it away from you, if it’s something you want.”
“...Huh. That’s.” She also struggles for words, though hers aren’t as painted. “Considerate.”
“Yeah, well, you can thank Maria for that.” He still sounds a little bitter. Must not win a lot of arguments with her. “So, we settled on telling him that we just adopted you.”
“He thinks I’m just some random teenager you decided to pluck out of Boston and make his daughter?”
His nose wrinkles. “No, not exactly. I didn’t give him any details. He’s eight. I figured maybe we’d just say that Anna was my friend from back during my army days and when I heard she passed and left behind a daughter, I adopted you. But.” Tommy sucks on his teeth before reaching for a toothpick at the end of the booth. “Might paint me as a better guy than I am.”
Something twists in her gut. She feels herself knotting together. “You said you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t,” he tells her gently. “But I ain’t sure if you believe that. And that’s okay.” His hand flexes like it wants to reach for hers across the table, but he refrains. “So if you want to tell him the truth, that we adopted you because you and I just found out about each other, that’s fine with me.”
Ellie sits with this, letting his words untangle the panic and fear that’s acidic and uncomfortable in her chest. “He might not believe you.”
“Eh,” he shrugs, a ghost of a smile playing at his lips, hardly seen behind the mustache that’s gotten unruly in their drive. “He’s eight.”
“He won’t be eight forever.”
“I know that, too.”
Again, she thinks. Takes the spoon from her milkshake and taps gently against the glass base, off beat to the song echoing with static across the diner. “Army buddies are fine,” she tells him. She knows her mom was in the army for a short time, and so was Marlene. It makes sense that Tommy’s telling the truth about this part. “Were you guys in the same…?” She struggles for the word. Infantry? Division? She ends up settling with, “...club?”
It does the trick to ease all the tension out of Tommy’s body, who laughs at her misguided joke. “Yeah, kid. We were in the same club.”
“...Matching tattoos?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
She doesn’t care, she realizes, one way or another. The indifference is a little startling. Indifferent isn’t a word that has ever been used to describe Ellie before.
But her mom is dead, Riley won’t answer her calls, and now she’s moving a million miles away to live with a long lost dad and his wife who probably wants nothing to do with her. Which is somehow…fine to her. Maybe it’s the lingering effects of the pills she’s still on, or maybe it’s grief.
But maybe indifferent is just who she is now.
Benji is pretty cool for a snot-nosed little brother.
He kind of makes up for the not-so-warm welcome that Maria doles out when they finally get to the house. She was polite enough, but she kept hitting her with the government-issued Eliana. Which, sure, it’s her name. It’s her mom’s name, too. But neither of them ever used it. Tommy seemed to know that as soon as met her - even with so many years passed, it seemed he still remembered what kind of person Anna always was.
With Benjamin, she’d expected an undercooked private-school frat boy jackass, but he’s not really anything more than a big, sweet nerd. Like her, he likes science - being so close to the beach has made him more of a geology and biology nerd, but she thinks it’s more than kind that he moved his entire seashell and fossil collection to her room in an attempt to make it more homey.
“This is a Megladon tooth,” he tells her. He’s been showing her each one in between her unpacking her meager boxes of clothes - they’d all been wrinkled when she and Tommy had packed them up, but he had still folded them up for her before taping up the cardboard. Benjamin has been making futile attempts to smooth out the wrinkles before putting them in piles according to color atop her new fluffy white comforter. “Some of them are twenty million years old.”
“How do they figure that out?” Ellie asks, all drawers of her dresser open as she tries to keep Benjamin’s color-sorting organization out of politeness. It’ll only be a few days before everything is shoved and wrinkled in there again. “Carbon-dating?”
“Stratigraphy.”
She blinks, closing the top drawer and spinning slowly, brows drawn up in surprise. A secret nerd herself, she’s no stranger to long, multi-syllabic scientific words. But she’s got no clue what the hell that word means. “How old are you again?”
When he grins, he’s missing one of his top incisors. “Eight.”
She taps her upper lip, then points to the tooth in his hand. “Looks more like the tooth you lost to me.”
He laughs, but still insists on her picking up the Megalodon tooth for herself. “I found this one on the beach! All the cool shells and stuff wash up there, but you gotta get up really early.”
“How early?”
“Before the sun. Wanna look tomorrow?”
She’d been dreading what kind of activities she’d end up doing once she got here, but instantly Ellie decides that sea-shell hunting before dawn is not one of them. “Sounds fun.”
They shake on it. It’s not really a deal - or a secret - but it feels distinctly sibling-like.
Benji wakes her up well before the ass-crack of dawn.
He picks her out an outfit - she wants to go out in her sweatshirt, but he doesn’t let her. He’s swiped a Hawaiian-style shirt out of his dad’s closet and tells her to put on a sports bra and a pair of shorts she doesn’t mind getting wet.
She’s so tired she doesn’t even mind being politely bossed around by an eight-year old while she slaps her hand around on her nightstand, looking for her glasses. “I’m not getting in the water when it’s pitch black, neither are you,” she yawns, struggling to get them to sit on the bridge of her nose. They’re a little dated, the bright green chipped in one corner, but one day of the salty, sandy air had her to her wits end with her contacts.
“Tidepools,” Benji clarifies, groaning when Ellie says she’s not getting in puddles in the pitch dark, either. “C’mon! I already packed our bags. Let’s go!”
He’s fairly quiet when they go down the stairs - he seems to know which steps to avoid so they don’t creak, but she isn’t so lucky. Still. The house seems plenty big. She’s sure it isn’t loud enough to wake up.
But maybe their voices were, considering Tommy’s already sitting in the dimly lit kitchen, a cup of coffee steaming from the mug.
Benji grumbles when he sees him, but Tommy’s all sleepy smiles. It seems Benji’s parents aren’t all that keen on getting up really early to take him shell-hunting much these days, so he probably felt like he was getting to sneak out on adventure now that Ellie was here. But she’s still fresh meat trying not to step on anyone’s toes - so she told Tommy the plan last night, before she went to bed.
Ellie just…didn’t know that meant he’d be getting up to see them off.
“Dad,” Benji whines. “Ellie said she’d go, we’re just gonna -”
“I know, I know,” Tommy says softly. “It’s fine, bud. I just wanted to go over a few rules. I know you know the beach real well. But you listen to everything Ellie tells you. Heard?”
He perks right back up. “Heard!”
Tommy puts a finger to his lips, his one-worded outburst a tad too loud at this hour. “Okay,” he whispers. “If you find a Megladon tooth, I call dibs.”
Benji scoffs, already dragging Ellie to the door. “Nu-uh. It’s Ellie’s.”
The better part of the time spent in the dark is spent trekking to the good part of the beach, according to Benji. By the time the sky is tinged a light purple and there’s enough light to really see the white crests of the tiny waves lapping up on the shore, he starts running a few meters ahead, turning over shells and inspecting them carefully.
“You have to make sure there’s nothing living in them,” he explains when he’s got a half-broken conch in his hand. “If there is, just put it back in the water. But don’t throw it.”
“Wasn’t gonna,” Ellie says softly, wading through a little tidepool. It’s finally light enough that she isn’t so nervous to stick her hand in. “Hey: what about this?” And she pulls out a tiny round thing, speckled with little dots.
Benji identifies it from a few feet away. “That’s a lettered olive shell. Dad says they look like burritos.”
She checks for a snail - nothing. “A good one to keep?”
Benji shrugs, which seems like kid-code for not really, so Ellie puts it back.
In the end, they only find one suitable shell for the start of Ellie’s collection. Benji calls it a wentletrap, laughing when she repeats it back in a bad British accent, claiming it sounds like some snotty private school. At the end of the stretch of their beach, when it starts to get rocky and the tidepools actually look like tidepools, Benji says they should turn around.
She doesn’t have a hat, but the morning sun is starting to get in her eyes, so she has to use her hand so the glare isn’t so bad bouncing off the dirty lenses of her glasses. “Why?” When she stretches she thinks she can see that the beach continues a little further around the rocky part, sand that looks white and untouched with how difficult it is to get there. “Bet there’s some good stuff over there.”
But he shakes his head, pointing to a sign she hadn’t noticed. “Turtle habitat,” he says. “There’s a lot of nests down there.”
She looks harder - when she does, she thinks she sees a house at the very end of the beach, up on the cliffs. “Does someone live there?”
“It’s the Mill Shack,” Benji tells her. “Jesse says there’s some old guy who built it years ago to keep track of turtle migration and populations. Now it’s part of the island sea turtle cooperative.”
She blinks. It’s a lot of big words for a small kid that’s got a lisp from his missing baby teeth. “Right. Sure. Uh.” Another pause. “Who’s Jesse?”
“He works for Dad!” He beams. “He’s a pro-surfer. He used to live in Hawaii!” He bounces on his toes, looking and talking much more like his age.
Now she feels awkward. She bends an extra beat thinking, toes digging in the sand as she attempts to remember if she asked what exactly Tommy did for a living. “Um. What does your dad do?”
“Our dad,” Benji corrects lightly, taking her wentletrap and wrapping it up carefully in a rag he brought before placing it in his canvas bag. He says it like it’s no big deal; Ellie has half a mind to think he’s probably overheard the conversations about her existence from Maria over the phone. A part of wants to correct him. Thinks maybe she should.
She doesn't have the energy.
“He owns a store," he goes on. "He sells and rents out surfboards and kayaks and canoes.”
She’s having a hard time believing there’s a real difference between a kayak and a canoe. “Does that mean you know how to surf?”
“No,” Benji sighs. “I’m…not a good swimmer.”
Ellie wrinkles her nose. “If it helps, I’m not a swimmer at all.” At his incredulous look, she adds, “There wasn’t anywhere to swim in Boston.”
“That’s not true. There’s a harbor. Where they dumped all that tea?”
She barks out a laugh. “Dude, that’s probably freezing. I’m not jumping in there.”
“Well, have you been on a boat?”
Ellie’s barely done shaking her head before he’s tugging her on the long trek back, straight past the house and towards the boat shack where the infamous Hawaiian surfer Jesse is apparently going to take them sailing.
But she still catches herself turning around ever so often to catch glimpses of the Mill House before he disappears entirely beyond the horizon.
Turns out, Benji wasn’t wrong about the sailing thing.
When they make it to the surf store, Tommy is already there. It’s definitely less of a store and more of a shack with the room it has on the beach, but the finishes inside are nice and the air conditioning unit is blasting blessed icy-cold air. There’s stacks and stacks of surfboards, kayaks, canoes, just like Benji said. There’s a clouded freezer with ice cream sandwiches and popsicles.
Jesse looks exactly like what she would imagine a pro-surfer would: shirtless, ripped, and tanned, complete with dark floppy hair that’s barely being kept out of his eyes. He greets her warmly when she walks in, wandering over to a container in the corner where there’s a mess of life-jackets.
“Oh, uh.” She becomes a stuttering mess when Jesse starts fitting one on her, yanking straps and tugging at the bulk part at the nape of her neck. “I don’t -”
“You're Tommy’s daughter, right?” He asks easily. Again - it seems Tommy’s worry about what the town will think of their circumstance is turning out to be a bunch of whatever down here.
When she finally nods, lips pursed, his hair flips dramatically and in boyish fashion when he tips his head back towards the office behind the counter. “He’s just grabbing a few things before we head to the marina.”
“Uh…we?”
“Yeah! We. You think we’re gonna leave our newest recruit?”
Ellie already feels sun-kissed by the early, cloud-less morning, her nose raw with heat, that she doesn’t quite feel up to spending more time outside, especially with the sun getting brighter and the day getting hotter. “We’re seriously going sailing?”
She nearly jumps out of her skin when a girl rushes past her, so closely her ponytail brushes against Ellie’s head. “Oh, c’mon!” She cheers, opening up the freezer with the ice cream and grabbing a sandwich before she takes a seat on it, kicking off her flip flops. Ellie’s eyes travel up to the cut-off jean shorts and the red bikini top before she meets the girl’s eyes - dark, long lashes, pretty. “It’s gonna be so fun. Tommy’s convinced Bill and Frank to come along so we can take their catamaran. They’ll do all the work and we,” she gestures to the circle she, Jesse and Benji have made, “Get to relax.”
He takes the lifejacket off Ellie. "You guys get to relax,” Jesse huffs, reaching behind the counter to grab a baseball cap, which he slaps on the top of the girl’s head. “I’m gonna be helping Tommy with the sails.”
The girl shrugs. “Frank’s more fun anyways.” She then peels the entire ice cream sandwich - neapolitan, and breaks off the end piece with the vanilla, handing it to Benji. The other end has the strawberry, which she then offers to Ellie.
“I’m Dina,” she says.
She hasn’t eaten anything all morning, and while she can’t remember the last time she had strawberry ice cream, it sounds like the most delicious thing imaginable at the moment. She ends up plucking it out of Dina’s hand and shoving it in her mouth in one bite, making her laugh. “I’m Ellie,” she says, mouthful.
“Yeah, I know,” Dina laughs, her eyes trained on Ellie’s lips when her tongue darts out to lick at the corner of her mouth. Or at least it feels like it. It’s only mentally confirmed when she definitely gives her ensemble and once-over. “Tell me you have a bathing suit on you.”
She’s still chewing, her left hand going up to cover his mouth - she doesn’t miss how this time, when she looks at her mouth, her face pales at the sight of her missing fingers. “I’m from Boston. I don’t own a bathing suit.”
“Yeah, Dina, what did you expect? Lend her one of yours. She can’t exactly wear her colonial powdered wigs and knickers to the beach,” Jesse jokes, slapping the bill of the cap down further on her head.
She hops off the freezer without complaint and immediately grabs her hand. “C’mon. Let’s get you changed before I slather you up.”
Ellie’s eyes go wide, eyes pleading Benji’s way. “Slathered in what?”
“Sunscreen,” she scoffs before her brother can bail her out. “I’m not gonna let you turn into a lobster roll.”
“Well,” Ellie jokes, cheeks already the color of strawberry ice cream. “That would be fitting. Considering I’m from -”
She interrupts with a not so threatening finger pointed straight into her chest. “I’m gonna get you the slightest tan if it’s the last thing I do,” she laughs, and Ellie mentally makes it her life’s mission as well.
Being on a boat is the most out of place Ellie’s ever felt.
And she’s been handed her mother’s ashes at the funeral home.
Ellie’s never ever been in a bikini top in her entire life. It’s not particularly skimpy, but it’s held together by ties which is terrifying. Dina ends up double knotting it and promises it won’t budge.
But blessedly, she gives her board shorts to go over the bottoms, as well as an oversized t-shirt to wear in case the Get Ellie Tan mission starts to go south very quickly. Ellie gets the cap that was slapped on Dina’s head, too - green with a dirty, brown, corduroy bill, the center decorated with a very small sea turtle on it.
The catamaran is huge - it makes Ellie wonder if her dad is the poor one in his circle of friends around here. It has enough room for all of them - including Maria, who meets them at the Marina with Bill and Frank.
Bill’s a grouchy fucker, Ellie picks up on that immediately, but Frank is kinder, with a scruffy white beard and kind eyes that shine extra when Dina dotes on him and hugs him like a beloved granddaughter.
True to Jesse’s word, he helps Tommy and Bill get the boat ready for a sail while Maria fusses over Benji, making sure he’s got enough sunscreen. Ellie checks her own skin - slick and sticky with the spray SPF 60 that they stole from the surf shop, a sweet smelling scent under her nose from the special face sunscreen that Dina herself rubbed into her nose and cheeks.
It doesn’t take long for Ellie to pick up that Frank is a bit… frail. He moves in such a way that brings up recent memories for her, of when she walked on stiff bones around the hospital, stretching aching legs and flexing a post-surgical hand until it didn’t feel like there was still glass from the windshield under her skin. When he’s finally settled on the boat - this net thing that took a lot of coaxing on Dina’s part- it takes a moment for him to catch his breath and greet her properly, the way all these southern people do.
“I’m Frank,” he says, a noticeable chip in his tooth when he smiles. She likes it, likes when people’s smiles lay crooked and broken, like they’re worn from overuse. “It’s nice to meet you, Eliana.”
Ellie shoots a look up and over his shoulder; Maria’s got her back to them, which makes it that much harder to stop herself from doing something childish like stick her tongue out or throw the middle finger. “It’s not -” She bites her tongue before she looks back to him, offering a tight smile. “Just Ellie is fine.”
Frank takes it in stride. “Well, Just Ellie, glad you have you onboard the Lincoln.”
It takes a few minutes before they end up heading out of the marina and into the open water - far far into the open water, her humble opinion. Dina tries not to laugh at her when she starts pressing herself as snuggly to the net like a starfish, like she could will herself not to move if she prays to gravity hard enough.
Dina, though, shimmies out of her shirt and shorts, laying down to catch some sun. Ellie manages to slip off her shirt at some point, making sure to focus on the clouds and not her. “This is Ellie’s first time on a boat.”
“Yeah?” He leans up with a groan so she can see his face. “Tommy’s probably going to start his fishing competition with Jesse and Bill soon if you want to kick their ass.”
Ellie hears Dina blow a loud raspberry. “Bor -ring. Who wants to wait around for hours trying to catch some fish that you usually have to throw back anyway?”
“You know, it doesn’t take that long if you’re a bit quieter.”
“Frank, are you seriously telling me this giant boat isn’t scaring the fish away in the first place?”
Tommy does end up asking Ellie if she wants to fish - a few times, really. But each time, she shakes her head, a little green at the prospect. The rocking of the boat, plus the heat, plus the possibility of having to hold a rod when her hand still aches something fierce these days, does not sound fun.
Plus, it seems to make Maria a little exasperated when she refuses, which somehow feels like a win to her.
She supposes it’s her own bias, but Ellie figured with Dina’s larger-than-life personality and girly confidence that she wouldn’t be particularly perceptive. But it seems she picks up on the tension with Maria instantly - that, or Ellie is terrible at hiding it, which is not something she wants to accept at the moment. “Maria’s not that bad,” Dina promises quietly, tiptoeing around Frank once he falls asleep, joining Ellie on her other side. “She’s just frustrated.”
Ellie purses her lips, looking at a sliver of thigh under the long hem of her board shorts. There’s a new scar there, long and pink - a keloid, the doctor called it. It was from the accident.
A million memories flash like lightning in her mind, her anger rolling in like thunder just moments later. Most of them are from the hospital where she’s alone and in pain and without her mom.
“She’s not the only one,” Ellie ends up admitting, because, really, what else is there to say?
Dina doesn’t say anything back, but she does hug her - it should be awkward, having someone she only just met give her a hug.
But it doesn’t. It feels nice, soothing, like an aloe to the burn that she’s inevitably getting on her skin.
“I’m sorry about your mom,” Dina whispers in her ear before she pulls away. She ends up staying close, fidgeting with the cap on her head, deliberately not meeting her eye.
Back in Boston, they didn’t have a funeral. Ellie was always her mom’s best friend. They were partners in crime, taking the city by storm, carving out spaces for them to fit, even if it meant stepping on people’s toes along the way. Sure, Anna had Marlene - and Ellie had Riley - but they didn’t really have friends. Part of Ellie wondered if they had a real funeral, if anyone would show up.
She was too afraid to figure out that no one would.
So, despite her dad’s insistence that he’d pay for one, she decided not to have one. Her mom was sent to be cremated, her ashes something they picked up a day or two before they left for Jackson Island, and Ellie ended up shoving the urn into the back of her closet, no headspace to really think about what that meant.
So Dina saying she was sorry about her mom - it was the first she’d heard it from someone who wasn’t a government official or a lady in scrubs at a hospital.
“Thanks,” she croaks back, the word tight in her throat. “Me, too.”
Dina grabs Ellie’s hand - the one that’s missing two fingers - and gives it a squeeze. She thinks that maybe it should hurt, just a little.
It doesn’t.
She spots it when they’re pulling back into the marina.
Ellie’s definitely sunburnt and thirsty, but Jesse’s been good to try and give her as many bottles of water from the cooler as he could - he even snuck her and Dina a beer, which did well to numb some of the tightness and burning her skin tingled with.
The marina is dotted with tons of sailboats, all going out for their sunset sails. It’s a pretty picture of white dotting the sparkling blue water - except for the one little boat with a colorful sail.
“That’sThe Monarch ,” Dina tells her when she passes her, following Jesse’s orders to help get them back to the dock. Despite all her huffing about not lifting a finger, she was quick to follow whatever request was made of her while out on the water.
Ellie, however, is still reaping the benefits of being a complete newbie - she gets to focus on the soft colors of the sail that blend in with the pastel colors of the setting sun. It almost looks like a giant sparkle on the water - and for the first time in weeks, she finds a strong urge to pain. Even if she thought she had her sketchbook, it would have been enough.
So instead, she just...stares. Tries to commit it to memory. "You see it a lot?" Ellie asks, hopeful.
“More or less,” Dina says, reaching for her coozie hiding her beer. “Haven’t seen it out in awhile, though."
“Whoever owns it, doesn’t dock it at the marina,” Jesse explains. “Not really sure where it comes from."
"It's pretty," Ellie mumbles and Dina leans her head down to grin in her line of sight.
"I've been trying to figure out who owns it for months. My bet's on Harry Styles."
"You wish," Jesse cackles.
Ellie’s more or less left to her own devices as Dina and Jesse focus on following Bill’s barking orders. She keeps her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs, and watches as The Monarch floats around the harbor and around the cove, disappearing to its home amongst the sandy turtle-egg beaches.
They have a late dinner of fried fish and chips; Ellie’s so hungry she gets seconds, which Tommy is all too happy to give her. She takes a shower half asleep, the steam barely dissipating when someone knocks on her bedroom door.
She’s still in her towel, so she doesn’t answer. “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Maria calls through the door. “I got some aloe for you, Eliana. Can I come in?”
Her name has never sounded so ugly as it does coming out of Maria’s mouth. It’s been a tough few months - between the hospitals and the social workers, and all the legal documents she’s had to sign, Ellie’s been having to scribble out Eliana so much that it’s perpetuated the identity crisis that already came with her mom dying and her dad appearing out of thin air.
Growing up, her mom always joked that she named her after herself out of pure laziness; couldn’t be bothered to think of anything else - something Ellie took at face value until about three weeks before the accident when she playfully cornered her mom after she was two glasses of wine in for the evening.
“You don’t even like it. You shortened it, too.” Ellie had said. “So why’d you stick me with the same curse when you knew you were always gonna call me Ellie?”
She’s gotten a little quiet, soft around the edges that she wasn’t used to seeing. “It’s a family name.”
It had confused her, this admission. Her mom was a foster kid - she didn’t have parents, or siblings growing up. “I didn’t think you had a family.”
Her mom had shrugged, pretending it hadn’t bothered her. Ellie knew it had. “You’re all I got, honey. So I gotta start somewhere, right?”
Another knock that kicks her out of her stupor. “Eliana?”
She’s kicked out of her stupor, landing straight into rage. She yanks the door open just as Maria’s posed for a third knock. “It’s Ellie,” she says tightly. “You know it, too.”
“Right,” she says, just as tight. She holds out the aloe in the worst attempt at a truce ever. “Here. So you aren’t moaning and groaning tomorrow.”
“I’d never be so cruel as to subject you to so much pain,” Ellie nearly sneers, too rough when she takes it out of Maria’s hand. “But thank you. I’ll be fine.”
Maria stares at her for a beat. Then, her shoulders sag a little with a sigh. “Sorry.”
It sounds a lot like someone making a child apologize. Ellie doesn’t really buy it. “It’s fine,” she says, clipped despite her best efforts. “Thanks for the aloe.”
Maria nods, awkward. “Your dad’s downstairs,” she says softly. “Try to remember to say goodnight before you head to bed.”
“He’s not -” she laughs instead of finishing, a bitter thing that almost burns in the back of her throat. “I’m sorry that I’m here, ruining your squeaky clean life with my drama. But I didn’t ask for any of this.”
They keep staring at each other. If Ellie didn’t have so much red-hot rage boiling in her chest, she might have remembered she had nothing on but a towel, standing in her doorway. “He loves you,” Maria finally says.
It throws Ellie for a bit of a loop. Tommy’s been kind - kinder than most would probably be in this situation - but she thinks he hardly knows her well enough to love her. “He just met me.”
She shrugs, a ghost of a smile on her lips. “That’s what parents do. They love you the moment they lay eyes on you.”
The fight drains out of her all at once, her blood feeling cold.
“Night, Ellie,” Maria says, leaving her an awkward, shaking mess in her doorway.
She’s covered in so much aloe, she gets a little on the railing when she shuffles downstairs to find Tommy reading a book under the light of a lamp in the otherwise dark living room.
It takes her a moment to brave breaking the peaceful silence. “Thanks for today.”
He jumps a little at her voice, even though she’s still across the room, speaking in a whisper. He’s got glasses on, too - green like hers - slipping them off the bridge of his nose when she invites herself in, curling into the loveseat opposite the recliner.
“You’re welcome, sweetheart,” he whispers, the edges of his lips curling up. “But I am sorry if it was too much. I was just trying to do something fun for you.”
“It was a lot,” Ellie admits, and he grimaces. “But it was fun,” she adds, which brings the smile right back. “Dina and Jesse are nice.”
“Thought you might like ‘em,” Tommy says, a little proud. He dog-ears his book and sets it aside, glasses folded on top. “They’re sweet kids. Dina’s your age and Jesse ain’t that much older.”
“Dina says she’s gonna teach me to surf,” Ellie tells him. “But I told her I had to wait until I wasn’t baked to a crisp anymore.”
“Jesse didn’t offer?”
“Well, I don’t think she really gave him the chance,” Ellie explains, and Tommy laughs. “She says he’s a horrible teacher.”
Tommy waves her off. “Nah, that ain’t it. Dina just ain’t so good getting instructions from her boyfriend, s’all.”
Ellie’s heart, for whatever reason, sinks all the way down to her feet. She shifts in her seat, trying to find a position that doesn’t make her skin crawl. “What’s the plan for tomorrow?”
He just grins, already reaching back for his glasses, and his book. “You’re a kid in the middle of summer vacation. I reckon you’ll find some mischief to get into.”
It’s a very Anna Williams type of parenting philosophy. It takes her by surprise. “So…carjacking? Arson? It’s all on the table?”
“As long as I’m not bailing you out of jail,” he winks. “Dina’s off tomorrow, but she’s always at the shop. Could start there, if you want.”
Ellie nearly whines. “I’m gonna get bullied into going into the ocean.”
He laughs. “There are worse things.”
Her left hand throbs. “I guess.” She heaves herself off the couch, everything about her feeling heavy - her hand, her eyes, her heart. “Night, Tommy.”
He spares her a flicker of a smile before he turns back to his book. “Goodnight, honey. Sweet dreams.”
After the day she’s had, trudging up the stairs with weary bones and hot skin, Ellie reckons she’s about to have a sleep so absolutely dreamless that she’ll have a resting heartrate that’s borderline dead.
But still, she has just enough energy to send a text before bed. The likely…thirty-sixth unanswered text, not that Elie wants to admit it.
Riley’s contact is still at the top. Her thumb slides over and punches out a similar message as all the others.
Hey. Just want to know you’re okay.
She hits send, eyes half-lidded, but just open enough to see the little red message that pops up just moments later.
Message Not Delivered.
Her heart skips a beat, hammers inside her chest.
It ends up taking her hours to finally fall asleep.