The Immeasurable Depth of You by Maria Ingrande Mora

Author:Maria Ingrande Mora
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781682635438
Publisher: Holiday House
Published: 2022-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FOR TWO DAYS, DAD stayed on the houseboat. I muffled the vibrating anxiety in my bones by reading my library haul of manga. I read on the roof of Dad’s boat under the shade of a bright-teal umbrella. I read in bed, my thin mattress crinkling below me. I read at the breakfast table and with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand and over dinner with my dad giving me furtive, bemused looks.

The alternative was exploding with the need to continue my investigation.

Whenever I wasn’t reading, Skylar came rushing into my head, whispering to me like gentle rain at the tail end of a summer storm. I pressed my forehead to the window in my bedroom, my breath fogging the glass and the oil from my face leaving a smear. In the distance, the mangroves were green bruises on the skyline.

I could feel her out in the water. It was like the itch of a scab about to fall off. Worry. Waterlogged sadness. I was used to these feelings, but usually they belonged to me. Not someone else.

She was out there. Waiting for me? Avoiding my dad? Avoiding me?

I had so much to ask her. I needed to know if she felt the passage of time, if she talked to anyone else. I needed to know if she made me feel things on purpose, or if her sadness bled out of her like a hemorrhage. I needed to know who killed her, but she couldn’t tell me the truth—even if she knew. The shadowed look in her eyes had told me everything I needed to know. It was a secret. A secret only I could uncover.

With nothing to pull me away from my spiraling thoughts, I pictured her death. A paddle to the back of her head, a brick weighing her down, strong hands thrusting her below the surface while the water churned with her desperate struggle. My heart beat sick-fast when I thought about her last moments, of her fear and confusion and the awareness of oblivion an empty breath away.

That’s what I hated thinking about the most. Oblivion. Nothing. Forever. As unfathomable as the universe around us stretching endlessly, impossibly big, horrible, terrifying. One of my therapists had suggested I recall the time before I was born, and when I’d made a face at her and told her I couldn’t remember the time before I was born, she’d reminded me that I hadn’t been aware or lonely or frightened. The worst-case scenario was that death was exactly that—a lack of awareness. But I didn’t take comfort in that, because it still seemed like nothing. A chasm. An eternity.

Being alive scared the shit out of me most of the time, but being dead would be so much worse.

“But you’re not nothing,” I whispered to the quiet mangroves. “You’re still here.”

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