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It is the storm again. The churn of the sea dragging me under. My body battered. My lungs exploding. I am tumbled head over tail and have no sense of up or down, it takes an eternity for me to grasp any stillness, any hint of calm among the maelstrom, enough to right myself and kick, reach, gasp the air of the roaring surface. My lungs shudder. I am somehow uninjured, somehow alive. It makes no sense. I look frantically for Raff but see nothing. I don’t know where the whale is. Or the Zodiac. The ocean is trying to calm itself. I dive below but I can’t see anything and it’s happening again, this can’t be happening again, I can’t be searching for his body down here, reaching desperately—

We surface together. He gasps and coughs. He is alive, a few meters away.

I swim for him, grab for him.

He grunts, yells out. “My arm.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re alive.”

“How?” he asks, all of him trembling.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know. Let’s get to shore.”

I try to support him as we swim. The weight of him in my arms is so much heavier than—

I wrench my thoughts away from that dark place, knowing I must be in shock if I am going somewhere I left behind so long ago. I don’t want to think about it except I can feel him now. His little body weightless against me. Shearwater is a place of ghosts, after all, and it has found mine and delivered him back to me.

Raff and I lie on the black sand as they run to us. I lose time. We walk to the hospital, I think. We are both dazed and in shock. Raff’s arm is broken, maybe. I am unhurt but the footsteps are pattering down the hallway of my mind. His laugh is in my ear.

All five of us sleep on the camp beds in the hospital. I sleep for a long time, I think, slipping in and out of dreams.

His name was River, my little brother.