Back when Cora still slept on the top bunk, I talked to her all night. That’s what Dad said, at least; he said he could hear me rambling on and on, asking questions to not wait for an answer, reciting plotlines from books I had read. Cora rarely responded, but if I quieted myself for a minute, I could hear her little lungs inflate, breaths long and even in sleep. I didn’t need her to say anything, I just needed her to keep up the symmetry of her breathing or to rustle around under her sheets, so I could know she was there.
I liked to fill the room with sound, once the lights were turned off. I didn’t like the visual wasteland of the darkness, and I liked it even worse when my eyes adjusted and the creepy chair in the corner grew a face and watched me not sleep. I furnished the darkness with my voice, like echolocation. My words were a surveillance system to warn the killer in the closet to stay away! Because I knew he was there.
On windy nights, the rusty chains of the old trailer in the driveway rattled, and the branches of the knotty trees groaned, as if a fat ghost were sitting on them. Nighttime air danced through the always-open window and fluttered the white curtains. I told myself it was just the wind, but I couldn’t work up the courage to peek my head behind them and make sure.
“Cora,” I whispered, testing if she was awake. When she didn’t respond, I said it louder and shoved my toes up into the soft part of her mattress between the wooden slats. “Cora!”
She moved around and mumbled something incoherent.
“Did you hear that?” I poked her mattress with my toe again.
“What?”
“That creaky sound.”
“No, I don’t.” She made a grumbling sound to settle back into sleep.
“Can you listen though?”
“Mmhm.”
I lay with the back of my head flat against the pillow, ears exposed for optimal listening. I didn’t close my eyes until I heard the creaking again, and there was relief enough in knowing that I hadn’t made it up.
That boat trailer has rattled through the night for as long as I can remember listening. It showed up at the edge of our driveway one day, half on the grass and half on the gravel, and has rusted there ever since. My dad says he haggled with a salty old fisherman at the pier and bought it for a good deal, but my mom thinks he got it for free on Facebook Marketplace. “No one in their right mind would think someone would buy that piece of crap.” She says that some nights he falls asleep scrolling through the postings, searching through things other people don’t want anymore.
Back when Cora still slept on the top bunk, we used to play around the trailer. We could only do it when Mom wasn’t watching because she told us we would get tetanus if we played too close. Tetanus was something that I had learned about from a Boxcar Children book I had been reading, where one of the kids cuts their hand on a rusty nail while spying through an old window and has to be rushed to the hospital. Luckily, this is where she discovers the case-solving clue. My mother’s warning made me all the more eager to investigate the trailer; I fantasized that the layers of rust would fall away to reveal a decades-old secret.
Sometimes Cora stayed after school with the other second-graders to take swim lessons at Town Landing Beach. I graduated from swim the year before, so I had to entertain myself while she was gone. I spent most of these afternoons wielding a jagged chunk of concrete that had fallen from the house’s foundation, chipping away at the lumpy orange metal of the trailer frame, only to find more orange underneath.
One Friday after swim, Cora returned triumphantly. I hid my concrete in a thick patch of grass while she begged Mom to open the trunk, gravel crunching under her pink watershoes as she hopped impatiently.
“Lanie, Lanie! Look what I found!” She tried to raise it above her head, but her arms weren’t quite long enough.
It was a boogie board, the kind that grocery stores sell at the checkout line for tourists to buy for their children and throw away at the end of the weekend. A sun-faded image of two purple dolphins jumping out of the water graced the layer of thick, stretchy fabric that wrapped around the board, and white foam innards peeked through rips in the material. There was an empty circle in the body of the second dolphin where a strap had once been attached, but was now gone.
“I found it at swim, and my instructor said I could keep it!” The board was almost as big as her, and she held it in awkwardly as she jumped. Mom sighed.
“You girls are just like your father,” she said.
“Good job, Cora,” I said, jealous that I had never found anything so useful during swim lessons. I contemplated the many potential activities the board could provide for us. “Let’s bring it to the backyard.”
Multiple failed attempts had passed to sled down the low-grade hill behind the house like we would do when the hill was snowy in the winter, when I had a great idea. Cora watched as I brought the board to the trailer. To keep it from rolling away, Dad had propped it up on a cinderblock, which angled the frame upwards from its usual flat position. Cora watched as I lifted the board to the middle of the row of small rollers that ran down either side, meant to ease the process of loading a boat. The board rolled smoothly down and skidded to a stop in the gravel. I retrieved the board and lifted it again, higher this time, and it rolled down just as smoothly. Cora watched me nod, satisfied by my experiment.
I gave the board to Cora as I climbed up the cinder blocks and dandled my legs off the edge of the frame. She asked me what I was doing.
“I have an idea,” I said. “Now pass it up.” She hesitated, looking back at the big window to see if Mom was peering through. The chain clanked under me, disturbed by my presence. Cora passed me the board.
“I want it gone,” Mom said to Dad later that night at dinner. I was trying to stab the last shells of Annie’s mac and cheese with my fork, but they were really suctioned to the inside of the bowl. I put the fork down on the placemat and reached my fingers in to unsuction the pasta shells. Mom grabbed my wrist before I could, still glaring at Dad accusingly.
She was not happy to find me shushing Cora in the driveway, my legs red with gravel-filled scrapes, and Cora’s eyes seconds from spilling over, staring wide-eyed at her bloody elbow. As Mom approached, I reminded my sister how much fun she had been having before the board veered off the track and sent her into a prickly holly bush, but it was hopeless to try to stop her tears from falling.
“I thought we told you girls not to play on it,” Dad said to us. Cora touched the band-aid on her elbow and looked down at her uneaten dinner. I looked past her and through the picture window above the sink. The glass was speckled with dried water droplets from washing dishes, but I could still see clearly through to the backyard and driveway. A yellow bird flitted down from a tree and perched atop one of the rollers of the trailer, but it only stayed there for a second before flying away. Probably it felt the roller turn under its weight and left to find a more sturdy branch. “There are plenty of ways to entertain yourselves that don’t involve messing around with my projects,” Dad said to us.
“Well, of course they’re going to mess around with your projects if you leave them in the middle of our driveway!” I saw Cora’s shoulders fall and release their tension, knowing Mom didn’t blame us, but the shift of her disappointment from us onto Dad unsettled me. I thought about saying, It’s my fault! Don’t be mad at him! so her eyes would stop looking at him with such despondency. But I didn’t.
“I’ll move it to the backyard,” Dad conceded.
“No, David, I want you to really get rid of it,” Mom said. “It’s taking up way too much space, and we don’t even have a boat.”
Dad said he got the boat from an old couple on Facebook Marketplace. A great deal! he said. And thank God he had the trailer, otherwise someone else would've scooped it up. It was a fifteen-foot Whaler from the eighties with a noisy engine that you had to pull to start. The words “Salty Bottom” were printed onto the side in a tropical-looking font. That first day, he brought us all to Town Landing to launch it. He surprised Mom with a baseball cap that said “Captain,” which she rolled her eyes at but put on instead of her usual sun-bleached Life is Good visor. Cora and I watched from the dock as they backed the trailer down the ramp, Mom directing and Dad driving. They backed up so slowly that when the boat finally met water, it barely splashed. The trailer made a banging sound as the crank released, but the boat slid right over the surface without complaint.
Mom closed her eyes as the wind blew through her hair. At first, she held her hat down with her hand, but eventually she took it off and held it, facing the wind unflinching. I’d never seen her hair so crazy, blowing in front of her face, and Mom did nothing to tame it down. She looked so free like that. Cora and I sat across from her, facing backwards. Cora turned her head in all directions like she was trying to see the entire ocean at once, but I just watched Mom.
“Girls, come help me steer!” Dad called from the wheel, slowing the boat down, and Mom didn’t say anything as we ran back to sit next to him on the bench.
He showed us how the engine turned in the opposite direction that he spun the wheel, and he told us to pick a fixed point to aim for to make sure the current didn’t take us away from where we wanted to go. Cora and I tried to give him our best attention, but I got distracted by trying to peek over the console to see whether or not Mom had put on her hat.
“Cora, you have the first turn,” Dad said, and she beamed like she wasn’t expecting it. I wanted to protest that I should've had the first turn because I was older, but Cora looked so happy to be chosen that I decided not to.
Dad put her hands on the bottom of the wheel, and she held on. At first, her turns were tentative and slow, but as the boat picked up speed, her confidence grew. She sent us careening left and right at her whim, giggling. My chest contracted when she made her first sharp turn, and my teeth chewed against each other. Dad’s recklessness was alive in her laughter. I repressed the urge to push her out of the way and take over, or scream at Dad to make her stop. Instead, I touched both of their arms.
“I don’t think you’re doing this right,” I said to her, and then to Dad, “She’s not doing it right.” Worry overcasted Cora’s expression, and she looked up at Dad.
“She’s doing just fine, Lanie,” he said. “You’ll get your turn soon, be patient.” I leaned back on the bench, rejected, and gripped tight to the railing.
Once we navigated around the island, slowing down to watch for rocks and sandbars, Cora let go.
“You can steer now, Lanie,” she said, and I reached over Dad to grab the wheel.
On the other side of the island, the water was open all around me and I could have spun the wheel, and us, in any direction and we would have gone there. Dad pointed at a lighthouse in the distance, and I focused my energy on aiming at it. I adjusted for every little wave that skewed my course, and our wake slithered like eels in water behind us. Dad was in charge of the throttle, and he inched it forward slowly and without warning, like he hoped I wouldn’t notice. I glared at him, but he just smiled back. I asked Cora if she wanted to steer with me, and she placed her little hands next to mine.
Once we got going fast and the bow rose up above the water, Cora and I couldn’t see over the console anymore. The world moved so fast around us, and I kept my eyes trained on the lighthouse, rather than try to see it all. Cora said something to me, but the wind swept it away before it reached my ears. There was a strange sense of silence in the whooshing of the wind. Dad held us by our life-jackets as we stood on the bench beside him, bracing ourselves against the wheel until we became a part of it, steering with our whole bodies.
Back when Cora still slept on the top bunk, we kept the boat on the trailer in the driveway. When it clanked and groaned at night, I’d think about the wind in my ears like white noise. I’d close my eyes and picture the whitecaps bobbing in and out of view as we moved with them, reliving the lightness that only hit my stomach at the crest, just before the fall, when all there was around me to fall through was endless sky. The wind blew moonlight through the curtains, and I didn’t look through them.
It isn’t the rattling of the chains that keeps me awake anymore, it’s the silence that follows. Back when Cora still slept on the top bunk, I’d listen for her steady breathing in the space between sounds. Sometimes I tried to line my breaths up with hers, but they were always too slow, and I could feel my lungs shriveling without air when I matched her pace. Now, when I look up, instead of wooden slats supporting a mattress, I see only ceiling. This room is smaller, but every empty corner feels impenetrably vacuous and unfamiliar. Now, I wait for a second sounding, an answer or an echo, not filling it with myself. The indeterminable silence rings dissonant in my ears, but I listen all the same.