The wind on Hal’s face was startling. Biting and sharp and all that he needed in that moment. The pain was aching from the inside and the cool air injected into Hal’s lungs was pure remedy. Xavier had asked once if he was afraid of the ocean, its power and rage. The answer was yes, a healthy and respectful fear. Xavier could understand that, but, unlike Hal, didn’t harbour the same sense of anxiety. Like so many others in the village, Xavier treated the Atlantic as a protector and friend, an entity that kept them all afloat even when news from far away pulled their senses back into reality. Hal was one of the few, he suspected, that had come to fear the ocean, had seen its power firsthand and knew that it could be unforgiving, unthinking, and unconcerned for the well-being of the people along its shores.

Xavier’s death was Hal’s first dose of reality; that day, he realized another soul could simply extinguish. Or rather, slowly descend into oblivion, depths they would never know, nor wish to. Boys were fated to be invincible, impossible to be so easily swept away. Especially by a current so familiar, a landscape woken up to each morning. The entire village spoke about the ocean differently now. As a friend who had betrayed them, a lover left and changed. If the ocean ever sent a shiver up his spine before, the taste of it on the breeze alone was now enough to make his whole-body tremble. The way it screamed at him, those waves, even from this high up. Threatening too, to take him somewhere forbidden. 

Hal edged a little closer to the last blades of grass along the rocky edge, precarious but promising. The wind continued its relentless journey across his swollen cheeks. The rational side of him knew there was pain involved but he did not feel it. Only the tightness across his face, a dull ache in his stomach, a sheet of white, frosted glass across his frontal lobe. He was holding his fists so tightly that his fingernails left gouges in his palms, blood trickling past his wrists and dripping into the marram grass. When he made it home that evening, his father said nothing as he worked to clean the wound, to wrap his hand in bandages. He was done by the time the fish had finished frying on the stove.

The following weeks were a daze. Hal stood at the funeral, stoic as he was taught, never invited to speak. This was a ritual meant for Xavier’s family and the community to come together and put to rest the hearsay of the ocean’s blame. It was a courtesy to remember Xavier, but also to remember that the Atlantic could not be at fault, not after all it had done for the village. They spoke candidly about how it had been an unusually windy day; the whales had been shifting all morning, riled up by some force beyond our human capacity. Poor little Xavier never was as good of a swimmer as his mother claimed. That boy was so fearless, courageous, but reckless too. Hal heard these remarks in the corners of the hall, in the gardens, and even in the streets, only days after the accident had taken place. 

The funeral was over after a few speeches, a blessing, and a small burial ceremony. Hal didn’t know that he would have done Xavier justice, but he held on to the belief that, if given the chance, he would have told the guests all their most embarrassing stories, the ones that Xavier would listen to, squirming in his seat, chiding Hal for forgetting the very best details: the exact tone of Mr. Smith yelling at them down the street, the glassy stare of the strange dog they found wandering the beach. But Hal also knew it was futile to hold a grudge, that he would have messed up the words anyway, choked on all the syllables, on getting the accent and inflections just right. Xavier had always been the better storyteller of the two. He figured it was better this way. That this unending ceremony had little to do with Xavier anyway, and more to do with maintaining the peace amid a tragedy still unfurling. Hal couldn’t bring himself to say hello to Xavier’s parents, despite knowing them since he was born and eating his fair share of their hard-earned portions on Saturdays. Hal’s father walked forward to pay his respects. He let his hand on Hal’s shoulder linger, did not push him forward. 

For the rest of the summer, Hal continued to follow his father each morning to the docks, tying the right knots, taking in his father’s authoritative voice as the law, the only method forward. Like he had in the years before, Hal helped his father throughout the season, taking on more of the heavy labour, trying not to notice the increasingly raspy quality of his father’s breath. Hal stayed silent while the rest of the crew continued in their usual way—humming and buzzing and mumbling together above the perpetual drone of the waves, the calls of the gulls. He often felt his hands moving, but was no longer aware of the sensations, the ways his hands and arms grew strong with the strain of heavy loads, and his shoulders freckled from hours baking in the heat. Most days, his head felt full of water, sloshing and overflowing. It left little room for imagination, reading, or anything beyond joining his father in the evenings, asleep on the couch after a finger or two of whiskey. 

And most evenings, after his father had fallen into his deep sleep, Hal returned to the cliff, meditative and numb until darkness found its way over the horizon. Every now and then a voice in his head toyed with the idea of jumping, or, more accurately, stepping just one step too far. Straight off the cliff in one clear line, a diver’s precision hardly leaving a splash in the water. But Xaviers’s voice interjected, louder than his own, as it always was. He reminded him that he would be furious if Hal dared do such a thing without him. He was right of course. The fall would be woefully dull without Xavier’s barbaric screams following behind, his suggestions for a fancier dive next time, an inventive position. And so, Hal always gave in, stepped backwards slowly and carefully. Wobbled a little before rooting in the sweetgrass and vomiting until the cold air rushed in to fill the empty space.