Free The Dead-Tossed Waves by Carrie Ryan

in town didn’t believe me when I told them I was from the Forest. They thought I was delusional. That I’d escaped from some pirate ship. They wouldn’t send anyone back into the Forest, and when I could finally go myself …”
    Her voice cracks and she swallows a few times. “I lived here for years helping Roger protect the beaches and then I left. I thought I could forget and move on. But I couldn’t. The Forest kept calling back to me. And so I went back. I tried again. And that’s when I found you and I thought the Forest was telling me something. I thought it was telling me to forget about the past and concentrate on the future.”
    As her words sink in her eyes snap into focus, widening so that the white surrounding the dark blue glows in the dusky light.
    “When you found me?” My voice has no substance, as if it’s less than air. I feel as if I’ve somehow woken up in the middle of the night in a strange place and can’t orient myself, the shock pushing in like thick darkness.

M y mother swallows and her fingers close around mine as I try to pull away. “Gabrielle, wait,” she says, but I pull harder, wrenching my hand from hers.
    “What do you mean, when you found me?” I ask, panic flooding through my veins, filling my lungs and choking me. I fall away from her, the damp sand soaking quickly through my skirt and chilling the skin at the back of my legs. Water splashes as she reaches for me but I keep backing away. Nothing makes sense and I shake my head, hoping to jostle the pieces back into place.
    “Wait,” she says again, and I stop. Waves push and pull around us, slicing between us. I stare at her and she stares back. She holds her hand out to me the way she would to a skittish dog, and I realize how terrified I am of what she’s about to tell me. I want to tell her to stop, to forget this entire evening. But the demand won’t press past my lips.
    “You were born in the Forest of Hands and Teeth,” shesays finally, her fingers trembling in the air, salt water dripping from them like tears. “I found you there. You were lost and alone and seemed to be in shock and so I brought you home.”
    “How?” I don’t even voice the question, just form the word with my lips.
    “You were on the path.” The explanation pours out of her and I want to cover my ears and block what she’s saying but it comes too fast, like a wall of water I can’t run from. “I’d left Vista years before but I could not stop thinking about my village and so I decided to go back. I was going to look for them, look for the others I left behind. I found you and there wasn’t anyone else. You were a child—almost catatonic. I didn’t know what to do. I got scared and I ran.
    “I didn’t have anywhere else to go and you were so sick and needed help so I came back to Vista. Roger, the old lighthouse keeper, had died the year before and I told the Council you were mine and that Roger had taught me how to run everything and that I’d take it over. No one knew you were not mine originally. No one but me.”
    I stare at her dumbly and watch the drops falling from her chin, circles radiating where they hit the water.
    “Why didn’t you tell me?” It’s all I can say, the only words I can pull from the whirl of my mind. Every memory, every moment in this town swims through my head and I can’t make sense of it.
    She looks down at her trembling hand still hovering between us. “Because I didn’t want to remember,” she whispers.
    Rage tears through me. “Then why are you telling me now?”
    She lets her arm fall. The waves break around us; the last gasp of light loses its battle with the evening. “Because you’reright,” she says. “We are nothing more than our stories and who we love. What we pass on, how we exist … it’s having people remember who we are. We’re terrible at that in this world. At remembering. At passing it on. And it is not fair that I’m the only one who knows your whole