The White Garden

The water in the shallow pool was warm as bathwater, and that was the first wrong thing.

Maya stood ankle deep and felt it climb past warm into a temperature her feet did not like. Last summer this pool had been cool even at low tide, cool enough to make her gasp when she stepped in. Now it held the heat the way a parked car holds it, thick and still.

"Soren. Come feel this."

He waded in beside her and went quiet, his toes spread against the rock. Then he crouched and put his whole hand under, palm flat to the sandy bottom, the way you check if a kettle is still hot.

"It's the same all the way down," he said. "Not just the top."

That was when Maya looked properly at the coral, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach.

Last year the little reef under the ledge had been the color of a bruise healing, brown and gold and green, with purple tips. She had named the lumpy one Brain because it looked like one. Now Brain was white. Not white like clean. White like bone. White like something that had been left out in the sun until all the color steamed off it.

The whole garden had gone pale. Branching shapes, fan shapes, the round one, all of them bleached to the color of chalk, glowing faintly under the warm water.

"It's dead," Maya said. The word came out flat.

Soren didn't answer right away. He had his face close to the surface, looking. He reached in and touched the tip of a branch, gently, one finger.

"It's not soft," he said. "It's still hard. When things die in the water they go soft and slimy. Remember the crab."

She remembered the crab. She crouched too, and looked.

The coral was hard. The white shapes held their structure perfectly, every ridge and pore exactly where it had been. It was the color that had left, only the color. Like a house with the lights off but the walls still standing.

"Where did the brown go," Maya said. Not a question, really. A thing on her list.

Soren sat back on his heels in the hot water. "The brown isn't the coral," he said slowly, feeling his way. "My uncle said. The color is something living inside it. Tiny plants. Too small to see. They live in the coral and the coral lives in them. The plants make food from sunlight and the coral eats some of it."

"So the coral is two things," Maya said. "An animal and a garden, in the same body."

"Yes." He looked at the white branch under his finger. "And the garden is gone. It threw the plants out."

"Why would it throw out the thing feeding it?"

He didn't know. She could see he didn't know, and she could see him deciding to say so instead of making something up.

"I don't know," he said. "But it happened when the water got too hot. The heat is the only thing that changed."

Maya put her hand back in the water and held it there even though it was unpleasant. She tried to imagine being the coral. Being so hot for so long that the thing living inside you turned from help into something you couldn't stand, and your only move, your one move, was to open your hands and let it drift away, even though it was your food, even though you would starve.

"It's not dead yet," she said suddenly.

Soren looked up.

"You said it's still hard. Things go soft when they're dead. So it's still alive. It's just empty." Her words were coming fast now. "It's alive and starving and white and waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"For the plants to come back. They have to be able to come back. Otherwise why would it still be hard." She turned to him. "What would make them come back?"

Soren looked at the warm pool around them, all that stored heat, and then out past the ledge to the open sea where it was deeper and the swell was rolling in.

"Cold water," he said. "If the water went cold again. If the heat stopped soon enough."

"How soon is soon enough?"

"I don't know that either." He frowned at the white branches. "Weeks, maybe. My uncle said it's a race. The animal can live a little while empty. But not long. If the cold comes back fast, the plants move back in and the color comes back. If it doesn't, the animal starves inside its own skeleton and then it's the crab."

Maya stood up in the hot pool, water streaming off her legs, and looked at the white garden glowing under the surface, every shape perfect, every shape empty, every shape holding on.

The tide was turning. She could hear it, the first cooler water from the deep sliding in over the ledge, finding the warm pool, mixing. A thin cold thread curled around her ankle and was gone.

"Feel that," she whispered.

Soren felt it. A second thread of cold, then a third, the open sea pushing its way in over the rock, weeks of weather and current beginning their slow argument with one hot afternoon.

They stayed crouched at the edge of the white garden, not moving, watching the surface for the smallest return of color, while the cold sea came in around their feet one thread at a time.