Chapter 8 Wedding Season #3
“There’s what’s legal and what you can get away with. He could come up with some other reason that I’m doing a bad job. He’s talked about layoffs a lot.”
“Alright. So,” Ollie says, looking around, “I guess I’ll give you space. But tell me if he escalates anything. I know good lawyers.” Ollie smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Just one more minute out here,” I say. “It’s nice to be here with you.”
“One more minute.” We look out at the distant water, and I tell myself not to ruin things. Try to have fun. Keep things light, I remind myself.
“So do you want kids?” I ask. Keeping things light.
He keeps his eyes on the horizon. “Sure. But I’m not dying to have them.”
“You like them, though.”
“Selectively,” he says with a shrug. “Your kid is good. Those ones, on the other hand…”
He tilts his head toward the group of teenagers who are now leaning precariously off the side of the boat, just pushing the limit of where Ollie or I would feel the need to yell at them.
“I’m forty-one,” I say quietly. “So I’m not sure I can have any more.”
“I’ll have to ask out Lana instead, then,” Ollie replies, still not looking at me. “I’ll wait until she’s done posting selfies.”
“I’m being serious.”
He looks at me and then glances around to make sure no one is nearby us. “If things work out for us, I would be getting a kid.”
“But not your kid.”
“My father was impressed with the high quality of his DNA. He wanted to have children to carry on his bloodline. Mind you that our bloodline goes straight back to thieves and murderers. But it’s safe to say that continuing my DNA is not something I’m obsessed with.”
I find it hard to believe him. I find it hard to believe someone would give up all of that just to be with me.
“You’d never get to experience the toddler years.”
Ollie smiles. “From what I hear, the teenage years are the toddler years all over again.”
“Speaking of,” I say, glancing over, “I have to go talk to that kid.”
I walk over to one of the more daring teens just as he leans so far off the side of the boat that both feet are off the ground.
“Hey,” I begin. “Can you come down, please?” My voice sounds irritating even to me.
The boy I’m addressing has straight black hair and a chipped front tooth and looks like he’s about fifteen. It’s clear that he doesn’t want to back down in front of his cousins.
“It’s fine!” he drawls. “I do this all the time.”
“It would make me less nervous if you had both feet on the ground,” I say, just as the boat lurches slightly higher as we hit a wave.
He groans at me and puts his feet back on the ground pointedly, glaring at me. I turn to walk back to Ollie, who is watching me with amusement. The boat lurches again, sending me sideways to grip the railing, just as I hear a gasp and a cry behind me.
I turn to see that the boy is gone. His cousins are shouting as they point to him in the water, and I rush forward to see his dark head spinning in the wake of the boat.
There are “man overboard” shouts. I stare at the waves, hoping the little idiot has learned his lesson, but then he goes under again, and I watch the foam from the boat’s wake drifting where his head used to be.
He doesn’t emerge from the water. He has vanished.
Without thinking, without giving myself time to think, I glance around, grab the round life preserver that sits on the front deck as a decoration, and jump off the edge of the ship after him.
I know it is a stupid decision as soon as I’m falling toward the murky water of the Long Island Sound.
My stomach drops, waves splash up my nose, and I sink deep into the yellow-green water, which is bracingly cold in mid-June.
I kick off my shoes so I can force myself up to the surface, then bob for a moment in the salty waves from the boat wake, coughing.
The boat is still moving away from me, sending a set of strong waves bobbing me up and down.
I scramble around to grab hold of the life preserver and turn and start to swim after the boy.
The one thing I remember about drowning people flashes through my head: I will need to push him the life preserver but not let him get a grip on me and pull me under.
Panicked people sometimes drown their rescuers, and Hannah needs me alive.
I can vaguely hear shouting in the distance behind me, but I can tell that the boat is still getting farther away.
I’m not a fast swimmer, but I can still make it… unless he’s too deep in the water already.
“Hey, you want to give me that?” Ollie’s head appears next to me. Also swimming.
“What?” I’m confused for a moment.
“The life preserver? Give it to me?”
Bewildered, I push him the life preserver and he shoves me a large orange mass that proves to be two brightly colored lifejackets tangled together.
“Put one on,” I hear him say, and then he swims forward with the circular life preserver around one arm, easily going twice as fast as I was. It’s almost comical how quickly he leaves me behind as he swims.
Strong, tall man, I realize. Childhood on the coast of Australia.
I pause where I am bobbing, badly out of breath, clinging to the tangled pair of orange life jackets that Ollie left me with.
The water is shockingly cold now on my feet, and I can feel my body starting to shake.
I glance back to see that the boat is finally slowing and that we have a crowd of observers.
I watch Ollie reach a point in the foamy wake of the boat and then dive under the water, and I feel a flash of fear, my breath coming and going in uneven puffs.
The boy could die. Ollie could die. I should have stayed on the boat. Ollie has rendered my efforts pointless. My white shirt and work pants are soaking wet and slopping around me. What was I thinking? Is Ollie okay? Is the boy going to drown him?
After a moment, Ollie and the boy emerge at the surface and my breath comes out in a rush of relief.
The boy is gasping and choking as he clings to Ollie, the life preserver floating abandoned nearby, and I realize that I should have swum behind Ollie with the two other life jackets.
I begin to kick forward as fast as I can.
Everything feels impossibly slow as I try to reach them.
“Put one of those on!” Ollie shouts almost angrily when he spots me. He is shoving the round life preserver toward the boy.
I awkwardly link one of the life preservers around me and clip it on, pretty sure I’m getting it under my arm somehow.
“Give me the other!” he calls.
I give a big push through the water to toss the other one to Ollie, getting a wave full of saltwater down my throat as I do. I start choking a bit, pushing briny water from my eyes as I try to understand what’s going on.
I expect Ollie to put the other life jacket on, but instead he pushes it to the coughing boy. “I need you to put this on, okay?” he calls loudly.
The boy shakes his head. “My phone,” he groans. “It fell.”
“It’s dead,” I shout, wondering if he disappeared underwater in pursuit of his phone, not because of imminent drowning. If so, it’s possible I will kill him before the boat has a chance to turn around.
“I need you to put this on!” Ollie says to the boy again, more firmly.
The boy just keeps shaking his head. “My phone…”
“Now.”
The boy groans and awkwardly holds on to the second life preserver, still coughing. He slings it under one arm as Ollie treads water.
“Good news,” Ollie calls to me. “I think they’re coming back for us.”
A rush of relief brings tears that blend with the water. Ollie gives the boy a glance and, deciding that he’s not going under again, swims the few feet toward me.
“You are amazing, Laura,” Ollie says as I cough near him, the salt stinging my eyes. “You didn’t hesitate. You went right in.”
“Because I’m impulsive,” I say.
“No, you’re brave.”
My head begins to clear, the salt water mostly out of my eyes, and that is when I let out a long, highly visual set of swearwords that leaves both Ollie and the coughing boy staring at me.
“You okay?” Ollie asks.
“Hannah,” I say. “I was barely going to get to her in time, and now I won’t, and if I’m late they’ll kick her out of her aftercare, and I don’t have any back-up.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Ollie says. The wrong thing to say right then.
“No, it’s not going to be okay. Because there is no one else to get her, do you understand? My ex-husband is eight hours away and my sister is in Newfoundland, and I have nobody. And my phone was in my pocket, so I can’t even fucking call anybody!”
“Hey,” he says. “Hey. Come here.”
I don’t move, so he swims closer to me.
“Come here. Listen.”
“Don’t tell me it’s going to be okay!” I yell at him. “Don’t tell me it’s going to be okay. You don’t understand my life!”
“You’re not alone,” he says.
But that is exactly what I always am. Have always been. Ever since I was a child. It’s why I don’t depend on anyone.
Except that Ollie jumped into the water after me.
“Hey,” he says gently, “rescuing someone from the Long Island Sound probably falls into the category of a forgivable sin with your childcare, okay?”
“You rescued him,” I say petulantly. “I just ruined my shoes.”
He starts laughing. For a second I am angry. Furious.
“I hate this!” the boy cries from nearby, and then I start laughing too.
Ollie’s eyes are full of warmth. “You know how we were talking about the teen years being like the toddler years?” he says. “Based on today, I think I can skip the toddler years, no problem.”
We glance at the boy who floats near us, staring listlessly at the boat as it makes its awkward reversal. “Fuuuucckk!” the boy cries in outrage at the sky. We both chuckle again.
“You getting cold?” Ollie asks me, coming closer.
“He probably is. You can help him.”
“Screw him, he needs the life lesson.”
I cough out water again as I laugh. I am shivering harder now. “I’ve been colder at an outdoor music festival, it’s fine.”
“The things you’ve done for My Chemical Romance.”