30. Hunter
Hunter
The Sydney air hit me in the chest.
I walked out of the airport with my bag over my shoulder and the air was different — warmer, wetter, carrying salt and eucalyptus and jet fuel.
The sky was bigger than it should have been for a city this size.
The light was wrong — no, not wrong, different.
Sharper. The shadows fell at angles I wasn't used to.
I walked. For three days I walked Sydney — the laneways and the harborside and the parks with trees I didn't know the names of.
I stood at Circular Quay at seven in the morning with the Opera House right there.
The water was doing something with the light that the book on my shelf had tried to describe and failed.
The margin note I'd written eight years ago said morning light on the harbor.
And now I was seeing the morning light on the harbor.
My hands were on the railing. The salt air was on my face. I was here.
I was here, and it was unreal. I enjoyed it as much as I could, but there was something — someone — missing.
I swam at Bondi Beach. It was the first time I'd swum in the ocean.
The water hit my chest and the cold shocked through me so hard I gasped.
A wave caught me sideways and rolled me and I came up sputtering with sand in my teeth and salt in my eyes and the sun on my face and I laughed.
Out loud. Standing chest-deep in the Pacific with my feet on the sand and the wave pulling at my legs and nobody knowing my name.
I bodysurfed until my shoulders burned. I sat on the sand afterward with the water drying on my skin while the sun set, and I watched the surfers.
My chest was full yet empty at the same time.
She should be here.
I found a pub on the hill above Bondi. Small.
Wooden. I sat at the bar and a guy next to me asked where I was from and I said Texas and he said "No shit" and bought me a beer.
By the end of the night, I'd met his wife, his brother, and his brother's girlfriend.
They'd drawn me a map on a napkin of every place I needed to stop on the drive north.
I pinned the napkin to the dash of the rental car.
I drove north. On the wrong side of the road.
My hands gripping the steering wheel for the first hour — my brain saying left, my body pulling right, every roundabout a negotiation between muscle memory and survival.
I drove through the Blue Mountains and the light through the eucalypts was soft and filtered.
I drove through farmland that looked like Texas if Texas had been painted by someone with a greener palette.
I ate things I couldn't name at roadside stops and drank flat whites, and the coffee was better than it had any right to be.
Byron Bay. I pulled over at the lighthouse and stood on the easternmost point of the continent.
The ocean stretched in every direction and the wind was warm and the whales were somewhere out there — the locals said you could see them if you waited — and I waited.
I didn't see whales. I bet I would’ve if Jess had been there.
Magic seemed to happen when she was around.
Instead, I just saw the horizon and the light and the space, and my shoulders dropped another inch.
I moved on to the Gold Coast. Big. Bright. The towers along the beach catching the sun. I didn't stay long. Too much of the city I'd left. Too much glass.
Brisbane. A river city. Slower than Sydney.
I walked the South Bank and ate shrimp — or prawns, as they called them — from a market stall and watched the river traffic.
The jacarandas were blooming purple along the streets, and I stood under one for a long time with the petals falling on my shoulders.
They would've looked pretty in Jess’s hair.
Then I went north. The real north. The road got narrower and the towns got smaller and the landscape opened up — cane fields and red dirt and the coast flashing through the trees.
Then I made it to Townsville.
Clay's friend was Blake Mackay. Australian Pbr champion.
Fifth-generation Queenslander. Big. Solid.
Hands like shovels and a grin that took up half his face.
He met me at the marina in board shorts, no shoes, and a Stetson — the hat sitting on his head like it had been born there.
An Australian cowboy. I liked him immediately.
"Mate, your brother is the only Yank who's ever beaten me on a bull, and I've been trying to drink that memory away for three years." He shook my hand hard enough to rearrange my knuckles.
The Mackays were cattle, cane, and the sea.
Blake rode bulls. His brother, Davo, ran a dive operation out of the marina.
Between the two of them, they knew everyone in Townsville.
Within forty-eight hours I'd met the woman who owned the café on the esplanade, Blake’'s fishing crew, a retired cattleman named Doug who told me stories about mustering on horseback that made ranch work sound like a desk job, and Davo — who took one look at me and said "If you can ride a bull you can ride a current, let's get you certified. "
Blake took me out on Davo's boat for my first look at the reef — snorkeling, my face in the water, the colors hitting my eyes, and my brain refusing to process them.
I signed up for the dive course the next day.
Four days. Pool training. Open water dives. Davo had been diving for twenty years and spoke about the reef the way Dad spoke about the ranch — with reverence and a fierce protectiveness that made me pay attention. He taught me to equalize. To check my air. To trust the buoyancy. To breathe slow.
I passed. I held the certification card in my hand, and it was a small piece of plastic that meant I could go under. All the way under. Into the colors and the quiet and the world the books had promised.
I went out every morning at dawn. Davo's boat — berth fourteen at the marina.
I was always first on the boat. The reef was different every dive — the light shifting, the fish changing, the coral revealing new corners and crevices and formations that my hands wanted to map.
I hung weightless in the water, and the sun filtered through the surface in shifting columns, and my body was quieter than it had ever been.
She would lose her mind.
The thought arrived every dive. I carried it back to the surface, onto the boat, and into the hotel room.
The days were full. The nights were not.
I'd lie in the hotel bed with the ceiling fan turning and the sea air coming through the window, and my body would ache.
My arms. My chest. The backs of my hands, where her fingers used to trace.
The hollow at my shoulder where her head used to rest. My skin remembered her.
My muscles remembered the weight of her against me.
I'd roll over, and the other side of the bed was cool and flat, and I'd press my face into the pillow, and my ribs would tighten around the empty space where she was supposed to be.
Wednesday morning at five-thirty, I was on Davo's boat at the marina with my gear laid out across the deck and my wetsuit half on — the neoprene folded down at my waist and my chest bare to the cool air coming off the water.
Six weeks of Townsville sun and Coral Sea salt had given me a tan the ranch never could.
The sky was barely light, the Coral Sea sitting flat and silver out past the harbor mouth, and the first gold of the day was coming through the cloud at the horizon line.
Davo was in the wheelhouse running through the engine checks.
The other divers hadn't arrived yet. The dock was empty in the way a dock is empty in the half hour before a working morning, the boats creaking against their lines and the water lapping at the pylons and the air smelling of salt and diesel and the faint sweet rot of old bait.
Then there were footsteps on the dock. Soft, light, not Davo.
I looked up from the regulator in my hands.
"Hunt."
The voice hit me before my eyes found her — a honey-thick Texan drawl carrying clean across the water in the pre-dawn quiet of a Queensland marina. My hands stopped on the regulator. My chest went still. My lungs forgot the work they had been doing all on their own for the last six weeks.
Jessica was standing on the dock.
Her clothes were wrinkled. Her hair was pulled back with strands falling around her face.
Her mascara was smudged under her eyes. She had a bag over one shoulder and her phone in one hand, and she was standing at the end of the dock in the grey morning light, looking like she hadn't slept in a day and a half, and she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Including the reef.
My mouth opened. Nothing came out. My brain was firing — she's here, she's in Townsville, she's on the dock, she's here — but my mouth wasn't cooperating. My hands frozen on the regulator. My body frozen on the deck. I stared at her.
She shifted her weight. Her bag slipped down her shoulder. She pushed it back up.
"Well." A breath of a laugh. Nervous. Her chin lifting.
"This is not how I pictured this going. I had a whole speech, Hunt.
A really good one. I practiced it on three separate planes and a shuttle bus.
It had structure. It had emotional beats.
" Her hand gestured at nothing. "There might have been a PowerPoint. "
My legs moved off the boat, and onto the dock. The planks were wet under my bare feet. My eyes on her face. My chest split open.