14
Darkness. Impenetrable black, nothingness, oblivion. Dan floated through it. No—you don’t float through darkness. You wade in it, feel it slide through your fingers like oil, squeeze between your toes like mud. Each step agony, every blink eternity. An endless ocean of night.
Welp. Better get used to it, huh?
But there was a voice. Soft at first—then louder.
Danny!
Practically shouting now. Geez. Pipe down. Dan was dead, he’d been shot to death atop the pool deck of Tizoc Grand Islands Resort and Spa while…singing. Ugh. Be quiet, please. The least a man can ask from death is a little quiet.
God, Danny!
Oh, no. That’s God’s voice? Dan didn’t have the energy to meet God right now, he wasn’t in the mood to explain everything. His browser history, his general attitude toward others, the time in third grade when he wore blackface for his book report on Booker T. Washington.
Wake up!
Dan’s eyes shot open just as Mara walloped the side of his head. She cocked back, ready to throw another.
“Goddamn, Mara, I’m awake, I’m awake.” Dan clutched his face. She’d slapped the same side as Rico. A few more and he’d look like Harvey Dent. He tried to shift himself—he was lying on a stone floor, somewhere—but his ribs screamed in agony.
“Danny!” Mara shrieked, wrapping her arms around him, kissing him all over. “Oh, Danny! You wouldn’t wake up. I had to slap you. I’m sorry. I couldn’t think of anything else.”
“You’re a nurse.” Dan attempted to prop himself against one of the walls—also stone—but he winced and grabbed his midsection. One wrong move and breath shot from his body like someone sitting on a whoopee cushion.
“Oh, babe. Rico shot you right in the stomach.”
Dan groaned. “With a cannonball?”
“Beanbag.”
Fuck. Dan associated beanbags with comfort. Mara placed her hands under his arms and helped him to the wall. It felt like his top half might detach on the journey. Eventually they made it though, and he rested his cheek against the cool wet rock and felt some relief. Mara carefully slid down beside him, put her head on his shoulder, ran her hand through his hair the way he liked. “Shh,” she said. “Shh.” Dan wasn’t talking, there was nothing to shush, but he appreciated the sentiment.
“Where are we?” he finally asked.
“Jail.”
Jail. Of course. His eyes adjusted to the dark. The cell looked to be about six by six, barely enough to lie in either direction, and the wall opposite Dan consisted of rusted iron bars. Water dripped and pooled in some spots, there wasn’t a single piece of furniture or a toilet, and it was cold. Christ, it was cold. Dan couldn’t see his breath in all that dark, but he felt it escape his mouth and float to the ceiling like an apparition.
“In one of the underground tunnels,” Mara added.
“Why does a resort in the Bahamas have an underground jail cell?”
Mara shrugged. “For drunks? Or rabble-rousers? You started a riot.”
Dan chuckled. It hurt. “So much for laying low.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have done that. That was stupid. It’s just—when Rico cut your rations—something snapped. But I could’ve found another way to get you food, I could’ve worked with Charles, or…” His voice trailed, joined their breath somewhere near the ceiling.
“I wasn’t expecting the singing,” Mara said.
“Hey, I didn’t start that.”
Mara laughed, nuzzled closer to him. “It wasn’t stupid, Danny. It wasn’t. You stood up to Building A. You fought back. People need to see they can still fight back.”
If Dan really had helped the people of Buildings B and C, if he boosted their resolve at all, he was happy about it. But that wasn’t worth jeopardizing Mara’s safety. He felt like he was being torn in two, and it wasn’t all beanbag.
“What now?” Dan asked. “They just gonna let us rot in here? If I die first, you have permission to eat me.” He shifted slightly and took a sharp breath. “I recommend avoiding the torso. Pretty sure there’s bone shards in there.”
Mara put pressure on the area just above Dan’s rib cage. It helped, somehow. “They didn’t say anything. Just dragged us from the pool deck and tossed us in. After they shot you, the guards took back control. You really pissed off Rico.”
“Fuck Rico.”
“Yeah,” Mara agreed. “Fuck Rico.”
They lay quietly for a while, the water from the wall—Dan hoped it was water—dampening their hair. This was the coldest he’d been all week, and it would only get colder from here. Dan always liked the cold, but his idea of cold wasn’t real cold. It was Tennessee cold. Real cold—parka cold, long underwear cold—was foreign to him. This was how mankind ended? A species that had moved at a blistering pace since it first emerged from a cave—a species that went from horse-drawn carts to space stations in one hundred years—would be frozen in place for eternity. A cruel joke.
At least let us blow each other up like civilized beings.
“I miss the internet,” Mara said.
Dan did too. “Oh, man. The internet. Will we ever get on the internet again?”
“I want to check Instagram so bad.”
“God, if Instagram was up, it would be so good right now. Can you imagine the stories? Or YouTube?”
Mara smirked. “TOP FIVE MISTAKES WHEN TRYING NOT TO FREEZE TO DEATH.”
Dan clapped his hands together once. “Hey guys, if you like this video of me slowly starving, make sure to hit like and slam that subscribe button for daily starvation videos.”
“And giveaways.”
“That’s right, for my thousand-subscriber special , we’re going to be giving one lucky viewer a single grain of rice, mint condition, let me know in the comments below how hungry you are to enter.”
They developed the giggles.
“There are so many things we’re never going to be able to do again,” Mara said. She gasped and her eyes widened. “Danny, we’re not going to know who wins this season of The Bachelor .”
“Or watch any more Disappearance Report ,” he said, his voice a petulant child’s.
“Oh, my God.” Mara buried her face in her hands. “So many good shows. Do you think I’ll ever pet a dog again?”
“What about Auntie Anne’s pretzels?”
Mara laughed. “What about them?”
“When you were in the bathroom at the Atlanta airport, I saw an Auntie Anne’s. And I wanted one so bad, Mara. It smelled incredible. The line was short, they’d just taken a fresh batch out of the oven. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it because I knew I’d be eating like shit on vacation. I told myself I’d get one on the way back home. Now I’m locked in an underground Bahamian prison.”
“There’s a lesson there.”
Dan nodded. “Always get the pretzel.”
They were quiet again, and Mara’s fingers fell from Dan’s hair, and her breaths were shallow. He thought she’d fallen asleep, which only she could do in this icebox, but after a moment she sighed and said, “I’ll never see my mom and sister again.”
Dan nestled into her, ignored the searing pain. “Hey, don’t say that. Why are you saying that? I know things looks bad right now. But I told you, we’re going to figure this—”
“Quit it, Danny.”
“Quit what? Listen. We’re going to figure—”
“We’re probably going to die on this island.”
Dan recoiled. “Hold on a minute. You’re mixed up. You’re the optimist. Remember? Mara, I’m going to get you home.”
“I don’t need you to save me, Danny. It’s okay. Hey, look at me. It’s okay. I’ve accepted it. There are worse places to die.”
She meant the island, of course, not the underground dungeon, but the reality of their surroundings in contrast to her statement made them both laugh.
Mara placed a hand on Dan’s cheek. “Maybe it’s a blessing, Danny. If we accept it, then we can focus on making things better rather than worrying about what comes next.”
That lit a fire in Dan. No, no, no. Dan didn’t want to die on this island. He didn’t want to die at all, actually. But more than that, he didn’t want Mara to die on this island. He’d made his mind up the day the sun exploded. Mara Nichols wouldn’t die in the Bahamas. She’d see her mom again and Raveena, her dumb sister, and the ivy that wrapped around the drainpipe near their front door, if it hadn’t shriveled up already.
“When did you give up?” Dan asked, hating the question.
Mara blinked, looked away. “When you did.”
What? Dan hadn’t given up. Every single decision he’d made since the sun exploded was about saving them. Saving her. And—
“When you stopped fighting,” Mara said more quietly. “When you screamed at me for helping people.”
“We were laying low,” Dan said for the hundredth time. “Our best bet was to hope Alan fixed the plane and rescued us. And these people—you know, who knows—maybe there are other planes coming. Maybe—”
“You can’t just do nothing and expect good things to happen, Danny.”
Damn. That struck him like another beanbag.
He knocked his head against the stone a few times. “Well. I did start a riot.”
Mara held him tighter. “That was good. Let’s help these people, Danny. Maybe we can at least make everyone more comfortable before the end. Push back against Building A. Do the right thing with the time we have left.”
Dan buried his face in her hair. Hearing her speak like that tore at his eardrums, pulled apart the lining in his chest. This wasn’t the end. Not yet. Not if he could help it. But in the meantime… Yeah. He could do more to help people. He could try. For her, he would try.
He sat quietly for a while, pretended they were at home in bed, that the dripping water was from the shower because he hadn’t completely closed the tap again.
Finally, he said, “Just promise me that if I find a way for you off this island, you’ll take it. Promise me that.”
She fidgeted. “Only with you.”
“Promise me, Mara.”
She squeezed his hand. “I promise.”
There’d been other girls throughout Dan’s life, of course, but not really. Not like Mara. He enjoyed himself when he was with those other girls—sometimes tremendously—but he always knew something didn’t fit quite right. His shoulders were too broad, so she couldn’t lay her head comfortably, or her hipbones came to too fine a point, digging into his thighs. When he quit holding the other girls, he still felt the weight of them there, the imprint of their bodies like divots in a mattress. But not Mara. She fit so perfectly into him that when they held each other, he heard the sound of a LEGO clicking into place. And when she left, he didn’t feel her absence in his thighs, or his shoulders, his groin. He felt it somewhere else. Deeper down.
That’s what love is. The LEGO clicking sound.
“You called me a miserable dick,” Dan said after a while.
“I did.”
“I don’t want to be a miserable dick. I’m working on it.”
Mara looked up at him. “You’re my miserable dick.”
“Would you like to have and to hold this dick forever?”
She laughed. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”
“I don’t have a ring.”
Mara propped herself up. “Wait. What are you doing?”
“I’ve been thinking about what Mrs. Betty said. Obviously this wasn’t the setting I had in mind, and I know I said I wanted to wait until I got another job. But—my plan was to get our wedding bands made out of the rock with waves on it. I’m not even sure if that’s possible, I’ve been doing some googling—”
“What rock?”
“Our first date rock. The one you wouldn’t let me throw back into the lake. But—”
“You kept that rock?”
Dan scratched his head. “Well, I did, yeah. Up until a week ago. Here’s the thing. I lost it in the ocean. I’m so sorry. Maybe I can find it. Maybe it washed up.”
Mara slapped his shoulder, mouth agape. “You kept the rock from our first date for two years ?”
Dan was beginning to feel stupid. “Yeah. And I wanted to take you back to the lake, you know, and I was going to bring some carrot cake. And I was going to hold your hands and say something like, I never want to throw you back in the lake either. And I know that line needs some work. I was workshopping it. But that was the idea.”
She collapsed on top of him, his ribs on fire. She kissed his neck, his face, his lips. She clutched the sides of his head with both hands and said, “Of course I’ll marry you, Danny. I don’t want to die without having been your wife. I want to marry you on this island.” And Dan felt like he could pry open the bars of their cell, like he could lift the island and carry it home, like he could reignite the sun with a couple of matches.
“Mara Usra Foster,” she said proudly, slipping next to Dan. Usra was a family name, one Mara had never been particularly fond of.
“M-U-F,” Dan said. “Muff.”
They looked at each other.
After a pause, she said, “Mara Nichols Foster.”
“M-N-F. Monday Night Football .”
“Better.”
“Way better.”
She squeezed him, and he squeezed back, and her left hand was on his tummy, and on her wrist the word happy was tattooed in Helvetica.