25
The clouds have flown to the north, leaving a clear, inky sky studded with winking stars. The heavy, humid, thundering air has blown away, replaced by a salty night-flower breeze. The frogs that hide in the mangroves have come alive, singing their song to the crescent moon, now bathing the black water with silver cobwebs of light.
I find McCormick on the beach, where the spiky grass meets the sand. He’s a lone figure, tall and dark, outlined by the glow of the moon. My feet whisper over the grass and my clothing, a silky white cotton nightdress, rustles in the breeze.
McCormick’s shoulders stiffen when he hears my footsteps. He doesn’t turn when I stop and stand next to him. Instead he continues to watch the waves cascade across the sand.
There’s a hypnotic rhythm to the thunderous waves. The foam glistens in the moonlight and the coral and shells tinkle musically as the waves tug them back into the sea.
McCormick is quiet. The deep quiet that you find in a sunlit glade in the middle of an alpine forest, or the quiet my mum loves, when you sit cross-legged at the Tor and bathe in the solemnity of centuries passing by.
After a short time dreaming of him I know a bit about McCormick. I know he loves his family. I know he thinks before he speaks. I know he’s careful, cautious. I know he’s given his trust to the wrong people. I know he’s patient and kind. I know he feels the pull between us, the ebb and tide of the sea, as strongly as I do. I know there’s a reason I’m dreaming of him.
But I don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t know his story. I don’t know what he does when I’m not dreaming him, or even if he exists at all when I’m not here.
It makes me think of the quote Amy just gave, “Let whoever can do so deceive me, he will never bring it about that I am nothing, so long as I continue to think I am something.”
If McCormick believes he is, does that make him as real as me? Does that make all of this real?
I look to him then, glancing up at the line of his jaw and the rough stubble growing in. His hair is still damp, and it curls in black loops at the nape of his neck. My fingers itch to reach up and brush his hair back from his forehead. I’d like to hold his face in my hands, rub my fingers over his stubble, and press my lips to his. A gentle kiss that tells him it’s all okay.
He looks down at me, his brown eyes nearly black in the night.
A bird flutters in the sea grape bushes behind us. There’s a quick flapping of wings and then a white egret bursts free and sails high, a flash of white against the night. It veers toward the wetlands.
I press a hand to my chest, my heart pounding.
The right side of McCormick’s mouth lifts and I reach over and loop my hand in his.
My feet sink into the cool sand and I relax into the warmth of his fingers. I want to fold into him, hold myself to him, but I let the tangle of our fingers be enough.
McCormick stares at our locked hands for a moment and then lets out a long breath.
“I thought we’d lost her,” he says, and his voice still has the remnants of that broken anguish.
I squeeze his hand, clinging to him. “I wouldn’t have let that happen.”
I decide then that I truly wouldn’t have. I would have dreamed something else. I would have dreamed her back to life.
He smiles then. The smile that crinkles at the corners of his eyes, a surprised flash of laughter at the edge of his mouth. “You sound like you believe you can change the world with willpower.”
I glance up at the stars overhead. Venus is out, the brightest light in the sky, only dimmed by the moon. “Maybe I can. In dreams you can do anything.”
“Hmm.” He nods, looking out over the sea. “Except this isn’t a dream.”
I lean into him then, and he wraps his arms around me and pulls me into his warmth. I watch the slow slide of the ocean over the beach. I listen to the night frogs sing. I breathe in the salt and ocean scent of McCormick.
A dozen feet behind us, at the cottage, Sean’s bedroom window is open. We’ll hear him if he cries. But for now, perhaps for the rest of the night, he’s asleep.
I watch the sea.
I wait to wake up.
And when I don’t, I say, “You never finished telling me your story.”
“You fell asleep.”
“And then what?”
He tilts his head, studying me. “And then you woke up, hopped on your bike, and rode back home without a word. You didn’t speak to me again until we found Amy.”
“Why not?”
“You were with Robert.” He says this without inflection.
Robert claims McCormick doesn’t know he’s planning to run off to New York with me. I’m not so sure.
“Do you think you trust too easily?”
He watches me for a moment, taking in the moonlight falling over my face.
“I don’t trust easily,” he finally says, and when I lower my eyebrows he explains. “I learned a long time ago that if you don’t trust, then you’ll live a lonely life. You have to choose. You can trust or you can die alone. I chose trust.”
I swallow, my throat still raw from the search for Amy. It hurts thinking about what he said. Because while he chose trust, I chose to be alone. After Joel I made the choice to smother the chance of any relationships because I felt incapable of giving my trust.
I couldn’t. Not even to my best friend.
“And if you’re betrayed by the people you trust?” I ask, contemplating my worst fear. Loving and then losing.
“Then I’ll move on. I’ll survive.”
“It’s not so easy.”
He glances at me, waiting for an explanation.
“It hurts. You’ll want to rage. Maybe you will. You’ll be so angry you shake. You’ll be so sick with grief that you can barely stand. It won’t be so easy to trust again. It’s not so easy to move on?—”
“Becca.”
I turn to him. His expression is resolute.
“What?”
“If I’m betrayed by someone I love?—”
“Yes?”
“I might rage. I might be so angry I shake. I might be consumed by grief. But most of all—even if it’s the hardest thing I’ve done—I’d hold my anger. I’d hold my grief. So I wouldn’t say or do something I’d regret. God knows the tears of regret hurt more than the tears of sorrow.”
I stare at him, stunned. “You sound like Amy. Are you a philosopher too?”
He gives me his dimpled, eyes-crinkled smile. “I only mean I can handle grief. I can handle anger. But regret? It’s a weight I wouldn’t wish on anyone. So if I’m betrayed, then I’ll do my best to keep loving that person. If I gave them my trust, then I imagine they’re worth it.”
He reaches out then, taking a strand of my hair that’s fallen free of my braid and tucking it behind my ear. I sway toward him, caught up in the quiet gentleness of the moment.
“You would stay in a situation that hurts you?”
“No,” he says. “I’d stay in a situation to help someone else. And then I’d go.”
Now I wonder if we aren’t talking about Becca and Robert. Maybe we’re actually talking about us. Fiona and McCormick.
He’s here. I’m here. I’m opening up, allowing myself the possibility of love.
But when that’s done, when I’ve felt all the heady-night, starlit love I can, I’m going to leave him.
He’s helping me even if he doesn’t know it. Is that a betrayal of him? And if it is, will he be the one to go first?
A stinging ache presses at the backs of my eyes and my throat feels swollen and achy. I can’t imagine it. He couldn’t be the one to go first. Dreams don’t work that way.
“I want you to tell me your story,” I whisper.
The crescent moon has risen high, spilling over the water. It’s the middle of the night, the perfect time for sharing secrets.
“Even though you already know it?”
“Pretend I don’t.”
I pull him down to the sand to sit in the cool, fine grains. He comes softly, settling behind me. When he opens his arms I rest against him.
His heart thuds against my ear and I wait for him to begin. The humid, perfumed air blankets us, the waves and the frogs play our soundtrack, and the breeze drags sand across our bare legs.
McCormick’s hand plays a slow circle over my back.
“You came back to the island when you were seven,” I remind him.
I feel the curve of his lips as he presses his mouth to my temple. And then he begins.
“My parents left because of me, and they came back because of me. I was born here, in Essie’s cottage.”
“Really!”
He laughs, a deep rumble. “You already knew that. You were born down the street.”
I was born in Glastonbury.
“A week later, my parents decided they didn’t want to raise their son on an island with so few opportunities. They wanted a big life for me.”
“Most parents do.”
He nods. “So they packed two suitcases and flew to New York. My dad found work as a porter at a seedy hotel near Times Square. My mom found part-time work at a wash-and-fold laundry and more night work at a garment factory. We were the kind of poor where you know the balance of your bank account down to the last cent and you know you’re not going to have enough money to make it to the end of the week, much less the end of the month. We didn’t buy clothes. I was on the end of a neighborhood hand-me-down chain. All my clothes had been worn by at least five or six kids before I got them. They were frayed and stained, and my shoes had holes and the rubber soles were peeling off. Kids at the playgrounds would point, call me nasty names. My mom always lifted her head when she heard them and said, ‘Don’t you listen to them. You’re a good boy, Aaron. You’re my boy.’”
He looks out over the water, a faraway look in his eyes. I grip the fabric of his T-shirt in my hands. I can picture him, a little dark-haired boy, pale and brown-eyed, standing in ragged clothes while kids pointed and called him names. The kind of poor he’s talking about, I know it too. I can still feel the hunger of a gnawing empty stomach, sleeping on someone else’s floor.
You wouldn’t know it now. No one would, looking at me or reading about my pedigree.
But we’re all a thousand layers making up a single life.
“Your mom loves you,” I tell him, glad she was there to stand up for him.
“She did.” His voice is warm, happy with the memory. Then he shakes his head. “When I was seven I was already smoking joints and drinking liquor. When my mom came home early from work one day—she was sick—she found me and the neighbor kids sharing a forty-ounce.” He laughs then. “I was on a bad road. Fighting, skipping school. Only seven and already cursing, drinking, smoking. Our two suitcases were packed that night. And me, my mom, and my dad were back on the island the very next day.”
I’m stunned. “You were a deviant at age seven.”
He strokes my back. “You liked me. You followed me around for weeks until I finally decided to talk to you.”
I would have liked to have seen that. I imagine he would have fascinated me, a hard seven-year-old from the city, transported to this tiny island. He was a legend, I’m sure.
“And then you decided to stay here forever. Your own tropical paradise.” I lean into him, breathing in the salt and the sand.
He laughs. “Right. Or the opposite.”
“The opposite? Like Amy?”
“Like you,” he says, smiling down at me. “You wanted to live in the big world, and so did I. This island always felt like a prison. One that was impossible to escape.” He tilts his head to the sky. “Whenever I looked up at the stars, all I saw were bars. I wanted to leave in the worst way.”
I think I know exactly how he feels. Because right now I’d like him to leave the island too. I’d like him to step out of this dream and into Geneva. I’d like to see what might happen if he were real.
But he’s right, this island is a prison. The bars are the confines of my dreams.
“I started swimming,” McCormick says. “I took to the water like I’d been born swimming. You couldn’t get me out of it. I’d spend hours in the sea. So much so that Essie’s banana bread was the only thing that could tempt me out.”
I think about the honey taste and the crumbly texture of the banana bread we ate on the hilltop and I wonder if Essie made that. If so, I can see why it pulled him from the water.
“Then, when I was eleven, I terrified my parents and everyone else. One day while swimming I decided I was going to swim around the whole island in one go. So I took off without telling anyone. It’s an eight-mile circumference. When I climbed back on the beach I was grinning from ear to ear, so proud of myself. I got a different reception than I thought I would.”
“I bet they were frantic,” I say, thinking of the scene on the beach tonight.
McCormick sobers. “I know exactly how they felt.”
“Did you stop?”
“No.” He shakes his head and his eyes glint in the moonlight. “I couldn’t stop. I was addicted to the thrill of it. My parents decided to stop fighting it. I started training for long-distance marathon swims. At fourteen I swam South Eleuthera to Nassau, Bahamas. It took more than forty hours of straight swimming. At fifteen I crossed the English Channel four times in a row, swimming unassisted for more than fifty hours. Any record, any long-distance swim, I wanted to be the one to do it. I swam from Ibiza to Mallorca. I circumnavigated Barbados. Current neutral ocean swims were where I was at my best. I wanted to swim the world. I wanted to beat all the records.”
“My word,” I say, staring at this man who raced around the world. Does it make it less impressive if it isn’t real?
Yes. I suppose so.
But in this dream world it’s real.
Which is why no one was concerned when he spent two hours in the swells and the strong currents searching for his daughter. If he’d spent fifty hours cutting through the ocean, what was two?
“You don’t have to pretend you don’t know this,” he says, and there isn’t pride in his eyes but a quiet sadness. A carefully hidden grief that pinches my chest.
“I want to hear it in your words,” I say quietly.
He takes in a deep breath, his chest rising beneath me.
Something happened. Otherwise he wouldn’t be on this island. He’d be out in the world. Breaking records. Living the life he was made for.
He nods then and tugs me close. My nightdress is damp from the sea mist and the humidity in the air, and it sticks to my skin. When I move against him the fabric drags a damp heat across me.
I smell a hint of lavender, and when I do, my heart quickens. Don’t wake up. Don’t wake up. Not yet.
“What about us?” I ask, urging him to hurry, to tell me everything before I wake and my dream-self leaves him again.
“You were in Miami. Waitressing at a beach bar, the . . .” He furrows his brow and looks down at me.
I shake my head. I don’t know the name of this fictional bar.
“The Sand Bar,” he says, nodding. “I was in Miami for a swim. You called me, an old friend saying hello. We met up. We drank. We had sex.”
The way he says, “We had sex,” low and rumbly, like sand scraping over my bare legs, makes a warmth pool inside me. A hot sensation steals over me and I resist the urge to turn my face up to the moonlight and take McCormick’s mouth in mine.
“A month later we married. Two months later I had my Gulf Stream swim and . . .” His voice trails off, and then he says, “And then we came back to the island.”
“To stay?”
“To stay.”
“You didn’t swim again?”
He hesitates. Stares down at me, his brow wrinkled. “No.”
Something happened there. Between Miami and his last swim. “You married me because I was pregnant.”
“I married you because I was in love.”
Thinking back on that wedding picture hanging on the bedroom wall, I think he was.
“Did I love you?”
He smiles. “You married me because you were pregnant.”
“And?”
He shakes his head. “And you knew I’d keep you off the island. I was your ticket.”
“Is that what I said?”
“Not before the wedding. But after. After the swim . . .” He shakes his head. “Look. We both have things we regret. It was a hard time.”
I think about what Robert said. How he claimed Amy drowning would destroy McCormick because he’d already killed his two best friends.
“Because of your best friends?” I ask, and McCormick’s chest stiffens beneath me.
Behind us, at the edge of the grass, the wind rustles through the palm leaves, rattling and hissing. I shiver at the sudden cold gust. At my shiver, McCormick’s tension eases and he pulls me close.
“Every marathon swimmer has a crew,” he says, his voice faraway, as if he’s holding himself away from the pain of what he’s revealing. “They’re in kayaks, with you the entire way. They’re your support, and you rely on them for sustenance, hydration, navigation, record-keeping, first aid, life support. Everything. You have a crew on the land checking weather, currents, and you have your crew in the water. I always, from the first, worked with Scott and Jay.”
“Scott and Jay,” I repeat.
McCormick nods and blows out a breath. The breeze, still sending a cool wind, tugs at my hair and sends it over McCormick’s hands.
I shift in the sand. The fine powder, once comfortable, is now cold and hard.
“Twins. Dee’s grandsons. Me, Robert, Scott, and Jay were inseparable. Every swim, they were there with me. Scott and Jay in the kayaks, Robert on land. I had this idea. It’d been eating at me for years. I wanted to set the record for the longest current positive swim in history. I’d leave from the eastern coast of Florida, catch the Gulf Stream, and fly through the water. If you ride that current you can swim faster than humanly possible. A hundred kilometers in just over ten hours. I wanted to swim three hundred kilometers. It’d take a little over thirty hours. I was high on the idea. Robert wasn’t sure. It wasn’t what I did. It wasn’t what I was known for. The Atlantic Ocean had large swells, rouge waves, storm bursts could crop up. We hadn’t trained. Scott and Jay thought we were ready. I did too.”
“So you swam.”
“I swam. We hired a boat with a twelve-person crew. A captain, deckhands, paramedics. Scott and Jay switched off every few hours with crew on the boat. Everything was going well.”
An itch crawls over my skin like an ant tracking over my bare arms. I shiver and McCormick rubs my arms.
“Go on.”
He drags in a breath. “A storm burst when we were a hundred kilometers out. Robert was on the radio, screaming at us that it was coming. He called in the coast guard. The boat crew was as surprised as we were. No one saw this coming. A thirty-foot swell came out of nowhere. It was this giant fist that reached into the sky and then crashed into us. I went so far into the depths I didn’t know up from down. I picked a direction and swam and kept swimming until I thought I’d die under the water. I was down for two minutes. I kept count in my mind, knowing my limit was two forty. When I got to the surface the rain was slamming so hard I couldn’t see. Waves hit from every side. I caught flashes of the kayaks. The emergency beacons. I fought to reach them, but when I did?—”
He cuts himself off. His hand, resting in the sand, curls into a fist.
“They were gone?”
But McCormick doesn’t take it as a question. He takes it as a statement of fact.
“Scott was gone. I couldn’t find him. He was nowhere. Just swallowed by the ocean as if he never existed. If he’d been taken down as far as I had there was no way he would’ve made it back up. Jay, he was still in his kayak. The crewed boat was at least five hundred meters off. It was cresting on the waves and slamming down. I could barely see anything through the rain. I thought if I could only get to Jay we’d make it.”
A wave hits the sand, crashing loudly against the beach, and I flinch at the noise.
“I made it to Jay, grabbed his kayak. He clutched my hand, shouted over the rain, ‘Scott?’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t find him.’ Then another wave rose above us. Jay looked up and”—his voice cracks—“he looked so afraid. I gripped his hand, ‘Don’t let go,’ and then the wave hit. He didn’t let go. I did. I couldn’t keep ahold of him. He was ripped from me. And . . .”
“It’s okay,” I say, resting my hand to his chest. “It’s okay.”
McCormick stares out over the water, his dark eyes glinting in the moonlight. “I treaded water for three hours before the storm died. I treaded for three hours knowing my best friends were gone and it was my fault. For three hours I barely kept my head above water.”
He looks down at me then, lines bracketing his mouth. “You know all this though.”
I shake my head.
He grips my hand. “I think sometimes I never actually made it out of the water. I’ve been treading ever since. Just barely keeping my head above the waves.”
I nod. Take my arms and fold them around him. Run my fingers through the curled ends of his hair. “Why’d we come back to the island?”
He wraps his arms around me. “Because I didn’t want the thrill or the fame anymore. I wanted to give back to Dee what I’d taken. I wanted to give back to the island that had raised me. I wanted my daughter to be safe. I figured I did life my way and I only had regrets. I was going to try life another way.”
“I wasn’t angry about coming back here?”
“You were furious,” he says, his hand stilling on my back. “It’s when you started calling me McCormick.”
I remember now. McCormick. An almost. A never was. A dream that didn’t happen.
“What would you say if I called you Aaron?”
I feel his smile then in the way he curves around me. “I’d say you aren’t yourself.”
I nod. That’s true. I’m not the me he knows.
“How about, if you ever want to know if I’m myself—the me of right now—just say ‘Fi’? And if I say yes, then that means I’m me and I want you to kiss me.”
“Fi?”
I nod, tilting my chin up to look at him. “Yes.”
His eyes light and the crash of the waves swells, sweeping over the shore. A gull flies overhead, a lone figure in the night sky.
“You want me to kiss you?” he asks, his eyes catching on my mouth.
My lips tingle as his gaze softens and strokes over my lips. “Yes,” I whisper.
He reaches up then, drawing his fingers over my cheek, his touch featherlight. I lean into his hand, turning my mouth to set a kiss over his fingertips.
“It will be okay,” I whisper as he reaches out and brushes his fingers across my lips. “I’m here. You’re here. It’ll be okay.”
The night is pregnant with desire, and the floral scent tangles between us. The air takes on a wavy, dreamlike feel. I’m floating, lost in the sensation of his fingers slowly tracing my lips.
I grab his wrist then and pull his hand free. He smiles and says, “This feels like a dream.”
“I know.”
And then I remember what he said before—how he told me he felt that if he didn’t kiss me he’d regret it for the rest of his life. He’s a man who has lived with regrets. It’s not something he would say lightly.
He has the same look in his eyes now. And so I lean forward, rocking in the cool sand, and grip his shoulders.
I kiss him. I taste the salt on his lips. I taste the tears he didn’t shed. I taste his regret. I taste his love.
He exhales a sharp, pained breath. And then he flips me beneath him, pressing me into the sand. He covers me. His clothing scrapes over me, and he captures my wrists with his hands and presses them into the sand.
His heat lines me, and the weight of him settling over me sends a liquid heat through my veins. He takes my mouth and kisses me. Gently. Softly. Like the breeze over a calm sea. Like he’s memorizing me and savoring me and thanking me.
But I don’t want him to thank me. I don’t want his softness.
I want to touch him, hold him. I want more.
I strain at his hands shackling my wrists. And then I rock my hips into him, the thin cotton of my nightdress scraping against the length of him, hard beneath his canvas shorts. He makes a surprised hum in his throat and releases my wrists. I reach out, sending my hands under his shirt to the heat of his skin.
The breath whooshes out of me as he rocks against me, hitting me perfectly, so that a bright light sparks through me. I gasp against his mouth and he catches it. He sends his tongue across my lips and then rocks into me again. The fabric between us scrapes and abrades. There’s an insistent growing ache pulsing where he’s rolling over me. The motion of his mouth matches the motion of his hips. He crests with the waves—a steady, luxurious rhythm that sends a warmth glowing over me.
I cling to him, sending my hands over him. Tasting him and touching him. And then, as I curl my fingers into his shoulders and wrap my legs around his hips, he raggedly whispers against my mouth, “Fi.”
The light sparks, and I crash against him as he takes my cries in his mouth.
“Yes. Yes.”
I come.
I come on the beach, under the silver-mooned sky, with the waves crashing over the sand and Aaron McCormick kissing me into senselessness.
I come from a kiss.
And then, when I collapse, breathless, he pulls me onto his chest and we lie in the sand, staring up at the stars until they fade from the sky and the pink blush of sunrise steals over us.
I wake up alone.