Chapter Five #5
We stay that way for a while, watching the light change and the clouds slide in from the east. A soft rain begins to fall, and Helen jogs back to her rented car to toss her recording gear into the back seat.
I follow, but more slowly, letting the rain dampen my hair and stream down my raincoat.
Inside the car, Helen already has the engine running and heat blowing through the vents.
We don’t speak as she turns the car around and starts back up the single-lane road.
The barren grassland and sloping hills remind me of sleeping woodland animals.
We pass farmhouses with damp, mossy foundations, fenced pastures, and sheds with the eyes of cattle or sheep peering out.
The sky becomes pale and flinty, a storm sinking over the Faroes.
But my heart feels dried out, exhausted.
I’ve chased this memory too far. Wasted too many days, ignored the real world, my real life, long enough.
It’s time to go home.
I tilt my head back against the seat, watching the last of the daylight flatten against the sea to the west, the sky shedding all its color. Soft and matte. As if this place were saying its goodbyes, its good riddance to me.
Through the passenger window, I notice a soft glint of light. Like sunlight refracting off glass. Only a handful of yards from the coastline.
I sit up, leaning toward the window. The thing is moving slowly, a fishing boat, most likely. But I can’t make it out clearly through the rain.
“Stop the car.”
“What?” Helen asks over the thumping of the windshield wipers.
“Stop!” I press a hand to the window, starting to open my door before she’s even slammed on the brakes, the car swerving onto the shoulder of the road.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, but I step out onto the gravel shoulder, leaving the door open behind me, and hurry to the embankment. My heart hammers in my ears.
“Holy shit!” Helen gasps. I hear her open the back door, probably grabbing her recording gear so she can narrate what we’re seeing, what’s happening.
But I don’t wait for her.
With the sound of the car engine still running behind me, windshield wipers thudding back and forth, I scramble down the slick, grassy embankment to the pebbled shore below.
I need to see. I need to be closer. I need to be certain.
Waves roll and heave up onto the empty beach, and from here, the island doesn’t seem too far off.
Only a few yards, a good swim at best. I glance back and I can see Helen at the top of the slope, clenching her microphone, speaking into it, describing what she’s seeing, but I can’t hear: Her voice is lost to the wind.
We’re on a remote sketch of road. No cars or nearby homes. No one to verify what we’re seeing.
My body vibrates as the rain streams over me. Adrenaline pumping wildly through every cell, every nerve, every memory I’ve tried to push away.
I swing my eyes back to the sea, a crush of thoughts piling up in my mind as I try to remember: In all the years I spent imagining this moment—what it might feel like to see it again—I can’t recall what I’m supposed to do now.
Do I watch it drift by, content to simply see it?
Do I trust my eyes, trust the sea air? Do I trust my own mind?
There’s been something unfinished inside me since the night I first witnessed the island. A loose thread that was never stitched back into place. A story without an end.
I tried to ignore it. I tried to pretend.
But it was always there… the part of me that still believed. That needed to know for sure. That’s been screaming silently to me since I was twelve years old. The part of me that’s still out on that island.
I need to finish the story.
I yank off my rain boots, my coat, and my jeans, and leave them in a pile on the rocks. Up the embankment, Helen is still speaking into her microphone, her free hand fidgeting at her side, eyes trained on the impossible island floating just offshore. She’s not even looking at me.
I hesitate. Even if I yelled up to her—told her what I’m about to do—she wouldn’t hear me over the wind.
So I turn, in only a T-shirt and underwear—like some reckless teenager who drank too much strawberry wine after prom—and I pick my way over the smooth, pebbled stones, and out into the Atlantic.
It’s cold, jarringly cold, splinters-across-flesh cold.
But the adrenaline is still thumping through my veins, and I wade in deeper, up to my chest.
I can feel the ground dropping away beneath me, the dark gray of the ocean, the deep.
And I pause, suddenly doubting this stupid thing I’m about to do.
But there is something else inside me, something louder: that grinding, impetuous need to know once and for all.
To know the truth. And it propels me forward.
I pull the damp air into my lungs. I can’t believe I’m doing this. And I dive forward, ducking beneath a wave.
The water is bracing, seizing my thoughts, but when I come up for a breath, the air is sharper in my lungs than the water against my skin.
I think I hear a voice behind me, Helen shouting, screaming for me to come back.
But I don’t turn to look, I keep kicking, arms wheeling over my head.
I was a swimmer in college, not competitively—I hated the idea of swimming against anyone else—I did it in the evening after classes.
I liked the way the water felt, the buoyancy, the numbing quiet when my head dipped beneath that artificial blue waterline.
And I think a part of me knew it also reminded me of the sea.
A part of me wanted to be ready, in case this day ever came.
I lift my head, but the island is still a good distance off. I miscalculated how far I’d need to swim—the rising and falling curve of the waves is deceiving. But I drive my legs even harder through the water. I need to reach the island before it drifts too far away, before I lose sight of it.
I need to know that it wasn’t all in my head.
The waves toss and surge over me, the ocean becoming deeper—a depth that I try not to think about.
I sweep my arms through the cold, pulling myself forward.
I can see the rocky shore rising up ahead of me, the tide pushing me closer now, waves cresting and falling, but I’m so numb I hardly feel it.
Two more strokes, three, I reach for the rocks, but a wave barrels into me, drawing me under.
I kick to the surface, gulping in air, and my hand touches one of the rocks—slick, jagged—but before I can heave myself out of the water, another wave slams into my back, thrusting me forward against the rocks.
I feel the sharp impact at my hip bone, a cracking pain down my leg and across my ribs.
I cry out, gulping in more water, but the next wave throws me fully onto the shore.
My hands reach out, bracing, but it’s the back of my skull that collides with the blunt edge of a boulder.
A cosmic burst of starlight spreads across my vision, blotting out the dreary sky, first turning everything searing white, and then a nauseating black that flips the world inside out.