Chapter 17 — The Storm89 #2
She pulled back to look at me. “Go where, Sean? There’s a hurricane.”
“Down to the water. There are boats out there, I saw them off the point before the light went, a whole row of them anchored in the cove, people sheltering from this same storm. Real people. Off-island people. We get to one of them and we are gone and none of this can follow.”
“In that?” Her voice wasn’t unkind. That was the terrible part. “Listen to it. You’d die before you got past the rocks.”
“Then we wait for the lull and we go. But we get down there now, while the leash is off, while it’s possible.” I had her hand in both of mine. “Mom. This is the only unlocked door we are ever going to get. Please.”
And I watched her not be able to do it.
It wasn’t a no. A no I could have fought.
It was worse than a no. She stood there in the lantern light with the storm trying to come through the walls and she could not make herself move, caught between the open door and the warm dark room behind her, and the part of me that loved her understood, and the part of me that was fighting could not afford to.
“I can’t,” she said. “Not like this. Not tonight.”
So I went without her. I am not proud of it, and I won’t pretend it was brave, but with the leash off for the first time since we’d landed it made its own terrible sense, the arithmetic of a desperate man.
One of us out was worth more than both of us in.
I would send help back the moment I was clear.
That was the story I told myself, anyway, and going out the door I half believed it.
The wind tore the lodge door out of my hand and flattened it against the wall, and then I was in it.
There is no preparing for the first second of weather like that.
It stops being air and becomes a thing with hands.
The rain didn’t fall, it was thrown, sideways and stinging, and the cold went through my shirt and my skin and into the bone before I’d crossed the deck.
The path to the water had turned into a black creek, shin-deep and moving, and I went down it half-running and half-falling, grabbing at the bent palms to stay on my feet, the noise so total I couldn’t hear myself breathe.
Then the trees ended and the cove opened and I stopped dead, because the boats were really there.
Four of them, maybe five, riding it out at anchor in the lee of the point, and their little cabin windows were lit, warm and yellow and ordinary, somebody in there dry and bored and waiting out the same storm I was standing in.
A hundred yards of water. Two hundred. A long pool length on a calm day, and I am not a strong swimmer and this was the opposite of a calm day, the sea between me and those lights heaving up in slabs and dropping on itself white in the dark.
And I stood there and did the arithmetic of swimming it.
I want to be honest about that, because it is the most afraid I have ever been of my own self.
Some animal under all my thinking had decided that drowning toward those yellow windows beat walking back up that path, and it moved my feet for me.
The water took my shoes. It closed cold over my ankles and my shins, and a wave came in at the thigh and nearly folded my legs, and I caught myself and leaned into the next step toward the deep, and that was when I heard my name.
Barely. A scrap of it, shredded in the wind. But hers.
Of course she’d come after me. She always came after me.
I turned and my mother was halfway down the path and still coming, soaked through, the thin thing she slept in stuck to her and her hair flat to her skull, screaming my name into a wind that ate it before it reached me.
She reached me where the water was breaking over my shins, and she had to put her mouth to my ear to land a single word of it.
“Get out of the water!”
“Boats.” I threw an arm toward the lights, the little yellow squares heaving in the black. “Right there. Two hundred yards. I can make it.”
“It’s a hurricane! Look at it. You’ll be gone before you make the rocks.”
“Better than another night in there.”
“You can’t even swim properly.” She got a fist in my soaked shirt and hauled, both of us staggering in the drag of it.
“Which is my fault, I know, I let you quit swim lessons when you were eight because you cried at me. So I know exactly what you can’t do.
You’ll die out there and I’ll be standing on this beach watching it happen.
Is that the plan? Is that what you want? ”
“Then come with me. Right now. Both of us.”
“There’s nowhere to go!” It tore out of her, raw, the truest and most hopeless thing either of us had said all night. “There’s just the sea. There’s just more of this.”
She had both hands fisted in my shirt, the two of us at the very lip of the water, screaming into each other’s faces.
And then the sea drew back. That is the part that kills, not the wave that comes in but the one that leaves, the undertow hauling out all at once and dragging the ground with it.
It pulled the stones out from under her like a rug yanked sideways.
She went down. The water had her, sliding her out and along, fast, toward the dark place where the bottom dropped away.
The boats stopped existing. The yellow windows, the hundred yards, the whole life waiting on the far side of that water, gone between one breath and the next.
I reached her in the shallows as the next wave was rearing up.
I got a fist in the back of her clothes, then both arms locked around her, and the wave broke over the two of us and drove us under, and the cold closed on my chest and squeezed the air clean out of me, and the undertow pulled for her with a strength that felt like a decision, like the sea had picked her, and for one black second I could not tell whether I had her or it did.
Then my bare foot caught rock. I got the other down beside it.
And I dragged her up the slope of it a step at a time on nothing but refusal, the sea clawing her back the whole way, until we were past its reach, the two of us crawling and coughing up seawater into the gaping dark of a boat shed, where we folded down and stayed.
Wrecked. Soaked through. Shaking hard enough that I could hear her teeth. Alive. Both of us, somehow, alive.
For a long time neither of us could speak.
She was half in my lap on the wet boards and I had her wrapped up in my arms, both of us heaving, her wet clothes gone transparent and freezing and stuck to her, my hands moving over her back and her arms without any thought except the dumb animal need to confirm she was still there and still warm, and under the terror, because there is no decent place for it but it was there anyway, was the old electric thing, her body against the whole length of mine, her breath on my throat, the wanting and the fury and the fear all running on the same wire.
“You,” she got out finally, shaking. “You absolute idiot. You would have drowned. You were going to swim. You were going to swim to a boat. In this.”
“You came after me.”
“Of course I came after you.” She pulled back enough to look at me and she was crying, or it was the rain, there was no telling them apart anymore, just Deb, the brand washed clean off her, white and furious and terrified in the dark. “What was I supposed to do, watch you walk into the sea?”
“You were supposed to come with me.” It came out of me cracked. “That’s all I have ever asked. Come with me.”
And there, soaked and shaking and a breath from my mouth, she finally said the true thing, and it was not the thing I had been fighting all night. It was quieter and it was worse.
“I can’t, Sean.” Barely over the storm. “And not just because of the water, though God, the water, you’d have died, I was right about the water.
” She was holding handfuls of my wet shirt.
“I can’t because out there I’m no one. You know what I am out there?
I’m a woman who was almost something for fifteen years and never got there, watching girls half my age and a tenth my work get everything I wanted while I aged out of the only thing I had.
Out there I am nobody and I am running out of time to stop being nobody.
And here it’s starting to feel like I’m somebody. Like I could be somebody.”
I didn’t have a thing to say to that, because it was true, and because I could not tell, holding her, how much of it was her good sense about a killing sea and how much was the island talking through her, and I think that uncertainty was the most frightened I got all night, more than the water.
I had come to save her from a place. I sat in the wet dark and understood that the place was giving her the one thing I never could, and that I had nearly drowned us both failing to.
We went back up when the worst of it eased, holding each other upright, and the lodge had gone to candle-warm chaos, people bedding down on cushions for the night the storm had taken from them. And in the middle of it, kneeling by an old woman to tuck a blanket round her shoulders, was Coral.
She didn’t see me at first. The lanterns were low and her face was off, the smile set down somewhere for once, and what was under it stopped me in the doorway dripping.
She looked young. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour, the particular exhaustion of someone who has decided, every single day, to keep believing a thing because the alternative is whatever sent her here.
For one second I wasn’t looking at the cheerful machine that had run us since we landed. I was looking at a girl the world had finished with, who’d found the only room that ever told her she mattered, and would burn it down before she let anyone prove it a lie.