30
My limbs feel as if they’ve been cut open and filled with sand.
I go to rub the sleep from my eyes, but my arm is tangled in tubes, and when I crane my neck, I see I’m attached to a series of machines.
Tubes run from my wrist and wires are attached to my chest, and I feel like I can’t breathe, as if I’m trapped.
“Hey, hey, shh, it’s okay, Laszlo.” Someone touches my hand, and then Louise leans over me, blond curls haloing her face as she frowns and presses her hand to my shoulder to calm me down. “Laszlo? Can you hear me?”
I move to sit up but groan, blinking slowly down at my stomach. “What…?” A sharp, stabbing pain travels from my hip up through my ribs.
“You were stabbed with what they suspect was splintered wood? They found some small splinters in you and had to pull them out in surgery.” Louise’s voice sounds far away as images flash through my mind.
“Laszlo,” she says after a moment, “do you remember what happened?”
I remember everything. I remember Hux and his privateering ship appearing as if out of thin air in the harbor just before the sun rose over the horizon, firing on us when Silas turned down the pardon.
Silas trapped beneath the foremast, the wood slicing into my gut and calf.
And then I’m gasping his name, drowning in place.
“Laszlo. Laszlo, I need you to calm down.”
But I’m already standing and shaking my head, my legs threatening to give out from beneath me. “Silas?” I ask. No, no, this can’t be. Why did I leave him to die all alone on that ship? How could I do that? “Silas?” I say again, louder.
“You’ve been calling his name in your sleep,” Louise says softly. She touches my elbow as if to coax me, but I pull away, stumbling in my hospital gown toward the door. “Is he the cat? He’s okay. He’s at your apartment, and I’ve been feeding him and stopped by to check on him.”
“No, he’s not the cat. But, Lou, where are my clothes?
” I look at her. “What did they do with my clothes?” I squeeze my eyes shut, picturing the bright blue wool.
Without that coat, I can’t get back to him.
Without it, what do I have left? I spent so long waiting to snatch it from him, until finally I realized I didn’t want to live in a world he wasn’t in, and now …
And now I am. If I looked up his name, if I looked up the ship he sailed on, would it say he and his crew died trying to escape Nassau? Would it say anything at all?
“Where’s the jacket, Louise?” I yell. I see the moment her heart breaks for me. Maybe I should apologize, but I need that coat more.
“Laszlo, what happened to you?” She takes a hesitant step forward. Her hand is outstretched as though to hug me, but I yank away.
Something rips, and when I peer down, red is blossoming over the thin fabric.
It soaks through my hospital gown and between my fingers as I press a hand to it.
Louise slams a button on the wall; machines beep wildly.
Someone runs into the room, asking something in a controlled, calm voice, but my head is spinning, and my vision is blurring.
And the last thing I see is Louise’s face as she crouches over me.
I heal, though slowly at first. There’s a disconnect between my physical body and my mind.
Because I’m missing something. There is something missing every time I wake.
There is something missing every time I sleep.
There is always something missing, and I realize it’s not a something, but a someone.
I miss him.
Between the long days at sea and the strange lapse of time between our worlds, I don’t know precisely how long I was with him, how long I was aboard that ship, but it felt like months, like an entire lifetime in his arms, and I don’t know how to cope with this world, with this life I’ve been thrust back into.
And Louise is trying to help, but there is only so much she can do.
“I can open the door myself,” I grunt as Louise slides her keys into my door.
She raises a brow as I shuffle past. “You lost your keys, remember?”
I grunt again. They’re somewhere at the bottom of the ocean where I dropped them off the side of She Deceitful.
I wonder if some scuba diver will find them, buried in the sand.
Will they see my Edinburgh Castle key chain Louise bought for me and wonder how that came to age as if it has been at the bottom of the sea for three hundred years?
Shaking my head, I move past her into the flat.
Louise brought me fresh clothes and pajamas while I was recovering, so the rest of my things from the hospital are in a tote bag.
I set the bag on my kitchen table and look out over my flat, even as my hands itch to take out the only thing I have left of him.
But I need to convince Louise that I’m okay, that I am past everything that has happened, even if I’m not.
It feels like an entire life has come and gone since I last stepped foot in here, but on this side of time, it’s only been six days.
A day and a half missing, the rest in the hospital.
I still find it difficult to wrap my head around the time, around the life I lived in so briefly.
It’s almost as though it didn’t even happen.
But I have the healing wounds and the coat to prove it.
Sir comes prancing down the hallway toward us, the bell around his neck jingling with each step.
He chirps as he rubs against Louise’s legs, looking for attention.
Louise stoops down to pet him, watching me warily as I unpack my things.
The boots, scuffed and beaten from weeks at sea, the pants, now threadbare and ragged.
They’re crusted with salt, stiff and crinkling as I set them aside.
The shirt … the shirt is a whole different story.
The bloodstains are large and engulf the off-white fabric.
The color has since turned a rustic brown, a hole going through the front and back where the piece of wood went in, the fabric fraying at the edges.
I stick my finger through the hole, hooking the fabric around it. That was me. That was my body less than a week ago. I can still feel it, the white-hot searing pain as the wood lodged itself into my gut.
Louise places a hand on my shoulder, her brows furrowed. “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but I am here if you need anything, Lasz. For anything, even if it’s just listening.”
Lips pressed together, I say nothing as I fold up the shirt and reach inside the tote bag for the jacket. I couldn’t stand to open it in the hospital; I didn’t know what would happen if I pulled it on.
But I do now. Part of me wonders—hopes—that it’ll send me back to him, but I’m still in my flat, my surroundings unchanged.
I shrug it on with a grunt and adjust the collar.
The familiar weight of it on my shoulders elicits a sigh from me, and I run my hands over it, fingers smoothing over buttons and catching in loops and black thread.
My fingers stop at one of the pockets, and I reach in, my fingertips skimming plastic. Lips parted in surprise, I pull out the bag with my phone and journal. I thought I’d lost it when I fell overboard, but Silas must have found it and shoved it into one of his pockets.
The image of his face when I showed him the camera flicks through my mind.
The frown as I took a video of him laughing, as I placed my fingers over his and snapped a selfie of us.
My hands shake as I pull it out of the bag and hold my thumb over the power button, and before I can stop myself, I type in my passcode as the background, a shot of Silas against a setting sun, pops up.
“Who’s that?” Louise asks quietly.
I open my mouth to say his name, to tell her about this man, but no words come out. How do I even start? What will she believe? I look at her, at those honey eyes that are warm and familiar, then down to her hand resting on my arm.
“I think I need to be alone,” I say instead. She frowns, and I can already hear the argument forming on her lips. “No,” I say, pocketing my phone and stepping back. “Louise, I know you have questions, but I-I need to figure some things out, okay? I need…” I need to grieve.
My chest squeezes tight, and I don’t know how much longer I can hold off the momentous hill of pain that I’m climbing up.
I stand firm. “Please.” It comes out in a whisper.
I can’t hold it together much longer, and she must see it in my face, hear it in my voice, because finally she nods and starts toward the door, pausing to slide off her copy of my key from her key ring.
“Until you get a replacement,” she says as she sets it down in the small bowl on the table in the hall before closing the door behind her.
I don’t move for a long moment. I stare around at the white walls and the drawn curtains, at the dark TV and small, minuscule pieces of my life I’ve left behind like a trail of breadcrumbs.
I didn’t miss these modern comforts aboard She Deceitful.
Instead, I had Eddie to tell me jokes, Jack and Mick supporting me at my side, and Silas, who kept me happy and preoccupied. I had a full life.
There’s my backpack, slung over the back of a chair at the kitchen table, unzipped and open, practically empty. There’s the corkscrew left out on the counter, and a half-drunk glass of water left sitting out beside the sink.
Did Louise come here when I was gone? Did she worry for me, wonder where I went? Did she feel a fraction of what I feel now?
I pull the jacket close around me and breathe it in. His sugary tobacco scent still there, as strong as ever, almost as if he’s just slipped it from his shoulders and onto mine. My blood stains the lining, but I don’t care.
I don’t care.
My legs shudder beneath me as I curl onto my couch, my phone in my hand, the coat pulled tight around my shoulders.
Sir hops up, walking in a circle before plopping down beside me and sniffing the coat, as if he too recognizes the smell.
Everything seems to settle around me, silence stretching.
I used to be afraid of the ocean, of all the things lurking in the dark water, but now I miss it.
I miss the creaks of the ship, the soft lapping of water against the hull, the cries of seagulls as they swooped overhead.
I miss it all. I don’t belong here anymore. And though I believed I didn’t belong there, either, I know now that I fit at Silas’s side better than anywhere else in the world.
A strange sound rips out of me, and before I know it, I’m crying.
I rock back and forth, clutching the phone to my chest, and I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much in my life, because there is one place I want to be in the world, and it’s in the arms of the man I love who’s long gone in the depths of the ocean off the harbor of Nassau.
It’s impossible, this. How am I supposed to move on? How am I supposed to breathe? I run a hand down my face, and then I thumb through the videos and pictures before pulling up the one of us on the beach.
Sir perks up, intrigued by the moving figures on the screen, and I angle it down so he can see it better.
“See, bud? Do you recognize him?” I whisper.
Silas lies in the sand, shirt off, pants unlaced above his hips.
Sand spills over him, packed around his thighs and arms, impressions of my fingers in the sand.
The sun is shining down on him as he squints up at the camera—at me.
The water laps against his feet, inching farther and farther up his legs and taking the sand with it.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
Something in me breaks at the sound of his voice.
I laugh on the other end of the camera. “Noooo, don’t move!” I straddle him by the hips, and the camera zooms out. I stick the phone in the sand, and it frames him and me at an angle, my hands sliding into his hair, his hands cupping my face.
And we look so in love.
On-screen, I bend forward until our foreheads are pressed together and our noses are brushing, and then we’re kissing and laughing, and a lightness fills my chest as I rewatch the video once, twice, a third time, wishing I could be there.
Wishing things hadn’t panned out the way they did.
I plug my phone in before the battery dies, and I play the video on loop, the sounds of our laughter filling my flat. I play it until I stop crying, and when I stop crying, I search my flat, sit down on the couch, flip open my laptop, and stare at the screen.
Whenever it feels like my world is falling apart, there’s always been one thing that holds me together—my writing. And I’m on deadline, after all. The book seems so small now, just a minuscule thing in light of all that’s happened, but I need to get it out of me, need to purge myself of this story.
“What do you think?” I ask, glancing down at Sir. He blinks slowly, green eyes locked on me.
Flipping through the journal, scanning the warped pages, I realize that I never needed it to begin with. It’s all seared into my memories. I couldn’t forget those six weeks even if I wanted to. I set the journal aside and stare at the screen.
My hands shake as I open a new document. The cursor blinks in time with my pulse, and I contemplate exiting before I’ve even begun.
But I type one word.
And another.
And soon they fall from my fingertips like dominoes, and I can’t stop. I have to blink away the tears and let the sound of our laughter lift me to the next chapter and the next, until a story so unbelievable but true fills the pages.
Our story. I have written our story. I don’t know how else to heal, and I don’t know what else to do, but this is the only way I can imagine moving forward, and it’s putting fingers to keys, and allowing Silas to live on for an eternity.
Just as he was always meant to.
Silas will always be my friend, my lover, but above all, my captain. He guided me when I was lost, and now that he’s gone, I have no course to find my way back to myself. Except for this, for our story, the one I can’t bring myself to say aloud.
And I sit here in the dark in my sad little flat until our story is written, until I have no more words left in me and the manuscript is bursting. And when the pages are filled and it ends, I send them off to my editor, close my laptop, and weep, holding Sir close.
Nothing else can be done.