2.
For Claire’s thirteenth birthday, they went boating.
Not necessarily because Claire wanted to, though she didn’t mind.
She was an introverted child and parties had no appeal.
What she really wanted for her birthday was a day alone in her room to read, but Dad had bought the houseboat recently enough that it was still gilded with novelty, and every free weekend somehow ended up with the Sutherlands on the ocean.
“You can take pictures, C!” Dad said excitedly. “With that new Polaroid.”
It had been enough to convince her.
Haddie was harder to get on board. “The boat is so boring.”
“Not if you make your own fun.” Mom, gleaming with sunscreen, made sandwiches and stacked them in the cooler, topping the pile with a new pack of Oreos. “Being bored is a sign of a stagnant imagination, Haddie. You and Claire could play some games, explore a little!”
Which was why, two hours into the trip, the shore a speck in the distance, Haddie was standing at Claire’s side and whining about hide-and-seek.
“Please, Claire.” Haddie clasped her hands beneath her chin, a childish gesture for a kid who thought her ten years meant she was a step away from adulthood. “I’m so bored I’m going to explode.”
“I don’t want to play hide-and-seek, Haddie.” She wanted to sit here and read Harriet the Spy, a book far below her reading level now, but one she loved. She could concentrate on it much better if Dad would turn down the radio. “And it’s my birthday.”
“So you can hide first! I’ll seek!” Haddie clapped as if this were now a foregone conclusion. “Just hide somewhere you can read. It’ll be like you aren’t playing at all.”
There was a thought. And Claire knew that if she continued to decline, Haddie would tell Mom, and then she would get press-ganged into playing anyway.
“Fine.” She rolled her eyes and slid in her bookmark. “Go count. A hundred, at least.”
Haddie pouted but skipped away pleased with her victory.
Claire knew exactly where she was going. She had a book light, and Dad’s huge old tackle chest was empty, stored belowdecks ever since Mom got him that new one. She’d get cozy, close the lid, and hopefully it’d take Haddie at least an hour to find her.
With that thought, she went to the cooler first and procured the new bag of Oreos.
It was her birthday, after all. Dad was fishing and Mom was sunbathing, Haddie next to them, facing the ocean and loudly counting.
Claire considered saying hi to Mom and Dad, letting Mom pet her hair and tell her what a good big sister she was for playing along.
But she really wanted to get back to her book.
There was a speaker system in the storage space, she knew, so that someone up top could radio down to someone below. Dad’s radio was probably superloud down there, oldies blasting across the deck. “Dad,” she called, already headed to the controls, “can I turn this down?”
“Sure, baby.” He didn’t look away from his bobbing line. “I’ll just sing.”
Mom gave him a half-hearted swat, smiling.
The volume button stuck. Claire wrenched at it, but it wouldn’t give. Teeth bared, loudly thinking a curse word she’d just learned at school, she started jabbing at buttons, not paying attention to what she hit. Finally the music cut off, the screen going dark.
When she went below, it was blessedly quiet. The old tackle chest was pushed up against the wall, next to a minifridge that had come with the houseboat. A spiderweb had inched toward the chest’s corner, shining silvery in the fluorescent light.
Claire turned on her book light and lowered herself into the chest, closing the lid over the top. It was cozy in there, especially once she propped up the pillow from the lawn chair behind her back. She smiled, opened her Oreos.
She’d been in there for half an hour when the boat started to rock.
At first, she wasn’t concerned. They’d hit a wake, or a burst of waves. It wasn’t until she heard the thunder, muffled through the sides of the tackle chest, that Claire started to be afraid.
The next hour was full of holes, her recall strobed by quickly rising panic.
She was thrown around, her head slamming against the sides of the chest as she scrabbled at the lid.
It wouldn’t open, and her fingernails broke against it, bright spots of anchoring pain. Her feet drummed the Oreos into mush.
She couldn’t mark the moment she was free-floating, but water began seeping into the corners of the chest, cold despite the summer heat. Her jeans were soaked, pulling at her skin. She spoke, screamed, but couldn’t remember anything she said. It was all a fog.
Her body gave out eventually. She slumped into the water, now up to her chin and freezing. Closed her eyes.
Guess I’m dying, she thought, and it was the most lucid notion she’d had in hours. Please, please, I’ll do anything to not die. Anything at all.
And then a voice.
Anything?
“God?” She said it quietly, though it seemed so loud in the confines of the chest.
A pause. Then—
Yes.
She was saved. She was saved.
What will you give, to keep your life? said the voice in the waves, curling into her like water in a swimmer’s ear, waiting to drip out warm when she least expected. Your body? Your soul?
“Whatever you want.” Like most thirteen-year-olds, Claire fancied herself practically grown. But she sounded so small.
Finally. The voice was triumphant. Smug. Someday, Claire Sutherland, you will be the last, the end. My eternity.
She didn’t remember anything after that until the tackle chest opened, the sun like the dawn of a new age.
○ ○ 2. ○ ○
Claire went quiet. The story was done, short and brutal, and there was no denouement to tie it up into something neat.
Ash shifted next to her, not to get closer, just to try to make his battered body more comfortable in all the tile and glass. “That’s why it wants you so badly.” She’d suspected surprise, disgust, but he just sounded tired. “You made it a promise. Even if we hadn’t come along, it’d go after you.”
It was true. She’d dug her own grave, sliced her own sail.
Ash sighed and tilted his head back against the wall. “I won’t tell you it isn’t your fault,” he said finally. “If that’s what you’re waiting for. You made the promise, Claire. But I understand why you did it.”
She wasn’t blameless. She knew the truth. Claire rested her head against the side of the submarine, mirroring him. If there was nothing else tying the two of them together, nothing but this sham of a quick marriage, there was at least honesty. “That doesn’t absolve you.”
“Of course it doesn’t.” He shrugged. “We’re all here by our own choices.”
She shuddered.
“But I will tell you this,” Ash continued.
“Everyone’s done something they aren’t proud of.
Something that makes them the villain in some story, somewhere.
Yours might be worse than others’—God, mine sure is—but you can’t live in it forever.
The world has gone on around you. It’ll keep doing that. Sooner or later, you have to catch up.”
“Doesn’t seem like I’ll have much time for that,” Claire murmured. “And it’s my own fault. I should have just died then.”
Ash gnawed on his lip, bloody and split, scabbing over. “But you didn’t,” he said.
The huge bed sat in the middle of the submarine, close enough for her to touch it if she stretched out her legs. Shining and innocuous, at home in any five-star hotel.
We need him to perform, Patrick had said. Make it official. The bed loomed white as a death specter, the pristine sheets nearly glowing. The rules, again, but only those the Ashburys wanted to follow. The god didn’t care, as long as it got what it wanted.
Claire’s hands were clammy; she clenched them to sweaty fists.
The ceiling of the submarine was all glass, the light from inside eaten almost immediately by the darkness of the ocean outside. The impenetrable void of the sea seemed to darken further as she stared out into it. Like something floated over them, something vast. Watching.
“I can’t… can’t do that, Ash.” Her hand fluttered toward the bed, pale and negating. “I don’t know what happens to us if we refuse, I’m sorry if that makes all this worse, but I can’t. I won’t.”
“Claire, I’d never…” It came out vehement, but he didn’t finish, letting it hang. He’d never. That was a full thought by itself.
She nodded, relief softening her rigid, abused muscles. Her eyes flickered to the waiting ocean outside, the darkness of something looming like a storm cloud. “So what happens if we don’t?”
“We’ll find out, I guess.” With a hissing breath, Ash heaved himself up from the floor and limped to the corner of the sub, one leg dragging on the floor and leaving a trail of smeared black-red. A blown-glass paperweight rested on one of the bedside tables; he picked it up, weighed it in his hand.
“They’ll still know we didn’t,” he said, almost to himself. “But I want to do this anyway.”
Ash lifted the paperweight and smashed it against the wall.
At first, Claire thought that maybe he was trying to break the military-grade glass, drown the two of them before something worse could happen. But with the second smash, a small piece of what looked like a lens fell to the floor, a tiny red light blinking, reflecting on the tile.
A camera. Her nose wrinkled. “Ew.”
“Small on the Ashbury list of sins, but yeah, ew.” Ash turned laboriously on his injured leg, offered the paperweight. “Right-hand corner.”
The glass ball was smooth and heavy in her hand, the center scattered with blue and green bubbles. Claire walked over to the opposite corner of the sub, squinted at the wall until she saw the telltale blink. Then she smashed it, and kept smashing.
She only stopped when something crackled in hidden speakers. Static, but nothing else, never resolving into words. It clicked off, leaving silence again.
Claire dropped the paperweight. It rolled over the tiles and came to a stop at the low corner of the bed.