1.
There was one yacht left. It looked ridiculously nice to Claire, and gigantic, but Dierdre rolled her eyes as they got out of the Aston Martin. “Of course they only left the old ones. There’s barely enough room to breathe on that thing.”
There was no one else on the dock. No one else on the island, Claire assumed.
The higher-up employees of Ashbury Marinography, those important enough to know where success came from and the height of its price, had all fled in their fancy cars down to the docks with their fancy boats.
She couldn’t spot any of them on the horizon.
They must’ve flown over the waves like bats out of hell.
There were bloodstains on the sun-bleached boards of the dock. Claire wondered if there’d been fights over the boats, if the chaos at Harrow Point had made everyone go mad.
Theo knew how to pilot the yacht, a stroke of luck that Claire hadn’t known to worry about until she didn’t have to worry about it anymore. The boat apparently stayed ready for departure, and it didn’t take long before they were pulling out into the glittering sea, away from the bloody dock.
Claire watched the house built into the cliff grow smaller and smaller on the horizon. The lights were still on inside, shining beneath the waves.
In a few years, the place would probably be on the damn Travel Channel. She wondered how the disappearance of the Ashbury family would play into the narrative, whether it would have a reasonable explanation or be blamed on ghosts and aliens. Just wait until the podcasters got ahold of that one.
Out on the tide, the glass dome of the island where Elias had communed with the god glinted in the sun. Part of her wanted to go there, still. It wasn’t his resting place—he’d been thrown into the sea and found no rest there—but it felt like the closest thing she could do to visiting his grave.
Claire had no need for closure, though. She’d gotten it.
When their path took a curve, following the arc of the island, Claire stepped away from the railing.
Dierdre had gone belowdecks to shower as soon as the yacht left the dock.
Claire was initially too nervous to do something like that, sure that another shoe was waiting somewhere to drop.
But the voyage was peaceful, the sea calm, and after a few minutes Claire wandered into the interior of the boat to see if it had more than one bathroom.
She found the pilothouse first, though.
Theo stared straight ahead, his hands white-knuckled on the wheel. He didn’t react when Claire came in, but his shoulders trembled every once in a while.
Claire held her hands behind her like a chastised kid, sure she should say something, but not sure what. Her default response to any uncomfortable situation was to apologize, but even she knew that wasn’t the move here. Besides, this and uncomfortable weren’t even in the same zip code.
So instead, she said, “Are you going to be OK?”
For a minute, Theo didn’t answer. Then a shrug, one jerk of his shoulder. “Things with Greg weren’t going so well,” he said, as if this were any normal breakup. “My sister never liked him. She’s always trying to set me up with this guy she knows from the bank. Maybe I’ll let her.”
“Couldn’t hurt. I’ll always support a rebound.”
He snorted, glanced at her over his shoulder. Tear tracks streaked down his face. “You planning on a rebound yourself? After you got two breakups for the price of one?” Forcibly light, forcibly casual.
But Claire understood how that went. How sometimes you had to force things into a context they didn’t fit, because otherwise you’d go nuts.
“Don’t know if that second one counts as a breakup,” she said.
“It better,” Theo replied, turning back to the light through the windshield. “Because you two were together, in one way or another. So either you’re broken up, or you’re still tied.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that.
“I’m sorry,” Theo said quietly. He kept his eyes fixed on the ocean, resolutely not looking at her. “I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to tell you plainly. Sorry I didn’t make you leave.”
It wasn’t fine, so she didn’t say that. “Things turned out,” Claire said instead. “Not OK, maybe. But they turned out.”
“They always do.” Theo swiped at his eyes. “That’s the bitch of it. You can’t stop things from turning out, one way or another.”
After a moment, Claire wandered back out of the pilothouse.
There was a second bathroom. Probably a third and fourth, too. Gleaming white, and she tracked blood all over the floor on her way to the mirror. She took a deep breath with her eyes closed before she looked at herself.
The same. Averagely pretty, averagely built. Only her eyes were different.
One was still the same soft brown as always. But the other, on her left—the same side as her scarred arm—was bright, electric, Glacier Freeze blue.
She stared at herself for a minute. Then, slowly, she washed her hands.
Something twisted in her stomach. Some gnawing kind of hunger.
Claire ended up back on the deck. They were passing the cliff, and even from far away, Claire could tell it was the same one she’d been kneeling on minutes ago.
Something was falling from the precipice.
Bodies. Misshapen, bloodied bodies, sacks of skin that had tried to hold a god and been ruined instead.
One by one, the skins dropped, landing soundlessly on the beach below, bursting apart on the sand. Claire hoped they found some kind of peace. She couldn’t put much stock in the ideas of heaven and hell anymore—not that she ever really had—but surely there was something afterward, right?
Once, someone had asked her what she thought happened after death.
At one of the parties she’d attended with Annie and some other friends in college, one not so much for dancing and lampshades on heads as it was for weed and fringe philosophy.
Claire remembered that she’d taken a moment to answer, breathing the smoke in deep.
And then she’d said that she thought the afterlife was like an ocean, and that you could wait on the shore with the people you loved, or you could dive in deep, as deep as you wanted, and pick apart all the mysteries you found.
Even then, the water had had its hooks in her. She couldn’t believe that anymore. At least she couldn’t conceptualize the afterlife like an ocean. It seemed unfathomably cruel.
The cliff was almost out of sight. The steady drop of skins had stopped, all of them gone, just pieces on the beach. At the top of the cliff, a mass moved, a graceful whirl of tentacles as if it were already underwater.
Ash.
It was too far away to see his face, to know where he directed his too-bright gaze.
But Claire knew he looked at the yacht, speeding away.
She thought of how the tentacles had seemed smaller, right before she got in the Aston Martin, smearing blood across seats that cost more than her half of the mortgage.
She thought of how she’d balled up her emotions, folding them over and over until they were so small she could make herself hollow, leaving the spiked mass of it hidden within herself.
She thought of how, maybe, you could do that with all sorts of things—make them smaller, make them manageable, even things like monstrous gods.
You could bind them up inside yourself until they were easier to deal with, until time made them finally shrink.
Not healthy, maybe. But necessary, sometimes.
Ash slipped down the cliff, a speck in the glare of the island sun.