Chapter 3 #3
Then, later, huddling in a tub with her hair being combed for lice—having refused the other children’s roughhousing to sit alone and study a pamphlet of too-large words about her transition from permanent ward of the Canadian government to trial adoptee—young voices whispered under the bathroom door:
“She’s a weirdo.”
“Freak—”
No.
She exhaled. She blinked back the memory of lice shampoo, the taunts and the comments. She blinked herself back to this shower, to Wes’s casual question.
“Um—yes, I’ve been to Vancouver.”
Left Vancouver.
She soaked a wad of cotton balls in vinegar and passed it over his calves, shoulders, and neck, counteracting the jellyfish blisters with mild acid. Her hands were only a little unsteady.
“When did you—ah!” He yelped when the fibers rasped against a sensitive sting under his ear.
“S-sorry.” She flinched. Her elbow struck the shower’s faucet handle.
Pipes screamed.
A blast of water sluiced over Wes’s head.
He yelped again and slapped a palm against the tile. “Jesus in a jalopy, that’s hot—”
“I’m sorry, sorry—” Cringing, babbling more apologies, she leaned past him through the spray, soaking her cashmere sleeve, fumbling for the temperature dial.
But then Wes unexpectedly sighed and relaxed.
“Oooh. No. . . leave it, don’t turn it to cold, it’s working.
Boiling me like a lobster, but it’s. . .
ahhh.” His moan of pleasure and relief echoed through the bathroom.
He ducked his head under the deluge with a noisy sputter, then withdrew and switched off the water.
He turned toward her with droplets beading on his cheekbones and in his eyelashes, moisture glimmering on the edge of his lower lip, dripping past a nautical compass and a reef knot inked beneath the sparsely curling hair on his chest, along the ridges of his sun-freckled abdomen, and farther to another darker, coarser trail leading beneath his trunks—
“Can you get me that second bucket of salt water?”
She choked. “Yes, sorry—”
She did.
She didn’t listen from outside the bathroom while he. . . did whatever he was doing to remove the rest of the jellyfish barbs. Only when he snorted moisture from his nose into a towel did she allow her attention to wander back to his muffled voice.
“I guess that could’ve been worse,” he said. “You’d already gotten most of the stingers off. Plus, you knew to use vinegar instead of urine. For which—thanks. That would’ve been even more embarrassing than this situation already is.”
Wait.
He was embarrassed?
Why?
Cracking open the bathroom door rather than continuing to speak through it, grimacing at the stretch of his burns and blisters while he patted the towel over himself and his freshly rinsed swim trunks, Wes went on before she could ask him—if she would even have dared to ask; she was scrupulously examining her feet instead of watching him dry off, instead of observing the functional flex of muscle in his arms, instead of studying the sun-bleached hair snagging through a metal hoop in his right ear:
“You know what you’re doing. Not just with fish tanks. What’s your background?”
At that, she retreated and extracted a travel-sized vial of pain pills from her toiletries bag.
Rizatriptan. For migraines. If she didn’t catch her own body’s early warning symptoms—prodrome—in time, this medication sometimes worked.
Its constriction of blood vessels and neutralizing of pain signals before they reached the brain should definitely function for jellyfish stings.
She extended the capsules to Wes. Then she told him, carefully, “I have experience with marine biology.”
That was true. It was also safe, generic, and obvious.
Nothing incriminating.
“Right.” He cupped a palmful of water from the sink and gulped down the pills. He wiped the back of his hand over his mouth. “Well, whatever happened last night, it seems like you couldn’t have gotten. . . beached?—on a better beach.”
She blinked.
What?
Wes sauntered by her before she could answer or protest. He shuffled through the sunlight streaming into the bedroom and over the sheets stretched neatly across the bed’s mattress (she’d erased the evidence of her presence last night, mindful of removing her toothbrush and cleaning a few strands of her own hair from the sink, too), and to the living room couch.
Two duffels slumped under one of the room’s pair of rattan lamps.
He retrieved a faded t-shirt emblazoned with the Marine Conservation Institute’s logo and carefully ducked it over his head, before returning to the bathroom with a pair of jeans.
The door closed. “Have you been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium? Or MORI?”
“No,” she said, while a zipper hissed.
“Really?” He reemerged with denim slung low on his hips and his hair combed into a bun.
Isabel trailed him back to the living room, where he hitched his chin at a camera with a wet nylon strap discarded near the duffels.
Distracted by his stings, she hadn’t noticed it earlier.
He ferried the device to the kitchen to dry its protective casing with a dish towel.
“Like I said last night, I’m here on a photography assignment with MORI. So if you’re curious. . .?”
Photography?
Without warning, the memories drowned her again:
Metal chair, cold through a thin medical gown.
“—going to photograph these injuries, then speak with your parents—”
Flash.
“We’re not her parents. We’d started the paperwork to adopt her. Another girl in the house for our daughter, since we have so many boys. But—”
“What happened?”
“Everything was normal at dinner. She wasn’t eating or talking much.
Our television’s old and it flickers, and she was avoiding looking at it.
Avoiding most eye contact, too. So, normal.
But afterward, once we’d finally settled the baby down for the night and the other kids were getting to sleep, we heard something fall in the girls’ bedroom.
She’d rolled off her bed. The top bunk. She was on the floor, crying.
When we tried to help her up, to see if she was hurt or just scared, she—”
Flash.
“—she went psy—”
Her inhale was too fast, dizzying. She grabbed at the kitchen door jamb. “Y-you’re—”