Chapter 15
Laughter rebounds off glassware, tinkling in her ears.
A night breeze wafts up from the Monterey Marina and across Osteria Al Mare’s outdoor patio, but it holds no chill.
The table is warm, bright, noisy. Faces and conversations flicker under a heating lamp.
Its illumination gilds leftovers on a mess of plates: mushroom ravioli, orecchiette pasta, two lasagnas, a fresh green salad with gorgonzola and poached pears.
Someone tells a story about wind tunnels and Frisbees.
A golden retriever perks up, nose inching toward the pastas.
Someone else mentions a childhood dog wolfing down the Thanksgiving mashed potatoes.
More laughter.
“Remember when—”
“Yes—”
She has nothing to contribute to the discussion.
That’s nothing new, so she smiles. She’s not unhappy, because she’s here and Wes is laughing along.
It’s been fine, like she promised, she hasn’t disappointed him yet—and for the moment, it’s all right, she’s all right.
. . until one of the voices seated nearby addresses her.
It asks her preference for dessert. A simple question, which she can answer correctly: Wes doesn’t drink coffee, so he won’t want tiramisu.
Despite her confidence, however, when she tries to respond, her own voice cracks.
“What?”
She tries again. But the words break apart on her tongue.
And then, abruptly, horribly—it’s not just her voice, but herself that shatters.
“Ah!”
Choking on air and nothing, Isabel woke with a gasp.
Her mouth was parched. Her hair was plastered to her scalp with sweat, her body contorted, arms and legs twisted, snail-like, her fingers fisted not in a dinner napkin but around a pillow, strangling it while she struggled to orient herself to a startling, shadowed quiet: the beach bungalow.
Alone.
Or almost.
The pain was with her.
No!
But it didn’t care if she didn’t want it.
The migraine had burrowed into her body while she slept.
Now it gained traction across her nervous system with horrific speed, throbbing at the back of her skull, splitting over her left eye socket.
Its pressure intensified in her sinuses, pulsing.
This wasn’t her imagination. Not a dream. Not even a nightmare.
Agony.
No, no—
She lurched off the mattress and crawled to her toiletries bag. A rug burn scorched her knees. Whimpering, she continued on all fours to the bathroom in the dark. Her hands shook when she dumped out a Ceretobicin dosage, swallowing the pill fast, dry.
It was too late, though.
The medication’s preventative effects couldn’t help her. The Ceretobicin was just a little lump of plastic in her throat.
She shoved her knuckles into her mouth after the pill, stifling her cry by biting down on her fist when a fresh wave of pain bucked up her spine.
Thighs convulsing, toes curling, she slumped down onto the bathroom floor.
Vertigo dumped heat and ice over her head and through her stomach. Her vision buzzed, blurred.
Quiet, be quiet.
“She’s on the ground! Isabel, did you roll out of bed? Was it a nightmare, or—”
Crying, gripping her head: “No—no—”
“Let’s see. . . shhhh, you’re not really hurt. Just scared, right? No blood. Even if you’ll have some bumps and bruises. The top bunk isn’t very high off the floor. Come on now, up you get. Let us help—”
Flailing against the hands: “No—”
“Stop it. You’re all right.”
“No!”
“Well, she’s not injured. This must be attention-seeking behavior. Isabel, no more yelling—”
But she couldn’t stop.
The hands came back. Hurting, panicked, she scratched at them. She bit.
“God damn it! What’s the matter with her?”
“I don’t know, there’s no blood, she’s just—”
“—psychotic.”
Hospital.
Her moan fogged the bathroom tiles.
Again, the pain: an angry vermillion drum beating in her head, thrashing nausea through her gut, ricocheting down into her hips, cramping her calves, searing her feet. Her tingling tongue tasted like copper. Her eyes burned. Fever and tears.
“A-ah. . .”
She hunched into a tight, helpless, horrible ball, rocking, gasping, sobbing when the vice-like grip on her temples squeezed tighter, when she couldn’t gulp back her body’s noises.
If she could just crawl into the shower, turn on the cold water, soak herself to slow her pulse and numb her skin—but she couldn’t.
Motion sickness and the blind, shimmering crescents filming over her right eye kept her on the floor.
She rocked, she cried, she hurt.
Quiet, quiet, and—
“. . . Isabel?”
Wes.
If she couldn’t see him through the gray and the pain, she knew: he was in the bathroom with her. She’d dragged him out of sleep with her shameful sounds.
“S-sorry—”
“How can I help?”
“Didn’t—didn’t mean to d-d-disturb—” Tears slipped past her closed eyes. They trickled over the fists that she dug into their sockets. She tried again, forced the apology out. “I’m—ss-sor—”
“Don’t be sorry.” Her Ceretobicin bottle rattled. He was checking the cap, assessing whether she’d outsmarted its childproofing. Yes, and too late. His radiant heat intensified beside her. “Can I touch you?”
She’d break.
“Buttercup?”
She couldn’t answer.
No, no, no. . .
“I’m going to touch you.” Then Wes was lifting her up from the tiles like she weighed no more than spindrift, cradling her as if gravity had relinquished its painful claim to her right here, like it did in the water.
He was very gentle, his skin hot and bare.
She screamed into his shoulder. If her nails weren’t already digging against her palms, she would have clawed at him. But this body wasn’t hers anymore. Screams were all she had.
“I’m sorry—” He tensed. He didn’t release her, though. He didn’t drop her. He didn’t leave her alone in the dark.
“A-a-ah—”
He carried her away from the unforgiving ceramic floor, cursing when his boxers snagged on the bathroom door’s strike plate and he stumbled into the jamb.
His arms shielded her from the impact, however.
He rushed out of the bedroom, past a dim glow from the reef tank that illuminated their caricature perched on the credenza, and to the porch.
She bit her bloody tongue or his collarbone when he leaped down the risers—thud, thud, thud, his footsteps beating into her, threatening to split her open like a rotting kelp float.
Maybe she screamed again.
She couldn’t hear her own breath over the hurricane in her skull.
“Sorry—I’m sorry, we’re almost there.”
Now he was running: across Tide Avenue and down the beach, hissing at the rip of saw-toothed grass against his legs, at tidal rocks tearing the soles of his feet. He didn’t stop, didn’t slow. He charged over pebbles and mussel shells, straight into the midnight surf.
“Fuck!”
A heart-stopping chill lashed through him. Isabel felt its strike, felt him jolt and shudder. Still, his pace didn’t falter. Neither did his pulse under her ear. Wes plowed on through the spitting foam and scalding-cold spray, wading deeper, laboring forward with water lapping against his thighs.
“S-shit—”
The next breaker knocked out his knees. He collapsed, yelping, submerging them both in the bay’s frigid embrace.
Underwater.
Her lungs contracted with an instant, animal imperative.
The cold shocked a bubbling breath through her teeth.
Salt and sand and wetness rushed to fill her mouth.
Her fragile mammalian body responded. She choked, fighting for the surface, striking out and kicking free of Wes’s arms, breaking back into the night air. She inhaled.
“I-Isabel—”
Struggling to keep her head up, she coughed hard and long.
“Thank Christ.” His hands found her again. He cupped her elbows, holding her upright, raising her chin above the water. “I’m sorry—the tide’s strong, and I. . . I panicked. Are—you. . .?”
Breathing?
Am I?
Yes, she was.
She was cold, too. So cold, shuddering through her racking coughing fit in the waves, gasping—and with that cold came a second instinctive physical reaction from her body: blood vessels narrowing, nerve conduction slowing.
Another inhale.
“Y-y-yes.”
Shivering, teeth knocking, her straining lungs nevertheless eased their spasms after several further wheezing, grateful breaths.
Inhale, exhale. Another cycle. Yes, now try again.
. . In response, she slowly guided herself back into a floating position, reclining deeper against every warm-blooded instinct, her arms and legs extended in the numbing water.
Wes moved with her. He braced her shoulders against his chest through the sodden, knotted silk of her slip and stabilized her buoyancy with an arm across her ribcage.
Beneath the raft he made of himself under her, his hips lifted, his own legs frog-kicking as he towed them out beyond the worst of the buffeting waves, to where kelp or curious fish-kisses skimmed their skin.
To where the ocean calmed.
And her breaths became moments, became minutes. . . became the slow passage of time.
Gradually, very gradually, her angry pain calmed.
The seaweed didn’t hurt. Wes’s touch was light.
The spikes pounding into her skull dulled, then receded from her temples, from her neck, from her spine.
The bright pressure on her eyelids wasn’t a migraine aura, but moonshine parting the marine layer overhead.
Breathe, in and out with the swells. . .
“Better?”
The question was no louder than the lap of water against her ears.
Not a demand for her to be better.
Just asking.
She could have pretended not to hear him. She could have let the pain continue its retreat and allowed silence to take its place inside her. It would have been simple. Easy. Comfortable. Instead, she nodded.
“Yes.”
Because. . . she was.