Chapter 2
She came up choking.
Salt water poured out of her nose and mouth. She coughed until she thought her ribs would crack, went under, came up again, and got half a breath. Something warm ran into her left eye. She tasted metal.
Blood, some faraway part of her said. You hit your head.
She turned in the water, looking for the boat.
It was already far away. That was the first thing she understood, and it was the worst. The Halcyon was a cluster of lights low on the black water, strings of white and gold, and it was getting smaller. She heard the engines. They sounded like a dream of engines.
“Ryan!” She screamed it. The water slapped her in the mouth. “Ryan! Troy! Help!”
The lights kept going.
She screamed until her throat tore. She started swimming after them, a hard, stupid sprint, arms wheeling, and within twenty strokes her lungs were on fire and the lights were no closer. They were further. A boat doing twelve knots does not wait for a woman.
She stopped. She was sobbing. She went under again because she was sobbing, and she came up coughing, and the part of her that had spent four years on a college swim team said, clearly, Stop it.
Stop chasing the boat. The boat is gone.
You will drown if you keep doing this. Roll over. Float.
She rolled onto her back.
* * *
The sky was enormous. She had never seen so many stars. There was no moon, and the Milky Way ran across the whole sky like spilled sugar.
Her body wanted to sink. Her arms and legs were heavy in a way that had nothing to do with the water.
Her thoughts kept sliding. She would be thinking about the stars, and then she would be thinking about her college pool at five in the morning, and then she would come back to herself with water in her mouth.
Half a glass.
The champagne. Alexis handing it to her. You look like you need this.
She had been drugged. The word sat in her head and did not feel real. Things like that happened in movies. They did not happen on your husband’s boat at your husband’s dinner with his investors laughing under the string lights.
She spread her arms and legs wide. She tipped her head back until her ears were underwater and her face was up. This was the first thing she taught every child who came to SwimSafe, before kicking, before strokes, before anything. Make yourself a starfish. The water wants to hold you. Let it.
“Let it,” she said out loud. Her voice was a croak.
The water held her.
* * *
Time did strange things.
She floated, and she drifted, and at some point she realized she had been asleep, or something like asleep, because she woke with a jerk and a mouthful of sea. She coughed and rolled and floated again.
She thought about Ryan.
She thought about him on the sky deck with his head bent toward Alexis.
Give me ten minutes. She thought about how he had sounded relieved.
She wondered how long it would take him to come down to the cabin.
She wondered if he would come down at all, or if he would stay up there talking, and talking, the way he did at one in the morning in their own house.
She wondered what he would do when he found the bed empty.
That thought made her cry again, and crying made her sink, so she made herself stop. She made herself be angry instead. Anger floated better.
You don’t get to kill me, she thought, and it wasn’t clear if she meant Alexis or Ryan or the whole black ocean. You don’t get to. I swam the mile at conference three years in a row. I am not dying in the Bahamas in a cocktail dress.
The dress was pulling at her. She reached down with numb fingers and tore at the side zipper until it gave, and she worked it down over her hips and kicked it away. It floated beside her for a while like a second, flatter woman, and then it was gone.
The water, which had felt warm at first, was cold now. Not cold like a winter pool. Cold like it was slowly reaching into her. Her teeth chattered.
* * *
Some time later, she saw the dark shape.
She didn’t see it so much as see what it hid. Low on the horizon, off to her right, there were no stars. There was a long black line where the sky should have been.
Land.
She stared at it until her eyes watered. It didn’t move. It wasn’t a cloud. It was too flat and too steady.
It was far away.
She knew about distance. That was the one thing she knew better than anything else. She knew how far a mile was in a pool, and in a lake, and in open water with chop. And she knew that distances over water lied. That dark line could be two miles. It could be ten.
She also knew about currents. She felt this one, a slow, steady pull. When she floated, the stars moved slightly across the sky. The current was taking her somewhere, and it wasn’t straight toward the land. It was carrying her along it.
Don’t fight it, her old coach used to say about rip currents. Swim across it. You can’t beat the ocean. You can only go sideways.
She rolled onto her front.
She swam.
* * *
It was not like any swim she had ever done.
She had no goggles. No cap. No wall to turn on, no clock, no coach, no lane line. One eye was swollen half shut. Every time she lifted her head to breathe, pain shot through her skull where she’d hit the platform. Her arms felt like they were full of wet sand.
She counted.
She counted strokes the way she had counted them when she was nineteen and training at five in the morning. One to a hundred. Then float. Breathe. Look for the black line. Correct. Then one to a hundred again.
Sometimes she lost count and started over. Sometimes she was floating and didn’t remember stopping. Once she threw up, and it was mostly salt water, and it burned.
Around the fourth or fifth hundred she started talking to people who weren’t there.
She talked to her coach. She talked to the kids at SwimSafe, the little ones who clung to the edge of the pool and cried. You can do it. I’m right here. Blow bubbles. She talked to Jess, who would have said something rude that would have made her laugh, and it helped to imagine it.
She did not talk to Ryan. She had nothing to say to him.
The black line got bigger.
* * *
The sky started to go gray.
At first she thought her eyes were failing. Then she saw that the stars were fading, and the water around her was turning from black to dark blue, and the black line was not a line at all. It was an island. The shape of trees showed on it now, and a paler strip at the bottom that might be sand.
She heard something, too. A low hush and rumble. Water breaking on rocks, or on a reef.
She tried to swim faster and her body simply refused. Her arms came out of the water and fell back in. Her legs trailed behind her. She was so cold she couldn’t feel her hands.
Float, she thought. Float and let it bring you in. You’re close. You’re close.
She rolled over. She looked at the gray sky.
She thought, calmly, that she might not make it the rest of the way. It wasn’t a sad thought. It was a fact, like the temperature of the water.
Then she heard an engine.
* * *
It was not the Halcyon. It was smaller and rougher, a single motor coughing and then catching and then droning closer. She lifted her head.
A boat was coming around the end of the island. A white open boat with a blue canopy and a rack of silver tanks in the back. A man stood at the wheel.
Scarlett tried to wave. Her arm went up about six inches.
She tried to shout. What came out was barely a sound.
The boat kept coming. It was going to pass her. It was going to pass right by her, a hundred yards off, and the man at the wheel was looking at the reef, not at the water.
She lifted her arm again. She slapped the water with it. Once. Twice. The third time she went under.
When she came up the engine note had changed.
It had dropped to an idle. The boat was turning.
“Hey!” a man’s voice shouted. “Hey! Hang on! I see you! Hang on!”
She hung on.
The boat came alongside, big and white, blotting out the sky. A man leaned over the side. He had sun-bleached brown hair and a tanned face and he looked terrified.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “Okay? I’ve got you. Give me your hand.”
She couldn’t lift her hand.
He swore, and then he was in the water beside her in his shorts and T-shirt, and he got an arm around her from behind, the way a lifeguard does, and he held her head up and kicked them both to the little ladder at the back of the boat.
“You’re okay. You’re okay. I’m going to push you up. Can you grab the ladder?”
She grabbed the ladder. He pushed. She fell onto the deck of the boat like a fish and lay there on her face on the rough wet boards, and the boards were warm from the day before, and she had never felt anything so good in her life.
The man climbed up beside her. He was breathing hard. He pulled a towel off a hook and put it over her, and then another one.
“Where did you come from?” he said. “Where’s your boat? Is anyone else out there?”
Scarlett turned her head. She tried to say no. She tried to say my husband’s boat. She tried to say the doctor.
What came out was, “Six miles.”
Then the gray sky folded up, and she let it.
* * *
She woke up under a ceiling fan.
It turned slowly above her, a wooden one with one blade slightly crooked, so that it made a soft tick every time it went around. The light in the room was yellow and hot. There was a window with white shutters, and the shutters were closed, and bright stripes of sun came through the slats.
Her head hurt so badly she thought she would throw up. Then she did throw up, over the side of the bed, into a plastic bucket that someone had put there for exactly that reason.
“There you go,” a man’s voice said. “That’s what the bucket’s for.”
It was the man from the boat. He was sitting in a folding chair near the door with a glass of water in his hand. He had changed into dry clothes. He looked tired.
“Where,” Scarlett said. Her voice was a rasp.
“You’re on Gull Cay. In the Exumas. You’re in the apartment over my dive shop.” He came over and held out the water. “Small sips. If you gulp it you’ll just lose it again.”