Chapter 7
The water followed her home.
It came the first night, a little after two.
She was asleep in her own bed for the first time in two weeks, on her own side, with the air conditioning humming and the good sheets that smelled like the laundry soap she liked.
Then she was not in the bed. She was in the black.
The engines were fading above her and the salt was in her nose and she was going down, and something had its hand flat on her back, pushing.
She woke up screaming.
She didn’t know where she was. The room was dark.
Totally dark, the way the water had been dark.
She couldn’t see her own hands. She threw off the covers and fell out of the bed and crawled across the carpet toward where the wall should be, gasping, her heart going so hard it hurt, until her hand hit the light switch and the room exploded into white.
Her bedroom. Her dresser. Her chair with Jess’s sweatshirt thrown over it.
Scarlett sat on the floor with her back against the wall and shook.
After a while she got up and turned on every light in the room.
The lamps. The overhead light. The light in the bathroom and the light in the closet, where her clothes were back on their shelves now, folded by someone who wasn’t her.
Then she opened the bedroom door, because the air in the room felt thick and she needed more of it.
Ryan was sitting at the bottom of the stairs.
She could see him from the top. He was on the lowest step, in a T-shirt and sweatpants, with his back against the wall. He had his arms around his knees. He was looking up at her.
He didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t take even one step onto the stairs.
“I heard you,” he said finally, quietly. “I’m not coming up. I just wanted you to know somebody was awake.”
Scarlett stood in the doorway of the bright room with her arms wrapped around herself.
She went back inside and shut the door.
She didn’t lock it.
* * *
The second night was worse.
She had left all the lights on. It didn’t matter. She dreamed that the lights were the Halcyon’s lights, getting smaller and smaller, and she was screaming for them to stop, and they didn’t stop. She woke up with her throat raw and her face wet.
This time, when she opened the door, he wasn’t at the bottom of the stairs.
He was at the top.
He was standing at the edge of the landing, one step down, with one hand on the banister. He hadn’t come onto the landing itself. He had stopped exactly where the carpet of the top step met the carpet of the upstairs hall, like there was a line painted there that only he could see.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You were screaming. I got this far before I remembered. Do you want me to go back down?”
Scarlett looked at him.
At the gray in his hair. At his bare feet on the step. At the line he wouldn’t cross.
“You can sit on the landing,” she heard herself say. “Outside the door. If you want. Don’t knock. Don’t come in.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not—” She didn’t know how to finish it. It’s not forgiveness. It’s not anything. I just can’t stand being the only one awake in this house.
“I know,” he said.
She shut the door. After a minute she heard him sit down on the carpet outside it, and the small creak of the wall as he leaned his back against it.
She slept until morning.
* * *
He sat there every night after that.
She never asked him to. He just did. When she went to bed at eleven, the landing was empty.
When she woke up at two or three with the black water in her mouth and her heart slamming, she would lie in the bright room and listen, and she would hear him out there.
A shift of weight. A long breath. Once, a soft snore that made her laugh into her pillow in spite of everything.
He never knocked. He never came in. In the morning, by the time she opened the door, he was gone, and the only sign was a pillow from the downstairs couch leaning against the wall.
* * *
The shower was its own war.
She could take a bath. She could sit in two feet of warm water and wash with a washcloth and feel almost normal.
But the moment she stood under the shower head and the water came down on her face, her body forgot she was standing in a bathroom in Miami.
It was the black water. It was the salt.
She couldn’t breathe. She would stumble back out onto the bath mat with her hair still full of shampoo, and sit on the edge of the tub gasping, and hate herself.
She told Jess about it on the phone. She thought she said it quietly.
Three days later she came into the bathroom and the shower head was different.
The big fancy rain-shower head that came down from the ceiling was gone.
In its place there was a simple handheld sprayer on a long silver hose, on a bracket at the height of her shoulder.
She could take it down. She could hold it.
She could point the water wherever she wanted, and never, ever have to put her face under it.
She stood there looking at it.
“Who did this?” she asked Ramona that afternoon.
Ramona had been their housekeeper for six years. She was wiping down the kitchen counter, and she didn’t look up.
“Mr. Walsh,” Ramona said. “Himself. Six o’clock in the morning. With a screwdriver and a YouTube video.” She sniffed. “He did the lights too.”
“What lights?”
Ramona finally looked at her. “You didn’t see? Come.”
There were little night-lights now. Small soft ones, plugged into the outlets all along the upstairs hall, and down the stairs, one on every third step.
The heavy blackout curtains in her bedroom had been taken down and replaced with thin white ones, so the lights from the dock and the bay came through at night and the room was never completely dark.
The hall light at the top of the stairs had been switched to a timer that kept it on from dusk until dawn.
Ryan had never mentioned any of it.
He didn’t mention it that night, either. He was in the kitchen when she came down, making a grilled cheese sandwich, badly. He looked up. He said, “Hey.” He went back to burning the sandwich.
She stood in the doorway and didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.
* * *
His study door was open the next morning when she went past it.
She wasn’t supposed to go in. That was her rule for him, not his for her. But the door was open, and the couch where he slept was folded up neat, and on his desk there was a stack of printed paper.
She went in and looked.
It was articles. Dozens of pages. He’d printed them out, because he never could read anything important on a screen.
Near-drowning and trauma. Sleep after a life-threatening event.
What survivors of water accidents need from family.
He had gone through them with a yellow highlighter.
In the margins, in his big slanted handwriting, there were notes.
Dark = water. Keep lights.
Showers — face. Ask Jess?
Don’t push her to talk. Let her lead.
Don’t make it about me.
That last one was underlined twice.
Scarlett put the pages down exactly as she’d found them, and walked out, and went upstairs and sat on her bed and didn’t cry, for about four minutes.
* * *
The days were strange.
The news vans stayed at the gate for a week and then drifted away to other stories. Agent Kerr called every couple of days with short, dry updates that were mostly we’re working on it. Jess came over after every shift and ate everything in the refrigerator and glared at Ryan until he left the room.
Luke called Ryan on the fourth day. Scarlett was in the kitchen. She heard Ryan’s phone buzz on the counter, and she watched him look at the name, and she watched his jaw go tight. He picked it up.
“No,” Ryan said into it. “You backed her statement. You went to the FBI and told them my wife was struggling for months. Don’t call this house.” He hung up. He put the phone face down on the counter. His hand was shaking.
On the sixth day Alexis sent him a message.
He was on the patio. Scarlett saw him take the phone out of his pocket and look at it, and she watched his whole body go stiff. He didn’t open it. He stood up, walked straight through the patio door, crossed the living room, and held the phone out to her with the screen facing her.
Alexis: Ryan, please. I know what she’s saying. She isn’t well. I only ever wanted to help you both. Call me. Please.
“I didn’t answer,” Ryan said. “I’m calling Kerr right now.”
He did. He stood in front of her and called the FBI and read the message out loud to Agent Kerr in a flat, careful voice, and he never once looked away from Scarlett’s face while he did it.
* * *
In the evenings he asked her about the island.
The first time, he asked carefully, like he was stepping onto ice. They were both in the kitchen at the same time by accident. She was making tea. He was pretending to look for something in the refrigerator.
“What was it like?” he said to the inside of the refrigerator. “The place you were. You don’t have to tell me.”
She almost didn’t answer. Then she said, “Small.”
“Small how?”
So she told him a little. Not much. Not Cooper’s name or the dive shop or the harbor, and nothing, never, about the dock.
But she told him about the far beach. She told him about the one dirt road through the scrub, and the water so clear you could see your own feet in it at chest deep.
She told him about a skinny girl with long braids who was scared of everything in the ocean.
He shut the refrigerator. He leaned against the counter. He listened.
He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t turn it into a story about himself. He didn’t check his phone. When she said the girl had put her face in the water on the second morning, he said, “The second morning? That’s fast. You always said it takes a week for the scared ones.”
She stared at him. She had said that. Years ago. She didn’t remember ever saying it to him.
The next night he asked, “Did she float? The girl with the braids?” And he had remembered the braids.