Chapter 77
amy
Even though I know Colt’s dead, I can’t let go of him. I kneel on the floor of the cabin, holding his body in my arms. This man did so much in his life that was selfish, even wicked; but he gave me Mac, and Mac gave me Nicky.
The irony couldn’t be more bitter: I’ve just learned my son is alive, but I’m going to die before I find him.
A week ago, I’d have welcomed death with open arms.
Now, all I can think is that I’ll never see my son again.
I’ll never get a chance to beg for Nicky’s forgiveness, to tell him how much I love him, that I never stopped searching for him, never gave up on him.
It’s too late to tell Mac I don’t care what happened between him and Ashley: I love him with all my heart; I never stopped.
McAmy forever.
The boat tilts suddenly as the shifting weight of the water tips it sideways. Colt is wrenched out of my arms as I’m flung violently across the cabin.
Everything spins, and I whirl frantically in the watery blackness, slamming against the cabin door; I feel the handle crushed against my back.
A bolt of pain shoots through my shoulder, the same shoulder I dislocated last year, and I can’t hold my breath any longer.
I inhale a filthy lungful of lake water, plummeting through a wormhole in time, back into the arms of a death that’s been waiting for me for fifteen months.
My vision fills with crystal-clear scenes from my childhood, events I’d almost forgotten until now: my father teaching me to walk on stilts, building a blanket fort with Iris, gluing cotton wool balls onto a cut-out of a snowman.
The memories come at high speed, almost all at once, in a wave. And yet I can process each one individually.
I’m able to perceive everything around me: the rush of the water as it fills the cabin, the gloss of the varnished walls, all of it brilliantly distinct.
I’m meeting my son for the first time, the midwife handing him to me still covered in blood and vernix. His eyes lock on to mine, as if they can see into my soul.
My son is two, looking over his shoulder to smile at me as he plays with his Lego.
My son at ten, asleep in the back seat of the car, his cheek pressed against the window, his hair flopping across his sweaty face.
Mac’s eyes meeting mine over the top of our baby’s head, our love a tangible, living presence for the first time.
I hold them both in my heart and in my mind as death comes for me.
And then the cabin door behind my back gives way.
I fall backwards, pummelled by water, a thousand tiny fists beating against my body; and then suddenly I’m falling upwards, up towards the surface, towards the sky, towards life.
Once again the lake has given me up, and I cannot imagine how or why.
I’m floating amid the wreckage of the boat, alive, still breathing, and the images in my head fade, and there is only the immense indigo sky above me, the lake around me, and the lapping of the water against the shattered hull.
Suddenly, in the darkness, I hear my sister’s voice, and for a moment I think I’m still hallucinating.
And then I realise she’s in the water with me.
Before I have a chance to register what’s happening, Iris grabs my shoulders, and pushes me beneath the surface, using all her weight to hold me down.