Fractured Tide Page 14

  I put my hand on top of his. “Don’t do that. There’s still one in the chamber.”

  When I got nothing from him but a confused look, I carefully took the pistol from him and pulled the slide back. Ben’s eyes widened as the last round fell into the sand.

  “We should store this somewhere safe.”

  We all looked down the beach at the same time, to where Felix had fallen asleep in the shade of some driftwood, completely unaware of what had happened. Mom was right. An earthquake could hit and that boy would sleep through it.

  I walked the gun to the boat, glad Ben was happy. But after two seconds with its cold weight in my hand, I wanted to throw it into the ocean. And not just because I’m haunted by the dream image of Ben gutshot on the beach. So here’s confession number whatever: The gun reminded me of you, and not in a good way. That part of you I don’t like, that part of me that won’t forgive you for what you did that night, that stupid, stupid night that took you away from me, from Felix, and Mom, and landed you in a crappy prison. Pistols and bowie knives and punches that knock a guy out cold. Forever.

  Sorry that hurts, but I promised you the truth. About you, and about me.

  I stashed the gun under a seat compartment and washed my hands with sand and water, as if I were scrubbing off the memory of it from my skin. I should’ve thrown it into the ocean. Mom would have. She hates all the combat stuff now—the antique weapons and your martial arts posters and nunchucks and brass knuckles, all of which you won’t find when you come home. The night you went away, after Felix drifted off, Mom boxed it all up and left it on the curb for garbage day.

  So it’s time for another confession. I almost rescued your death collection for you. I wanted to sneak it back inside our apartment and hide the box somewhere she wouldn’t look. But I kept waffling about it. Lay on my bed watching videos on my phone until I drifted off, and when the roar of the garbage truck woke me in the morning, it was too late.

  I threw on clothes and ran down our apartment stairs to save it. Really, I did. Or maybe I walked. Maybe I just wanted to see it disappear. I can’t remember anymore, three years later, what I did. Anyway, you won’t find it when you come home.

  ENTRY 17

  YOU PROBABLY KNOW ALL the species of fear, sitting in your tiny cell, surrounded by a reef full of dangerous creatures. So you know the kind of fear that makes your bladder soft, your bowels loose. The kind that reminds you that underneath all your thoughts and dreams and plans for the future, you’re still walking around in a meat suit.

  This kind of fear and me, we weren’t friends.

  Standing there in the wet sand, the sun hot on my scorched face, I looked for ripples in the water. Swells. Telltale humps under the waves. That thing tunneling its way back and forth along the coast of our mysterious island, tonguing the ocean currents for traces of us, my sweat, the blood from a tiny cut, a hint of my saliva.

  And Dad, I couldn’t even spit into my mask. My arms, my legs, they were parts that would go first. Pieces of me sputtering out like the edges of Easter fireworks, disappearing into the dark. Strange thoughts bubbled up. The Sense rose in me. I’d never felt so vulnerable, not even when I was floating in the dark that first night dive with you.

  A long time ago Yiayia showed me an old black-and-white picture of her from the 1930s she kept tucked away in a box of letters. Her mother was in the picture too. They stood on a small fishing boat, both smiling, wearing old-fashioned swimsuits, their hair tied up in scarves. The cliffs of Kalymnos rose in the background, immense and jagged. She must’ve been fifteen at the time.

  She told me that after her fourteenth birthday, she and her mother spent almost every day free diving. She told me what that was like; so little between your skin and the big blue, no neoprene or tank or regulator, plunging deep to find the sponges that would keep the entire family housed and fed all year. Her eyes seemed so young as she spoke, all the time between her old age and that perfect moment in the picture gone, somebody else’s messed-up, off-track life. She was glad she had Mom and me. Still, a big piece of her wanted to go back to that moment in time when neither of us existed and it was just her, her mother, and the sea.

  Yiayia and I drank mountain tea and talked about the big blue for hours—diving in the cold waters off Kalymnos where she grew up, then the warm waters of the Keys when her father moved the family just after the war ended, where she learned to judge her depth by the colors as they slowly seeped out of the reef. Red coral dimmed as she passed the twenty-foot mark. Orange seeped out of the fans when she’d passed forty. And when she couldn’t see yellow anymore, she knew she was close to her limit. The greens and blues and purples, they stayed with her all the way to the glorious bottom, to eighty feet—where the other free divers didn’t dare to go—all on a single breath. She told me that’s why blue was her favorite color: it was one of the few things in life that never gave up on her.

  As I listened, I imagined myself with her, back when she was young and no one called her Yiayia. When she was just Litsa, diving for sponges. We were creatures of the sea, nothing between us and the ocean. We belonged in a way I’ve never belonged above.

  You always thought my love of the ocean came from you, Dad, from our time fishing and the first snorkeling trips. But she was first.

  So I stood on the beach on this strange island that didn’t make sense, the sun a hot coal on my skin, lips cracked like a dried-out flower petal, and focused on that image of Litsa and me, diving into the deep. A fantasy. Like I said, dreams and fantasies and reality all blend together here. That memory feels as real to me as my memories of you.

  Unafraid, I slipped on my fins and my mask and walked into the surf.

  The sand shifted underneath as I kicked my fins against the soft brush of current. Sunlight filtered down and illuminated the world below, patterning over the sand and embedded tiny shells, the moving tufts of seaweed. I could see for a hundred feet. You would’ve loved taking out a group of divers in this kind of water.

  I counted. No more than ten minutes, I reminded myself. Before it could smell me.

  My skin felt thinner the farther out I went in my search for lobster or anything slow. It was my day, I told myself, a good day for fishing in the deep. My grandmother swam a few feet ahead, her long dark hair trailing behind her.

  Finally, when I was about to turn around and head back to shore, I spotted the crab. A nice one a little ways ahead and forty feet down. Its spindly legs stuck out from under a shelf, and I thought about how they’d look with steam coming off them. My stomach pinched with hunger.

  Ten minutes were almost up, and if I turned around right then, I would’ve made it back in time. But the taste of cooked meat rose up in my head, making me light-headed. What was another minute? Steph’s ten-minute rule was a stab in the dark anyway.

  I took a deep breath and imagined I was diving off Kalymnos. And I went deep, the red bleeding slowly from the coral, then the orange seeping out of the fish as the bottom rose up to meet me. I would stay down for the two-minute burn if I needed to, Litsa there beside me, young and strong and powerful.

  Counting out the seconds, I descended to the rock where the food hid, a black, craggy mass the size of a car and covered with bright coral. I hovered above, eyeing the last leg that stuck out from underneath the shelf. The tip of its pincher moved, dragging in the sand. Litsa swam in circles like a mermaid a few feet away, her black hair twisting and floating in the sea.

  Go on now, Child. You can do it.

  I pushed off the rock and grabbed dinner.

  The crab convulsed in my hand. A sudden shock of pain. I’d grabbed it in the wrong spot, and its pinchers took a slice of flesh from my thumb. Thoughtless, clumsy. An amateur’s crab fishing mistake.

  A tiny cloud of blood formed and floated past my mask. My heart picked up a beat. Thirty seconds into my free dive and there was already blood in the water. I pressed my thumb against it until it hurt, tried to will my heart to slow.

  My g
randmother didn’t seem fazed, starting for the surface, asking me to follow with crab in hand. I started to swim up and passed the edge of the rock.

  And stopped.

  The light above me dimmed, as if a cloud had moved in front of the sun. A flash of movement in the distant deep. Gray. Huge. And moving my way.

  I sank down below the edge of the rock shelf, searching for a place to hide. Reef rock—that was my only option.

  I told myself to stay calm and I kept the count to ease my fear. Forty-five . . . forty-six . . . forty-seven, gripping the crab hard, as if fear had turned to electricity, making my hands spasm and clench. It struggled, scrabbled, the sound of its scrape rolling through the water. I pinned it against the coral. And I counted.

  Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two . . .

  Pushing myself up a few inches, I peered over the edge. A steely shape, forming and growing in the hazy distance. Absolutely nothing, I told myself. A school of snapper or smelt. Not the thing. Something else.

  The gray shape grew, swimming straight for my hump of coral. I went still, like those rabbits in the book you made me read when I was twelve, and I watched it come, suddenly thinking about rabbits and how they’re born to be prey.

  The gray shape wasn’t a school of anything.

  An oversized dolphin. That’s what I told myself. The shape shifted direction, and when I saw it from tip to tail, my heart flipped like a fish on dry land. Pale belly. Darker gray on the sides. Dorsal fin. It changed directions toward me, and I ducked lower, hugging the rock as if I could melt into it. It swam over the rock and me.

  Sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three . . .

  The burn would come soon, deep in my lungs. The huge tiger shark sliced through the water above me, circling. It turned its face to me, and I pressed myself into the rock.

  The rounded head tapered to a snout as long as my arm. Its mouth hung open as if tasting the water. It swiveled its head side to side, dumbly searching. Sharp teeth. A hundred of them. The seconds ticked away.

  Seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven . . .

  My body’s cry for oxygen was coming too soon, because I hadn’t been practicing like I said I had.

  I waited for the shark to turn away. I shoved my body between a lump of brain coral and an orange sea fan—becoming just another part of the reef. Except for the blood coming out my hand. Litsa swam in circles a few feet away, counting out the seconds. You’re fine, her eyes said.

  She could make it to two minutes. So could I.

  Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty . . .

  The shark swam so close I saw its tiny scales, the remora on the underside of the white belly. The push of its wake swept over my skin, paralyzing. I thought of offering it the crab, a sacrifice to the sea god.

  Fire burned inside my chest. I made myself stay. Closed my eyes and turned my face to the black rock. Pretended it was gone. Imagined my hand reaching out for the sponges down deep. My grandmother was no longer beside me. I was my grandmother, and I was fifteen and strong and free and hunting.

  I opened my eyes just as the shark turned, its body curving, and swam back the way it had arrived, and away.

  Ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three . . .

  Black spots formed in my vision, my lungs burning away like tissue paper. My racing heart had betrayed me, taken all the oxygen from my blood. I got ready to shoot to the surface. Just a few more seconds to be safe.

  Fifty feet away, the shark stopped. Struggled. It was tangled up in something, body jerking like it had been thrown into a pot of boiling oil. A phosphorescent green glow pierced the haze. My eyes widened.

  No.

  Not here.

  Not now.

  I pushed off the rock and raced for the surface. The green glow pulsed in the deep, and the shark twisted against the filaments that held it.

  Not far now, the surface, shining above me.

  One hundred two, one hundred three, one hundred four . . .

  The black spots had become growing dark masses, the green glow nudging the corner of my eye, along with two strange white shapes my brain couldn’t make out. Like huge rectangles, floating, bobbing. Boats. A small silver shape. The images faded, blacked out.

  My eyes. They were dying, screaming for oxygen along with my brain.

  I broke through the surface and gasped a lungful of air.

  Something struggled in my hand. The crab. I’d held on somehow, a current of fear turning my grip into an iron clamp. It had sliced me again and I hadn’t noticed.

  I swam for shore, not daring to look back. Someone had set off a firebomb in my veins. Then I heard screams behind me. An explosion. And I didn’t look. The crab struggled, slowing me down. I thought of dropping it. Then I imagined Felix’s face when I told him there’d be nothing for dinner.

  The land bobbed into focus ahead, suddenly bright, as if the sun had turned on like a light. And then I was remembering again, that Sense this had already happened in a thousand different ways, and in some of those memories, I didn’t make it to shore.

  That last thirty seconds . . . I’m not sure how to explain it, but I became the waves, became the burn in my muscles and the Sense building within me. Reason gone. I was nothing but the taste of salt water and the gasp of breath and the burn of effort, the rough shell of the crab in my hand. It’s strange, the tricks your mind plays to get you through. The mind is a little kid shut in a room with toys and horrors, and it still has to play, no matter what.

  The beast was gone. Had never existed. You showed up, swimming beside me. Litsa freestyled a few feet behind. We were all coming back from the perfect dive, my grandmother at fifteen, and you before you’d killed someone. An ice chest waited for us on shore. There would be water. Oranges and pineapple. Yellow snapper on ice. Your portable grill. And we would watch the night fall over the island, like we used to when we were together, and eat our fill and stare at stars and laugh at your ridiculously unfunny jokes.

  I reached the shore. Crawled up onto the wet sand and collapsed face-first. The ocean swelled and faded behind me. Cool, drenched sand on my skin, I thanked Yiayia for staying with me. I thanked you. Both you and she disappeared in a puff of light and air.

  I was alone again.

  I lay gasping on the sand, too weak to do anything but breathe and hold on to our angry dinner, and a realization drifted to my mind, up from the place where I keep things I thought I’d forgotten, like the capital of Maine, the order of the planets, the atomic number of helium. And I laughed into the sand. Because my mind was assembling all the pieces I’d glimpsed out there in the ocean. A soda can, floating in the water as if some yahoo had thrown it at the shark. And the white hulls of two charters, side by side.

  I staggered back to camp, the crab clenched in my fist, my legs shaking and my stomach queasy. Steph had put aside her homemade net and dragged the canopy from the Last Chance farther up onto the beach. She kneeled next to a pile of metal odds and ends, lashing together rods, making her sun shelter. It seemed such an odd thing to do—making us a shelter—when the world was splitting in half.

  Ben sat against the boulder, the notebook in his lap, a couple of crude sketches crossed out. Felix was dragging a piece of driftwood, heading to a spot down the beach where he’d laid out several others in a row. It looked like the beginnings of a giant S.

  His face broke into a smile as I approached, although when he got a good look at my expression, it faded.

  I dropped the crab next to the fire.

  “Hey, you got a big one!” Felix said, leaning over the crab and poking it with a stick. It snapped at him.

  I pulled him back and showed him my hand. “You wanna lose a finger?”

  A few feet away, Steph put down her screwdriver, her expression unreadable. “Yeah, so if you get a cut like that, Felix, just keep it clean with seawater, okay? And we’ve got a tube of Neosporin in the charter.” She glanced at my hand and went back to her work. “Don’t use it all, Sia.”

  Ben limped over and
picked up the crab. “Sorry, Felix, but this one’s dinner.”

  His face fell and he turned away to the ocean, wincing. “Bye, Frankie.”

  Ben threw the crab on the coals. It struggled, its powerful claws fighting across the sizzling glow.

  “You have to give some of Frankie to the guy,” Felix said.

  I followed Felix’s gaze and my breath stuttered.

  Our prisoner was awake. Blood from the wound Ben had given him stained the collar of his dingy white shirt. And his hands and feet were turning an unnatural blue. I’d tied the rope too tight.

  I grabbed another line from the Last Chance and kneeled in front of him to tie a better version of your handcuff knot before taking off the old one. When I finished and stood, he looked up me at curiously and flexed his fingers.

  “Better?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond, his gaze returning to the crab that smoked and turned brilliant on the coals.

  “Did he say anything while I was gone?” I asked Ben.

  Ben shook his head. “Nothing that makes sense. He keeps giving us his rank and serial number. He thinks he’s a soldier or something.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Ben squinted at me. “What is what?”

  “His rank and serial number.”

  “Why? He made it up.”

  I didn’t tell them what I’d seen, what I thought. I still had something to figure out. Occam’s razor. Occam’s razor told Ben the guy was from the science trip, wrecked here when we were, just getting out of the ocean on a different shore, and out of his mind with grief after watching all his friends die. That explanation had the fewest assumptions. But I’d formed a theory as I walked the crab over to the others. Weird and irrational, but a theory.

  I kneeled in front of the prisoner. From a distance, the half-grown beard made him look like a man, but up close, he looked as young as Ben and Steph and me. A little acne over the cheeks and the bridge of his nose.