The Unforeseen

by Molly Gloss

  She did not bother to look at him. “You could eat shit,” she said, so it had almost the sound of well-meant advice.

  Jin was still looking past her to Neye as he said, “The first symptom is unprovoked hostility.” Still privately, as if she did not sit there between them.

  Around the food, she made some grumping sounds, perhaps an obscenity, but also clearly a private message, a cutting off. Enough.

  Jin obliged her by falling silent, but in a while they exchanged a look of gentle amusement, of affection, and Neye, watching them both obliquely while he ate, surprised himself by feeling only faintly excluded.

  • • •

  Jin brought sodium lamps on high telescoping stands, and they worked a while longer in that insufficient, long-shadowed glare. But the wind was rising, and a dark, cold rain rode in on it. The tide pushed in too, until it slopped over the tops of the piers in the pond. Neye waded in it to his armpits. The water was dark, and sometimes he had to feel with his hands even to find the drone cart standing waiting in the water beside him.

  He did not hear Jin coming, only heard him say, “We’re quitting,” and when he turned he could see the boy in the wind-shaky light standing at the edge of the pond, leaning on a cart burdened down with lamp heads and collapsed uprights. Behind him, Lisel came slowly up the path from the darkened beach, carrying a sheaf of poles in her arms. She kept her eyes on her feet as if she needed to remind them to move.

  Neye sent the cart up out of the pond and waded up after it. Jin was already dismantling the two lamps there, and Neye found he could only stand lumpishly and watch, could not quite summon the energy to help. Now that he was out of the water, he was acutely aware of his hands, swollen thick and numb.

  In darkness, finally, and windy silence, they crossed the little rise of grass and went down among the farm buildings. Neye fumbled with his stiffened hands, attempting to help the two of them stow away the carts and the lamp pieces in one of the sheds, but when Lisel looked at him with a sort of disgusted embarrassment, he was not surprised. He knew his clumsiness was slowing them down.

  She said, “You can take a shower and sleep inside, I guess.” It was only a little grudging. He was too tired to be other than relieved.

  “We left the raft out where we were planting,” Jin said. “Maybe we should bring it in.”

  She made a hissing sound through her teeth. “Shit. I forgot about that.” Her shoulders seemed to drop a little, and it was that, more than the words she’d spoken or the spurt of disappointment he could feel from her, that reminded him: while he had drunk coffee and rested his knee all morning, they’d been diving in the cove.

  With some care, so it was a straightforward question, he said, “Is it worth going out again?”

  Lisel gave him a perfunctory glance, then said, “It’s a cybernetic,” and looked back at Jin. “I want to put on a dry shirt, at least. I’ll see you down at the skiff.” She went past Neye into the windy darkness.

  To Jin, when it occurred to him, he said, “Is it anchored? Maybe it would just ride out the swells, like a boat would, as long as it’s out on the open water.”

  Jin shook his head. “It’s so damned underpowered. The anchor mode won’t hold it in a gale, and then it would end up on the rocks.”

  Neye followed him through the rain to his building, stood self-consciously beside the shipping crates while the boy peeled off his sodden shirt and looked for a dry one. His own arms felt clammy and cold. He could hear the wind-pushed rain sheeting off the roof of the dobe, could feel the heat in the room and its dry comfort. He did not want to go out again.

  Finally, Jin looked toward him. He had put on the bright yellow tunic. His forearms below the edge of the sleeves seemed thin, knob-wristed, pale. The fine hair stood out with the cold. “Stay put,” he said. “Get a hot bath. You look like your body heat is really down. We don’t need you.”

  Neye had seen the raft at fairly close range. It was heavy enough, he thought it would take at least the three of them to horse it up out of the water. But they were used to handling things themselves, without his help; they must have worked out a method. And the boy spoke matter-of-factly, as if what he said should be indisputable. So hell. Maybe he would just stay inside.

  Jin went out, and for a while Neye stood leaning against the crates. He could hear rain running down through the cistern pipes to the underground, the wind whumping against the outer wall of dobe. After a while he went out too.

  He put his head down and pushed a way along the slick, wet path toward the tide pond. It was very dark and the rain beat almost horizontally against his lowered head. He placed his feet carefully in the puddles between the dank tufts of grass. If he fell now, there would be no one to see it. From the top of the rise, he could see the ocean leaking into the pond along the low notch between the dunes, running thin and fast as snowmelt there where the drone carts had earlier worn marks in the grass. So he turned and went up the steep pathless slope of the seaward dune, stepping carefully in the darkness heel first, sliding a little on the wet grass. From the crest he peered against the wind-driven rain out at the sweep of cove. The sea was breaking just above the tidemark in narrow fluorescent lines of surf.

  It was Jin’s yellow shirt and Lisel’s sand-colored one that he saw, finally, against the darkness. They were not very far below him, bailing rainwater out of the skiff. He thought of waiting, watching them from here. Or going back. They had surely pulled out the raft before, just the two of them. And Lisel might see it only as an extravagant and insincere gesture. But he started over the hill and down to where they were dragging the skiff seaward. As he helped them push the prow out into the swells, he saw Lisel’s face turn, a pale glance of surprise, no more than that. But it was Jin’s hand he felt boosting him up when he had trouble getting his leg over the gunwale into the boat.

  They did not speak to one another. He crouched in the sloppy water between the thwarts, with his hands gripping the ribs of the bottom and the thrum of the little engine coming up through his fingers.

  In the darkness on the choppy water, he could not see the raft, but he thought he knew where it lay, just off the fence line at the point of the north cape. He watched the headland rise like an edge of sky, high and black above the black water. In its shadow, in a wet crosswind, they plied back and forth looking for the raft, saw it finally, low and awash, west of them and just off the rocks.

  Jin turned the stern to the wind so they could come alongside, and when their port side scraped the fiberglass timbers, Lisel went over the edge, crawling out on the heaving deck to secure the line and then as quickly back again. As she crabbed over into the boat, the sea swelled under them both and for a moment she teetered above the water. Neye grabbed for her, caught his hand in her shirt, but she was already in the boat, had never lost her balance. In the darkness he saw her looking back at him gently, felt her kindly amusement.

  The raft was heavy and cumbrous, three or four times as big as the skiff. They towed it endlessly through the darkness. The wind out of the southeast pushed them always north, so Jin finally turned them that way, toward any part of the beach where they could safely push the raft up out of the water. Neye sat hunched behind Lisel, peering against the rain. His eyes had begun to burn a little, but he sought the black line of the shore. Finally, above the sea there was a bumpy dark rise, the dunes.

  Neye crouched on his heels in the bottom of the boat. He put one hand on a gunwale. In front of him he could see the faint rise of Lisel’s spine stiffening under her tunic.

  When the skiff rose on the first comber of surf, Neye went over the side with her. He thought he would be able to stand; instead he sank, and the tide sucked him sideways and down. He was not much aware of the cold, only the utter blackness. His hand touched the skiff, felt it sliding by him, borne in on the water.

  The sea swelled again, pushed him hard against the side of the boat, and he grabbed with both hands, hugged it to him. When his head and shoulders broke above th
e water, he could see, through the smear of wet, Jin, belatedly clambering over the port side into the water. Lisel was right in front of him, bobbing with one arm clasped over the starboard gunwale. She turned her head, looking back at Neye to be sure he was there. They did not speak.

  The bottom of Neye’s feet rubbed the sand. Ahead of him Lisel tried to run, chest-deep in the water, pulling the boat up with her or the reverse. Neye set his heels down hard, but there was no running, only a sluggish torpid sort of striving against the sea.

  Maybe Jin yelled, but there were no words. Neye only felt the sudden bright burn of the boy’s alarm.

  Across the gunwale he could see the tight cap of the boy’s hair plastered so the scalp seemed bare and burnished. And behind him the raft, skewed on its towline, coming up on a white line of surf. Gently its rear end lifted high on the water and it began to come in, quick and light as a chip of wood.

  He did not feel the raft ride down on top of them all. He felt only a sudden unbearable heaviness in his chest. Afterward he was cold, and he thought someone was twisting his leg, or jumping on it.

  He said, “Don’t,” yelled it, and the sea filled his mouth. It was very dark and there was sand in his eyes and his teeth. Sometimes the water was not deep and then he tried to crawl up out of it. He did that several times. After a while, someone—it was Lisel—came and put her shoulder under him and hoisted him up. He wanted to help her, but she staggered up out of the water carrying his whole weight across her back. He could hear the sobbing gasp of her breath, could hear it even over the boom of the ocean. Okay, he wanted to say. I’m okay, put me down. But he did not know what sound would come out if he opened his mouth.

  She let him down or dropped him on gravelly sand, on his back, so the rain falling out of the darkness struck his face and ran in his ears. He lay partly across one of her arms or a leg, and she tugged it out with a fierce whistly sound like a wail, a sound he felt in his bones. He heard her feet go away again, running across the sand, and after that he lay alone in the cold, loud darkness. His head hurt, and hurt more when he vomited thin dribbles of salt water.

  He was alone quite a while before he remembered Jin. He sat up and then, a little later, stood. There was something broken, or rent, this time in his knee. And sticky blood in his eyebrows. But he went down deliberately toward the water.

  She had brought the boy most of the way out of the breakers but then probably she had dropped him and not been able to get him up again. She was hunched over on her knees with his head in her lap so his face was off the sand and out of the shallow low foam of spent surf.

  Neye braced his leg and bent for one of the boy’s arms.

  “Here,” he said.

  Lisel looked up at him abstractedly. There were bluish arcs like bruises beneath the bones of her cheeks. She stood and took Jin’s other arm and they dragged him up, all the way up, out of the water. The boy’s heels scuffed a pale furrow in the sand. At the edge of the hill, Lisel sat again and put Jin’s head again in her lap, and Neye lowered himself to the grass beside her. He did not look at Jin. He peered out at the dark ink line of the horizon. A bead of blood ran down from his eyebrow alongside his nose.

  “He was already dead,” Lisel said after a while. “I went out to him first, but he was already dead. So I left him while I went to look for you.” A little later, as if she thought it would comfort him, she repeated, “He was already dead.” And then, as if she thought to comfort herself, “I couldn’t have helped him.”

  The boy’s head was in her lap, she was holding him by the shoulders, but she didn’t look at him. She looked sideways, away from Neye, up the dark curve of beach. He could see only part of her face, a corner of mouth pulled in like a little drawstring purse.

  Before too long, she put one hand under Jin’s head and lifted it and slid out from under him. When she stood up, Neye could see the dark shine of blood on her hand. She didn’t wipe it off. She said, “It’ll take a while. I’ll have to go clear around on foot to tele for the ambulance.”

  He thought she was asking him something, so he said, “I can wait,” and in a little bit, solemnly, she nodded and started off along the beach. He didn’t want to watch her going away, so he closed his eyes. And then, carefully, he lay beside Jin, on his side, curled a little. The wind blew wet against his spine.

  He didn’t hear Lisel come back to him, but when he opened his eyes she was there, squatting beside him. He felt she had been waiting several minutes. He was the only one of them who was crying, but the tightness, the pain in Neye’s skull now was hers.

  “There isn’t much I can do for the knee,” she said. As if she had come back to him just to say this one thing, something she’d forgotten to say before setting off for the tele. “I could make it quit hurting but you’d have to be careful. If you walked on it, or turned it the wrong way, you could injure yourself more.”

  He did not answer right away. When he did, he just said, “No.”

  She looked at him as Jin sometimes had, sideways, as if she was turning away. There was a quality of reticence about it, or of shyness, that he had not seen in her before. Abruptly, he knew what she would do. When her hand came out, reaching for the bleeding place above his eye, he reached too, clasping her lightly by the wrist.

  “Don’t,” he said. “It’s nothing. It doesn’t hurt.” There was a hardness at the back of his throat so the words came out squeezed and small.

  There were beads of rain or of the sea in her eyelashes. She let him hold her that way, briefly, and then with only a small change in her face she pulled her hand free of him.

  “Yes,” she said. “It does.” And she touched his eye, denying gently several things at once.

  A Story

  CINDY IS BACK IN HOSPITAL— she’s got COPD, is that the right term? Respiratory something—so last night I went down the dock to their place to take care of the cat, and then I had the weirdest experience. I always sit down for a few minutes to talk to the lonesome thing, and I’m sitting at the table and the cat is rubbing against me and purring while I commiserate with him about the absence of the people in his life, and the phone rings. Naturally, I don’t answer it, but I’m within earshot of the message. It’s Mike—or I guess I’d better say it sounds like Mike, exactly like Mike, his rumbly low mutter. The cat when he hears that voice really perks up—he was always more Mike’s cat than Cindy’s—and he stares at the machine. I do too. Mike, or whoever it was, said he was sorry he hadn’t heard from the two of them in a while but he hoped they were doing all right, hoped they were having a good Christmas. He was lonesome, he said, really lonesome, and he loved them both and missed them. Goodbye, and the message clicks off.

  The cat held still for quite a while, like he was waiting for Mike to say something more, and then he went over to the table where they keep the phone, jumped up there, and tried to get inside it. Well, not inside, but he was nosing around the phone base and batting at it with a paw like he thought Mike was hiding behind it or under it. And he launched into a long, forsaken-sounding yowl.

  For a couple of minutes I was knocked off kilter too. Trying to make sense of it, frankly. And then picturing Mike, from wherever he is, saying, Here you go, friend. A ghost story for you.

  So now I’m just trying to figure out how to tell it. Should I say up front, Mike has been dead at this point about four months? And I’m wondering how much I should tell you about Cindy and Mike—kind of an odd couple for sure, but does their backstory have much to do with that weird phone message? Should I tell you how the two of us, me and Mike, used to talk about the speculative stuff I write, how it’s good for asking the big questions, is reality even knowable, that sort of thing? Which would make the story kind of meta if I’m using that term right. Then there’s Mike’s “inklings,” and that weird moment at the hospice right before he died. The cat really did go crazy when he heard the voice on the phone, like he absolutely knew it was Mike calling from wherever he was in the afterlife. And the truth is, fo
r just a minute, when the voice said “I hope you’re both doing well,” I thought so too. I guess I could speculate about whose voice it was if it wasn’t Mike’s, but I don’t think I will, and I’ll leave it up to you, where to land on the ambiguity spectrum.

  So okay, Cindy and Mike. When I moved onto this moorage twenty years ago they had already been here a good ten years, so something like thirty years for them. They were together all that time without ever being married, which I think was Cindy’s choice—they were always up and down, those two.

  She had put herself through law school, and when they met she was working for a big firm downtown, and Mike was tending bar at the Teardrop, the lounge she went to after work. Then he had four or five different jobs over the years but spent a fair amount of time unemployed, which meant money was always a source of tension between them. Maybe that’s why she never put him on her insurance? Medicare kicked in a couple of months before he died; that was all he had. No idea if insurance would have made a difference in finding the cancer before they did, but I’ve wondered about it. And Cindy had walked out of a marriage when she was young, so maybe that was part of the reason she never wanted to marry again?

  The other thing, maybe related, maybe not, is that she had a daughter from an unplanned pregnancy in high school, and gave up the baby, which nobody knew until a couple of years ago. The whole thing came out when the daughter traced her biological parents, and one day Cindy just brought the girl and the adoptive mother around and introduced them to everybody on the moorage. That girl—well, I guess she’s a grown woman at this point—looks exactly like Cindy, and now they talk on the phone every week.

  None of this is probably relevant to a story about Mike calling from beyond the grave, but I keep thinking it’s history, circumstance, something, and maybe I should tell it?