In the Deep

by White, Loreth Anne

  He yelled. The boat rocked back, and I stumbled backward and fell into the captain’s seat, the fishing knife still in hand. I stared at him, trying to balance my brain, feeling very drunk. I grabbed the targa bar, pulled myself up. I planted my feet wide, keeping my knees bent and supple so I could move and sway with the boat. We were going around in another circle, and the swells were broadsiding us again. One big wave could send us both overboard. There would be no one to rescue us. I needed Martin back at the wheel. I had to free him if I wanted to get home safely. I had to be careful, though, be both slow and steady yet work fast because the line was slicing deeper into his hand, and his arm was now dripping blood where I’d cut him. His complexion was white, his eyes glassy with fear.

  I fought to bring the focus back into my vision, and I brought the blade up to the taut line at his neck, worried I was going to pitch forward and sink it right into his throat, and that dark seed, that inky secret part of me, could almost visualize doing it, wanted to do it. To punish him for terrorizing me.

  I sliced through the fishing line. The rod suddenly whipped free as it was snatched into the sea and sucked into the deep, swirling, foamy blue. A wave hit the hull and the knife was knocked out of my hands. As it flipped backward, the blade cut across the backs of my fingers. The knife hit the floor. My heart thudded as I saw my own blood welling. It wasn’t bad. Focus.

  Martin staggered to the controls and sank onto the chair, the lure dangling down from his neck. He reset the course of the Abracadabra so we now had the swell at our back.

  “What . . . what does my throat look like?” he croaked. “Is . . . is it bad?”

  I fought a wave of nausea and took a closer look at the damage. Bile surged into my throat. I couldn’t see properly because his neck was bleeding now. “Wait.” I wiped my bloody hand on my pants and reached for my backpack. I took out my sweatshirt and pressed it gently to Martin’s throat, mopping up some of the blood so I could see better.

  “Two of the three hooks have gone right in, barbs and all. And they’ve ripped some skin where they were pulled.”

  “My arm? What about my arm?”

  I pushed up his sleeve. The cut was clean and it wasn’t deep. I pressed on it and tightly wrapped a bandanna from my backpack around the wound.

  “Reel in the lines,” he ordered as he steered us back toward land.

  With shaking limbs and blurring vision, I struggled to wind in all the lines. I hooked the lures safely into the rod eyes near the reels so they wouldn’t swing around and snare anyone else. My hands were slippery with blood. It was my blood, his blood. It stained my jacket and pants. I adjusted my cap and got blood on that, too. I set all the rods back into the rod holders while Martin kept the Abracadabra on course. I collected the fishing knife and the gaff from the bottom of the boat and stashed them carefully in the compartment that ran along the side so we wouldn’t stand on either the blade or the sharp gaff tip and incur more injuries.

  Martin ordered me to sit down, and he increased speed. We began to bang and thump toward home. I saw him wince each time we hit a big swell.

  “Aren’t you going to radio in your injury?” I yelled over the engine and the wind.

  “And have a whole bloody entourage of ambulances waiting? No fucking way.” Vitriol laced his words. I hated the way he was cursing. I honestly had not heard him do this before—not in Canada. Not on our trips, either.

  “But that would be good, right?”

  “This shit with hooks happens all the time—just need someone to push the barbs through the flesh, cut off the barbs, and pull out the shanks. I can drive to the hospital. They can do it there.”

  “I can drive you.”

  “No, you bloody can’t! You’re fucking three sheets to the wind. Jesus, Ellie.”

  “Martin, please don’t swear.”

  He mimicked me in a child’s voice: “Martin, please don’t swear.” He shot me a chilling look. “How about you stop popping pills and getting completely blotto every time you face a tiny bloody challenge, huh, Ellie? How about that? This is your fault, you know that?”

  “It’s not my fault.”

  “If you’d been sober, if you hadn’t been sneaking pills and downing wine coolers while I was fishing, you could have gotten that net under the fish instead of losing it overboard. We would have been going home with a fish instead of a fucking hook in my neck.”

  I fell silent, my heart thumping in my ears. Horrified by his language, his vitriol, by how ugly he looked with that rage twisting his face. My gaze fell to the wine cooler bottles that had rolled to the back of the boat. I shifted my gaze to the sky. A vague memory stirred. I’d asked him if he’d brought water. He’d told me to look in the cooler. All I’d found were the cold alcoholic drinks. I’d refrained from opening a bottle. But after more than three hours of trolling back and forth around the FAD buoy with no water, under the relentless sun, with salt drying my lips, I’d buckled and reached for an ice-cold cooler because it was part fruit juice and I was desperate. That was the last thing I recalled before waking up on the bottom of the boat. Humiliation and anger burned into my eyes as a vehemence rose inside me. Hatred—that’s what I felt. It was pure white and black and dark and hot. Hatred for this man. My husband. I truly abhorred him right now. I felt I could kill him, wished I had.

  When we neared the Point of No Return, I could see the surf had risen even higher. Throngs of spectators lined the headlands in the late-afternoon sun. I could hear the roar of the breaking waves. Getting into the river mouth was going to be worse than getting out.

  THEN

  ELLIE

  People came running down to the boat launch as we limped in on the Abracadabra. Martin threw the bowline out to Zog as he waded into the water to meet us. Zog began to pull us into the shallows. His son grabbed the gunwale and helped guide us in until we bumped up onto the sand.

  The young brunette from the standup paddleboard rental place came running over the lawn toward us, two men following behind her.

  “Willow saw you in her scope,” Zog said as he and his son held the Abracadabra steady while I tried to climb out. “She said you guys looked like you were in trouble—are you good, mate?”

  Martin was holding my sweatshirt over his neck. Blood covered his arm.

  “God, you’re bleeding, Martin,” Rabz said as she hurriedly waded into the water, worry tight in her face. “Ellie, you’re all covered in blood. What in the hell happened out there?”

  A woman covered her mouth as Martin removed the balled-up shirt from his throat and showed them all the monstrosity of a purple squid lure that dangled from the hooks in his neck. Someone swore.

  “Do you need an ambulance?” yelled someone with a cell phone from the grassy bank.

  “No ambulance. Please,” Martin said as I clambered over the side of the boat and fell with a splash onto my butt in the water. I scrambled up onto my feet and waded to shore. I started up the road, wet shoes squelching.

  “Ellie?” said Willow, coming up behind me. “Are you okay?”

  “It’s her bloody fault!” yelled Martin after me. “She did this! Bloody drunk!”

  I began to run. Willow ran after me as I crossed the lawn in front of the SUP rental place, aiming for the shortcut river trail to our home. Blood boomed in my head. My whole body shook with a cocktail of rage and shame and horror. I stumbled, still feeling spacey, and I still couldn’t figure out how or why or what exactly had transpired out at the FAD.

  “What happened?” Willow asked as she caught up behind me.

  I put my head down and walked faster, tripping every now and then on raised bits of grass.

  “Ellie—” She reached for my arm and turned me to face her. “What happened out there?”

  “We shouldn’t have gone out. He did this. On purpose. He wanted to scare me. Damn him . . . he . . . he knows I’m afraid. Damn him!”

  Willow’s gaze lowered over my shaking, wet body. I was smeared with blood. I had to look
as drunk as I felt. I probably appeared to her like a loose cannon, a wild madwoman dangerous to my own husband and to myself. Someone you shouldn’t take out on a boat alone because she would cause trouble. They could all see it—that was the message they were getting. That was the message Martin was screaming about down at the launch—Ellie the lunatic. Ellie the psycho. Ellie with an addiction problem. They would all have seen the empty cooler bottles rolling around in the bottom of the boat. And one thing I was learning fast about Martin was that he had pride. Arrogant, alpha-male, chest-thumping pride. And God help anyone who undermined that and made him look foolish. He was the kind of man who blamed his tools or his employees—or his wife—when he got a hook in his neck because he had foul-hooked a fish and screwed up. As nice as he’d seemed back in the Cook Islands lagoon, he actually got off on making me scared.

  I took in a deep and shuddering breath and said, “I . . . I’m sorry. I need to be alone right now.”

  She eyed me in silence for a moment. Then quietly she said, “Why don’t you come and see me tomorrow, okay? Or whenever. Because you look like you could use someone to off-load on.” She glanced over her shoulder at the small crowd gathering around the Abracadabra at the boat launch, and I sensed her assessing the situation, computing. She turned to face me. “I’m trained, Ellie. I can help.” She paused. “At the least, I can help you get help.”

  I stared into her clear eyes and wanted to cry. I wanted to fold myself into her and let her hug me. And just hold me. Like I’d wanted someone to hold me when my mom had died. I missed Dana. I missed my old friends and my old life. I even missed my goddamn father, which was pathetic. Because he’d failed to hug me all those times I’d needed him most after my mom overdosed. I swiped moisture from my eyes with a trembling, bloodied hand and nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “But you’re okay right now?” Willow asked. “Physically—you’re not injured anywhere?”

  I shook my head. My hand wasn’t badly cut. It wasn’t even worth a mention.

  She moistened her lips. “How about emotionally?”

  Tears suddenly streamed down my face. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

  “Let me walk you home.”

  I took a step backward, shook my head, and held up both my hands, palms out, and I turned and staggered toward home.

  She called out behind me, “Come and see me, Ellie! Or call. Anytime. I mean it—day or night, okay?”

  I nodded and kept going.

  When I blundered down our driveway, I saw the curtains in the window next door twitch. A shadow moved. That woman in the window again.

  Watching.

  THEN

  ELLIE

  I entered through the open garage door, palmed off my Nike ball cap, and threw it into the corner, onto the concrete floor. I kicked off my bloodied sneakers, shucked out of my bloodied and wet windbreaker, and tossed them into a crumpled heap on top of the cap. Breathing hard, I wriggled out of the bloodstained pants and threw the pants onto the pile. Heart thudding in my chest, I marched out of the garage’s side door wearing just my panties and damp T-shirt. The woman watched from the window as I crossed the lawn. I flipped her a finger. She ducked back into the shadows.

  Inside the house I marched straight for the wine fridge. I uncorked a top-of-the-line sauvignon blanc and filled a big glass. I gulped down half the contents of the glass, refilled it, then carried the glass and bottle into the living room. I plopped my butt down onto the sofa, drank deeply, topped up my glass again, and reached for the remote. I clicked on a mindless Netflix series and thought of Dana and began to cry. I finished my drink and poured yet another, desperate to get numb, to blunt the images of blood flashing through my brain, to quell the rage in my heart that was tipping me toward violent and heinous thoughts of stabbing Martin to death. I was frightened of myself, of my own mind. My own thoughts. I wanted to hide from me—this terrible me who was emerging like a demon inside my own body.

  I considered taking another pill, then recalled I’d left some pills in the pockets of the pants in the garage. I decided against going outside to retrieve them. I refused to allow that freak woman in the window to see me stumble drunkenly over the lawn. Instead, I fetched another Ativan from upstairs, came back down, finished the bottle of wine, opened another, and settled back into the sofa, still in my panties and damp T-shirt. Finally a calm descended on me, and I began to feel as though I could manage myself.

  That’s when Martin came in the front door. I didn’t even tense. It was like he was in a time and place removed from my present.

  He walked slowly into the kitchen, eyes fixed on me as he set his keys on the granite counter. He stared at the drink in my hand; then his gaze went to the empty bottle on the counter. His mouth tightened. He had a fresh bandage on his neck. I saw another bandage around his arm where the knife had cut him. He looked pale. Strange.

  I waved my glass at him. “So they got the hooks out.” My words came out slurred. My head was spinning, but in a nice, delightful way. “Here’sh to the good docs at the hoshpital.” I raised my glass in cheers and took a swig. “How’d they do it?”

  “They pushed the hooks, including the barbs, right through my flesh,” he said coolly. “Following the natural curve of the hook until the point and the barb poked out the other side. Then they cut the points and barbs off with bolt cutters, then drew the shanks back out the way they went in. Luckily the hooks missed vital parts.”

  “Yeah. Lucky. And the arm? Stichesh?”

  “Several.” He came slowly toward me. As he neared, a shiver of warning prickled over my skin, but I held my ground. He seated himself on the ottoman close to me, within arm’s reach of my wine bottle. The lights in the neighbor’s house went on—I saw the flare of light through the narrow floor-to-ceiling window between the living room and the kitchen. It had gotten dark outside. I hadn’t noticed the time passing. That woman could probably see right into our living room at night.

  “We should get blinds. That woman ish always watching.” Again my words ran into each other, but I didn’t care. I took another sip.

  “What woman?”

  “That biddy next door. Watch, watch, watch, then she ducks behind lace curtains.”

  He frowned.

  “You’ve seen her, right?”

  “No.”

  This irritated me. “Of course you have to have seen the watcher next door.”

  “Ellie—”

  “Wait—” I wobbled my finger at his face. “Just you wait before you go Ellie-ing me.” I set my glass clumsily on the coffee table and leaned forward. “What in the hell were you trying to prove taking me out like that? In that bad weather—the swell so high, the wind so strong? Going so far out? For so long—with no water to drink? Were you trying to scare me? Or kill us both, or what? Even Rabz said we shoulda gone out earlier.”

  He regarded me in simmering silence.

  Be careful, Ellie. He looks dangerous.

  “Is it a power thing, Martin? Is that what this is? Ish this something I’m just learning about you? And you know what I think? I think you set me up to drink wine coolers by not bringing water. Did you set me up? Did you intend to return me to the boat ramp drunk so everyone could see—a whole cliff full of onlookers, a whole heap of witnesses at the boat launch? Did you tell all the doctors at the hospital your wife had done this to you because she was drunk?”

  His face turned puce. His features looked weird. I didn’t recognize him.

  Stop, Ellie. Stop now.

  “When we went for a walk yesterday, Martin, you told me that people would line the cliff when the waves on the bar started breaking. You knew there would be tons of witnesses there.”

  “No one forces you to get drunk, Ellie. No one is forcing you to take pills. You’re an addict. You’re ill. Do you understand this? You have a problem and you need help. You know what I did? I asked the doctor at the hospital for a referral for you, to a medical professional who handles addiction issues.” He
set a card onto the coffee table next to the wine bottle. Dr. Kenneth Marshall.

  I felt a change happening in me—the Shame Monster rearing its head, unfurling its big dark body inside my chest, awakening through my haze. Everyone in town was learning fast that Martin Cresswell-Smith’s wife was a drunk, an addict. First my apparent scene at the Puggo. Then at the boat launch. Now the doctors at the hospital. Poor Martin.

  “So why did you take me out in that weather, then? Even Rabz said—”

  “Because I wanted to distract you from the meds, for heaven’s sakes. I wanted for us to do something together, to get you out of the house, away from the bloody pills.”

  “Liar.”

  He blinked. Shock showed on his face. It spurred me.

  “You wanted to terrify me. And this morning when you brought me breakfast in bed, why did you not mention my behavior at the Puggo? You acted like nothing was wrong, like nothing bad had happened. You’re messing with my head—you want me to think I’m mad.” I reached for my glass, took another fortifying swig, and waved the glass at him. “You know what thish ish, Martin? It’s called gaslighting.”

  The word hung.

  Air quivered, hot. The fan up high in the vaulted ceiling whopped slow paddles of air.

  “Go to bed,” he said softly, darkly. “You’re out of it and you’re being paranoid, psychotic. We’ll deal with this in the morning—”

  “No. No, we deal with this right now.” I jabbed my fingers on the coffee table. “Why are you doing this to me? I wanted a fresh start here, a clean happy new life—”

  “Except it’s not clean, is it, Ellie? You arrived all drugged up right out of the airport gate, and now you want to blame me? No one is doing anything to you. You’re doing this all by yourself.”

  “Is it because of Rabz?”

  His face paled. He went very still.

  “I want to know, Martin, right now—tell me now. How long have you been screwing Rabz?”

  Silence.

  The fan paddled. The air simmered.