by J. C. Evans
Mom never recovered from losing Dad, and has been more like an unpredictable girlfriend I don’t trust to borrow my shoes than a mother the past seven years, but I still love her. Dad is so far up Penny’s ass it’s ridiculous and way more impressed with the wealth he married into than anything I’ve accomplished in my twenty years of life, but I love him, too. I even love Penny. She’s tried to do the right thing by my little brother and me, stepping in to play Mom when my own mother couldn’t be bothered, and always making sure Erick and I had the best of everything.
I love all three of my parents, but our relationships have become too complicated, and I have no idea what they’ll think when they find out the truth.
Maybe they’ll hate me, maybe they’ll pity me—either way they’ll want me to do the right thing. My parents and stepparent are all very much into Doing the Right Thing, in facing the consequences of your actions and fessing up to your failings. They would want me to stop running, but I can’t and I won’t.
It’s best to end things now, with a clean break, without even turning on my phone to listen to the messages that I have no doubt are waiting in my voicemail box.
I take a deep cleansing breath and let grief wash through me and wash back out again, like a wave lapping against the shore before being absorbed back into the ocean.
The thought of losing touch with Erick hits harder than anyone else, but eventually I loosen my grip on that regret and send it out to sea with the rest. Erick and I aren’t super close, but we have fun together and I’ve always felt obligated to look out for him. To keep him from starving to death when my mom was mired in misery, and pull him aside for a long talk about not doing dumb shit when I caught him dropping acid on the beach with his friends. But he’s graduating from high school this year and going to college next fall. He’s starting his own life and doesn’t need me the way he used to.
Besides, there might come a day when it will be okay to reach out to my little brother. He’s so wrapped up in his own life that he’s never been terribly interested in mine. There was a time when that hurt, but now I’m grateful he’s self-absorbed.
I’m grateful for all the people who don’t care enough to stick their nose into my business, who are so busy with their own personal dramas they haven’t noticed that I’m falling apart.
“Not anymore,” I whisper, shifting my gaze from the trash can to my reflection in the mirror above the sink.
I’ve been avoiding my reflection the past few months, but now I force myself to take a good, long look.
I’ve lost weight, and have faint hollows below my cheekbones for the first time in my life, but I don’t look gaunt or sickly. The new leanness gives my face structure it didn’t have before. The strong angles of my jaw are visible instead of blending into my chin, and my eyes look even larger than they used to. I’ve always thought my eyes were my best feature, but they’re also my greatest weakness. I’ve never been good at hiding what I’m thinking or feeling. It all shows in my eyes.
Or it used to.
Now, holding my own gaze, I can’t see a hint of the giddiness I felt when I entered the bathroom, the sadness I was feeling a moment ago, or the anxiety pricking at my nerve endings doing its best to convince me that crushing a couple of SIM cards won’t be enough to keep my secret safe. I look tired, which is to be expected after a flight to the other side of the world, but not troubled. My eyes are…empty, and only seem to grow emptier the longer I stand staring at myself.
Even when I start to feel disturbed by the lack of emotion in my expression, nothing flickers in my eyes. The electrical lines connecting my feelings to my face have been severed, leaving my soul adrift in my physical body, contained, but not connected.
“Sam? Are you okay in there?” Danny’s voice echoes through the empty bathroom.
“Yes, just brushing my teeth,” I call back, breaking eye contact with my reflection with a sharp shake of my head. “Be out in a minute.”
I fish my toiletry bag out of my purse and give my teeth a quick brush. I mop my face with a cleansing cloth, drip a couple drops of Visine in each eye, and smooth on sunscreen and a fresh coat of peach lip gloss before working curl cream through my fuzzy hair. I concentrate on moving through my post-plane-flight ritual swiftly and efficiently. I don’t linger over the squashed curls at the back of my head, and I don’t make eye contact with my reflection again.
It’s natural to be feeling drained after a ten-hour flight, and there’s no room for existential angst in my fresh start. I’ll just have to fake it until I make it, and one day soon the smiles I’m forcing will come naturally.
Chapter Five
Samantha
I toss my toiletry bag back into my purse and head out of the bathroom, fake smile firmly in place and lies swirling inside my head.
Lies are necessary right now, and I’m not going to hesitate to tell them.
Lies are kinder than the truth, for Danny and me both. I’m lying because I love him. The truth wouldn’t set either of us free, it would only cause more pain and make moving forward impossible. Danny would never be able to look at me the same way, and I couldn’t live with knowing I was the one responsible for bruising his big, tender heart.
“You look nice.” I loop an arm around his waist, squeezing a fistful of his long-sleeved blue tee shirt as we start toward customs. “I brought you a fleece, by the way. It’s in my pack. I figured you wouldn’t be prepared for winter.”
Danny laughs. “The season change didn’t even register until I was standing at the sink brushing my teeth and people kept giving my shorts weird looks. So is it winter here at the end of May?”
“Late autumn, I think.”
Danny hugs me closer. “Good. I love fall.”
“I can’t remember the last time I saw a real one,” I say, excitement creeping back in, banishing the lingering angst. “Probably when I was little and we went to go visit my great grandma in Pennsylvania before she died. I hope we’ll see some color on the way down to our kayaking trip.”
“Kayaking, huh?” Danny pulls his arm from my waist as we reach the end of the customs line, and shifts his backpack around so he can reach the pocket on the front. “You’re full of plans and schemes.”
“I am. I’ve got all kinds of adventures planned.” I keep my smile in place as he pulls out his passport and continues to sift through the outer compartment. “First kayaking, with a stop at a hot spring in the middle of the trip, and then a caving expedition the company calls Descent into the Abyss that sounds terrifying. Should be right up your alley.”
“What about your thing with tight places?” Danny asks, brow furrowing as he continues to shift items around.
“The caves are some of the largest in New Zealand,” I say, playing innocent as I get out my own passport and shuffle forward in line. “The guy I talked to said there weren’t many narrow parts, but there is one stretch where it’s completely pitch black and you have to find your boat with—”
“Babe, I’m sorry, but could you try to call my phone?” Danny asks with a sigh. “I think I might have left it on the plane.”
“You think it was in your pocket? I don’t remember seeing it.” I reach into my purse, checking all the usual pockets before I start shaking my head and allow my sifting to become more frantic, hoping my acting is good enough to pull this off.
“Shit,” I say after a minute. “I think mine is gone, too.”
“You’re kidding.” Danny runs a hand over the top of his now-smooth ponytail as he glances around us. “Do you think someone stole them?”
“I don’t know how.” I continue to move the crap in my purse around for a few moments before I abandon my efforts with a frustrated huff. “But it’s definitely not in here.”
I shake my head again, meeting Danny’s mystified look with one of my own, ignoring the guilt niggling at the back of my brain. “How could this have happened? I didn’t even set my purse down when I went to the bathroom. It’s been right next to me since we
got off the plane.”
Danny curses, “I don’t know, but I’m going to have to hit a payphone as soon as we get through customs and let Caitlin and Gabe know my phone got snatched. Caitlin is supposed to have the baby any day, and I told Gabe to call as soon as they headed to the hospital.”
“Maybe we can get one of those pay as you go phones,” I say. “Just to use for however long we decide to stay. That way we won’t miss the baby news.”
“That’ll probably work,” Danny says. “But we need to call and report our phones stolen, too. I have no idea what kind of information I have saved on mine. All my banking stuff for the business is on there and the login pages for the scheduling portal…”
He pulls in a deep breath. “I am seriously screwed if I have any passwords saved, and I only have a handful of phone numbers memorized. I’m going to have to call Pete and have him pull my client contacts from the computer at the office.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it.
I hate that I’m causing Danny stress, no matter how necessary it was to ditch our phones.
“It’s not your fault.” He wraps an arm around my shoulders. “And hey, at least we still have our passports and our wallets. Could have been much worse.”
His choice of words makes me smile as I lean into him. “You’re right. It could have been.”
Things could have been so much worse, but they aren’t.
I made it out of the country before the shit hit the fan and have eliminated the first threat to our new beginning. I’m not stupid or naïve enough to believe everything will be clear sailing from here on out, but so far it seems like the fates are with me.
Or at least not totally against me, and for now that’s good enough.
Chapter Six
Three Years Earlier
Danny
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and the music in its roar.”
-Lord Byron
Some days the ocean is the best friend you’ll ever have. Some days, the ocean is out for your blood, and you never know what kind of day it’s going to be until it’s too late to make a damn bit of difference.
No matter how good a swimmer you are, how savvy you get at reading the waves, or how careful you try to be, the ocean is better, savvier, hungrier. Mother Ocean will give you joy, hope, and comfort, but she will also drag you low, strip you bare, and make all your nightmares real.
The ocean is where all the oldest nightmares were born, and where they still live, washing in and out on the tide, waiting for humans to drop their guard and step into the water…
I learned about the ocean’s dark side my first year on the island, when I got smacked in the head by a surfboard, got so dizzy I didn’t know which way was up, and nearly drowned. If Sam hadn’t been there to tow me to shore, I might not have lived to see my fourteenth birthday.
The violence of the ocean shouldn’t take me by surprise, but when I look up from the book I’m reading—a mystery about aliens taking over the earth I wouldn’t have touched if Sam hadn’t put it in my hands but that now I can’t get enough of—to see Sam struggling against the current a few hundred feet from shore, I can’t believe she’s really in trouble.
But she’s the strongest swimmer I know, flits through my head even though I know that doesn’t mean anything.
The ocean doesn’t care if you’re Hercules with a side of Thor. If the ocean’s decided to fight you, the best you can hope for is to live long enough for it to lose interest.
I know this, but still I sit on my ass for a good thirty seconds after I see her, some stupid part of my brain refusing to process that Sam is fighting like hell to get back to the beach in between sets of punishing waves that toss her farther out to sea every time they roll her under. By the time I throw my book to the towel and surge to my feet, she’s already ten feet farther out.
By the time I race like hell for the ocean, snatching some kid’s abandoned boogie board off the sand as I run, Sam is getting slammed by a shoulder high wave so hard that when she goes under she doesn’t come up again for a long, long time.
I hit the water at a sprint, muscles burning as I fight my way past the shore break, heart lodging in my throat until I see her dark head surface in the trough, her shoulders heaving as she pulls in a breath.
“I’m coming, Sam!” I scream as I shove out into the deep water, using the boogie board like a kick board and kicking like crazy toward her, hoping the board will be enough to keep us both afloat until we can get out of the rip tide.
I scream her name again, but I’m not sure she can hear me over the roar of the surf and I need all the oxygen in my lungs to keep kicking like hell as I duck under waves that are curling hard overhead, clawed fingers determined to scratch through skin and draw blood. It’s a brutal swim, but I make good time and I’m almost close enough to touch her when a double wave catches the front of my board and flips me hard.
If I’d taken the time to leash the board to my wrist, I would have been able to let go and use my arms to fight free of the roll, but I didn’t. If I let go of the board now, I’m never going to get my hands on it again, and Sam and I might both die because of it. I’m a strong swimmer, but not as strong as she is, and definitely not strong enough to tow her to shore without something to help me stay afloat.
I tighten my grip on the boogie board and concentrate on holding my breath while I’m spun like a top and punched down toward the bottom of the ocean. Finally, after seconds that stretch on forever, with nothing but the darkness behind my eyes and the muted rumble of the water frothing above my head to keep me company, the wave decides it’s done with me and spits me back up toward the light.
The second I break the surface, I suck in air and shake the hair from my eyes, blinking as I scan the water around me, trying to orient myself and figure out how far I am from Sam.
“Danny!” she screams. “Over here!”
I spin in the water, spotting her not five feet away. Our gazes lock as another monster wave bears down and then we’re both pulling in air and dropping beneath the curl.
The moment of eye contact lasts less than two seconds, but in those two seconds everything that needs to be said passes between us. I tell her to hang tight and I’ll be there as soon as the wave passes over. She tells me that she’s scared to death, but she can hold on for a few more minutes.
Ever since we were kids, I’ve been able to read everything I need to know in her eyes. How to give her comfort, how to give her pleasure, when she wants me to tease her into talking about the shit that’s bothering her, and when she wants to sit next to me and share a silent moment. I never have to ask Sam what she’s thinking. I never have to wonder how something I’ve said made her feel.
And I’ve never been more grateful for that than when I break through the surface, scissor kick to her side, and slide the boogie board into her hands. I know without either of us wasting a breath that she’s okay now, and we’re going to get through this together.
We duck under another wave, but by the time the next one is rolling toward us, Sam is on the boogie board in front of me and I’m leveraged above her, holding on tight as we catch the swell and ride the crest diagonally toward shore. We get pounded once or twice, but we stay together, hold on tight to the board, and within ten minutes we’ve team boogie boarded back to water shallow enough to stand in.
We lock hands, and I squeeze her fingers tight as we struggle out of the water and collapse onto the sand, gasping for breath.
“Shit,” Sam says after a moment, her breath still coming fast. “I thought I was going to die.”
“I thought you were, too,” I say, the words making me laugh for some crazy reason.
“Shit,” Sam repeats, laughing along with me. “That’s the word that kept going through my head, over and over again, shit shit shit shit shit. I thought I was going
to die and my last words were just one long stream of profanity. I’m so disappointed in myself.”
I put my arm around her shoulders and pull her against me while we both continue to laugh. Her skin is cold and damp, but it has never felt better to have her in my arms.
Before today, I wouldn’t have said I take being able to touch Sam for granted, but as I press a kiss to her forehead and hug her closer, I realize I do. I take for granted that she’s going to be waiting for me every summer when I fly back to the island and that this perfect thing we have is always going to be perfect and no one will ever be able to take it away.
I feel invincible when I’m with her, but nothing is invincible, not even a love like ours.
“I’m going to think of you,” I say when we’ve finally stopped laughing and are sitting, staring at picturesque Hamoa Bay where Sam might have died if I hadn’t looked up from my book in time.
“I was thinking of you, too,” Sam said, understanding what I mean without me having to explain. “I didn’t want you to have this beautiful beach ruined for you forever.”
“It would have been more than the beach.” Something deep in my bones recoils from the thought of Maui without Sam. “I would never have come back to the island. Ever.”
“Don’t say that.” She pulls back to look up at me. Her face is still pale, but her eyes are sparkling with their usual life. “I love this island, and I love all the memories we’ve made here. I wouldn’t want you to stay away from places that remind you of good times because one place reminded you of something bad.”
“You dying would be worse than bad, psycho.” I brush my thumb gently across her cheek, rubbing away some of the sand stuck to her skin. “I can’t imagine anything worse. I love you so fucking much.”
“I love you, too,” she says, eyes shining when she smiles. “Thanks for saving my life.”
