The Girl in the Water

by A J Grayson

  My heart always rejoices when I see David, and today I need that rush more than most. I rush forward, grab him by his fleshy, muscular shoulders, and pull his lips towards mine. They’re parted even as we meet and I lock us into a long, warm embrace. It extends into a span of time I really couldn’t measure, and wouldn’t want to try. I am a woman who knows true love; and when you know that love, you don’t try to understand it.

  Finally, our lip-lock breaks. ‘Well, hell, good to see you too.’ David’s face is a wide grin. Stubble, firm cheekbones, that slightly olive skin with its twinkle of shine – ‘It isn’t oily, babe, that’s Mediterranean sexy!’ Everything is familiar and welcoming. A touch of my pink lipstick has clung to his chin. ‘I take it life in the shop wasn’t all that bad today?’

  I’m shaking my head, kicking off my favourite retro flats with an overly girlish motion, like Dorothy flipping her slippers to an unheard musical beat. It’s a playful gesture that made him laugh once, and which I’ve repeated a hundred times since. My shoes wind up somewhere in the corner, lopsided, near Sadie’s plastic water dish.

  A flash of white light at the edges of my vision – to be ignored. It’s nothing. The remnants of a migraine. I do so often get those.

  ‘Work was fine, David. I’m just happy to be home.’

  The flipping of shoes has roused Sadie to life. She’s already at David’s feet, looking pleased to have the household back in proper assembly. Her orange fur droops against the tiles beneath her as she saunters over and shoves her snout against my ankles. I tap at her head and give the usual ‘That’s a lovely puppy’ utterance in baby-talk tones, which sends her tail wagging.

  Wagging. A breeze. Wind …

  I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s always been amazed how quickly our thoughts can take us to another place. The present moment is a spectacular case in point. The day, the house, the dog – they all coalesce, and suddenly they’re all gone. All I see in this instant is a seaside walkway in the Marin Headlands, a vividly blue sky, and the sound of seagulls squawking over steep hillsides that abruptly end in cliffs sheering down to the Pacific.

  A good memory, this one. I permit it to sweep through me without resistance.

  I was hiking north, that’s how I remember it, and at a good clip. Years ago. The shoreline on my left lay at the bottom of cliff faces that lifted up in brilliant severity from sea level, with the hills on my right dressed in spring wildflowers that almost concealed the cement remains of the naval turrets and bunkers that had been active in these hills until the end of the Second World War. In the distance, only grey-blue seas and low clouds over the minuscule Farallon Islands. Beyond them, nothing at all until Hawaii.

  I was alone, as I always was, and lost in grey thoughts that clashed with the bright skies. I was walking with sticks, those retractable kinds that look like ski poles but cost twice as much. He was at the front of a group of two or three, walking in the opposite direction. I don’t think I noticed him first. It was the other way around.

  ‘Excuse us,’ he said, politely. The wind was blowing (a given; it was the Pacific coast in early spring – the wind is always blowing). He was covered in a puffy red coat that looked as if it had been injected with a little more stuffing than required, giving his torso the appearance of a badly packaged tomato.

  It could have ended right there, our first encounter. It could have been our only. But in a moment out of a children’s cartoon I sidestepped left when it should have been right, my eyes downcast, on my feet rather than on the strange tomato person in front of me. He did the same, and a second later our bodies collided – heads first, with the requisite crack, and then chests and arms and hands to keep each other from falling.

  The way things begin.

  ‘Oh, Hell, I’m so sorry,’ he said, reaching out to stabilize me. ‘That was entirely my fault.’

  ‘No, it was mine,’ I freed a hand to rub my forehead. And I looked up, wincing in the slanted light that suddenly felt too bright.

  That’s when our eyes connected for the first time. That magical, painful, wonderful moment.

  David’s eyes were, and are, a stranger hazel than most I’ve seen before. Blue and green in equal mixture, but they have brown centres, just around the iris. Something unique. I must have stared into them longer than social norms would allow because the next words were his, awkward and accompanied by a glance that broke mine and tried to find some other landmark on the barren horizon at which he could stare.

  ‘At least we’re both still upright.’ His words were cheesy and superfluous, but I didn’t care.

  ‘I should pay more attention to where I’m going,’ I offered. Sheepish grin. Foolish girl. I wished I had stronger words to say, but I had’t been feeling myself, and those words didn’t come.

  ‘It happens,’ he answered. The profundity of our conversation was truly epic. ‘These surroundings, they can … they can take you in.’

  And there was his smile. The first time I’d seen it. The one I’ve grown to know so well over the years. One too many teeth in an otherwise nicely balanced mouth. That cute, very cute, face, bordered with slightly disorderly locks of black hair and a refreshingly masculine touch of stubble on his chin. I’ve never understood women who don’t go for stubbled chins and hairy chests. They’re an incomprehensible demographic, too influenced by the wax mannequins that pass for men in magazines. I’ve always gone for the Chia Pets of the race.

  The skin around his eyes bunched as he smiled, full of warmth and sincerity. ‘I’m David,’ he’d finally offered, reaching out a hand with its glove considerately removed. ‘And these guys over here’ – he gestured towards the men a short distance behind him, who didn’t seem to notice – ‘are my work colleagues.’ One of the men might have nodded, but seemed too chilled to consider approaching and reaching out a hand himself. He was huddled with a third member of their party, stood a few steps away, engrossed in a gathering of sea birds diving for fish over the edges of the cliffs. I might have been on Mars for all they appeared to notice me.

  I raised my hand to David’s and felt a powerful grip.

  ‘I’m Amber,’ I answered. ‘It’s … it’s lovely to meet you.’ The words were almost flirtatious, like nothing I’d ever uttered before.

  It made him smile again.

  Then, the strangest thing of all. I spoke not only flirtatiously, but with an openness completely uncharacteristic of everything inside me.

  ‘I’m staying just up the way, by Muir Beach. At the Pelican Inn. If you … you know, ever wanted to bump into each other again.’

  In the midst of my confusion, wit. Spectacular.

  Or maybe not quite spectacular, but definitely more than was normal for me.

  I cringe at the memory, but it’s that wonderful cringe of something so horrible, something that could have gone so terrifically, spectacularly wrong, that ended up going just the opposite. It wasn’t two nights later, or three, that David crouched his big frame through the short, barrel-wood door of the Pelican Inn, ‘just stopping by’ with the hope to say hello. It was the same evening. The very same.

  There was something magical on the coast that day. That’s the only explanation. Something magical that brought me out of my shell. That brought us together.

  And now we’re here, in our kitchen in the little town of Windsor, California, standing in front of the refrigerator on which an orange paper cutout of the word ‘Bump!’ remains the perpetual reminder of our first meeting. We’re still locked together, bodies close, though the kiss has ended. There’s beer on David’s breath – the scent of more than one. Usually means a long day in the shop, and the need to get out from behind the pharmacy counter for one or two before heading home. I have a fleeting desire to ask him about the mundane details of his day, but it passes quickly. Work is work. For today, his is behind him, mine’s behind me.

  But I’m not wholly in control, and that conviction bends. The thoughts that come are an invasion, not an invitation. Into the s
wirl of memory floats a river with a bend I don’t recognize. The woman I’d read about on the computer and thought about so vividly on the drive home. The unexplained.

  In this intimate moment I can feel goosebumps rise on my arms.

  It almost happens. I almost touch that buzz of electricity that pulls my world out of order and into the mêlée of impulse and memory. I can tell I’m right at the edge of it. There are so many draws.

  But I’m anchored in an emotion that’s more powerful than them all. I have my means of resistance. My solidity and my rock, firm and stable in my arms, with his big, beautiful smile.

  I pull David’s face towards mine again. I can taste the beer on his lips, and I push him towards the door.

  9

  Amber

  It happened in the night, somewhere in the darkness of the drawn curtains and the muffled lampshades, beneath the cotton sheets and in the midst of the heady scent of all that goes on in the dark room of a husband and wife who’ve found their way there by stumbling up their staircase, falling into bed as clothes are thrown at walls and ceilings.

  Somewhere in the midst of all that, the strangeness closed in.

  Our bodies were as tightly wound together as two bodies can be. My chin was pressed into his neck, my lips somewhere near his ear, his whole body slippery with anticipation. His breathing was heavy, rhythmic. Mine was keeping pace.

  Then came the flash of light. An image, bursting into my mind. A stranger’s face, loving and peaceful and kind and wicked and cruel, all at once. One of Cinderella’s sinister stepsisters, only far more beautiful.

  I suddenly remembered the bookshop. The headline, my hours on the Internet, and something beyond all the details I’d read. Someone else’s games and mysteries and … wrongs. My whole body suddenly felt the immense, overwhelming wrongness of the world. And I remembered the highway, the flashes of my thoughts and fears on the drive instantly back before my eyes. The image. The face.

  And I can hear whimpering, and crying; the utterances of a creature, crying out and asking me to know its pain. A judgement, cascading into my present.

  And in my embrace with my solidity and my rock, my arms wrapped around David’s fiery chest, I said it. The single word that echoed out to me from that strange, white darkness.

  A name. Her name.

  ‘Emma.’

  I don’t know where it came from, why it made my lips move. But her name was suddenly there, and I couldn’t keep it to myself.

  ‘Emma.’

  I could feel David’s body go rigid beneath me. There was ice. The cessation of everything. And then the world stopped, and started to fade away.

  10

  David

  It pains me to think that Amber might start to understand. There are so many things a husband and a wife share, but there are also things we can’t. She and I can never share the truth. Not this truth. It would destroy her. It’s only the lies that keep us alive, and keep us together.

  I’ve struggled with this fact countless times. Since childhood it’s been engrained in all of us that truth is what liberates, and it alone. It will set you free – such a pithy saying, and probably as a general rule it holds true. But not always. No, not always. Sometimes truth is the greatest form of slavery.

  At one point in my life I would have rejected that premise with all my energy – I’d have spat out that lies have absolutely no place in life, that they lead only to darkness and torment. That ought to be argued as a matter of principle. But I simply can’t. I won’t. Experience sometimes proves right what social norms insist are wrong.

  Everything I’ve built with Amber is a lie. I admit that. It’s all facade. That’s what makes it work – for me, for her. A beautiful, artistic, warm facade of manufactured reality. It isn’t true, perhaps. That depends on your definition. But it’s real.

  It’s been real since that day in the Marin Headlands when – for all Amber knows, or ever will – we met for the first time. That happy little headbutt above the sea, the little sidestepping dance that forced the moment not to pass but linger. Some might say the staging of it, the weeks of thoughtful planning, of following her movements and learning her itineraries, of making sure I’d be on just the same path at just the same time, were manipulative or false. But no one accuses a man who plots out a typical first date of being sinister for doing so – deliberating what flowers to buy, what restaurant to go to, what music to ‘accidentally’ have playing on the car stereo during the drive. It’s normal, all of it.

  Is what I’ve done really so different? Only the circumstances are out of the norm, and for damned good reasons.

  And I still have means of rescuing the situation. Tools. Resources. Not everything is lost.

  This is a world I’m not willing to let fall apart.

  11

  Not every den of torture looks like what we’re given to expect. Like what the storybooks tell us we should see there. It is possible that there are those which fit the stereotype: dark, damp stone walls with old chains hanging from hooks on the ceiling, the devices of abuse crusted with dirt and gore.

  It’s possible.

  But reality can be more hellish than those props. Strip away the myth, and what’s left behind – what’s left to be real – is something different. Something worse.

  It’s a basement, though not because there is any particular power to darkness or to being underground. It’s a basement because basements bar sound better than ground-level living rooms, and though there isn’t usually that much noise involved in the way torture really works, one does want to guard against even the remotest possibilities.

  It is furnished nicely, if simply. The carpeting is higher grade than discount, the walls are a muted tan. There are bookshelves with nondescript volumes – the kind that bespeak a degree of education but not an excess of wealth – and a small desk in one corner, with an old tube-style television on a table in another. The chequered fabric sofa with pull-out bed is the centrepiece of the wall to the right, as one enters, and the door itself is wood-panelled with a knockoff brass knob. The prefab sort with a lightly marked up, push-button lock.

  The only sign of the room’s real purpose is the sturdy chrome bolt lock that’s been added above the knob. An ordinary basement den, with no windows or external exits, doesn’t have a deadbolt fitted towards the interior hallway. Especially not the kind that is key operated only, from both sides.

  The kind that, once locked, keeps you in as well as out.

  12

  Amber

  As all days do, the new one that began when the daylight crept over the hills has rolled through its usual routines. It’s brought the sun and home and work, but I haven’t been seeing them in a bright light. This day was inaugurated differently, and as it began, so it carried on.

  Differently.

  I arrived at work at 8.50 a.m. It should have been 8.30 a.m., and I should have been in better cheer, but there’s only so much control one can exercise over the ebbs and flows of life. I was late, grumpy, and had been praying solely for a lack of conversation and an empty path between the front door and my desk.

  That I made it through Classical Fiction and New Releases en route to my periodicals corner, past the coffee kiosk, arriving at my desk without interruption, felt like the first bit of unmitigated good news of the day. My unusual tardiness meant the bookshop was already bustling with customers, and someone else had already gone through the day’s delivery packs, at least enough to get a few copies of the morning papers on the racks in time for the day’s first push. I’d probably end up being scolded for thrusting that role onto someone else by my absence, but I would simply have to face that.

  Mitch had left a cup of tea on my desk, though his office at this moment was empty. I sighed, marginally disappointed with myself for being relieved, but I simply wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have interacted well if he’d been there in his usual cheer. When you’re in a pissy mood the cheerfulness of others is doubly revolting.

&
nbsp; I popped the plastic lid off the Peet’s tea and drew in a long sip, taking advantage of the distraction to avoid the disorder of the boxes around me. The tea was tepid, but it still satisfied. It washed the latent coffee taste from my tongue, and with it a bit of the tension of the morning.

  Then it was onto automatic pilot. Sorting. Shelving. Cutting boxes and recycling. Bringing order to the most changeable corner of the shop. Then, when it was all done, settling into the quiet that invariably followed. Reading the papers. Scanning the glossy magazines. Gold computer, open – the surest sign I was fully caught up despite my late arrival and could settle into the calm of the day. Eventually, a little chime announced that all was well with the technological innards of my laptop and the screen shifted to display the desktop. I called up my usual starting pages: AP, Reuters, The Times. All auto-refreshing to the day’s latest.

  The rhythm of ordinary life in a low-intensity job is a decent tonic for anxiety, and it’s cheaper than Xanax. A comforting montage. This is my morning, I reflected, my every morning. It’s today’s, and it will be tomorrow’s.

  It was yesterday’s.

  I’d stiffened a little at that. The word didn’t feel right in my head. Yesterday. As if it weren’t an actual day.

  Next to my computer, opposite the memos, was a little notepad. I’ve been repeatedly reminded I can take notes on the computer itself, but I suppose I feel the same way about paper and pen as I do about novels with covers and words on actual pages. On the cover of the notepad is a garishly pink Hello Kitty logo, augmented with purples and reds that only a colour-blind teenage girl could admire. I’d grabbed it out of a stationery shop’s discount bin a few weeks back without closely examining what I was buying, and every time I look at it now, it makes me feel ten years old and ridiculous.

  I flipped open the cover.

  Yesterday.