The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners

by Luanne Rice

  My father, my role model, has let me down.

  So I did something awful in return: I betrayed the boy I love.

  Travis, Travis Shaw.

  Travis, I whisper now, knowing he is on the way here. I’m sorry….

  Eighteen

  Rafe thought of the very first time he’d seen Pell stepping off the boat; the feeling had started then. Her long dark hair, wide blue eyes that took everything in, a gaze that made you feel you wanted to know her, and be known by her. He’d been so hungry for a friend, for company, for someone to love. The empty place left by Monica had felt unfillable. But then Pell had come along.

  Getting to know her, then today: on the boat, seeing her so tense and upset, knowing something was eating her up. He’d shown Pell the seahorses and in that instant—when she first saw them—she’d lit up with such happiness, he’d thought, Okay, yes, I can make her smile, we actually have something.

  Now, standing on the steps in the rain, he looked up at Lyra’s house. There were lights on. Which one was Pell’s? Did it matter? He wanted a chance to redo the ending—they’d been having such a good, quiet time. He’d felt good about bringing her back to the boathouse, so she could pull herself together and go home.

  He’d gotten up the courage to kiss her. Led her over to his bed, and eased her down, and he’d thought they were good, that everything was going to be great. He’d felt her wanting him—he knew about girls, arching backs and pressing and murmuring. And to have that kind of sexual heat with Pell, along with her singular depth and intelligence and kindness, he’d been ecstatic. And then she’d pulled herself back, yanking her arms away.

  So hard. Jumped off the bed, pacing, saying, “What have I done?”

  “Nothing, Pell, I just wanted to kiss you, I thought I could help.”

  “Travis,” she’d said. “Oh, my God, Travis.”

  Travis, her boyfriend.

  What had Rafe done wrong? He felt frantic himself, not understanding. He’d thought something special was starting between them. Had he misread her signals so badly, or had he just been blind, yearning to replicate what he’d wished for with Monica? He wanted to talk to Pell now, try to explain. Lyra wouldn’t let him back into the house, he was sure of that. And Pell herself seemed unable to get away from him fast enough. Rain poured into his eyes, and his clothes were soaked through.

  He might as well go get the boat out of the grotto, tie it more securely to the dock, in case the storm got worse. Or he could drive it to the marina. It was midsummer, the height of the action on Capri. Boats in from the States, Spain, the south of France. Docks full, bars packed. Young people looking for each other. Rafe’s familiar old cravings kicked in, worse than ever.

  He wanted to get Pell’s eyes out of his mind. It wasn’t their beauty that was killing him now; it was the despair and disgust he’d seen in them after he’d kissed her. She felt sick for betraying Travis. And Rafe suddenly admitted how lost he felt without Monica.

  The problem with loving drugs was that it kept you from loving everything else. Life became a series of forgettable pleasures. Then, after they wore off, you hated yourself and whoever you were with.

  At rehab there was a rule against getting involved with other clients. His last rehab, in Malibu, the rule was strongly enforced; get caught in a compromising situation, and you were out.

  You were supposed to concentrate on your own recovery. “Keep the focus on yourself” was one of the slogans. You had to learn to recognize the whole spectrum of feelings. The average person might think that was no big deal, but addicts lumped them all together, got high whenever anything got too intense, good or bad. There was actually a wheel—a big pie chart on the wall—every wedge a different feeling: happy, sad, nervous, doubtful, excited, tired, hungry, lonely, angry.

  “HALT can be a trigger,” the counselor was saying. “And make you want to use. So don’t let yourself get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. We have to learn to take care of ourselves in a whole new way.”

  Rafe had heard it all before. The acronyms, the quaint sayings, the hopeful cheerleading. He felt worn out—why wasn’t that on the chart? What good did any of this do? Across the classroom was a girl with a pixie haircut and huge green eyes, skinny in a pink T-shirt, black jeans, with a huge linen scarf-shawl thing wrapped around her neck. When the counselor started in on the feelings wheel, she’d glanced at Rafe. He’d happened to be looking over, and they started laughing.

  Her name was Monica, and she came from Santa Monica, just a few miles south of the rehab’s Malibu location.

  “Your parents named you for your town?” he asked.

  “Even worse,” she said. “Santa Monica Boulevard. I was conceived in a parked car outside a pizza place in West Hollywood.”

  “But how does that make you feel?” he asked, and they laughed. They walked through the rehab grounds smoking cigarettes.

  “Is this your first time in rehab?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Third. Yours?”

  “Also third.”

  “Maybe three’s the charm.”

  They walked and smoked, aware of the staff watching. No fraternizing with the opposite sex. Groups were okay, one-on-one was frowned upon. Rafe didn’t ask her her drug of choice. Another rule, one he didn’t mind keeping. Once you started talking about what you took, you wanted to take it. And hearing what someone else once used, realizing you never tried it, could plant a seed in your mind for when you got out.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “New York.”

  “Where’d you go before?”

  “Wernersville, Pennsylvania. Antigua. Now here.”

  “Nothing but the best,” she said.

  “How about you?” he asked.

  “I always come back here,” she said, smiling. “Feels like home.”

  They’d gotten to know each other over the stay. Walks around the campus, supervised hikes into the Malibu scrubland, Friday night movie excursions. They talked about their families; her parents were divorced, her mom a screenwriter now married to a director, her dad an actor who’d stopped working to shoot heroin.

  Rafe told her about his mother. Monica listened as if she cared. When he told her about his first Christmas after his mother had died, how he’d asked the elevator man in his apartment building to take him to the roof, so he could leave her present up there, closer to heaven, she’d cried.

  His father had stopped visiting. The first two times in rehab, he’d shown up on family day, and for family counseling. But this time was different. Rafe’s father was finished with him—not just because he kept relapsing, every rehab stay costing him thousands of dollars, not to mention legal bills for the Central Park arrest—but because of what had happened on Capri.

  Because of what Rafe had done to his grandmother. His grandmother, who’d never been anything but wonderful to him, all he’d had to do was stay with her for an hour. An hour. Sitting on the lawn, Pacific Ocean gleaming blue on the horizon, Rafe told all that to Monica.

  “That’s why you have to stay clean now,” she said, staring at him with enormous green eyes.

  “It’s why I don’t think I can,” he said. “She took care of me when I was little and would visit her, and all she needed was one hour—keep her safe, from falling and hurting herself, and I couldn’t even do that. I keep seeing her face looking at me. And I just want to block it out.”

  “Don’t you know you can’t?” Monica asked. “For as long as you live? All you can do is find a way to live with it.”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “What was her name?”

  “Christina Gardiner.”

  Looking up, Monica stared at the sky. “Christina,” she said. “Please help Rafe. Be with him, and help him.”

  Rafe had a lump in his throat. It was as if Monica knew his grandmother, realized she was the kind of woman who would help him if she could, would watch over him. Who would forgive him.

  At the movies a
month before he left rehab, he’d sat next to Monica, watching The Lost Pawn. There, in the dark, he’d felt her elbow touch his on the armrest. Then she’d taken his hand. They’d clasped hands all through the film; he’d barely seen what was happening on the screen.

  “Did you like it?” she asked afterward, standing on the sidewalk under the marquee.

  “I loved it,” he said, wanting to kiss her in the warm California night air, aware of the counselor watching them.

  “I meant the film,” she said, smiling.

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, it was good.”

  They smiled, walked to the van. Something stirred in Rafe that night. He wanted something—or someone. Lying in his bed back at rehab, he thought of Monica. He wondered what life would be, having a woman to love, wanting to get up in the morning because you didn’t have to feel so alone. She didn’t hate him for what he’d done—she understood addiction, knew she’d almost lost her own soul along the way.

  People were allowed to contact each other once they were discharged. Rules were strict inside the rehab gates, but it was a free world outside. Rafe had every intention of getting her address and phone number, contacting her when they were both released.

  The suggestion was “no major changes during the first year,” including relationships. But something between them had already developed over the months together; wouldn’t it be an even more major change if they left each other’s lives? He had planned to wait a month or so, to make sure he could stay clean. Then he would call her.

  Rafe never got the chance. One day he went downstairs, and she was gone. No one could tell him why—confidentiality. He heard that her insurance had run out, that her mother wasn’t willing to pick up the difference this time around. Rafe knew the despair and frustration of three-time-rehab parents; his father had told him this was the last chance. But he wished she’d left him her number.

  When he was released, he called information first thing. Her stepfather’s number was unlisted; her mother’s office wouldn’t even take his call. He’d kept waiting for Monica to search him out, but how would she find him on Capri? Had he even told her that’s where his grandparents’ house was?

  Now, staring up at Lyra’s house through the rain, the lights shimmered and blurred. He blinked, hoping Pell was okay. The sound of her saying “Travis” haunted him—not just because she felt so bad, but because it woke Rafe up to his own heart. He should have been saying “Monica” with as much regret, grief. She was in him, as much as he’d tried to think it didn’t matter.

  “Rafe?”

  Hearing his grandfather’s voice, he turned.

  “Hi, Grandpa,” Rafe said.

  “What are you doing, standing here? You’re soaking wet. Come up to the house with me.”

  “How’d you know I was here?” Rafe asked.

  “Lyra called to tell me you’d seen Pell home. I assumed you were down at the boathouse. I don’t want you staying there tonight.”

  Rafe felt frozen in place. He’d lived in the boathouse these last four weeks. Going to the villa made him feel raw, too close to his grandmother and what he’d done.

  “Come, Rafe,” his grandfather said, reaching for Rafe’s hand.

  Rafe flinched—he felt undeserving of tenderness, of his grandfather’s love, and the touch of the old man’s hand threw him back to childhood, when he’d still been good, before he’d caused so much destruction.

  The slope was wet, the stone stairs carved into the rock slippery, and in that instant Rafe let out a huge yell as his feet went out from under him. His grandfather clutched at him, trying to hold on, and all Rafe could think of was stopping the fall, keeping his grandfather from crashing down the rocks, and he went backward into darkness.

  Lyra heard a shout; the voice echoed off the hillside, dissolving so fast, she wondered if she’d imagined it. She stepped outside to investigate.

  A steady drizzle was coming down. She shielded her eyes with one hand, peering into the dark. Rustling sounds came from the stairs, then a groan. Moving cautiously, Lyra inched her way around the cypress grove to see who was there, what was going on. Through the mist she saw Max with one foot on the stairs, one over the side, planted in the wild scrub.

  “Max, what is it?” she called.

  “Lyra, thank God!” he called back, and she saw his shoulders straining as he bent over trying to haul something heavy out.

  Running over, she saw that it was Rafe. By a quirk or miracle, Max’s grandson had fallen not into the abyss, but onto a narrow strip of crumbling soil, old branches, and brambles clinging to the rocks. Blood poured from Rafe’s temple, trickling away in the rain; his eyes were shut. Her heart seized; for a moment she flashed back to Christina’s fall.

  “Is he …,” she began.

  “He’s breathing,” Max said. “Please, help him.”

  Lyra climbed down beside Max. They were balanced on the steps, looking into a sharp ravine that fell a hundred feet down to the cove. Rafe had gone over backward, must have struck his head on the step, landed on a foot-wide strip of hillside between the stairs and precipice. Fallen branches, shallow pine and cedar roots, and cascades of dead leaves and debris had woven together to form a cradle, a web between the stairs and plunging rock face.

  Max held Rafe in his arms, one foot digging into the precarious weave of earth and roots, and Lyra realized that if Max’s weight broke through the fragile basket of knit-together ground, or if Rafe woke up and rolled the wrong way, the two men would go over.

  “What should I do?” she asked.

  “Can you brace me,” Max asked, “while I try to pull him onto the stairs?”

  “Okay” she said.

  “Stay on solid ground,” he said. “One foot on the stairs, that’s right—the other on the rock.”

  “I’ve got it,” she said.

  Stepping forward, Lyra grabbed for his arm. She felt Max’s weight straining toward the edge, reaching around Rafe’s inert body, easing him toward the steps. Hearing Max’s labored breathing, she prayed that he wouldn’t have a heart attack.

  She stared down at Rafe’s pale face, the blood dripping from the cut in his head; he was clearly unaware of any of it. Two years ago she’d found Christina where she’d fallen, just a hundred yards away. This young man had already been responsible for one disaster, now there was another in the making.

  Lyra glanced at Max’s face, saw the strain, and hope, and desperation. No matter what Rafe had done, Max loved him with everything he had. Lyra thought of Pell upstairs, shut in her room. All day Lyra had been worried; no matter that Pell had run off on her own, Lyra had wanted to blame Rafe for taking her away.

  “He’s slipping,” Max said. His voice broke; she heard so much love. The rain was coming down harder, and Rafe’s weight plus the way Max was wedging his foot into the root system made the cradle of branches and earth start to give way with a terrible tearing sound.

  “Hold on,” Lyra said, bending down, grabbing Rafe by the collar.

  “Get back,” Max said. “Lyra, make sure you’re on the steps.”

  Lyra couldn’t let go. She closed her eyes, hearing Max’s voice: “I have you, Rafe, I have you, my boy.” In that moment she knew he was prepared to go over the edge with his grandson. There was no way Max would let Rafe die alone.

  And in that moment, Lyra felt flooded with love of her own. Pell; she had come to this island, she loved Lyra enough to forgive her for all that she had and hadn’t done; Lucy was on her way. And for Max, her dearest friend, who taught her with everything he had to believe in goodness, to open her heart a little more, a little more, each day. He was crouched in the pouring rain, holding on to the boy who’d thrown his own life away over and over, who’d caused Max’s beloved Christina to die, ready to give everything for him.

  Christina was with them. Lyra heard her voice, right there on the craggy stairs, in rain driving so hard it seemed to want to wash the earth, the trees, Max and Rafe, every living thing off the rocks.
>
  “Rafaele,” Lyra heard Christina say. “Rafaele …”

  Max turned his head; he’d heard it too.

  And Rafe woke up. His eyes flew open; he jolted, but Max held him steady. Lyra offered Rafe her hand, pulled him toward her as Max stepped carefully backward, onto the steps. Very slowly Rafe got to his knees, crawled to safety.

  Lyra and Max supported him. He walked between them, one arm around each of their necks. They made their way gently, both not wanting to jar Rafe and perhaps not wanting to discuss what had just happened.

  “You saved me,” Rafe said to Lyra and Max when they got to the car parked outside the villa, to take him to the hospital.

  “Thank God you woke up when you did,” Max said, helping his grandson into the front seat.

  “It was Christina,” Lyra said.

  They both looked at her, confused. “You heard her, didn’t you?” Lyra asked.

  “I heard you,” Rafe said, reaching for her hand. “You said my name, and I woke up.”

  “That wasn’t me,” Lyra said.

  “Really?” Max asked, and she saw him smile.

  “Really,” Lyra said.

  “My grandmother,” Rafe said, bowing his head.

  Lyra crouched by the open door. He looked up again, and she gazed into his blue eyes, this young man Christina had loved so much. “You are so loved,” she said. “Do you know that?”

  “I don’t deserve it,” he said, his voice low and hoarse.

  “I don’t either,” she said. “But I seem to be surrounded by it. You helped Pell come back home today. Thank you.”

  He nodded. “She wasn’t ready to leave,” he said.

  “I’d better get him to the hospital,” Max said, and Lyra felt his hand on the back of her head. She stood up, face-to-face with him. Her heart was pounding—she’d been so afraid of losing him back there on the hillside. She reached up, touched his cheek.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said. “I’ll call Pell from there, let her know what’s going on.”

  “You don’t have to come,” he said.

  “Yes,” Lyra said. “I do.” She looked into his blue eyes, felt something shift in her heart. She’d heard Christina’s voice back there, no matter what Rafe and Max thought. And she knew her old friend had been giving them all her blessing. Perhaps Lyra had actually spoken Rafaele’s name, inspired by Christina herself. But this was all Lyra, straight from her own heart.