Falling Awake

by T. A Richards Neville

  “Bye Gracey,” I called over my shoulder.

  Back behind the wheel of the truck, I started the engine and pulled away, driving to a secluded spot on the marina, where in the stillness of the harbor- I broke down and cried. I gave myself a few minutes to get it out of my system, and then tried to pull myself together. Sitting here crying wasn’t going to help anyone. I needed to do something. My dad was gone; that much I was sure about. What I didn’t know was where he’d gone, or worse, if something had happened to him. With shaking fingers, I dialled the only other person I knew could help me. After the first ring, the sound of Ressler’s voice flooded me with instant security.

  “Pria.” The tone of his voice told me he wasn’t expecting to hear from me.

  “Where are you?” he asked. On second thought, that next question held a note of desperation, and I knew something was definitely up.

  “My dad’s missing.”

  “Can you meet me at Sully’s?”

  “Yes. I’ll see you in a minute,” I said, and I hung up. I floored the gas all the way, until I recognised the familiar dead end road guarded by shrubs, and the faint glow of the bar at the end of it. I turned and drove along the gravel road to the car park, where I saw Ressler crouched down next to the front door. I parked up and jogged over to him stiffly, my leg beginning to ache under all the movement. My crutches were at home, I didn’t really feel like I needed to be using them, and they definitely wouldn’t help me now. They would probably only succeed in holding me back. Ressler stood up and threw his arms around me, and my body shuddered with sobs underneath him.

  “We’ll find him Pria, calm down,” he said soothingly.

  “This is all my fault,” I cried. “He thought I was mad at him. What if I never see him again?”

  “Sshh,” he said. “It’ll be fine. And you will see him again. Let’s go inside, there’s someone in there who can help us.” I wiped my eyes and my nose on the back of my sleeve, and followed him inside the bar. It was full of the usual type. Rough, mean and ready, and I avoided eye contact with any of them. The cigarette smoke hung thick in the air like a vale and stung my swollen eyes as I walked through it.

  “Were going downstairs. She’s with me. She’s okay,” Ressler said to Sully, taking me around the back of the bar. Sully’s usual hard edge look he reserved for me was gone, and he nodded at me instead. I was too stunned to do anything but stare at him as I passed by, and I certainly didn’t dare smile at him. Downstairs I stood awkwardly on the inside of the door in the living room, not really knowing what to do with myself in Caleb’s space.

  “Where’s Caleb?” I shouted to Ressler, while he busied himself in the kitchen. I couldn’t see him but I could hear him. I walked through to where he stood pouring whisky into two glasses. He pushed one towards me. “Here, for your nerves.” I took the glass with a sense of de-javu washing over me from last time when I was here with Caleb.

  “So where’s Caleb?” I asked again.

  “I don’t know.” He gulped down his drink and poured another, downing that one just as quickly. “I’ve tried calling him, looking for him. I don’t know where he is.”

  “What about Drake?”

  “He hasn’t seen him either.”

  I threw my drink back at the thought that Caleb might have disappeared because of me. “We had a fight in Paris,” I told him, thrusting my glass out for him to re-fill it. “I told him to get out of my life. I said I didn’t need protecting. I had you for that.” Ressler looked up at me from under his lashes, as he poured the last of my drink. “Why did you say that?”

  “He was keeping things from me,” I said, shrugging my shoulders “I’m better off without him. I don’t need his help.” Even hearing the words now, I knew they weren’t entirely true. They were a cop out and I didn’t dare go back on it now in case he really had walked out on me.

  “And is that what you really believe?” Ressler asked me. It didn’t take a genius to figure out he didn’t agree with me, and even I had to admit I’d acted a tad on the dramatic side. That was exactly why I had to cut Caleb out when I did, I reasoned with myself. He brought out an irrational and over sensitive side in me. A side that I never even knew existed. And he made me act too much from what my heart wanted rather than my head. I was too unstable around him. No, I was right to do what I had done; I needed it for my sanity.

  I knocked back my drink then said, “Yes it is.” He didn’t look in the slightest like he believed me, but he left it there anyway. I perched on the edge of one of three white leather bar stools and dropped my head into my hands.

  “What now?” I asked him. “I don’t think sitting here getting drunk is going to help my dad, so have you got any better ideas?” My tongue was sharp, but I didn’t mean it. I was still on edge from wondering what on earth had happened to my dad.

  “Leah!” He shouted, and two seconds later, the sound of her stilettoes clicking against the wood floor echoed around the room, and she slid onto the stool next to me.

  “What do you want Ressler?” She asked, and I noticed for the first time that her voice was as smooth as silk, carrying the faintest pitch of obscenely high bells. If you never paid close enough attention, you would easily miss it, and you could say despite her sultry exterior, it was angelic even.

  She was wearing a tight black leather mini skirt and matching corset. The electric blue from her hair was absent, and instead, her head of wild curls shone with the deep vivid colour of red wine, with lipstick to match. I couldn’t help but stare at her. She was so far beyond beautiful it was infuriating. I was finding it hard to believe that Caleb had her shacked up here and nothing was going on between them. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was another reason he refused to be with me. He seemed to just be plucking excuses out of the sky.

  “Where’s Caleb?” he asked her, appearing totally un-phased by her demanding beauty.

  “Is this why you dragged me out here?”

  “Just tell me where he is,” he said, growing impatient.

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “Where’s Gabriel?”

  “Who?”

  “Pria’s dad.”

  “How should I know?”

  “Because you know everything.” She stood up, the stool scraping across the floor behind her. “If that’s all, I’ll be going. You’re boring me.”

  Ressler slammed his palms down on the counter. “Just tell us where he is Leah. I’m not joking.”

  She crossed her arms in front of her. “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “You do know, you just don’t want to tell us.”

  “No, I don’t know,” she said more coolly this time. “But she does.” I spun around at the prodding of a long fingernail in my back. “Excuse me? Are you talking about me?”

  “Of course I am, who else?” She was speaking to me like I had any idea of what she was even talking about.

  “How can she know?” Ressler asked, obviously irritated. “Were here because she’s looking for him, hence the, she doesn’t know where he is part.”

  “She knows where he is, she just doesn’t know she knows.” I was growing sick of them talking about me as if I wasn’t in the room.

  “If I knew where he was,” I said through gritted teeth. “Then I wouldn’t be here would I?”

  “Had any dreams lately?” Leah asked me with her eyebrows raised looking as contrite as ever. How could she know about my dreams? Angel or not, what I dreamt of was private surely. She couldn’t know about them.

  “So what If I have,” I said, giving nothing away.

  “Tell me about them.” She said it as if it was no big deal what so ever.

  “No, they’re private,” I snapped. “What do my dreams have to with anything anyway?”

  “She’s wasting our time as usual,” Ressler said. “I don’t know why I bothered bringing you here, it was a mistake. A leopard never changes its spots right?” he said to her, his voice full of animosity.

  Her eyes fl
icked up over him with a venom I had never seen in a person before. “Ressler have you ever head the saying ignorance is bliss?” He looked back at her ready to pounce at any moment. “Well right now-” She raised an immaculately shaped eyebrow at him. “You are very blissful, and if I were you, I would shut your mouth before I decide not to help you. I don’t owe you anything, remember that. Despite what you might think, I don’t owe any of you.”

  I felt uncomfortable sitting between them, seeing them both charged like this, and I regretted ever letting him bring him here.

  “Your dreams,” she said, and I realised she was talking to me. “Don’t worry, you can keep the sordid details to yourself. Just tell me where you were in them.” I really didn’t see what relevance my dreams held in any of this, but I told her anyway. Sighing heavily I said, “I’m in a cove, just off the ocean somewhere, but I’ve never been there before, only in this particular dream.

  “Describe it to me.”

  Describe it? I tried to think what I could remember of it. The dream had mostly focused on Caleb, and what he had hidden from me, but I searched my memory trying to place myself back there. I closed my eyes and sucked in a deep breath, then twisted my imagination until I was lying back on the same rock. The kitchen disappeared and I could practically feel the see breeze on my face.

  “I’m sitting on a large circular rock just inside the cove,” I said, mentally searching for what lay beyond. I could see two powerfully large boulders sitting in the middle of the sea, the surfaces covered with lush greenery and low hanging tress that curved around the edges, hugging the rock. The white capped waves sloshed up lazily around them as the tide slowly rolled in. How had I not noticed those before? How could I be sure my imagination wasn’t just making this whole scenery up? Searching for something, anything that might lead me to my dad.

  “There are two boulders in the sea with trees and grass growing on them,” I told Leah. “But I’ve never noticed them before, so I can’t trust that they really exist. This isn’t working.”

  “Sshh,” she said. “What else can you see?”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Nothing. Behind the boulders there’s a wall of rock. It’s really high and it’s lined with more trees. They look like fir trees, or cedar trees.” I marvelled at the mental image. Wherever I had found myself, it was beautiful– majestic even. I was in a haven, too real to just be dream or imagination. “That’s all I can see,” I said, opening my eyes.

  She stretched out her hand to me with her palms facing upwards. “Give me your phone.” I dug into the pocket of my jacket and handed her my IPhone. One look at my screen and she scrunched up her face and thrust it back at me. “I can’t use that. Ressler give me your phone please?” She asked him, tapping her booted foot against the floor impatiently.

  “You’re trying to tell me that in this day and age, you don’t own a cell?” he asked her with a cocked eyebrow.

  “Phone, Ressler. Now.” She demanded, and with a loud sigh, he handed over his cell. She tapped away on the screen for a few seconds, and then slid the phone onto the counter in front of me. The living image of everything I thought was make believe stared back at me from inside the glass screen. “How is that possible?” I whispered, picking it up and brushing my fingers over it.

  “Cape Flattery,” she said. “That’s where your dad is.”

  “How did you…?” I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t even finish my sentence. My dream was right here in my hands, only in more vivid colour and detail.

  “And my guess is, Caleb’s there too. You know what he’s like for sticking his nose in other people business,” she said, and then walked off back down the hall.

  “Why should we trust you?” Ressler shouted after her. Reluctantly, she came back and stared him dead in the eye. “Don’t trust me, what do I care? But consider this the last time you can ever ask me for a favour, and the last time I will ever offer you my help. You’re on your own from here.”

  “Why would he, or Caleb be in Cape Flattery? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I never said it made sense; I said that’s where you can find them. Go find them or stand here all night questioning what they might, or might not be doing there. It’s your call.”

  “What are you getting out of this?” he asked. I could see that he didn’t trust one word of what she said, but I didn’t exactly know why. There was something going on between these two, I could tell. No one held that much animosity for someone unless there was a history there.

  “Not me Ressler. Everyone.” Seconds ticked by as a heavy silence hung in the air.

  She glanced down at me with her dramatic black eyes. “Now run along, your dad’s waiting.”

  When I was sure she was gone, I turned to Ressler. “You and Leah?”

  “A few times after I fell,” he said, showing no reaction to my question. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to my next question but I was going to ask it anyway. “And Caleb and Leah?” I asked, biting my bottom lip.

  “You’ll have to ask Caleb.”

  “If I ever see him again.” I muttered, swinging my body off the stool and catching up to him as we left Caleb’s place. “Do you think I’ll see him again?” He stopped abruptly in front of me so I had to put my hands up against his back to stop myself from falling into him, and he turned to look at me. “I think Caleb would do anything you asked him to.” I swallowed hard. There was my answer then. “But honestly, I don’t think he would agree to what you asked him.”

  “And my dad, do you think he’s where Leah says he is?”

  “Let me tell you one thing about Leah. The phrase God works in mysterious ways applies to her. She does things that at first seem shady, and she tells you things that sound like a lie, but she has nothing to gain as far as I can tell from sending us on a wild goose chase. So I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt here, and believe that she’s being honest with us.”

  That was enough for me. “Let’s go then,” I said.

  We stepped outside of Sully’s and into the cool night. “Where’s Cape Flattery anyway?” I asked Ressler as he pulled a set of keys from his jeans pocket and aimed them into the night. A pair of headlights responded, blinking twice and I could see the silhouette of his Mercedes in the moonlight. He was parked in the farthest part of the car park, angled just in front of the thick shrubs, shrouded in complete darkness.

  “It’s in Clallum County, on the Olympic Peninsula.” Right. I was pretty sure it was part of the Makah Reservation in Neah Bay. I had no idea why my dad would be there. My mom’s Native American roots where in Nevada, so it couldn’t have anything to do with her.

  “That’s miles away,” I argued. “It’s going to take forever to get there. In fact, how do we even get there?” I climbed into the passenger side of the car, and fastened my seatbelt as Ressler started the engine. “And then what if they aren’t even there?”

  He revved the engine and floored it out of the parking lot and onto the main road, throwing me back in my seat. Thank god for my seatbelt or I’d be through the windshield.

  “We’ll deal with that when we get there.”

  “You still haven’t told me how were gonna get there,” I said, throwing him an exasperated look.

  “You’ll see.” The ghost of a smile flashed across his eyes.

  ***

  I looked down at the mass of boats under the Harbor lights, bobbing up and down on the water of the Marina peacefully. Apart from a few fishermen getting ready to set sail, Ressler and I were the only ones out here.

  “This way,” Ressler said, leading me along the empty pier until we reached the very end. We then took the stairs to a smaller plank, where a gleaming white powerboat with a thick black strip running the length of it, sat tied to the plank. “Whose is this?” I asked sceptically.

  “It’s mine. Who else’s would it be?”

  “How can you afford this?”

  “I can’t. You could say I stumbled upon it,” he said
, smiling to himself.

  I whacked him in the arm, and he merely laughed, rubbing the spot where I had caught him. “You stole it?”

  “No, I never stole it. I earned it. Just get in and get off your moral high ground will you.” He held onto the side of the boat and hoisted himself up jumping into the driver’s side, then offered his hand out to me. I took it and lowered myself inside, and into the plush white leather seats.

  I looked around at the luxury that surrounded me. “You promise you didn’t steal this?”

  “I promise,” he said. “Though, I don’t see what difference it makes, considering it’s gonna get us to your dad.” There were so many reasons why I couldn’t abide by stealing, but the noise of the boat starting up, kept me from voicing them. I felt myself slowly moving backwards, and then as we turned steadily and Ressler steered us out of the Harbor, we gradually picked up speed until we were bouncing over the black endless water. The sea turned to the ocean, and the frothing water trail from the engine sloshed up over the sides of the boat as we soared through it and the air grew cold, stinging my face. I had never felt rawer, or more exposed to the elements. I pulled my jacket tighter across my chest and glanced sideways at Ressler who seemed to be immune to the icy blast.

  He steered the boat, looking relaxed and comfortable in a slim fit navy hooded jacket and white tee with jeans. He was wearing little more than I was, and he sat as if it were the height of summer. I on the other hand, was freezing. The longer I sat next to him, the more I couldn’t help but feel agitated at how attracted I was to him. Even in a bizarre situation like this, I couldn’t put aside my feelings towards him. I was annoyed for even allowing myself to think of him in that way considering people I loved could be at risk, or- I shuddered. No, I wouldn’t think it. My dad would be fine. I bet Caleb was already with him playing the hero as usual. I hoped so anyway.

  “Are you cold?” Ressler asked me, with a grin on his face. So he had caught me watching him then.

  “You aren’t?”

  “We don’t get cold. We’re not human remember?”