“Well, nothing happened to me. That’s why.”
“Perhaps not, though it says in your file that you refused to talk about the events that led up to the incident, and I rather wonder why that is.”
I shrugged despite the sudden stiffness in my shoulders, but it was hardly worth the effort to pretend that I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“There was nothing to say,” I said.
“I see. And what about now? Is there anything to say?”
I swallowed and looked at the clock, but the session was barely half over. I sucked in my cheeks as I debated what to tell him.
“I don’t ... I don’t want to talk about my mother, Dr. Beringer.”
“I know you don’t, Enim. But I think that we should.”
He waited for me to respond, but I could not. The room seemed to have dropped several degrees and I had to press my hands beneath my legs to keep them from shaking. Beringer eyed me cautiously.
“I wonder, Enim, if you don’t want to talk about what happened because you feel guilty about it.”
I clamped my teeth down on the insides of my cheeks to keep my expression neutral; my throat was too tight to swallow.
“Why would I feel guilty?” I said.
“I wouldn’t know; I had hoped that you could tell me.”
I shook my head too quickly to warrant innocence and kept my eyes on the ground to avoid Beringer’s gaze. After several minutes of silence, he quietly suggested that I could think about it and allowed me to leave. I hurried from the office without another word.
“Back so soon?” Jack asked as I entered the dorm room. “Beringer’s cutting the sessions short?”
“Yeah,” I said distractedly.
“What a cheapskate. Not that I’m complaining, mind you – I’m all for having him waste your dad’s money rather than your time.”
He grinned and flipped off his bed, hurriedly pulling his sweatshirt and shoes on and collecting something from the bedside table. It took me a moment to remember that I had said we would go down to the boathouse. For a fleeting moment I considered telling him that I was too exhausted, but then I changed my mind: I needed the distraction.
Flashlight in hand and pocketknife in the other, Jack paused in the hallway to make sure that we hadn’t alerted Sanders to what we were doing. It would soon be after-hours and our building was silent except for the occasional snippets of conversations and muted sound of music coming from a set of blaring headphones that hadn’t been turned off. Sanders’ door was decisively shut against a silent room and we crept past it without incident. Hurrying down the stairs, Jack glanced over his shoulder to give me an energized look. After a brief pause, we opened the main door and slipped out onto the grounds.
The campus was dark and silent in the night, and only a few lights on the sides of buildings lit the way for us to sneak out across the grass and through the garden in the direction of the woods. The air was a crisp cold that scratched at the skin beneath my sweater and coat and hastened our stride.
“Here – I think it’s through here.”
We had reached the fence that circled around Bickerby’s campus. It was chain-link and mostly covered by some spindly plant, though the branches had been plowed back in one section to reveal where the metal wire had been cut. Jack swept away some of the dead leaves and tugged at the fence to enlarge the hole. With a quick grin, he pulled himself through the opening. I stooped and followed him. The wires yanked at my clothing as I went, momentarily preventing me from going through, but with a firm tug I stumbled out onto the other side. In the moonlight, the hoarfrost spreading across the dirt shone white like marble on the ground. I stood and wiped it from my hands before we continued.
The boathouse was visible in the distance. It was a small wooden building off to the side of the woods that sat amongst the rocks on the shoreline with large double doors chained shut for the winter. Jack pressed his forehead against one of the frost-covered windows to ensure that the boats were there before crossing to the doors. Taking out his pocket knife, he proceeded to slip the blade between a slight gap in one of the links and pried it apart. With the chain broken, he easily slid it off the door without touching the lock. I crossed my arms as I waited for him to get the doors open, too used to seeing him breaking and entering with such ease to be impressed.
“Here we go,” he said, shining the flashlight inside.
The place had an old, rotting smell that I could never get used to. The salt water that had either flooded the place after heavy rains or dripped onto the floor when the boats were brought in filled the space with the distinctly foul smell of mildew. It was a wonder that Barker hadn’t had the place redone as he had the majority of the other buildings. Jack grabbed the end of one of the boats and indicated for me to take the other. Walking backwards, I maneuvered out the door and onto the rocky shore. Jack trailed behind me carefully, but neither of us could help as the boat hit the doorframe at a sharp angle: the sound of cracking wood filled the air and we both stopped and listened as the air around us rang out. Nothing around us stirred to indicate that we had been heard, though: we were too far out from campus for anyone to hear us.
“Let’s just drop it and drag it,” Jack said, releasing his end of the boat and clutching his back.
“No – it’ll be too loud.”
“It won’t. Besides, no one will hear. Think about it, Nim – we’re in the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere.”
I glanced around at the empty shore and chewed my lip, still worried about being caught. The beach looked more forsaken than ever beneath the dark sky, and the bluish hue of the rocks highlighted their jaggedness. Behind them, the ocean looked more uninviting than ever.
“Fine,” I said, and dropped my side of the boat as well. As we shoved the boat towards the water, the plastic squelched against the rocks with a horrific sound. When it finally slapped against the water I climbed into it and Jack gave it a final shove forward before jumping in after me.
It only took a moment for us to get into the rhythm of rowing the oars in synchronization. The boat was intended for eight rather than two, and it took us a while longer to get out into the ocean than it would have for two members of the rowing team, but we were able to maneuver it in the direction we wanted and succeeded in propelling out against the steadfastness of the waves. When we were a good deal away from the shore we eased up on the oars and let the boat rest against the waves. The blackness of the water slapped the sides of the boat as we paused in an attempt to gain entry.
Jack leaned back and stretched his legs out, staring up at the sky. His face was white with moonlight.
“You ever think about what it’ll be like to leave here, Nim?”
“All the time.”
The stars were reflected in his eyes as he tilted his head back. The white light highlighted the damage on his face more clearly: the skin beneath both eyes had turned a sickly red-purple and one lid was black; his lower lip had cracked and was hardened with blood. I had begun to forget how Jack looked without the characteristic injuries, or perhaps I had never known him without them. Even when I had met him he had sported a bruised face, though back then he didn’t have the bend in his nose from having it broken so often. There was a distinct white scar going across the bridge of it from where he had been hit in the face with a glass maple-syrup bottle a few years back, and the other more recent one running through his eyebrow from the fight with Peters. And yet, as far as I could tell, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him: it was only me who harbored something ugly beneath the neatly-ironed dress shirt and sweater.
“Imagine what it’ll be like to get up and do whatever we’d like,” he said. “Get up at any hour, dress however I want, smoke my morning cigarette, and go about my day the way I choose.”
“You already do three out of the four of those,” I pointed out.
He tore his eyes from the sky to look back at me.
“Way to be a downer, Nim.”
“Isn’t there anything you want to do when we leave here? Drink real coffee? Wear something other than khakis and blue sweaters? Read a book that’s not for English class?”
“I don’t know. Not really.”
“There must be something,” he persisted.
I shrugged.
“I guess ... I haven’t really thought about it.”
He rolled over so that his head was resting on the side of the boat and looked at me carefully.
“Nothing? Really?”
The idea must have been entirely foreign to him given that he had been waiting to escape to France for years now. I wished that I could think of something that I would enjoy even a fraction as much, but nothing crossed my mind. The blankness was oddly disturbing.
“What about once you’re eighteen?” Jack said. “You’ve got to be looking forward to being free from your father.”
“I’m pretty free from him already,” I said. “It’s Karl I’ve got to get away from, now.”
“Right. And that house.”
I stared into the black all around us, training my mind away from the image of the place where Karl and I resided in my father’s absence.
“Yeah, that’ll be good.”
“But there’s got to be something else you’re looking forward to,” he said. “Isn’t there something you’ve always wanted to do? Jump out of an airplane or something?”
“Definitely not.”
“Right, didn’t think so,” he said with a grin. “But there has to be something.”
He was undoubtedly right, though I had to strain to think of what it was. Years before, my mother had insisted that one day we would see Turandot together, the opera that her favorite song, Nessun Dorma, was from. As the boat rocked back and forth with the waves, I thought of how she had sat next to me on the piano bench and taught me the notes to the aria that she had converted to sheet music, and how she would hum the song even on the days when she refused to leave her room.
“I guess I thought about seeing Turandot,” I said reluctantly.
“Seeing a tornado? Wicked,” Jack said.
“No, Turandot – it’s an opera.”
“Oh. That makes more sense. Well, from you, anyway.”
He smirked through the dark at me and I smiled weakly in return, my thoughts still faraway on the moments that I could never get back again.
“Well, we could go see that,” he said with a shrug.
“Jack, it’s an opera,” I said.
“So?”
“So it’s an opera,” I repeated. “You’d hate it.”
“I might not.”
“You would – it’s not even in English.”
“Ugh – don’t tell me it’s in Latin or something.”
“It’s in Italian.”
“Oh, that’s not so bad.” He sat up and considered it for a moment. “Even better – we can see it in Italy. It’s just a train-ride away from France.”
He scooted closer to the middle of the boat at the idea.
“Yeah, let’s do it,” he continued. “We’ll go see Tornado, take a look around Italy, send your dad a postcard or two – it’ll be great.”
He grinned over at me in his infectious way, but for once my expression didn’t flicker to mirror his. Something about the thought of going to see the opera without my mother gnawed at my insides and my heart burned against my ribcage. All at once, looking out over the dark expanse of black that was the surrounding ocean, it finally occurred to me that no matter how much hope I harbored inside, she would never stand on the beach with her back to the shore again, or play the piano in the parlor of the house we had once shared, or dream of seeing the opera that she had loved so well again, because she was gone – and I would never get her back again.
Ch. 5
Something clattered behind Jack and broke me from my thoughts.
“What was that?” I said.
He squinted through the darkness and patted his hands along the side of the boat before groaning.
“The oar just fell.”
“What? In the water?”
“Yep.”
He brushed his dark hair from his eyes and peered over the side of the boat to see where it had gone.
“Do you see it?”
“I think so – here –”
He grabbed my arm so that he wouldn’t fall and leaned over the boat to snatch it back up. The moonlight was just bright enough to make out the hint of white plastic that was floating a few feet away.
“Almost –” he said, fingers outstretched over the water.
He had only leaned the slightest bit further, but it was enough to throw us off balance: the boat rocked horribly before flipping onto its side and throwing us into the water. I hit the surface with an impact that felt as though I had slammed headfirst into a sheet of glass that shattered and dragged me down through its shards.
My mind went black as I plummeted downwards and my limbs turned to stone in the cold, preventing me from kicking my way back to the surface. Above me, the moon was just a glimmer of white as I sank; it wavered up through the water, waving in its place in the sky in a silent farewell, and then disappeared as the world faded to black.
Though my lungs compressed and body sank, my mind stayed as active as ever. I was certain that I was seeing exactly what the local girl had as she drowned, and the dismal sky was so desolate that I found I didn’t mind sinking lower and lower if only to get away from it, and a strange part of me felt very calm as I descended towards the ocean floor.
Something clamped around my wrists and kept me from sinking down further: Jack had found me and was tugging me up. He dragged me past the surface and I choked out a breath before he flung me back into the righted boat and heaved himself in after me. I couldn’t hear his chattering teeth over the sound of my own, but he appeared to be shaking just as badly as I was.
“I thought you knew how to swim,” he said , gasping in the cold air.
I only shook in response, too cold to answer properly. When my jaw had stilled enough to speak, I asked, “Did you get the oar?”
“No.”
“What?”
“Sorry, Nim, I was a bit busy getting you,” he said.
“Right.”
I slowly sat up from my curled spot and looked out over the water: the black surface was smooth and silent now, and all trace of the oar and my desire to sink down with it was gone.
“At least we still have the other one,” I said.
“Think again: it went over with us.”
“So we lost both of them?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
We fell into silence again. It was only after several minutes that I realized I had lost my shoes as well; my feet were so cold and stiff that it was hard to tell.
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know, shout for help?”
“No one would hear us.”
“Good point.” He gave a violent shiver and then looked around. “Well, then I guess we’d better find the oars.”
“They’re probably at the bottom of the ocean by now,” I said.
“No they’re not. Oars float.”
“Yeah?”
He nodded and rotated around to see if he could catch sight of either of them, but was careful not to lean over the edge of the boat again.
“There’s one,” he said after a long moment. He gave me a look. “Stay here ... I’ll see if I can get it.”
He eased over the side and back into the water, swearing at the painful cold as he went, and then swam in the direction of the oar. After a minute he shouted that he had it and made his way back, dropping the retrieved item into the boat before climbing in himself.
“Just one?” I said, but hurriedly bit my tongue as he sprawled on the floor in a fit of shivers.
I took up the oar and did my best to steer us back to shore. It was a much longer, more difficult journey back: it seemed to take an eternity j
ust to reach the halfway mark, and at one point I wasn’t even sure that we were going in the right direction. My arms were so stiff with cold that I could hardly move them, but halfway there Jack regained some of his energy and took over. After another seemingly endless amount of time, the boat bumped to a stop and scratched against the rocky shore.
We climbed onto the beach with languid, heavy steps and had barely gotten away from the edge of the water before we collapsed again with cold. It felt as though my hands were being compressed under smoldering weights – the bones crushed to powder as the skin shriveled and died. My feet protested in pain as I stood up again, but it was impossible to know if they hurt more from the cold or sharp rocks below them.
Jack didn’t seem to be fairing much better. I could see him stumbling across the beach in repeated attempts to walk before he finally gave up and crawled towards the woods. His soaked clothing weighed him down as he went.
“What about the boat?” I said, looking in vain at the distance between it and the boathouse.
“Just leave it.”
“But then Barker will know we broke in and stole it,” I protested, though I didn’t think I would be able to drag the boat back to the boathouse regardless.
“No, Barker will know that someone broke in and stole it. He won’t trace it back to us.”
I gave the boat one final glance before agreeing then, hugging myself to keep warm, I followed Jack as he fumbled through the trees and broken fence back onto Bickerby grounds. The grass was cold and frozen under my feet as we stumbled along, silent except for rattling breaths and Jack’s occasional swear as he collided with things in the dark.
“Finally,” he said, thumping to a stop against the door to our residence building. “Do you have your key?”
“No,” I said. “Do you have your key?”
He had had it in his pocket when we left the room and had used it to lock the door behind us; I had seen him slip it into his pocket before switching on the flashlight. His lack of response, however, was an answer enough to my question.
“Jack – don’t tell me you lost your keys again.”
“Here’s the thing, Nim. I had the keys, they just aren’t in my pocket anymore.”
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 8
