Fractured Tide

by Leslie Lutz

  I swam to the edge. Mom grabbed my forearm to pull me onto the slick mud bank. While she helped unbuckle my gear, Phil slid out of his BC and dropped it, splashing a dark streak across Steph’s ankles. She glared at him.

  “No sign of the calamari,” he said. Then he nodded to the equipment, which sat in a heap in the dappled sunlight. “Get that for me, will you, sweetheart?”

  Steph hauled his stuff over the boulders. “Why do I have to clean your gear?”

  “You want to dive in the hole?”

  She glared over her shoulder again and began breaking down the BC. “Have Graham do it.”

  “He’s watching the woods.” He turned to Graham. “Seaman Fitch, you see any roadkill walking around?”

  Graham gave him a sharp military head shake and continued his vigil.

  “We got four bombs over the threshold,” I said, stripping my wet suit down to my waist and shimmying out of it. “Five more to go. You guys decide where to put them yet?”

  Mom studied her fingernails. “I’ve checked the tanks, and we have enough to move the rest. So that’s good,” she said, her voice unusually flat. And she hadn’t answered my question.

  Ben took my wet suit from me and hobbled over to a boulder to lay it out to dry.

  “You’re moving better,” I said.

  He looked past me, into the dark water. Distracted. The others fell quiet, and I again got the sense that they were about to drop something big—bomb number ten—right on my head.

  Phil stripped his wet suit down to his pale waist and rubbed the sparse dark hair on his chest. “Well, ladies. Time to drain the weasel.” He paused like a stand-up comic waiting for a pity laugh. “I get nothin’ for that?” He shrugged and wandered into the palms.

  “Please tell me we’re not bringing Captain Horrible to Fiji,” I said to Mom.

  She gave me a brief smile, her eyes lighting up for a moment. Then they clouded with worry again.

  “Okay, guys,” I said. “Spill.”

  Everyone except Felix exchanged a loaded look. My little brother didn’t take his eyes off me, his expression a little excited, a little scared. I had a sudden urge to pick him up and run to the beach, where we would find something for him to do. A kid thing. But whatever they were hiding from me, Felix had already heard.

  Ben settled himself against a boulder and motioned me over. He nodded to Mom, who unfolded a crude diagram.

  I walked through the mud in bare feet and sat on the rock to get a better look. Xs on the drawing marked nine spots all over the hallways.

  “As best we can tell,” Mom said, “we have to put the bombs in all these Xs or we’ll just knock the machine off kilter. We’ll never get home.”

  “Could make things worse,” Ben said.

  I tried to overlay the diagram onto my mental image of the dark labyrinth. The place wasn’t familiar. “You know that for sure?”

  “If Graham’s memory of the hallways is solid, then yes,” Mom said.

  Graham turned his head and gave her a little nod. Then he went back to watching the palm forest.

  “And Steph has a good eye for this,” Ben said. “How to make a structure collapse. Where the supports are.” He exchanged a brief glance with his ex. She raised an eyebrow and turned away, focusing on Phil’s gear.

  “Place the bombs, wire them up, press the trigger,” I said. “Boom. It doesn’t seem that difficult. What am I missing?”

  Ben met my eye, and for that less-than-a-second moment, I saw all of it—the whole scene they’d had while I was down below, how much he didn’t want to have this conversation. He pointed to the X on the left side of the page again and dragged his fingertip down the sketch of a hallway. “Depth charge nine needs to go here, which is ten feet past a locked door. It’s reinforced steel, so we can’t knock our way through it.”

  “Can you pick the lock?” I asked.

  “No. But there’s a small opening above the door. Ventilation. We can get the flimsy grate with nothing more than a screwdriver.”

  “How big is it?” I asked.

  “About one and half feet wide.”

  “How on earth is someone going to get through that?”

  Ben pressed his lips together, holding his breath. Then he looked at Felix.

  I didn’t understand. My brain wouldn’t put it together. Maybe I didn’t want to understand. And I really don’t want to tell you now.

  My lungs picked that moment to quit working. No, not enough air on the planet to fill me. I leaned against the boulder, put my hands on my knees.

  Ben spoke, his voice low and full of regret. “I know you don’t want to hear this—”

  “No, I don’t,” I said, cutting him off. Then I looked up at Mom.

  Mom didn’t answer. Ben, who looked like he was about to be sick, shoved his hands into the pockets of his board shorts, his jaw tense.

  “What kind of mother sends her kid into a place like that?”

  Mom straightened up, as if to remind me who was taller. “What kind of mother?”

  “Sia, calm down,” Ben said.

  I held my palm out to Ben to shut him up, my eyes on Mom. “Yeah, you heard me.”

  My words lit that short fuse in her. You know it well.

  “What kind of mother? One who wants both of her kids to get out of here alive! You think this is easy for me? We can’t stay here anymore, Tasia.” She flung an arm toward the forest. “It’s getting worse. I’ve seen it.” She tapped her temple with one finger, her eyes wild with a memory. Something that hadn’t happened yet. “We’re gonna die if we don’t fix this. All of us.”

  “I’ll squeeze through,” I said.

  “You won’t fit.”

  One more look at Felix and I was scrambling for ideas, no matter how insane. “We’ll fix the charter. Patch the hole with . . . I don’t know, Steph will come up with something. Make a sail. Once we get past the edge of the bubble we’re in, the Coast Guard can find us.”

  Steph’s face had gone a shade paler, if that was possible. “We’ll never make it. That thing will drag us under. Kill us all.”

  I put my face in my hands. “This can’t be the only way.”

  “It’s all we’ve got,” Ben said.

  A tug on the sleeve of my rash guard made me turn. Felix. His head barely came up to my elbow. His face small, full of determination, looking up at me. “I’m a good swimmer. I’ll use the orange ropes to get me in and out. Mom showed me a pony bottle that’s nice and small. I can switch to it and slip right through the hole and open the door. Easy peasy. Mom and Phil will come with me. Mom let me use the scuba gear in the pool last month and—”

  “You what?” I turned back to Mom.

  She threw up her hands and shook her head, as if she’d gotten exactly what she’d expected from me. “He was four feet underwater,” she said, raising her voice. “He was fine.”

  “He has no business breathing compressed air. He’s seven.”

  “No, I’m not,” Felix said. “I’m eight. Today’s my birthday. You forgot.”

  Eight. His birthday. Was it?

  Had we been on the island a month? Six months? A thousand years? When I spoke again, my head was spinning. “Eight, seven. You’re just a little kid.”

  “Stop calling me that!”

  “Come with me,” Ben said, and his tone had none of his earlier patience. He walked into the palms, certain I would follow. I stood stock still a moment, stunned and wondering what the world had come to, that my mother wanted to send my kid brother into a bottomless sinkhole filled with dead bodies—deadish—to navigate a labyrinth only the best divers in the world would chance. And then there was the calamari.

  Ben stopped mid-limp between two massive palms. “C’mon. Your mom and your brother need to cool down.”

  Mom gave me an angry glare. Felix had his back to me. And Ben suddenly thought he was in charge.

  I threw up my hands. “Fine. Whatever.”

  Once inside the perimeter of the palm forest
, I stopped. The cool air inside felt good against my hot face, the scent of the place rose up like a root cellar. But the shadows, they slid over the dry bed of fronds and slithered up my legs. I was torn between wanting to run out into the sunlit clearing and needing to get away from Mom and her suicidal plan. My little brother down in the hole. In the silo. Tying knots in the dark. I just couldn’t.

  Ben limped over to a fallen tree, sat on the trunk, and stretched out his bad leg. I leaned against the smooth bark of a palm across from him.

  “I’m not letting Felix go down there,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “One, it’s full of dead people.”

  “So’s the island.”

  “Two, he could die.”

  “Naw, that’s not what you’re afraid of.”

  “Oh really?”

  Ben angled his head to the spot on the trunk next to him, and gave me his best “C’mon now, don’t be like that” look. I sat, still steaming.

  “Your mom will be with him the whole time,” he said. “He’s just hitching a ride until they get to the grate. Then he lets go of her, swims through the hole, unlocks the door. Hitches a ride back up.”

  “He’ll panic. When you’re diving, panic gets people killed.”

  “He cries when things get bad, but he doesn’t rabbit.”

  The thought of Felix crying while trying to breathe into a regulator hit me like a five-foot breaker. “Felix should be playing on a jungle gym. Learning math. Not risking his life.”

  “Just being a kid, right?” Ben asked, an undercurrent I didn’t like in his tone. My anger kicked up a notch.

  “Every kid should have the chance to grow up without . . .” I trailed off.

  “Without what?”

  I didn’t like the words that had popped into my head. “What did you mean when you said, ‘That’s not what you’re afraid of’?”

  Ben leaned on his knees and stared at his hands, which were loosely clasped in front of him. “You’ve got a screwed-up idea of how to make someone happy.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Ben side-eyed me. “Neither did you.”

  “Okay, fine. I don’t want him to go through what I have.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?” I asked.

  “Because he’ll be a better person if he never has pain? Is that what you think?”

  “Yes.” As soon as the word was out of my mouth, it sounded ridiculous.

  “You turned out okay.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did. You’re kinda wonderful.”

  I was vaguely aware that Ben had taken my hand. My fingers were numb, the rubber band pop of the threshold down below still reverberating through my blood, but the warmth of his palm cut through. Wonderful. He said I was wonderful.

  Reality flooded back. Felix. The Silo. I pulled my hand out of Ben’s grasp and stood.

  In the stillness of the forest, the memory came flooding back, that quiet mausoleum I visited with you forever ago, when you dragged me along to pay your respects to that dive buddy, the one who drowned cave diving in Montego Bay. The Widow Maker had taken another soul from the earth. And that place was nothing compared to where Felix was going.

  “Sia, if you need to get something out, just say it. It’s just you and me here.”

  I had my back to Ben, so he was little more than a deep voice. I kept my eyes on the hashed trunk, toed the crisp palm fronds beneath my feet. I remember standing next to you in that mausoleum, sure I’d never be reckless enough to dive the Widow Maker. Three years later, I was checking flights to Montego Bay, making a list of stuff I needed to make it through.

  Then the confession started pouring from my mouth before I could rethink it—my midnight dive in the Silo. Like a breath I couldn’t hold anymore.

  Ben didn’t seem impressed.

  “A lot of people like a rush,” Ben said. “Roller coasters. Mountain climbing. It’s not that weird.”

  “Not that weird?”

  “You’re just being hard on yourself.”

  “One time, I was using a box cutter on an Amazon package and sliced my arm open. Had to get five stitches and couldn’t dive for a week.”

  “Ouch.”

  “So, yeah, on day three, I get itchy. Climb up to the roof of our apartment building. Four stories up. Nothing but concrete below. And I stand on the edge. Hang my toes over. And not to kill myself or anything. Just to feel scared. To feel the bottom of my stomach drop.”

  The palm leaves in the canopy above rustled in the ocean breeze, filling the space between us. Ben’s silence was worse than an insult, or a slap. I guess what he was thinking was so awful he couldn’t say it.

  I’d never told anyone that before. Not Mom. Not you.

  So I stared into the shadows between the trunks and imagined the ocean at night, its whitecaps lit up with moonlight. Me, finning my way through the dark reef, a dive light in my hand. You, right beside me. That’s what I wanted to be doing, back in Key Largo, while Felix stayed at home and watched cartoons.

  Ben’s voice came out of the dark, bringing me back. “If you’re trying to scare me off, it’s not working.”

  A crunch of dried fronds sounded behind me. Ben limped to the tree trunk and leaned against it, crossing his arms. “I can’t talk to you with your back to me.”

  “You think you know what I’m afraid of?” I said. “You don’t have a clue.”

  He took a deep breath and blew it out. “Felix is going to be okay.”

  “You can’t guarantee that. And when he comes up”—I had to say when, not if, or I would lose it right then and there—“he still won’t be okay.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Because he’s got you and your mom. Because he’s going to go see his dad when he gets home. Because he has all of us to help him through. Just like you have all of us.”

  He took my hand again, and this time I let him.

  “Except maybe Steph,” I said.

  Ben let out a little laugh. “True.”

  I leaned my forehead against his shoulder. The smell of his clean sweat overpowered the root cellar scent of the forest. I found it comforting. His hand came up to stroke the back of my hair. We stood there listening to the rustle of the palm leaves high in the canopy, the cry of the fairy terns as they flew over the island. And I knew he was right. I wasn’t afraid of Felix dying. I mean, yeah, I was, but that’s not why I was freaked.

  I was afraid of Felix becoming me.

  “You know,” Ben said, his baritone a low rumble in my ear, “halfway through this conversation, I’d decided to kiss you—finally—and instead you ruined the moment by talking about your weird risk addiction.”

  My eyes popped open. “Kiss me?”

  “Yeah, it’s this thing people do when they like each other.”

  I pulled away and met his gaze. “Is this your way of getting me on board with . . .”

  The warmth in his eyes dimmed. “You really think I’d do that?”

  “No. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Not afraid of sharks, or a long drop from the roof of an apartment building. But this”—he touched my face—“scares you half to death.”

  I blushed and looked away, and when I met his eyes again, a small smile touched the edge of his mouth.

  “Just think of me as a really tall cliff,” he said.

  I laughed and put my forehead against his chest. Closed my eyes.

  “You’re standing on the rocks,” he said, the smile still in his voice. “The sunset is beautiful, and you’re teetering right on the edge.”

  I pulled away from him to meet his eyes. “Just close my eyes and jump? Is that the idea?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what—”

  Then I kissed him.

  No details. My gift to you. Bu
t I’ll tell you this much. It was the kind of kiss you get at the end of a pier. The ship’s waiting. One of you is leaving. The engines roar to life, and you have so little time. A goodbye kiss, filled with “sorry” and “I wish” and “I wouldn’t leave you if I had a choice.” I imagine it’s the kind of kiss you get when you’re going off to war.

  And for once, I loved the island. Adored it. Worshiped it. Most people get moments like these measured out in the lives of mayflies. A brief flutter and gone. But here in this broken place, that kiss happened a thousand times, in a thousand variations. And it keeps happening, in my head, splintering into perfect moments that fall through my fingers like broken glass.

  Ben and me, holding on to each other like there’s no tomorrow.

  So I didn’t screw it up, Dad, not this time. I didn’t need high school after all to teach me what to be.

  ENTRY 30

  THE NIGHT BEFORE we were supposed to blow the machine, we had a feast on the beach. Steph built a roaring fire high and hot. Ben spent at least an hour retelling Survivor episodes to Felix and sending me an occasional warm look that made me blush all the way to my toes.

  Mom and I stacked more driftwood, getting it ready for the signal fire we would light when the Bubble popped and the Coast Guard could see us. Despite my awesome mood, the unspoken words between Mom and me weighed as much as a barrel of explosives. Neither of us were ready to talk about our fight, so we stacked driftwood and told Felix stories about you and how you would be getting out of the pen soon. Six months wasn’t too long to wait to have you home again.

  We ran out of small talk, and Felix moved to sit beside me at the edge of the fire glow, watching the dark ocean crash on the beach. I put my arm around him and leaned back against a stack of wet suits I had been using as a pillow, my eyes half closed, the smell of neoprene lulling me into a partial sleep. Nothing wipes me out like a four-tank day.

  Felix’s voice was sudden, a harsh stage whisper. “There it is.”

  I snapped my eyes open, scanning our camp for this new threat. But he was pointing into the dark, toward the ocean. At first all I could see were the stars, the Milky Way stretching like a highway above our heads until it plunged into the black sea. Then I saw the glow that lit up the water about two hundred yards offshore, near the buoy that marked the USS Andrews. Green, phosphorescent.