Fractured Tide

by Leslie Lutz

  “Do you think it knows we’re here?” Felix asked, his eyes wide.

  “Probably,” Phil said from the other side of the fire. “I bet it can smell us on the wind, especially Ben.”

  Ben’s voice came out of the dark. “Shut up, man.” A moment later he was limping over to settle himself next to me. The three of us sat side by side and watched the creature rise to the surface, a patch of light in the distance that brightened as it did. Then it sank, its phosphorescence growing duller until it disappeared.

  “You still think that thing came up from the Mariana Trench?” I asked Ben.

  He shook his head. The creature rose again, then sank, its light fading, moving slowly toward the beach. I was horrified, but I couldn’t look away.

  “I have these dreams,” Ben said, a brittle, frustrated edge to his voice. “More like memories. It’s like there’s a part of me that knows what it is, but I can’t totally remember.” He rubbed his face. “It’s a really weird feeling. I want to remember, but I can’t.”

  Felix’s voice followed, small and curious. “I think it’s an immortal jellyfish.”

  “There is no such thing,” I said.

  “Yes, there is. I learned about it in school. It’s this sea creature that can’t die unless something eats it. It grows up and gets bigger and bigger, and then it becomes a baby again. Over and over. It’s immortal.”

  “Jellyfish don’t have eyes,” I said. “And they can’t move like that thing does.”

  Felix went quiet while he thought about that. The creature rose again, this time farther away. A shiver hit me, along with a memory from that day on the charter. Teague holding on to me and the blood and the smell of fire and gasoline and—

  Felix reached for my hand and threaded his fingers through mine. The images faded.

  “T?” Felix’s voice was small in the dark. Nervous. “When we blow everything up, the Coast Guard can find us, right?”

  “That’s what we think.”

  “But who’s going to kill the monster? Won’t it just follow us?”

  Ben and I exchanged a glance. I didn’t answer. The images of our charter taken apart by that thing, the heat of the fire and the smell of blood, rose again. But this time Teague falling over the side shifted and melted, until he became an image of Mom, and then Ben, and then men and women in uniform, dragged into the ocean.

  The vision had come to me a dozen times while I slept, and I’d hoped it was nothing but a nightmare. Felix and me, standing on a deck of an unfamiliar ship, holding each other as that thing took everything apart, as it sent us all to the bottom of the sea. But like I told you before, dreams and fantasies and memories are all the same here. I have no idea what’s real anymore.

  When Ben’s voice came out of the dark, it was heavy with dread he couldn’t entirely cover. “One thing at a time, Felix. One thing at a time.”

  At the end of the night, after Felix had gone off to find Mom, I fell asleep next to Ben, his arm around my waist. Neither of us cared about the poison look Steph sent our way, or the curious glance from my mother, or the obnoxious smirk from Phil. Could have been our last night—I didn’t know—and I wanted him with me.

  Then in the early hours of the morning, the Sense rose up, like a creature coming from the deep, dark places of the ocean. Teeth and spines and bloodlust in its dumb shark eyes. Me on the beach, watching the Andrews explode. Felix standing on the ocean, waving to me desperately and crying. The island splitting open and the monster rising from within, swallowing us like a Leviathan. I woke in a cold sweat, and the splinters of my dreams set so deep in my head I couldn’t shake them.

  Ben’s arm lay heavy around my waist. His breath warmed my neck. The dark world swelled with wave crash and the scent of seaweed. A silhouette stood down by the water. Mom, staring out to sea. Just beyond the breakers, a hundred yards offshore, a faint green glow lit up a patch of dark water.

  I slipped out of Ben’s arms and made my way down the beach to stand by her side. She acknowledged me with a brief nod. I gave her a small smile she couldn’t see. My insides as tight as a drum, I stood next to Mom and watched the phosphorescence until it faded into darkness again, and my body relaxed. I hoped to God I would have the chance to blow that thing into hell where it belonged.

  “I’m going down with Felix. Not you,” Mom said.

  “I know the hallways. I’ll get in and out faster.”

  “Phil can go with me. Or Graham.”

  “It’s okay. Let me do this.”

  “No!” she said, her tone so sharp I blinked in surprise. “No,” she said again, this time softer, as if she’d regretted losing control. “Because I’m the kind of mother who wants at least one of her kids to be safe.”

  I stared out into the ocean, the way it rushed the land, disintegrating into white froth before pulling its arms back into itself, gathering power. My mother stood with shoulders set. But then her shoulders slumped, and she put her hands over her mouth as if trying to hold back a cry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice stuttered over a breath.

  I crossed my arms and waited. She had been trying to tell me something for days, but she couldn’t quite spit it out. “What happened on the other side of the island? Before you found us.”

  She shook her head. “That doesn’t matter anymore. There was nothing I could do to stop it anyway.”

  “Whatever it is,” I said, “just tell me.”

  “I put too much on you. You were fifteen. You needed to be a kid.”

  My arms dropped to my side. Something heavy lodged in my lungs. She didn’t want to talk about the last few months. Or Felix going down into the sinkhole. Three years of silence on my missing childhood, and she chose now to apologize.

  “You needed me to grow up,” I said, the words feeling heavy in my mouth, like they weren’t mine. “And at least I was doing something I love, rather than working in a tennis shoe factory or something.”

  For some reason this made her turn away. And then Mom’s breath hitched.

  “I shouldn’t have done what I did,” she said, still not looking at me. “But I was so lonely when your dad went away.”

  I stiffened, because we weren’t talking about me growing up too fast anymore. We weren’t talking about the three-tank days, seven days a week. We weren’t talking about the late nights I spent studying, in a classroom of one, just me and my computer, when all the kids my age were going to football games and homecoming dances.

  The diving trip to Texas, that’s what we were talking about, back when you were fresh in the pen and we had all those years of waiting ahead of us.

  “I shouldn’t have,” she said again. “I was . . . My head was in a weird place then. Can you understand that?”

  I didn’t answer at first, waiting for the cool breeze to calm me down, soothe my heated face. No such luck. My mind snapped three years back in time, that day we arrived at Clear Springs. We stepped out of the car, and her ex-boyfriend held her like you used to. Like he knew what she needed, had always known, and he had been waiting for her to come back to him. Waiting for her to come back to her senses and realize you had been nothing more than a terrible mistake.

  So like I said, Dad, I promised you the truth. Her confession. And mine. Because I knew, before she spilled her guts on the beach, confessed like a woman does when she knows she’s about to die or lose somebody. I knew everything, even before I picked up a pencil to write this letter to you. I looked you in the face a hundred times during our weekly visit, with this weight clinging to my bones like coral, and I said nothing. I’m so sorry.

  Mom and her ex-boyfriend inside his tent, after she thought Felix and I had fallen asleep in ours. Talking and laughing. Until they went quiet.

  I had nowhere to go, so I got my gear on, which felt so light compared to what was inside me, and I dove the Silo. A midnight dive into oblivion. My way of sticking a knife in memory. And my fear pulled apart the past and the future so that nothing would be left but t
he now.

  “Can you forgive me?” she asked, her voice cracking on the last word.

  I tried to wrap my mind around her question. Wondered what your answer would be. Wondered if you would forgive me. You know, for trying to forget everything. Everyone. Because forgetting is a kind of leaving, isn’t it? And I want you to know I won’t forget you, I swear. I will never leave you behind.

  “Do you forgive me?” she asked.

  “I’m not the one you need to ask.”

  “Please, Tasia.”

  I almost said no. Then I turned and looked up the beach, an instinct pulling my gaze away from my mother and the sea. The fire that had gone out long ago had been lit again. A girl with long black hair sat next to Felix, just inside the warm glow. Our eyes met, and a flash of understanding passed between us. Between me and me, I guess.

  I turned back to Mom. “I forgave you a long time ago.” I reached out my hand and found hers in the dark. “And I’m going with Felix. You can’t stop me.”

  A murmur under her breath. “My brave girl.” I could tell she meant it. She was proud of me. But I felt that hot flush of shame anyway.

  You know why. Going back into the sinkhole was the least selfless thing. I needed to get away from the topside world, the heavy pull of gravity and the smell of the forest and the noise all of us made. Down in the dark, floating weightless in space, I can finally breathe.

  She squeezed my hand. “I won’t fight it. I guess me telling you what to do doesn’t make sense anymore.”

  Dad, people do strange things when they’re in pain, and Mom’s affair doesn’t mean what you think it does. It just means she’s not perfect, which you already knew. But we all can’t be together without you two talking about it, and she’ll never bring it up. So consider this an intervention. Mom and I are going to make it home, and we’re bringing Felix with us, and we’re all going to be happy.

  I don’t care what the Sense says about it.

  While Phil and Mom rigged the safety stop, I cut off a foot of neoprene from the arms and legs of a spare wet suit and helped Felix slip inside. When I strapped him into the smallest BC we owned and secured the last release, a drop of water fell onto my fingers. I looked up to find the clouds thick and gray, swollen. Ready to pop. After three weeks of nothing but bone sky blue, Mother Nature would give us rain. A good omen, you would say.

  Felix’s gaze went skyward, and when he took in the sky, his face broke into a smile. We were both thinking the same thing: rig the tarp to capture fresh water. There was no guarantee our plan would work, and something clean to drink would be a good consolation prize.

  By the time Phil and Mom had added a few bungees to Felix’s gear, the wind had picked up. A crack of thunder rolled across the island. Mom’s face darkened, taking in the heavy clouds, the lightning in the distance. Another flash and crack had Felix burrowing into her side.

  “That’s just a storm, Felix,” Mom said. But she picked up speed anyway, preparing for our big drop to the center of the earth.

  Phil tightened Felix’s gear while Steph distracted him with little kid jokes. Ben stood nearby, his expression pained.

  I kneeled in front of Felix and attached the extra reg to the front of his BC.

  “If your reg stops working, you can grab this.” I put his hand on the backup.

  “I know. Mom taught me in the pool.”

  I bit my lip. But it wasn’t the time. “I’m sorry I forgot your birthday.”

  Felix tested the regulator, looking very grown-up. After his Darth Vader breath, he pulled it aside. “It’s okay. You were busy.”

  “I was.”

  “When we get back home, you have to buy me extra presents.”

  “Just one extra present.”

  “A Supersoaker Soakzooka.”

  “Okay.”

  “And a morfboard, the one you can make into a scooter and a skateboard.”

  I cinched his vest tighter as he went on about the morfboard. Mom stood a few feet away, suited up and ready. She looked to Phil and he nodded. Felix played with the zipper pocket on the BC. The playful movement—something a little kid would do—made a bubble of panic rise in my chest. I grabbed him by the shoulders so he would look at me.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Yes, I do,” he said.

  “I know what you’re thinking. ‘This is what Dad would do. He would save everybody.’ And you think you have to be like that.”

  He took another breath from his regulator, pulled it away to speak again. “That wasn’t what I was thinking.”

  “Then why?”

  “I was thinking, ‘This is what T would do. She would save everybody.’”

  I hugged him then, so he wouldn’t see me tear up.

  When I pulled away, and Mom and Phil had slipped into the sinkhole. I helped Felix into the water, and his BC floated up around his ears. Steph kneeled by the edge and wrapped her arms around his neck, a tear making its way down her cheek.

  Before I could look for Ben, he was kneeling next to me. His hands on either side of my face. “Don’t take any extra risks down there, okay? Not this time. Just focus on your goal, what you’re doing.”

  I nodded, and he kissed me. When he pulled away, I caught a glimmer of longing in his eyes. Warmth. Something more maybe. I almost said, “I love you.” Before I could, he’d turned and walked away, past Steph, who didn’t look up from her hands, clasped so hard in front of her the knuckles were white; past Graham, who gave me a brief nod before returning his attention to the perimeter.

  I swam to Felix. Mom held his BC in a death grip. Phil floated a few feet away, his expression unreadable through his mask. I met Felix’s eyes, and he held up a fist for me to bump. My throat constricted, and I forced a confident smile. Our knuckles met.

  One more breath, and we descended.

  Plummeting through the dark.

  The sinkhole yawned beneath, swallowing us. The Vanessa Peters song played in my head.

  I tell myself that . . . everything . . . will be okay from now on . . .

  if I just close my eyes . . . and believe it . . .

  Four lights. Three steady, the fourth—Felix’s—dangling from his wrist, his light skittering over the rough rock walls, the cored-out earth.

  In my head there was a fifth light. Yours. But that light shone like a hot coal in my throat, lighting me up from inside. Then the last bit of the chorus came to me, the part I’d forgotten until now.

  The unravelling of love . . . is sometimes hard . . .

  but there’s only so long . . . you can grieve it . . .

  A glint of silver below caught in my beam. A railing. The lab.

  Mom slowed, her hair floating around her face, like Yiayia’s hair streaming out behind her when we dove for sponges. Which wasn’t real. Or it was. I was no longer sure.

  A rush of bubbles obscured Mom’s mask as she gripped the edge of the catwalk and came to a stop. She gave me the okay. Phil’s sign joined hers, his breathing slow and measured.

  The four of us hovered there for a few breaths, taking stock. No green glow beneath us, just the honeycomb of blackness waiting beyond the railings, tunneling into the earth. Felix hung onto Mom like a barnacle, his body very still. A rush of bubbles came from his regulator, and then another. His breathing was fast, which meant he was scared. But I told myself Ben was right. We’d be in and out of there fast, before anything could go wrong.

  I finned over to the entrance marked with the orange line, unspooling the wire Mom and Phil would connect to the last depth charge. We swam past the bomb that sat a few feet from the drop-off—one of Ben and Steph’s Xs. Mom stayed a few feet behind me, her arm wrapped around Felix’s thin waist. The silt had settled at the entrance to the lab, and my firefly dive light punched a clean hole through the dark, all the way to the end of the hallway.

  Making my way into the blackness, I obsessively glanced over my shoulder. Three lights floating in the dark, two close together and one behind. F
loating in space, our lights had become stars.

  The orange line would take us right, then left, past a hallway, and left again. Deep in the heart of the labyrinth. Your voice stayed with me the whole way. Breathe in. Breathe out. Keep your breath steady, Sia. Shallow and easy. Piece of seaweed cake.

  We passed a body. Mom turned Felix’s face toward her chest, his light jittering. I made the last turn, skirting a dead guy in a white lab coat, and checked on my brother again. His grip on her BC had turned his knuckles white. I couldn’t even imagine how frightened he was.

  My dive light caught the silver of a depth charge ahead, sitting in the hallway like a promise, so much violence and destruction held inside that metal skin. And this whole place, flooded with seawater and secrets and some government’s arrogant idea of progress. I reached the barrel and hung on to the metal handle that ringed the top, watching my bubbles rise and catch on the ceiling. Waited for Phil to help me roll the last bomb down the hall to the locked door. Thought about all those scientists screwing with Mother Nature, thinking there wouldn’t be any consequences.

  Phil’s light joined mine. He made a hand signal in front of his dive light, silt particles moving through the beam. Easy.

  Yeah, Phil, go easy with the two-hundred-pound depth charge. Got it.

  I wedged myself against the corner, and we eased the barrel over to roll it. And then my hand slipped. Before I could catch it, clang! rang out through the hall.

  My heart jumped, and my breathing stuttered. Phil did something I’d never heard him do—talked into his regulator. I think he was swearing. So was I. And I was so happy the depth charge hadn’t exploded that I didn’t think about the burst of sound traveling through the lab.

  We slowly rolled the barrel down the hall. Mom and Felix followed behind us with the wire and the trigger. I directed my beam ahead, and as we swam, a door gradually materialized out of the dark. Phil stopped in front of it, his light sliding over its thick metal surface. Above the door was a small rectangle space. Just big enough for a child to crawl through.