Awake in the World

by Jason Gurley

  I tried to rotate my body toward the sound, but my leg held fast. Even the barest movement lit my nerves like a bundle of fuses, and I gritted my teeth until I tasted blood. I was hurt, and badly. I tried not to think about open wounds, in this water. The infections would kill me before I had a chance to drown.

  The voices were distant, but not quiet. People, speaking loudly. In a boat? But I didn’t hear the sound of oars, the flap of a sail, the hum of an engine.

  My throat was raw. I tried to call out, but my voice was little more than a croak. How long had I been unconscious this time? Only minutes before, it seemed, I’d had the full use of my lungs. My body was falling apart, systems failing all over the place.

  I could make out the voices now, or snatches of them. “Sudden drop-off,” one said. “Stay away from the water.” So they were on land. Which meant I wasn’t lost at sea. I was in Orilly. I had to be. Which meant …

  Orilly was underwater.

  I couldn’t seem to generate a loud enough shout to draw their attention. But I could splash. I kicked hard with my good leg to keep myself afloat, then slapped the water wildly with my good arm. Make all the noise you can, I thought. Make a scene.

  In other words, be exactly the person I wasn’t.

  And it worked.

  A shout went up, and then more cries filled the air.

  40

  Vanessa

  The phone didn’t even ring. As soon as I pressed the green button, I heard the awful triple tone in my ear. Your call cannot be completed, a voice said. I disconnected and shoved the phone back into my pocket and looked helplessly at Mom. “I can’t get them,” I said. “His family needs to know. They must be going crazy.”

  Mom put her arms around me. “I’m sure they’re safe. And your friend is going to be okay.”

  Behind her, Bo trudged cautiously into the water, plunging his long wooden stake into the mud beneath his feet. Adele stood beside us and watched as he waded deeper, and then, abruptly, he dropped out of sight beneath the water. A moment later he came surging up, coughing. When he clambered out, his clothes and skin were streaked black with grime and muck.

  Zach was in that shit up to his eyeballs.

  “Hang on!” I shouted toward Zach, so small out there. “We’re coming!”

  Bo, stripping out of his wet jacket, muttered, “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” and Adele smacked him again.

  * * *

  Over the next few hours, a rescue plan took shape. An aluminum boat arrived, towed behind a four-by-four pickup. Mom took charge alongside Adele, coordinating the effort. When the boat was put into the water, it sent tall ripples surging outward. “Careful,” Adele warned. “Every ripple could drown him. He looks like he’s barely staying up.”

  “Send me,” I said. “Less weight in the boat, less displacement of water. I’m the smallest person here.” Which wasn’t exactly true—Mom was perhaps a little shorter than I was, and sparrow-boned—but I was going.

  Instead, Adele went. Mom stood beside me on the shoreline, and we watched as Adele paddled slowly toward the center of the sinkhole. She glided gently alongside Zach and slowed the boat. When she tried to lift him into the boat, I clapped my hands over my mouth; the sound that came from Zach was gravelly and barely human. My eyes filled with tears.

  “He’s stuck,” Bo guessed.

  When Adele returned, she looked sadly toward me.

  “He’s going to be okay,” I said. “He is.”

  Zach was pinned. “He guessed it might be concrete,” Adele said. “He’s got one leg free, and he can feel rebar.” She’d left Bo’s long wooden stick out there with Zach, taught him how to use it to push against the debris. It wouldn’t be enough to free him, but it would help him stay above the surface. “Maybe that way we won’t almost drown him next time.”

  “Concrete and rebar, that’s structural,” Mom said. “Could be a collapsed wall. A roof.”

  “And if that’s the case,” Adele agreed, “we won’t get that boy out of there until the real equipment gets here. If they can even do it.”

  “There’s no if,” I snapped. “We’re not leaving him. He’s my—” I was nearly hyperventilating. He was out there, small and alone. “He’s my best friend.”

  “Honey,” Adele said. But I didn’t want to hear her sympathy. She wasn’t angry, and I hated that. For her, this was just one more sad story in a long line of them. One more terrible disaster filled with them. But it wasn’t for me.

  I stalked away, and Mom and Adele let me go. But a moment later Bo followed.

  “She’s seen this before,” he said. I didn’t reply, and he sat on the trunk of a wrecked sedan. “Aunt Addie was in the Peace Corps, like, thirty years ago, or something.” He told me the story: Colombia. A volcano. Mudslides. It was the first time she’d seen real disaster, the first time of many she would join rescue efforts. “There was a girl. She was young.”

  “What happened?”

  “Her house collapsed,” he answered softly. “On top of her. They found her on her knees, chest deep in filthy water. Her eyes turned almost black. The only way to get her out was to amputate her legs, but the shock would have killed her.”

  My voice sounded hollow in my ears, and I repeated my question. “What happened?”

  “Nothing she wasn’t afraid of,” Adele said. She’d walked up behind me. Mom was with her. Adele looked sternly at Bo. “You shouldn’t tell her this story.”

  “She made it, though?” I looked up at Adele hopefully. She didn’t answer, but the facts were written on her face. I turned away from the three of them. I couldn’t see Zach, not from where I stood.

  The wind had picked up, turned the water choppy, and I flashed back to the bus ride. College fair. All his drawings that day were so clear to me now: the sea, its hungry mouth, those bright teeth; the oil rigs, probing the earth like fat ticks. Somewhere out there, trapped in the black water, was a boy who believed the sea had taken something from his family. A boy who knew that the sea was never sated, that it would only take and take, again and again, until it had taken everything he had.

  And now it had come for him.

  Specifically for him.

  I rubbed my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket, then turned back to the group. “He’s alone,” I said. “He’s alone out there.”

  Adele shared a look with Mom, and Mom nodded.

  “Yeah, okay,” Adele said. “Take the boat.”

  41

  Zach

  The sun moved across the sky, then vanished behind a bank of clouds. It began to rain again. I was beyond cold; my whole body trembled as I leaned on the wooden pole Adele had brought. I didn’t know how much more I could take. My leg throbbed painfully. I was getting tired.

  After Adele had left, things had certainly picked up on the shoreline. The voices were more or less steady now as people shouted directions to one another. There were more of them than there had been this morning.

  This morning. I’d been in the water, as best I could estimate, nearly twenty-four hours already. I’d be one hell of a prune by the time they got me out. If they got me out. I’d always been regarded as the unlucky kid in town, but it was more than that, I thought. Bad luck is a tame thing. It trips you up when you’re confident, deals you the wrong cards at the right moment. What I had was more insidious than that. It took Dad away, drowned Mama in memories. I had no idea if my family was safe right now, or even alive.

  Bad luck was a high inside pitch when you swung low and away. This was going to kill me out here on the water, alone, within shouting distance of strangers. I thought about the last things I’d said to my family. And the last time I’d talked to Vanessa, it had gone about as badly as it could have gone.

  Maybe it wasn’t bad luck. Maybe it was a curse.

  Curses are vengeful.

  This felt something like that.

  * * *

  The rowboat returned as darkness fell, gliding slowly across the water like a Viking funeral lo
ngboat. I imagined myself lifted out of the water and laid in its belly. Imagined what the flaming arrows, fired from shore, might look like from that vantage point. Sizzling through the sky, sparking and popping as they arced high and then plummeted toward my—

  Wait.

  There was a light in the rowboat, gently illuminating the person who swept a paddle from one side to the other. As the boat creaked closer, I realized I was hallucinating. Because it looked like Vanessa.

  * * *

  “Zach. Come on, Zach, snap out of it.”

  My eyes flew open, and Vanessa was right there, leaning over the side of the boat, struggling with my arms. Confused, I looked down and saw something magical: a life jacket. She was trying to fit my arms through it without losing her grip on me. I helped, despite my shaking limbs, and the difference was immediate. I hadn’t realized how exhausted my muscles were until I relaxed them and sagged into the embrace of the jacket.

  “Where … did you—” I began.

  “Hold still,” Vanessa said, and she lifted a contraption out of the boat next: four lengths of wood, hammered together like a window frame. Lashed to each board were hefty orange buoys, the same kind that had been laced into the rotted, old fishing net on Dad’s boat. She lowered the frame over my head, like a squared-away wooden collar. “Now hang on to this,” she said. “Does that help?”

  The contraption lifted me a couple of inches above the water.

  “Y-yes,” I stammered.

  “It’s the best they have right now,” she said. She gripped my good hand. “They’re working on it. We’ll get you home.”

  She said it earnestly. She had a trustworthy face. But I could see a flicker of something else there, something she was trying to keep pushed down where I wouldn’t notice it. I knew what it was. I felt the same thing.

  Maybe I wouldn’t get home at all.

  * * *

  I slept again. When I came to, things were worse. My face was hot, but my body was frigid. My hands had begun to throb mercilessly.

  Vanessa had tied the rowboat to my little raft and was sitting there, watching me. “I was starting to float away,” she explained. “How are you feeling?”

  My voice sounded like broken glass. “O-okay.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Peachy,” I said. I tried to smile, but it hurt. “Y-you?”

  Her chin quivered, but she didn’t cry. “Are you scared?”

  I nodded. “I’m s-sorry I didn’t say good-b-bye.”

  “Don’t think about that.”

  It was getting colder. The sun had already gone down.

  “You’ll be back in San Diego before you know it,” she said.

  “D-didn’t even m-make it halfway there.”

  “You will. It’ll be sunny and warm. You’ll do all those life-studies classes with naked ladies.”

  “Naked old guys, t-too,” I said. I swallowed hard. My tongue felt bulky. “My h-hands hurt.”

  She leaned as close to me as she could and put her hands on mine. “You’re freezing.”

  “It’s g-going to be hard,” I said. My teeth were chattering now. “To g-get me out.” She didn’t say anything to that. I wondered how badly things were beyond my little lake. “How b-bad was it?”

  “I don’t want to say. You have enough to deal with.”

  “People d-died, th-then.”

  She nodded. There were lights on the shore behind her. Her hair glowed, but her face was draped in shadow. I wished I could see her face. I wished I could draw her. Just like this.

  Sunrise was hours away. It might as well have been years.

  “V-Vanessa.” I hesitated, then said it: “I’m really s-scared.”

  She squeezed my hand. I didn’t tell her that it hurt. She bent down and kissed my forehead, then each of my eyes. I could feel myself slipping away again. The sound of the water, the wind, the voices—it all knitted together into a blanket of static.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said softly.

  I wanted to believe her.

  42

  Vanessa

  Zach woke me just before dawn. I’d fallen asleep in the boat, and I woke with a frantic start. He was looking at me, but not; there … but not. His eyes fluttered between open and shut. His lips were an alarming shade of blue-gray. He wasn’t trembling any longer; he was shaking. Hard. Hard enough that his little raft was beginning to pry itself apart.

  “Do … y-you b-believe in … g-god?” he asked.

  This wasn’t good. “Zach, hang on,” I said, and knelt in the boat and shouted toward shore: “Now! We have to get him out NOW!”

  He continued without waiting for an answer. “M-Mama,” he said. “Sh-sh-she b-believes.”

  “Of course she does,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear a word I said. He looked off to the right, away from me, as if he could see someone else there. His eyes were unfocused, his pupils liquid and vast.

  “Sh-she w-would pray for m-me,” he said. “Even th-though I d-didn’t.”

  I put my hands on his face. “You’re going to be okay,” I said. But I didn’t know if he would be. I was trying hard not to break down in front of him, but I was losing him. He was falling apart, right here in front of me. “You’re going to be fine.”

  “Y-you have to t-tell her,” he stammered, “th-that I l-love her. T-tell all of th-them. The g-g-girls.”

  “Zach, no,” I said.

  “V-Van-nessa,” he said. “I’m g-going to d-die.”

  The words were so final, so heavy. His lips were swollen. Blood had dried in the cracks. His tongue was swollen, corrupting his speech even as he struggled to speak.

  “They’re going to get you out,” I urged. “You have to hang on. You have to just hold—”

  He looked right at me then, lucid and sharp-eyed, and clearly said, “Vanessa. I’m going to die.”

  “No,” I insisted.

  Zach’s face seemed to fog over again. His head lolled forward and collided with the raft. “I…” he began. “I-I w-want—”

  “What, Zach? What do you need?”

  I’d only ever seen him strong. Stoic. Carrying everyone else’s load, without complaining. But now … he looked like a lost little boy. His shoulders shook. “M-Mama,” he rasped. “I just w-want … m-my mama.”

  I turned my face away so he wouldn’t see me weep.

  * * *

  He drifted in and out of consciousness. Each time he woke, he was further away, less aware, more frayed. I wasn’t certain he knew I was there anymore. I clung to his life jacket so hard my hands hurt, afraid he’d shake himself right off the wooden raft and pitch forward in the life jacket and drown. I shouted myself hoarse, but nobody came. They didn’t understand. We’d run out of time.

  * * *

  The sun was up when he woke again, and for a moment, he was his old self. Despite everything, he smiled at me.

  “What, Zach?” I asked.

  “Don’t you feel it?” he asked. His voice was crisp and bright. “Something’s different.”

  His eyes closed, and he went limp in the water, and I screamed toward shore.

  * * *

  What happened next felt like a dream.

  Through the fine mist of rain, I saw a white truck skid wildly down the hill toward the makeshift rescue station Adele and Mom had established. The door burst open, and a man whirled out, shouting, yanking bulky bags from the truck bed. I recognized the voice, distant but powerful, and the shock of red hair.

  Derek steamed across the water in a boat with a small outboard motor. Adele and Bo were with him. Derek was wearing his dive suit, and Adele worked furiously in the bow of the boat, unpacking the bags of gear he’d brought.

  “Two days!” Derek bellowed. “Two goddamned days!”

  I burst into tears at the sound of his voice.

  He barked orders. “I’m going down,” he said, reaching for his air tank. “Your job,” he went on, nodding toward Adele and Bo, “is to get him out of the water and
into the boat. Then you get him to shore. Don’t wait for me.”

  His confident, angry facade faltered as he got his first look at Zach. His mouth opened and closed. Finally, he said, “Oh, Z.” Then he drew a deep breath. “Gonna get you out of here.” He climbed down into the water, then patted the side of my rowboat. “I’m glad you’re here with him.”

  To Adele, he said, “You be ready.”

  He put the regulator between his lips and sank below the surface.

  Word of the rescue effort must finally have spread. While Derek was below, a siren squawked, and an ambulance picked its way through debris to the shoreline. Two medical techs emerged with a stretcher, then waited at the water’s edge.

  Adele threw her hands up. “Where were they yesterday?”

  I could see the sickly green glow of Derek’s lantern moving about. He wasn’t down long before he surfaced. “It’s a slab,” he said, yanking his regulator out. “I think his leg’s cr—” He looked at me. “It’s not good,” he corrected. “If I had a couple more divers, we could probably shift it. Hand me that pry bar.”

  Bo hefted the bar and passed it over to Derek. Then Derek said, “Vanessa, you hang on to this,” and handed me something else. “It was our dad’s. Zach must have dropped it.”

  I wiped grime from the compass. Water had gotten through the cracked glass and sluiced over the needle, but it still worked. “He’s going to be okay, right?”

  “You keep talking to him,” he said to me. “He’ll need the distraction.”

  Derek submerged again. I could see his shadow, faintly, in the glow of his light. He was down there a while, and then several things happened simultaneously: There was a deep, muted groan from below the water, and a storm of bubbles raced to the surface, and Zach popped out of the water like a cork, then lurched sideways against the wooden raft. It had held together, right until the end.