She was in a bedroom. She was in her bed, covers drawn tight around her. Something squirmed around her feet, then her calves, her thighs, her stomach. It reached her hands. It touched her face. It giggled like a small child and Doris giggled back, not realizing she was choking. It hugged her and she hugged it back, until it was impossible to tell them apart.
The ripples of the surface faded until there was nothing but a solid wall filling her body, making itself apart of her. She felt herself going down and down, deeper and deeper. Her fingers glanced against something—another set of fingers. She reached up as she sank; those fingers reached down. She’d never know whose they were.
Thea shrieked as her natural buoyancy pulled her up too close to the boat, too close to the people aboard it that were shouting at her. It felt like she’d traveled leagues, but every time she surfaced, she hit her head on the hull, always right there no matter how hard she fought and screamed. Eventually, a pair of hands gripped her by the hair and yanked her out of the water enough for someone else to grab her arms. A collection of hands and fingers and elbows heaved her onto the boat platform, then dragged her toward the prow. They performed like headless marionettes, as if they had a job to do and they were going to do it whether she liked it or not.
“That water’s not safe,” a man said. “There’s something big in it.”
They were never going to find her sister. Thea could jump back in, and they’d simply pull her back out again. She could dive in again and again, and even if they left her to drown, she would never find Doris. Thea had seen it happen, despite the smoke and the commotion. Doris sitting there, then something lashed around her neck, and then she was gone.
Now, as she paced the perimeter of the boat waiting for her sister’s body to surface, she knew it wouldn’t. She’d finally turned to stone and had plunked herself on the bottom of the stream, content to tumble along with the other forgotten pebbles. Not even physics could bend Doris’s will.
The driver kept a suicide watch over her. The lady and her kid clung together and stared seaward; it was truly an ocean now. Rain scattered itself, slowing, but not stopping completely for another three months.
Before he died of fever, the Russian leaned over to Thea, resting a hand on her shoulder, and said, “Sestra.” More a proclamation than anything. Thea could only guess at what it meant. What she always had been—sister. He didn’t live to see the rain stop.
She sat in one of the ripped-up bucket seats of the boat, floating, hiding from the rain for days. After the Russian died, she helped roll his body into the water while the woman and child, the driver’s wife and child, stared in silence. The man watched them until his eyes went bloodshot. No one ate, no one moved, no one spoke. Thea felt the tautness of muscles, as if the entire boat was about to capsize. The tendons in the woman’s neck stuck out, as if to be plucked, and the boy pointed ahead of them, behind them. Pointing at nothing, but it wasn’t nothing. It was that thing, that big thing that’d continued to follow and torment her.
Sleep draped over her like a fog, so that she was never sure if what she remembered was real or a dream, and often she’d wake calling out to her sister without realizing that she’d even been asleep.
“No!”
She woke up as water splashed over the sides of the boat. The driver dove overboard. The mother and son were gone. How long had it been? Weeks? Hours?
Thea watched from under the tarp as the man scrambled in the sea, digging through it and screaming names Thea didn’t have the energy to commit to memory.
“There’s something in that water,” she said. The driver didn’t hear her. “It’s not safe.”
They were gone. Bloop—gone under. They would never be found.
The man slogged his way back to the platform of the boat and curled his arms around the top rung of the ladder. He didn’t hear Thea approach or see her hand extending toward him. Covering him in her shadow as she loomed over him, she wrapped her hands around his wrists.
“Come on,” she said.
He did not come, not at first. He languished in the water, wailing for his family. Thea didn’t have it in her to feel bad. She should have but didn’t. He wanted to find them and die with them, but Thea knew as soon as she saw his screaming head surface above the water that he would live (for now). Doris had gone down like a stone. Bobbing only meant that it wasn’t his time yet.
Both plunked into ripped-up bucket seats and searched their own corners of the water.
“Who are you?” the man asked.
“Call me Sestra.”
He said to call him Rob. Then they floated.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Rob had her cornered in the cabin. Mijo sat next to her, careful to keep his hands to himself.
“What really happened?” Sestra asked. Again.
“I already told you.” A quick flick of the eyes toward Mijo, and Rob repeated himself. Again. “You were going nuts. I knocked you out.”
He was fucking lying. She knew he was lying, and he knew that she knew he was lying and yet here they still were, repeating themselves for the third time.
She’d ask Mijo, but she didn’t trust him much either. The way they kept glancing at each other could only mean that they were in cahoots. But what neither of them understood was that her not knowing was far more detrimental than anything they might tell her. Had she hurt one of them? Tried to hurt herself? Did she try to jump? Rob, for all his saltiness, would never lay a hand on her without serious cause. His style was stealthier than that, like black mold growing behind the drywall. Sestra figured this was why they’d gotten along so well all this time. Or at the very least, hadn’t thrown each other overboard.
And though they had never expressed it aloud, she felt betrayed, as if Rob had severed a bond between them.
“What are you not saying?”
His body clenched; he was a diamond-compressed with anxiety. “What does it matter? Doesn’t change things.”
She wanted to throttle the bastard, but God help her, she restrained the urge. “You know why it matters.” There was so much that she didn’t know—wouldn’t ever know. For him to withhold something as important as this felt spiteful. It felt like a lot of things, and her composure quickly faded.
Apparently, so had his. “You want to talk? Then talk!”
“Talk? About what? You knocked me out!”
Dismissing her with a wave, he said, “It was only a few minutes.”
“And you haven’t let me topside since.” Two days, to be exact.
She must have tried to jump overboard. Shit, this sucked. She looked to Mijo and he nodded. Sestra couldn’t help but detect a little satisfaction in the way he grinned.
What was it about these posies? She’d thought she’d understand it better once it happened to her, but all it had done was make her irritable and gassy from not pooping for forty-eight hours.
Her legs were weak, but she stood anyway. She squared off at Rob. “I’m going up.” No needs or wants this time. It just was.
Rob palmed her chest. “No, you ain’t.”
That was all she needed. Instincts that had all but shriveled suddenly bloomed. She swung at him, clocking him good in the jaw. But he had instincts too.
The pair went feral, unleashing a year’s worth of grief all at once. Though not meant for one another, they delivered it all the same. Scratching, biting, screaming and cussing—they were well matched, what with his age and deterioration, and her penchant for conflict. If anyone had listened, they’d have detected the audible snap of their sanity.
Due to an error of judgment on Thea’s part, Rob managed to pin her on her back. He screamed at Mijo to help him while attempting to hold her still.
For her part, Sestra hurled every clever insult she could recall. “You pussy. You fucking pussy, let me up!” Annoyed at her own redundancy, she switched tactics. Poignan
cy gave way to volume, which ended up being more effective anyway.
Rob yelled louder at Mijo, and louder still, until he couldn’t muster anything else. “Shut up. Shut up now!” He covered her mouth with his hand.
She bit him, tasted his blood, but still he didn’t remove his skin from her mouth. That only made him hold her down harder.
“You need to shut up.” His regular voice disappeared. He only spoke in growls.
She’d have gone on and on forever if not for little Mijo, waving his arms behind them in a way that suggested he was either panicked or trying to direct a Boeing 747 onto the tarmac.
Rob seemed pretty pleased with himself as she quieted, not seeing Mijo’s desperation fanning out behind him.
“Let me go, Rob.” He relented slightly, but not enough for her to move.
Mijo flailed in a blur. He spoke softly in Spanish, and even though she couldn’t discern the words, she could tell it was a prayer.
“Rob!” She was screaming again. Whoops.
Then Mijo was gone. His steps sounded thumped up the stairs and he was gone. Only then did Rob release her, scurrying after, begging him to stop.
There wasn’t time to think There wasn’t even time to catch her breath. Off she was, absorbing the fresh air like osmosis. The pleasure didn’t last long. It never did.
Mijo craned over the bow of the boat, staring at the water. Sestra didn’t need to join him to see what he was looking at—the water glowed, just like before.
Floored, she didn’t assist Rob in yanking Mijo away from the edge. She didn’t move much at all. These definitely weren’t any kind of shrimp or krill.
“Do you see what you did?” He pointed to the water as if it were her doing.
She switched her gaze between the toxic-colored water and Rob.
“It’s listening to you.” His voice was softer this time.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“It gets brighter when you scream. It hears you.”
“And what is ‘it’?” The morning was warm as usual, quiet as usual, but today carried with it an eerie undertone that plucked at all the hairs on her body.
Mijo signaled outward. “El monstruo.”
“Bioluminescence,” she said.
But even Mijo shook his head. “No.”
“What am I supposed to do about it? Really, how is this my fault?”
“You tell me,” Rob said.
A crack widened between them, each of them positioned on opposite sides. “This is nonsense.”
“Oh, is it? You have always been strange about these things. You like them. You talk to them. I hear you whispering like I’m not there. Well, now the things are listening and listening only to you. Maybe you don’t know what they want, but I don’t think that matters.”
The fight had left her—she didn’t have it in her to be indignant anymore. What if he was right?
Really, what if he was?
She still had to poop, but the thought of hanging her bare ass over the edge of that neon ocean was enough to stifle the urge.
Without another word, she fled back into the cabin, suddenly exhausted beyond all functioning. It was like her body knew to conserve itself, to shut off her brain. If it didn’t, who knew what she might do?
Knock knock. She mouthed the words, realizing a while later she hadn’t actually knocked on the door.
James answered once she did. She made sure to come when Doris wasn’t around. He seemed shocked to see her. He shouldn’t have been.
“I need some money.”
Realization dawned on him, his pasty jaw shivering at the indignity. “You stole my wallet.”
“Of course I did. Now I need more money.”
Blocking the doorway with his body, he leaned toward her as if he meant to shake her. “Where’s my ring?”
“Why was it in your wallet?” she asked. It’d been bothering her since she found it.
“Where is my ring, Thea?”
“It’s odd for a married man to keep his ring in his wallet during clandestine meetups with his sister-in-law. Very, very odd, if you ask me.” It was so easy to toy with him; his emotions reeled against his features.
“Where is my ring?” He was getting angry now.
All the better. Angry people were the least reasonable of all people. “Some people might get the wrong idea.”
“What wrong idea? What the hell are you talking about?”
She shrugged. “You know what I mean.”
He was fit to explode, but somehow buttoned it up just in time. “You don’t have it anymore, do you.”
The pawn shop had paid handsomely for it, but he didn’t need to know that. Yet.
“It’d look awfully bad for me to show up with your ring on my finger. Who knows what people might think?” She laughed. God, he was the easiest mark on the planet.
But he laughed too, as if the idea of them together was too ludicrous to take seriously. “Doris wouldn’t believe that for a second and you know it.”
“She’s probably the only one to not underestimate the depths of my shittiness. I’m sure she’d figure it out. But the rest? Jesus, can you imagine what my mother might say? Can you imagine how tiring that would be? Especially for Doris.”
His body went rigid, to the point that she could have rung him like a bell. “You truly are a psychopath.”
No, she wasn’t. Of course she wasn’t. She was smart and he was dumb, and this was all too easy. She wasn’t a psycho—she just needed money. And he was going to give it her.
She smiled. “Small bills, please.” Then she waited.
James stood in the doorway, stunned. It was all too easy. Too easy.
Then he backed away from the door, moving at an odd slant that had her wondering if he was fainting or was just too upset to function properly. Slipping into the dark of the living room, she grabbed at the edges of the door and peered after him.
“I don’t have all day, James. And if I know Doris’s schedule like I think I do, neither do you.”
But he was gone. The shades were drawn and the lights off—the room was completely empty. No furniture, no pictures on the wall. The archway into the kitchen was black as tar.
“James?”
When had they moved in? It was years ago. She remembered their housewarming party—Ma had been adamant that Thea show up and be presentable for the love of God. There was champagne, and she’d stolen an entire bottle for herself, boozing it up in the corner of their yard while pretending to smoke. Ma had found her, and she’d been spitting mad.
Where was all that shiny new furniture now? Where was James?
She was about to step inside when a low gurgle echoed from the black space where the kitchen should be. Then came the water—a slow trickle at first, like runoff from a leaky cooler.
“Doris?”
No one responded.
The water picked up, churning into the living room and spilling through the doorway. Where was all this water coming from? It just kept coming, more and more and more. Thea wanted to back away, to run, but something rooted her in place.
“James!” Her voice cracked, springing from her throat in a panic. “What the fuck is going on, James?”
A voice—so familiar and so strange and so not possible.
“I told you they were coming, sister.” The noise oozed from the black space. “Now look what you’ve done.”
She spoke delicately, so that Thea had to lean in to hear.
“Doris?”
There was no answer.
“This isn’t funny. Fuck this, I’m leaving.” Her body wanted to bolt, to get the fuck out of there as quickly as her feet would carry her, but the moment she stepped back from the doorway, a wail erupted from the house. Something monstrous and huge shuddered and shook the walls apart. The
floors began to rock, splashing against the drywall in waves.
Before she could run, a tentacle sprung out of the black. It snatched her around the waist, crushing her organs between her bones with ease. She tried to scream or fight or do something, but it gripped too tightly.
It pulled her down and down and down. Down under the house. Down under the waves and water. She could do nothing as the house sealed up over her head, her breath pressurizing in her lungs.
Down she went.
Down she stayed.
Sestra startled out of it, unsure what was real and what wasn’t. The boat moved. She wasn’t on a boat. She was in the water, or on a raft, or in the clutches of a monster, or getting high behind a dumpster. She settled into a fog, never quite sure if she was awake or asleep or dreaming or just seeing shit like it had always been—gray and mean and indecipherable. There were times when she was certain that there were other people on the boat besides Mijo and Rob, but then she’d snap out of her funk and realize that it was just her, acting a fool all by herself.
Past and present stretched and snapped together, her mind circling itself like an ouroboros—a snake eating its tail—she was consuming herself whole.
More than once she felt the warmth of a small hand laid across her cheek. She was rather certain that was real.
She heard crickets and the soft rapping of knuckles against the window.
And then she woke up for real. There were no crickets. The room was empty and dark. She was alone.
Her mouth felt waxy and parched. How long had it been since she’d bothered to drink anything? Where was everybody?
By now she had gotten used to the sound of lapping water against the side of the boat, but just then it slapped a little too loudly. Every shift of the boat knocked her legs loose. Aside from the water, the boat was suspiciously devoid of noise, and a knot of panic congealed just beyond her tonsils.
Where was everybody?
It felt like the first time she stepped foot on this boat. Shadows jutted out at devious angles; she bumped into steps that she’d memorized weeks ago. Sestra couldn’t orient herself. Everything was foreign and new all over again.
A Flood of Posies Page 21