Mike’s thoughts of victory were diverted as he looked out over the ocean’s roiling surface, spotted something he couldn’t quite believe.
There was someone in the cove.
Near the edge of where the small inlet met the great water, Mike clearly saw… what? A head, poking above the water. Blond hair melted in a spill over the surface. A pale, white face. Dark shadows for eyes. Eyes that were watching him.
“Hello?” Mike yelled, waving his hand.
The head didn’t move. It was so distant. The waves would hide it, then reveal it once more, unmoved. Was it a rock? Something he’d never noticed before?
But then the head did move. Turned, as if hearing something close by. As if in alarm.
The face lowered into the water. A wave passed, obstructed Mike’s vision once more, and when it cleared, the person—or whatever he’d seen—was gone.
As the water continued to drop, minute by minute, he kept looking for the swimmer. He knew it was a person, because it had moved. But they never resurfaced. There would be no help, then, from that source.
But I’m alive, he thought, exhausted already beyond measure, eager and ready for help to come. To be saved.
He looked to the sky, saw the white shadow of the pale moon watching him from the north, hazy behind the great blue veil of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Enjoying the show? he thought with defiance.
Then he waited, patiently, for the retreating tide to pull back, to go away, and leave him be.
* * *
Joe sat with his father in the waiting room, red-eyed and miserable. The officers had walked him to an emergency area where he saw his dad sitting up, legs dangling over the edge of a hospital bed. The room was filled with similar beds, each divided by thin blue curtains clipped to rollers in the ceiling. Nurses and orderlies bustled about, pushing carts or talking to and treating other patients. There weren’t many.
Hank had thanked the officers, one of whom had rubbed Joe on the head as they left, and told Joe what happened. There had been an accident. A stupid accident, according to his father, who was shirtless and fiddling with a decent-sized wrap of bandages around his forearm. While he spoke Joe’s eyes darted from cut-to-cut, injury-to-injury, double-checking that none of his father’s scratches and gashes seemed life threatening. There were a few on his face. Chin, cheek, forehead. A nasty-looking one on the bridge of his nose, which appeared a little swelled (“from the airbag,” he’d said), a red mark on his shoulder (“from the seat belt,” he’d said), and a rip in his forearm that needed stitches and a bandage. Joe touched the bandage softly, wonderingly, as his father looked down at him. He was not surprised his father could be hurt, but it still filled him with a strange, icy emptiness to see it. Made him feel more vulnerable to the world than he’d ever felt before. Made him think of death, and the things that could happen to one’s body.
“I’m gonna be fine, Joe,” his father said, smiling, and pulled the boy in to give him a tight hug. “And so is your mom.”
Joe let himself be crushed against his father’s massive chest, inhaled the scent of his musky skin, let the feeling of fear and vulnerability slip away into his warmth.
“Mr. Denton?” a voice said from behind Joe, and his father released him, looked up to the voice expectantly. Joe turned, saw a woman wearing blue scrubs. He noticed she had similar blue booties over her shoes.
To keep blood off ‘em, he thought, then pushed the thought away and waited to hear what the doctor had to say about his mother.
“Mr. Denton?” she said again, waiting for confirmation.
Hank put a heavy hand on Joe’s small shoulder, stood up off the bed. Joe felt a quick squeeze and a moment of weight as his dad balanced with the slightest of wobbles before straightening.
“Yeah,” he said, “and this is our son, Joe.”
“Hi, Joe,” the doctor said, and smiled at him.
Please don’t be dead please don’t be dead please don’t be dead. He tried to smile back, but felt sick to his stomach so could only grimace instead.
“Well,” she went on, “your wife is out of surgery. Only minor repairs to her arm, where the bone had…” she looked down at Joe a moment and Joe felt his father’s hand squeeze, more gently this time.
“I know what happened,” Hank said.
“Right, well, it’s been repaired and she’s in recovery. The rest of her wounds were fairly superficial, aside from the head trauma, which we believe is only a grade one concussion. We’ll keep her overnight for observation, and if everything is clear she can go home in the morning, or late afternoon at the worst.”
“Great,” Hank said, “thank you. Can we see her?”
“Of course, I’ll have a nurse take you to her room. She’s still sleeping, but she’ll likely wake in a couple hours. She’ll be glad to see you both, I’m sure.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Hank said again, then shook the doctor’s hand. She smiled once at Joe, then left.
“Let me see if I can get a hospital gown or something,” Hank said. “Should have asked one of those officers to bring me a shirt. Hold on, champ. Stay here a minute.”
Hank wandered off, left Joe standing awkwardly by the bed, uncomfortable and eager to see his mother.
There was an old man in the bed next to Hank’s. He’d been moaning quietly the whole time, but had really amped up the volume now. Jeez, Joe thought, guy sounds like he’s gonna die or something. A nurse went over to the old man, started talking to him in a soothing voice.
“I want to get out of heeerrre!” the old man yelled, so loudly that Joe jumped and saw two orderlies in scrubs start over from the far side of the room. “You need to let me leave, god damn it!” he shouted, his voice gravelly and phlegmy at the same time, like a whiny child with a bad cold. Joe saw one naked foot kick out from the divider that hung between the beds, saw something strike the sheet, make it bellow.
“Mr. Slatsky, you need to calm down, sir,” the nurse said, and now the two orderlies were in there, helping control the chaos.
“You get off me, you, you bitch!” the old man cried, and for a split second the dividing sheet was pulled back—jerked back—by one of the orderlies, and Joe saw the old man’s face. He had wild white hair and a fat caterpillar of a moustache. His neck was like a chicken bone and his face was sharp and stretched, the skin spotted and weathered, like a man who’d been found on a raft at sea, down to his last days.
Joe couldn’t help but stare, and the old man turned toward him, met his eyes. The eyes were dark, almost black, and he snarled at Joe, bared his gray teeth like an animal, those bottomless eyes boring into his own quivering brown ones with mad fury.
“What are you looking at, piss-pot!” he raged, directing his inexplicable anger straight at Joe now, who could only shake his head in response, mouth open in shock at the turn of events. The nurse turned, saw Joe, and grabbed the curtain with a fist. Before she could pull it across, dividing the crazy, angry old man and the little kid standing on the other side of the next bed over, the man poked a long, bent finger in Joe’s direction and said, “Go play with your friends, you little fucker!”
And then the curtain screeched closed, blocked him, took him away. He was moaning again, his horrible voice seeming far away from Joe now, as if divided by an actual wall rather than a flimsy stretch of blue cloth.
Then, like a bolt of lightning, it hit him.
Joe went cold all over, began to shake. Oh shit, he thought. Oh shit oh shit oh fucking shit.
Joe’s father was back, lifting a blue orderly shirt over his head. “Guy gave me this, pretty cool right? Hey, you okay?”
Joe started to answer, but Hank was now locked on the groans and wails of the old man. “Come on, Joe,” he said, and began to gently guide Joe across the room toward a nurse’s station. “Let’s find that nurse and go see your mom.”
As they approached the nurse’s station and his father questioned one of the women, Joe’s heart beat like a jack rabbit. H
is mind was a thunderstorm, confusion swarming and swirling like clouds, fear stabbing him in the guts.
One of the nurses came around the counter, gave Joe a quick look and his father one of those warm smiles most women gave him, the one his mother called their “fuck-me grins.” This particular nurse wore an exceptionally bright fuck-me grin. Like a neon casino sign, Joe thought, having no idea where the metaphor arrived from, and not caring one bit. On another day, under different circumstances, he might have razzed his dad about the pretty nurse, but right now all Joe could think, as he followed his father and the flirty hip-swinging lady down yet another white, antiseptic-smelling hallway, was one word:
Mike.
PART FOUR
2ND Low Tide
(4pm—7pm, approx.)
Mike didn’t know what time it was, and he had grown sick of looking to the sun for guidance.
The water had retreated. Pulled back to reveal newly moist beach, a few strands of glistening seaweed. His arm hung numbly at his side as he sat, hunched and shivering, on the bottom step of the staircase, the hot afternoon sun beating mercilessly down once again on his already burned back and neck, his body wrecked from the extremes of hot and cold.
His skin was bright red, splotchy crimson in places. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting in the cove, but figured it to be around five or six hours. The sun was past its zenith, so it must be late in the afternoon.
He wondered for the thousandth time where his father was, why he hadn’t come looking for him. Mike was pretty much given complete freedom at the summer house, but the one hard and fast rule was to be home at 1 p.m. for lunch and 6 p.m. for dinner. Mike figured, based on the growling and cramping pain in his stomach, he had blown right past his first meal appointment.
To make things worse, it was one of the hotter days Mike had experienced. Or maybe it just felt that way because he was trapped beneath it, like a pinned bug under a magnifying glass. His back and shoulders hurt from the sunburn, and he was so exhausted from surviving the first tide—physically and emotionally—that he couldn’t think clearly enough to devise a solution. He could lay in the sand. Cover himself up. But the idea of burying himself down there, one arm extended to dangle limply from the staircase, gave him the willies and he dodged away from it like a fly zipping clear of a swatter.
He looked out at the water again. Could sense it watching him. Waiting.
Next time, he imagined it saying, the voice gargled and deep as an abyssal trench, you won’t be so lucky. Next time, the ocean said, stroking the beach with wet, webbed fingers, I’m going to swallow you whole, boy. I’m going to gobble you up.
Mike wanted to cry, but he was all cried out. He stood again, stretched his back, needing to move, needing to do something.
“Hello?” he tried to yell, a low-flying croak bouncing off the steps and back at him. “Hello!”
He had memorized the top of the steps by now. There was a high cluster of brown grass to the left and a crumbled rock formation to the right that looked like a face, like a broken mask he had seen before – one of two conjoined masks that hung in his English 10 school room, just above the basket where they turned in homework. They’d even studied them for an assignment.
Comedy and Tragedy.
Mike studied the broken rocks, debated if the chipped stone mouth looked more like the former or the latter. Was it a frown, or a smile? Either way, it did nothing to sooth his nerves. The idea of being in some giant play attended by the hot sun, broad ocean and pale, wispy moon did nothing to enhance his mood or bring him hope.
“Please,” he said, speaking to the mask and not knowing why, talking only loud enough so that whatever might lay behind it, whatever form it was hiding from him, would hear him out, consider his plea. “Please,” he repeated.
The earth’s mask—he was pretty sure it was Tragedy, although it sure looked like it might have been laughing—stayed silent.
* * *
In his dream—because it surely is just that, just a dream—Paul sits on the rocky beach, stares at the ocean. He can almost feel the warm ocean breeze on his skin, feel the itch of the grass tickle the backs of his knees.
His dead wife sits next to him, saying nothing. In the POV of his dream, he can see her legs, her feet. Her skin is pale and bare and he knows she’s not wearing any clothes. Or maybe just a swimsuit. He doesn’t turn his head. He doesn’t want to look at her.
So he watches the ocean.
It’s wide and clear. Low, broad waves, like ripples, play their way toward the shore. The red sun dangles like a ripened apple above the blur of a strawberry horizon.
“Help!” he hears, so distant and soft it may only be the cry of a bird coasting along the shoreline.
A soft, cold hand slips onto his arm. He looks down at it not the face dear god don’t look at the face and sees his wife’s fingers tighten around his wrist. As if constraining him.
“Dad!”
Paul looks up, eyes sharp. He heard it that time, he knows he did. He tries to stand, to better view the water, but the cold hand is tight, holding him back. Without bothering to look at her, he grips the hand in his own, removes it from his arm and stands, scans the water desperately, looking for, looking for…
“Dad!”
There! About fifty yards out he sees Mike, splashing in the water, arms flailing, head bobbing up and down. He goes under, then resurfaces.
“Mike!” he yells. Oh Jesus, what’s wrong with him? He steps toward the edge that drops a few feet down to the lumpy strip of beach below. “Mike! Hold on!” he yells, knowing—somehow knowing—he has to hurry.
He hears a voice behind him, calling him back. A warning.
He ignores it. He jumps down, kicks his shoes off into the sand and runs for the water, hits it in a hard dive, prayered hands pointed toward his son. He swims, frantic to reach his boy, his child. He looks up, making sure he’s on target still, body rising with a wave and… yes, there! He sees him, waving, his arm slower now, as if he’s tiring out.
“Mike!” he yells again, stupidly because there’s no point to yelling other than to let the boy know help is coming, to hang in there a few moments more because Dad is coming.
Paul swims, frantic, exhausting himself to reach his son while he still can, while the boy is still above water. He looks up quickly, sees he’s close—so close! Mike is just a few yards away, his face stretched with exhaustion and fear, his eyes pleading.
“I’m coming, Son!” he screams and throws himself forward.
Arms grab him from below and yank him down. Paul gets out a yelp before his mouth fills with saltwater. He blows it out, holds his breath instinctively. He spins around, sees his wife, in the murk below, coming up at him, her arms entangled in his legs, pulling at him savagely. Her mouth is a sharp-toothed snarl, her eyes black as a shark, her flowing blonde hair like yellow seaweed dangling from a gray coral head.
He kicks at her savagely, terrified but also angry. He needs to save Mike. Like a trumpet deep inside him, blaring over and over into his brain: SAVE HIM! SAVE HIM!
Paul punches at her face, thrashes at her vice-like claws. She bites at him, tears at him, her sharp teeth cutting into the flesh of his fingers, her hard nails dragging red meaty tears into his skin. He screams but continues to fight, finally managing to free himself and burst toward the surface. He looks around, panicked, waiting for her to rise beside him, grin at him with those sharp teeth and shark eyes.
“Mike?” he says, staring dumbly at the empty patch of sea that had, just moments ago, held his son.
He swims a few more yards, to where Mike had been, waits to be grabbed again, to be pulled down. “Mike!” he screams, his throat raw with terror.
He dives down into the water, eyes open, ignoring the sting.
He sees Mike’s hair, his pale reaching hand.
Paul kicks downward, grabs his son’s hand, and pulls.
Together they break the surface. Seagulls are screaming and the sky is gray and c
old, but he holds Mike in his arms, panting, crying. They’re safe.
“Mike? Are you okay? Mike?”
His son turns to face him, smiles with relief; tears dripping from his cheeks mix with the ocean’s already vast supply.
“Dad?”
There’s a brief moment of wonder in his eyes, a realization. Then his lips part to cry out, his eyes go wide, and he is tugged away. With a cut-off scream and an outstretched hand, he’s torn from his father’s arms, sucked down into the water. Paul reaches, catches a hand, tries to hold on, to hold on. He curses with the effort, but the hand is slipping… slips away…
Paul dives again, finds and grabs his son’s arm with both hands and holds on tight as together they are dragged downward, downward.
Paul’s chest tightens as they plummet, but he keeps his eyes open, on Mike’s scared face, reassuring him it will be okay.
That they are together.
* * *
Paul opened his eyes and the weight of the world crashed down on him. He was back in the sick room, the IV dripping into his arm, his body too weak to move, almost too weak to function. Total shutdown imminent, he thought. Thanks for the laughs, guys, he tells his heart, his lungs, his liver, but you can stop now.
He laid in bed, his heart slow and unsteady. Drool ran from his mouth. The room was hazy and gray, ethereal. He tried to focus his thoughts, but they were muddled, twisted. What dream was this? He couldn’t remember. Or was this real, and not a dream at all?
He considers the mirror across the room, its shining black surface pulsing, the waves on its frame splashing and smashing against themselves.
Paul lifted one weak, frail arm, forced himself to focus on it. He could make out the contours of the bone beneath the paper-thin yellow skin. Without hesitation, he yanked the IV out of his hand, let it drop, bloody, to the floor. Using everything he had left, he focused on the memory of Mike’s eyes. Mike’s wide, frightened eyes, his clutching hands, as they were both dragged down, down into the deep.
Behold the Void Page 27