Lured In

by Laura Drewry

  Up until that moment, he thought he’d understood how huge it was for her to trust him in that lake, to put her faith in him keeping her safe, but seeing her like that, trying to be so fuckin’ brave even though she was terrified—that was something else entirely.

  And once she curled up on his lap, there was no way in hell he was going to voluntarily let her go. Shit, he’d still be sitting there if she hadn’t dragged him off the log and back to the lodge.

  He’d tried to find words to let her know what it meant to have her trust him like that, to let her know he’d go out in that damn lake with her every night for the rest of her life if she wanted him to and that he didn’t care if she never wanted to tell him her whole story. But those words never came.

  Instead, he did the one thing he never thought he’d do: He’d told her about Ma. It was the only way he knew to show Jess that her trust in him meant more than anything else he’d ever known.

  He’d expected her to say it wasn’t his fault and that he shouldn’t blame himself for any of it, because that’s what people always said when they wanted to make someone feel better. And they always said it in that patronizing “there there” voice that really meant they were just uncomfortable talking about it.

  Not Jess.

  She’d pulled her chair closer to him, she’d taken his hands in hers, and she’d never once looked away from him.

  It was as if she knew what he was feeling, but what could she have possibly done that would leave her saddled with guilt like that? He knew almost everything about her, and she’d never mentioned anything that would—

  The lightbulb burst so bright in his head that he had to blink hard to clear it.

  Whatever it was that had kept her out of the water—that had to be the guilt she packed around with her.

  “Fuck me,” he muttered, just as Art and Ken both hollered at the same time.

  “Fish on!”

  The lines on both downriggers whizzed out even after the two men wrestled the rods out of the holders, but Finn wasn’t worried; of everyone on Fishin’ Impossible right then, those two knew how to reel in fish.

  The other four scrambled to get everything out of Ken and Art’s way, giving the two of them room to move. It was busy enough back there when there was one fish on, but two at a time made things extra crazy.

  While Finn did his best to keep the boat steady in the slow rolling swells, everyone else settled in to watch the battle—and it was a long one for both men.

  Ken hauled his in first—a good-sized salmon, no doubt about it—but the one Art brought in a while later weighed in at close to thirty pounds, making Ken’s pale in comparison.

  “Not bad for an old fella, eh?” Art slumped down on the edge of the boat and chuckled as sweat ran down his red cheeks. “Think I’ll let you guys take it from here.”

  By mid-afternoon they’d limited out on both halibut and salmon, but no one was ready to go in yet, so Finn took them on a bit of a sightseeing tour up around Calvert and Hecate Islands. He slowed the boat to a crawl whenever they came across a pod of dolphins or whales, to give his guests time to snap pictures if they wanted to, and unlike the Green-cabin women, this group was properly impressed by all of it.

  Six smiling passengers climbed off Fishin’ Impossible a couple of hours later, and it was that energy that gave Finn the boost he needed to haul their load off the boat by himself.

  They’d been a little late getting back to the Buoys, and Olivia had salmon terrine on the menu again—something no guest should miss out on—so he’d sent them all ahead, making Art promise to save him some.

  Inside the fish shack, he’d just finished gutting the first salmon when the door opened and in walked Jess, pint of Gat in one hand, fish gloves in the other, and her hair pulled back into a messy wild twist.

  Nodding his thanks, he took a long pull of the beer, wiped his mouth, and grinned. “You’re a good woman.”

  “Heard you limited out,” she said, smiling up at him. “And the way your brother’s hovering around the kitchen, there’s not going to be any terrine left if we don’t get you up there soon, so put me to work.”

  Finn didn’t hesitate, just nodded toward the other cutting board. They worked well together, always had. Gut, clean, fillet, vacuum-pack, and freeze. He used to brag that she’d learned everything from him, but Jess was better. Faster, too.

  But she wasn’t usually this quiet. They were over halfway done when Finn couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Is everything o—”

  “I was seven.”

  Three words he wasn’t prepared for, because no matter how many times he’d wondered what had happened, he honestly never thought she’d tell him. And now that it was happening, he didn’t want to know; he didn’t want to hear the pain he knew would come with it, and he sure as hell didn’t want her to feel it again.

  “Jess,” he said, her name hanging in the air between them. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I know. I want to.” She didn’t even look up from the fish she’d just sliced open. “It was the Monday of Labor Day weekend and we were camping near this lake outside of Kamloops. Most of the other campers were already gone, but Dad wanted to wait until the traffic thinned before we left.”

  As she spoke, she sealed her fish in its bag, tagged it, and laid it flat in Art’s box. Then, after a quick swipe of her upper arm over the side of her face, she reached into the cooler for the next fish.

  “It was really hot that weekend, and I kept bugging my folks to let me take the air mattress out on the lake. We had one of those big old ones, you know, like the size of a double bed, but they wouldn’t let me go out by myself. I was too young, I couldn’t swim well enough, all that. So I…I, uh…”

  Jess inhaled slowly, tucked her chin in a little, and exhaled even more slowly. “I told my sister, Tracy, if she went out with me, I’d do her chores for a week when we got home.”

  Finn’s hand slipped, sending his knife slicing straight through the side of his fish. Thirteen years he’d known Jess and never once had she so much as breathed a word about a sister. Neither had her parents, the few times he’d met them.

  “Jesus.”

  Her big brown eyes fluttered as she glanced up at him. It couldn’t have been more than a second or two, but it was enough for him to recognize the same terrified look she’d worn the day he took the header off the dock.

  “Tracy was only ten, but she’d cruised through every set of swimming lessons they put her in and Mom and Dad always said she was the most responsible kid they knew, so they had no problem with her taking me out as long as we didn’t go too far. It wasn’t a big lake, maybe four or five hundred meters across, so we paddled out about halfway, then we laid there on our backs with our feet dangling off the end.”

  She never stopped working once, just kept slicing, gutting, and rinsing as if she were on autopilot.

  “It was so hot,” she said, swiping her arm over her forehead as if she could still feel the heat. “So we got into the water and hung on to the sides of the mattress. Couple times Tracy dunked under the water and I couldn’t see her, because she’d swim away under the mattress, then suddenly she’d grab my ankles and scare the crap out of me before popping up right beside me again. And then…”

  Finn pushed his fish aside and waited.

  “I don’t know how it happened.” Jess’s voice was barely a whisper. “She went under and I…I kept expecting her to grab my ankle again, but she didn’t. I remember I…I had to plug my nose so I could put my head under to look for her and…and…she was stuck. Her foot. It was wedged between a couple of downed logs at the bottom and…God, she was thrashing like…”

  She hesitated only long enough to seal the fish in a bag and grab the next one.

  “I—I couldn’t swim like she could; I could dog-paddle, but I couldn’t go under without holding my nose. I knew if I let go of the air mattress, it’d float away, but I also knew if I got Tracy free, she’d be able to go get it.
So I let it go.

  “Everything happened so fast, and yet at the same time it felt like it took forever, you know? I got down to the logs, and I tugged and tugged, but I only had one free hand and I…I couldn’t. I swam up to get air and tried to scream for Mom, but Tracy grabbed my ankle and pulled me back under.”

  Her breath came faster, her chest heaved in and out, and her eyes barely blinked, just like every time she went back there, to that dark place.

  “It was…God, I kicked and kicked until she let me go, and when I got up, I tried to scream again, but I was thrashing around so hard and water kept getting in my mouth and I couldn’t breathe…and…I was so scared. And Tracy…I couldn’t leave her there, so I tried to go under again, but I couldn’t get to her foot because she grabbed me and pushed me down like…like she was trying to get on top of me. I tried to get free but…God, I was so…and then when I finally did get away, she grabbed hold of my leg again. It was so cold…so cold…and I kept kicking her, over and over, until she let me go.”

  Huge fat tears pooled at the corners of her eyes, then spilled down her cheeks, but she didn’t wipe them away; she just kept working.

  “By the time I surfaced again, Mom and Dad were almost out to us. Mom grabbed the air mattress and shoved me on top of it while Dad dove under to get Tracy, and then Mom…Mom dove under, too, and then another couple came out to help.”

  She blinked a few times, hard and fast, sending more tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “I was so cold sitting on that air mattress, which was stupid, right, because it was so hot, but it was like I’d brought the cold up with me. I could see Mom and Dad and the other couple down there fighting to move the logs, and I could see…I could see Tracy’s hair…it was floating out around her head like…like she was a mermaid or something, and I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t thrashing around anymore…she just sort of hung there…like she was suspended.

  “Mom and Dad and the other couple kept coming up for air and then going back down; I don’t know how many times. And then suddenly they all shot up out of the water. I was so happy because they finally had her, but then Dad was yelling at me—so loud—to get off the mattress while they shoved Tracy up on it, but I wanted to stay there with Tracy, you know? They got her; she was right there. But Dad kept yelling at me, and Dad never yelled, so then the other lady pulled me off and made me climb on her back, and she started swimming toward shore. I remember she was yelling, too—at first I thought she was yelling at me, but it was at some guy in a golf cart who was driving past our campsite.”

  Finn still hadn’t touched his fish; he just stood there listening, his imagination taking him through every god-awful second of that day with Jess.

  “Mom and the other man were swimming, too, pulling the mattress behind them. And Dad was up on it with Tracy. I tried to tell him to stop pinching her nose, that she wouldn’t be able to breathe, but he wouldn’t listen. Mom was crying so hard and the lady still had me on her back. It felt like forever before we got to the beach, and by then the golf-cart guy was back with more people. I don’t know why he brought those people, because none of them did anything; everyone just stood there watching Dad breathe into Tracy’s mouth.”

  Finn wiped his scale-covered hand across his mouth and waited, because whatever was coming next was enough to make Jess stop working.

  She set her hand over the head of the fish and sighed.

  “It was so quiet,” she said, seemingly unaware she was whispering. “Even with all those people there. And then the golf-cart guy—I remember he was down on one knee like…like he was about to propose to someone—he shook his head so slowly, like I’d seen people do at my grandpa’s funeral, and then he whispered…he whispered to the gray-haired lady next to him. He said, ‘She’s so blue.’ ”

  Fuck. Why did people always say such stupid things at the worst possible moment?

  “And she was,” Jess choked. “She was so blue, and all I could think was that when she woke up she was going to be really mad at that guy for saying that, because…because she hated the color blue.”

  A tiny hiccuping sob escaped from her throat and then she laughed, a horrible wretched sound that ripped through Finn.

  “And then everything got really loud; the ambulance and the police were there and everyone was talking so fast I couldn’t understand what any of them were saying. Mom got in the back of the ambulance with Tracy, but they made Dad and me get into one of the police cars, and the whole way to the hospital, I was sure they were taking me to jail.”

  “Jesus, Jess.”

  She tipped her head to the side, chewed her bottom lip, then shrugged and picked up her knife again.

  “Mom and Dad tried for a while. They sent me to a shrink, then we all went together a couple times, but they couldn’t talk about it and I wouldn’t talk about it, because I was the one who made Tracy take me out on the air mattress, and I was the one who left her down there, who kicked her off me when all she was trying to do was save herself. I kil—”

  Before she could finish that sentence—one he couldn’t stand to let her say—Finn knocked the knife out of her hand and pulled her into his arms. She struggled against him at first, but he tightened his hold until she finally gave up, bunched his T-shirt in her gloved hands, and rested her forehead between them on his chest.

  “You know that look,” she said, her voice so fragile, “the one you saw in Jimmy’s eyes when he was drunk?”

  It was all Finn could do to nod; God, how he hated that she knew about that.

  “That’s what I see every time I look at my parents.”

  He could have told her it wasn’t her fault, and it would have been the truth, but the truth didn’t matter, because there wasn’t anything anyone could say that would erase the memory of that look.

  An accident, a horrible accident, that’s all it was. It wasn’t Jess’s fault, but how could she ever believe that if all she saw in her parents’ eyes was that same hollow vacant look Finn saw? He couldn’t imagine how awful it must be to lose a child or how hard it must have been for them to remember they still had another child who needed them, but still…

  “I’m sorry.” He pressed a soft kiss against the top of her head, sighed, and then did what needed to be done: He tried to lighten the mood. “Have you ever met two people as fucked up as us?”

  She choked, but when she glanced up at him and laughed, a tiny bit of the hurt was gone and in its place was the beginning of the warmth he needed to see.

  “We are a pair, aren’t we?”

  He knew she was going to pull away soon; she was already leaning back, but before he let her go, he swiped his thumb across her cheek and caught what he hoped were the last of her tears.

  “If I could…”

  “I know.” She nodded slowly, shrugged even slower. “But we both know there’s nothing anyone can do. It is what it is.”

  “Yeah,” he said, dragging the word out. “But I shouldn’t have guilted you into telling me all of that. I didn’t mean—”

  “You didn’t guilt me into anything,” she said, offering him a small smile that looked pained and tight. “All you did was tell me I should find someone I trusted, and in case I haven’t made that clear in the last few days, you’re the one I trust, Finn. Just you.”

  Everything inside his chest seized up, choked him breathless at the way she said that with such ease, as though he should have already known it.

  “And after hearing your big sob story,” she teased, “I figured you’d be the only one who’d understand, since both of us are so—what was the elegant term you used?”

  “Fucked up.”

  “Right. That.” She was trying to make light of it, too, he knew that, but it didn’t make it any easier, knowing how much she hurt.

  Finn didn’t move for a long moment, because it struck him that even though her eyes were all puffy and red, her cheeks blotchy, she had fish guts all over the front of her sweater, and she’d just snorted snot do
wn the front of his T-shirt, she was still, hands down, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  Really not the time.

  No matter how loud or how often that screeched through his mind, he couldn’t look away from her. It was Jess who finally broke the trance he’d fallen into when she cleared her throat, stumbled back a step, and reached for one of the clean rags so she could wipe her face.

  “Come on,” she said, her voice light but still a little wobbly. “We better finish up or you’re going to miss your share of terrine.”

  “Right. Yeah.” Nodding, Finn turned his back on her and rummaged around in the cupboard until he finally managed to blink the burning out of his eyes and was able to take a breath without it getting stuck in his throat.

  When he finished filleting the salmon on his board, he scraped the scraps into the bucket, then leaned his hip against the counter while he bagged and tagged it.

  “Tell me something.”

  This time when she snorted it made them both laugh.

  “Yeah, okay,” she snickered. “Because clearly we haven’t told each other enough the last couple of days.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want, but—” He had to blink to stop staring at the way she chewed the corner of her bottom lip. “After all that, what in the holy hell were you thinking coming out here of all places?”

  “I couldn’t stand it at home anymore.” She shrugged slowly. “I needed to get as far away from everything as I could. Away from my parents, from the empty chair at the dinner table, from having to walk past Tracy’s room so many times a day, and away from how we could never talk about her. They took down every picture of her, cleaned out her room and everything, but even without a trace of her anywhere in the house, she was still right there in every breath of air in that house.”

  “I bet.”

  “So when I saw Jimmy’s ad for someone to do grunt work, I jumped at it. I figured it would get me good and far away from all the silence, which it did, and it would force me to get over my fear of water.”

  “But it didn’t.”