The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  When he finally stops, we are really, really far from the shore, and nearly as far from Josh.

  “Okay, lie flat on your board,” he says. “We’re gonna catch this next set.”

  “We?”

  “Sure, I’m gonna surf when you do,” he says. “That’s why I do this job.”

  “What if I fall, though?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “You won’t. That board’s like an ocean liner. But if you do, just float until I get back.”

  Right. Just float in the middle of the shark-infested ocean alone ‘til you get back. Excellent plan, Stan.

  He pushes me while shouting frantic instructions about paddling and standing. I only make it to my knees because the board is less like an ocean liner and more like a flimsy piece of plexiglass going god-knows-how-fast over rushing, uneven water. Fortunately, he’s still there, though he looks a little disgruntled. “That was a perfect wave you just missed.”

  “I’ll try to stop being so bad at surfing, then,” I reply. “Surfing, something I’ve never done.”

  He is looking into the distance, not listening. “Get flat,” he says. “Hurry. This is a good set.”

  This time I manage to get up, for all of two seconds. Stan gives me a thumbs up as he blows past me on his tiny little board, and just the act of looking at him is enough to send me right over the side.

  When my head comes back up, I’m alone and there’s an endless ocean on three sides of me. The shore is so distant it almost seems like a mirage and I feel panic setting in.

  God. Don’t do this here, I beg. Do not do this here. I take shallow sips of air and try to ignore what’s happening—though after Amsterdam I should know this tactic doesn’t work. Passing out in front of thousands of people, and on camera, sucked. But not as much as passing out in the middle of the ocean.

  I attempt to get my board right side up, but just as I do, a wave hits, knocking me for a loop, the board tugging dangerously on the ankle strap and flying into the air. I cover my head with my hands as I go under. What happens if it lands on me? What happens if I’m knocked unconscious? No one will even know. No one will even see me.

  Don’t panic, I plead. My head breaks the surface and I look around frantically—no one is nearby. I see Josh in the distance but he’s not even looking my way, and another wave is coming. Stan told me to dive under them, but I can’t get on the board in time. Once again, the wave hits, and this time my leash doesn’t survive. When I emerge, my board is sailing away without me, heading straight for the glamorous shores I can’t possibly reach on my own. My breath is coming short now, and without my inhaler, I’m going to pass out in the water and no one will have a clue.

  My head goes under again and when I reemerge, I see Josh paddling toward me fast. I have no idea how he does it, but within seconds he’s there. He jumps into the water and grabs me from behind, holding onto his board with one hand while the other arm wraps around my waist, keeping me safely above the surface.

  “What happened?” he asks.

  “I panicked,” I weep, placing a hand on his board and trying desperately to get air into my lungs. He’s the last person I want to freak out in front of, but there’s no helping it. “I get asthma attacks when I panic.” Deep breath in. “It always happens at the worst times. And now my board is gone. And…” I’m still trying to get air in and out. I squeeze my eyes shut tight trying to control the quiver in my lower lip.

  “You’re okay,” he says, his voice low and calm in my ear. “You’re absolutely fine. If you can talk, you can get enough air. I’m gonna get you back to shore now, okay?” His certainty reassures me, even if nothing is solved yet.

  With the arm he has around my waist, Josh slings me onto his board.

  “Just sit up unless I tell you otherwise,” he says. “If a wave’s coming, I’ll have you lie flat.”

  “But—” I begin.

  He places a hand on my knee, warm and huge and reassuring. “All you have to do is sit there. Pretend you’re back lounging at the pool.”

  “Do I have a drink?” I ask. I’m still crying, and it’s so goddamned embarrassing. But he laughs.

  “Yes, you have a margarita, but they forgot the salt,” he says. “So you’re trying to get the waitress fired.”

  “Of course I am,” I whisper. “The salt’s the best part.”

  He laughs again, and then he starts to swim toward shore, pulling me with him. I am still trying to suck in air, still wondering what happens if I pass out.

  Stan is paddling toward us, dragging my board alongside him.

  “I’ve got her,” he tells Josh, as if I’m some tedious pet he’s been assigned to watch.

  “The hell you do,” Josh replies, placing his hand on my back. “Give me her board.”

  “I told you, man, I got this.”

  “Give me the fucking board,” Josh snaps, reaching out and snatching it from him. “And next time, don’t leave someone who’s never been out in her life a half mile from shore in heavy surf.”

  “Fuck you, man,” Stan says.

  “Come repeat that on shore, asshole,” Josh replies.

  Stan gives him the finger and paddles off, and I find myself laughing quietly, and still crying a little, as Josh climbs on the board and begins to tow me in.

  “Found that amusing, did you?”

  I nod. I still can’t breathe but if I could, I’d have a big old laugh over Josh putting that kid in his place.

  We reach the shore at last. He helps me to my feet, shoves both boards toward the sand and then bends, as if he’s going to pick me up. There are people everywhere, staring at us, and I know how this will unfold if I let him do it.

  “Don’t,” I plead. “They’ll say I was drunk.”

  His eyes meet mine, looking at me as if he’s starting to put something together.

  “Okay,” he says, wrapping an arm around my waist, and helping me out of the water. My legs are shaky and I’m pretty sure I’d be on my hands and knees if he wasn’t holding me up. I stumble onto the sand toward the Halekulani, with him still holding onto me.

  A group of teenagers walk toward us. “Don’t even think about it,” Josh barks at them, and I’m oddly grateful, even though this will end up as another story about what a bitch I am.

  We get through the Halekulani entrance and he leads me toward the chairs where his family was sitting, though only Sloane is there now.

  “Where’s your inhaler?” he asks, his arm still around me.

  “I’m getting better,” I tell him, straightening, attempting to put distance between us. I can already feel Sloane’s illogical resentment from thirty feet away. I didn’t even finish high school and am known only for having a nice ass and singing barely literate songs about sex. It’s not like Josh would choose me even if she wasn’t around.

  “Stay,” he replies, holding me tighter. “And I’m getting your inhaler. Your breathing is still really shallow.”

  “It’s upstairs in my toiletry kit.”

  We reach Sloane and I drop into the chair, doubtful I could have stood for a second more. “What happened?” she asks. “You haven’t even been gone thirty minutes.”

  Josh holds out his hand for my room key and I place it in his palm. “The instructor ditched her in the middle of the water so he could surf,” Josh says tightly. “I’ll be right back.”

  Sloane raises her sunglasses, looking from me to Josh’s departing back. She appears irritated by my inability to survive a half mile offshore alone. “Why did he have to come back with you?” she demands.

  My tongue prods my cheek. I don’t want to tell her anything, but Josh will be back in a minute with my inhaler so there’s no point in lying.

  “I had an asthma attack,” I admit, closing my eyes. “Or a panic attack. It’s hard for me to tell them apart sometimes.”

  She stands up and walks over to me. “Sit up,” she says wearily. She reaches back and adjusts my chair so it’s fully upright and at the same time flags down a waitress.
“Can we get a cup of coffee, please? As fast as possible?”

  “This really isn’t…” I begin.

  “Stow it,” she says. “I noticed when you walked up that your lips were blue. I thought you were just cold. Why would you go out there without your inhaler?”

  I shrug. “I didn’t know if it was waterproof.”

  “It’s not,” she says. “So you get a waterproof bag. Or take a dose of albuterol before you go out.”

  The waitress comes with the coffee and Sloane hands it to me. “Drink,” she barks.

  Her bedside manner leaves something to be desired, but at least she’s trying. “Thanks,” I say quietly.

  “Of course,” she says with a sigh. It’s a soft sound, full of resignation and disappointment. I can’t tell if she’s upset that I expected less of her, or upset that she led me to expect it. “I don’t especially care for you, but I don’t want you to die.”

  It would be easy to take offense, but I’ve been in her position before—wanting someone I can’t make want me back—and it sucks. I just don’t understand why she seems to believe she’s competing with me.

  Joshua returns with my inhaler, looking like he sprinted the entire way. “Jesus, you own a lot of makeup,” he says, handing it to me. I take it from him, shake it, and place my lips around the mouth, feeling the rush of cool air sink through my throat and open up my lungs. I do it again and begin to relax at long last.

  Josh glances at the coffee beside me. “Thank you,” he tells Sloane.

  She looks up at him. “Just like old times, eh?”

  He laughs. “The waitresses in Dooha weren’t quite so efficient.”

  They smile at each other like old friends, and I wonder if this incident is going to help them find their way back to each other.

  I don’t know why that bothers me.

  11

  JOSH

  Thirty minutes since seeing Drew sinking beneath the ocean’s surface and my stomach still remains in a tight knot.

  She goes back to her room and I flag down the waitress and order a scotch. I need something to ease this strain in my chest.

  I haven’t been in a fist fight in at least six years, but I’m still trying to talk myself out of one with that prick from the surf shop. I know I should probably be mature about it and settle for getting him fired once Sloane’s not around to overhear, but it won’t be nearly as satisfying.

  The scotch is delivered and I take a healthy swig of it, willing myself to calm. Drew is fine, I tell myself. She promised she’d lie down.

  My eyes close as I picture it. She will shower first and barely dry off before she collapses in bed—naked, I imagine. She seems like the type. She’ll let all that hair of hers soak the pillow. If I were sharing a room with her, she’d forget the pillow was wet until bedtime and then she’d beg me to trade with her. She’d look at me from under those long lashes and smile and say Come on, please, it’s not that wet. The double entendre would be an accident, but she’d lean into it, letting the word wet pop off her lips like a promise. And it would totally fucking work.

  Sloane looks at my drink, which is now down to ice. “Too much adrenaline?” she asks.

  I set the glass on the table, wondering how bad it would look if I ordered another. “Yeah,” I say, with a long exhale. “It was surprisingly stressful to be a half mile off shore with someone who can’t breathe.”

  It was a joke, sort of, but also not a joke. Her smile is muted at best.

  “So she has asthma and panic attacks?” Sloane asks. “Or is she just confusing one with the other?”

  I don’t fault her for the question. I already texted Michael, one of my best friends from med school and now a pulmonologist, to ask the same. “Apparently, people with asthma are more prone to panic attacks and one can trigger the other,” I tell her.

  Sloane raises her sunglasses, graces me with one of those long looks of hers, meant to convey something her words won’t, not entirely. “She’s messy,” she says quietly.

  I could argue she’s being unfair. I could argue she’s punching down, given that lots of people would panic in that situation, and she’s clearly had it in for Drew since her first day. But I know what she’s really saying: Drew is more complicated than she appears, more fragile, more damaged.

  I say nothing, because I know what Sloane is really doing is giving me a warning.

  And I don’t want to hear why she thinks I might need one.

  When Sloane finally goes up to the room, I grab my phone to pull up the video of Drew falling offstage. I haven’t wanted to see it, but there’s something in my head. Her saying It always happens at the worst times.

  She’s in a tiny white dress, platinum blonde ponytail swinging. With all that makeup, she looks more like a doll than the girl I know. The crowd is chanting for her to sing Naked and she smiles but it’s forced. Even through a long-range lens, you can tell it’s forced.

  She isn’t stumbling at first. She’s just wide eyed, staring off to the side of the stage as if she’s thinking of making a run for it. For a moment the camera zeroes in on her face, and there is absolute panic there, her chest rising and falling too fast.

  The music starts and she misses her cue and then she takes one step out on the catwalk, and another, as if she’s lost or doesn’t know where she’s supposed to be, before her eyes flutter closed. The microphone falls to the stage with a discordant crash and she falls right over the side.

  She had a panic attack.

  And she’d rather let the whole world think she was drunk than tell the truth.

  12

  DREW

  “So what I hear you saying,” Tali says once I’ve finished updating her about the trip, “is that Joshua rushed across the ocean to save you, lifting you into his brawny arms.”

  “Oh my God. Stop.” I’m out of the shower after the incident in the ocean, still shaken enough that I needed to hear a friendly voice, and Tali is pretty much the only friendly voice I know of. I pull off my robe and climb into bed naked.

  “And for the first time in your life,” she continues, “you felt found and seen, and a piece of you, a secret piece you hadn’t even known was there, recognized he was what you wanted all along.”

  Tali just published her first book last summer and is now at work on the second. She can romanticize almost anything.

  “Jesus,” I groan. “Are you just reading to me from your next book?”

  “My next book is even worse,” she says with a reluctant laugh. “It’s so much worse, you wouldn’t even believe it. Pregnancy is making me so dumb—I couldn’t remember our phone number the other day and Hayes said Well, let’s hope he gets my brain and your looks. But I want to hear more about Joshua.”

  I pull the towel off my head and sink back into the pillows. “I was drowning—please don’t turn that into a metaphor—and he decided not to let me die, though he was obviously a little on the fence. It was in no way romantic.”

  Except I can still see the sheer determination on his face as he paddled toward me, and the fear in his eyes. I suppose, had Tali been watching, she’d still argue it was a little romantic.

  “Is he good looking?”

  I sigh heavily. “He’s not repulsive.”

  “Oh my God. You’re so full of shit. I’m looking him up. Joshua…what’s their last name again?”

  “I’m not telling you.”

  “Ha! Bailey. The baby hasn’t taken every brain cell. Bailey, doctor, Somalia…oh. OH. Wow.” And then she starts to laugh. “Holy shit. ‘Not repulsive’? You are such a fucking liar.”

  I wish I could see what she sees and I’m also glad I can’t. It’s probably some picture of him refusing to smile, a brooding Viking with a baby in the curve of one bicep and a puppy in the other.

  I snort. “Maybe it was a good picture day for him.”

  “This guy is a living good picture day.” I hear her then laugh and say Yes, Hayes, you’re handsome too, before she returns to the phone. “And I
notice we haven’t discussed Six even once. I assume he’s still in prison?”

  I exhale and scratch the back of my neck. “They think it’ll all be settled tomorrow. And don’t make him sound like a serial killer. He made a little mistake, and you’ve got to take the good with the bad, Tali. You put up with Hayes being British, I put up with Six smuggling weed in a guitar case.”

  “Sure, okay, but Hayes is also sweet, and loving, and okay-looking, which balances out the fact that he’s British.” I hear a shout in the background and she stifles a laugh. “What balances out Six’s many, many negative qualities?”

  I shrug, though she can’t see me. It’s as if I’m trying to convince myself the answer doesn’t especially matter. “He’s laid back.”

  “He isn’t laid back,” she says softly. “He’s careless. There’s a difference.”

  “Not everyone is going to be Hayes,” I reply. “But if he’s not here by the time we leave for Lanai, I’ll just go back to California.”

  “Or you could spend more time with hot Josh who doesn’t get along with his girlfriend and just saved your life in a dramatic sea rescue.”

  “Even if Sloane’s generally an asshole, I would never move in on someone else’s boyfriend, nor would you,” I reply. My hair has soaked the pillow. I reach over and grab one from the other side of the bed. “And besides, this is Josh, who also accused me of potentially stealing their silver, Tali.”

  She laughs. “You are never going to let that go, are you? Cut him some slack. Maybe Six’s previous girlfriend stole the silver. Maybe there’s someone online claiming you’re a klepto.”