Undertow

by R. M. Greenaway

  Motion out of the corner of his eye distracted Dion, and he saw Dallas down in the lapping surf, leaning over and thrashing her hands about in a panic. Her sandwich floated away, but it wasn’t the cause of her distress. He was about to jump to her rescue when he saw her grab at some floating object and stand upright again. She looked pleased, her world back in balance.

  So her horse could fly just fine, but apparently couldn’t swim.

  Now she turned and made her way up the sands toward them, to Jon, pointing at the sky, at the animal-shaped clouds drifting over the sun and cutting the glare.

  They packed the boat and cruised northwest instead of southeast, since Jon said he couldn’t face returning inland just yet, back to the bastard straitjacket called life. The daylight was ebbing away. Along with the clouds came spatters of rain, and the water ahead looked rough. Dion pulled on his windbreaker. Jon left the boat idling and made his way back to put another sweater on Dallas. He re-zipped her life jacket, placed a blanket over her, and returned to the controls.

  Dion had stopped worrying about Dallas. She wasn’t a child who made sudden moves. He had watched her running on the sands, and even chugging along at full throttle she was a slow mover.

  They hadn’t left the island far behind when the outboard motor choked and sputtered. Dion stared back at it with concern. “What if it fails?” he asked. “Way out here. You have Plan B on board, I hope?”

  “My Plan B is in the shop for service,” Jon said. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing I can’t fix.”

  The motor had only guttered briefly, and was growling away again as if nothing had happened. Dion forgot about it, until some minutes later it choked again. Now there was no nearby landmass in sight, and no sign of other boaters on the horizon. “Just needs a tweak,” Jon said, standing. “Take the wheel, if that makes you feel better.”

  He left Dion at the controls and went back to deal with the motor.

  Dion had never operated a boat before, and steered nervously against the waves, on the lookout for the dreaded deadheads. But nothing happened, and soon he heard a shout of triumph. He turned and watched Jon clambering his way back, stepping over the child and untidy piles of picnic gear. Cheerfully cursing technology, Jon took the driver’s seat once more and started putt-putting them forward again.

  Dion sat back in the passenger seat. “Everything’s okay?”

  “Perfect,” Jon said. “Everything’s perfect.”

  But he was quieter now. Maybe having his doubts about coming out here without Plan B on board, his name for the secondary fifty-horse motor that he had assured Dion he kept tucked in a storage box. Now he stared toward a distant opening between what had to be the northern flank of Vancouver Island and another jut of land that might be mainland, or maybe the peninsula of Sechelt. The opening looked narrow, but Dion knew it was a matter of perspective. It would take hours to reach that passage, and then it would be vast, an ocean in itself. Without explanation, Jon gunned toward this space with purpose.

  The boat was bucking now, smashing the waves. “What’s up?” Dion asked, his shout ripped apart by the wind. “Where are we heading?”

  Jon’s finger traced an arch, due east. The sky was dimming toward evening, and his intentions seemed illogical. “I’ll take you along the coast,” he shouted. “Show you the inlets. Some great kayaking. If you weren’t such a wuss I’d lend you Mel’s Delta and take you for a tour.”

  The heart-to-heart conversation Dion had prepared hadn’t happened, much. He hadn’t talked about his long-term plans, or suggested Melanie deserved a faithful husband. And he hadn’t told Jon how he felt about water, not a phobia, not even a fear. But it didn’t matter anymore. Their mysterious friendship seemed to be dying a natural death.

  He stared forward anxiously, and then back once more, checking as he did every so often to make sure Dallas was safely lodged in her nest of cushions.

  She wasn’t.

  Thirty-Seven

  Crawl

  She wasn’t in the snug cabin below, wasn’t anywhere. Dion knelt on the back deck, gripping the rail, and scanned the sea for a dot of orange. Jon had sent out an SOS, cut a turn, and was retracing their path, not too fast — she could be missed too easily in the rise and fall of the turbid waves.

  “There,” Dion shouted. “There, to the left,” he cried, pointing, not knowing boater’s lingo. “See her? Go, go, go, that way.”

  Jon throttled up and started the sharp turn, and the motor revved too high maybe, too fast, because instead of shifting audibly to the higher RPMs, it gagged and spat and went silent. It was the coldest silence that had ever hit Dion. The boat lolled like a dead whale. He stared over his shoulder at the man at the controls, who was cursing and fumbling, trying to get it going again.

  Instead of going again there came a horrible, impotent whirring sound. “I can’t restart her,” Jon called out. “She’s flooded. It’ll take a minute to dry out.” He left the driver’s seat and came stumbling back, stepping up onto the deck beside Dion. “Where is she? I can’t see her.”

  “Way over there, the orange.” Dion tore off his jacket.

  York stood peering outward, hands clasped to face. “Call for help, Cal,” he ordered, and turned to do something, strip down or remove his shoes. “I’m going — what the hell are you doing?”

  Dion was barefoot already, T-shirt discarded, and now it was just a matter of taking aim.

  “Hey man, don’t be crazy, you can’t swim!” Jon reached for him. “Cal, you can’t — don’t!”

  The words blew away on the wind. Dion steepled his bare arms toward the horizon and swung them down toward the grey-green water. He sucked in air, as much as he could hold, and dropped his weight forward and outward, launching for speed with a push-off kick against the boat’s flank.

  He was inside the ocean. The cold gripped him like an electric shock, but he had propelled as far forward as the subsurface control would allow, aiming for where he hoped the girl would be. Surfacing, pulling in air, he was rocked and shoved by the waves. He saw her, was hit in the face by a falling elephant — not an elephant, but a wave. He flailed, blinded. He sank, kicked to rise back up, spat out brine and pulled in air.

  He would need to stay calm, avoid thinking. Don’t imagine the depths. He needed to predict the roll of the water. He would crawl, breathe, predict, crawl, to get to her, climbing and falling on this swell that was so much wilder from down within it than it appeared from the deck.

  He located the dot of colour once more, what looked like a mile away, flashing in and out of view. He wheeled an arm back, plunged it forward, and began to kick with all his might toward it.

  * * *

  It seemed like an hour to reach her, but time was distorted. His flesh was numb. His ribs ached, and his muscles were starting to seize. He clutched at the girl’s life jacket and pulled her toward him. Her face tilted back to the smacking rain, shiny white skin, mouth open, eyes half-closed. She looked dead, but he was in no shape to check. He began to crawl right-armed back toward the boat, double the trouble, hauling her dead weight with his left.

  He heard an engine. Jon had got it going again. He bobbed a moment, thanking God as his lungs wheezed like broken bellows. The boat came into view, far away, toy-sized, but that was okay. It would be roaring toward him now. He was blinded again by another wave. When the view cleared he saw the boat was … smaller. Not bigger. It was receding.

  Why?

  Why wasn’t it speeding toward him? The waves kicked up by the vanishing boat began to course faster, washing over him with watery muscle. He stopped swimming and treaded in place, gasping, thrown around like a cork, trying to understand. Was it a trick of the light, a mirage? The waves dropped away, and he blinked hard and stared. The boat was just a pinprick on the horizon now.

  And now it was gone completely.

  Jon had just murdered him.

&
nbsp; * * *

  The rain was coming down now, mingled with the light of the setting sun. The road to the airport seemed endless. The world was flat here. A sociopath was out there somewhere, at sea, along with a mentally challenged child and Leith’s mentally challenged ex-colleague. But it was beyond him, out of his control. The planes were huge in the evening sky, one surreal structure floating down, another drifting away. The sun sat low, harsh on the eyes, making him squint. The ambient airport roar seemed to distort sound, and his ears felt plugged, like he was climbing a mountain.

  He wasn’t climbing a mountain but was sitting behind the wheel of his rental Taurus, with Alison beside him and Izzy behind in her car seat. He followed the directional signs to the airport’s drop-off zone and parked. He unloaded family and suitcases, helped them inside, and in the lobby gave Izzy a squeeze that only made her protest. Then he and Alison embraced. The drive had taken longer than they had expected, and Alison would need to rush off directly to Departures. There was no time to sit, no time to add to what they had already said. Probably that was a good thing; the sooner she was gone, the sooner she’d be back.

  “What d’you think about what I said?” he asked her, as they broke apart.

  “I’m still not sure. I don’t know if I could get used to the horizon. And I’ve got so many connections here.”

  “It’s not the moon.”

  “Oh Dave, it is. But I’ll give it some serious thought.”

  “That’s all I ask,” Leith said.

  Driving back through Richmond, he cast his mind back a few days, himself and Ali standing in their prospective new apartment, two-bedroom, exorbitant rent, signing the lease. Awful. Depressing. To be truly happy he would need to get away from this boxed-in living. He’d go home, if it took a year or more. Back to Saskatchewan, buy a place close to his parents.

  It was a romanticized picture, of course, the open door, the fresh air and dazzling sun. A world without barricades, bottleneck bridges, bumper-to-bumper traffic. To hell with the spectacular mountain trails that now surrounded him, and the endless drama of the crashing sea. He would trade it all for the simple freedom to walk for miles in any direction, stretch out his arms, turn in circles and not hit anything. Or anybody.

  As a boy in Saskatchewan he had run everywhere. Not walked. His legs had been long and his head full of wonder. Probably he linked that time in life with the land itself, something he couldn’t get back, innocence and optimism.

  But face it, he was a man now, and a fairly sedate one. Even if the terrain stretched out invitingly before him, he wouldn’t run. He would just get his chores done, then climb back in the ol’ truck and speed home to the hockey game on TV.

  “She’s right, it’s the moon,” he said. He zipped along for a while, until traffic bunched up. He didn’t know, but could guess: another accident on the bridge.

  Traffic crawled, then came to a stop. His phone was silent. He idled a minute more, then shut off the engine, and like everyone else on the planet he was trapped in a lineup to nowhere. An ambulance charged by along the shoulder, wailing loud, then a police car. One by one in front of him, the tail lights switched off, and in Leith’s mind the prairies continued to beckon.

  Thirty-Eight

  Cold Blood

  Dion floated with the strapping of the child’s life jacket still hooked in his left fist. She was in and out of the water, submerging and rising at the whim of the sea, definitely a corpse by now. So was he. All he had were the depths below and the sky above. He was cold beyond shivering now, and his thoughts were going haywire, but not so haywire as to not know what was what. York had not gone for help, had not sent out an SOS. This was deliberate.

  He eyed the darkening grey skies with wonder. There was no heaven up there. No angels were going to pull him to safety. Cold pellets of rain hit the water and struck his face. No cosmic house party, no reunions. He would be nothing, nobody, alone forever. Fish food. He cried out in anger and fear, but only in his head. He had no spare energy to even sputter.

  He tried to estimate his distance from all points of land, but knew there was no hope. This would be his final resting place. Here. Down there. He knew why, too. This was the punishment he had been in line for, for what he had done, and what he meant to do. He could still taste the blood spatter, and he could still feel the thrill of the chase.

  Thrilling was his sin, and for that he was drowning. Good, he told himself. No more searching. No more worrying. It’s over.

  He woke with a start. He thrashed and began a mad kicking crawl toward what he believed was the closest point of land. The heat of fear thawed the freeze of the ocean and spurred him on. He strained toward an imagined goal, but with every foot of progress the sea gripped him and dragged him and his cargo two feet back. He looked again at the dark dome of the sky. No stars, smothered clouds. No sun, ever again. He would go down raking at the air and rain, lungs flooding with seawater. The water would turn the lights out slowly on him. The fish would watch him descend, doing slow-mo jumping jacks, however many miles it was to the ocean floor.

  He heard a motor. He saw a pale speck on the blue-black horizon. Maybe a hallucination, or maybe a passerby teasing him with a glint of light. It disappeared below a wave, and reappeared.

  And it was coming this way. Definitely heading closer.

  The shock of hope nearly filled his lungs with water, nearly sank him. He spat again, kicked harder, tugged Dallas closer. The speck got bigger, became a beam of light. A boat, throwing white froth behind it, and now he knew. It slowed and shut off its engine. York was clambering down the ladder toward him, leaning forward and extending an arm. “Drop her,” he commanded. “Grab my hand.”

  Dion was an iceberg. He couldn’t crank an arm or splay his fingers. He couldn’t stay afloat. Definitely couldn’t respond, or even keep his eyes turned up toward the confusing play of light and darkness that was salvation. He was spent. He was aware of York climbing further down the rungs, swearing, slipping into the night waves, and approaching in clumsy strokes. A rope encircled him, clipped to a cable. York swam away, left him there. Dion was tugged like flotsam toward the boat till he bashed against the ladder, his fist still attached to Dallas’s life jacket.

  York was shouting down at him. “I said let her go, you fucking idiot. You’re going to have to climb up yourself. She’ll float. I’ll get her once you’re on board, but I can’t haul both of you up at once. Let her go! Now!”

  The words worked through Dion’s frozen brain, and they made sense. He let go of Dallas. He hooked the rungs with stiff fingers and could see but not feel them connecting. The rope harness helped him climb, tugging steadily until York could grab him by the arm and haul him the rest of the way.

  Onboard, Dion collapsed. He struggled to roll onto his front, for more control, in case he needed to launch himself up again. From here he intended to keep an eye on York. He would make sure the man descended those rungs as promised to collect the child before she was carried back out to sea.

  Maybe he blacked out, and sometime later he heard someone say, “I’m sorry.”

  He shifted onto his side and looked up. York stood with his arms full of a limp little body in an orange life jacket. Dallas’s head and arms and legs dangled. “I couldn’t see you,” York said. “I panicked. I went to flag down help.” He laid the child in a heap on the dark deck. “She’s dead, Cal. I killed her.”

  Shut up and try to revive her, Dion said, or thought he said. But York had sunk into the driver’s seat and was bowed forward, arms wrapping his head.

  Dion pushed himself into a kneel, which made him cough, lung-scorching hacks that nearly put him back on the floor. An abandoned flashlight lay within reach, its rays sliding this way and that. He managed to grab it and used it to look Dallas over. She was a sopping wet miniature human, and York was right, she was dead.

  Dion’s CPR training was stale but not expired. H
e struggled to get her life jacket off. He pressed on her chest with the heels of his hands, not too heavily because she was so small, but hard enough to hopefully jump-start her back to life. He tilted her face back, clamped her nose shut, leaned, and puffed breath into her, twice, slow but steady. Then checked for response. Nothing. It was over.

  York was steering them toward the mainland, glancing back often but saying nothing. Strange silence, Dion thought, with fury. The occasional shout of encouragement would be appreciated. He repeated his efforts and again checked for signs of life. Still nothing. He tried again.

  And again.

  And again.

  He saw York rise from the driver’s seat and approach, staggering as the floor sloped side to side. The boat kept chugging forward without a pilot. He gave York a warning scowl, the man who had steered away from him instead of toward him, when every fraction of a moment counted, but York kept coming, rasping “No. It’s too late. Let her be.” He sounded careful, like a man approaching a mad dog. “Even if you bring her back, she’ll be brain-dead. It’s not fair to her. Or to us.”

  “She’s alive,” Dion replied. He pushed the words through pain and fatigue, and they sounded distant, unreal. “She’s got a pulse.”

  “Then stop, now, before you send us all to hell. Let her go.”

  A burbly choking sound made Dion look down. Dallas coughed. He cradled her head in one palm, gave her face a light slap with the other. He told her to breathe. She sucked in a rough inhalation, then coughed again, violently. He rolled her to her side, and she spewed water and vomit. When he was sure she was breathing on her own, he wrapped her in a blanket, and for more insulation added the windbreaker York handed him. Now he stood with her in his arms, his own legs like rubber, to keep her away from Jon Fucking York. “You sent an SOS?” he said. His voice quaked. “Did you?”

  “I did,” York said.

  “Send it again.”