No reply.
I spun through the house in a fury, spending only enough time in each room to be sure Del wasn’t anywhere within before moving on. I half slid, half ran down the stairs from our room, the last vestiges of hope evaporating with the knowledge that she wasn’t in the house.
I stopped in the kitchen, trying to think through the whirlwind my mind had become. Where? Where would she go? Immediately I ran for the door, rushing through the rain to the edge of our yard. I leapt onto the highest rock I could see, nearly slipping from its wet top.
The sea tossed itself against the beach below in utter abandon. It was as if it shared in my despair and wished to dash itself apart on the rocks. Or maybe it was reaching for me after all my time spent upon it. Perhaps it wanted revenge for harvesting its waters without recompense. Maybe it had already taken something back from me as payment.
I scanned the roiling water but there was nothing. Its surface was so bleak and cold, I knew that if Del had entered the ocean even since I had pulled up in front of the house, she would be lost. With that thought, my head snapped around to Harold’s darkened house. I almost jumped from the rock and sprinted to the old man’s home, but thought better of it at once. Harold wouldn’t be of any help searching for her in the rain, and if he had seen her wander off he would have already called me or been waiting at our door when I came home.
I was about to leap down from my perch when something caught my eye, trailing off to the south down the beach. My stomach fell as if a trapdoor had been opened beneath it and my legs nearly collapsed.
Because it was at that moment I realized where Del had gone.
~
I climbed the last few steps up the hill bordering the cove. Our cove, we used to call it, laying claim to something so large and free as a border between sea and land being only within the reaches of two people young and so in love. The wind had risen even more since I had pelted down to the beach, following the ghostly impressions of where she’d walked, their indentations already being muted and washed away by the rain, as if the weather didn’t want me to find her. Even now I think it might have been better if I hadn’t known, if I hadn’t seen.
But I did. I did.
I spotted her as soon as I crested the rise. She was a deeper shadow among the swirling water within the cove. She wore the thin, cotton pants and t-shirt I’d dressed her in the night before and she stood with her back to me, the water reaching nearly to her hips.
“Del!” I screamed her name as I ran down the path that stretched to the beach, her form disappearing behind a tall rock that the trail wound around. When I stepped onto the soft sand she was even further out, the rolling waves washing against her bulging stomach. “Del!” I didn’t break stride, the sand giving way beneath my feet, the rain and wind shoving me back. She didn’t seem to hear me as she took another step. But that was wrong. She hadn’t stepped, she had glided deeper into the water.
Even though there was something elementally wrong about how she moved, I didn’t stop. I couldn’t have stopped as much as I could have forced the sea away from her, away from us. It was only when my feet touched the water that she finally looked back.
She was so pale it looked as if she had lost all the blood in her body. She was translucent, shimmering there in the shadowed waves, blue veins and vessels teeming in her white skin. And her eyes. They were full of something that scared me more than anything had since the beginning of our dual descent.
Her eyes brimmed with regret.
“Stop, Jason!” She put up a hand and I obeyed because there was power in her voice. The diminutive tone she normally spoke in was gone and I could even hear the rasp of her tongue through the tempest surrounding us. “I’m sorry,” she said, tears springing from her eyes and mixing with the rain. “It made me! It made me!”