I had no idea. But I had to try.
I kicked toward them and my head ripped open and light flooded in, or lightning flashed, or both, I don’t know, and for a second I may have blacked out again; my mouth and nose were underwater, breathing in water, then I lifted myself up, coughing, spluttering. My arms were lead; my legs were marble.
I felt stickiness, a sting, on my forehead, and I raised my hand and touched it to my head—big mistake, I went under, a wave hitting me, and for a moment was in the blackness again before I desperately trod water, got my head above water.
And big mistake too, because I realized I was wounded. Whatever had struck my head, whatever I had struck my head on, had hurt me badly.
I managed a couple more strokes, but I saw straightaway, even from this distance, the steepness, the angle and smoothness of the rocks between me and the shore; there was no way I was climbing them.
“Swim south,” said the voice. “To the main beach.”
Four blocks, I thought. I couldn’t even talk out loud, I was so cold, and my head was a bass drum going bang, bang, bang; what an irony, when your voice can speak and you can’t. I can’t make four blocks.
“The rocks might end before that,” said the voice.
Can’t do it, I thought.
And then, cold as the ocean surrounding me, I realized something.
I was going to die.
I was going to die right here.
It had always been waiting for me, this time this place, and now it was here.
I tried, Paris, I thought.
I was so very cold. My whole body was shaking.
For a moment I thought about your swim training, about how you had been trying out for Nationals, and I imagined you surging strongly through the water toward me, knifing through it, swimming the crawl, to take me under the arms and hold me up. Or my dad, I mean he was a Navy SEAL, maybe he would be there suddenly in the water, maybe he had followed me in some way and he would— But this is not that kind of story, and this is not a movie, and you weren’t there.
My dad wasn’t there.
“It’s okay,” said a voice in my ear, a quiet voice, thrumming muted through viscous water.
But not the voice.
No.
Paris’s voice.
“It’s okay,” said Paris again. “It’s okay; you did try—you did.”
I looked for her, treading water, turning to see her in the pale light, but I couldn’t. Even now there was a cold, rational part of me that thought she had never been there, that I had imagined her face in the water, the hair framing it.
“You did try. You did.”
At first it sounded like an echo, Paris’s voice repeating itself, but then I heard it, a soft burr, a hitch, in the throat of the speaker, a sound I knew so well. It was a different voice.
Mom?
“Yes, honey, I’m here. Oh honey, I’m so sorry.”
For what?
“Dying. Leaving you.”
Not your fault. Those men. Just wish … just wish we could find them … wish we could make them pay.
“Oh baby. Don’t you know? Don’t you know by now? Haven’t you learned anything?”
Her voice getting quieter; departing. Leaving me.
What? What? What should I have learned?
“It’s not for us to find people. Or to make them pay. You take revenge, all you do is throw away your soul. Sometimes things happen that you can’t control. Sometimes we lose things we can’t get back. And there are some things we just can’t ever know.”
But—
A whisper now, nothing more:
“I’m sorry, Cass.”
Then gone.
Nothing but cold, blank water, all around me, and I saw that I had sunk under it, had gone below the surface, and I hadn’t even registered. The water was dark around me; I wasn’t even sure which way was up.
Then the clouds parted, and I realized I was looking right at the surface, was seeing the storm-lit sky through maybe a foot of seawater. There was a break in the darkness, and the stars were shining through, thousands of them, millions.
I fixed on the stars.
Eternity, and a couple of minutes, passed.
Pressure tightened around my head; my chest was burning. And I kept on looking up through the water, as slowly, slowly, the stars began to go out, one by one. And then my heart did what it had been practicing for in the moment between every one of its millions of beats and, at last, stopped.
I died.
I mean, I guess I can’t prove that I did. But I know.
My heart was still. There had been pain in my chest, but now it was gone, suddenly.
Everything was pitch-black, and I had the sense that I was unraveling, a mummy with its bandages spiraling off it, crumbling into darkness and dust, disintegrating.
The blackness opened its vast mouth and—