Taken by Storm (10 page)

Authors: Angela Morrison

Tags: #Social Issues, #Dating & Sex, #Christian, #Friendship, #Juvenile Fiction, #Sports & Recreation, #General, #Religious, #Water Sports, #Death & Dying

“What do you mean
let’s
?” The scowl isn’t cute this time.

i crank the keys, and the pickup’s engine dies. “Get inside before you’re hypothermic.” i open the driver’s door and get out.

She slides into the driver’s seat. “i’m already hypothermic.”

“You’re right.” i grab her arm and tug. “Your lips are blue.”

That scares her enough to let me pull her out of the truck. The wind hits, and as she stumbles against me, the shaking gets worse. i take her arm, support her to the door, open it, and flick on the light. Air, warm and yellow, flows out, embracing us in the dark.

She puts her hand against the doorjamb. “I can’t go in there with you.”

“What?”

“I can’t go in there with you.” She clenches her jaw but can’t keep her teeth from chattering.

“What are you talking about?” i seize her wrist and push her inside, shut the door. “Go in the bathroom and take off that wet stuff before you get sick. i’ll get you something to wear.”

She turns to face me and takes a step back like i’m going to attack her. “I’ve got to go.” She’s dripping a puddle on Gram’s worn linoleum floor. “I can’t be in a house alone with a guy. Family rule.” She’s too cold to blush but would if she could.

She’s more into me than i thought. “Gram’s here.” i keep my voice normal, matter-of-fact, consciously fight my reflex to drop into seduction mode.

“B-b-but—”

i push her down the hall. “Go get in the shower. Turn it on warm, not too hot.”

chapter 12

THAWING

MICHAEL’S DIVE LOG—VOLUME #8

When i come up from checking on Leesie’s clothes, she’s finally emerged from the bathroom. She sits on the couch, her mouth a straight line, her hair twisted up in a towel. She looks good in my sweatshirt, swims in the pants, but the pale gray around her face is nice.

“Your stuff will be dry in a half hour or so.”

“Thanks.” She leans forward and untwists the towel, rubs her hair.

Part of me wants to just get her out of here, but another parts says, “Hey, go sit next to her.” My shirt touching her body is getting to me. Her cheekbones seem higher. Her face looks smaller, delicate. Unearthly. i get this primal protective urge—like on the bus. But after the fit she threw at the door?

i take a chair on the far side of Gram’s small living room. Be decent. That’s all i have to do. “Are you warm enough?”

“Fine.” She stands up and folds the towel.

i take it from her and hang it in the bathroom. She’s sitting on the couch again when i get back.

“Do you want some cocoa or something?” i ask to ward off the evil eye she’s drilling into me.

“What’s going on with you? Why do you keep doing this to me?”

i stare at my hands.

“What were you thinking?”

None of your business. i glance at Gram’s shrine of family pictures on the desk next to my chair. A copy of the one of Mom, Dad, and me sitting in a dive boat that disintegrated in my wallet is there. i pick it up. We all wear big smiles, lots of teeth. Mom has her arm around me, and my head is on her shoulder. She’s sitting on Dad’s lap. He’s got his massive arms around us both, holding us together.

Leesie clears her throat.

After what she’s put up with the past couple of days, guess i owe her something. “i needed to get back in the water. Back
under
water.”

“So was it worth it?”

i set down the picture, look over at her. “You soaking wet? Yeah. Definitely.”

She tries not to, but she smiles. She drops her eyes, fluffs her damp hair, twists it into a ponytail, realizes she doesn’t have anything to hold it with, and lets it fall back down. She looks up and catches my eyes on her, but she holds my gaze. “I’m still waiting.”

“i haven’t been underwater since Belize.” i stare at Gram’s flowered rug.

“Belize is where—”

i nod. “Hurricane hit our boat. i was up on deck with the stupid camera when the storm surge hit. Isadore took me, but i held my breath. My dad. All my friends were trapped. My mom came on deck searching for me. But she—” i can’t say it. Drowned. i see her sinking and choking, breathing in seawater. Dying. No. That didn’t happen. She’s a diver. Divers don’t drown.

Leesie leans forward, her chin in her hands, elbows on knees, eyes soft now. “I’m so sorry.”

“That lake of yours freaked me. i thought maybe the pool . . . i had to go there. See if i could.”

She closes her eyes. “And i messed it up.”

i get up, cross the room, sink beside her on the couch, not letting my thigh bump hers. “i was down there long enough. And”—a knot forms in my throat that i can barely speak around—“maybe it was good you were there.”

She shifts toward me, relaxes enough for our shoulders to touch. “Don’t do that again.”

i stare across the room, trying to make out the details of that picture of my parents and me. It’s fuzzy from here. Did i want to stay at the bottom of that pool? Never come up? Sitting in Gram’s living room, that freaks me, but down there it all made sense. Diving is life to me. Isadore is death.

We sit quiet. Leesie’s too smart or too scared to say anything. i find myself longing for that shimmering blue place with my parents. It tasted so good.

Leesie whispers, “Do you mind?” She slides her hand under mine and lifts it to her knee like it’s something frail she doesn’t want to break. She weaves her fingers through mine, curls them up around my cold hand. She strokes the back of it. It feels good, safe, her hand smoothing over my hand.

i sink back into the soft cushions of Gram’s fifties couch. “The shark story is a bunch of crap.”

Leesie starts. “Somebody actually said that to your face?”

“DeeDee asked to see the scars.”

“Kids here are dumb. Generations of pesticide use.”

“We dove with sharks all the time.” i remember a hammer-head slipping through the blue at the limit of my visibility on a Cayman wall dive, sharks whizzing around my head in the Bahamas, and the massive bull sharks at the Blue Hole in Belize. i feel myself getting emotional. i sit forward. “i’ll go check—”

Leesie’s knee presses into my thigh. “It’s going to be all right.”

No way. Never. Not for me.

Heat emanates from Leesie’s leg, warm from the shower, and wriggles into the sadness, under the pain. i lean my head back, incline my face toward her hair, and breathe deep and slow, in and out, over and over. Training. Hanging on tight to her hand. With every vent, i suck in more and more Leesie. My grip on her hand tightens. Her fruity shampoo mixed with chlorine whirls around me. i cling to her hand like i held on to the mangrove tree that saved me in Belize. Isadore tugs, but i have Leesie’s hand—don’t want to let it go.

Her hand in mine writhes. My eyes stray down. My fingernails are digging dints into the soft flesh on the back of her hand. A tear makes a wet path down her cheek. i let go.

“Look what i did to you.” i shift so a space opens between us.

“It’s nothing.” She buries her bleeding hand in my sweatshirt’s pocket. “I’ll be back.” She slips away—just to the bathroom, though. She can’t leave. i still have her clothes, drying.

i stretch out on the couch, listening to the water run in the bathroom sink, sorry that i hurt her.

She comes back and leans against the doorway. Her eyes travel over the pictures on the desk. “I should go.”

“Not yet.” Please, no.
She comes to me.
i need to ask her before she evaporates. “Was it real?”

She looks down at her hand.

“i know that’s real. i’m sorry.” Four red fingernail digs—i can see them from across the room. It’s like i branded her. “i’m a freak these days.”

She blows on the cuts, meets my eyes again. “It’s nothing.”

“That
‘she comes to me’
stuff in your poem. Was it real?”

Her eyebrows draw together. “You want to talk poetry?”

“Did you make it up?”

“No.”

My palms get sweaty, and my fingers tingle. My slow, free-diver heart revs. “You saw your grandmother?” i need so bad to believe what she’s going to say. Maybe she’s a medium. Are Mormons into that? Fine by me. Pull out the crystal ball. Turn off the lights. If she can find me something other than two dead bodies in a morgue in Florida, i want to know.

Leesie breaks eye contact, stares down at Gram’s flowered rug. “It’s not like she zapped into my room and flew around.” Her voice is quiet. Calm but strong. “The whole thing happened in my head.”

i roll on my back, stare at the ceiling, disappointed. “Like a dream.”

“No. Not a dream. A few weeks after Grandma’s funeral, my mom and I spent the evening crying together. I went to bed, said my prayers, and tried to sleep.”

“You pray?” i sit up. She crosses the room, takes her old place on the couch next to me. i turn toward her.

She leans forward. Her hair hangs like a veil between us. “I think this was kind of a vision.”

“Okay. A vision.” Is that what happened to me at the lake? A vision? And in the pool tonight? What was that?

Leesie nods. “My mind raced. I couldn’t sleep, and then my grandmother was there, inside my head, pulsing with light.”

She shifts her hair so it falls down her back, almost dry. i touch it—just the ends with the back of my hand. She doesn’t protest.

“You have amazing hair.” i take a handful, let it glide through my fingers. She closes her eyes, tilts her head back. i take another handful.

She opens her eyes and stares into mine, doesn’t blush or look away like she usually does. “Grandma wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. So changed from the body we laid in her coffin. Not old. Not young. So beautiful I couldn’t breathe.”

Leesie’s hair cascades through my hands again and again, the scent of it, the rhythm, hypnotizing me.

She comes to me.

Awed joy rustles in her voice. “Happiness flowed out of her, filled me up. Tangible—like you could pour it from a pitcher.” She oozes with the power of what she tells me, what happened to her.

i drop her hair, break eye contact. “Couldn’t you have just imagined it?”

“Overcome. That describes what I was like when she left.” Leesie doesn’t continue until i face her again. Her eyes are tender now, reach down to my soul. “I lay in bed, holding my pillow, totally embraced.” She brings her hand to my face, pushes a stray lock from my eyes. “In the morning, putting the whole thing into words was impossible, like trying to capture a beam of light.” She takes my hand again. “Could I make that up?”

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