The Darkest Joy (8 page)

She’s gonna die
, I think as a slow numbing horror tries to assert itself and shake my natural calm.

I roll her onto her back and begin giving mouth-to-mouth. The chill of her lips makes me shiver; I only want to feel the warmth of her flesh pressed to mine, evidence of life. I begin chest compressions. My palms fill her entire chest, she’s so small.

I don’t want to break her
. That thought doesn’t derail what I must do.

I watch my hands, crosshatched over that delicate rib cage. They pump up and down, covered in a whitewash of the palest blue underneath an uncaring sky, laced together to prevent her death.

Up
.

Down
.

As though from a distance I hear a clicking sound.

It’s my teeth chattering.

I pump
.

I kiss savagely icy lips again with breath . . . with hope.

I repeat
.

Though it’s cold enough for me to flirt with hypothermia myself, my wet clothes clinging to me like a second skin, I break out in a sweat.

A life in my hands
.

I own a moment I don’t want to.

I’ve never given a shit about anyone. I fish, I party . . . and I’m accountable to me. It’s always felt perfect . . . right.

But suddenly, it all seems meaningless as I work to bring another human being to life.

She shudders and pukes up more water.

I turn her gently on her side. Then . . . like music to my ears, she draws her first shuddering breath.

I watch her hack more of the sea onto the soft charcoal sand, black as night, the occasional white stones staring back at me like luminescent eyes.

I fall back on my heels and shudder as I plant my hands on my soaked knees.

That was so close
, I think as that hot sweat begins to chill on my skin.

We stay like that. She begins to breathe on her own, and suddenly I’m left wondering what I’ve gotten myself into, what to do next. I suddenly feel the weight of responsibility for something bigger than me, something I don’t understand.

Like a girl who doesn’t want to live.

Her eyes pop open and I give a weak smile, a tired smile full of relief.

It turns to surprise when I recognize her.

She’s the sad beauty who watched me play my set tonight. Her image burned into my skull, pinging around like a ball without a goal.

Well fluke of fucking flukes . . .

But a more important question hangs in the air between us.

Hers is a different one from mine . . . or maybe not.

Why?

I open my eyes and notice my body is moving and I can’t stop it. I shake until I rattle, my teeth slamming into each other.

I’m a Mexican jumping bean.

A horribly, irrefutably, mortally embarrassed one. I take in the odd scene, the chattering of my teeth and the roar of the waves as they hit the shore the only backdrop of sound. The moon casts strange silver and blue light around me and for a moment, reality and fantasy blend like vision that doubles and I wonder if I’m in heaven, if my goal has been met. Then it hits me like the ocean slapping the beach: I’m alive. The moon, the waves, the cold . . . they bear silent witness to a life that stubbornly clings to me, regardless if I deserve it or not.

Even with his hair slicked back and draped in drenched clothes that cling to his body, showing every rippling muscle fiber, I know he’s the one.

The guy from the Salty Dawg, the inked-up guitarist.

Fucking great
.

I can’t even die right.

I close my eyes as I try to control my convulsions. But I can’t shake my horror that he’s been witness to the darkness inside me.

Suddenly something scratchy but soft folds over me and I’m airborne.

My eyes swim as I open them, double vision clouding my sight until I gradually focus on his face. This close I can feel the electric charge between us.

If I think it’s been tangible when I caught sight of him inside the dimness of the saloon, it’s a suffocating inferno now.

“I almost lost ya there,” he says in a soft voice, regret lacing his words.

It’s not his fault
, I think, my mind swimming with the disorientation of hypothermia and a chaser of shock.
I’m nobody’s responsibility. Not anymore
.

I open my mouth to tell him that, but instead I croak, “Thank you,” my teeth back to chattering.

He gazes down at me as he easily carries me to his car, contemplative and silent.

The gloom recedes as the hour approaches for the sun’s return. It gathers at the edges, pale golden light timidly seeping in at the edges of the sky, teasing darkness with its early approach.

He smooths a piece of hair out of my eyes and I see the stubble of his chin. Dark, hard, a shadow of black pepper that moves along the contours of the squareness of it, diving into the pronounced cleft at the center. His eyes are shadowed and sad.

He knows
, I think and I close my eyes against the knowledge I see in his.

“Whatever it is . . . it’s not worth this. Never,” he says and my eyes open to the raw command in his voice.

I want to believe that I can transcend this slow-boiling agony of guilt.

Of bereavement.

I don’t know that I can
.

“I can’t”—I pause to rattle and shake—“talk . . . about it,” I finish with a chilled lip clamp, my feelings in turmoil about his rescuing me.

He looks into my eyes. “Promise me that if I take you home, you won’t . . . do this again.”

We stare at each other. His heartbeat thuds against my cheek, the latent heat of his chest gifts me with vitality, warmth . . . and strangely, peace.

I nod.

Today I won’t die.

I don’t know about tomorrow
.

It’s not day by day for me anymore, it’s hour by hour.

But maybe, him saving me is the sign I need to move on. Maybe I don’t have to die to live.

As if he knows that, he places me in the backseat of his car then tucks the blanket around me.

Like a future butterfly in the safety of its temporary home, I lie there in a cocoon fashioned by him.

He slides into the front seat and swings the heavy door shut with a soft click. I watch silently as he turns around, his muscular arm hanging over the seat.

He looks at me and our gazes lock.

“Where?”

I tell him, my teeth chattering almost gone.

His brow rises in surprise but he starts the engine. It roars to life, a powerful and separate presence, reverberating underneath me like the purr of a lion.

I close my eyes. They’re so heavy.

I’ll just rest them for a second
, I think. Shame, despair, and exhaustion are a heady mix, driving consciousness away like a riptide. I feel it change course toward something that might allow the grief of my despair to lift like fog when sunlight appears even as I spiral into a discomfited slumber.

I don’t wake when he lifts me and tenderly places me on my crappy couch. I don’t feel when he takes off my wet clothes, wrapping me in the coverlet from my bed.

I don’t know that he stays for an hour, alternately checking my pulse and feeling the slow and gradual return of my warmth.

My life.

As my consciousness fades again to black, it strikes me that for the first time since everything happened, at least in this moment, I don’t feel alone.

My fingers drum on the steering wheel, eyes pegged on the old homesteader’s cabin at the bum-fucked-Egypt last stop of East End, torn between staying or leaving.

I scrub my face, so tired I feel like I have sandpaper where my eyeballs should be.

The sea doesn’t care if you save a girl that wants to die.

How late you stay up.

How hungover you are.

The tide comes, the fish spawn, swim, and wait to be caught in an endless circle of the food chain.

My clients won’t be sympathetic to anything either. Fishing waits for no man. And yet . . . I can’t bring myself to move. I glance at my phone and remember the girl I’ve picked from twenty applicants. I’m due to meet her in . . . I look at the glowing numbers on my cell.

Six hours
.

Fuck me running.

With one more glance at the cabin, I exhale loudly as I put the ’Cuda in gear and glide down the driveway. The ribbon of grass that bisects the center hisses like a snake as it whispers its good-bye underneath my low-riding car.

I reluctantly pull away as I hope she won’t try to do that again.

I swallow hard.

Ever
.

I don’t want to admit that she’s the first real thing that’s ever shaken the careful foundation I’ve laid.

I don’t do attachment
. It’s safer that way. Attachments are for those who have never lost anything, their trust easily given. But I lost something a long time ago. And I know how to steel myself against ever feeling pain like that again.

I belong to the sea, that’s my attachment. In that sense, I guess I am a one-woman man.

And I’m taken.

But as my thoughts move back to the girl from the pier, she stirs something within the careful house of cards I’ve built for myself. And I wonder if that fragile structure will hold.

The image of her rises in my mind. It’s not pretty: the purple lips, the chalky skin, the slicked-back, waterlogged hair clinging to her like silken despair.

But those eyes, those haunted eyes, they’re burned into my brain. Her sadness has caught me like the fish I net. I’ve hit her hook without even knowing I’m in the ocean; saving her has reeled me in inextricably.

And I don’t even know her name.

S
omething smells like ass.

Wait . . . it’s me. I crack an eye open, breaking the crust of sleep induced by near death, the dried seawater covering me in a stiff shroud of vileness.

Somehow, it’s not as awful as the memory. I stew in my own seawater stench and the night’s memories wash over me like the ocean had just hours before. Now that the fog of alcohol has lifted and the melody of the painful tune has faded I feel . . . embarrassed. My heart gives a lurching thump in my chest, pounding with my emotion as I realize I’m not honoring my family’s memory through my death. They would want me to live . . . if not for me, at least for them. I lie there a moment longer, hot tears creating clean paths against salt water that’s dried on my face in a sticky mess. I think about going to work in the same capacity that Joey did, fishing lazy summers away in Alaska and how that choice has been robbed from him forever. Now I have
the chance to do it . . . for him, for me. It’s a gift, not something to toss into the sea like I tried last night. I feel my old determination rise within me. It’s scary, exhilarating . . . right.

“Ooh!” I groan, throwing my bent elbow over my eyes as bright sunlight stabs its way through the gray glass of my small cabin, spotlighting the grimy interior as I choke back a sob, remembering, my feelings of getting back on track wavering like water running over glass.

The hot guy who witnessed my botched suicide attempt.

My new friends, Evan and Tucker . . . I ditch in favor of despair. Everything is fucked six ways to Sunday. But I realize now, it doesn’t have to be.

Slowly, I lower my arm from my face, the sunlight bathing me despite the dirty glass. Vaguely, I can hear the sound of the ocean, a symphony of crashing waves, a ruthless rhythm that’s timeless and unending.

I look around, my eyes latching onto the clock. An archaic windup thing with the name
Ben
inscribed on its face I’d found in a nightstand drawer in my bedroom and commandeered to the living room. Its loud ticking jars the quietness. My cell is safely stowed in the drawer, though the low-power beep is like a beacon of alert that it’s about ready to die.

There’s one right thing I can do: I can phone my new friend and let him know I’m okay. I sit up, the blood rushing to my head, blanking my vision momentarily. I sit there, trying to regain my balance. I haven’t eaten in . . . I can’t remember. It was a dumbass move to drink last night, considering. And to let everything get to me. I mean . . . I can’t listen to a song without it becoming a trigger?

Apparently not. My eyes trip over my damp clothes on the floor.

They damn me on the spot.

Oh Jesus
, I think,
he’s seen me without clothes
. The nameless hottie cum rescuer has seen . . . shit, everything.

More blood rushes to my head and I fight the urge to put it between my legs, my palms dampening.

I offer myself a lame consolation:
I bet I’ll never see him again
, internally promising myself to avoid the Salty Dawg at all costs.

That’s it
, I determine.
Easy
.

But I should know, nothing ever is.

Easy
.