Page 43

His name is Alex, Dom tells me. Raff’s Alex. His voice is soft and aching as he tells me a story of field huts and the sea, and of Alex’s guilt.

“There are two more,” Dom says, pointing farther along the hill. “One for Naija, another for Tom.”

I look at the handsome young face in his seaside grave and what I think is that I have had enough digging. I will disturb no more resting places.

I don’t know what’s happened to my husband but if he is in a fourth grave somewhere here I decide I do not need to find it, or see his face, or know one way or the other. It is possible he has done what Alex did when presented with an impossible life, an impossible choice. Some part of me suspects this and will start building protections against it, but maybe not, this may not be right either, and so I give up, I give over to the tide, to the story I’ve been told that he has left Shearwater and that I will see him again someday. It’s all I have the capacity to deal with.

There’s just one thing I can’t square. One thing stopping me from surrendering to the story.

“Why do you have his passport?” I ask.

Dom and I stare at each other.

He lets out a long breath. “Shit,” he says. “You must have been thinking something really bad.”

I wait.

“I don’t have a good answer,” he warns me. “You won’t feel comforted by it.”

“Just tell me the truth.”

“He left it.”

“Bullshit.”

“I told you it wasn’t a good answer.” Dom rubs his face. “He was struggling. I said that, right? He started talking about letting all the seeds drown. He said we should all just drown. The whole lot of us. Humans, animals, plants.” Dom shakes his head. “I’ve been trying to spare you, but I think he was having a psychotic episode. When he hopped on that ship it was like he was fleeing for his life. He left everything. We went to clean out his room the next day, and it was like he still lived in it.”

“How would he have got through customs without his passport?”

“Fucked if I know. But a navy ship’s not gonna turn around and sail all the way back down here just to get one idiot’s documents, I’m damn sure about that.”

“Why are they hidden under your workshop then? Why not just tell me all of this?”

“I did tell you. But I could see you didn’t believe me, and I knew if you found the passport you’d think something terrible.”

“Why should it matter?” I demand. “What I thought? If it wasn’t true?”

Dom lets out a breath. “It matters to me.”

We stare at each other. I try to read him. His face seems open, regretful.

Maybe it’s because I want to, but I think I do believe him.

It is a gray afternoon by the time we have buried Alex once more. I tell him how sorry I am with every shovel of dirt I heap back over him. This poor boy.

Dom and I make our way to the red field hut—I find that I don’t want to sleep in the blue hut, Hank’s hut—and we collapse exhausted into beds in separate rooms. I expect to sleep for days but I can’t. It is too bright, maybe, even with the blinds drawn. I think of cabins swallowed by waves, I think of a young man in that rough water down there, trying to save his brother. I think of earth, of shovelfuls falling over that wrapped figure, and of his face. I think of the blood Alex must have spilled in the field hut, his own blood, and what it must have done to Raff to see it lit up in blue. Of Yen’s eaten body in the sun. I think of the whale, of the barnacles on her body.

I think of what my life will become if I ever make it off this island. Of how, by the sound of it, I will be caring for a husband with serious mental health problems, a husband who did not spend a single moment taking care of me when I lost everything.

I must sleep because some time later I am woken and I think I have woken to someplace new.

A few days after the house burned and we were still sorting through the wreckage, Liv came to help, and as she and I surveyed the wasteland before us, she said, “Maybe this could be freeing. Do you feel freed?”

I looked at her in bewilderment, not sure how it was possible for someone to get something so utterly wrong. I felt the opposite. I felt a prisoner of the loss, and of the memories, and of so much time wasted.

But this evening. This evening I have woken to the sensation of having shed a skin. In my sleep I have let something go. An entire life.

I go into the small living area to find Dominic taking off his shirt.

Which is the last thing I need.

“Sorry—”

He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t seem embarrassed, just continues to take off his clothes. “Dirt’s driving me crazy,” he grunts. It’s true, we are filthy from the digging, and the coarseness of it against my skin has been awful between the bed sheets. It looks good on him though.

“Going for a swim,” he adds, unbuckling his belt. I stare at him, stripping down to his long johns. His chest is covered in dark hair but I can see the lines of the muscle beneath the skin, his broad chest and shoulders and strong arms, and I want to touch him with a hot kind of want.

“A swim?” I repeat. “Where?”

He looks at me like I’m a moron. “In the ocean.”

I turn to peer through the window. I’m not sure what time it is, but the sun is setting slowly, the evening sky streaked orange to violet to navy. Here, that could mean anywhere from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. “In that ocean, which is so rough it drowned two people and sank a building?”

Dominic shrugs. “I can’t stand it.”

He walks for the door and the metal stairs, climbing his way barefoot down the rungs and onto the rocks. Aside from the violence of the waves, there is also the cold to contend with, and I watch him flinch as the water reaches his toes, his feet, his ankles.

He glances back at me once. “You coming?”

My feet curl over the edge of a metal rung, and below me is a drop onto slippery rocks, and before me an icy, drowning ocean. A man who is not childless, or safe in any way, a man not mine. But he is wading into that freezing water and he’s shouting in pain, and he’s laughing, it is uninhibited, and some part of me can perceive a threshold laid out before me.

I take off my clothes, all of them—he has seen me naked anyway, he has picked over my prostrate body, what does it matter, a body seems a meaningless thing now—and I walk down to the water’s edge. This water I have feared for so long.

I sink into it. The cold is sharp enough to steal air and thought. I am battered and for a brief second I am filled with the terror of it, of being back underneath, and then I release it, I let the water batter me and I survive this battering, I surge to the surface with a scream, and Dom is laughing and using a towel he’s brought to wrap me up, and he’s saying, “You’re a mad woman, you are.”

Our bodies are close. I stand almost within the sphere of his. If I look up, and he looks down, I think we might fit together, the lines of us. But we are too cold, we go inside, and the tension of it will kill me, the unfulfilled want. I don’t know where to put it, it doesn’t fit within me.

We dry ourselves with trembling hands. My teeth chatter. The saltwater stings. I watch him. Neither of us has put clothes on yet, we are huddled in towels.

“I want…” I try to say it, say anything, but the words fail and I am aching, I am so needful I can’t speak.

He looks at me, takes me in. Then he crosses to push me against the wall. His hand goes to my jaw, tilting it, to my throat. “This?” he says against my mouth and I nod. The kiss burns.

He pushes my towel to the floor and he looks at me as though he’s never seen me before, and he touches me and he is reverent, and I feel strong. I feel alive. He drops to his knees and runs his tongue from my naval to my breast, tasting the salt on my skin, and mere minutes ago I thought a body was meaningless. His tongue drops lower, tasting me, and I am already so wet I could come in seconds, but he stops and rises, leaving me ready to burst, and as I am throbbing with need he lifts one of my legs around his hip and he fucks me deeply and I lose my breath and my sight and I dissolve around him until he is holding me up, holding me so I don’t slip to the floor. “Oh god,” I breathe, dizzy, and he kisses me again, lifting me and carrying me to a bed while our mouths are still pressed together and then he makes love to me more slowly, letting the orgasm build again until I can feel it everywhere, every edge and tip. When he has come too, we lie together, entangled, and I taste his neck, his collar, where I have imagined tasting a thousand times before.

We sleep, I don’t know for how long, but when we wake it’s because our tummies are rumbling with hunger. I feel a powerful surge of guilt. I long to be able to call Hank and tell him what I’ve done and how I feel, but this is not something he will forgive, and so maybe the need to tell him is really a need to end us.

Dom and I rise and dress, and we don’t speak much except to mention the food and how we’ll cook it. I brought rice and frozen curry in my pack, but only enough for one, we will share it and still be hungry, but I am always hungry on this island.

We get a couple of pots going on the camp stove. We stand on opposite sides of the small kitchen, pressed as far from each other as we can be. He stirs the curry slowly, helping it defrost.

“Should we not have done that?” he asks softly.

I shake my head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

He looks at me. “It’s just—I thought I could have died from wanting you so badly.”

I close my eyes. My heart will explode, it is beating so frantically out of my chest. I hear him move but I don’t open my eyes, I squeeze them more tightly shut. I feel his breath on the back of my neck. Then his lips. A sound leaves me. He takes my clothes off and his mouth moves down my spine, over my bum, his tongue finding me again. I turn and press him to the floor so I can straddle his lap. I hold his chin and look into his eyes and when he tries to kiss me I don’t let him, I fuck him slowly, watching him, his eyes and his mouth, and it isn’t until we are both coming that I kiss him, taste him, breathe him in.

The curry is bubbling over the pot and we break away to rescue it. After a moment of battling the stove we look at each other and we can’t help it, we laugh, both a little in shock.

We eat the curry beside each other on the couch. We talk. We agree we won’t let it happen again, that it’s best if it doesn’t but it does, several more times in the night. I feel lost within it, within a sea I have never swum. I thought I knew the texture of desire.

“How will you live here if no one comes to bring you supplies?” I ask softly in bed.

“Did I say I planned on staying?”

I leave the question where it is. I don’t think Dom genuinely believes they will stay, but I think he is struggling enormously with the idea of leaving, and those are two different things.

He sighs. He is tracing my lips with his finger. “I’ve had fantasies about buying a boat. So I could come and go more easily.”

“Would you be allowed to just… stay?”

“No. But I’m not sure anyone would bother to stop me.”

“And the kids?”

“My kids stay with me,” he says, absolute.

“And when the sea gets too high?”

He doesn’t answer. Pulls his hand from me.

“Dom,” I say, “it’s dangerous here.”

“It’s dangerous everywhere. Right? I won’t let anything happen to them.”

“But you’re asking them to have that same vigilance and that’s not fair on kids.”

“,” he says calmly, and his tone warns of a blow. “I won’t make decisions motivated by your trauma. You’re not their mother.”

I turn away, embarrassed. But he pulls me back. “Sorry,” he is saying. “I didn’t mean for that to hurt.”

“I don’t want them to be mine,” I tell him. “They can’t be,” and he nods, and he is kissing me, and we both pretend what I’ve said is true.

A storm comes. Shuddering claps of thunder, streaks of lightning. Crashing waves and shrieking wind and it feels like this cabin will be taken, it feels like we are within the story he told me, and I can’t believe, suddenly, that we are sleeping in such a hazardous place. The sky has fallen dark, finally, the storm has swallowed even the band of sunlight on the horizon. Dom snores lightly beside me, but it is too cramped in this bed and I can’t make my mind stop whirling. I give up on sleep and go sit in the living room so I can watch the lightning through the window. I take the blankets from another bed and huddle beneath them. Imagine the sound of the pylons creaking, the waves smashing through the windows and into this room, filling it so quickly that I don’t have time to swim for the door.

“How long you and Hank been together?”

I am startled out of my daydream. Dom doesn’t sit on the couch beside me; instead he sinks into the armchair, wrapping a quilt around his shoulders.

“Do you want to go there?” I ask him.

“Think we’d better, don’t you?”

“We can leave this in the cabin, when we go.”

“Can we?”

We can fucking try , I think. We have to try.

“Nearly ten years,” I say.

“How come you never had kids?”

“We didn’t want any,” I reply bluntly, and why is it that I feel this need to be defiant about it, even with him? There is unfathomable pressure on women to have babies—it is our only purpose—and when we don’t, we baffle people.

I take a breath, come down off the ledge. “I didn’t want any. Hank did.”

“Ah.” Dom’s eyes are on the streaky sky. “Because of River, do you think?”

My immediate reaction is to say no, of course not, why should it need to be about that? But with him not looking at me I am able to breathe instead. My eyelids fall shut and I sit with it. Poke around in the dark for the truth. It is tender and aching, like the wound on my hip. “It’s just… too dangerous. And I am a coward.”

“No,” he murmurs. “You’re not that.”

“I can’t have children that I may not be able to keep safe.”

I open my eyes. Dominic nods once, accepting that.

“He’s never forgiven me for it,” I say. “For not wanting them. They asked him to come to Shearwater years ago, asked him a few times, but he always said no. I think he thought he could change my mind. Then the property burned, and he gave up. He was on the next ship out.” It sounds bad, when I say it like that, and Dom’s expression agrees. I try to explain. “I think he just felt like there was no use staying anymore. He didn’t have anything left.”

“He had you.”

I smile humorlessly. “Cold comfort, I guess.” Having me didn’t turn out to be enough for Hank. “We didn’t break up,” I clarify.

“And then you came all the way here for him on a flimsy private boat.” Dom sounds perplexed, almost angry.

“He asked for my help,” I admit. “He said he was in danger.”

Dominic frowns. I can see his mind working this through. Then he says, “I think he was. Inside him, I think he was.”

“Why didn’t anyone help him?”

“We tried. We gathered around, I promise we did. But there was no way to call for help and we were in over our heads and he didn’t want our help. He was furious. He wanted to destroy things.”

“But he only ever wanted to plant things,” I say. It is so broad, the distance between the man I know and the man he became while he was here. It is so sad.

But that’s not the full truth, is it? He plants things but sometimes I glimpse that tiny seed of nastiness within. It appears only in brief flashes, the lightning outside and then gone, hidden behind the charm, the friendliness, the laughter—but it is there. His selfishness. An ego so fragile, he takes hits to it poorly. Which is why I don’t think we’ll survive what I’ve done.

“Did you and Hank have a plan for after Shearwater?” Dom asks me.

I shake my head. “He couldn’t talk about after.”

“But in your mind, there is an after, for the two of you?”

A flash of his face in lightning. I say, “I don’t need to explain to you what a marriage means.”

“No,” Dom concedes. Then he says, “But they do end. I can tell you with great certainty that they do end.”

“Do they?” I ask. “Yours hasn’t.”

He is startled, I think.

“Let’s not pretend,” I say, “that I’m the only one here being pulled in another direction.”

Dominic and I fall asleep where we are, curled in our blankets. I listen to his breathing. As I drift off, I am locking doors, building firmer barricades. But he wakes me in the early morning with a soft question, the sound of which could almost be a dream.

“Could there be an after for the five of us?”