---THE GETAWAY---
Death drove me out of this place and death brought me back.
I knew my father would die, but I didn’t expect him to have a heart attack on a boardwalk Ferris wheel. He was gone before the gondola came back down to the ground. He didn’t have a chance.
I also didn’t expect my mother to want to bury him in California, near my childhood home. We’d all left the state after I graduated from high school, shedding horrible memories that permeated the summer after my senior year of high school. All of us had made lives elsewhere. We started fresh. Me in Chicago, my parents in New York. But California had been Dad’s favorite place we’d ever lived, Mom swore. And she wanted to spread his ashes standing at the end of the same boardwalk he died above.
I’d thought it was morbid, but I was hardly one to instruct another person on how to grieve properly. After my best friend Mel died in a car accident, I’d done my fair share of weird grieving behaviors, most of them self-destructive. I’d been in the same car but had only sustained some severe injuries even though she’d hit a redwood tree in the mountains. Survivor’s guilt wore me thin in the years just after the accident.
I swore when I got on the plane from Chicago that I wouldn’t let any of the old feelings seep through the cracks in my mind like smoke entering a room beneath a closed door. I came here for my father’s memorial and I’m leaving as soon as my mom opens this container and tosses the ashes out into the bay.
“Well?” she prompts me, turning and looking at me with watery eyes. There’s something about the set of her jaw that dares me to challenge her. “Aren’t you going to say something?”
I stare, transfixed by her pain. She’s beautiful, my mother. And right now, she’s vulnerable.
I want to tell her I was never close with Dad. That I don’t know what to say. On the tip of my tongue is the thought that this is all ridiculous. It’s macabre. He died atop the Ferris wheel just to our southeast. I glance over my shoulder at the monstrosity as it moves, half expecting to see his ghost waving from the top.
But he’s not there.
I turn back to my mother and look at the urn.
A whole human reduced to gravel. They gave him to us in a plastic box that contained a plastic bag that was marked with a metal tag that looked like it belonged on the D-ring of a dog collar. Instead of Fido, it had some random number engraved on it. Not even his name. It made me imagine him being shoved into the crematory after they swept some other poor soul out, their ashes mingling because it’s impossible to get them all out of the oven.
Maybe that’s why it’s a number and not a name. It’s not entirely Henry Grove, but mostly him. For a moment, I imagine the seal on a bottle of orange juice: 100% juice blend!
I picture a label slapped onto the bag of gravel: 100% Henry blend!
“Nancy!” My mom loses patience as I zone out.
“Umm—” I hesitate, struggling to find words. Something that shouldn’t be hard for a journalist. “He was a good dad,” I say.
“Jesus Christ, Nancy, is that the best you’ve got?” she asks. Then she smiles sadly at me. “I guess I don’t have anything better to say. I’d expect more from you, though.” She reaches out and squeezes my hand. “Having put you through journalism school.”
“Well, I never studied obituary writing.” I smile back at her.
“I guess we might as well open this and do the damn thing,” she says as she drops my hand. She tries to get the zip tie off the top of the bag, but it won’t budge. I help her tear a hole in the plastic.
“Together?” she asks.
I nod, and the two of us shake the bag out over the bay and say goodbye to my father.
* * *
We part ways afterwards. She heads to an old friend’s house. A lady she was close with as I was growing up. I go back to the hotel, not in the mood for stirring up memories. I take the most direct route, avoiding any of the places Mel and I used to frequent.
My hotel towers above the city, high and removed from the places below that hold so many of my most prized moments with Mel.
I grab a water bottle from the mini fridge, suspending any irritation I might feel about the price of it, and I walk over to the floor to ceiling windows. I catch sight of my reflection projected out into the cloudless blue sky over the city, but shift my focus further out.
I see the ocean, and I’m immediately brought back to a night with Mel, drunk on Smirnoff Ice that we bought from a gas station not known for checking IDs, stumbling down to the water with our shoes in our hands. It was near midnight and the sky was clear, just like it is now. The stars were bright and the world before us felt infinite.
The fifteen-year high school reunion is this weekend. An unfortunate coincidence, because under any other circumstances, I wouldn’t be caught dead on the west coast at such a time. I wasn’t popular in high school and the idea of seeing my peers fifteen years later holds no appeal.
I had friends. Mel and I had friends. There was a group of us that ran around together. Danny, Jack, Mel, me, and our favorite English teacher, Mr. Bloodsmyth. He was an import from the UK and made a big splash with his accent during his first year at our high school. All the girls had crushes on him, me included. Bloodsmyth was probably in his early thirties when we were on the edge of eighteen. We all stayed after class with him to talk about this and that, sometimes books that he’d recommended us, sometimes life.
I wonder how he’s doing.
I wonder how Danny and Jack are doing. I haven’t heard from any of them in years.
I made a conscious decision to separate myself from that summer on social media. I’m not friends with anyone from high school. My sole goal after that May was to put that weekend at Danny’s dad’s cabin as far behind me as possible.
I step away from the window and place my water bottle on the nightstand. My flight is this evening and I have an entire afternoon in front of me. I crawl onto the bed and grab the remote. I find a true crime show and set the alarm on my phone.
Before I know it, I drift off to sleep.
---SWINGERS---
My best friend Jackie recommended we install color changing light bulbs in the pool. As her husband backs me into the softly glowing lavender water and kisses me, I have to say she was right.
I sink down until the warm water is touching my chin. Nathan, Jackie’s husband, does the same. He’s tall, but not as tall as my husband, Billy. Not as slim, either. Built like an MMA heavyweight fighter, Nathan is far stockier than my husband. Billy is built more like a track or basketball star. A funny thing to my ex-husband, Michael, who is also built like a track or basketball star.
My hands are pink in the lavender glow. Nathan reaches for me and pulls me across his knee, into his lap. Where Billy’s hands are smooth, Nathan’s are rough. Billy spends his days working as a financial advisor at his own firm. Nathan is a mechanic.
For now, though, it’s just me, Nathan, and the fireflies.
Mid-July in Texas means lightning bugs everywhere, their little bioluminescent bellies pulsating a yellow-green in the night air, streaking slowly across backyards in suburbia.
It would be romantic. But this isn’t really about romance.
Tonight, I’m hosting a party. Billy, in one of his sour moods, isn’t taking part. He’s buried deep in his work inside his home office, doors shut so he doesn’t invite any unwanted socialization. Besides myself and Billy, there are three other couples here. Jackie and Nathan are one of them.
Nathan kisses me again and his hand trails down between my thighs. I look over his shoulder as Jackie rounds the corner out into the backyard and I flash her the widest, most wicked smile. She mirrors it and gives me a wave of her fingers.
They’re delicate and long, punctuated at the end with nails sharp enough to kill a man. All except two of her fingers. Eight stiletto acrylics and two that are short and oval. Painted all black, she calls these her party nails.
Jackie steps to the edge of the pool and shimmies out of a pair of shorts that look like they might be airbrushed onto her body. Frayed at the edges and worn in like a favorite denim jacket, they hug her curves effortlessly. She has an hourglass figure, the kind that society would have most women kill themselves to achieve. But Jackie comes by it naturally.
Beneath the shorts, she wears her bikini bottoms. Black with short and wide metal pyramids decorating the places where the strings tie together. Her top is much the same, barely covering her breasts. Despite the heat, her nipples are hard beneath the fabric.
She tosses her hair over her shoulder as she joins us in the water. Jackie’s hair is shaved on one side, long on the other, and just as dark as her manicure. Smokey eyes and pouty red lips complete the look. She’s a bombshell.
She’s younger than me by about seven years, only twenty-four. She seems like a kid in some ways and so mature in others. Billy hired her two years ago, and that’s how she met Nathan. One afternoon, Billy sent her to take his car to have the oil changed and Nathan was the mechanic on duty. Sparks flew. Happily ever after and all that.
Jackie walks up and kisses the back of my shoulder. She works her way up my neck and I reach for her, finding the soft velvety texture of the shaved side of her skull. And then she kisses me, her tongue just as soft and velvety against my own.
I forget about Nathan, drifting into her arms. She pulls me close. Nathan makes some noise of encouragement in the background, but he’s not even there to me anymore. Jackie smells like cherries and vanilla ice cream. Her kiss tastes like sweet mint. She reaches for the strings of my bikini and pulls slowly at one of them until the whole thing comes undone. She does the same to the string around my neck and I let the top fall.
I look into her eyes. And for a moment, this might not only be about sex; it might be about romance.
She backs me toward the deep end, dark as midnight because we haven’t changed out those burned-out bulbs for the new ones yet. A husky chuckle escapes her throat. The water swallows me up, climbing my body like mercury climbing a thermometer.
The way Jackie looks back at me, I think she might think the same thing.
We never talk about it. It’s like an enormous elephant listening in on every conversation we have with each other, but neither of us will address it. We’re married. To men.
Swinging isn’t about love or romance. Friendship, maybe. Swinging, to me, is about sexual freedom and expression. About the way it feels to look into your partner’s eyes while they fuck someone else, knowing the whole time they’re putting on a show for you. It’s about not being afraid to share your partner, confident knowing where they’ll lay their head at night. I’ve never wanted to be truly monogamous. Yet, somehow, I’ve married monogamous men. Twice. And just like my first marriage, this one is about to fail as well.
Jackie kisses me again, this time needfully. She sighs when our mouths connect. I press my body against hers, our feet barely touching the slope into the deep end. I feel her hands all over me, snaking further and further towards the center of my body.
“Y’all,” Nathan says. His voice is faraway. It barely registers. It’s like Jackie and I were two passengers on a capsized boat, now huddling together beneath the upside down vessel. Nathan’s voice comes from somewhere outside of that cocoon.
“Y’all,” he repeats.
Jackie pulls away from me. I don’t want her to. She turns to Nathan, annoyance on her face.
“What?” she asks.
“What is that?” Nathan asks, pointing at something behind us. He stands up out of the water to get a better look.
Jackie turns her head and as I’m following her gaze, something bumps into my shoulder. It’s weighty, solid. I turn and reach for it, wondering what the hell my teenage daughter put in the pool before she went to her dad’s house.
When my hand makes contact, I know on some level what it is. Fabric, skin. An arm. A human.
I whip around, my toes barely touching the bottom of the pool. It floats closer, up into the lavender glow of the new lights.
I see the side of his face, bruised and looking like a center cut filet. Bright pink.
It’s Billy. Fully clothed, floating face down in the pool.
And I think he’s dead.
---FOR ROSIE---
Midway through a laugh—at a joke Mason’s told a hundred times—I see the dead girl on the news. The mood of the day changes on a dime. My laughter dies quickly, like fast-motion footage of a flower withering as the first frost arrives.
It’s an aerial shot. The news helicopter hovers over the Oklahoma River. On the bank, a forensics guy zips the top of a black body bag over the young woman’s face. I catch it, though. It’s unintentional on the part of the news. They didn’t mean to film her face. They aren’t supposed to expose victims. But the shot lasts long enough that I see she’s got blonde hair.
Two people in white polos and black pants lift the black body bag onto a cot that’s backed into an unmarked white van. The kind you pass every day on the highway.
I wonder how many of them have a girl just like this one in the back.
I wonder if it’s the same van she rode in.
My stomach is heavy, like a stone just dropped out of my esophagus down into my gut. Suddenly, I’m not hungry, but I clamp my fist around the fork in my hand, allowing the metal to dig into my flesh. I squeeze harder. It’s a grounding sensation.
A reminder that I’m here now.
“Winona?” Mason says my name from across the table, but my eyes remain glued to the screen. He turns, wanting to see why I’m transfixed.
Closed captioning runs across the bottom of the screen.
...
MUCH MORE THAN THAT RIGHT NOW, BOBBY. THE OKLAHOMA CITY POLICE ARE OUT AT THE RIVER INVESTIGATING A CALL RECEIVED THIS MORNING. A KAYAKER RAN INTO THE BODY ON AN EARLY MORNING BOATING TRIP. WE’RE GETTING REPORTS THAT THE BODY BELONGS TO A YOUNG WOMAN. AS YOU KNOW, TWENTY-SEVEN YEAR-OLD AMANDA JONES HAS BEEN MISSING FOR MORE THAN THREE WEEKS. WE HAVE NO CONCRETE INFORMATION FOR US TO THINK THIS YOUNG WOMAN IS AMANDA JONES, BUT WE KNOW HER FAMILY MUST BE WATCHING WITH A HEAVY HEART THIS MORNING.
Amanda Jones.
I remember her name.
A young woman that went missing only a matter of weeks ago. Young, blonde, and partying at Club Royale. A dance bar in the city.
It’s not the same bar. Calm down.
She’d been out with friends, then disappeared. No one ever saw her again. And the body that was just loaded into that van might be hers.
Even though it’s not the same bar, it’s all too familiar.
The shot pans over the river and gives a wider view of the scene. I imagine what it would be like to be kayaking and stumble onto a dead body floating in the river. I wonder if that person will ever get that image out of their head. Skin stretched beyond reason while gas builds up inside the putrefying corpse. A face so swollen it’s unrecognizable. Black splotches gathering on the skin, nature’s rot taking its claim.
Mason turns slowly back to me. There’s a look on his face that tells me he’s mourning the day. I’d been in a good mood, something that’s not always guaranteed. Something that he delights in when it happens. The frown and the way his brow furrows make me think he’s about to say, But we were just having such a good time.
He knows as well as I do that I can’t help the shift. Still, I feel guilty. Sometimes I feel like Mason carries me through life. Like I’m his burden. Maybe he did something terrible before I met him and this is his punishment. Although, I can’t imagine Mason doing anything wrong. I can’t even imagine him so much as gossiping about another person.
He’s so good.
He’s the sun while I’m a black hole, sucking all of his light into my void of nothingness and never reflecting it back.
The thought is a hard one to swallow.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. An entire conversation between us has played out in my mind. Me freaking out. Him comforting me. Me apologizing. I don’t want to go through that routine right now. I feel zapped. Watching the news has drained the life out of me. Like a bloodletting.
“Winona,” he says softly.
I want to cry. I feel tears prick the edges of my eyes as a lump rises in my throat.
Fuck, I hate being vulnerable. I hate it.
I would rather be dead than vulnerable.
Not the best attitude to have if you want to make a marriage work, but Mason does his best for both of us. He takes care of me and I love him for it. There’s a part of me, though, that resents the kid gloves with which he tends to me. A part of me wishes he didn’t have to. I’d love to be better. And you’d think after five years of therapy, I would be.
A tear escapes my eye, and I swipe it quickly.
“It’s okay,” Mason says. He reaches across the table for my hands. I let him have them. “This doesn’t mean anything.” Mason shakes his head as he speaks.
I don’t know how to tell him this, but it does.
Not every dead woman on the news has a connection to her.
My therapist’s voice comes through loud and clear.
I fight back against his gentle baritone. The sage advice may be comforting, but eventually it will be wrong.
Eventually, one of them will have a connection to her.
And what if I’m looking at that one right now?
“You don’t know anything about this girl,” Mason says, still holding my hands.
I know he’s right. Logic fights with emotion inside me. The terror is real; the connection may not be. It’s a panic I’ve addressed over the years with Dr. Ewing.
Ride the wave. Let the anxiety crest.
I inhale deeply.
“There isn’t any reason to think she has anything to do with her, honey,” Mason says. His voice is so kind it cracks me open. My chest aches for him. He deserves to be with someone who doesn’t need him to glue their pieces back together at least once a week.
I’m better than I was, though. Things had turned around. We’ve been trying for a baby lately. Life has been stable.
But just that one news shot is enough to remind me that it’s all a house of cards. I’ve been waiting for this day.
Mason deserves someone stable. Someone good.
That’s another thought I’ve learned to question through therapy.
But right now, I’m not doing so hot at stopping those intrusive thoughts.
Just hold it together long enough to get to the car.
That’s all I’ve got to do.
“Are you ready to go?” Mason asks.
Our food is only half-eaten on the table. He used to do this for me all the time. When I would have a panic attack in a restaurant, he would get our food to go and have me wait in the car. It’s not something we’ve had to do in a long time.
I just nod my head, not wanting to speak because I’m afraid I’ll cry.
“Here,” he releases one of my hands long enough to fish his keys out of his pocket. I take them and head for the entrance, walking quickly like I’m escaping danger even though we’re safe here. It doesn’t feel that way to me, though. When you live with severe anxiety and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, your gut gets turned inside out. You can’t trust it any longer, seeing danger where there is none and sensing none where there’s plenty. This is why people with trauma can end up putting themselves in risky situations without realizing they’re doing so. It’s also why I left the last concert I was at, midway through my favorite band’s set. I became convinced a bomb was about to go off in the arena for no reason other than my mind decided that was what was about to happen.
I feel that way now. Like if I don’t get out onto the street, I’m going to be grabbed from behind and dragged screaming to the back of the diner. I jog the last few steps to the door.
Pushing it open, the bell rings. The winter air hits my face, reminding me that it’s almost Christmas. I inhale the cold, letting the shock of it fill my lungs. Letting its prickly little fingers force the blood vessels around my trachea to warm themselves, making my lungs burn. It’s a reminder that I’m here now. Nowhere else. And that there isn’t someone chasing me out of the diner.
I hurry over to Mason’s SUV and get inside, locking the doors once I’m safe in the seat. I breathe a sigh of relief. For a moment I sit in silence.
Grabbing my purse, I rifle through it for my wallet. I open the cracked, yellow leather and pull a photograph from behind my driver’s license. The photograph that’s been in this beat-up old piece of leather for far longer than five years. And I look at us.
We’re young, still in our twenties, and intoxicated by the possibilities that life is throwing our way. She smiles, radiant and gorgeous as always. Megawatt. That’s how I used to describe her smile. Those blue eyes pierce through me even now. Familiar blonde hair falls down past her shoulders. We sit together on a porch swing. It’s dark outside. We were at a party. A lit cigarette clutched between her slender fingers as she rests a hand on the bench seat below us. I lean into her. I remember our skin touching that night. How hot she was—life pulsing against my side. I’ve never known someone that alive. Not before or since.
I’m smiling in the picture, too. A smile that I haven’t seen on myself for years. This was innocence. This was youth.
I catch movement out of the corner of my eye and look up. Mason walks out with our to-go bag. I shove the picture back behind my driver’s license and toss my wallet back into my purse, resting it at my feet.
Maybe he’s right, I try to tell myself.
But there’s a voice I can hear, coming from somewhere inside of me that’s older than I am. A voice that’s primal, part of my lizard brain.
A knowing that’s bigger than this moment. A culmination of indicators I’ve picked up subconsciously. My gut isn’t lying to me this time.
With calm assurance, it washes over me.
That body is not random.
The person who put it in the river is the same guy.
The man that killed Amanda Jones is the same one that killed my best friend.
It’s the same guy that killed Rosie.
He’s back.
---I REMEMBER EVERYTHING---
This trip to the Amazon was my idea. Shoving me overboard from the second deck of the riverboat was my husband’s.
As someone forces me upright, soaked and bleeding on the deck, I hack water from my lungs with a throbbing at the back of my skull. I remember only those two hot palms against my bare back and the jarring impact of my head against the edge of the boat.
The wound throbs, and I feel a wetness gathering at the base of my skull that has nothing to do with river water. Blood, warm and thicker than the river. I reach back, touching my scalp gingerly, and draw my hand into my field of vision. The amount of blood shocks me, tunneling my vision and making me nauseated. I roll to the side and vomit onto the deck.
“Breathe, Steph.” My name sounds strange, like it’s coming to me through a tunnel. Waterlogged ears make it hard to hear clearly, but I recognize the voice.
Steve. My husband.
My eyes shoot open and I look at him, unsure what I’m going to find on his face, knowing that he pushed me. But he looks down at me with concern, sheer terror in his eyes at the prospect of losing me. An interesting dichotomy of emotions since he just tried to end my life.
I recoil from him, scooting backward against the uniformed deckhand holding me upright. It’s a feeble attempt at putting distance between us, and Steve kneels at my side, taking my hand. Fighting the urge to pull back and reach for the perfect stranger holding me up, I let Steve have it and look into his eyes, searching them for meaning.
But when Steve looks at me, relief floods his face and his concerned mouth breaks into a smile. A smile I’d know anywhere. The same smile he gave me at the altar on our wedding day. The thought is chilling.
I stare back, unblinking, my face expressionless, hoping that he can’t discern the terror I feel.
Is he just going to pretend like everything’s fine?
It’s an idea so suffocating that I gasp for air.
“Breathe,” he repeats, squeezing my hand.
I shake out a nod that seems to go on endlessly, my head waggling before him, desperately trying to show that I’d never consider anything else.
“We need to take her to the infirmary,” a woman’s voice rises above the chaos.
With a slight French accent, she takes command of the scene and two deckhands show up with a narrow stretcher with the boat’s name embroidered on it. Jaguar. The tagline from their brochures hangs below in finer print. The trip of a lifetime.
Indeed.
They shuffle me onto the stretcher and carry me down the hallway, Steve following behind. We go below deck and arrive in a tiny white room with a small cot on one wall. Beside it is a stool and a small set of cabinets with a desk below. Thank God I’m not in need of emergency surgery. Or at least I don’t think I am.
Internal injuries could make me hemorrhage rapidly. I try not to think about it as they deposit me onto the bed. Steve rounds the corner into the room, his hand lingering on the doorframe and his shirt partially unbuttoned and hanging loosely against his chest. When he approaches, I notice the top button is missing.
“Mrs. Silkwood,” the French woman’s voice breaks my train of thought. She enters the tiny room and claims the stool next to the cot, forcing Steve to take a step back. I’m grateful for that, but I want a moment alone with her. I want to tell her what happened, but he seems hellbent on staying by my side. If the tables were turned, I’d do what he’s doing now. “Roll over onto your side for me.”
I do as she says, following her gesture to turn myself to face the wall. She snaps on a pair of gloves and examines my scalp. Cringing at the first touch, I contort my face with pain as she looks it over.
“You’ll need stitches,” she says.
I say nothing, unable to find my voice at that moment.
“Is that alright?” she asks me.
When I don’t answer, she turns around, her voice more distant, and repeats the question for Steve to answer. I assume he nods because he says nothing, but the woman returns to her work at my scalp.
“I won’t be able to numb you, so you’ll feel some pressure and possibly a little pain,” she says.
My body tightens, each muscle tensing in anticipation of the suture needle’s first prick. I think about the moment right before I went over the railing into the water. Inhaling, I feel the spot below my rib cage that’s sore from the impact against the balcony. Concrete proof that I went over the railing of the boat from the second story, as if the bleeding at my skull isn’t enough.
I wonder if she can see the palm prints on my skin. If Steve’s large hands bruised me. Did he push me hard enough for that to happen?
I search my mind for the moments just before he shoved me.
We flew from Los Angeles to Peru and boarded the riverboat. I’m not sure of much else. There’s something I’m forgetting. I can feel it like a piece of popcorn stuck between two molars. I worry at the spot with my tongue, coaxing it out, seeking relief and unable to leave it alone until it’s out.
What is it?
I feel the poke of the needle and the searing burn of the surgical thread passing through my skin. I stare at the white wall in front of me, feeling Steve’s presence in the room even though I can’t see him. His eyes bore holes into me, or maybe that’s just in my mind, but I swear I can feel his gaze on my back, tracing the lines of his handprints. I dread being alone with him. The nurse can’t leave.
My breath quickens.
“My name is Helene,” she says. I only nod, unable to form a coherent sentence. “I’m sorry for the discomfort,” Helene says. A word, along with pressure, that doctors and dentists use as a euphemism for actual pain. The needle feels huge and the split in my scalp is raw and tender. It feels like the thread zips through the needle hole, singeing my flesh with its speed. With each stitch, I grow more acutely aware that Helene is going to be done soon.
Thinking back on the last few days, I search for what might have happened before I went overboard. Did we get into a fight? We never fight. Our marriage is almost boring with how little conflict we have with each other. The beginning of our marriage blazed hot, though.
Passion can only take you so far. It burns fast and bright, but God, it’s like heroin. Instantly addictive, coursing through your veins and making the edges of your vision fuzzy. Everything takes on a pink glow. You don’t see the red flags that you should.
Helene tugs at the thread running through my skin. It burns as it moves against the wound. Squinting my eyes, I grind my teeth until they squeak against each other and I’m afraid I might crack a tooth.
Forcing myself to relax, I slow my breathing, still aware that Steve is just behind me.
What happens now?
How do we proceed?
Do I roll over and ask him why he shoved me off the boat?
Do I run? Where? I can’t.
Everything is fuzzy. I only remember the feeling of two palms against my back. Hot, someone else’s blood flowing near the surface of them as they contacted my skin, and a little damp with the sheen of sweat that’s unavoidable in the Amazon.
A memory comes to me like lightning striking the tin roof of a barn.
It’s the moment when I struck my head against the edge of the lower deck before I hit the water. I heard the thud before I felt it, and the impact rocked my brain inside my skull. I’m lucky to be alive, I realize.
There’s something else.
Something brushed against my leg in the murky water as I sank.
Scales. Mass. The threat of ancient muscle.
I try not to think about what it was, even though I know. I’m overcome by the idea that I should make sure something didn’t bite me.
“Do I have any bites?” I croak as Helene works on my scalp.
Her hands are still, shocked by the sound coming out of me.
“You don’t. You’re alright,” she says. “I looked when they brought you onto the deck. You are lucky. A woman once fell, and the caiman got to her before we could.”
I’m dazed by everything, unsure if she’s joking or being serious.
Steve doesn’t laugh, but I hear him sigh.
The same way he sighed when I gave him an ultimatum.
Leave her or lose me.
That was a lifetime ago. Jane’s ghost dances at the edge of my mind. The wife before me. The wife I stole from. Our love was born out of deceit and our trust has always been brittle.
I don’t want to roll over to face him, but before I know it, Helene tells me she’s done and rolls me onto my back. I glue my eyes on the ceiling until he moves into my field of vision, craning his neck out over the table and leaning so close that I smell his breath. My heart stops.
I hear Helene fussing with instruments on a counter against the opposite wall. I need to scream. He’s going to finish the job right now.
Finally, he speaks, his hot breath fanning across my face.
“My God, you could have died,” he breathes.
I exhale as he leans in and wraps his arms around me. Steve hugs me tight, pulling me up from the cot and my body goes limp. Dead weight in his arms, I hang there like a rag doll. Partially because I’m probably in shock. Partially because sometimes animals play dead to evade a predator.
And right now I feel like prey.
