Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“I’ll drop you to shore and circle back,” Fen says.
“No,” I say, and she looks at me. “We’re going home now.”
“What? No, I can make it.”
I hold her eyes. “We’re going home now. It’s alright.”
Her mouth opens but whatever she was going to say dissolves and her shoulders slump. “But we need the radio.”
“It’s not worth drowning for.”
Fen starts the Zodiac once more and makes a wide turn. It opens up a different view of the rocks the craft is wedged within.
“What’s that?” Orly asks. “Stop, Fen, what is that?”
She slows and I make sense of it seconds before they do. I grab
Orly and pull his face to my chest so he can’t see. “Don’t look,” I say to Fen. “Don’t look.” But she is looking, and a sob leaves her. Because the body barely looks human anymore. Birds have feasted on him. And the rocks. He is not in the shape he should be, his limbs are out of place. Parts of his skin gone.
“Go, Fen,” I order her, making my voice hard enough to reach through to her, and she blinks, wipes her eyes, and navigates us out of the bay. Her hands on the throttle are shaking. I am still holding Orly against me, not letting him move, and he submits to it, returns the embrace, I don’t know how much he saw.
I face the wreck and the rocks and Yen’s body, I watch it grow smaller, I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, I hate myself.
They are waiting for us on the beach. I can see it’s going to be bad. Raff’s pacing back and forth like a tiger behind glass, and Dom is still as a gum tree, arms folded over his chest.
“Why would you take him down there?” Raff demands the second the Zodiac hits the sand. I realize he’s talking to his sister, furious with her even as he helps her out of the boat. Orly is still within the circle of my arms. Dom wades into the sea and reaches for his son; Orly clings to his father as he’s lifted easily out. I raise a leg over the side just as a wave hits us and I’m sent into the ankle-deep water. The pain of the impact brings hot tears to my eyes.
“Did you get the radio?” Raff is asking as I drag myself upright.
“We didn’t even go for it, nothing happened,” Fen says.
“We saw a body!” Orly shouts. He is halfway between terrified and excited. Then he says, a little more subdued, “He was all eaten.”
“Oh my god,” Raff snaps. Dom places a calming hand on his eldest son’s shoulder, while his gaze swivels to me.
“I’m sorry,” I say quickly.
“Why would you take my children to a boat wreck?” he asks me, eerily calm. “Where you know there will be a dead person?”
“I-“
“We took
her, Dad,” Fen says.
“A nine-year-old and a teenage girl who’s been through more than enough already,” Dom says, ignoring his daughter.
“What has she been through?” I ask him. “Why does she live alone in that shack, for god’s sake?”
“Don’t, Dad,” Fen says and then walks a few paces away.
“They seemed like they knew what to do,” I say helplessly. “That it was simple, and I?… I just was thinking about that radio, it didn’t even occur to me that we would see him…” I press palms into my closed eyes. “I mean they run wild around here, how am I meant to know what they can and can’t do?”
The question falls into silence, sounding pathetic. The wind leaves me. I am shivering with cold, drenched through. Instead of making excuses I say again, “I’m sorry.” And “I really messed up.”
Dom’s eyes move to his children. “Are you okay?” he asks them.
They nod, but they look pale, and I don’t think their father is convinced.
“Everyone up to the house,” Dom says. Then to Fen, “Including you.”
Orly says he wants to walk with his brother and sister. Dom tells Raff to carry him if need be, and then he and I trudge over to the quad bike.
I grip the seat and peer over my shoulder at the three figures behind us. It’s late; the sun is starting to set and I can feel something unraveling inside me. No radio to call for help. No boat on which to leave. No husband here, as he said he was, when he pleaded for me to come. No home to return to, only ash. And I have killed a man and left his body in the sun to be picked at. I have shown him to children, and altered the way they see the world.
I am a tunnel, wind screaming through me.
And into this empty space comes a mad thought, unbidden.
They have killed him. My husband.
Dominic
I am conflicted as I turn off the bike and help Rowan climb off. Half of me despises her. For existing. For being here. For being any part of a stunt that might harm my children. The other half feels concern for her and a reluctant sympathy: she is shivering, her hands ice to the touch. I am aware of what Fen and Orly can be like; I can imagine exactly how they convinced her to go along with the plan, how they made it seem easy.
“Head inside and get warm,” I tell Rowan, who seems distant and lost in her own thoughts. I wonder if she’s thinking of Hank. And of the boat she couldn’t reach, the radio she couldn’t retrieve. I wonder what she thinks of us, this odd little family she has found herself trapped with, instead of the husband she came here to find.
I will have to tell my kids who she really is. I will have to warn them that she’s a liar. I’m not sure when or how to do this.
I walk back to meet them on the hill track. The sky is charcoal and releases a spattering of rain. I hear the kids before I see them, their voices drifting up and around. They are talking about Claire. Raff and Fen are telling Orly what they remember. Things like
she always had music on, every second of the day, or
she was really good at gymnastics, she showed us how to tumble and flip, or
she used to put oysters under her nose and pretend they were boogers. And though they do this often-he craves the details-it stops me in my tracks because they are always things I’d forgotten and there is something profound about being reminded that they had specific relationships of their own with her.
My kids round the bend and fall quiet as they see me. Once, not long ago, I would have joined them easily-we were never apart, the four of us. Now I am a conversation killer, a mood deflater.