Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
They don’t understand what I’m trying to do. They fear what I have realized and they fear me for knowing it.
And then this.
I am in danger. Send help.
I don’t sleep. I let the words turn over in my mind. I let them stir some dormant part of me. A little after dawn I stumble into the kitchen,
startling Liv, who is not used to seeing me at this hour. She’s drinking coffee in her dressing gown, which is barely closed over her enormous eight-month-pregnant belly.
“God, you look…”
I am aware that I must look deranged. I put the laptop in front of her, open to the first email.
“What is this?”
“It’s from Hank. These three. Read them.”
She frowns as she does so. Then looks up at me. “This is?… Jesus. He doesn’t sound?… well.”
“No.”
“Should you call the police?”
“The police? What the hell are they gonna do? He’s thousands of kilometers across an ocean.”
“Well, what about his colleagues out there?”
“Nobody’s getting back to me.”
“So we just?… stay calm, okay.” She reads the emails again.
I start making myself a coffee with trembling hands.
“We’ll go through the right channels,” Liv is saying but I’m barely listening. I am vibrating. My mind is working with a clarity it hasn’t known in a year, making swift plans. I feel woken from a dream.
“Rowan.”
I look at my sister.
“Don’t do anything stupid, okay?” she says.
But the answer is simple. “He’s my husband,” I say, “and he needs my help.”
And so. I should have waited. Pursued other avenues first. But the messages did something to me. They brought me back to life.
Raff
Raff is up early, and walks the hill track to find his sister. She is on the beach, as always. He wonders at the kind of person you’d have to be to hate shelter, to want only exposure. The same, he supposes, as someone who has to punch and punch and punch. Longing takes on different forms.
Fen is using a thick chunk of driftwood to mark the height of the high tide. The seals are farther down the beach, honking and barking and bleating. He can’t spot any penguins today, but the shags on their rock are like a dark cloud, rising and falling. Fen waves to him and waits for him to reach her.
“Higher again?” he asks.
“Higher again.”
Soon there won’t be a beach here at all.
They go to her little campsite and he takes out the container of food he’s brought. Last night’s leftovers, unheated. He stokes the campfire, searching for coals, but Fen doesn’t bother heating up the cold steak. She eats it with her hands, juices running down her chin like the wild animal she is becoming. Though truthfully she has always been a bit fey, a bit
other. He flicks her forehead. “Savage.”
Fen smiles.
“Come back with me.”
“I can’t, Raffy.”
He does not understand why. Not truly. He knows she has been frightened badly, and he knows his dad is not a man capable of acknowledging fear, except to tell them to get it out of the body, to physically force it away, which is not how Fen copes, and so she has come
down here to be alone with the animals and the ocean. Raff misses her as he would a limb cut off. That’s how they’ve spent most of their lives, joined heart and mind. He is scared of what leaving this island will do to that connection, but maybe that’s stupid; it existed before they came here.
They spot Dominic and Orly headed down the hill, just two little shapes in the distance, a wide gray sky at their backs. After a while the larger of the two swings the smaller one up onto his shoulders.
“How will either of them survive on the mainland,” Fen says, not really a question.
None of them, Raff included, know how to imagine another life. Still, he thinks, Fen needs people her own age. Raff wants for her the things he was lucky enough to have found, by some miracle, with Alex. He wants her to forget Shearwater.
He knows, as his dad does, that he’s failed to protect her. That he got wrapped up with Alex and forgot to look after his sister. He wakes in a cold sweat sometimes, thinking about this, hating himself.
But she is still here.
“He doesn’t want to leave,” Raff says, of Dominic.
Fen frowns. “Don’t we have to?”
“What would you want, if you had the choice?”
He watches his sister contemplate this. She is looking at the seals farther down the beach. “When I think about leaving,” she says, “I almost can’t breathe. But staying here is killing us.”