Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“I was thirteen. And watching three kids.”
“That’s right.”
I stare at her. The cancer has stolen any youth from her face; it has made her ancient and barely recognizable. I can’t remember what she looked like before this. There is a hot thing growing in my abdomen, in the middle of me, it is expanding and making it hard to breathe. I think I was going to reach for forgiveness, here at the end. I won’t get it, I can see now. She hates me for losing River. Will blame me until her last breath. If I want sense from what happened I will need to make it myself.
“I’ve been so angry with you for putting me in that position,” I tell her. My voice breaks. “Why did you have kids if you weren’t going to bother keeping them safe?”
She says nothing. She’s just watching her movie.
Mum passes away not long after this. It feels protracted and agonizing but in reality it is not so long. Liv and Jay come so that I’m not alone when it happens, though they haven’t been here for the last months of deterioration. In the ten years since River, Mum has not made herself easy to love. They barely know her.
I am more of a mother to them. Dad doesn’t come back to say goodbye. His means of survival was to get away, get as far away as possible and pretend none of it, and none of us, ever existed. To be honest, I understand that. He cut himself free so he would not be dragged under.
With three of Mum’s four children sitting around her bed as she takes her last breaths, I let go of blame. It was not my fault River died and it was not my mum’s. I thought she chose that boat and that life of danger, but really the flood chose it for her, it was this crumbling world. And there will be more floods. More children swept under. But they will not be my children.
I am so sure. I am thinking of words to make sense of this, to offer some comfort. I knew this ending, I have known it all along, and we should have walked away at the start.
And then. The pathways we have carved begin to work. I watch in stunned disbelief. The sea is wild and powerful and it is not done with her, it is hungry to have her back. It surges. This is what saves the whale: this impossibly high tide.
We watch as her massive body is dragged back out along with half the sand of the beach. We see her float, tilt, and then swim. She swims. Straight for her baby, who is waiting for her. Mother and calf come together, slide over and around each other, we can hear their calls, see their fins lift. It’s dark; they are gone quickly, their skin as inky as the waterworld embracing them.
But I can’t move. I can’t leave this as easily as they can. I watch where they disappeared for a long time. It doesn’t make sense that they should have lived. An impossibility, to shake some foundation of me. Something I have learned to rely on.
I see Dom holding his children. Raff and Orly first, and then his daughter moves to be tucked into his embrace, which is big enough for the three of them.
He sees me watching and moves a hand, gesturing for me to come. He seems to think his arms wide enough to hold me, too.
I don’t know if I can cross to them.
But a mother and her baby have survived tonight. On a night I thought bound for death we’ve witnessed life instead. They didn’t surrender, they held on, they fought, and my god, so did we. These kids fought, they pushed themselves past every threshold. Knowing all the while that it would probably be for nothing, they pushed on anyway.
If they can do that, then I can cross this beach to them. I can put my arms around them, I can help him to hold them. What kind of idiot would choose only a quarter of the love they are offered?
Dom delivers us home, one at a time, on the back of the quad bike. Orly first, then Raff, Fen, and me last. I try to make the walk myself, thinking to save him a trip, but my legs are gone-I take a few steps
and end up on the ground. So I sit in the rain and I make silent apologies to Hank for the choice I’ve made. It is a betrayal but it’s done, I can’t turn back. Perhaps I will be as our home was for him: a simple enough task to cut himself free of. I feel delirious. I can hear the wind, as Orly does. It warns me to be careful, it doesn’t know I have had enough of careful.
Dom is white with exhaustion by the time he returns for me. I am sitting in the grass and for a disorienting moment, in the blast of the engine and the headlights, I think he will run me over. I see my body collided with, dragged along.
But he stops.
In the dark, on the ground, in the grass.
I say, “Before I came here, I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t want anything. It’s really?… desolate, not wanting anything.”
Dom meets my eyes. His expression, it could kill me.
“Now,” I say, “what I want is for your beach house to have a workshop that’s big enough for both of us, and all our tools.”
I am not the only one with a choice to make, and I don’t know what his will be. But he smiles and I have never seen this smile before. “You’d hate being near the ocean,” he says. “In a place that could wash away.”
“I’ll go anywhere with you,” I tell him simply.
“And I you,” he murmurs, and we are kissing and I feel it again, that sense of time folding over on itself, of a thousand lifetimes spent together. If it is our bodies that should one day be washed up onshore then I hope they will do so together.
He helps me onto the quad behind him. I snake my arms around his middle, rest my head on his back. The blood rushes in my ears and every bump hurts my teeth. At the lighthouse we are too tired to climb any steps so we both sink onto the floor of the living room, beside the fire that has burned down to coals but is still warm. There are no pillows or blankets but our fingers are touching as we slip out of consciousness. Deranged with exhaustion.
“Goodnight, darlin’,” I hear him murmur. “Love you.”
But something about the ring of it makes me unsure if he is talking to me or his dead wife.
Wake up.
Wake up!
I drag my eyes open. The world is blurry and spinning. There is a face over mine. I adore this face. But I would very much like it to stop talking.
“Come on,” Orly is saying. “Hurry up. We have to go back for more seeds.”
“Oh my god,” I manage to utter. “Couldn’t I just?… die? Instead?”
“No, get up, come on.” He turns to his dad who has flung an arm over his eyes in protest. “Dad, you promised. Get up.”
Dom groans. “What time is it?”
“It’s 7:30. I’ve let you sleep in.”
“Wow thanks,” I mutter. I get myself upright, stumble to the kitchen for coffee. Fen is already there, making a pot. She looks about as bad as I feel, pale and very slow moving.
“Raff’s had a bad night,” she tells her dad, who disappears to check on his son. Orly, Fen, and I eat toast with jam and honey because we are all desperate for the sugar hit.
When Dom gets back, he looks worried. “His arm’s swelled up. I think he’s sprained it again. He’s gonna stay here and rest.”
“Oh no,” Orly moans, more I think for being a man down on our mission than out of concern for his brother.
We get back to it. Everything is terrible but I look at Dom and feel woozy with love, I am limerent. I look at his kids and for the first time in a long while I see a future. As we carry our containers out through the chamber doors and into the long tunnel, though, I hear a faint, echoing scream in my ears and a chill moves down my spine. I look ahead to see if Orly heard, but he’s facing forward and I can’t tell. It’s
as if the island is reminding me not to forget, for a single moment, that this is a place of death.