Filed to story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“And Dad?”
“What about him?” I know he’s trying to piss me off, to push me away, that the intimacy of the last few minutes is more than he knows how to handle-I’m aware of this but it’s still working because I think he’s hit upon a genuine nerve.
“You’re not planning on seducing him?” Raff asks me.
I burst out laughing. “Piss off, kid. You need to get off this island.” I go into Hank’s bedroom and close the door, and I am astonished to see that my hands are shaking.
I love my husband. I do. Trying to distinguish between loving him and being
in love with him feels petty. I see his faults and I see what we lack. I can see that we fractured, and I know we both feel betrayed by the other. There is distance between us now and distance is like concrete cancer. With time it’s fatal. I may not know what will become of us, but that does not mean I plan on “seducing” anyone else.
It does not mean I don’t care if he’s been murdered.
I wake in the night from another dream of the child’s footsteps running away from me, disappearing between the floorboards where I can’t reach him. The fact that I’ve dreamed the same thing twice in this room is as disturbing as the dream itself.
I take the spray bottle out of my pack and creep into the kitchen. Raff is asleep in the other room, but I don’t make a sound in case he’s a light sleeper. I look around at the space, not knowing where to start. The bleach smell is pretty much gone now. I spray the sink first but the luminol sits invisibly on the surface and then evaporates. I spray the bench tops, same again. But when I spray the floor, the liquid turns a bright, luminescent blue. I spray and spray, and the blue gets brighter
and thicker and covers the entire kitchen floor and I realize I am wiping my tears with one hand and squeezing with the other, and I stop only when the chemical has run out.
“What’s this?” a voice says, and I whirl in fright. Raff is standing in the dark, staring at the blue floor. “What is that?” he demands.
My mind races, trying to think what to tell him, but I can’t come up with a lie fast enough and then I think fuck him and fuck Dom.
“It’s blood,” I say.
Fen
Under the surface it is almost pitch black. She is sitting on the ocean floor, counting the seconds. Her hair drifts around her in eerie tendrils. Shapes move, mostly kelp. And then something different slides into her eyeline. A large mass, drifting down from the surface. It’s a sleeping elephant seal, its body relaxing into its deep dream state and moving into a gentle, downward spiral. Fen watches its passage until it bumps into the ground and settles there.
She wants to stay here with the sleeping seal, wants to know what it dreams of. But her lungs. She kicks off the seafloor and rises to the surface for air. It’s too cold now, she shouldn’t swim at night, but it is like entering a state of bliss she can’t compare to anything else.
Fen emerges from the sea with a shake of her heavy, tangled hair. Unlike the elephant she saw, the furs are all up on the beach, draped over each other in huge mounds.
She scans the ocean, the horizon, looking for any sign of Raff and Rowan. She’s been watching since they went out this afternoon, and she doesn’t intend to give up the vigil, but she needs to get warm. She walks back to the boathouse. Peels off the wetsuit, towel dries herself, and draws on her thermals. On the windowsill are her mother’s things, the items she’s stolen from Dom. Something compels her to take the jewelry-the silver necklace, the earrings, and the three rings-and put them on. She feels the weight of them against her skin. They are warm, probably because she is so cold. Next she takes the silk scarf and drapes it around her neck. Then she draws her finger over her lips as though painting them with lipstick, paints imaginary eyeliner onto her eyelids. Is this what she will be expected to be when she gets back to the mainland? She feels like a child playing dress-up. She won’t fit in,
she knows this. Eight years is too long to expect a child’s friendships to hold on, so she has no real friends waiting for her. She doesn’t belong on the mainland, desires nothing about it, but she can’t stay here. She’s not a child but she isn’t really an adult either; the last year has proven that. She is not her mother, not beautiful like Claire was when she wore these things.
She peers around the little shack, looking for any sign of her, any light or shadow, even a faint impression, but there’s nothing. Even with the possessions to tether her, Fen’s mother doesn’t appear to her like she does to Dom.
Fen comes to her senses and takes off the scarf and the jewelry. She dresses and returns to huddle among the seals for their warmth, continuing her watch for the Zodiac. She isn’t sure what time it is when she sees the shape of her father walking along the beach toward her. But it fills her with dread because he only comes down to her when things are really bad.
Dominic
When they don’t come back in the night I start getting scared. I walk to the beach, force myself not to run. Fen is among the seals, a shape just like theirs in the dark. She rises, shadowy and almost monsterly with her insect-long limbs, and I think, not for the first time, what complete madness it is that she lives down here and that I let her.
“You’re not supposed to sleep on the beach,” I remind her, but I’m too distracted to press the point.
“They headed south hours ago,” she says, pointing at the horizon. “I’ve been watching for them.” She must see the terror in my face because she says, “It’s okay. They went exploring. They’ll be back.”
Or they are both drowned.
I stay with her on the beach until morning. The sun never completely disappears; even in the deep dark of night there is still a band of warm light along the horizon. We sit on the sand and I think about how cold it is down here, how inhospitable, and as the sun rises I am distraught because this is how my daughter spends her nights, cold and alone among the animals, and how did it go so wrong. I am the monsterly thing. I don’t know how to reach for her, how to hold on.
“Orly said he chose Tasmania,” she says, the first words either of us have spoken in hours.
I nod.
“So is that it then? That’s where we’ll go?”
“What do you think?”
She shrugs. “I don’t mind where.”
“Raff said the same. Orly wants plants. Forests. Trees.”
“What about you?” she asks. “Where do you want to be?”
I don’t know how to explain that I can’t leave, and must. That I can’t
be without my children, but that I don’t know where we could possibly go that could ever be like it is here. So I say nothing and she doesn’t understand my silence and the gap between us gets even wider.
“We can’t stay here,” she says.
I am surprised because I’ve never admitted to wanting to stay, but I guess my kids know me better than that.
“Even if the ocean wasn’t rising, we still couldn’t stay here.”
“Why not?” I ask her. “You love it here.”
“I know. But it’s too easy for you to hang on to her.”
I feel my face warm and look away.
“Dad. You’ve gotta let her go. I can’t watch you like this anymore.”
“It’s got nothing to do with you,” I tell my daughter, which is not true, it is cruel in its untruth, but it does what it needs to, it ends the conversation.
Orly makes his way toward us, greeting each of the penguins he passes with a polite, “Good morning, sir. Morning, madam.”