Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
It is the storm again. The churn of the sea dragging me under. My body battered. My lungs exploding. I am tumbled head over tail and have no sense of up or down, it takes an eternity for me to grasp any stillness, any hint of calm among the maelstrom, enough to right myself and kick, reach, gasp the air of the roaring surface. My lungs shudder. I am somehow uninjured, somehow alive. It makes no sense. I look frantically for Raff but see nothing. I don’t know where the whale is. Or the Zodiac. The ocean is trying to calm itself. I dive below but I can’t see anything and it’s happening again, this can’t be happening again, I can’t be searching for his body down here, reaching desperately-
We surface together. He gasps and coughs. He is alive, a few meters away.
I swim for him, grab for him.
He grunts, yells out. “My arm.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re alive.”
“How?” he asks, all of him trembling.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. Let’s get to shore.”
I try to support him as we swim. The weight of him in my arms is so much heavier than-
I wrench my thoughts away from that dark place, knowing I must be in shock if I am going somewhere I left behind so long ago. I don’t want to think about it except I can feel him now. His little body weightless against me. Shearwater is a place of ghosts, after all, and it has found mine and delivered him back to me.
Raff and I lie on the black sand as they run to us. I lose time. We walk to the hospital, I think. We are both dazed and in shock. Raff’s
arm is broken, maybe. I am unhurt but the footsteps are pattering down the hallway of my mind. His laugh is in my ear.
All five of us sleep on the camp beds in the hospital. I sleep for a long time, I think, slipping in and out of dreams.
His name was River, my little brother.
Dominic
Raff’s wrist is swollen to twice its size. He says he felt it twist when the humpback’s body landed beside him and the force of its weight threw him hard. But, and here is the wonder of it all, it did not land
on him. If it had, he’d be dead. I can’t even approach how I feel about that, I can’t go back in my mind to those moments, watching and powerless and so sure my son was gone. It’s not about me, so I will leave that there. I have only very basic first aid knowledge with which to treat the break. I can’t x-ray it without power, wouldn’t know how to read an x-ray anyway. I bandage it and shovel pain meds down his throat. We don’t have a freezer, which means we don’t have ice.
He is awake and calm. I can’t stop hugging him. I don’t move off his bed, and he suffers me, as well as his little brother and his sister at his feet. He says he’ll stay with Rowan until she wakes; I can only imagine what gets forged in the moments before a whale falls on top of you. I agree, wouldn’t be leaving her anyway. We all stay. We sleep in the camp beds and sit talking in the camp beds and eat in the camp beds. It is the longest I have spent with all three of my children together in months.
Rowan sleeps. She looks different from how she looked when she arrived, when I watched her sleep and dream the first time. Perhaps it is not her, but my eyes, that are changed.
Rowan
When I wake it’s to see his face and I am returned to the first time, to when my body was on fire. I am returned to the sea.
We are alone-the kids have gone to get supplies, he tells me, even Raff, who can’t lie still despite a possibly broken wrist. I meet his eyes, this man who nearly lost his son, nearly watched his son die. I’m so sorry, I say, and he reaches to give me a hug, but it’s awkward and we find ourselves moving so that we are in the same bed, facing each other, and I think how did we get here. I can feel his breath on my lips. I haven’t seen his eyes this close before, today they are more gray than green, they are a storm.
“You’ve been sleeping again,” he tells me. “And dreaming.”
A prison of dreams.
I’ve never spoken of it. Not even to Hank. How telling that seems now. To share a life with someone but to never share the truth of that life, to never express how that life is damaged. Surely it was his right to know this wound in me, since it was bound, at some point, to become a wound in us? I’d simply worked so hard to leave it behind that I couldn’t bear to bring it forward again, not even to speak it aloud.
But it is here now, and I am awake, and I don’t feel so frightened of it. Shearwater is a place of ghosts, but mine does not haunt me, not anymore. I can name him, I can do that.
I tell Dominic, this stranger I do not know, this man who is lying in my bed and lying to my face, I tell him that there was a boat, once. That my mother and father had four children and raised us, for a time, on a houseboat. Three girls and one boy; I was the oldest, River the littlest. That we were all very good on the boat. When Mum and Dad went ashore to work, I looked after my sisters and brother. I cooked and
bathed them, I brushed their tangled hair, read them stories, got them to sleep. We were wild, every one of us, often unclothed because it was easier to dive into the water and swim like fish, then swing on ropes to get back aboard. I held him in my arms most of the time, I swam with his face by my shoulder, his little hands curled against me. I made sure he didn’t fall, but it was wild, I said it was wild, didn’t I?
I loved him, and he drowned while I was meant to be watching him.
That’s what I dream of.
His tiny bare feet on the deck, pitter-pattering toward me, and his laugh as I catch him.
Dominic is holding me and our lips touch. What a strange thing that grief can become need in moments, in breaths, in the strength of his hands. Maybe it’s shelter. Maybe distraction. Or something else entirely. But there is old pain in me and we kiss as though we have kissed a thousand times before, as though in other lives we kissed every day, we kiss as though we have been waiting years to do so. He tastes of salt. I recognize his body against mine. And then I disentangle myself, saying, “I can’t,” and, “I’m sorry,” and I walk outside to the black sand and the blood-red kelp and the bones, I walk among the bones to the sea’s edge, this sea that brought me here.
If he has killed my husband.
What then. What will I be.
Dominic
I was taken to my knees by the fear alone. While she has endured the thing itself. Maybe it is not the same thing exactly because he was not her child, but then I think that is a very small way to look at love. He was hers, and beloved, and he’s lost. I am sick with the terror of this thing, and I think that to survive it must take a fathomless kind of strength. It’s this strength, her strength, that takes the edges of me. Those edges that crumble first into the sea.
Rowan
The kids are in the mess room eating two-minute noodles. They are vibrating, high on what happened. They tell me she saved us.
But I can’t think about that, I can’t go there, I have to be a different thing now, something with sharp edges and a solid center.
All five of us walk back up to the lighthouse. Dom and I don’t look at each other or talk. It will be as if the kiss never happened. A fever dream. A betrayal, certainly, but more than that a softening. A weakening I can’t afford.
He, Fen, and Orly carry armfuls of driftwood with which to make fire, and walk ahead to get stuck into the chores we’ve neglected over the last couple of days. Raff and I travel behind at a slower pace. Walking does not feel good-my body aches again, I am so sick of feeling like shit-but I’m more concerned about Raff’s arm and how it will get fixed.
“Pain?” I ask him.
“Four,” he replies, which has got to be a lie. How will he play the violin if his arm doesn’t heal properly? He must see my concern because he says, “I don’t think it’s broken,” showing me how he can wiggle his fingers. “Just a sprain.” Then, “Are you gonna talk to Dad about…?”
“The blood?” I say. “Yes. I have to, don’t I? Unless you want to tell me about it.”
He shakes his head quickly. “I don’t know anything. Just talk to him.” He pauses but I get the feeling he’s not finished. “Sorry I was such a prick the other night. When I said you wanted to seduce Dad.”
“Honestly that’s the last thing on my mind.” I try not to sound as guilty as I feel.