Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
Don’t trust him. “You okay?” Dom asks me, and the earth shifts off its axis. Everything he has ever said to me will need to be reevaluated in this new, ugly context. There are lies within him, and malice, and violence. At the very least he has kept a terrible thing from me, he has worked hard and elaborately to keep it from me.
“Forgot my scarf,” I say, and there is, I think, a survival instinct that is keeping my voice normal.
He puts his arm around my shoulder and we walk the rest of the way together. Outside, when the others are occupied, I vomit behind some rocks. The sky spins above. It happens again over the edge of the Zodiac.
Fen slows her boat and calls out to me. “Are you okay?”
“Seasick, I guess,” I call back.
At the lighthouse I tell them I need to lie down, I must have a bug. Dom makes me a cup of tea, gets me water and Advil, tucks me under the covers and kisses my forehead, it’s all very sweet and the whole time I am screaming at him silently to get away from me. They leave for another trip and I stare at the ceiling. I meant to think and plan. Instead I am blank. I can’t conjure a single thought that makes any sense, that has any true form.
I am so cold, I can’t stop shivering. I am only a body. A body that loves his. A body revolting against me now, because it wants his,
wants never to be parted from his. It doesn’t care what he has done. I did not feel this way when Hank left. I did not feel an absence I could die from.
At some point Raff knocks on the door and pokes his head in. I am calmer now, so I gesture and he comes to sit on the bed. His heavily bandaged arm is back in the sling. He looks pale and in pain. Am I to fear these kids, too? They must know about Hank-Dom would need their help keeping him alive, which means they are complicit. The performance of it all is staggering, all that time I spent in the vault, so close to where my husband sat, and them pretending nothing was wrong. I find I can’t access any feelings to go with this knowledge. Just disbelief. These kids, who are so kind and warm, all three of them, locking a man in what amounts to a dungeon. Can you blame kids for the decision of a parent? Not Orly, surely. But Raff and Fen are pretty much adults themselves.
I can’t escape some of the blame either. I asked Dom straight why he had Hank’s passport and he said he just
forgot to take it, and I believed him. The insanity of that is mind-blowing. My own stupidity, unbearable.
“You’re sick?” Raff asks me.
I nod. “Your arm’s bad.”
He shrugs. “I made it worse. Easy trade for their lives.”
The whales. They seem a lifetime ago.
I study his face as he peers out the window. “Are you scared?”
Raff doesn’t look at me. Just nods once. There will be no violin without a properly working hand.
“I need to ask you some things,” I say.
“Okay.”
I lick my lips, my whole mouth feels dry. “Your dad said Hank started to become unwell, at the end.”
Raff nods.
“Did Dom ever have to be violent with him?”
The boy goes very still.
“You can tell me,” I say. “Whatever it is, I’ll try to understand.”
Raff’s head tilts and he is studying me the way I am studying him. “You love my dad,” he says suddenly, like it is fact.
“No,” I croak. Because I can’t. Not now.
“So you know,” Raff goes on as though I have said nothing, “deep down, you know as well as we do, that everything Dom does is for his kids.”
The storm arrives. Mighty claps of thunder and a dazzling light show. The wind is wailing and as though swept in by it, Orly appears in my room. I pull back the covers for him and he scurries under. His warm little body is like a hot water bottle in the cold. “Where will all the animals go?” he asks me. “When the island’s gone?”
I think of Ari and Nikau and their egg. I think of King Brown and his harem of mother seals and their babies. I think of the thousands and thousands of penguins.
“They’ll find another,” I tell him. But we both know there is no island like this one.
As I hold Orly I think of how he stood at the air vent, talking to Hank. He knew. He has known all along that my husband is beneath the ground.
Still, I can’t bring myself to let him go.
Dominic
I make the last trip of the day alone. The storm has begun and Orly needs no convincing to stay home. Fen hates being anywhere near the vault so she too is happy to remain at the lighthouse. But there’s time in the day for another load, and in truth I can’t shake the bad feeling I am getting from Rowan. I can’t shake the image of her emerging, alone, from the vault.
I climb down into the bowels of the world.
He is sitting on the floor with papers on his lap. He is drawing something. I don’t care to know what.
“You’re back,” Hank says, without looking at me.
I had thought maybe I’d be able to tell. That if I looked at him, I could read on his face whether he’d seen his wife for the first time in many months. But I can’t see anything.
“Toilet bucket needs emptying,” he commands. “I need more toothpaste and another notepad.”
Naija used to sit with him and talk to him. She said it was important for his mental health. She also said she needed to try to make sense of what he did, and what he wanted. For herself, she needed to understand what his own internal logic was, assured me that no one was “just crazy.” I don’t know if she worked it out, before she died. I never cared to know.
But it occurs to me now that Rowan will need the same answers. That she will expect me to know them, to have at least tried to know them.
“What gets me,” I say, instead of asking him anything, “is that in your psychosis you had to drag my seventeen-year-old daughter down with you.”
Hank looks up at me. Smiles a smile of infinite wisdom. “I know it’s easier to tell yourself I’m crazy, but I’m not,” he says. “And none of that matters. It’s so small. Don’t you get it? Of course you don’t, you’re a dumb thug. Let me spell it out: we’re all fucked. We’re dead. Everything is dead. All life: drowned, burned, or starved.”
I feel a chill run down my spine at the recognition of these words. I don’t understand how Rowan could have loved this piece of pond scum, of animal shit. I wish she didn’t see the world the same way he does, with such bleakness. But I do know how to answer his proclamation.
“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.”