Four Times Blessed, page 14
I step onto my toes and launch through the air. My arms brace over my head and I feel my own heaviness against nothing for a moment, before I slash into the bitter cold. The impact tugs my skirt and sweeps back my hair. Underwater is bubbles and quiet. I breathe a trail out my nose and wiggle, fingers to feet with my dive’s rush.
The saltiness pops me up again, too soon. I gasp and take off arm over arm, keeping my eyes and nose above the surface as best I can.
I aim for the buoy and the splashes. Open ocean swimming is not like swimming down the lanes of the academy pool. That’s why so many drowned when they put us in the sea. Inlanders. This unforgiving water here, it’s why I didn’t.
I kick hard and cut through it ruthlessly. I know the feeling is deceptive, of course, but I can’t help the thrill it gives me. Thrill is good, I tell myself, in the surge of strength and warmth. It fades to an ache that’s cold. Then surges again.
Shoving my hair away, I see Cassie’s arms and head, thank goodness. I’m so close. She slips under with the next roll of the moon-dappled surface, and dread hardens me from the inside, even as the cold hardens me from outside. There is something else near her. Garbage? No. Another person. Eleni. Forefathers, how did she beat me?
I redouble my efforts, not breathing at all, muscles that should be burning but are just rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.
I finally breathe. Ten more lengths.
“Len! Cassie!” I screech, voice scratched with salt.
I get no response, but I can see Cassie’s head and her moving arms.
“Say something back!”
Still no response. Panic or they can’t breathe. I hope that they just don’t care to answer me. I scramble forward, falling out of form in exhaustion, but I don’t care about form. The cold, hard ocean rocks, oblivious, sliding over my back, flooding my mouth with metal, thready seaweed fingering my numb limbs.
I spit and cough water and air. I’m right here, just not close enough. Eleni is latched to the buoy with one slender arm, reaching out for our drifting, splashing cousin.
“Len! Cassie!”
I reach for Cassie’s dress and catch the hem in my stiff fingers. I twist and yank, and it swings us together. I’m close enough to grab the buoy’s chain, now. I try to get my arm around Cassie’s chest, too, but she thrashes. Her heel connecting with my stomach.
I gag. “Cassie, relax, it’s me, Crusa.”
She doesn’t say anything even though I’m right up against her closed eyes and open mouth, as they stream above the surface. She coughs wetly and gurgles, mouth dropping back underwater. Her dress still tight in my fist, I shove her up, bracing myself with the chain. Still, the move dips me under, all except for the crown of my head. I think, my scalp isn’t sure.
Eleni has let go of Cassie, I notice when another roll carries her and me up, and Eleni just washes secure against the buoy. We dip, Cassie panics and starts to climb my body, dunking me without warning.
My own panic flares at the burning salt shoved up my nose, so while I realize I have what I think is Eleni’s foot, I claw at it to pull myself up. Up, and gasp. And lock my legs around Cassie. Haul her up.
I shove her into the buoy and she clings reflexively. I loop my own arm around the chain down below.
I hear Eleni whimpering. I hear myself rasping, short echoes against the pilled plastic. I don’t hear Cassie. My eyes are the only hot part of me when I put my ear against her wet lips. I can’t tell if she’s blue because of the cold or the darkness or some reason. I think I feel her…ouch. She coughs into my ear. Again.
My legs swoosh out from under me. I loop a knee around the chain, but some current still insists I fly out to sea. I sense Eleni straining, too. Body streaming out behind her.
Apparently, I’m not as amazing of a swimmer as I thought. No, the reason I got out here so fast is that the ocean brought me.
We’re all caught in a rip tide.
My feet slip and churn on the current. I look over to see Eleni’s wide-eyed face pressed into the buoy next to me. The shore is just too far away. My muscles are empty and cold. Too far to swim. Maybe if I rest a minute, just a minute and I’ll be stronger, I soothe myself. I know I’m lying, though.
It’s too far for anyone to see us in the dark, that’s for sure. They don’t know. I should have, I should have…why did I dive into the water without telling someone? Stupid. I just assumed once I was here we would go back, together. I don’t know why I thought that. My plans never go that smoothly. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Cassie is awake and wailing now. Well, at least she’s breathing and conscious enough to be properly terrified. Eleni has slipped a shaking elbow through Cassie’s, and reaches around my arm to hook me in, too. I pulled her around to my side a minute ago, so the rip is pushing her face-first into the buoy, but as long as she keeps behind it, I think it should keep her and us from being carried further out. I assume. And sweetest of the forefathers, aren’t my assumptions turning out splendid tonight.
Something splats at my back. I shiver as thoughts of sharks and creepy flying fish slip through my mind. Then I get ahold of myself and crane my neck.
It’s a bump of orange shade laying on the rolling black. A standard M.S.A. life preserver. I stretch out and flop a worthless hand on it to reel it in, and notice it’s tethered to a person a short distance away.
“Hey!” I call.
It’s one of the boys, splashing a lot but coming fast. With his brother beside him. I’m very glad to see them. They mash into us in no time at all.
“Everyone good?” Hale spits out. They reach around us three girls to the chain. One clamps his hand over mine. We’re a mess of heads and arms, but we all try to still our limbs, to move slower, except for Cassie. Hale peels her off me and the buoy, pinning her against himself like I’d done. Only it works out for him a whole lot better. She stops crying, even.
“We’re fine. It’s a rip tide, though,” my jaw shudders. I leave what logically follows unsaid.
Lium grabs his brother under the arm. Hale is suspended for a moment, and plunges the life preserver under Cassie. He slips away, but I reach for him underwater and catch his pants. Lium’s kept his grasp on him as well, and it churns us all into each other. Where my arm is folded around the chain, my flesh is pinched painfully but I ignore it.
“Are you going to try to get in?” I ask over the rush of my panting. And more shivering.
Hale doesn’t answer for a second, and wraps the preserver’s tether several times around one hand. Lium, meanwhile, lashes Cassie. He plunges in and out of the water, with huge gasps each time he surfaces.
“Yeah,” says Hale.
“Y-y-y-ou sh-should sss-wim diagonal t’ th’ shhh-ore.”
“I got it.” He glances between me and Eleni. Lium pulls himself back to us along Cassie and Hale’s taut tether.
“I can pull in one more. Who’s first?”
“’L-eni. Sh’s too cold. Eleni!” I nudge her with my elbow.
My cousin moans. Between Lium and Hale, and me prying her fingers from their death-grip, she’s secured to the float as well.
“Crusa,” she croaks.
“You’re going in, Len. I’ll see you in a minute.”
“You really think,” I wipe my nose on my shoulder, “you can drag two people?” I ask the boys. It’s more of a challenge than a question.
“I told you, it’s fine,” grunts Hale. I give him a look. He ignores me.
“He’s got it, Crus,” Lium says, out of breath, dripping on my cheek.
“He’s got it? You’re not going to help him?”
“I’m waiting with you.”
I panic, “How is he going to get them in!? They’ll all drown.” I feel dirty for saying it, using it for shock, but I can’t believe it.
“He’s got it,” Lium reassures me, pulling one of my frozen arms over him. I’m scathing mad at him, at both of them, but I realize my muscles don’t work. So there it goes.
I’ve been keeping Eleni’s fingers knotted in mine, so I feel Hale’s strength when he begins to go. It makes me feel a little better. I keep reminding myself of that as I watch him swim off with my two cousins.
He goes diagonally. And actually moves the girls, tug by short tug, just inches, but still. He moves them against the current. The relief comes from nowhere to hit me. Good at first, it soon morphs into a convulsion that rings with the surrounding cold. I wedge the chain inside my elbow, and bow my head.
“He’ll send it back to us, don’t worry.”
Stupid Hale. I hate him.
“I’m not worried, I’m freezing,” I sputter. Stupid Lium. I hate him, too.
I can’t stop shaking. I almost loose my grip on the boy as I wrap my other leg around the chain.
He grabs me by the ribs and tells me to stop squirming.
I’m an idiot.
Yeah, sure, stupidest boys I’ve ever met. I’ll just wait here and freeze to death with one of you while I wait for the other one to swim around in circles in the middle of the ocean in the dead of night. Here’s my cousins, drown them with you, while you’re at it.
Lium reminds me of the rope again. Asks if I want to hold it. I decline. Hale left us one end of a line and took the other end with him. Plans to string on the life ring and send it back to us with the current.
Lium keeps talking but I don’t pay attention to what he says. I cling to him and the chain, I think, I can’t feel my legs anymore but sometimes they twinge which is possibly the links pinching my thighs, and I think about the bitter cold. And phantom jellyfish.
The cold hurts. I grit my teeth and shiver, half on purpose to see if it helps, but it doesn’t. Except to make me more tired. It’s constant, the new water sliding up against me, stealing away any warmth. It eeks in between me and Lium, through the smallest of spaces.
A base patrol boat’s motor growls somewhere further out. I try not to listen to it because there is no chance of it spotting us, for better or worse. Instead, I just listen to my own catching breath and clutch my arms tighter around Lium’s neck. I can’t feel my face. I don’t realize that I should have paid more attention to the boat until the first wave picks me up.
It surges under my legs, rising bitterly around my nose, and then dives out from under me. It yanks us against the chain. I’m ok. Chilled viciously deep where Lium’s body has been pulled away from me, but ok.
I feel the urging of the ocean, still restless, and brace for another one. I float with the boy and the buoy on the slanted edge of it. Then, abruptly, my whole head is wrenched down.
A dark pain stabs the back of my neck. I clamp down in my chest. I jerk and twist, trying to gather some momentum, but I feel the sharp bleeding pang on my scalp, so warm after the iciness of the yank.
Another yank, but I stay smothered. Underwater, completely underwater. I swipe my hand through the thickness and listless swathes of hair that writhe around my head. I hit something firm, maybe a leg, maybe the chain, I don’t know.
I do it again, and hit a tenseness and the bite on my scalp. I follow the section back with my arm, hands useless, lungs getting too hot too fast.
I shove the top of my tongue against the roof of my mouth, determined to keep myself from inhaling. The searing just intensifies, though, spreading from my chest down into my belly. The back of my nose is so on fire it itches and I sneeze out a puff of air. Snort in a little. The sound of the bubbles is all I hear.
I’m reaching and pulling, bucking, kicking. Pulled in all directions. I find the chain and go to shake it but the metal is rigid, tight with the buoy above and the rocks below. And the chill.
I’m choking on the fire in my chest. It overflows. I can’t help but inhale the stinging water, through my nose, my mouth. It smells of metal and salt.
My sneezing sinuses, choking throat, they bow away from the sinking heaviness in the back of my head but they can’t.
Tired. I grasp the tether of hair and pluck it, but it holds fast.
I’m almost drowned. The ocean will have me. I like the ocean but I don’t want it to have me. Not now or ever.
I’m tired, warm, I seep into the ocean. And I’m not anything. Not anything that could drown it like it’s drowning me.
No, I think. Only my heart responds. I want to get away but I’m overflowing with silvery black and blue like it. There is a tensing around my waist. Rushing over my limp spine, curved into a c.
It’s light out.
No, no it’s not.
It’s dark.
Because it’s night.
It burns me.
I cough.
The air is light, compared to the water, silly girl, my soggy brain corrects me.
I get whacked on the back and I spurt the ocean back to where it came from. I’m alive. Holy forefathers, I’m not dead.
I revel in that, exhausted, and suck in air.
“Can you talk?” comes a rough voice.
I cough and nod. My top half is lying over a flat floating thing. Hey, I still have arms and legs. And they’re all tingly. Feels weird. Jesus, they’re cold.
“What’s your name?” the person that is Lium asks.
“Crusa,” I say, with an emphatic cough on the C.
“Crusa. Good girl, good girl.”
I roll my head to the side, dripping and heavy.
“Lium,” I close my eyes. I’m sleepy.
He shakes my shoulder and I groan. Pushes me up and drags us both more onto the floating thing. Orange and blackish blue go good together. Lium is close on my side and he’s all soaked, but he’s warm. I definitely don’t mind at all when he moves half on top of me. See? I knew I was right not to mind it before.
The boy swims with one arm and half drowns me with the other, all the while breathing right into my ear. I realize that we, or rather, he, is swimming into the current so I try to kick along. All I make is a pathetic flexing at the knees but it’s the thought that counts, I think happily. I giggle because I’m not dead.
He takes a moment to move the heavy chunks of hair out of my face with a touch that is very soft.
I pout and blink. I was planning on a blink but I drift where it’s dark. He shakes me again.
“I was drowning,” I tell him. It wasn’t what I’d meant to say, which is probably good because I don’t know what that was but it was probably something embarrassing. I guess I’ve stored up a few phrases that need to come out before anything else.
“I know, but I got you now.” He tucks me more under his chest, and it frees up his other arm to swim.
I sigh. I’m very sleepy now.
“It’s a good thing we ate all those marshmallows. I think they’re making you float.”
“That. Was extremely, rude.”
“Rude seems to be the only thing that wakes you up, little lady.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yeah it is.”
“No, it’s not. Say something else and I’ll stay awake for it.” I roll my shoulders and he tries to hold them still.
He swims a few strokes.
There’s a piece of seaweed. I like that kind. You can pop the bubbles.
“All I can think of is rude stuff,” he says.
I try not to make a sound when I sigh again. Which, I realize, is worthless because his whole torso goes up and down.
“That’s making it worse.”
“I’m sorry,” my mouth works like fresh clay.
“Don’t be. This is good exercise.”
“Oh, good. Because that’s what…everybody needs. A nice, brisk...midnight swim, to get the heartrate going. Tomorrow, I’ll climb a tree, and get stuck in it so you can work some different muscles. Then, I’ll twist my ankle on the road and you can carry me home. How far would you like to carry me? We could probably do that one twice, once with hills for strength and once flat…for speed. I have two ankles so that’s no problem. Hey, and if you like the water, this winter I can fall through the ice.” I shiver. It’s beyond exhausting. I see dark clouds and I hear them too.
Lium tells me shhh. Which is kind, considering how obnoxious I’m being.
“Are we there yet?”
“Not really, love.”
I tell him I’ll help him swim, and he says ok.
I do try, but I think most of my brain’s commands are turning to ice before they make it to my legs. I try flapping my arms to see if that could work.
Lium shakes his head and sniffs as my attempts send a hefty splash into both of our faces. I blink and wipe my own face off. I don’t like water on my face. But what with the swimming and the balancing and the hold he has on me, I don’t think Lium can really do the same.
So, I twist back, take a numb hand, and carefully aim a knuckle at first one eye and then the other, moving the drips away because I’m sure it stings. I should know, I just swallowed it all.
He blinks a few times, and I finish my ministrations by brushing the residue off his cheeks. There.
“Better?”
“Much. Thanks. Say, why don’t you leave the swimming to me for now on. You just lay there,” he laughs to himself.
I snort and pretend I don’t get it. “Um, Lium? I’m laying here like a dead fish. And if-”
“A dead fish? Nah, I spent all last winter with those guys and you’re not like them at all. See, you’re a lot prettier than a dead fish. You’re warmer, too. Not by much, but still. Girls keep you much warmer than dead fish. Also, you smell a heck of a lot better. You’re mostly softer, too, except for your shoulder blade.”
“Well…I’m glad you’re comfortable.”
“Good. I like to make the ladies happy.”
“I’m happy,” I say. A little too happy. Loopy, even. I can’t move anymore. “Lium, I know you were a great fighter once, but that was against humans. And some animals. So don’t feel bad if you can’t fight the whole ocean,” I reach back and pat him. I think. My eyes are hot.
“I wasn’t planning on fighting the whole ocean,” he grunts, determined, still working hard.
