Dead in the Water (53 page)

They hung suspended like space-walking astronauts while John’s lungs fought the good fight; his brain clouded over and fear took hold for a few last moments. What had he done? What was he doing?

Was this Matt? And if so, how—

No more questions, then, as an approaching shadow chilled the water above them. Hull-shaped. The
Pandora
, or whatever the hell it was.

Perhaps someday Cha-cha would rename it the
Good Ship Lollipop
. The old guy thought like that. He thought, he
thought … John lost track. He swirled into himself. This was it.

He opened his mouth and sucked in the ocean.

“Welcome aboard, Daddy,” Matt whispered in his ear.

Alone, Donna and Curry alone, drifting endlessly on the hazy, nickel-plated ocean. Donna thought a lot about drowning; imagining how it would feel. First you would tread water, then you’d try to float. You’d tire. You’d start to go under …

Curry kept whimpering, “It’s a trick. We’re still there. He’s making us think we’re safe. All that stuff about Cha-cha, that didn’t really happen. He made you think it.”

Donna considered strangling him, just to shut him up. ’Cuz what if he was right?

And who the hell was safe? The boat was starting to leak, and there was nothing to drink.

God, they were all gone, all those people. The van Burens, once so hilarious in their yupster-squabbling. Ramón, the poor asshole—Curry told her all about it—who started it with his goddamn barrels of shit. No, of course he didn’t. Curry said in order to encounter the
Pandora
someone had to call
to the captain; had to want something bad, and that would draw them to the ship. That had been Ruth. (
Not my husband, not
, and she had bloated in the water like a rotten rubber mannequin, and the others, diving at her …)

Little Matty, lost anyway. He must have drowned after all while they were trying to revive him. Within the fog, the illusion of life could be maintained by whatever ruled aboard the
Pandora
now.

John, his long-suffering father. Had she really believed it would ever be okay for them? They had seemed marked, those two. Or was it just that she had never believed in happy endings?

Cha-cha. Dear God, what of Cha-cha? What was he now?

Had she dreamed all of it?

“Talk to me, Curry,” she said. “Tell me about it. Tell me everything you know. How it—she—he captured you.” Make it real, hoss, or she was going to go out of her mind.

“What did you see in there? In the hatch?” he asked her in return. “Tell me again.”

“Sea monster,” Donna said curtly, again. And she heard that lonely song, that voice:
Oh, baby, I am so lonely. Oh, baby
.

Her throat closed over. “How far away do you have to be from it, that it can’t influence you?”

Curry shook his head. “I dunno. I’m so scared. I’m still so scared.”

Drifting, drifting; the sky and the sea stretched into endless, heartless gray, bone-bleached and pitiless. If the boat went down, there was nowhere to swim to. And how long can you tread water?

How long can you hold your breath?

“Talk to me, Curry. Tell me how it controlled you,” she muttered through cracked, peeling lips.

Curry made no reply. Then he said, “I don’t deserve to live. I’m evil.”

And she had no answer for that.

*  *  *

Drifting, drifting; dreaming of water, water, everywhere, in buckets and bowls and in goblets and bottles. Fresh, clear as a mirror, as glass …

And being pulled up, up, slowly, dangling in the air … oh, no, she must be out of her body, floating, dying …

His voice. “Baby, oh, Donna, baby.”

Glenn.

She slept for hours, and the doctor stuck her and tested her; for a second she panicked, remembering the blood pressure cuff on the
Pandora
, and the thing that rattled in the cup … it had been drugs all along, yes, that was it …

No …

And you wouldn’t think she’d want to, you’d think she’d just lie there in the close, dim cabin and scream; but Glenn came into the cabin and sat beside her. Looking as perfect as ever, the beautiful, conceited bastard; and then he bent over and gently touched her swollen lips with his mouth.

She gasped and he said, “It’s okay. Barb left me. It’s okay.” Which struck her funny, in a tragic way, it being okay. It being that anything in the universe was okay.

But right then she wouldn’t have cared if Barb was in the cabin, pulling off his pants for him. The ointment dulled her sunburn and he was as careful as a burning man could be; he went right inside like he belonged there, sliding into home, oh, my God, my God, oh, Jesus; how could you drown in love? But you could,
my man, I love him so
; and it was too much, too happy, too relieving; she wept against his shoulder until she fell asleep.

She didn’t wake until the cabin was dark. She started violently. A trick, just like Curry said! They were back! They—

“Shh,” Glenn said. And she asked questions, dozens of them. He told her the Coast Guard had been searching the area since first word of the
Morris
’s difficulty. They had found Donna’s lifeboat within thirty nautical miles of the freighter’s last known position. She had been missing for a week.

“I don’t think that’s right,” she murmured.

She slept a deadened, dreamless sleep.

Then she woke again and said, “I hated you when you said … when you told me you were going to get a new partner.”

Naked beside her, Glenn gaped at her. “Donny, I haven’t talked to you since the day you left Long Beach.”

Reade was that good? She shuddered.

Later, they talked, on the small Coast Guard cutter, tiny cabins, gray and white, bunks, everything, and it seemed so amazingly simple, so lifelike, so real: “We had it out that day I dropped you off.” His exquisite smile was grim and sad. “At Disneyland. She knew I’d driven you up. She told me it was cruel to her and you both, pretending. She … she said she had someone else, too.” His face was flushed. “I don’t really think that’s true, though. I think she’s just hurt.”

“God, I’m sorry,” Donna said. “I shoulda—”

“Donna, if you’d died out there …”

They made love again. Not protected, she thought; birth control pills lost at sea, too. Then; who the hell cares? And they slept in the cherishing embrace of the smooth blue waters.

She woke to ravings. Curry was out of it, Glenn told her, and who was he anyway? Not from the
Morris
, so where
was
he from?

She told him, and he didn’t believe her.

She didn’t know how she was going to handle it, if she’d explain it away eventually, forget about it. But there was Curry, the evidence.

Oh, Matty, John, Ruth. Poor Phil. Elise, how had they died? She never saw them. Tears ran, pooled on the pillow. She drifted.

Her eyes opened in the dark. For all she knew, they could have still been alive when she abandoned ship. And she hadn’t gone back for them. She’d let Cha-cha convince her. Or was it Curry who had convinced her? Or was it all a lie?

Had they been alive, the ones she hadn’t seen?

Finally, land ho. Hawaii, Don Ho. At the bow of the Coast Guard vessel, she stood on wobbly legs and stared at Diamond Head.

“Do you know you can die from drowning two-three days after you’ve been revived?” she asked, tracing the landscape with her eyes. Palms. High-rises. The blessed, blazing sun. “It’s called hypoxia.”

“Yes, hon,” he said, careful of her sunburn, of her. “Yes, baby.” Like she was crazy.

Across the deck, something moved on

little

cat

feet,

but there was nothing there. Once out of the fog, Nemo had proved to be dead, too, and all her babies. Little kittie-ghosts, nurtured by the milky evil of the fog.

Nevertheless, a few of the crewmen now swore they heard kittens mewing; and Donna had felt the pressure of a small animal between her legs as she dozed.

“How’s Curry?” she asked.

“Still sedated,” Glenn replied. She wondered if Curry’s mind had drifted away to a safer sea; if it would ever drift back.

The Coast Guard vessel moved past Aloha tower. A helicopter buzzed overhead.

They talked about what they’d do back in San Diego. Barb was moving out. Donna said she’d need some time, but she knew that was a load of crap.

He was beside her, really there, in the heart and the flesh; and inside she was cracked and opening for him … 
hello, my love, please, please, don’t hurt me
.

They walked off the ship together, hand in hand. And then a man in a white uniform gestured Glenn aside, and he collapsed.

They had drowned: Barb, and the two little bastards, in a freak accident: facedown in a neighbor’s pool, and no reason for it. Their new swimsuits. The girls had been drinking lemonade. Barb was there to get some emotional support—the neighbor was somebody’s ex-wife, too.

No reason for it.

*  *  *

Donna threw back her head and screamed. She ran for Curry, ran and roused him; and on the nightstand beside him, in a pool of wet, a sparkling green glass bottle spun lazily in a circle.

“No! No!” She rattled him hard. “Where are we? Are we there? Curry!”

“No more!” Curry sobbed, half-unconscious. His face was white, his eyes wild. “No more!”

She had faced the Lorelei:

(
Oh, baby, I am so lonely
.)

I want my man.

(
What is your Desire?)

My man.

(
What is the thing that will draw you to me?)

To protect. To save. My man.

“No!” Donna picked up the bottle and smashed it against the nightstand. It didn’t break. It glittered in the soft light like a beacon as she brought it down again and again, swearing, weeping, hefting it with both hands. Curry staggered out of bed and fell to his knees, pleading and begging with something, with someone.

They pounded on the other side of the closed hatch as she fell down beside him and shook him, saying, “Are we still there? Damn you, are we on the
Pandora
?”

But it didn’t matter. Because either way, she was going back. It wasn’t finished. It—
she
—knew Donna would go back. For Glenn—the threat to him was clear. For his wife and babies, to save them from a hellish existence, if that was what it was now. If they needed saving. And she wouldn’t know that unless she went. And the … thing knew it.

Oh, baby, I am so sad and lonely
.

Lonely enough to make Donna—who also understood lonely, who could be a soul mate—a
mate
—come back.

Or was this one of Reade’s games? Was she really back on the
Pandora
, right now?

“Cha-cha, don’t you have any say?” she whispered. “Are you there at all?” Perhaps he’d been too gentle, too crazy.
Maybe the creature was already looking for another Dreamer.

And reeling her in.

The bottle spun lazily, as if to say, Remember, there are plenty of other ways—and people—to drown. The particulars don’t really matter. Someone else’s boat might sink, or their plane may go down, and there are, as you know, ponds and lakes and rivers. And bathtubs. Or hot tubs. Dreadful things can happen in Jacuzzis. Have happened.

You will be my Life-in-Death. The woman who brings death …

unless you come.

The bottle spun slowly, like a boy on a lake. Is that where it all began? Because she didn’t go gentle into that frigid water? No second chances, big girl, on the Sea of Death.

How do you know we aren’t still there, at the place we met, oh, my lady of the lake? How do you know I haven’t caught you, and now we’re beneath the surface, you and I, me beauty. And as the shadow passes above us, you think, Thank God, thank God, you’re saved. But you know how wrong you are
.

You know
.

The bottle twirled, rolled.

To protect and to serve. To rescue. To save. Donna’s foremost Desire.
Oh, my man, I love him—

“All right, you goddamned monster,” she whispered. “Okay, I’m coming.
Alone.
”

But she knew that wasn’t true.

She knew.

And that is what it will be like. And more or less, how it will happen.

So nice you can join us.