Scary Out There (23 page)

Lucy A. Snyder
is a four-time Bram Stoker Award–winning writer and the author of the novels
Spellbent
,
Shotgun Sorceress
, and
Switchblade Goddess
. She also wrote the nonfiction book
Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer's Survival Guide
and the story collections
While the Black Stars Burn
,
Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows
, and
Installing Linux on a Dead Badger
. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, and is a mentor in Seton Hill University's MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program.

Website:
lucysnyder.com

Twitter:
@LucyASnyder

Facebook:
facebook.com/LucyASnyder

NANCY HOLDER

The sea has neither meaning nor pity.

—ANTON CHEKHOV

T
he sea. Vast and black, an open grave.

Where Marie died.

Where I left her to die.

It was chilly for a June night, especially in San Diego. Anya had on shorts, flip-flops, a T-shirt, and a hoodie; she had realized too late that she should have worn a lot of heavy clothes. She hadn't been thinking, but that was the point, wasn't it? To stop thinking. There was no fairness or logic. There was nothing. Nothing left.

The moon was full. A year ago, it had not been. Exactly three hundred and sixty-five nights ago a crescent moon had hung in the sky, dancing with bright stars. A gigantic bloodred bonfire had burned away whatever was left of Marie's inhibitions. In the scarlet light Anya's best friend's eyes had spun like soccer balls. Marie, a good girl gone very bad, very harsh, very crazy, whirling in a thong and a bikini top, head thrown back,
while too many guys watched and hooted and cheered when she stumbled toward the fire. It was all guys, in fact, except for Anya and Marie. Those were not good odds, even if the guys hadn't been older unknowns. Anya was furious with Marie for luring her there with the promise of a party. This was just a drugfest and date rape waiting to happen.

“Let's leave, let's
go
,” she had insisted. Ordered. Pleaded. The sea air reeked of weed. The guys were throwing half-full bottles of alcohol into the fire to see what would happen. Glass was exploding, comets of crystalline shards popping like fireworks. Marie kept dancing, not so much oblivious as lost. Utterly.

Drowning in misery.

Only, Anya hadn't known that then. She hadn't known what drowning looked like. Numb with anger, she had shifted her weight and watched her cell phone battery run out while Marie ignored her. She hadn't brought her car charger. She couldn't call anyone. Couldn't use her safety word to let her mother know she had an emergency. Marie hadn't even brought her phone. Marie had brought a little straw purse containing twenty dollars and her student ID. Bitch.

I was her ride. And I left her.

They had found Marie's purse on the beach ten hours before her body had washed up. Her eyes had shone like mirrors, and that was how they confirmed death by drowning. Marie's bloodstream had been filled with drugs and her lungs with seawater. How long had it taken? Had she suffered?

Hard to say.

Now, a year later, Anya's conscience pushed her to her knees. Water swirled inches below the rock shelf she perched on and splattered spray and salt on her face. Barnacles bit into her skin; the rock was gritty and wet. There were no tears. There had never been, not in the whole long year. She was as dry as a desert.

The cove was hard to find, though close to busy places: the Cabrillo lighthouse, now a museum, and Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, where they buried people in the military. You had to leave your car in a hiking trail parking lot, walk down the trail, and then push through chest high clumps of white sage and deerweed bushes. The cove's seclusion had been part of the draw. You could do what you wanted and no one would be able to stop you. But Anya hadn't wanted to do any of it, and she couldn't stop Marie from doing it either.

Marie, her best friend for her entire life—preschool, Brownies, soccer, boys—had been out of control. Her parents' ongoing divorce had been hideous. In the middle of it Marie's stupid cheating boyfriend had dumped her. First came the cutting and then the partying, and Anya had
known
the cove was a mistake. But she couldn't deny Marie anything. They had once been so close that now saying yes to anything and everything Marie wanted felt like building a bridge over troubled water, a way to calm her friend down. Maybe even to save her.

Now, a year later, she stared into the water and faced the truth: by then Marie had scared her and hurt her, and their friendship had been all but dead. In the black glassy ocean, she couldn't see her reflection, but she couldn't face herself anyway. No one knew that she had left Marie here, no one in the world. Those guys that night had been so preoccupied with Marie that they had forgotten Anya had been there. Or if they remembered, they didn't know who she was. For months she had held her breath, bracing for trouble, or at least blame. Checking social media for someone to mention that Marie had been stuck there because her best friend had driven off. All night, every morning, at school, she braced for consequences. She began taking stuff to knock herself out, wake herself up. No one noticed that, either.

The realization that she was going to get away with it made it worse. Guilt weighed her down, gnawed on her bones, picked away at her heart. And it never got better. The months and weeks and days stretched into one silent scream. She couldn't live with herself any longer. Couldn't bear this horrible tension of waiting for it to be over. It was never going to be over.

Until she ended it.

“You're such a chickenshit,” Marie had flung at her that night, when Anya had pulled on her hand and told her that they had to leave
now
. “A little goody-goody.”

Anya was stung. “Who talks like that? Are we in a fifties sitcom?”

“Blow me,” Marie sniped.

“You're such a bitch. I'm going to leave you here.”

“Yo, I'll drive you wherever you want,” one of the boys had called, and Marie had smirked at Anya. Then she had wordlessly turned her back on Anya and taken a swig from the bottle of tequila the same boy held out to her.

By then Anya had been so furious that she had driven straight home. Her parents were doing something, she didn't remember what, and they registered that she had beaten her curfew, but that was all. Maybe if they'd asked her how her evening was, shown some
interest
—but no, that wasn't fair. She hadn't asked them how their evening was, either.

After Marie's body was found, Anya still didn't tell anyone that she'd been there, didn't come forward as a witness. She kept her grades up and still played soccer and didn't drink or cut like Marie had. Marie had sent out calls for help. Anya didn't deserve help. To ask, she would have had to say what she needed help for. She was the most functional suicidal person in the world.

She read obsessively about drowning. What it felt like, what you looked like. Often, you didn't realize that you were in trouble. Maybe you'd tumbled out of a boat or you had gotten too far from shore or you were drunk in a pool. You could drown in six inches of water. For a while you tried to keep your head above water. Most people didn't think of flipping onto their back and floating, which could save you.

If you didn't think of floating, you dog-paddled and called for help, and then you bobbed down, came back up. You kept sinking and forcing your way to the surface. Each time you went deeper. You started to get confused. You couldn't remember how to get to the surface. You couldn't make it anyway. Panicking led to big mistakes, like opening your mouth and sucking in water, maybe seaweed, maybe a tiny fish. It was choking to death anyway.

If the water was rough and the beginning struggles were worse, then it all happened quicker, down to the suffocating. That was why Anya had thought about trying to drown herself in the pool at school. To prolong her own agony. But it had to be here, the scene of her crime.

Marie had been so out of it that she might not have ever realized she was drowning. She might never have struggled. But Anya had been drowning for a year. Tonight, she was going to let herself open her mouth. It had been closed for far too long.

I killed her. I knew I shouldn't leave her here. I was so petty.

She couldn't make up for it. She never could do that. But she could end it. She wanted to. She was ready. She had rehearsed this moment so many times that part of her felt as if it had already happened, and right now she was just watching a rerun.

Feeling in the pocket of her sweatshirt, she got out her flashlight and smeared watery yellow over the crashing waves.
The swells raised forward, then trailed back out like someone hurriedly unrolling a carpet. Or like a group of dancers. Everything about the ocean was rhythm, a gigantic heartbeat. She was sick of listening to her heartbeat. She wanted to make sure she did it right. She didn't want to jump in too close to shore, in case she lost her nerve and swam back in. She didn't want to fall against the rocks and break something, because Marie hadn't broken anything. She wanted to die like Marie, only not drugged up, because she needed to make sure she wasn't rescued.

Moonbeams sparkled on the vast black expanse, silver mingling with the gold of her flashlight's circle. She started timing the rushing of the waves.

Then a seal darted in and out of the light, as if chasing it. It made no noise, just wriggled across the blackness, and she pondered the likelihood that she might hurt it when she jumped. Narrowing her eyes, she tried to figure out if it might swim away anytime soon. But it continued to laze back and forth.

And then she realized that what she was looking at was not a seal. It was a human floating facedown in the water, arms out to the side, head invisible. A swimmer? The ocean swept it forward, back, forward, forward forward forward. Then a giant wave rose up and crested over it, churning it under the dark surface.

“No!” Anya shouted, and without another thought she jumped in.

The water was cold; it was a shock. She went under and immediately plummeted; holding her breath, she struggled to peel off her sweatshirt. Her flip-flops were already gone, and as she sank, her bare foot hit something hard. It was a rock. She pushed down on it, propelling herself back toward the glimmering silvery moon.

With a gasp she broke the surface and flailed and wheezed for a few seconds, then pulled herself together. As she scanned for the other person, a rolling wave dragged her away from the cove. The dark, churning water was brushed with patches of moonlight that rippled like neon as she reached for the sand and saw it recede from her grasp.

“Hey!” she shouted, treading water in a circle, spewing out saltwater. “Hey, where are you?”

No answer.

Coughing, she kept treading water, ears cocked, scanning. Facts about surviving in water scrolled through her mind like a science fiction data stream.
I'll stay alive just until I find this person
, she promised herself.

She spied a dark shape about thirty yards to her right, which was even farther away from the cove. Wishing so very much for her flashlight, she stroked through the water toward the black blob. Then something physically grabbed her leg. Yanked. When she opened her mouth in surprise, her assailant hauled her an inch or two below the waterline and dragged her along so fast she was almost hydroplaning. It didn't hurt.
There were no teeth. Or else she was going numb.

She fought, trying to kick, but all her attention was focused on not choking. Her back arched as she tried—and failed—to lift her face out of the water. Whatever had hold of her kept hold. All she could do was keep her mouth closed.

But she was running out of air.

This was the turning point, when people's lungs burned and the impulse to expel the old air and suck in new was nearly irresistible. She went limp, losing focus. Her arms trailed over her head. Classic instinctive drowning response.

Don't open your mouth. Don't do it.

Her lungs were about to explode. Blurring, she tried to figure out what was gripping her, how she could force it to let her go. Gathering every last ounce of her strength and concentration, she crunched her body sideways and snaked her right arm down her body, then shot it out at a forty-five-degree angle from her waist.

She made contact with nothing. Then, as quickly as it had started, the dragging ceased. The sensation of being restrained was gone.

She bobbed to the surface and sucked in oxygen in huge, starving gulps. A hoarse, near soundless scream tore out of her constricted lungs, then another, and although she told herself that her chances were better if she stayed on her back, she popped up to a vertical position, pumping her legs to stay in place, and examined her surroundings.

The cove was a lot farther away. A
lot
.

And then she realized that she had been caught in an undertow. A riptide. It had dragged her out to sea.

Oh my God, my God, I really am going to die.

But the peace she had been seeking did not come with that realization. Because of the figure, she told herself. The one she had jumped in to save. That was why she was freaking out.

But
had
there been a figure? Had she imagined it?

No. She knew it had been there. But by now whoever it was had to be dead, right?

Except that
she
wasn't. One of the ways to prolong your life if you were stuck in water was to do the dead man's float to rest, then flip over onto your back to breathe. Maybe that's what that person had been doing. Was doing right now.

She felt another tug. Tingles of fear prickled like gooseflesh. She was back in the undertow, then. She remembered what to do: swim parallel to the land rather than toward it. That way you didn't fight the riptide, didn't waste valuable energy.