The Drowning (25 page)

“He was here. And now he isn’t.” Suddenly I get it. “You’re drying off.”

“What?” she says.

“You see him when you’re wet. Like I did, but I don’t see him at all now. I can’t see him. He disappeared earlier. He’s come to you instead. That’s why I rang you. I figured it out …”

She’s still holding the lamp like a weapon. She narrows her eyes.

“What did you see, Carl? Tell me again.”

“Rob. Only Rob like he was when he drowned. He just had his shorts on” — suddenly I’m very aware of how I’m dressed, or not dressed — “nothing else. Very pale, and streaked with —”

“— mud,” she says. “Look at you, Carl. Look at you. You’re just like him. But you’ve got blood … What are you playing at?”

“I can explain.” I sit up a bit, still ready to curl up if she gets nasty again. “I was in the bath when I figured out what
was going on. He wasn’t there, you see. I was completely wet and he wasn’t there. And suddenly I realized he’d be here.”

The lamp hangs by her side now. She looks at me still groveling on the floor, and it feels like she’s come back to me.

“God, Carl, I never really actually believed you. All that time, I thought you were losing it. I’m so sorry. What’s he going to do, Carl? What’s he going to do to me?”

There’s no easy way to say this. I get to my feet. I want to walk over to her. I want to hold her hand or wrap my arms around her, but I don’t want to push it. She was beating me hard a few minutes ago. So I stand where I am, near the doorway, and I tell her.

“He wants to kill you, Neisha. I wouldn’t help him, so he’s going to try to do it himself. But I won’t let him. I won’t, Neisha.”

She sinks onto the bed, perching on the edge, and puts the lamp down next to her.

“He’s going to drown me.”

She looks strangely calm, but her voice is unsteady, giving away how she really feels. And now I do move. I sit next to her and, without thinking, put my arm around her shoulders.

“But he can’t hurt you,” I say. “Not if you stay out of the water. That’s what I was trying to say on the phone.”

I lean my head against hers. She squeals, then hisses, “He’s here! Carl, Carl, he’s here!”

What was I thinking? My skin is wet. My hair is wet. I jump up, away from her.

“Wipe your face!” I bark. “Quickly, wipe it on the bedspread. I’m sorry. I just wanted to be close to you. That was my fault. I’m soaked. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“For God’s sake. Do you want to bring him back again?” She lifts one edge of the bedcover and dries herself, her actions jerky and panicky. Then she scans the room. “One minute I think I can trust you, and the next …”

“I know. I’m sorry. I just forgot. You can trust me, Neisha, I swear. I won’t let him win. I won’t let anyone hurt you ever again. Has he gone?”

She looks at me hard for a moment, assessing me with her big brown eyes. Then she turns and looks around the room.

“Yes,” she says. “He’s gone. I’ll get a towel from the bathroom. You shut the window. Shut him out.”

I cross to the window. Outside, the water is higher now. It can’t keep on rising forever, though, can it? It’ll have to stop sometime.

I heave on the window and pull it down. It slides shut and I press on the frame and twist the lock around to make sure nothing can come in. Rain spatters against the glass, but it can’t hurt us now.

Neisha’s back, carrying a couple of towels and some clothes. She stands in the doorway and I feel self-conscious — her fully clothed and me with hardly a stitch on. My arms and legs are skinny, a boy’s arms and legs, not a man’s. But I don’t feel like a boy when I look at her.

I catch her looking me up and down. Up to my face and down to my —

“Here,” she says, and throws the bundle of towels and clothes toward me. I catch them in both arms and dump them on her bed.

“Thanks,” I say. I’m blushing and it’s a relief to bury my face in a towel for a moment, try and get myself back together.

“They’re my dad’s clothes, but, you know, better than nothing …”

I dive into a yellow polo shirt, put a thick fleece on top. My shorts are still dripping.

“You can finish changing in the bathroom,” she says. “I found you some jeans. I wasn’t sure about underwear …”

I swipe the jeans off the bed.

“That’s cool,” I say. “I really couldn’t wear your dad’s underwear, even if my life depended on it.”

Her face slowly breaks into a smile, then she grins.

“I know. Eww.”

In the bathroom, I quickly peel off my shorts, dry myself, and put the jeans on. They’re way too big, but they’ll do. I’m already feeling warmer. I shuffle out of the bathroom and look over the banister. The water’s about halfway up the stairs now, lapping at the hall wallpaper. I stare for a minute or so, trying to see whether it’s creeping upward, but it’s moving too much for me to be able to judge.

It’s going to be okay. All we have to do is sit it out. It’s a bit like being on a desert island, and I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be here with than Neisha.

I’m about to pad back along the landing when I look up. She’s coming toward me.

“Wondered where you’d got to,” she says. “Oh God, you look … weird … in my dad’s clothes, I mean. Not a good look. At least you’re dry, I s’pose.”

She puts her hands on my waist. I mirror her. We hesitate, awkward for a moment, then she slides her arms around me, drawing me close, and hugs me.

I kiss the side of her face, not much more than a peck, but then she turns and our mouths meet and we kiss silently and tenderly. Below us, the hall table taps gently against the wall.

We draw apart. I hold her face with both my hands.

“Neisha,” I say, “I’m so, so sorry. For everything.”

“It’s all right,” she says. “You don’t need to say it.”

“Yeah, I do. It’s important. I’m sorry for the things I did. I’ve done some terrible, terrible things.”

“It’s okay,” she says. She brings her finger up to my lips. “Shh. I know.”

I open my lips and the end of her finger crooks into my mouth. I kiss it, then take both her hands and hold them between us.

“I want to say it. If I don’t say it, then it’s not real. Now or afterward. I need to say the words and you need to hear them. God, I’m crap at this. I wish I could say what I really feel.”

“You’re not crap. Go on.”

Her face is serious now. She’s listening carefully and there’s something so trusting about her expression, even after everything we’ve been through.

“I can’t make everything right,” I say, “but maybe I can start to make things better. I did something so bad that, by rights,
you should hate me, and I know you did for a while. I’ll do anything to make it up to you. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make you forget, forgive.”

“The rest of your life?” she says. “Are you asking me to marry you? ’Cause that’s way out there …”

There’s a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth and I feel like I’m blowing it, messing up this opportunity big-time. This time, this moment, is slipping away from me. I look up to the ceiling.

“God, I’m not doing this very well. I told you I was crap.”

“No, you’re not. Sorry, I’m listening.” She strokes my face.

“I’m not asking you to marry me, but I do love you, Neisha. That’s all. I love you.”

I want her to say it back, really quickly, like she doesn’t have to think about it at all.

But she doesn’t.

My heart’s sinking inside. I’m ashamed and embarrassed at what I just said. But then she kisses me again, and it’s tender and sweet, full of comfort and warmth. And maybe it doesn’t matter if she won’t say it, can’t say it, yet.

When we stop kissing, I hold her close.

“I’m scared,” she says.

“I think the water’s stopped rising,” I say. “I think we’re going to be okay.”

And then all around us the windows burst and the world turns dark. The water rushes in, sweeping her out of my arms.

N
o time to take a breath. No time to say, “Hold on.”

The water is sudden and brutal, cutting my legs out from under me, flipping me over, throwing me against a wall or a banister or a ceiling, I can’t tell. I can’t fight it — I don’t know how. Which way is up? What do I cling to? The water is everywhere, dragging on my clothes. I twist and turn, helpless. I’m slammed into something else. I try to grip on to it, but my scrabbling fingers can’t find anything to hold.

My mouth’s full of water. I try to spit it out, using the small pockets of air left inside me to push the stuff out, and then I realize how stupid that is. My lungs are empty now and my brain is telling me to breathe in. I fight the urge to open my mouth again, but the instinct is too strong. Moving makes it worse, so I freeze, and as I do so, my body finds its way up, only now up is actually sideways. I break the surface and twist my head to the left, gulping at the air. Everything hurts. I use my first lungful to try and get rid of the water still in my pipes, breathing in hard, breathing out hard, too. Another breath in and I force air out of my nose. How can water hurt so much?

Neisha’s not here.

I drop my legs down, tread water, and try to suss out where I
am. There are maybe ten inches or so between the top of my head and the ceiling. The room I’m in is quite small, and by the look of the light fixture in the middle, I’m in the bathroom.

Don’t think about drains. Don’t think about sewage. Find Neisha. That’s all. Find her.

She’s not in here, not on the surface, anyway.

“I hate having my face in the water …”

The water’s six or seven feet deep in this room, but out in the hallway it will be twice that, more. Oh God, where is she?

She must have been blasted in the same direction as me, surely? I take another breath and drop under the surface, sinking down so that my feet touch the floor, paddling with my hands, turning and looking. A little light comes in from the bathroom window, highlighting the white fixtures — the bathtub, the sink, the toilet — through the dirty water. I keep thinking of a ship, the
Titanic
or something, sunk to the bottom of the sea. But this isn’t a ship, it’s a house, a house like I’ve never seen one before.

She’s not here. I push off from the floor and bob up by the ceiling to get some more air. A big breath and I’m down again, this time swimming under the doorframe onto the landing. I try to get the map of her house straight in my head. The bathroom is next to her room at the front of the house. If she was washed in the same direction as me, then she’ll either be in the bedroom next door or in the hallway.

I surface again, scanning around for any sign of her. There’s a layer of debris floating on the top now. I gasp as I catch sight
of a child, floating facedown a couple of feet away. I swim over and flip it over, crying out as the face turns toward me. The eyes are crisscrosses of thread, the hair is sodden wool. Not a child, a big cloth doll. Repulsed, I drop it and swim away.

I stop to call out.

“Neisha? Neisha?”

And then I realize that my head is almost touching the ceiling. The water’s rising. Time’s running out.

Another breath and I duck under the doorframe into the front bedroom, her room, frogging with my legs to swim lower in the water, looking left and right. I swim to the front wall and my hands find glass. The window is still closed. If I open it, will it let some of this water out … or let more water in? I peer at the window. It’s all one color, gray from the bottom to the top of the glass. There’s a wall of water outside. It’s deeper out there, and it’s still trying to push its way in.

I turn around and head back again. The pressure is building in my lungs, so I make for the surface, but as my head erupts from the water it brushes something hard. There are only a few inches between the surface of the water and the ceiling now, and that will be gone soon. Shit!

If she isn’t here, then she must be somewhere in the hallway. Unless the water funneled around. Could it have hit the front of the house and washed backward?

I don’t know what to do. Should I search the other bedrooms? Or dive down? If she’s been taken to one of the rooms downstairs, she’s got no chance.
Taken
… taken by the water.
Taken by Rob. I can’t see him, but I know that he’s here. He’s here with her and she must be terrified.

I’ve hardly got any time at all to find her and get her out. No more dithering, I’ll just have to try somewhere. Anywhere.
Think, Carl, think.
If Rob’s here, in the water, he’ll have taken her to the worst place, the deepest, the most difficult to get out of.

I suck in another lungful of air, trying not to wonder if it will be my last. I jackknife forward and dive down. There are strange currents at work. As I scoop the water below me, I’m drawn away from the front of the house toward the back. It’s taking all my strength to move downward, and I find myself moving with the flow. I’m in the downstairs hallway now and things close in as I’m carried away from the stairwell and under the hall ceiling. It feels like an underwater tunnel. It feels like I’ll never get out again.

I’m trying to hold the air in, but it’s got a life of its own. The surface is a long way up, and it wants to get there. I let a little out of my nose. The bubbles trail past my face on their way up. I must hold the rest in, but it’s pushing at my throat, trying to force its way out.