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I pay extra for the other driver to pick me up and take me to the same place he took Victor. “Where did you go?” I ask as soon as I get in, hanging between the front seats to try and understand his broken English.
“To the beach near Posillipo.” The words slap me across the face. “I ask him why the beach at night,” the driver complains, taking a sharp turn, “but he no answer.”
“Please go as fast as you can.”
When he bumps 8 km up on the speedometer, I put my hand on his shoulder. “Sir, I will pay your fucking speeding ticket, hell, you can tell them I forced you at gunpoint and I’ll go to jail for you, just please hurry up.”
He glances at me with a chuckle, half-bemused and half-concerned, and floors it. When we pull up on the road above the beach, I see the headlights of a car down on the sand and I feel like I might vomit again, if there was anything left in me.
I throw everything in my wallet at the taxi driver and sprint down the beach path in the dark, tripping on rocks and sliding on loose sand.
When I get there, it’s just Katrina and Rachel, high in the back of the car, and endless miles of empty sand and water.
“Fuck!” I run into the surf, as deep as I dared go with Victor’s hand in mine, and try to see him. If he could hear my voice maybe he’d come back.
“They left two hours ago,” Katrina calls out.
Shivering in my wet clothes, I come into the bright circle of the lantern sitting on the bumper between their knees. “If he gets tired before they go halfway, he can still turn around, right?”
Kat lights a cigarette that the breeze keeps trying to put out, and offers it to me. I shake my head. “Honey, I saw the look in his eyes. He’s not coming back.” I don’t know if she means back to this beach or back alive, and I’m starting to think there’s no difference.
“God.” I sit heavily in the sand, the grains cutting into my skin. “This can’t be happening.”
Rachel yawns, and I look up at them accusingly, impotent anger searing through me. “Did you twoknowabout what happened to him? All those years?”
She blinks. “Know what?”
Kat looks between us uneasily, smoke trailing from her nose. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but…I always felt like he and Alek hid stuff from us. And I don’t think it was good.” She narrows her eyes at me. “Does this have to do with all that weird news this afternoon?”
I can’t tell them, not now, not his last secret. So I shake my head. “Forget it.”
I want to fight back like I always have, to force the universe to give me a way of fixing this. But it's Chelan all over again, the day where I learned that in the end it doesn't matter how hard you try or or how deeply you desire, the day I've been running from ever since. And just like that day, the inexorable, black water has no answers for me. I stumble back to the edge of the sea and sit down, staring at the trail the moon leaves across the waves.
He’s sitting in the dandelions, among the ruins, wearing my sunglasses. He tips them down, catches my eyes with his. The hint of a dare in the tilt of his lips. “Say it,” he breathes.
Sometimes I wake up and I’m made of want.
It’s all caught up in my chest and I can’t get it out. But this time I know what it’s for.
And it hurts. God, it hurts.
A hand on my shoulder makes me jump. Rachel crouches next to me, leaning into my shoulder, and offers her palm, a couple of white pills. “This really sucks for you,” she says. I think she’s trying to be nice. “These help.”
When I hold out my hand, she gives them to me and offers me a bottle of water. I roll them around under my thumb, scared to lose control.
When there was no hope and no salvation and nothing else he could do, this is how he dulled the pain.
I wonder what he saw when he was high. I wonder if he found answers.
I wonder if he ever saw me.
If I’ve lost him here, maybe I can see him again in a world where you don’t have to be dreaming to be happy.
Before I can stop myself, I slide the pills under my tongue and drink the water, feeling them come apart in my throat. I lie on my back in the sand and look up at the stars. The ones he promised me weren’t lonely.
By the time I remember my mom, that I need to go back to her, that I’m all she has, something’s wrong and I can’t move any more, even when I hear the girls calling my name urgently, arguing. I’m drowning, deep, and maybe now I’ll discover the things he says to the water, and what it says back to him.
