AllFreeNovel
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I become aware of warmth. Of heat. Of attention.
Daphne’s been watching me, her eyes curious and affectionate. “Do you like it out here?”
The beauty is what I like. Being outside my house, less so. Surfing, like walking fifteen blocks, has always been a way to build up tolerance. To punish myself with the staring sky. To force myself to live with it.
“I like that you’re here, little painter.”
She rises on tiptoe and kisses me.
I kiss her back.
Out here in the cold, she’s warm. Precious. Priceless. I meant every goddamn word I said in front of my brothers. It’s perhaps more astonishing that I could say it at all. It was magnificent.
Daphne pulls away with a little sigh. “You should get going.”
“I’ll be back soon.”
“I’ll be here.”
No goodbyes.
I like that.
I push out into the water.
Fuck, it’s cold. Far more frigid than the day I went after her. I didn’t think about it then. It hardly registered in comparison to the raw terror that she had already gone under. That will probably come back to me every time I swim out for as long as I live. There’s no separating the memory from the waves.
I stop paddling to look back at her.
Daphne has her sketchbook open, a pencil in her hand, and her head bowed over her work.
She’s safe.
At the moment I found her in the water, she wasn’t. Her face was tipped toward the sky and her arms were outstretched, her hands splayed on the surface of the water. That pose, more than anything, is what haunts my dreams.
Daphne is not, in fact, the first person I’ve pulled from the waves in front of my house. Two others, since I’ve lived here. A ten-year-old boy who’d wandered away from his family’s beach day and a teenage girl who had been drinking with her friends. I came across the boy at mid-afternoon on the last wave of the day. The girl I found at dawn, deep into August, still drunk. Both of them were in that same Jesus-on-the-cross pose in the water, glassy eyes skyward. That’s what it actually looks like when a person is drowning. They can’t scream, or speak, or wave their hands. It’s a quiet death.
My little painter might not know how close she was. A person at that stage has less than a minute.
I use the time out in the water to hang these memories in an appropriate place. Smooth them out so they’re not so jagged. When they are still, I can focus on last night. On how good it feels to be with her in the fresh day.
I turn back toward the shore and let a couple of lesser waves pass me by. Daphne is watching me now. It’s hard to see her expression from this distance, but I know it well enough. She’s not angry. Not hateful. She’s looking at the scene before her. I’m part of it now. I’m part of her reference.
Part of her life.
Heat in my chest overpowers the cold.
I make myself go under. The cold bites into my fingertips. My toes. The wetsuit is top-of-the-line. It’s designed to keep people warm in subzero temperatures, but it doesn’t completely insulate me from the worst of the cold. That’s good. It’s more like a punishment this way. One I still deserve for doing this to her. For loving it so much. For feeling peace in this moment.
Joy, even. There is no distant pain in my heart. It’s a wide, expansive crush of emotion. There is an element of pain, of course, but it’s just because she’s beautiful.
When I resurface, Daphne has taken a seat on the shore. She’ll be glad for the snow pants now.
I didn’t know I was looking for her, all those years.
Now that she’s here, I can’t imagine anyone else.
I climb back onto the board and surf the way I always surf. Pushing myself. I wouldn’t say I have a particular obsession with surfing. It’s just something I do. We grew up near the water, so Sin and Will know how to surf, too.
