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Chapter Two
Emerson
Iclimb out of the ocean and into a fucking painting.
The world does not look real. I don’t even feel its unreality as a particular stress. Only a pulling sensation in my head. I’m well aware that the washed-out beach a mile away from my house is not actually oil paint on canvas. I’ve just lost the ability to see the structure underneath, even when I concentrate.
I abandon my board to the waves, which are choppy constructions of navy and steel with white-foam peaks. Gray-tinged light melts into the waves. The board is all angles, floating up onto the crest and disappearing from sight. There. Gone. There. Gone. I’ll never get it back. My hands are numb on the straps of the backpack. I can hardly feel the zipper. I can hardly feel anything.
This is a last-ditch survival attempt. The eye of the storm. I don’t feel anything, because the approaching panic will become an onslaught. For the moment, my mind has placed its bet on denial.
There is no one at my house. I can return any time. Daphne has not been taken.
I put on the coat stowed in the waterproof pack, and the shoes. At the edge of the snow-dusted sand, a path leads between two fenced-in properties to an access road. When my feet meet asphalt I pull up the hood of the jacket against a slicing wind and call an Uber. It arrives ten minutes later. My feet are numb. Hands, too.
“Went for a swim?” The driver frowns, judging.
“Every day.”
He doesn’t ask any more questions.
The address I give him is fifteen blocks from Will’s apartment.
One step out of the car, and I know I’ve overestimated the strength of denial. Concrete looms above me, bowing out the shape of the street like a funhouse mirror. The dome of the sky flickers between black and gray. It’s a featureless wash of brush strokes one moment and filled with pinprick stars the next. That has to be some kind of hallucination. There’s too much light pollution to see the stars.
My mind readjusts to that tidbit of knowledge. Orange leaks across the bottoms of the clouds, reflecting a burning city far below. I have a moment of complete disorientation. The sidewalk falls, dropping like an elevator with a severed cable, and I’m looking up through miles and miles of empty air.
I take a step on instinct.
Fifteen blocks minus a single step.
My shoes are weighted down with ocean water. My knees ache with the effort of fighting against gravity. Windows stare sightlessly at me as I go by. My reflection is a smear of dark paint on the glass.
Fourteen blocks.
Pinched lungs. The fact is, I can’t go back home. I have any number of ways to physically transport myself, but the house is a crime scene. It will take them hours to process the large space. Longer, if the Morellis want an investigation that will include every fucking object inside.
Headlights spill beams onto the rough texture of the road. I concentrate on the play of the light and shadows and ignore the aggressive acceleration of cars and trucks with enough weight to kill me.
It’s only a few steps to the centerline. At this hour, when impatience peaks in the city, it would be a matter of a few steps. A moment of stillness. Then impact.
Another image, this one frozen in a frame but rendered in vivid color, is of Daphne. Her horrified shock at learning I’d been killed in a traffic accident.
The order of operations has been jumbled. Usually the panic comes first, then the powerful urge to end it permanently. Perhaps panic has already arrived, soaking my brain in adrenaline. It’s probably some protective mechanism that I can’t feel it.
Ten blocks.
The difficulty, of course, is that I’m torn. Will’s apartment will mean relative safety but every muscle in my body resists walking in this direction. It resists being away from Daphne. Leaving her felt like removing my ribs one by one and taking out my heart. She stood watching from the studio.
I want her as much as I want my house.
Need her that much, too.
More.
The world shudders loose from the painting and shoves into my senses. It’s a riot of live, three-dimensional feeling and it hurts like a motherfucker.
It’s like the ocean.
