DANIEL LOOKED UP at the sky. He felt that he could see the sun arcing across it, and he really wanted it to slow down. He heard the slap of the water against the float. He felt a silky strand of her hair tickling his armpit. He felt as though he’d smoked a whole lot of pot. He knew he had no right to be happy with a gun trained on the two of them. He knew he should feel anger and outrage, but he couldn’t quite help it. Fear almost always trumped joy, but not today.
“I should be coming up with a plan,” he said, twisting a strand of her hair between his fingertips, “but all I can think about is how you look under that dress.” He rolled onto his elbow. “I can’t take it.”
“Maybe we should do the deed right here and now,” she said. “That would show him.”
“That would probably get him mad enough to shoot us both dead.”
“But we’d come back together, wouldn’t we?”
He sat up and looked at her seriously. “If you love me even a tiny fraction of how much I love you, then yes. I am almost certain we would.”
“Then we would,” she said simply. “Because I do.” She thought of a darker possibility. “Maybe us together is exactly what he doesn’t want.”
“I suspect he doesn’t.”
“Maybe we won’t give him a choice,” she said. She sat herself between his legs and pressed her back against his chest. “There’s no way he’s getting you without me. He’s not that good a shot.”
“I don’t know how I feel about that,” he said.
She shook her head. “You’re not going anywhere without me.” She might have sounded like she was kidding, but she wasn’t. “Wherever we are going, we are going together.”
He frowned at her.
“Seriously, Daniel.”
He held both her hands and rested his chin on her good shoulder.
“So besides both of us getting shot, what are our other options?”
“We could swim in to shore and take our chances.”
“And what chances would those be?”
He pressed his lips together. “I don’t know. Probably end up at Joaquim’s mercy. That would be his option of choice.”
“And what happens then? He takes me hostage? He hurts me in some way, and you have to watch? He forces you into some humiliation and then he ends up killing you anyway? That’s the kind of showdown he’s looking for, isn’t it?”
“I’m almost sure it is.”
“He doesn’t care about committing murder, does he? He can just skip to another body if he ever gets caught.”
Daniel nodded.
“That is the worst of all worlds. Are those the kind of chances we are looking at?”
Daniel closed his eyes for a moment. He didn’t want to enumerate what would happen, but he couldn’t stop her from doing it.
“Is there anywhere we can swim to? Can we try to swim around the headlands and make our way in?”
“He’d get there faster.”
“Do you think anybody ever comes here?”
“It’s not impossible, but I think this is a pretty remote spot.”
She thought about that. “Daniel?”
“Yes.”
“If by some miracle we can’t think of, we do get out of this, what then? Is there anywhere we can go or anything we can do where he won’t find us?”
“Probably not for long.”
She looked discouraged, and who could blame her? “Daniel?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever think we were meant not to be together?”
Her face was serious, but he couldn’t help smiling. “No. We are meant to be together. We are just meant to want it very badly.”
She smiled at his smile in spite of herself. “I’m running out of ideas. Are you holding something back? Do you have an idea here?”
He lay his head back and looked up at the sky. “I have the idea of being with you a little longer.”
“ARE YOU SCARED of dying?” she asked him.
The sun was rapidly making its way to the top of the sky. He lay on his back and she was curled up against his side with her head on his chest. He felt remarkably relaxed.
“No. I’ve died many times. I’ve only made love to you once, though, so that’s the miracle I’m focusing on. Joaquim can’t take that from us one way or another.”
“Do you think we’re going to die?”
He breathed in and out, in and out. He’d never felt the warmth of the sun so purely. “Lucy, I don’t want to have to think about it. I just want to think about you. But if I have to, I guess I think it is likely that either we are going to suffer or we are going to die. I’d rather die, and honestly, I think I can die happy now.”
“You can?”
“Yes.”
She lay back beside him. “Did you call me Lucy before?”
He turned his head to look at her and shielded his eyes from the sun so he could see her well. “It’s funny, I look at you now, and you are all I can see.”
She shook her head. “We’re on a float in the middle of the water. I’m all there is.”
He laughed and pulled her on top of him and hugged her. He kissed her neck and then her lips. “Lucy,” he said. “Lucy.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think that is a perfectly good name.” He kissed her chin. “Lucy. That’s you.”
BY THE TIME the sun was stretched overhead, Lucy’s skin was turning pink and she was getting thirsty. She could tell he was, too, but neither of them wanted to say anything about it.
“I’m seeing a problem with the waiting,” she said.
“Tell me.” He pulled her onto his lap.
“I’m going to get burnt to a crisp, and we’re both going to get very thirsty, and it’s not going to feel good. I’m going to try to be brave, and you’re going to start worrying about me, and then you are going to do something you’ll regret.”
“You are right.” He kissed the side of her face. “So maybe we should undress each other and enjoy what we have left.”
“I don’t want him to kill us.”
“I don’t, either.”
“And we can’t just wait forever.”
He nodded. He didn’t want to mention that he didn’t think Joaquim would let this stalemate go past sunset. He’d never been a patient man.
She was quiet for a while. He wrapped a hand around each of her feet. “Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Anything.”
“What kind of a death is drowning?”
He looked at her in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, how is it? Does it hurt? Does it take a long time? Is it worse than, say, getting shot to death?”
“Well.” He thought it over. “I’ve done it twice. That was a long time ago. I’ve gotten shot twice. That was more recently. I would say drowning is, overall, better.”
She rubbed her hands together. She licked her dry, chapped lips. “Then that’s the worst that can happen, right? And I grant you it’s pretty bad, but it’s better than giving him the pleasure of taking our lives. What do you say? We’ll just jump off this thing and start swimming.” She gestured out to the open sea. “Either we’ll make it to China or we won’t.”
He squinted toward China.
“So what do you say?”
“I say there’s weather coming in.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a storm out there, and it looks like it’s coming this way. I don’t know if that’s good for us or bad.”
“How could it be good?”
He thought about that. “Less sunburn. Less thirst if we could catch some of it.”
A shot rang out, and it startled them both. “I think he’s getting tired of waiting,” Daniel said.
She curled herself tighter around him, and he knew why. “I think we should make our move,” she said. “Come on. I know you don’t want to give him the satisfaction.”
He was in a daze. He wanted to touch her and talk to her and smell her smell and watch her laugh. He d
idn’t want to die. He didn’t want this to end. But he had to shake himself out of it. He didn’t care very much about what happened to him, but he cared about what happened to her.
“Is this really what you want to do?” he asked.
“Yes.” She put her feet over the edge, and he followed her. He noticed she was staying very close to him, touching some part of him all the time.
“Are you willing to choose this? Do you really believe the things I’ve told you so completely that you are willing to swim to China?”
She looked him in the eyes and checked him. “Yes.”
She wasn’t kidding around. He had to contend with that, and it forced him to have to be serious, too. “Stop for a minute, Lucy. Think it through. I’ll let him shoot me, and you go back to him in peace. Maybe that would satisfy the bloodlust for a time. Maybe he wouldn’t hurt you. You could head back to the States and go back to some regular kind of life. That would be the most sensible thing to do.”
“How can you even say that?” She twisted his big toe, hard. “I could never let that happen. Anyway, do you really think he’d leave me alone? Do you really think he’d let me go back to a regular life?”
He wasn’t going to lie. “No. I don’t. But there’s a chance.”
She chewed on her bottom lip. “I like that about as well as I like the rest of our chances. Anyway, I’m not going anywhere without you. We’re swimming to China together. And if the worst happens, I’m dying with you before I’m living without you.”
“You said something like that once when you were Constance, and I talked you out of it.”
She looked at him ominously. “Fool me once, Daniel.” He heard her Virginia twang.
She put out her hand for his. “Ready?”
“I don’t want this to end,” he said.
“It’s the beginning,” she said, with a certainty he envied.
They pointed themselves west. He leaned over and kissed her. “To China,” he said.
She nodded. Her chin quivered, and he could see that she was afraid to open her mouth for fear she might cry.
“I love you,” he said.
She gave him one last look, a teary smile. She held his hand so tight his fingers went numb, and when she jumped he jumped, too.
ANOTHER SHOT RANG out as they plunged in. He wanted to keep holding her hand, but he knew it made it hard for her to swim. He thought about her shoulder. They swam with a sense of purpose, but he knew they wouldn’t last very long.
The sun was still shining down into the water, but he saw a bolt of lightning in the distance and presumed that would be the end if it didn’t come before. He watched her pink legs in the water, the scraggly smock. He was still holding off on the reckoning, but it was starting to come after him cruelly.
A part of his mind was back on Joaquim. The waves were getting bigger and frothier, which would make it difficult to target them from the shore. A few hundred yards farther out and they would be out of his sight and out of range. He was calculating, as Joaquim would be calculating.
Joaquim could try to go after them in a boat, but the weather would make it difficult. No reasonable boat owner would agree to let a craft out in a storm. Maybe Joaquim already had a boat. Maybe he’d steal a boat. But if he left the beach even briefly, he’d be giving up his command of the shore. He must have believed they would come in at some point. He knew they had no other option. The one thing he couldn’t control was their ability to die. He couldn’t chase them where they were going.
They’d made it another quarter-mile or so when he saw that she was out of breath, and he feared she was in pain. He slowed down and bobbed for a minute. It took work not to get buffeted. “We can take it easy,” he told her. “China isn’t going anywhere.”
“He can’t shoot us from here, can he?”
“Not likely. I can’t even see him anymore.”
“It’s just us, then.” She was shivering.
“Just us.” He put his arms around her. “How’s the shoulder?”
“I’d say it’s the least of our problems.”
He nodded. He wished they could skip over this next part, because it wasn’t going to be fun. The water was getting colder, and it would slow all processes down, including death.
“What happens if we don’t get there?” she asked breathlessly. “How do you die?” She didn’t look frightened so much as determined.
“You don’t give yourself to it,” he said. “You let it take you. You just keep going until it takes you.”
“Does it last long?”
He didn’t want to go into the biology of drowning. It would only scare her. “A few minutes. You’re strong and your body will struggle, but I promise you something.”
“What is that?”
“At the worst possible moment, the most painful, darkest moment when you can’t take it anymore and you are afraid, that is when a feeling of peace and comfort will come over you, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever felt.”
She looked hopeful. “Does that happen to everyone?”
“It will happen to you.”
THERE WAS A strange stillness that came over them through the next stretch. They did their swimming underwater, coming up for fewer breaths. He stayed close to her and watched her. He felt almost hypnotized by the slow beauty of her body under the water. He fought with himself about whether to try to support her and give her a rest or not. He didn’t want to drag it out. As terrible as it was, there was something lovely about the way the waves surged around them and yet the sunlight continued to filter through. He thought of his first life in Antioch, as a five-year-old lying in the river through an earthquake. He thought he saw eternity then, and he wondered if he would see it again with her.
She was remarkably strong. Her body was giving her a great burst of energy, and he could see it in her legs and her face. He knew she wasn’t feeling pain anymore.
And then slowly, in time, she began to falter. Her movements slowed. Her strokes were less precise. It was happening to him, too. It didn’t disturb him in himself, but it hurt him to watch her. He didn’t want to watch, but he wasn’t going to spare himself, either. He had dragged her into this.
And then came the moment, unexpected though it had to come, when she stopped laboring. Under the water, in the speckled sunlight, she turned her face back to look at him. It was not a smile but like a smile. It wasn’t a face of fear. It was an expression of faith more than anything. She had faith in him and the things he promised her. She trusted him.
This was what it felt like to be loved. Instead of warding it off as he used to do, he let it sink in. He tried to open up every part of himself to take more of it in.
And then, to his horror, she lifted her arms over her head and began to sink. He watched it as though in slow motion. The sun was streaming down in shafts, fluttering around her. Her hair was a slow golden cloud, and her hands were open.
She was sinking. He saw the back of her head, her open fingers sinking down past the level of his chest. She was pulled down by the hungry darkness of the bottom. She was leaving the sunlight and leaving him, and he was frozen by the sight of her.
You have to let her go.
Why? A voice in his head was bellowing at him, waking up the rest of him.
Because this is how we save ourselves. This is what we chose. This is what we’ve been waiting to do all these centuries.
What were all those centuries? They were days and years and months of memories. They were nothing. They were thoughts in his mind and nothing more. Could he really be sure of any of it? Did he have any real, tangible reason to know he had ever come back from death or ever would? She believed him. But did he believe himself? Was he so confident he was willing to sacrifice her?
Because maybe he was crazy. Maybe it was as simple as that. He belonged in a mental institution with all the other people who shared his views. Why did he think he was any better? Just because he was good at keeping his crazy ideas to himself?
Ho
w could he be sure there were any lives before this one? He couldn’t. How did he know there would be any lives after? He didn’t. What if he’d invented this memory as a way to contend with a life of abandonment and abuse? Damaged people did strange things. How did he really know he wasn’t crazy? He didn’t. It was easily possible that he was living one long delusion and he’d dragged her into it.
It was all just stories, he knew that much. But what if they weren’t true stories? Could he take that risk? Could he really let her go on the strength of that?
Thoughts were nothing. Memories were nothing. They were nothing you could touch. They took no time. You could fit them all on the point of a pin. You could bring your entire world into doubt in a span of a few seconds.
He watched the cloud of her hair sink to the level of his knees. Don’t drag it out. Don’t make her die a longer death. Her larynx was going to seal off, and her heart and her lungs and her brain were soon going to start their involuntary struggle, and him holding her or interfering with her wasn’t going to make it any easier.
This was the girl he loved. This was his strong, beautiful girl.
He’d made love to her in the most exquisite moment of his life and kissed every inch of her body just a few hours before, and now she was dying in front of his eyes.
No. There was one word in his head, and it spread through him quickly. It galvanized every muscle and nerve. No. She wasn’t leaving him. No. He wasn’t letting her go.
No. With the word came a memory. He had watched her die once before. He watched her die because he had killed her. He had burned down her house and watched her die, and he’d thought of it and dreamed of it with pain every day since. No. He was not going to watch her die this time.
We have no choice. We have no options.
No! If you didn’t have a choice, you had to make a choice. If you didn’t have options, you made some. You couldn’t just let the world happen to you. He’d done that too long.
He didn’t see eternity. He saw this girl and this moment and one slim chance. His body broke out of its strange freeze. It knew what it wanted to do. It was pure brain voodoo and bodily torture to hold back from her any longer. He dove down and reached for her. He grabbed her around the middle and pulled her up to the surface. This was his body, and it was a good, strong body. It loved her as he did, because it was him. It wasn’t any more or less.