Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

She dives. The cobbled bottom is right there—they are in ten, fifteen feet of water. She can see Jacob against the surface. He is drifting, limp, blood falling from him in streamers. She grabs him by the hair and hauls him up.

“Breathe!” she yells. “Breathe!” He takes a breath and immediately pukes. She holds on to him. Buckhorn Island is close beside them. They are being dragged toward it. A tremendous amount of water has washed up into the cove and all of it is now pouring back out to sea, funneling past the island, through the narrow, rocky channels that usually protect the cove. She and Jacob have to reach the beach. If they are pulled out with the tide, they will find themselves in the unsheltered sculpture garden of twisted black rocks that litter the coast here.

Above them, on that well-groomed hook with its redwood mansion, the gardener is still going back and forth with the lawn mower.

“Jacob, can you swim?”

He nods. She dives and he follows. Together they kick hard across the blue-cobbled bottom, great whips of seaweed winging past. They make no headway against the current. She breaks the surface, choking. Then a backwashing wave crashes over them, and Jacob is sucked, screaming, into the island’s gorging stone tunnel. She delves under the surface and follows him into the cave beneath the island. They breach together. The chop throws water over their faces. Turtle gasps. She sucks air. They lull up and down, the lapping water and their breathing echoing, and Turtle looks up. They are in the tide-hollowed chamber inside the island.

She can see the bright demi-circles of the entrances to either side, blocked by intermittent swells. One side looks toward the beach. The other fronts open ocean. Water eddies off the walls and drips, echoing, from the vaulted ceiling. It is waist-deep, the color of old glass. The mouth of the blowhole is open above them and garlands of nasturtiums hang through it, the flowers a burnt red. The floor is carpeted with brown feathers of kelp, and huge orange starfish cling everywhere to the rock. The kelp fronds plume forward and back with the opposing currents.

“Shit,” Jacob says, and she turns. A wall of water is sweeping in through the cave’s mouth.

“No,” she says. She turns and looks behind them. A second wall of water is rising in through the opposite entrance, and the two walls are converging. One is the wave coming in off the ocean and the other is the backwash draining from the beach. “No, no, no,” she says. Her thoughts are green and yellow with terror. She thinks, we are going to die, her diaphragm hitching with sobs. He grabs her by the waist. She puts her chin on his shoulder. She thinks, we are going to die, we are going to die right now. The water swells around them, lifts to their chests, and then the wave hits her and she goes slip-sliding through the kelp and is miraculously swung up into the air among lofted chandeliers of water and great, hanging tresses of blooming nasturtium. Her brain and her guts hurt with terror. She puts her hand out to brace against the impact and she is clapped against the wall. Her fingers break, her arms fold, and she is keelhauled across thirty feet of rock, rolling side over side, covering her face with her forearms and going hard into the stone with the rupturing bursts of shattering mussel shells. Something is talking to her, someone right behind her is whispering into her ear, you are not going to die, hold on, you are not going to die, and Turtle herself thinks, you bitch, you slit, you just hold on, do not let go, never let go.

Then they are out of the cave. Turtle is swimming hard. The water tosses above her head and the chop breaks around her. The beach, the cove, and Buckhorn Island are behind her. Around them, the sea is worked into green mounds that funnel and break on crooked black rocks. Kelp fronds rise out of the indecipherable green, broader than her hands, painted in lustrous brushstrokes dark and golden brown. She and Jacob have been drawn into the maze of small islands and black rock that lie just off the coast. She fights hand over hand through the water. There is no pain, no sense of effort. She catches a glimpse of sand, shingle, blue walls of rock. It is an island, some nameless piece of rock a hundred yards from the bluffs with a small, sandy notch cut into the western face. She fights through the surf and a swell drags her up onto the rough blue stones of the sea stack’s small beach. She pitches forward and claws out of the draining water, then turns and wades back in to help Jacob up.

Together they slosh up the beach to the stone foot of the island and clamber desperately away from the water, a climb of twenty or twenty-five feet, the damp blue rock shearing away beneath them, the cracks grouted with swarms of quivering roaches. She mounts into a swash of spongy, tightly grown weeds and lies puking. The top of the island is thirty feet of scrubby grass filled with the small, bleached bones of birds. She crawls on her elbows to the edge and looks out. The island is of a height with the bluffs. Between here and there, three hundred feet of black rocks awash in the surf and the shadow of rock sprawled beneath the blue-green water. Between the sets, it looks almost as if they could swim to shore, but when the waves break into those channels, it is something else. She lies in the grass thinking, we’re fucked. Then she thinks, we’re not fucked. If anybody knows how to handle this, it’s you. Where are your guts?

Jacob is lying beside her, facedown, hands clenched together beneath his chest, shivering and vomiting. He has a concussion, she is sure of it. She has had a few herself and knows the feeling. He is bleeding copiously into his hair. There is blood on his face and in the grass all around him. It’s the outsized bleeding she associates with scalp wounds. He is going to be fine. She cannot say the same for herself.

“Can we swim there?”

She looks at him. She does not know if she can even stand.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

There is a single cloud high above, attenuated into white threads. She peels her hands from bloody folds of her shirt and looks at them. Her nails are cracked away from their pulpy beds. Her right hand is cut deeply across the palm. She’s broken the smallest three fingers of her left hand. All but the index. She puts her hands in her armpits and lies with them held securely against her. It hurts to breathe.

“What do we do, Turtle?”

Sand is stuck to half his face, his teeth rimmed with blood. He has vomited all over himself.

“Turtle?”

“Yeah?”

“Are we okay?”

Her mouth is full of sand. She says, “We’ve got to traction my fucking motherfucking goddamn fingers.”

He begins vomiting again. She lies in the grass and watches the single cloud turn and shift. At last he says, “That sounds like something better left to a doctor.”

She doesn’t say anything to this.

The wind blows across the island’s top. He’s trying out his objections in his mind. She can see him doing it. He shivers in tight bursts.

“Okay,” he says at last.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“We need sticks to splint them,” she says. “Wide cotton ties, an inch wide, eight to twelve inches long.”

Jacob staggers to his feet. Turtle lies holding very still and grimacing. Jacob paces around the island. He is unsteady on his feet. At last, he says, “Not a lot of sticks here.” She can hear him trying several of the small bones scattered in the grass, but they are bleached and fragile. At last he says, “How about a pen? I’ve got one in my pocket.”

“Still?”

“Well, I started with three.”

“Get my knife.”

He comes over to her. She lies very still. He unsnaps the clasp and drags the knife from the wet sheath. He cuts the pen in two. He says, “That was my lucky pen. I wrote a very good essay on Angela Carter with that pen.”