Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

He holds it against her cheek, saying, “I am not useless.”

She closes her eyes with attention. “Too wet. But everything’s wet.”

“How about this?” he says, picking up another.

“It’s redwood.”

“And?”

“You want a fine, tight grain. Lay dents in it with your fingernails. There, see how soft that motherfucker is? Useless.”

“Okay. This is good. Keep talking.”

She nods to a piece she’s picked out. “The spindle is held between the fireboard and the handboard. The top end of the spindle is a sharp point that turns freely against the handboard, like the point of a top. And the bottom end should be a round joint that fits the fireboard’s socket as tightly as possible. That rounded point of the spindle, which pivots forward and back in the fireboard’s socket as you saw the bow, is what makes the coals.”

He picks up the spindle and begins to work at it.

“Slivers,” she tells him. “More like paring fingernails than carpentry.”

Jacob wipes blood from his eyes.

“There. Like that.”

“This is awesome,” he says.

“Shut up and focus.”

She watches him whittle the spindle and auger a hole into the fireboard with the point of the knife. He lays the remains of his T-shirt and her flannel across a driftwood log and, rasping the knife blade across the fabric, brings up trundles of lint for tinder. He prizes splinters from the logs for kindling and props them up to dry. By the time he is done, it is getting late in the afternoon, the light slanting into their little notch of beach, jellyfish and kelp suspended in the clear blue waves and silhouetted against the horizon. The tide has continued to rise. A single wave swishes past the rest and climbs, crackling, up the beach to her feet. Turtle’s guts squeeze, even as she watches it dissolve into the sand.

“The tide?”

“The tide.”

They climb back to the island’s top and huddle together in the scrubby grass. The top of the island is exposed and the wind cuts right through their damp clothes. It is six p.m., she would guess, or thereabouts, and the tide will likely peak just after sunset, around nine or ten. They are both shivering. It is going to be a very high tide. The biggest waves make Turtle very nervous. Jacob says, “Should we try to start the fire now?”

“Not in this wind.”

“I think we need to make a raft.”

“Maybe,” she says.

The sun melts into the horizon, the moon cresting up in the southeast, waxing gibbous, a day or two shy of full, sitting nearly opposite the sun in the sky. It is cold. The wind gutters at sundown, and then it picks up. Jacob falls into a fitful sleep, gasping and shaking, and Turtle clings to him for warmth, breathing the hot wet air he exhales, her hands aching, but she cannot sleep. The wind sucks all the warmth out of her and she lies in silent, bitter endurance of each moment with her hand sometimes cupped over her ear, the ache seeping nauseously down into her very cochlea, into her jawbones. She cannot sleep, but her mind descends to fevered imaginings that do not deliver her from the torment of the cold. Clamped tight and fetally about herself, her back throbbing and the cold seeping through her, she feels stripped of everything, bereft. She crawls through the grass and looks down at the beach. The dark water’s rise has swallowed the sand. The driftwood logs rolling-pin against the cliffs. She can catch the spray where the waves break against the island. She lies cursing to herself. Her back, deeply cut where the waves broke her against the mussel beds, is throbbing and engorged. The feeling is familiar to her, the distinctive swelling of a wound not getting better but worse. The cuts must be dirty, packed with bits of cotton, mussel shells, something. She needs to get out of the cold, out of the wind, into some clean, warm, firelit room. She crawls back to Jacob and, drawing against him, soaks up what warmth she can. Hours pass like this. Finally, when Turtle hears the sound of the waves change from the booming, breaking crash against the bluffs to the swish and grind, she wakes him.

“Jacob.”

“What?” he says.

“We have to get out of the wind.”

“Turtle,” he says, “what if another wave—?”

“I can’t,” she says, her teeth chattering. She leads him, Jacob holding her elbow as they pick their way with numb, bloody feet down to the beach. The tide is still terrifyingly high. The sand is wet.

“Jacob,” she says, “I’m fucking cold .”

“It’s the wind,” he says. “I could stand it if it weren’t for the wind and the spray.”

“We need to make a fire.”

He is silent for a long time. Turtle is on her haunches with her arms wrapped around herself. She can read his face as he tries and discards his own questions.

“Okay,” he says. “Tell me what to do.”

She shows Jacob how to hold the fireboard in place with his toe, how to hold the spindle between the fireboard and the handboard, pressing carefully and steadily with the handboard, how to saw the spindle with the bow so that it turns, forward and back, forward and back. Then she sits up with him, coaching him. “Slower—patient, steady. Don’t speed up and don’t slow down. Just go even strokes, forward and back, forward and back. Like that.” He breathes rhythmically with the drawing of the bow, forward and back, and she warns him, “Steady, steady.”

With a misstroke, he jumps the spindle from the socket.

“Goddamn it,” she says, shivering. “Listen, Jacob: Slowly. Carefully . You have to do this right.”

Coolly, he reassembles the drill and begins to work.

Turtle says, “Don’t think about it. If you think about it, you kill it. Pay attention, but don’t think about it, put your brain in your lunch box and just go to work, there’s a part of you that knows how to do this, and you have to let that part do it.”

She lies in the wet sand, suffering with cold, but sheltered now from the wind. She can feel her heartbeat in her swollen back and in her broken fingers, which are cemented into her armpit with blood and salt. She opens her mouth and her lips come apart with a cracking noise. Her tongue wallows audibly in her mouth. Her eyes are gummy and she blinks with difficulty to clear her vision. Her face is numb. The moon is still in the southeast, hidden by the island. She tells herself, it may hurt, but you’re a long way from dead yet, girl. When you stop shivering, then you’ll know. But you’ve still got it yet. The clouds above her are lit eerie and silver, and she can make out their smoky, wispy texture. Where the waves lap up, she can see the silver on their faces, the beach itself black and lightless in the shadow of the island. Jacob is bent intently over the bow.

“Jacob,” she says.

He says nothing.

“Jacob, I need you to do this.”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t fuck this up.”

The cold and her own uselessness are on her like a panic. If she had the use of her hands, she could do it. God, she thinks, shivering, why do you have to start to lose it now, Turtle?

He wavers again and she hisses, “God fucking damn it. Concentrate. Pay attention, you spoiled useless spineless—”

She watches with wretched urgency.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she says. Her voice is hoarse, bitter. “Jacob, you have to carry some weight here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh,” she says, “you’re sorry? Fuck, Jacob. Fuck.”

She could die. She could die here on this island, broken, dehydrated, sapped by the wind, and, finally, awfully finished by the cold and the wet. She could die because of his incompetence. She needs him to understand that, and at the same time, she does not want to scare him and so, seething, she watches him, her throat throttled with rage. “You pathetic piece of shit,” she says, wracked by shivering. The words are disgorging from some deep pit inside of her.