Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

Sometime that night, in the dark, she hears the beginning of the low tide by the swish and grind of the freshly revealed cobbles. Jacob sleeps his exhausted sleep. She is cross-legged, waiting out the moon. It will arc across the sky and begin to set in the west before they can go. Exhaustion rises and falls through her mind like a tide itself and she thinks, you are still and you watch and you wait. She thinks, wait. You wait, you bitch, and you watch and you do not miss the moment. She thinks, you have this at least: you have yourself and you can do with that what you will, Turtle. The smoky red moon wheels through the night, and when it lights the island slantwise from the southwest, casting a long silver path across the water, she rises and walks to the landward edge. Stone spurs stand up from the ocean floor in long, diagonal slashes, wet and glossed with moonlight. The island sits like a castle on the end of its causeway, the landward side too steep to climb, the western face slanting down to the small cove, which fronts deep water. She wakes Jacob gently, touching his face and saying his name.

They descend to the beach. The island is footed in a vast black tide pool. The sand ramps down into that cold, unmoving water. Jacob is afraid. From within its depth, faint glimmers. Across its surface, the dappled reflections of the starry vault. They wade out into the water holding hands, shivering with cold, and then release each other and plunge forward and swim, both of them wounded, floundering. Jacob clambers gasping onto the next stand of rocks. Turtle begins to climb out after him, stops, stands arrested. A ridge of black flesh breaks the surface, and she reaches out and puts her good hand on a scaled flank. It turns, drops beneath the surface, and Turtle cannot guess the size of the thing. She waits, and the flank lays out of the water again, and she puts her hands on it and feels an enormous strength there, a firm muscled body beneath the scales. Jacob stands on the rock behind her, looking on, and Turtle takes a step back down into the water. The darkness and the moonlight move in slippery patterns across its surface.

“Turtle,” Jacob says warningly.

She looks into the dark water. She takes a second step down off the rock and something brushes against her leg, something circles, and she feels the passage of its flank—six feet, maybe more.

“What are you doing?” he says.

She looks up at him as if breaking from a spell, and climbs back out. The rocks themselves are slippery and hard to climb, so Turtle and Jacob keep to the sandy passageways among the outcroppings, hip-deep in water. Crabs move atop the rocks on either side, the creatures silhouetted against the blue-black sky, turning themselves cautiously sideways, lifting their claws into the air, their legs clicking on the stone. The water grows shallower and rockier. Holding hands, Turtle and Jacob move haltingly, they feel their way, they are careful of urchins.

Even so, it takes less than twenty minutes to find their way up onto a small, private beach beneath Turtle’s neighbors’ house. There is a redwood staircase that climbs onto a wide lawn with Monterey cypresses and a large mermaid fountain lit by underwater lights. Near them, the neighbors’ redwood mansion, with its wall-to-wall picture windows, an empty room, empty couches, a table, light slanting from the kitchen.

They follow a gravel driveway out onto the highway and a single car slows as it passes them, the headlights cutting across rattlesnake grass and wild oats, lighting them brilliantly, then going past. They walk along the road, listening to the quiet ocean. They limp up her driveway, sticking to its grassy median, and in through the door, Jacob leaving bloody heel prints on the boards. They sleep on the floor of her room, on wool blankets and under her sleeping bag, holding each other, exhausted, waking, each as the other rises to drink more water, glugging it down their dry throats and sighing and then standing, listening to the creaking of the old house.

Jacob wakes them early. “Come on, come on, come on,” he says, rousting her up off the floor where she lies facedown, protesting into the blankets. “Come on,” he says. “We gotta get you clean and fed and I got to get home. Come on, come on. You’re excited, I can tell. My parents’ll be home from the airport soon, and seriously, I best be there.” He gets her up. He has made oatmeal pancakes. They are on a platter on the counter. “The power’s out,” he says, “but I guess you know that. I checked the eggs in a glass of water. They seemed to be okay, if not ideal. You haven’t been to buy groceries in a while, have you? Though you’re not exactly strapped for nonperishables.” She sits on a towel on the bathroom floor with her left hand lying out in front of her, curled and broken like a crab left at the tide line. Jacob has found the first aid supplies under the sink and has boiled a basin of water and has laid out the wound sponges, irrigation syringes, splints, and gauze. He reads the directions on each sponge and ointment, Turtle watching with deadpan incredulity. “Okay, okay,” he says, rubbing his hands together, psyching himself up. He puts on latex examination gloves and begins to cut away the sand-crusted flannel-shirt bandages. Her pinkie finger comes into view. He says, “Whoa. Oh—okay. So. Wow .”

“I’m fine,” she says around the thermometer.

He pulls out the thermometer and frowns at it. “Ninety-nine two. You have a fever.”

“I run hot,” she says. Jacob has put peanut butter on some of the pancakes. She takes one off the platter, folds it in two, and takes a bite.

“Ninety-nine two is not normal.”

“Hmm,” she says, taking another bite. “For me it is.”

“We need to go to the hospital, Turtle.”

“These pancakes aren’t bad,” she says.

Jacob fills the syringe from a copper pot of hot soapy water and begins irrigating the wound. The water drains pink into the basin.

“So—what do you have against hospitals?”

“My daddy doesn’t like them.”

“Where is he?”

She selects another pancake with her free hand.

“Marlow hasn’t found him yet, then,” he says. “And you’re afraid that if Child Protective Services gets wind of that, they’ll take you away.”

She has nothing to say. There’s a little too much peanut butter on her pancake and it’s giving her trouble. She chews mightily.

“Maybe they should take you away.”

“You don’t think that,” she says after a heroic swallow.

“No,” he says. “I think that the system is probably completely fucked and Kafkaesque. I think you don’t want to be part of it. But I do think you need a doctor.”

“No doctors,” she says.

“If I don’t trust you to make your own decisions, I don’t know who I would trust. But please—Turtle. Let’s go to the hospital.”

“No.”

“I’m begging you.”

She is silent.

“ Begging .”

There is nothing to say.

“The sum total of all your trust in me; does that prevail on you at all?”

She says nothing.

“Do you know Bethany?” he says. “Her parents are into meth. So Will, the philosophy teacher at the high school, took her in and she lived with them for a little while and now she lives up Little Lake Road with a friend from school. This is Mendo. Everybody hates the system. Half of us are growers and the other half are aging hippies, right? And then some are like my parents, Silicon Valley transplants who believe in social services, but who deplore their present underfunded, stagnantly bureaucratic iteration and want them to be run by Google and financed by Scandinavians. What I’m saying is: Nobody’s gonna turn you in. Nobody wants you to go into a state- or federally run institution. People will take care of you. Caroline would, in an instant. My parents would. So what I’m saying is that, if we call Will, that’s the teacher I’m talking about—or hell, any teacher, if you have someone you trust—and they take you into the hospital and tell the doctor you’re their student, nobody’s gonna call CPS. You’ll be in and out of the hospital just fine.”