Via Dolorosa(51)

Up ahead, something broke straight out of the water. It was too far ahead for him to see what it was but, as is the way with dreams, he did not have to recognize it to feel the strong, needling embrace of terror that suddenly encapsulated him. And before he could visibly identify what the object was from sight, he suddenly and simply knew what it was and did not need to see it (as is also the way with dreams): an arm. A single flailing arm coming straight out of the water.

This sudden knowledge propelled him to run the length of the sandy strip until he was adjacent to the arm coming out of the water. He paused. The arm was several yards out. Looking down, he could not tell how deep the water was, not even just past the strip of sand on which he stood. Surely the water had to be deep for this person to drown…

He rushed into the sea and at first it was like he was running on top of the water. Then, an instant later, the ground pulled away beneath him and he came crashing down through the surface of the sea. Eyes open, the world around him was pitch black and silent. The water froze him straight to his core, freezing his gut, his heart, his lungs. There was no air; he could not breathe. Still, he pushed himself onward, and proceeded to swim in what he thought was the direction of that single flailing arm.

Something grabbed his ankle.

He felt his bowels loosen and his heart seize in his chest. Looking behind him, he could make out nothing, as the water was too dark. It was like swimming in ink. He could not even see the flank of his own white ribs, so close to his eyes. Nothing—nothing.

Some miracle sent him bursting through the surface of the water. Gasping for air, he could feel his lungs burning. When he managed to look quickly around, he could see, with a sudden clap of horror, that the narrow passage of sand was at least fifty yards away, impossibly out of reach. Had current dragged him this far out so quickly? Had the hand around his ankle—

His ankle—!

He screamed, and it was like screaming inside a closet. The sound reverberated back to him. He could still feel the icy grip around his ankle—most definitely a hand, most definitely fingers—and he tried but could not shake it loose.

He felt a second hand slap down on his back. Shrieked. A third—this one coming up from the water directly in front of his face, fingers hooked into a bloated, blue talon and clamping down on his left shoulder. It was then that he realized there were what appeared to be dozens of flailing arms breaking up from the surface of the sea, all around him now, all drawing steadily closer like the dorsal fins of frenzied sharks.

The Chinese divers, his mind yammered crazily. The goddamn Chinese divers!

Ghostly, as if she were whispering into his ear, he could hear Isabella Rosales saying, Sometimes I fill up a bathtub with water and hold my head underneath until I think I am about to black out. I see how long I can hold my head under water, and I try to experience what it is like to almost die, almost drown. I see how far along I can get, Nicholas, and how close to dying I can bring myself without actually doing it. I wait for some great change, or for something insurmountable and unimaginable to overtake me. But it is just water and it is just my head, and so far nothing has happened.

Isabella’s words had hardly concluded when he felt the hands drag him back down beneath the surf. Again, that freezing water—again, that inability to breathe. He was conscious only of two sounds: the rush of the water filling his ears and his own heartbeat, trapped somewhere between his chest and his throat, reverberating within him like muffled gongs against a steel drum.





—Chapter XVI—





She entered the room, saying, “I was trying to be as quiet as a mouse. I didn’t want to wake you.”

“I’ve been awake.” And he had: he had spent the past forty-five minutes on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“Yes.”

“You scared me, getting sick so quickly like that.”

“It was nothing.”

“You looked very pale. You looked scared, too.”

“I wasn’t scared.”

“It’s fine to admit you were scared.”

This angered him. He turned his head away from her. “What is it?”

“Now that you’re better, I was hoping we could start fresh tonight,” Emma said. “I was hoping we could pick up from where we started, when we first got here.”

“Things have changed.”

“We can’t survive in this limbo for the rest of our lives, Nick.”

And he knew this was true. He said, “So, then, what?”

She mentioned a waterside festival at the other end of the island, with music and seafood and costumes and plenty of alcohol. There would be vendors, she said, and beautiful dark-skinned women in Hawaiian dresses, and Tiki torches staked into the sand by the shoulder of the sea. There had been much talk of it today down by the pools, she told him. All the guests would be going. Some sailing ship was supposedly returning to the island, too, although she did not know if that was the cause of the celebration or, perhaps, a result of it. Still, she said, it would be fun to get out.

“I am in no mood,” he said, punctuating each word.

“I think we should do this,” Emma said. She hadn’t moved from her position at the foot of the bed since she’d entered the room.

“I was going to paint tonight.”