My Name Is Memory (34 page)

“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?

How 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.

He held her and treaded water. Her head fell on his shoulder. Her limbs weren’t moving. A surge of adrenaline filled his body as he felt her neck and her chest for signs of life.

She wasn’t dead. She hadn’t taken water into her lungs, but she had sealed them off, and it was a crippling moment of suspense until she opened her throat and started breathing again.

“You are not going to die,” he told her. He felt the emotion breaking his voice. “I know I said I’d let you, but I can’t.”

HE PUT HIS arm around her chest, under her armpits, the way he’d learned in a lifesaving class in Fairfax, and towed her along. He swam into the storm, because there was nowhere else to go. The sun disappeared, and the rain came down. He prayed the lightning would keep moving up the coast and away.

He swam as hard as he could. He didn’t know where he was going or what he would find besides water and rain. He felt the current pulling him north, and he fought it at first, but then he swam with it. How did he know which way to go?

In moments of tremendous stress he used to picture the world as it would look from high above. But now he saw them down here, two tiny white faces bobbing in a wide, stormy sea.

His lungs were raw and his limbs were starting to ache, but he wouldn’t slow down. He wouldn’t give in. You are not taking her, he wanted to say to the indifferent ocean as much as to Joaquim. I am going to keep her safe.

He didn’t know how to keep her safe other than to keep swimming. He had to fight. That’s all he had. Not memories, not experiences, not skills. He had a will. And his will was to fight until he couldn’t fight anymore.

THE SUN WAS cast over by storm, and so it set without much bother. He knew it must have set only because the air was suddenly dark and hard to see through. He had long since stopped feeling anything from his body. His legs were numb. He knew his arm was there only because it was still clutching Lucy and towing her along. He knew his body was trying to conserve oxygen for his brain and his vital organs, but even those were badly depleted. His brain had entered the phase of slow blur. He should have drowned already. In his blurry mind he almost envied the times when he’d just been able to drown in peace.

When he looked back at Lucy he suddenly discovered that her eyes were open wide and disoriented. Her limbs weren’t moving. She let herself be pulled along.

His face was so numb he could barely make his mouth open or his tongue work. “Hey, baby,” he choked out. He wished he could make his voice sound normal enough not to scare her.

She blinked a few times. “What are we doing?” she asked. Her voice was barely audible.

“We’re not dying,” he said.

She leaned her head back. “It’s raining,” she said.

“I know.”

“Are you sure we’re not dead?”

His mouth loosened up a little. “I really fucking hope not,” he said.

THE THUNDER RUMBLED, but the lightning stayed away. The wind blew the waves up and over them, and with each one he glanced back to see her sputter and breathe again.

What have we done? he thought.

His heart was swollen to bursting. It was all puffed up to start with, with love and lust, and now add hypothermia and myocardial infarction. Usually you lost consciousness before your heart exploded, but he was clinging pretty hard to consciousness. His thoughts were getting dim and disorderly, but he tried to keep alert and out loud for her. Don’t you go yet, he begged his heart.

Her head was back. Every so often the clouds let through a bit of moonlight, and she watched it. The planes of her face, turned up to the sky, were lovely in the moonlight. She trusted him enough to die, and apparently she also trusted him enough to swim hopelessly and endlessly in a stormy ocean.

He thought he heard something besides the wind and the toil of the storm, but his brain was too slow to process what it was.

He heard Lucy say something, but he couldn’t quite hear her. He willed his dead arm to pull her a little closer.

“Is this the darkest hour?” she sputtered.

He realized his teeth were chattering uncontrollably. His body was shuddering. “W-why do you ask?”

“Because look.” He followed her eyes up to the sky. He saw a flash of white through the rain and heard the sound again. He stared at it stupidly. Ideas were clamoring to be thought, but he couldn’t quite get them started.

“Do you see it?”

“I-it’s a gull.”

It circled them a couple of times, probably wondering whether it could possibly figure out a way to eat them. Daniel saw the direction it went, and he followed. He couldn’t make the thoughts go, but his body seemed to know that gulls did not stray far from land, especially not in weather like this. They did not fly this far out to sea without some place to land.

Daniel doubled his efforts. Blindly he knew he had to follow the gull. He couldn’t let it out of his sight. The bird soared and stuttered and twisted through the rough air, and the pain of envy woke Daniel up a little. We weren’t made for water or sky, he thought. How are we supposed to follow you?