Yesterday
I woke up gagging, spitting out water, my brother over me giving me some kind of CPR-slash-Heimlich maneuver, and I almost yearned to go back to the black void where there was no pain, no worry, no nothing. I felt shrunken, like one of those sun-dried apple heads, collapsing in on myself, every organ wrung out and throbbing.
Theo and Max’s faces were so scared, their eyes huge, and they hovered over me. Theo lightly slapped my cheek. “Ruthie. Ruthie!”
“Stop hitting me,” I said.
“I’ll take that as a good sign.”
I tried to stand, but Theo gently pressed me down. “No rush, not yet. Take a breath.”
The gravel didn’t make for a good pillow and I still tasted the ocean in my mouth. “How long was I out?”
Theo and Max shared a look. Their foreheads wrinkled, a secret passing between them. Debating whether to share it.
“What?” I said. “Tell me.”
“Five minutes,” Theo replied.
That’s not so bad. Of course, how would I know? I’d never been unconscious.
Only then did I notice Max and Theo were both soaked and shivering. They must’ve jumped into the ocean to save me. Fat beads of water dripped from their hair. Max’s teeth chattered. I’d offered to stay on the island and yet, it was me who had to be saved. Again. Gratitude was turning into embarrassment.
Theo and Max weren’t telling me something. They had weird energy. Max stared at Theo and they seemed to be having a mental tug-of-war. Max shook his head and I heard Theo mumble no.
Max turned to me. “You were underwater, Ruthie. For five minutes.”
“What do you mean? That’s…impossible.”
“I know.”
Theo wasn’t happy with Max, I could tell, but he said, “We thought…we thought you were gone.”
Oddly, I wanted to ask a bunch of questions. I’d never died before. And I certainly didn’t see any white light on the Other Side. I hit the rock one moment and I was gone the next.
“Was I breathing?”
Max and Theo shared a look again. They shook their heads.
So I was technically dead.
Not technically. Dead.
I looked across the ocean. Maybe the water’s cold temperature had saved me? I’d read instances of kids falling into icy rivers, only to be rescued an hour later, their bodies having gone into a strange hibernation. Maybe the same had happened to me.
Maybe I was just lucky. Real lucky.
Then I thought: some people look for signs their whole lives, some signal to give them hope that they were doing the right thing.
I came back.
I came back from the void.
The void wanted me here. The void wanted me to survive.
If there was a God, He, She, or It put me back here for a reason.
I mattered, after all.
And then I knew, I knew! I felt like some monk on a mountain that finally understood the meaning of life. I had tears in my eyes.
Max said, “I’m sorry. Maybe Theo was right. Maybe you didn’t need to know.”
“No,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“I know.”
“No. I mean, I’m okay. And you’re okay. We’re gonna be fine. We’re gonna make it.” We were doing the right thing. I would survive. They would survive. And the world would know what we went through.
Max and Theo exchanged glances, maybe thinking I had some post-death high, some loopy-ness from all the carbon monoxide in my system, but I’d never felt better. More alive.
I reached out to Theo. In the water, I must’ve terrified him. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” he said.
“For what?”
“Not being a better big brother.”
“Don’t get all mushy on me. I could’ve been a better sister.”
“Fair enough.”
“Hey!” I playfully hit him and he had the very beginning of a smile.
Something was missing, and I realized what it was. “Where’s Dirk?”
They gestured toward the forest. Wherever he was, I couldn’t see him.
“Did he make it?”
Theo nodded. “We’ll take you there in a bit.”
I got the feeling they didn’t want to talk about what happened to Dirk. So we rested, the wind blowing over us, the boat so far out in the ocean it looked like a speck of dust, soon to disappear over the horizon, and that’s when I looked down at the boulders and rocks. Kensom Daniels’ body stretched out, as if getting a tan in the oddest place.
Another name to add to my list of the dead.
I didn’t know him, but anyone willing to take three strangers aboard for no good reason was a decent guy in my book.
After several minutes, my breathing fell to a normal rhythm, and though I’d finally felt well enough to walk, I waited more for Max and Theo’s sake. I saw how tired they were from swimming out to save me. They could’ve drowned.
If there was ever proof of love, that was it.
When I pressed myself upright, they didn’t try to stop me. My headache, I found, was subsiding. I stood between them and reached my hands down, allowing them to pull themselves up.
“I guess we’re like the Three Musketeers.”
“Or,” Max said, “the Three Stooges.” I smiled and we walked back into the forest, my tennis shoes squeaking from the wetness.
The canopy of leaves above me was a comfort, a kind of ceiling that gave a sense of structure, instead of the wide-open space of the ocean. We didn’t have to walk far before I saw Dirk sitting cross-legged next to a body. Dirk had his head down, his posture sunken and he didn’t look at us as we approached. A rifle lay across his legs. Whatever had happened, he’d gotten the gun from the shooter.
As I got closer, I recognized the body as Dirk’s father, short, chubby, and definitely dead. He lay on the ground as if sleeping off a bender.
“What happened?” I asked.
Dirk kept staring at his feet. “What’s it look like?”
“I thought you shot him back at your house?” I caught myself thinking what a weird, awful thing to say.
“I did.” Dirk raised his father’s arm. It was as loose as a ragdoll. “Right here.” There was a bloody wound near his shoulder. “Wasn’t fatal.” He then swiveled his father’s face toward me, and it looked like the Batman villain Two-Face. Part of his skull was normal, the other part had been bashed in. Looking at the barrel of the rifle, I put it together. Dirk had bludgeoned his father to death.
“How did you get the gun from him?”
“I charged him.”
That meant Dirk had wrestled the gun from him before he fired. Unless the rifle jammed.
“Was he out of rounds?”
“Nope. I checked already. Four shots left.”
“Why didn’t he shoot you?”
Dirk faced me. His eyes were wet with tears. “Don’t know.”
“Why didn’t he shoot?”
“I don’t know!”
I didn’t want to hurt Dirk, just to find out if maybe… “Did he hesitate because he remembered who he was? Or who you were? Was he getting better?”
“I DON’T KNOW!”
Max said to me, “We’ll never know, okay? Everything’s speculation. The only thing we know for sure is the adults are still a danger to us, and until the day they aren’t, we can’t trust them.”
I calmed down and said to Dirk, “Are you okay?”
“I told you my dad would hit me. Sometimes I didn’t even know what for. And I let him because I was powerless to the thing that made me, you know? Not any more.” He paused then added, “You were right about one thing. My yelling brought him here. I’m sure of it. He knew what I sound like when I scream.”
I didn’t know what to say. What could I say?
I asked, “Should we…?”
“What?”
“Bury him?”
Dirk looked over his father and shrugged. “The forest can have him.” Dirk made no move to get up and I didn’t want to rush him.
We waited, this odd combination of us and a dead body, when Theo sat down. “I get it now. Why Sasha ran. Why she was willing to risk everything to run. Because whatever she was scared of happening, she was right.”
“And what happened?”
“This. Us. Everything.”
“But you’re alive.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be!”
Why was I always the one to make the guys in my life see how special they were? “Did you hear a thing I said? About us being okay?”
“Ruthie, are you seriously saying that to me? After Sasha died? After we locked up our mother in a cellar? Look around. We are so far from okay. We’re the exact opposite of what okay would be. And the more you tell me, the more I want to punch you in the face. You’re my sister and I love you and I’m glad you’re safe, but do you understand? I’m not okay.”
“I’m sorry. I was just…”
“Trying to help? I don’t want any more help.”
We were quiet a while and then Dirk looked over at Theo and said, “Pussy.”
“What?”
Dirk repeated it. “I just killed my father. And I’m gonna keep on killing.” Dirk looked at all of us. “We take the fight to them.” Before we could ask how, he added, “The school. We go to the school.”
“Dirk Kincaid wants to go to school,” Max said. “I think an angel just earned his wings.”
Theo replied, “I’m sick of hiding.”
“It’s not hiding. We go there to attract them. They’ll come to us. And we’ll be ready. We know it better than they do. There might even be things we can use as weapons in the shop room. We’ll fight ’em, and we’ll win.”
Max turned to me, and then back to Dirk. Max said, “We’ll be outnumbered.”
“We’re outnumbered already. I’m talking about evening out the odds.”
“By being sitting ducks at the school?”
“By making it a fort. From the word fortify. That much I know.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” I said.
“It’s the only idea,” Dirk replied.
“There might be more kids there,” I said. “We could secure it.”
“It’ll be epic. We’ll make our last stand there,” Dirk said.
“And if we lose?” asked Theo.
Dirk picked up the rifle and peered through the scope. “Then we’ll take out as many of them as we can.”