“And then?”
“We get rescued,” I say. I look down at the table, staring at the remains of the charcuterie plate, no longer hungry.
Sawyer pulls an electric hand blender from a cupboard and pulverizes the contents of his stewpan into soup while the rest of us imagine ourselves in lifeboats, crashing into breakwalls and splitting our heads open on rocks.
Or maybe that’s just me.
Thirty-Two
I stay at Sawyer’s when everybody else leaves.
“The soup smells delicious,” I say, trying to get a peek at it over Sawyer’s shoulder. “Looks great too.” I wrap my arms around his waist and he pours a splash of cream into the pot. I can feel his muscles tense as he stirs.
“Almost ready,” he says. He takes a clean spoon and dips it in. “Wanna test it?”
“Of course,” I say. I blow on it and take a sip, closing my eyes to savor it. “This tastes like a cold fall day,” I say. “I forgot it was April. Delizioso.”
He turns off the burner and faces me. I put my arms around his neck and he slides his around my waist, and he looks into my eyes, not smiling.
I look into his eyes, and I don’t smile either. “Talk to me,” I say softly. “What happened to you?”
His eyes narrow a fraction. “Nothing,” he says.
I tip my head slightly. “So what’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
Our faces are inches apart.
“What is it about the water?”
He breaks his gaze. “Oh. That. It’s no big deal.”
I stare at him. “Come on.”
He loosens his grasp on my waist and turns to look at the soup. “Okaaay,” he says. “When I was ten I was kayaking on a lake with my brother. There were two guys on Sea-Doos screwing around nearby, doing stupid stunts. One of them fell off and his Sea-Doo kept going for a ways after the motor cut, and the guy wasn’t wearing a life vest or anything.”
Sawyer stirs and shrugs his shoulders. “He was trying to swim to the craft but he was starting to struggle, so my brother and I glided over to try to give him a hand. I took off my life vest and threw it to him while my brother tried to reach out to him. The guy was starting to freak out, and he grabbed the side of the kayak. With my brother leaning out in that direction, the kayak flipped.”
“Oh no,” I whisper.
“Oh yeah. So basically I wasn’t prepared. I panicked. My mind went blank. I was underwater, and when I finally had enough sense to realize the kayak wasn’t flipping all the way around, I tried to get out. My leg got stuck. And the Sea-Doo guy was holding on to the bottom of the kayak, so I couldn’t flip it upright again.”
He pulls two bowls from the cupboard. “I sucked in some water and started to black out. And you know what’s so scary about starting to drown? You stop moving. You can’t struggle, because you go into shock, and you have no oxygen, so you can’t make noise. You just go limp.”
I can hardly breathe, listening to him. “What happened?”
“My brother got me out, and I coughed and puked and started breathing on my own again. And I was fine. But I never went in any body of water over my head again.”
He gets spoons for us and ladles the soup into the bowls. “I’m not a strong swimmer, either. So.” He shrugs and pulls a chair out for me, and we sit and eat our soup, even though I can hardly get it down after hearing that.
“You don’t have to do this, you know. You can stay back on shore and help from there.”
He smiles and draws his finger over the back of my hand. “And that’s why I didn’t tell you this before.”
“I’m just saying—”
“I know. And I’m going with you, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’m dealing with it, okay? And this time I’m keeping my damn life vest to myself.”
Thirty-Three
Tori calls every day. Things were better for a day or two after we met at her house, she says, but as the week progresses the vision is growing stronger and more intense. By Thursday afternoon she can’t watch TV because it’s just the vision on a loop, and on Friday it’s reflected in all the windows in her house.
“Are you sure there’s nothing more?” I ask. I’m getting impatient. We really need to figure out what day this will happen.
“Nothing,” Tori says. There’s an edge to her voice now, and I know she’s suffering. “I’m looking at everything. I promise.”
“I know.” I don’t know what else to say. “Be sure to tell me if . . . well, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“And e-mail me a detailed list of what all the drowning people look like and what they’re wearing.”
“Got it.”
We hang up. I dig the heels of my hands into my eye sockets and yell out my frustration.
Rowan comes running into the bedroom holding a dish towel. “What? Did something happen?”
“No. I’m just frustrated.” I fall back on my bed, and Rowan sits next to me. She checks her phone.
“I’ve been watching the weather. There’s still a small chance of thunderstorms pretty much every day next week, but the highest chance is Monday.”
“How big is the chance on Monday?”
“Forty percent, and windy. Ten to twenty percent on the other days.”
I stare at the ceiling. “My gut says this is coming soon. It’s getting really bad for Tori. And that’s always been an indicator that we’re either doing something wrong or the tragedy is imminent. And after doing this a few times, I’m feeling relatively confident that we’re getting it right except for knowing the day. So that makes me think it’s imminent.”