It had become a hot day after the fog had burned off and Tammy had somehow gotten way ahead of her.
“Hey, what’s the rush!” Ann shouted.
The outgoing tide had really picked up. Ann watched Tammy get smaller in the distance while seals popped up to the surface, their dark heads glimmering in the sun. She’s just anxious to get back to shore, Ann thought. Wants to get in her sunbathing fix while she can.
Well I’m in no rush to get burned.
Ann pulled her paddles into her kayak and lay back while the water below pulled her toward the mouth of the jetty still a mile away. She stared at the green-blue water and watched the patterns of crescent-shaped silver until it made her feel drowsy.
She closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift until she felt she’d become like the light itself.
She still slept better during the daytime when there were fewer shadows for her to worry over. Although her leg had healed, the doctor said the rest would take more time. The sleeping pills he prescribed for her didn’t seem to work more than a few hours, and she often found herself getting up and turning on all the lights in her room and reading until morning.
He promised you she wouldn’t come back.
Ann remembered his arms holding her as he hiked up the switchbacks, watching as his fast stride caused the forest shapes above them to blur. When she’d tried to wriggle free, he’d held her tighter and warned her not to move and she smelled his foul breath and thought she was going to be sick. But she asked him what was happening anyway, and Cyclops told her she had nothing to worry about anymore, that she’d never see him or her mother again.
And yet it didn’t seem to make a difference. She had been scared of the dark, especially on nights when she could hear coyotes up in the woods, until one night the herd of elk came through the neighborhood, eating from the unprotected vegetable gardens. She’d seen their shadows from her window. She hadn’t seen any since the night she’d found the dead one off the highway.
She got dressed and followed them all night as they finished their pillaging and moved back into the woods where she could only keep up with them briefly before losing them in the dense undergrowth but not before they stopped for awhile and watched her and she saw in their eyes the thing that took away the fear.
For a flash second Ann didn’t know where she was. Her kayak wobbled as she found her balance again. She looked around and was surprised to see how far she’d drifted down the bay. On a small sliver of a beach Tammy lay on her back, her blue kayak drying next to her.
Ann dipped her paddles and headed for shore.