A Chance for Sunny Skies

A Chance for Sunny Skies

By Eryn Scott

Copyright © 2015 Eryn Scott

All rights reserved.

www.erynwrites.com

This edition published by arrangement with

Kristopherson Press

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover photo by Masson/Shutterstock

Cover design by Paper and Sage

For Maura and Sherri. Obviously.

The fake yearbook page Melanie Carter taped to my locker senior year was the only thing that flashed before my eyes as I drowned.

Most likely to die alone.

How could she have known?

Well, I guess it wasn't the only thing I saw. There were other things besides the paper, but I didn't recognize any of them. Not a one.

There I was, thinking, what the crap? I'm dying and the only thing I can remember is the worst freaking day of high school?

I know it seems like I was doing a lot of thinking whilst dying, but when you're tired of fighting, sinking, about to let the water flow into your lungs, you've got a good few moments to think about your life.

I even had time to get annoyed. After the initial image of the yearbook page, the random pictures I didn't recognize began repeating. It was like a slideshow that kept starting over and over and over.

Sinking, I watched these seven images flash before me.

A fence.

A bag.

A shoe.

An old woman.

A photograph of lightning.

A rhinestone dog collar

And last, a pond.

Yep, that's what I got. A whole lot of zero from my actual life. I guess God was too bored by what he saw on my reel, so he decided, "What the Hell, (it's okay if God says it, it's his word) let's just put these pictures in her mind instead. They're more interesting than the nothing she's seen in her life. It's the least I can do for her."

For a few moments, I watched these seven images with great concentration because my lungs were burning, my head felt like it was going to pop, and it was nice to feel distracted. They got clearer each go-through, more detailed.

The white fence was missing one picket and the paint seemed more chipped than not.

The bag was purple and had some weird flap that held a rolled up yoga mat. At least, I think it looked like a yoga mat, but I wasn't well-versed in working out or sweating on purpose.

The shoe was green. A green tennis shoe that pointed to the left.

The woman was small with frizzy gray hair, and she sat alone in a dark restaurant.

In the picture the lightning cracked through the sky and settled on a tree when it reached the ground. The tree looked intact, but I could see tendrils of smoke curling up from its trunk.

The dog collar was, well, stupid and elaborate. Baby blue and encrusted with enough rhinestones to make any Bedazzle-loving-teen squeal with delight.

The last image was that pond again. It looked peaceful, with a willow dipping the fingertips of its leafy branches down into the water while a stone path hopped across the surface.

The images kept repeating, kept not being from my life. When I finally couldn't help it any longer, I opened my mouth and took a breath of water, let it pour into my lungs, curl down my nose, and seep into my eyeballs, the only thing I could think was, no one's going to miss m--

But I never finished that thought. Nope. Because something started to pull me up. (Come on, you knew I wasn't actually going to die.) Something wrapped around me and yanked me out of the water. In most stories when women are saved from drowning, it's a hot guy. He rips off his shirt, dives in, encompasses the damsel with his strong, tan arms, and pulls her out. His CPR transitions smoothly into a you-saved-my-life make-out sesh.

When I woke up, I was lying on a wet, cold, smelling-of-fish boat deck, puking the water out of my stomach and all over some poor old fisherman. He didn't have many teeth and I couldn't understand the dialect of Bumpkin he sputtered because my ears were full of water. He waved his hands in disgust and backed away as I puked again.

Once all the water was out of me, I couldn't help but stare at his arms. They weren't strong or tan and he didn't look like he had just jumped into the water to save me. Plus, I really didn't want to have a make-out sesh with him. I scanned the boat for someone else, for the hot guy who must have pulled me out. Then, I spotted my savior.

A big, strong, taut... fishing net.

I wasn't even saved on purpose. I was the equivalent of collateral net kelp.

"What'r yoo doin'?" I managed to understand from Old Man and the Sea.

He was right to ask. What had I been doing? I winced and sat up. I could see the jetty, merely a small black line jutting out into the vast blueness. I pointed and tried to talk, but my throat still burned from the bile and almost-dying bit, so I mimed what happened instead. I showed him how I had been walking on the jetty, not paying attention to where I was walking because I was avoiding a loud group of teenage beach-goers, slipped, and was dragged all the way out here by a ferocious undertow. I showed him how hard I had swum until finally giving up.

He shook his head and muttered something I couldn't quite hear before turning back to his net. He spent the next few minutes untangling it, undoing the damage I'd caused to the few fish he'd managed to catch before I got in the way. When he had put the net away, he clomped into the wheelhouse and came out grumbling with a blanket in his hands.

The blanket flopped through the air as he threw it -- yep, threw it right at me -- and smacked into my face. Thanks, man. It was old, woolen, and smelled like the sheep had been dead for a while before someone decided to take their wool. But the gray storm-clouds were low, the wind whipped through my wet hair, and the old man must have known I was in the first stages of hypothermia, so I wrapped it around my shoulders.

Old Man and the Sea started the boat and we chugged back toward the jetty, around the small spit, and into the harbor. When he docked I stood up, unsteady on my feet, as usual. I slipped three times just trying to walk the few steps over to the side of the boat closest to the dock. (Okay, worse than usual, but I did just almost die.)

I stood, hand gripping the side rail. Port, starboard, I had no idea, I just wanted to get off that fishy boat.

"G'on." The sound flew at me, flopped over to me like the blanket. My eyes found my captain standing outside the wheel house. "G'on," he said again, the words slurring together without the structure of teeth to keep them separate.

He waved his hand at me. Seriously? It's not like I wanted to stay any longer than I had to, but he was kicking me off? Holy goodness, I was worse than collateral net kelp. Net kelp he could just throw back overboard. However, this dumb girl he'd managed to catch, she had to be dropped off at the dock, inconveniently. I looked over the side of the boat at the dock. It bobbed up and down, my legs wobbled. He couldn't be serious.

But boy was he. After a few more hand gestures and a frustrated check of his watch (the sky), I realized he wasn't going to help. I took a deep breath, tried to suck in my stomach, and lifted a leg.

Squelch! My soggy shoes betrayed me and sent me flying backward on my butt. I grimaced, hoisted myself up, and scrambled over the edge, falling again, but in the right direction this time.

"Thank you," I croaked. My throat felt raw, like the salt in the water had been in crystal form, scraping the whole length of my throat as it had gone down, and back up. The cold wind sliced through my wet clothes, through the sheep-shit blanket, through my whole life as I watched him pull his boat out of the harbor and back out to sea. I was nothing more than a setback in his day.

I tried to paw my normally-frizzy-now-trying-to-suffocate-me red hair out of my face and turned toward the shore. As I walked, my water-logged shoes made farting noises loud enough to wake the dead. Luckily, the dock seemed empty. Um, really luckily, I thought as I looked down. My jeans were clinging to my let's-be-honest ample thighs in all the wrong places and weighed approximately twenty-five pounds from all the water they'd soaked up. I tried shimmying them away from my skin as I walked, kicking my knees up high, and wiggling as I tugged trying to un-wedgify myself.

"Ahem." A throat cleared to my left. I froze and my eyes found the dock attendant standing by his tiny bobbing building. "Everything okay, miss?" His face scrunched together, telling me he most definitely saw me walking like a duck and picking my jeans out of my butt.

If there had been any heat left in my body, I'm sure my cheeks would have turned red, but as it was, the whole of me stayed quite blue and pruney as I nodded, waved, and cringed. The man stared at me, not believing, needing more. I needed help, I wanted help, but I was too embarrassed about him seeing me pick my wedgie. I tried to open my mouth to say something, but all that came out was a loud laugh, so I simply cackled and shoe-farted past the poor man.

Before I even got to the top of the dock, my face crumpled and my laughing turned into loud sobbing. I tried to turn it off, or at least down, but there I was, duck walking into town, sob-laughing, dripping wet, and covered in a gross blanket. It's a wonder they didn't call some sort of super hero team to come help rid them of the crazy villain who must've crawled out of the sea to destroy their peaceful town.

There was no movement. No super heroes. I scanned the small strip of shops making up the harbor town. Mae's diner, where everything had a yellowish color I assumed meant it was covered in oil. A small motel sat next to the diner. Then there was Seaside Souvenirs, where approximately 78 flags snapped in the coastal wind telling me it was "open". I knew they probably sold the stupid things, but it looked desperate. And that was coming from me, the farty-shoed-loud-sobbing-sea-beast.

Even though the town looked a bit sad, it did look warm and inviting. I pulled the smelly blanket tighter around my shoulders and started toward the motel, maybe they'd have a phone I could use to call...

I stopped in the middle of the street. My heart ached. There was no one I needed to call. No one would care that I had almost died. I was twenty-six and I didn't have any friends, not even anyone who owed me a favor. My mother would simply give me the number to her counselor and I really don't think I could deal with the fact that there was a large part of Bunny that wished I was gone already. I had been the reason my dad had left all those years ago, when they found out she was pregnant. She'd always blamed me for his absence and never let me forget it, keeping me a few good arm-lengths away from her most of my childhood, pawning the raising of me off to a nanny until she eventually took her away, too.

Surely no one at work would care. I was just a temp, after all. Heck, my roommates from college probably didn't even remember my name (especially since I barely talked to them, which is why I got a new one each year). The only living thing that would be at all affected by my death would be my cat, Benny, and he couldn't use a phone.

I felt the painful truth of the evil yearbook page stab into my chest. Touché, Melanie Carter.

Sure, I had been weird before the terrible paper was taped to my locker. I rarely said a word to anyone, froze when teachers called on me (eventually they would just shake their heads and move on), and I'm pretty sure my red frizzy hair resembled more of a helmet than a hairdo (even my mother's expensive hairstylists couldn't figure out what to do with it).  Years later, in college, I realized that I had a pretty severe case of social anxiety, something my mother would have probably seen had she gotten close to me at all. At that point in my life, I just thought I was weird and I became weirder and weirder after that yearbook page. Every encounter I had with people after that was colored by that poorly colored fake-yearbook-page.

As much as I wanted to talk, to make friends, I just couldn't make words come out, couldn't get out of my own way. It got way worse throughout high school, it grew during college, and once I was an adult, I realized how easy it was to shut myself off from the world, convince myself that friendship wasn't something that was in the cards for me. I lost myself in the British TV shows my nanny had shown me growing up, found new ones to obsess about, and soon my only conversations with actual people who I didn't work with were through the keys of my computer on online message boards about those very shows. In my head, those were my friends. They were people and I talked to them daily, but here I stood, not knowing who they actually were and not being able to call them.

Rain splattered on my face as the weather started to turn. I shivered and realized I still stood in the middle of the street, so I turned on my heel and pointed myself toward the parking lot by the jetty, where my car sat waiting for me. Seeing my car reminded me for the first time of my keys. I patted my pockets and felt the metal dig into my leg. I thanked my one tiny, almost non-existent lucky star that I had decided to leave my purse in the car while I took my walk earlier.

I tried to wiggle my fingers into the pocket, but holy mother of all things ridiculous. If I thought walking in these water-logged jeans had been bad, trying to get my keys out was nearly impossible. Pulling them out of my pocket felt more like extracting Excalibur from its resting place, but I finally pried them loose and let myself into the dry, windless car. I turned on Gerald (that's what I called my little green Subaru), blasted the heater, turned the "hot butt" setting on high, and scrunched down into the warmth as I drove.

The hour drive back inland to where I lived in Willamette Falls was silent, save for the "whump whump" of Gerald's wipers flinging the water off my windshield at steady intervals. My mind reeled, rationalizing my life, my choices, trying to push back the very real feeling that I wanted, needed friends. Maybe I had been wrong about everything. Maybe my awkwardness wasn't as bad as I thought. What if I just hadn't tried hard enough? I'll tell you what, almost dying brings a lot of things into question and it gave me a newfound burst of longing for those relationships I lacked.