Where Sea Meets Sky (25 page)

She’s already splashing into the water, like a mermaid returning to a kingdom of blue milk. If the cold is shocking her, she doesn’t show it, it doesn’t slow her down. The lake splashes around her in Technicolor brilliance, her darkly tanned skin shimmering from the reflection.

In seconds she is diving under and I hold my breath as my legs and blood pump me forward. I’m bizarrely, acutely, aware that she might not come up again. I think about what she told me, huddled in my rain jacket.
I think I ache for things I may never get. I long for purpose, for life and yet sometimes I think I’m too afraid to live
.

My fear is in
not
living.

We need to meet in the middle.

So I go into the lake after her. I’m stripped down to my boxers and T-shirt, my dusty jeans and flip-flops discarded somewhere between me and the bus, in a patch of purple and pink foxgloves.

It’s so cold I think I’m going to die. My lips open to yell, “Fuck me!” but my mouth is more intent on chattering my teeth together. Each step stabs stones into the soles of my feet and jagged knives of ice water into my legs until the feeling—all feeling—subsides.

I’m breathless, surrounded by ice blue, a color I’ve created myself when I’ve touched too much eggshell into too little cerulean. The shores are granite, a soft warm gray, peppered by the unimaginable greens and pinks of foxglove and whatever plants happen to spring up in this country. I’m swimming in a painting, numb, and I’m going for her, the bronze mermaid who wants to swim forever.

But she’s not mythical. She’s very real. It seems to take forever and eventually she breaks the surface, shrieking out in surprise and agony from the cold. It doesn’t numb her after all. Perhaps in this case, the number you are, the closer you are to death.

Though she swam for a while under, it doesn’t take me long to catch up with her. I was an avid swimmer for years.

“What the hell?” I say to her between chattering teeth, spitting out lake water.

She stares at me, wide-eyed, her head above the surface as she treads water. Her wet, dark hair is slicked back from her forehead, an inky wave between her shoulders, her cheekbones highlighted by sun and water.

“I told you I wanted to come here,” she says, as if suddenly abandoning your van and stripping to your underwear in public is the norm.

I can’t help but smile at how blasé she tries to be about it. “A little warning would be nice.”

“Don’t worry about me, Josh,” she says.

I pause because something in my heart has swelled. “But I do.”

Oh god, how I fucking ever.

She holds my gaze and my fingers itch to reach through the water and touch her. A few days ago I wouldn’t have, not in public like this. But I want to see just how numb she is.

My hand glides forward, sluicing through the water in slow motion until it rests on her light and silky waist.

She stares at me, her eyes glowing white against her brown irises, and her brows thread together in contemplation, as if she’s trying to unravel me, uncover some truth. I know something is bothering her and I know it’s about me more than anything else. It should be a good thing that it bothers her because it means she cares.

I want to tell her that she’s all I’ve ever wanted. I want to show her.

She relaxes into my touch for one sweet moment of victory before she slowly ducks her head under the water. I’m not sure what she’s doing so I take in a breath and submerge my head.

The cold shocks my face and when I open my eyes under water they seem to immediately freeze. Gemma is a hazy vision of pale blue, her hair swirling around her. She is so beautiful it makes my chest ache more than the cold does.

Her eyes hold mine and I see that yearning in them again. She reaches forward, grabbing my face, and pulls my head toward her. She kisses me, full on the lips. It’s so warm against the cold and I’m afraid I’m about to drown from happiness. I want this and I want more than this.

I don’t know how long the kiss lasts—we seem to float through time and space—but our bodies foolishly decide oxygen is equally as important. She breaks away and I am left sucking in ice water before I break through the surface.

I gasp in the dry air, fingers touching my lips as if I can’t believe it, but she’s back to the way she was before. Impassive. Immovable. Numb.

“We should go back before Amber freaks out,” she says in a brisk tone, and in that moment I wish to be as numb as she is.

We swim back to shore and Amber comes running out of the van with towels for us. I know they’re the same towels that we put down to cover the parrot poo, but I’m too cold to care.

We run out into them and huddle together briefly, Amber yelling at us for being crazy, then head back into Mr. Orange. We get changed in the back, no one caring about nudity at this point, even though I can feel the girls’ eyes on my body as I strip, then we head into town to get a bowl of hot soup and coffee.

Gemma seems to brighten up a bit after that “swim” but I’m watching her closely and I don’t think it will last.

She’s too comfortable being numb.

Chapter Fourteen

JOSH

“Looks like you have to answer that age-old question, my friend,” Tibald says as he raises his beer. “Can I sleep with a woman that I deem to be fucking crazy?”

I give him a steady look. “Gemma isn’t
crazy
.”

“Maybe not fucking crazy, but she’s not normal. Then again, neither are most girls and we sleep with them anyway. Some even marry them.” He finishes his thought with a shrug and a long drink of beer.

Pink Floyd’s “Breathe” comes on the speakers and I hunch over, groaning into my Speights ale. No matter where I go, I can’t escape this fucking band.

He pats me on the back. “But at least this fellow, Nick the Dick, is out of the picture.”

“Yeah but it doesn’t change anything,” I mumble.

Tibald and I are sitting in the Dux Live bar in Christchurch, the one place we’ve been able to meet up. Schnell and Michael are off at some fancy nightclub and Gemma and Amber are off doing their own girly thing. I needed a break from all the tension and was more than happy when they agreed to split for the night.

“Change is relative,” Tibald says. “Use your balls and act on it.”

I roll my eyes. “Tell me, Tibald, are you always spewing advice to people or do you ever get a taste of your own medicine?”

When his features go stony and grave, I feel like I’ve said the wrong thing.

“I did love someone,” he said, his voice flinty. “I was engaged to her. But she left me for my brother.”

I grimace. “Oh, dude, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

He exhales sharply out of his nose, then shakes his head and smiles. “It’s all right. It was a few years ago. It got me in the best shape of my life, so I can’t regret everything. Everything that happens, I believe, leads us where we need to be.” He finishes his beers and starts toying with the Speights coaster. “I know that sounds cheesy but whatever. It’s my belief and so it’s true.” He fixes his eye on me. “What do you believe, Joshua?”

It’s weird to hear my name like that. It reminds me of my mom. It reminds me that I haven’t talked to her since I left home. I could be a better son, that’s what I believe. A better brother, too. I could be better, full stop.

“I believe,” I say slowly, “that everyone you meet leaves an imprint on you. By the end of your life, that imprint has shaped who you are what life you’ve lived. So, I guess it’s kind of the same thing.”

“We’re getting awfully deep for a couple of blokes, don’t you think?” he asks with a smile.

“Blokes? You’re really turning into a Kiwi now.”

“So are you, bro. It suits you, makes you sound less like a dumb Canadian.” He places the empty bottle of beer on the table and spins it around. “Look, I figure I’m only a few years older than you and it’s not my place to tell you how to live your life or even prepare for it. But I will say this . . . if you find that person who makes you feel like everything going forward is worth living, hold on to her.”

“Is that what you had?” I ask.

“Yes. It was. And I don’t regret a moment of it, because in the end it was mine and she could never take what I felt away from me. I could turn to anger, and I did, but I had to admit to myself that I loved her because she was worth loving, no matter what happened.”

“And your brother?”

He shrugs. “Brothers are brothers. It’s blood. But it doesn’t mean anything beyond that. Just because I’m bound to him, forged by our parents, doesn’t mean I owe him anything more than a polite smile at family gatherings. My brother is dead to me and I’m sure I’m dead to him, otherwise he never would have slept with her. But that’s the difference that people don’t get about family. They think it’s their right to take them for granted when it’s not. I didn’t choose him, or my parents, and they didn’t choose me. Choice, in the end, is freedom and freedom is everything in life.”

I’m a bit shocked at Tibald’s revelation. From what I knew about him before, he was the fun-loving jokester. But there’s a serious side to him that I didn’t know about. He had been good at hiding it, especially around Schnell and Michael, but around me now, it’s a different story.

I have to wonder about Gemma. What was she hiding from me, Amber, Nick, everyone around her? What she said to me on Key Summit still rang through my ears. That night she was afraid and open and spilling her confessions to me. I took them in like water for a dying man. She was broken and bruised and aching for something she didn’t know.

I had my theories. Selfishly, egotistically, I hoped I could be the one to cure her ache, to make her feel fulfilled. But maybe it would take more than that; maybe she was harboring lost dreams. I saw it a lot, when I used to work at the restaurant. I would take my breaks and eat my hot fudge brownies out on the dining floor and watch the people around me. There were so many of them, young and old, alone and sad, eating to fill the void, being out in the open just to get the comfort of a polite server. It broke my heart, time and time again, to see these lost and lonely people. They seemed to have no one, and if they had someone, they seemed to have nothing to keep their days going. No passion, no dreams. Just a life in the wake of what could have been, discarded attempts at trying to live better.

I
was no better. I had no one either, no life, no motives. But I had passion, even if it had to be excavated from me. I had a passion for the arts and the moments that made me love life. The buried passion was what got me going from day to day until my sister fucked off to Spain to live with some man she barely knew.

And that’s when I knew I was missing out. I wasn’t living at all. I was barely any better than the lost souls I saw at work, hiding their sorrows with beer and greasy burgers. So I applied to school, hoping to at least get that ball rolling, and then I met Gemma that fateful, drunken, horny night, and everything seemed to click, click, click into place, like a key turning a lock.

Now I’m here, transient, unsure of where the door leads and where I’m going next.

“Sorry to bum you out,” Tibald says. “I think I like smiling, stupid Josh a lot better.”

I glare at him. “You should like all of Josh.”

He shrugs, grinning. “I’ll leave that to Gemma.”

“Right,” I say despondently.

“You got to her once before,” he points out. “You can do it again.”

“By being a forward, cocky, horny-as-hell animal?”

“Whatever works.”

I clink my pint of beer against his and say, “Then here’s to whatever works.”

We drink ours down, fast, and order another.

The amount of beer I’ve consumed in New Zealand has been pretty ridiculous. People always say that Canadians are the beer drinkers of the world—as in we drink a lot of it and all the time—but I think the Kiwis have us in a headlock over that one.

The next morning I wake up in a six-bunk dorm that seems to stretch on forever. There’s someone snoring in the bunk beneath mine and across the room, Gemma and Amber are just getting out of theirs. Gemma opted for a cheap hostel in Christchurch since we’ll be spending a few days at a nice one on the Banks Peninsula.

You get what you pay for. This place has weird stains on the carpet, bathroom doors that don’t lock properly and they charge you five dollars to use the Internet for ten minutes. And if I hadn’t come home drunk last night after being with Tibald and passed out right away, I would have been up all night listening to the backpacker bus group whoop it up in the shoddy communal lounge.

Needless to say, we’re all dressed and packed in record time and piling into Mr. Orange, with Amber worried she’s caught some contagious disease from the bed. Our trip to the Banks Peninsula is supposed to be a short one but I volunteer to drive anyway.

Gemma declines, telling me it’s not an easy drive, and thanks to the remnants of a hangover, I’m okay with that.

She wasn’t kidding. The peninsula used to be a volcano, and now it’s this massive, tall lump of land jutting out into the ocean, like a round thumb. The mountains in the middle are high, with rolling brown and green hills dotted with sheep and pockets of forest. The road winds back and forth, switchback after switchback, past deep valleys along the edge of the original crater. Occasionally you can see fingers of rich, jeweled blue as different harbors reach inland.