“Dad, what if the sun died?”
I smile and pull the boy close underneath my jacket.
We were fishing off the jetty, and the cloudy night blotted out the stars like the thick piles of seaweed scattered along our cove strangled the sand.
In patches, pinpricks of light stab through, but the engulfing night is so dark that I can’t even see my son, and I am surprised at how cold his cheek is when it brushes against my own.
I know the boy is still afraid of the dark and on a night like this I can empathise. I start to answer when Alice arrives – it’s too dark to see her, but I feel her wrap her arms around my neck. Her skin is as cool as the boys, and damp.
“8 ½ Minutes” she says, her words floating in the air, “We wouldn’t know for eight and a half minutes – that’s as long as it takes the light to get here. Then, if it was night like it is now, a few seconds after that, the moon would disappear.”
It’s silly, but I can’t see the moon anywhere – I try to turn my head but I can’t, it’s frozen. Her cold hands tighten around my neck as I watch the planets wink out one by one, my sanity being eaten away like the light. I reach out for my wife, my son, but all I can feel is the cold, wet dark as it catches in my throat and I’m drowning…
The bedsheets were sticky, sodden with sweat as the cold realities of the world slowly soaked back into my brain. Ben was dead. My son was dead. Ben was dead and Alice had left me.
I poured myself a whiskey before brushing my teeth. I needed it today. Not only was it too fucking early – the sun hadn’t even risen yet – Alice had asked me to stop off at her house and sign the papers that would finalise the divorce. Her house –my fucking house! Not that I wanted it anyway; Ben’s presence was everywhere there, as omnipresent as the sea that surrounded this godforsaken island. I poured another whiskey for the drive, wondering if Alice would even notice it on my breath – if she’d even care if she did.
I almost missed her – her brown hair wafting under the jetty in the tide looked just like the clumps of seaweed that scarred the entire beach – but the locket I’d given her to celebrate having Ben was cheap gold and it strained towards the surface of the waves.
The reflection caught the torchlight, and although I watched the tide comb it through her hair in the time it took to reach her, I hadn’t been able to believe she was dead until I touched her skin.
It was the same temperature as the ocean.
I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t floating until I tried to hold her, the soft but certain sound of metal meeting metal underwater somehow skipping my ears and arriving right at the brain.
I dove down to see what was tethering her and came up with bile in my throat– a pair of my handcuffs – with one end around her ankle and the other around the bottom rung of the jetty ladder.
They’d had to use bolt cutters to release her for the coroner’s office. The key they found in her stomach, along with two litres of seawater.
I wondered if Alice had known this. It would have been terrifying enough – watching her life rhythmically ebb away. The panic the first time the water reached her mouth, then her nose. The first few times swallowing water, desperately trying to hold on until the wave withdrew. The moment she realised that the next breath wasn’t coming. The despair of inhaling water with air only inches away.
Yeah, I hoped she hadn’t known.
It was just like told that young officer– Alice was dead when I got there. Of course, that bitch – her name was Turner – was against me. She was young enough that she would have never worked alongside me; I think she might have even been my replacement after Ben died. Turner had the nerve to say I was a suspect. She brought up the funeral, called me a wife beater, and she actually asked how I’d known where to look.
I’d stopped responding at that. She should have known – it was the same place we found Ben.
I can still hear the sound of my sock squelching against the pedal as I forced the accelerator to the ground, my soaked, saturated suit staining the seat. Behind me, I could see Alice trying to give Ben C.P.R but his scrawny tanned torso remained stubbornly still. He was still bleeding, which gave me hope, even though I was unable to stop crying watching her, the warm tears carving valleys down my frigid face.
I’d found him facedown, his blood and the water somehow mixing to become darker than either individually.
I’d wanted to believe Ben would survive but I’d been the one to carry him from the ocean, my cheek pinned against my boys loosely flopping neck so his mother couldn’t see. His skin was as cold as the deep.
Alice hadn’t noticed – I could feel the hope drain out of her when the doctor returned, obviously avoiding our eyes. My shoes were still soggy and all I could hear as Alice and I carried each other out of the hospital was their incessant squeak against the floor.
It’s dark again by the time they let me go, and I catch myself wondering if the sun came up today at all. It’s so cold, even with the windows up, you could almost believe that it had disappeared completely. I drive to the jetty and stare into the water for a while, the headlights of my car cutting through the night yet barely piercing the thick murk of the water. The tide has withdrawn, and the rung that Alice was handcuffed to is staring back at me. I rest my feet on it, and the rising tide gently licks my toes.
Eight and a half minutes I think. Our world could be doomed and we wouldn’t know for eight and a half minutes.
I close my eyes, remembering the last time I saw Ben, his brown little eyes flashing as he begged me to take him fishing off the jetty. Sending him off with the promise I was right behind him. Pouring myself another whiskey, just a little bit, I did have work in the morning after all. Alice coming home and the two of us trying to squeeze just a scrap of affection out of our shitty, overworked days, not realising that we only had eight and a half minutes of sunshine left in our lives.
I get back into the car, my wet sock squelching as I force it down against the pedal, wheels still spinning even as we sink towards the bottom.
It’s impossible to know in the dark how long it takes the car to fill with water, but it feels like a short lifetime. I can’t even see the water pouring in, only feel it, glacial against my skin as I close my eyes and become one with the cold wet dark.
The warmth of light on my face makes me open them and I watch the sun rise from the ocean floor. For the first time in a long time, I can see the sunshine and I never remember it being so beautiful.
Wasted Hours & Warnings 