Page 108 of Everything You Hate
“I got you in the basket,” I say. “I watched you go up. After that—” I shake my head, and even that hurts. “I don’t remember getting out of the water.”
Scarlett goes quiet. Her thumb moves over my knuckles once.
“You didn’t get yourself out,” she says.
The words land wrong. I hear them and my whole body rejects them before my brain catches up.
“Zade went in after you.”
“No.” It’s out of me before I’ve decided to say it. “No. Zade was on the hoist. Zade doesn’t leave the hoist, that’s the whole—” I stop. The machine speeds up. “He was operating the hoist. He was up in the bird. He doesn’t come off the aircraft, that’s not how it works, you don’t leave your station to?—”
“Dean.”
“—there were two of you up there and if he came off the hoist then Crew was alone flying that thing in a gale with nobody working the cable, that’s not a rescue, that’s how you lose the whole crew, that’s how you lose everybody, he doesn’t get to just?—”
“Dean.” She takes my face in both hands. Her palms are cold. “He did it anyway.”
I stop.
“The light died and you went under and he unclipped and jumped,” she says, low and even, holding my eyes so I can’t go anywhere. “Crew held the bird solo. Zade got a hand on you and they hauled you both up on the same cable. He did the exact thing you’d have done. The thing you did do, for me, an hour before.” Her voice cracks down the middle. “So don’t. Don’t you dare lie there and do the math on why he shouldn’t have.”
There’s something in my chest that isn’t the water. It’s bigger than the water.
I’ve pulled people out of the sound. Strangers, tourists, a kid off a capsized Sunfish, my own crew once, a long time ago, in a life I keep trying not to remember. I know what it is to be the hand that comes down out of the noise. I don’t know the other side of it. I don’t have anywhere to put it. The idea that Zade—that the kid who followed me into the Coast Guard, who I taught to read weather, who I have spent eleven years feeling like I abandoned—that he came off the hoist into a gale because I was drowning and he decided I was worth the whole crew’s odds?—
“Is he okay?”
“He’s okay. Bruised up. They kept him overnight for observation and let him go this morning.” She wipes her face with the heel of her hand, quick, like she’s mad at it. “He’s been down here twice. You were asleep. He said, and I quote, ‘tell him he’s an idiot and I’ll be back.’”
That’s Zade. That’s exactly Zade.
I close my eyes. When I open them, she’s still there, and her hand’s back in mine, and I make myself ask the thing I’ve been afraid to ask.
“Abel?”
I see the answer in her face before she says, “He didn’t make it.”
I exhale long and slow. “Fuck.”
“Zade worked him the whole flight,” I say. The words come out flat, a report, because a report is the only shape I can get around it. “Crew and Zade both. CPR. The defib. I remember—I was on the deck, I remember getting him in the basket, his pulse was—” I stop. Because I’d swear I felt it. Weak, flickering, gloved fingers at his throat. I’d have sworn.
“Dean.” Scarlett’s grip tightens. “He was already gone.”
“No, I felt?—”
“You didn’t.” Gentle. Relentless. “The medic told me. They said it plainly because I made them. Abel was gone before you ever reached him. In the water. Whatever you thought you felt out there in thirty-two knots with numb hands, it wasn’t a pulse. There wasn’t one to find.” Her thumb presses hard against my knuckles. “He was dead before you made the choice.”
And there it is. The thing I’ve been carrying since I stood in the open door with the basket swinging and Zade’s voice in my ear saying Abel first. I went for Abel first. Closer victim, unconscious, protocol says stabilize the near one and deploy for the far one, and I did it, I followed the manual while I watched Scarlett get smaller in the chop, and every second since I woke up I’ve had it lined up in my chest like a verdict: you went for him and it cost you her, almost, you chose wrong, again.
Except I didn’t choose. There was never a choice. Abel was already gone. Going for him first didn’t cost Scarlett a thing—it put me in the water on the near side, which is the only reason I had anything left to reach her with.
I’ve spent twelve years believing I chose wrong on a fishing vessel in another storm. I built a whole life around that belief. Left the island for it. And I don’t get to un-believe that one—that one’s mine. But this one. Tonight. I followed the protocol and the protocol didn’t kill anybody, because the man it sent me toward was already dead, and the woman it sent me toward second is sitting here with her cold hands on my face telling me to breathe.
“You did the right thing,” she says.
And for once—for the first time I can remember—I don’t fight it. I don’t tell her she’s absolving me because she loves me. I don’t tell her it’s not fair. I let it be true, because it is true, and I’m too tired and too glad she’s breathing to hold it off the way I’d hold anything else.
“Okay,” I say.
