“All I had to do was let her tell me that I ruined you? That I was a shitty wife? That she wanted better for you than me? Seriously, Carter, were we at the same meal? You didn’t mention that I would have to suffer abuse from your family in the deal. Maybe you should have said that instead of glossing it over asgrowing pains.”
His eyes are like fire right now. “She’s a cranky old woman with issues, not an abuser. She loves us.”
My mouth drops open. “Jesus, Carter.” I feel nauseated and I put a hand on my belly. “I can’t believe I thought you’d have my back for this.” I shake my head as thunder makes the plates stacked on the counter tremble. “So I had to have my own back. I had to stick up for myself and there’s nothing wrong with that, no matter what you or anyone says.” I’m choking on the words now but I don’t even care. “I didn’t ruin you and you and I both know it. I’m not a whore or a slut like she called me when I was a little kid. That shit is called verbal abuse and I encourage you to look it up, since you were raised to think it’s synonymous with love.” I clear my throat as the tears finally fall down my face. “Iknowwhat abuse is, Carter. I know what it looks like inallits forms.”
Outside, the sky has darkened so much, it looks like night has come at four in the afternoon. Wind rushes by the windows with a series of howls that just make me feel sicker.
Carter’s face has fallen. “Teal—” It looks like he is going toapologize and I can’t let him. I need to hold on to this. I need to remember this, so the next time I feel weakened by my attraction to Carter, I won’t get my heart involved. He doesn’t have my back. He will let me down and it will hurt so much worse if I’m stupid enough to open my heart up to him even more than it already is.
I point at him, which ceases his sentence. “Absolutely the fuck not.” I race toward the bedroom, where I slam the door. I kick off my lilac heels, the ones that match this dress I so carefully picked perfectly, and pace, running my hands through my hair.
“Teal.” Carter knocks on the door. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Erika was crying all over me and I didn’t know what to think. I know she started it—”
I swing open the door where he’s frozen, his loose fist up, midknock. “You know what she told me before she left?” I take a big, shaky breath. “She said she was going to cry for you, and that you would choose her over me. She planned that shit. She called it. And she and I both knew that she was right.”
I’m too upset to even put my shoes on. Instead I race past him, out the back door, through the backyard, through the fence door, until I’m on the beach, barefoot, running into the wildest storm I’ve seen since I was four years old.
21
The waves on the beachrumble and roar, rolling higher and higher. If a surfer had a death wish, they’d have the time of their life right now, out there on those blue shimmering monsters. Rain slaps against my face and my arms, my chest and legs, all so hard it stings as though hundreds of tiny arrows aim at me straight from the clouds. The sky is a swirling, inky mix of black and indigo, the kind of sky you see in horror movies just before everything goes to hell.
I’m running as fast as I can, maybe even faster than I can, because I can’t bear for Carter to catch up to me. If he’s even come after me at all. Just this morning, I would have said Carter might’ve followed me anywhere, especially were I this upset. But now…I don’t know. Maybe he went back inside to call Erika and now they’re gossiping about what a spoiled bitch I am. They’re probably founding a club right now, the Teal Haters, and they’re planning their inaugural meeting, so they can bond over all the ways I am broken.
It doesn’t matter. It’s what I keep repeating to myself, every step a word. It. Doesn’t. Matter.
This marriage is fake. It doesn’t matter. Sure, I wanted to be best friends with Carter again, but that, too, no longer matters. I want to laugh when I think about my plans to get him to fuck me so we could get it out of our systems.
It. Doesn’t. Matter.
Shells and rocks whoosh under my feet, and on a couple of steps, I stomp on something sharp. I can’t bring myself to care, and instead I increase my speed until it feels like my legs are nothing but blurs, like I’m Sonic from the video game Carter and I used to play when we were little kids.
At about one or two miles, I come upon my first roadblock of jagged, chert-gray rocks, appearing like the open mouth of some giant, ancient creature, its row of fossilized teeth all that’s left of it. They’re so dark they almost look black in this rainstorm. It would be damn difficult, if not impossible, to climb them. But just the thought of turning around makes me ache, makes me want to weep, and so with grim determination, I slow down to climb, to crawl, to do anything to get myself on the other side of this line of gargantuan fangs.
I’m pretty sure I can hear Carter yelling something likeTeal, what the fuck?in the distance, so I grab the nearest rock and haul my ass up until I’m balanced right on top of it.
I suck in my breath, my stomach bottoming out as I look down. This is the moment when I realize I’m being an irresponsible ass. Because this,this—my feet, slick against the sharp rock, my arms out because the wind is hell-bent on shoving me right back down, the fact that I could so easily fall, and one of those rocks would absolutely pierce my middle, or my spine, or my temple—now I’m the one asking myself,Teal, what the fuck?
This is how I watched my sister die. Sure, it wasn’t exactly balanced on a sea rock, and she didn’t exactly die, but all the same, when I look around, I am there, at Cranberry Falls State Park, looking down at my sister screaming before nothing, nothing, nothing for eight entire years.
I wonder if all the running I do, if it isn’t just keeping my worst bipolar symptoms at arm’s length. I wonder if I’ve been running from that day, from that moment, as though it were alive and chasing me, ready to fling eight years’ worth of guilt on my shoulders.
I swallow and lower myself until I’m in a crouch, placing my hands on the cold, smooth stone under my feet. Even though it means I have to see Carter’s stupid, handsome face, I’ve got to get back. I need to figure out another way to deal with my mess of a brain. There’s no way that climbing over rocks barefoot in the middle of a storm is going to somehow help.
I steady myself so I can slide off and back onto the sand.
And of course…this is when lightning strikes.
It’s a brilliant and massive map reaching across the sky in all four directions, like hands, only the hands are made up of nothing but an electrical circular system. It makes the sky light up in amber gold, the same color as Carter’s eyes, the drops of rain in that glare looking like yellow diamonds falling from the sky.
I don’t know when the lightning gets me, the exact moment when I hook up to its vibrating, hot current. All I do know is I look down at my left hand, because it feels strange, kind of like I dipped it into a hole in the wall that led to an alternate universe where everything is thick, where gravity is stronger. And it’s alight. I lift my arm and somehow my hand keepsglowing, and it glows not yellow nor white, but blue.
And I watch as that blue light stretches in front of me, and justten or so feet away, it forms into a figure. A little girl, no more than five years old, running after another person lit in blue—a woman.
Goose bumps prick my skin so hard, it’s painful. I don’t know if it’s from being electrocuted or from watching my first great trauma unfold before my eyes in nothing but pure, hot lightning. Probably both.
Farther out, maybe a quarter or a half mile away, there is one more figure. I think it’s another woman, and she’s not made of lightning. She’s real. And she’s looking right at me.
Before I can think about it, I stand, leaping forward to the next rock. I don’t understand what the hell is happening, but I can’t shake the feeling that there is something essential out there, something that is undeniably mine, and I need to get it with the same desperation a selkie would need to find her lost skin before she withers and dies.
