Underwater
Table of Contents
Underwater
The Mer of Pend Oreille Book One
Brooke Moss
Copyright Warning
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).
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious or have been used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real in any way. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Published By
Etopia Press
1643 Warwick Ave., #124
Warwick, RI 02889
Underwater
Copyright © 2013 by Brooke Moss
ISBN: 978-1-940223-26-1
Edited by Rachel Firasek
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Etopia Press electronic publication: August 2013
~ Dedication ~
For Ryann and Eedy.
Prologue
Water fills my ears and nose, and the numbing silence consumes me. I can’t hear anyone at the surface anymore. Can’t see the rocky beach and sky. I sink deeper and deeper into the cold, focusing on the dancing light that represents where air ends and water begins.
I move my arms, cupping my hands and clawing upward. Resistance meets my every move. My legs remain limp, lifeless, and immobile—pointing downward at the endless black abyss that awaits me. When I look down, I see eyes watching me from the darkness, their eerie blue glow waiting…waiting…waiting.
I’m not scared. Not even when my lungs begin to crumple and burn like paper bags on fire. Not when the lilting light above me grows smaller and smaller as I sink. Ten feet…twenty feet…fifty feet…a hundred feet and the light vanishes. There are hundreds of thousands of feet to go before I hit the bottom and meet my fate. I drop my hands and close my eyes, no longer trying to paddle. This is it.
Something cold wraps itself around my wrist. Scaled and webbed like a fish—but strong like a hand—it doesn’t pull me up toward the oxygen, toward life. Instead it merely holds my fisted hands in its grasp. Like a friend. A comforter accompanying me on my descent.
The burning sensation in my lungs paralyzes me. My body becomes rigid, plank-like, fighting death, even though I’m surrendering. My thoughts grow cloudy and muddled. Images of my family flash and pop behind my eyelids like fireworks. Just as I feel as though my body will explode, sending millions of tiny pieces of me floating to the surface, euphoria sets in. Like a high, only better. Stronger.
Permanent.
The hand around mine squeezes, one last motion prompting me to open my eyes before death gobbles me up, sea-monster-style. When I do, I see it: light and colors and brilliance beyond anything else I’d ever witnessed. And then I know.
I’m home.
Chapter One
“I saw a man standing in the middle of the water.” Fruit-flavored cereal dropped from my kid brother’s mouth, and I suppressed a grimace. He didn’t notice.
I guess the fact that I’d recently celebrated my eighteenth birthday by piercing my septum and dying my hair ink black had finally made me completely ignorable to my family. Oh, well. Watching Declan consume food was like watching a helicopter eat anyway.
My sister, Evey, dropped her empty bowl into the sink. “No, you didn’t. Nobody can
stand
in the middle of Moon’s Bay.” She turned to me, her long blonde ponytail brushing against the sea-glass wind chime hanging in front of the kitchen window.
The tinkling sound of the blue and green chunks caught my attention. We’d gotten the chimes while at the beach near Seattle, Washington, two summers ago—the same day as the accident. When our car rolled three times into a pea field along the highway, the sound of the chimes was the only thing I’d been able to hear. Evey said she remembers crunching metal, breaking glass, and Mom screaming. I’d only heard that stupid sea glass clinking together like bells.
“Did you hear me?” My mom’s expression was the same one she always wore: concern, annoyance, and maybe a small side of fear. I could practically hear her inner thoughts.
Will Luna ever be able to focus again? Will Luna ever stop being so angry all the time? Will Luna
walk
across the stage at graduation?
My parents worried about stuff like that all the time. I heard all their late-night conversations. It was hard not to when we lived in an old house with wide vents. Even the sound of the lake, lapping away at the rocks a few hundred feet below my window wasn’t enough to drown out the sound of their fears. There was something really disturbing about listening to your six-foot-three father weep through the night.
Now I was just plagued with their worries about living on a hill next to the fifth-deepest lake in America. Every boat accident, every swimmer reported missing kept them awake for hours, hissing at one another in hushed voices about whether to sell our house before I wind up the next one under water.
“Luna?” My mother rested her hand on my arm and gave it a small shake. “Did you eat something? I can’t have you going to school on an empty stomach and failing another trigonometry quiz.”
I scowled at her. I’d failed my last test because I’d hidden behind the captain of the wrestling team, rested my head on the desk, and slept through class. It had very little to do with my breakfast menu that day, but my fitness-obsessed mother blamed everything that went wrong on a lack of protein. If she could, she’d send the people of the war-torn Middle East a boatload of energy bars and then expect peace to wash over the region like a wave.
“I ate, all right?”
That was usually all it took to insure that my mother would leave me alone for the span of the drive to school. She was easily exhausted by my surly attitude and often whined to my father that she loved me, but no longer liked me. Another gem I’d picked up through those damn vents.
“Good.” She stared at me tight-lipped for a few seconds, and her movements were jerky and angry when she whirled around to face my sister. Score one for me. “Get your coats and backpacks. Evey, I saw your history notebook on the stairs a few minutes ago. Please don’t forget it. I can’t leave work to bring it to you again.”
Her fingers twitched at her side. She raised her hand toward my hair, but I made no move to soften my attitude. I didn’t want her pity.
“Is everyone going to ignore me?” Declan pretended to slam dunk his bowl into the soapy dishwater, sending foam in all directions. “There was a dude. In the middle of the lake.”
“Where?” My dad asked as he charged through the room, snatching half a piece of toast off the countertop. He took a bite and bent to peer out the kitchen window.
Declan pointed below our house to the end of a grassy slope that evolved into a rocky beach, where the choppy, gray waters of the great Pend Oreille Lake met our yard. In the middle of the bay, a duck bounced up and down over the waves.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a wrinkle appear between my father’s eyebrows. He put a hand on Declan’s shoulder and guided him toward my mom and her tapping toe. “Don’t think it was a man, son. Looks like the ducks are coming back early this year.”
“But, Dad, I saw him.” My little brother blew his shaggy hair out of his eyes and wriggled out from under my dad’s hand. “He was there.”
Evey followed his line of sight. “Well, what was he doing out there? Was he fishing or something?”
“No. Standing.” Declan pressed his face to the window, his green eyes scanning the view. “Or maybe swimming.”
I pulled my binder off the table and fingered its tattered cover. “Dude. It’s like hypothermia temperatures in the water. Nobody is swimming today.”
“You guys are jerks,” Declan whined. “Nobody ever believes me.”
“We believe you.” Dad threw one of his
knock it off, or else
looks over his shoulder at Evey and me. “We can talk about it some more tonight.”
“Do we have to?” I watched from behind my long bangs, pretending to be unbearably bored with everything going on around me. I was good at that. Everyone in my family thought I was perpetually in la-la land, but I rarely missed a thing.
My mother swung open the door, letting in an icy burst of mid-March air. “Luna Marie, could you have a decent attitude this morning?”
I glared back at her. “Breaking out the middle name already? It isn’t even eight o’clock.”
My whole family shuddered in unison as cold air filled the kitchen, prompting Declan to scoop up his Spider-Man backpack with a grumble. “You guys all suck.”
Evey pushed herself away from the sink and cast a glare at me. “Well, that was unnecessary.”
“What? You don’t believe there was a crazy moron going for a polar bear dip this morning?” I looked at my fifteen-year-old sister, and we exchanged a smirk. Though Evey kept her attitude at bay most of the time—probably because I was usually bursting with enough for both of us—it was still underneath all of that pink-cheeked, well-intended obedience. I considered it my personal goal to bring it out of her as often as possible.
She pursed her mouth. “I think Dec’s been sniffing glue.”
“I have not. That’s rude!” Declan punched at Evey’s arm.
She ducked, narrowly missing his swing. “Watch it.”
“Wow. We’ve got a whole troop of surly kids this morning.” My dad swallowed the rest of his coffee and gently pushed Declan toward the exit. “They all need attitude adjustments.”
“Badly.” My mother shook her head, clearly exasperated as we filed out of the kitchen toward the dusty, red minivan in the driveway.
I turned around and craned my neck so I could see the lake and felt my heart thud against my breastbone. There was nobody in the water, just the green-headed duck, floating in place like a buoy. I wondered if Declan actually
had
seen someone out there. Unlikely. Swimming during March in a lake nearly two thousand feet deep in places was insane.
My mom saw me gazing at the water and offered me a consolation prize. “Pool therapy is tonight.”
“Oh, goodie.” I shoved my binder into my black denim messenger bag covered in safety pins. “Four feet of water and a foam kickboard. Where do I sign up?”
She closed her eyes for a second. “Would it kill you to have a good attitude?”
I propped my bag on my lap, unlatched the brakes on my chair, and wheeled myself toward my mother at the top of the wooden ramp my father had built when they brought me home from the hospital. I cried the first time I saw it.
My brother and sister watched us from the van, and my father rubbed his eyes as though he’d not slept eight hours the night before. Guilt started to tickle the back of my throat, tempting me to apologize, but I swallowed it.
I glared up at my mother seeing only part of her face through my dark veil of hair. “Yes, Mom. It would kill me.”
“Don’t be late after school.” My mother’s voice was brittle as she tossed our bags out of the van door. Offering us a tight smile that never made it to her eyes, she waved. “I’ve got to get my afternoon workout in, and Dad needs me at work as long as possible before I come to the school.”
I caught my messenger bag with one hand and avoided her eyes.
Evey leaned into the front seat and offered Mom a quick kiss on the cheek. “Have a good day.”
“Thanks.” My mom pushed her reddish-blonde bob behind her ear. “Luna, good luck on your test.”
I nodded, pretending the armrest on my chair was the most interesting thing I’d seen in ages.
My mother’s sigh made my stomach twist. Evey pushed the door shut, and the van revved up and peeled out of the back parking lot.
My sister stared down at me over the top of her black-framed glasses.
I ignored her for ten seconds. Twelve. Fifteen. “What!”
“Can’t you be nice to her once in a while?” She slung her backpack onto one shoulder and reached for the handles on the back of my chair.
I slipped my fingerless leather gloves onto my hands. Silver studs decorated the knuckles, but I didn’t wear them as a fashion statement. I wore them because pushing the wheels on my chair burned my palms to hell and stained them black. If there was anything worse than being the girl who survived a horrific car crash that rendered her partially paralyzed, it was being that same girl with callused, filthy hands.
“You don’t have to push me.” I gestured for her to walk next to me.
We crossed the back parking lot of Sandpoint High School, carefully weaving our way around the faculty members’ cars. My mom dropped us off there every morning so I wouldn’t have to drag myself out of the car and into my chair in front of everyone like some kind of morning freak show.
Luna Prosser can’t even, like, get out of her mom’s car now? OMG, do you think she, like, wears diapers now?
Yeah. Kids in my school sometimes forgot that my spinal cord was injured and not my ears. And for the record, I didn’t wear diapers. I still had control of all that stuff. They said I had full sexual function too…though I’d yet to test that theory. I hadn’t even been asked out on a date since becoming a poster child for Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Evey fiddled with the end of her ponytail, twisting it and untwisting it around her long finger. “Listen, I have softball practice starting next Monday.”
She was the only sophomore in the whole school to make varsity. As proud as I know she was, she pretended to be aloof about the whole thing for my sake. Before the accident, I’d been the star of the junior varsity softball team. My coach called me “The Golden Arm” and put me in the front of all of the team photographs even though I was five foot eight and belonged in the back.
Those days were over. He offered me a pitching position as a courtesy when I’d returned to school, but I refused. I wasn’t interested in being some sort of handicapped prodigy, like that one-armed drummer in the eighties hair band my dad was always telling me about.
“I know.” Leaning forward, I hunkered down to push myself up the cement incline that led into the gymnasium entrance. “You’re gonna do awesome. You know that.”
“Thanks.” Her voice was soft. “What are you going to do afterschool without me?”
I shrugged. “I was thinking about taking up drugs.”
She kicked my wheel. “That’s not funny.”
“Ev, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me all the time. You’ll turn into Mom.”
In the time since the accident, Evey and I had become pretty close. It started because I was so dependent on her to help me get around, but the older she got, the more I considered her a friend more than an annoying kid sister. Oh, don’t get me wrong, she still annoyed me—especially when she stole my face soap or borrowed clothes without asking. But since becoming chair-bound, most of my friends pulled away from me, whereas Evey had grown closer. She’d inadvertently become my best friend.
She opened the school door and waited for me to roll past. “I’m only a sophomore. I can wait until next year to play softball if you don’t want to be home alone all the time.”
“I won’t be alone. I’ll have Declan to torture.” I wrinkled my nose as a sweaty jock lumbered past us, cutting right in front of me. “Hey, watch it!”
“Awesome.” She pushed up her glasses and grinned. “So, you’ll be at home all season watching some very tall guy swim in the bay, right?”
“No. I’ll be home all spring watching
ducks
.”
We exited the corridor behind the gym, and the noise of a Wednesday morning hit me like a slap across the face. Throngs of kids shuffled in unison to their classes like zombies, bags and backpacks weighing their arms down. The hum of dozens of different conversations filled my ears: lame teachers, bad grades, strict parents, after-school practices, in-school suspension, boys who behave like jerks, and girls who don’t put out. All of the conversations were the same as every other day, and they made my head pound like a jackhammer.
“At least spring is coming,” Evey offered as we shoved our way into the crowd. “Which means swimming season will be here soon enough.”
I nodded. She was one of the few people who understood how desperate I was to get back into the water. My parents bought me a full-body wet suit last year, and after that I was able to swim in the late fall and early spring. Every single day I woke up waiting for the temperature to hit sixty-five degrees so that I could go for a dip, but the winter here in the Inland Northwest was hanging on for dear life. My only water time was my weekly aqua therapy session with my physical therapist, and that left much to be desired.
“Maybe
I’ll
take a dip this afternoon.” I watched people in the crowd glance over their shoulder. As soon as they spotted me below them in my chair, they’d do their civic duty and shift to the side a bit. Grimacing, I inched forward. Courtesy wasn’t a perquisite to attend my high school.
“Luna, it’s too cold. You’ll cramp up. Not to mention the fact that Mom and Dad will kill you.” She took her place behind me and put her hands on the handles of my chair. “Excuse me.”