Below The Surface. Karen Harper

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СКАЧАТЬ she dead? Briana wondered. She slitted her eyes open, just barely, trying to keep the bright lights out of her dark brain. She felt loggy, helpless, at the mercy of the sliding, shifting sea. Up, down, all around…But the sky looked whiter now, too bright, one big cloud floating over her with more than one sun in it. Ceiling lights. They hurt her eyes, and even when people spoke across the room, it seemed they shouted at her.

      People’s faces, unfamiliar, swam in and out above her. The sharks were gone. Had they been real? Daria, her mirror image, where was she? She didn’t like to dive alone, she wanted Daria, her other self, there when they stepped together through the looking glass into the wonderland of the deep.

      Someone forced her eyelids apart and shone a bright light into the depths of her brain. She jerked away. She tried to lift her hands to shield her face, but one of her arms was heavy with tubes and the other was bandaged and hurt like heck. A man—a doctor—leaned over her. Oh, Amelia was standing beside him. Why was Amelia here? And who was the tall, handsome man with dark eyes and black hair, his face so worried as he looked her over? His clothes showed he was not another doctor. Had he been swimming with her?

      “What happened?” she tried to ask, but she didn’t sound like herself and no one answered. What was the matter with these people? And where was Daria?

      “She sustained no burns except on her left wrist, where she wore a stainless-steel dive watch,” the doctor was telling Amelia and the man. “Actually, it’s probably a skin lesion—an inflammatory response—which may disappear in a few days. I’ve already ordered a CT scan and an MRI, and we’ll have her in a room as soon as possible, so we can monitor her better. We’ll do some functional scans but call in a specialist for that.”

      “Functional—function of the brain?” the man asked, his deep voice a soothing whisper compared to the others.

      “Precisely. Aftereffects can vary widely. And although her pupils are dilated, I want to assure you that does not necessarily mean brain injury, Mrs. Westcott.” He leaned closer, very close. “Briana, I’m Dr. Hawkins. Can you hear me?”

      She could hear him, all right. She heard every sound in this place, even the dripping of that bag above into her tube. “Yes,” she said with great effort, because she didn’t think she had the strength to nod. Her lips felt stiff and cracked. “Where’s Daria?”

      The tall man spoke again. “Brianna, can you tell us where you last saw Daria?”

      She fought to form her words. They had to help find Daria.

      “When I dove—off our boat—at Trade Wreck—before the storm.”

      Amelia gasped, a sound that pierced Bree’s eardrums. “You mean she could be lost at sea?” her sister demanded, but the man put his hand on Amelia’s arm to keep her quiet.

      “Was she still on the boat when you saw her last?” he asked.

      “Yes. Yes!”

      “Then she’ll be all right,” Amelia said. “She probably had to ride out the storm, or put in somewhere else.” She squeezed Bree’s shoulder and moved away with the doctor.

      No, Bree wanted to scream. Didn’t they know Daria never would have left her? Not of her own accord.

      “We’ll look for her and find her,” the tall man said, and put his big hand lightly on her shoulder where Amelia’s had just been. His hand was warm, solid. Where had she seen him before? “Just try to rest now,” he said.

      If Amelia and the doctor thought they were whispering when they moved away, she heard them anyway. The doctor was saying that a lightning strike near her in the water—a side flash—must have given her a concussion. He told Amelia she might have sporadic amnesia or become moody, distracted, irritable or forgetful.

      Exhausted as she was, Bree vowed never to forget what had happened to Daria. But what had happened? At least that man said he would help. He said “we” would find Daria. She should know who he was, but she could not recall. She felt both fearful and furious, so the doctor must be right about her moods, but she could not have amnesia, not about Daria.

      Though Bree was afraid if she closed her eyes again she’d see the horror of the sea, the sharks, she pressed her eyelids tightly closed. Amazing how these bright lights hurt her eyes and how she could hear even the shuffle of the nurses’ feet on the floors. Other people’s voices and moans, cries of pain. Was she really hearing those or were they deep inside her?

      The occasional screech of the curtains’ rings across the metal rods almost deafened her. She could hear the man ask Amelia for her cell phone and then take it outside the curtain to make a call to the coast guard to tell them about Daria and their dive boat.

      Exhausted, sick, she felt so strange, but Bree knew then what she had to do, even if that man had promised to look for Daria, even if he was calling for help. When Amelia and the doctor weren’t looking, she had to get out of this bed, get another boat and go find her sister somewhere out on the dark, devouring sea.

      4

      It seemed to Bree that the nurses tried to keep her awake all night, not that she had time to sleep anyway. She wanted to get out of bed, find her clothes and find Daria. But nurses came in to check her eyes, shining pinpoints of light into them. They took her blood pressure and checked her drips. She heard them come and go, heard one chewing gum. And always, she thought she heard the roar of the wind and waves.

      Despite her desire to stay awake and get up, each time they walked away, Bree slept the sleep of the dead. Had they drugged her? Had someone drugged Daria, too? Had she seen drug dealers trying to make a drop and they knew they had to silence her? Had the horrible people who brought in women for the twentieth-century slave trade called human trafficking come upon her and taken her prisoner, too? Daria would never desert her. Bree knew Daria as well as she knew herself, didn’t she?

      Fighting a riptide of fear, she swam from nightmare to nightmare, but was suddenly aware that someone sat by her side. A woman. Amelia, when Bree wanted it desperately to be Daria.

      “So strong, the water,” she said, once in the midst of a waking dream in which she was trying to tell her handsome rescuer what had happened. She was safe in his arms, huddled against him for protection. She never thought she’d need or want a man that way. Who was he? Shouldn’t she remember?

      “Just a minute. I’ll get you some water,” Amelia said, evidently thinking she’d asked for a drink. She held up a glass with a straw to her lips. Bree saw that it was barely dawn and she was in a private room. Light poured through the window as bright as noon sun.

      “Any news? Did they find her?” she asked, then drank greedily. She knew one of the tubes in her arm was to hydrate her, but her throat was so dry.

      “They’re going to do a wide search at first light, so that’s right now. The coast guard’s starting with the coordinates your boatman gave them and did an initial sweep of the area last night.”

      Manny. If only Manny had been with them as usual, this never would have happened…and then Daria’s sudden toothache…Bree ached all over.

      “My boatman’s name,” she told Amelia, exhausted from the little effort of drinking, “is Manuel Salazar—Manny. Please call and tell him I’m okay.”

      But what was the name of that other boatman, the sailor? She felt СКАЧАТЬ