Page 67 of Swept Away

I go higher. Higher. For a while I sing to myself to pass the time, “How Far I’ll Go” fromMoana, and I think about dancing drunk on the deck with Zeke. We knew we were in danger then, but it was different—with hindsight, it was a less pressing sort of danger. We might die, but notimminently. Whereas right now…

It gets windier the higher I go, the breeze buffeting my ears with the sound you hear if you crack a window in the car on the motorway. I look up: I don’t think I’m even close to halfway.

My foot slips again. Properly this time, the result of tired legs and endless repetitive motion. I jolt forward and whack my nose on a rung of the ladder. Pain blooms. I cry out, clinging on, and suddenly my breath isn’t just fluttering in my mouth, it’s catching helplessly on the wind, too fast, out of control.I’m going to die, I think, and the moment I’ve let the thought in, it floods through me.I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.

The pain in my nose has made my eyes water, and the tears on my cheeks seem to set something off—I’m crying in earnest now.

“Oh my God. I’m going to die.” I say it out loud and it gets truer, and I’m staring down now; I couldn’t resist, because the fear said,Go on, just check, just once.

The rig platform looks like a child’s toy down below me. I can’t see Zeke, just a lacework of machinery and swathes of color below it: rusty red, gray concrete, the speckling blackness of all thosemussel shells. Bird poo forms vivid green tie-dyed patches on the rig floor, spread and reshaped by the glinting puddles.

It swims, shifts, like a reflection in water. I can see the edges of the rig—that’s how high I am. The full width of it lies below me, and then sea. Vomit rises in my throat. I tilt my chin up and force myself to look at the top of the tower, its apex black against the sky.

I can’t go up any more. I just can’t. I shift one trembling foot, planning to climb down, but I don’t know that motion; I don’t know the distance to the rung below—I only know up, up, up.

I can’t go down. I can’t go up. I’m stuck here. The panic is all-engulfing; it takes me under. I cling and I sob, useless, in an absolute frenzy of terror. Sweat runs down my back and tears drip from my chin, spiraling downward into the tiny bird’s-eye landscape below me.

“Lexi, you’re OK.”

I inhale sharply at the sound of Zeke’s voice.

“Lexi? Listen to me. I’m right below you. OK?”

“Why?” I choke out. I’m angry, because why have I done all this if he was just going to come up anyway and risk himself? But I’m relieved, too, because thank God, thank God, I’m not alone.

“You telling me you’d let me enjoy the view up here all on my own, if the roles were reversed?”

“Zeke,” I say, shoulders shaking as I sob, “I can’t do this.”

“Course you can.” He sounds so calm. “You’re the person who threw herself into the ocean half-concussed to get us here. The person who carried an injured seagull in a shoebox from the boat to the rig because you didn’t want him to get lonely.”

“Youdidn’t want him to get lonely,” I manage, my words catching on a sob halfway. “I said leave him in the fucking boat.”

“You said that, but then there he was in the mess room when I came back out with dinner,” Zeke says, with a smile in his voice.

“I was just keeping busy while you cooked,” I say, voice thick.

“Uh-huh. Of course.”

He sounds as though he’s just below me, but I can’t possibly look down—my gaze is fixed on a patch of white sky. While I’m looking into nothing, then I can almost imagine I’m not here.

“Zeke…”

“Lexi.”

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

“I can’t.”

“Take a breath. You’ve done amazingly. We’re almost at the top.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” I sob. “It’s all for nothing if you rip open your stitches or fall off and die, you selfless moron.”

“Can you look at me?”

“You want me to look down?”

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