I’m suddenly choking, unable to breathe.
I can’t lose them.
I can’t lose them like I lost my father.
“It’s my fault,” I cry out, my voice breaking and I’m so close to breaking myself. Shattering into a million pieces and there’s no glue that will ever hold me back together.
“Shhh,” she says, running her hand over my cheek. “It’s not your fault.”
“I sent them out there!”
“They wanted to go, Anders. They were more than happy to. You said you were helping them, and you did. They are the ones that went, that was their choice. You didn’t give them an order.”
I barely hear her. All I hear is this sick thud of my heartbeat, all I feel is my chest closing up, tighter and tighter.
“Look, what can we do? We have to be able to do something,” she says. “Where abouts are the rescue boats leaving from? What’s the closest port?”
I try to think back to what the dispatcher told me over the phone. “Bessaker. I think it’s a small fishing village. North of Trondheim.”
“Then we go there,” she says. She puts her fingers at my jaw and makes me look at her. Inside, I’m completely lost, but in her eyes I see she’s in control. I surrender myself to her. “We go there. We help out. We do what we can. We don’t sit here, okay?”
I nod slowly, licking my parched lips, the world feeling like it’s at the bottom of a fishbowl. “Okay.”
“Do you want me to drive?”
I blink, her question snapping me out of it. “You? Drive? This car?”
She gives me a quick smile. I don’t think she meant it. Maybe. “Okay. Then if you can drive, let’s get going. I’ll plug in the location on my GPS.” She brings out her phone and asks me to spell the name of the town for her. Then she plugs it in, frowns. Shows me the screen.
We’re about two hours south of Trondheim right now, but close to the highway that bisects the country in half, the E-6. It will take us five hours, and hopefully the ferry we have to use is running on time.
“Let’s go,” I tell her, shoving my heartache and anxiety and doom somewhere deep down until I have to deal with it later. Until then, I need to concentrate on driving, on getting me and Shay there in one piece, especially with the weather being the way it is.
I bring the Datsun back on the road, zipping along the river and heading further inland. I glance at her quickly, my heart waterlogged. “You don’t have to come. I’ll have to drive through Trondheim anyway. I’ll drop you off at your hotel.”
She turns her head and gives me a steady look. “If you think you’re getting rid of me that easily now…”
“I was never trying to get rid of you,” I tell her, my hands gripping the steering wheel as our fight from yesterday settles over us. I don’t want to bring it up, I don’t want to rehash it, but I also don’t want her to think that I don’t want her. “Shay.”
“It’s fine,” she says, looking out the window. “Just drive. We need to concentrate on Epsen and Dag.”
And the boat, I finish in my head. Because the boat is as alive as they are. The boat is my father, my duty, my legacy, personified.
“We’ve got five hours,” I tell her. “That’s a long time to not discuss what happened yesterday. And I know we should be thinking about them right now, I know it, but I also know that if I do, if I let my imagination run away on me, that I might sink so deep I’ll never come back up. Okay?”
She doesn’t say anything to that.
“And so, I’m going to talk,” I go on. “We’re going to talk about what happened.”
“Nothing has changed,” she grumbles.
I sigh heavily. “I don’t…I don’t want you to think that I don’t want to be with you. That you don’t make me happy. Shay, you make me so unbelievably happy that it’s like, when I’m with you, I’m not even myself anymore. I’m someone better. Someone with a new purpose and that purpose is you and—”
“Stop,” she whispers, and when she looks at me, her eyes are wet with tears. “I don’t want to hear this. It doesn’t help. Why tell me all that if it’s not going to change anything? Because it feels good to say? Anders, it kills me to hear it. So please. Just please, stop talking. We said all there is to say yesterday, and you made it more than clear why this won’t work between us, and I get it. I get it now.” She pauses, pressing her lips together for a moment. “You’re right.”
“But I don’t want to be right,” I tell her.
She doesn’t say anything. Turns her body away from mine, resting her head against the window, closing her eyes. Shutting me out, just as I’ve shut her out.
So much for distracting me during our five-hour drive.
In fact, Shay ends up falling asleep until we get to Trondheim, when I reach over and purposefully wake her up. I guess with all this traveling, she’s become a pro at falling asleep in cars, planes, and trains.
My mind goes back to when she first got off that train in Trondheim, at the station, when I first saw her in the flesh after so many years. I had no idea what I was getting myself into with her, but I knew I had to do everything in my power to keep her in my life again. That I wouldn’t make the same mistakes I did before.
And what am I doing now?
Making the exact same fucking mistakes.
When I was a young fuck-up, I hated myself so much. It was hard not to hate myself. I had a father I didn’t see eye-to-eye with, who became a shell of a man after my mother left him. Maybe I reminded him of her too
