CHAPTER 1:
BEN
Everyone thought I had drowned. That I’d died on a day in February almost two years ago.
Everyone was wrong.
I hadn’t died that day, and the truth was out now that I was perfectly fine and perfectly alive. But for so long that was what everyone had believed; what I’d deliberately led everyone to believe. My family even had a funeral for me, the real-deal kind where all my relatives had attended, where half the people who’d known me in high school had attended, where my obituary had been published in the paper, and where my family had even buried an empty coffin filled with some of my favorite childhood possessions. I had a grave. And my grave at the local cemetery still existed. It had been a while since everyone discovered the truth about me, but no one had bothered removing the grave yet. Kind of messed up, I suppose. Then again, everything about my life was messed up, so my whole ‘fake grave’ and ‘fake death’ were both just kind of on par for the course.
My ‘fake death’ happened when I’d been out on a rescue mission with my Coast Guard team, somewhere off the coast of California. I’d fallen overboard, stupidly enough. A simple mistake in footing really—or maybe my mistake had been a little bit on purpose. Looking back now, it was hard to say with absolute certainty. Either way, the wind and the choppiness of the sea, combined with the blackness of night, had easily engulfed my body the moment I hit the water’s surface. The ocean devoured me up like a ravenous dog. I was at the mercy of the storm and current, choking on salt water, being tossed around in waves as tall as a two-story house, struggling to keep my head above water.
Despite the odds, and despite the fact that I’m pretty sure a big part of me had initially wanted to drown, somehow I persevered. I lived through the night. Like a switch being flipped, some basic survival instinct inside me clicked—the fight or flight instinct—and I fought for my life that night.
It was the longest eight (or so) hours of my existence. But somehow, I found myself exhausted, terrified, and covered in sand the following morning. Maybe I had a guardian angel out there, or maybe God was punishing me by keeping me on this earth a little longer. Who knows? But I lived. I made it to shore. Not just any shore either, I’d washed up on Malibu Beach.
Carrie Stone, the widow of the late Joey Stone, a Hollywood director who’d overdosed on heroine in the early nineties, found me. Actually, her live-in male nurse, Kale, had found me. The man, all three hundred pounds of him, had discovered me and hauled my ass up the beach. I still remember the moment he flopped my body across the dining room table like a sandy fish.
Giant. Crystal. Chandelier.
Ugh—
Blinking through the saltiness and disorientation, I attempted to open my eyes. Everything was a blur, but I noticed that there was a big chandelier hanging above me. That and two people hovering. One very large man and one very tiny old woman. A strange rocking sensation, like I was still outside in the ocean treading water, consumed my whole body, and I blinked my eyes, checking to see if I was actually awake.
I was. Unfortunately.
Where the hell was I?
What the hell was going on?
Every muscle in my body ached.
“Dear, God,” came the wavery, shaky voice of the elderly woman. She was thin and frail and she held onto a walker as she tried to inspect me. “Is he dead?” the woman gasped. “Did you just drop a dead man onto my table?”
“No,” answered the large man. He had dark skin, was in his mid-thirties, and was possibly Hawaiian. “His eyes are open. See?” He pointed.
The old woman chuckled, placing a leathery hand against her very thin throat. “You’re right, his eyes are open,” she said, scrutinizing me like I wasn’t awake and staring right back at her. “I’m blind as shit, Kale,” she told the man. “Go find my glasses for me, honey. Please. Then let’s call him an ambulance. And then I’m going to need a gin.”
I was groggy. I felt like death. My mouth was drier than a cotton ball and my skin itched. I knew I had to be dehydrated, probably dangerously so because my thoughts weren’t fully coherent, but the last thing I wanted was the ambulance.
“Please, no,” I choked out. “No ambulance.”
“Sweet cakes,” the woman said, glancing down over my body. “You look like hell. Did you have too much to drink and go skinny-dipping last night? Swim out too far from shore? Because that happens to the best of us, but you look like you need some medical help.”
Um, sweet cakes? Um, skinny-dipping? With as much strength as I could muster, I lifted my heavy-as-hell head up off the table to glance down at my body. I still had on my underwear, thank God, but everything else was gone. My uniform, my gear, my shoes—all of it. The ocean had literally chewed me up and spit me back out.
“Ma-am,” I said to the old woman, letting my head flop back down on her hard table, “being on this table, right here, right now, is the best I’ve felt, the freest I’ve been, in over a year. Please. I just—I just don’t want to go back to my life just yet. Can you give me thirty minutes? Please. Anything?”
I was begging. I was pleading.
I couldn’t help myself.
I was desperate.
She sighed. “Fine. As long as Kale says it’s okay. He’s a nurse, my nurse. If he says you’re fine, then you can stay as long as you want. If he says we need to call an ambulance, then we’re calling an ambulance.”
My life hinged on whatever this Kale person would decide.
Swallowing hard, I nodded. Fuck me, I think I was crying. Or at least, if I wasn’t so dehydrated I would have been crying. My eyes burned. Kale came back into the room with the old woman’s glasses. Once they were in place on her face, she had the man inspect me.
“I’ll start an IV,” he decided. “Once he gets some fluids in him and some rest, he should be fine.”
And I was fine. Other than the fact that I was mostly naked, on some stranger’s dining room table, with a large man nursing me back to health, I was fine. Physically, fine.
Mentally…not so much. That was a bit more questionable.
Because I didn’t end up staying only thirty more minutes with the old woman and her nurse. I stayed in Mrs. Carrie Stone’s Malibu beach house for the next nine months.
Me, Carrie, Kale, and her neighbor’s cat (which I soon found she frequently took care of) were all suddenly roommates. It’s funny where life can take you sometimes. And my decision to stay at Carrie’s house (rather than telling anyone I was still alive) was both the worst and best decision of my life.
The Coast Guard searched for me. They had dozens of rescue ships, helicopters, and volunteers off the coast, scanning the water, working desperately to locate my body. Except my body wasn’t out there to be found. Instead my body watched everything unfold on the nightly news, all from the comfort of Carrie’s magenta, living room couch. The three of us—me, Carrie, and Kale—all sat glued to that television for four days straight.
“Lost at sea.” That was phrase the media kept repeating.
Then—on day four—the phrase turned into “lost at sea, declared dead.”
Wow, shit just got fucking real.
The world thought I was dead. My family thought I was dead. People I went to high school with, people I grew up with, my ex-girlfriend Sonya, everyone I had ever known, everyone thought I was dead—that I’d drowned that night. And I let them continue to think the worst.
Carrie Stone didn’t even care. She didn’t care that I was using her house as my hideout, eating her food, and borrowing her late husband’s clothes. I think the old woman was that desperate for more company that she didn’t even try to push me into telling the truth; in fact, she encouraged the opposite.
“Oh honey, sometimes you just have to say, ‘fuck you, world,’ and you do whatever it is you have to do to make yourself happy. Stop living for everyone else.” That was what she’d told me. Maybe, because of her age or perhaps due to the privileged, consequence-free life she’d always lived, she didn’t understand the gravity of my decision.
Kale understood.
“Dude, this will blow up in your face.” That had been his one warning. Beyond that though, Kale stayed out of my business and did nothing to alert the world that I still lived.
So I got away with it.
And for a little while it was really nice being ‘fake dead’. No responsibilities. No pressures. Only a small, sharp-witted old woman to contend with, beautiful sunsets to enjoy on the balcony overlooking the Pacific, and all the Netflix binge shows a person could ever dream of. At one point, I stayed in my pajamas for an entire week straight. It was great taking time off from being…me. Still, there were certain regrets from my past that couldn’t be undone, but for a short while the pain from those mistakes was almost bearable.
But that was then. And this was now. Now everyone knew about my lie. I guess it all came down to the fact that I couldn’t stay dead forever. Eventually I caved and called my sister Ellie, needing to know how she was and how my family was. From there, things spiraled. She told a couple of her friends and then brought my other sister Georgina out to California to see me. Thus blowing my cover. After that I knew I had to tell the rest of my family. I had to man up and grow the fuck up. It sucked, but I had to do it. My secret was out and just like Kale had warned, everything blew up in my face.
It wasn’t just a matter of ‘wow, Ben’s alive’ either. Since I hadn’t died and I was still of ‘sound mind’ (that was the term the lawyers kept throwing around during my trial), the Coast Guard legally found me guilty of being a deserter and I was dishonorably discharged. I faced a sentence of one year in prison, which ended up being reduced to nine months—to match the nine months of my AWOL period. Which kind of felt like an eye for an eye in the end. Then the state of California sued my ass.
So…yeah…Kale had been right, it had all fucking blown up in my face.
Prison was not fun. Neither was probation. Or my parole officer, Jack ‘the hard-ass.’ Or the fact that I was not legally allowed to leave Kill Devil Hills, the town I’d grown up in, the town I now despised, for the next three months. There were hours of community service left to serve and thousands of dollars that I owed my parents. Everyone now knew just how undead I actually was, and everyone hated me for it.
So much time had passed since I’d made my original decision to leave Kill Devil Hills. It had only been a couple of years, but it felt like a lifetime. I’d enrolled in community college classes the summer after my junior year of high school, earned the credits needed to graduate a whole year early, and sacked all thoughts of ever going to a typical four-year university. I’d even given up the possibility of a future playing college football. Because I’d been damn good at football too, maybe even good enough for the NFL one day. But instead of chasing the dreams everyone always expected me to chase, I enlisted in the Coast Guard. It was the quickest way out, and I took it. I got the hell out of Kill Devil Hills.
Which was supposed to solve all my problems.
But there are some mistakes that can’t be solved by running away, or even by faking my own death. I’d been naïve to think otherwise. And now here I was, right back in the same spot I’d started, back in Kill Devil Hills.
* * *
“Hey you, weirdo,” yelled a voice that I knew had to be my sister Ellie’s. All my sisters sounded alike. But only Ellie would call me a weirdo—at least to my face. “It’s fucking freezing out here, Ben. Get up. Get inside.”
Sure enough. There was Ellie, appearing out of nowhere, yanking on my arm, trying to make me stand. I had my butt firmly planted in the freezing sand where I’d been sitting for the last hour straight, staring at the ocean, avoiding being inside with everyone else. It was February in North Carolina, it was below freezing today, my hands didn’t have any feeling left in them, but I hardly cared.
“Do you have a death wish?” my sister nagged. “Don’t answer that. Just come inside. It’s starting to get dark out here.”
I didn’t respond, but I did stand.
She huffed at me just the same. Her cheeks were rosy from the blistering cold wind coming off the ocean. A portion of her coffee-colored brown hair had been shaved short, while the rest she’d let grow long. My sister was always experimenting with different hair styles, this might have been her craziest yet. The long half whipped around her face as she scowled at me, her hands landing on her hips. “You could at least try,” she yelled. “You’ve been back home a whole week already and I don’t think I’ve heard you say two words to Georgie. Try!” And with that last word, she slugged my arm with her tiny fist.
Ouch.
Her massive wedding ring was going to leave a mark. The thing was something like eight carats, a giant sapphire, and even through my sweatshirt I could feel it. She got married this past year while I was in prison. She hadn’t waited for me to get out. I couldn’t blame her, obviously I didn’t expect my sister to put her life on pause for me, but it still fucking blew that I’d missed it.
“I don’t know where to start with Georgina,” I admitted, rubbing at my arm. “And watch it with that thing.” I meant her ring.
Up until she started dating actor Nate West, her now husband, my sister had always defined herself as a lesbian. At least that was what I’d assumed. It had been the shock of the century when I found out she was dating a man. Any man. Celebrity or not. Completely shocking. I still wasn’t sure if I bought it, but it wasn’t my business to question her relationship either way. And I liked Nate—Nathanial, as he preferred—so I sincerely hoped it was what she wanted.
“A simple ‘hi’ seems like a good place to start,” Ellie said. “Just say anything to her.”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll do that,” I responded, nodding, saying whatever to appease Ellie for the moment. It wasn’t so black and white with Georgina. In fact, it was gray as fuck.
I followed Ellie across the beach, up the wooden stairs that cut through the dunes, and back toward our parent’s house. This promised to be another awkward evening at the Turner house, as all evenings this past week had been. That was when I spotted a light on at ‘Sol Mate’—the vacation rental property that sat to the left of our house. Seeing that light made a little shiver run up my spine, almost like I knew something wasn’t right over there.
A lot of the houses in the Outer Banks had names. My parent’s house was named ‘The Shore Thing.’ But I was pretty damn certain ‘Sol Mate’ wasn’t currently available to renters. My mom had mentioned that the owners, the Davenports, had recently lost the dad in the family, and that it was now up for sale. She’d know too. My mom was a real estate agent.
Someone probably left a light on by accident, I assured myself, dismissing the little voice in my head that was telling me otherwise. I had a tendency to overthink things. This was probably just another one of those instances.
Ellie and I entered our house through the lower level. Basements were impossible this close to the ocean, but in all practicality, the lower level was our basement. It had Ellie’s old room, a guest room, a bathroom, and a game room. We took the stairs up to the main level where the kitchen, living room, and everyone else would be.
Ellie didn’t live here anymore. She was the oldest of my siblings, twenty-six now, and hadn’t lived at home since high school. She lived with her husband now, but since it was physically impossible for her to miss out on any sort of family drama, and Nathanial was on location filming the latest season of his TV show, she’d been staying here since I’d returned. Georgina wasn’t typically at home either. As a twenty-year-old, my sister should have been finishing up her second semester of her sophomore year of college. But she was, and I quote, “taking a break from school.”
Add that to my long list of issues with Georgina.
Compared to the girl I once knew, my middle sister had done a complete 360. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that she was dating Noah—Ellie’s oddball, best friend who never said much. I didn’t like her break from school because I feared that it meant she would drop out for good. And worst of all, I didn’t like how she’d tried to commit suicide after my ‘fake’ death. Because I knew about that now, when I hadn’t during my stay in Malibu, and every time I thought about it, my throat would close up and I’d barely be able to breathe.
Maybe I shouldn’t have run off from my family, maybe I shouldn’t have been so careless the night I fell overboard, and maybe I shouldn’t have stayed hidden in California for as long as I had. But, fuck, Georgina shouldn’t have tried to take her own life. That one was one hundred percent on her. It wasn’t me that picked up the knife that slit her wrists.
It wasn’t me…but it sure felt like it was. It sickened me to the core every time I thought about it. Sure, she seemed better now, happy and fine, dating Noah and all, but was she really fine? How could anyone know that for certain after what she’d done? What if she tried it again? I’d always thought my sister was a strong person. Now I wasn’t so certain.
Except—I lost my right to have an opinion the day I left. Which meant I was in a constant state of internal confliction. All I wanted was to say exactly how I felt, to everyone, but at the same time I knew I had to keep my mouth shut.
Okay…
Ellie and I came into the living room and everyone was gathered around. The whole family, front and center, crammed on the L-shaped couch, waiting for us to walk in. Mom, Dad, my little sister Rose, Georgina and Noah, and even my new brother-in-law Nathanial. Which I’d thought Nathanial was supposed to be in Africa or something, but I guess whatever this was about was more important than his career. If it had been my birthday, I would have expected everyone to yell surprise.
“Shit, it’s an intervention,” I said, voicing my realization aloud and wishing like hell that I could be back in Malibu right this moment.
“What? No,” Georgina answered, the first to respond. Her voice was soft, her blue eyes gentle, and a smile of excitement on her face. “I gathered everyone here because Noah and I have an announcement. I’m pregnant.” She squeezed his hand in her lap. “Well, everyone else kind of already knows, but we hadn’t really formally announced it. So, yeah, that’s the big news. Surprise.”
Oh, Jesus, my head was going to explode.
I gritted my teeth and attempted to smile.