The woman sees it as a sign to swim faster in the water.
Until she suddenly stops.
I don’t care why she stops. With us no longer moving, I can study her features more clearly, I can see the light freckles dusting over her nose, I can see the gold flecks in her otherwise dark brown eyes, I can see the streaks of red in her hair as the sun catches it just right, as it begins to rise over the horizon behind her.
And I know in this moment she is my angel. She is here to take all of my pain away. And I’ll forever be thankful for her.
She shakes her head at me again, disappointed, but I don’t understand why.
She reaches for something behind her, and my gaze runs along her tanned arm to the tip of her red painted fingernails as she grips the first rung of the ladder.
A ladder?
She hosts herself out of the water, dragging me to the ladder behind her. I grip on automatically, and then I’m pulled into a boat.
We both fall to the wooden deck, exhausted and panting heavily.
“I don’t know why I risked my life to save you when it’s clear you wanted to die,” she says.
“Die?” I ask.
She nods. “You dove under the water just as I shouted that I was going to throw you a lifesaver.”
My eyes widen. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I never heard her speak before I went under.
Her eyes soften as she realizes I didn’t hear her. I was just an anguished man, who was tired of the pain and needed to end his life on his own terms.
She quickly looks over my body until she sees the blood oozing from my chest where the bullet hit me. She grabs for a towel behind her and holds it to my wound, applying pressure with her hands.
“Is this real?” I ask. Or is this the end? The pressure of the ocean squeezing out the last drops of oxygen from my lungs?
“This is real. You are on my sailboat off the shores of Saint Kitts. We can make it back to the island in about two hours if the weather is in our favor. Do you think you can hold on that long, sailor?”
I nod.
She gives me the faintest hint of a smile or at least what I assume for her is a smile. Her lips thin, her eyes turn bright, and her cheeks shade pink.
“You’re my angel,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I’m no angel.”
“What’s your name?”
“You can call me Siren.”
Siren—such a beautiful, unique name. A name that for thousands of years meant death to any sailor who met a siren. But this woman isn’t like the mythical stories. This woman saved my life.
I close my eyes, needing rest.
She strokes my face, running her hands through my long hair.
She starts humming, and it’s the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. Calming, entrancing, enduring. If I could stay awake, I would, just to listen to her voice.
“I shouldn’t have saved you,” she says. But then she’s right back to humming and singing with her heavenly voice.
She’s wrong. I will make her see that risking her life was worth it. She saved me. Now I owe her. And I never relent on a debt.
1
Siren
THREE MONTHS LATER
I was raised to tell the truth, no matter what. It should be my greatest virtue. Instead, I consider it my greatest weakness. Maybe it’s because of how I learned the skill that makes me feel this way. But the truth of the matter is that I can’t lie.
Can’t—as in can’t physically make my mouth form the words to tell a lie. I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s my truth.
It started when I was three. My best friend in the world at the time, Gavin, ripped my favorite doll out of my hands, so I pushed him. He ended up crying for the next twenty minutes, loudly enough that my father came to check on us. When he asked me what happened, I lied. I said he had fallen and hurt himself, not because I pushed him. That was my first lesson, my first mistake.
What my three-year-old self didn’t realize was that my father had been listening to Gavin and me fighting in my bedroom behind the door. He heard me shove him. He knew I wasn’t telling the truth. And I paid for my sin, dealt by my father’s belt.
At three, I didn’t quite realize what sinning was, but over the years, my pastor father and religious mother drilled the message into me. Lying was a sin equal to murder in their eyes. Whether it was the smallest of white lies or biggest of lies, it made no difference in their eyes.
It was a sin.
I was a sinner.
And so I had to be punished.
But I also learned another important lesson in those first few years of life; I’m not a fast learner. The daily beatings did nothing to stop my lies. I didn’t lie about anything big—just normal childhood fibs.
Did I eat a cookie before dinner? No, I lied. Slap.
Did I finish all my homework? Yes, I lied. Slap.
Did I drink alcohol at the party? No, I lied. Slap.
And over and over again. I lied. I sinned. I was punished.
It took me almost eighteen years to finally learn my lesson. Eighteen years of groundings, spankings, beatings. Eighteen years of being wrecked and broken—until the lies finally stopped.
I can’t lie now, even as a thirty-two-year-old woman. I got pulled over for speeding last year. When the cop asked me if I knew I was speeding, I said yes. I couldn’t lie, I couldn’t fib and say that I didn’t know the exact speed I was going. I said I knew I was going exactly twelve miles over the speed limit. I got the ticket.
But it’s not all bad. Telling the truth has saved me as many times as it’s gotten me into trouble. For example, when I was twenty-one, my boyfriend at the time and I went through an adventurous sex phase. We tried all the toys, positions that we could find. One drunken night my boyfriend thought he was shoving a dildo into my ass turned out it was a spiked paddle. I bled, we got scared and ended up in the emergency room. Normal, rational people might fib, embarrassed by the truth. But I told them exactly what happened and got medical care much faster.
But sometimes a lie could save me, even from the smallest of things. When my friend, Rue, asked me how her butt looks in her new dress, I told her the truth—it makes her butt look too big. Times like those, I wish I could lie. I wish I could spare her feelings, my cheek when she slaps me, and the turmoil our friendship goes through every time I tell her the truth when she’s looking for me to lie.
It’s my burden, my curse, and my greatest strength.
My sailboat floats into the harbor of Saint Kitts with just me aboard. It’s a beautiful day, but why do I have a sinking feeling in my stomach every time I come back here?
I try not to focus on the feeling in my gut; after all, I’ve learned not to trust it. It’s led me in the wrong direction many times before.
I tie off my sailboat, and then I hop down to the shaky pier. The wood beneath my sandaled feet is worn, the paint stripped from the harsh weather here. Each step I take, the wood creaks, the pier sways. All it would take is one mediocre storm to wash this all away. Yet, somehow day after day, year after year, the pier and the small town relying on it, remains.
I strut down the pier with my bag thrown over my shoulder. Even though I’ve been a resident of this island for years, it doesn’t stop the men’s eyes from stalking me as I walk.