“Who’s starting?” she said. “If you want to drink, let’s hear it from the heart.”
Bodie reached out. “I spent two hours at an eighth birthday party,” he told them after taking a swig from the bottle. “It was six minutes from my home. My parents dropped me off and left me there because it was for my best friend, Darcey. It was interrupted by the police toward the end. They asked for me and sat me down, told me what happened. I didn’t cry. It didn’t hit home. I didn’t believe them. Darcey’s parents and others said they would look after me for a while and they did. It was a blur. I don’t remember any of it. But what I do remember was the cold on that first night in the orphanage. The cold that was solely in my head and heart, because they kept that place at boiling point. It was the coldest night of my life.”
Cassidy swigged from the bottle and went next. “All the horror stories you hear about kids are worse than mine. I had two parents who wanted me. But they never loved me. I was an ornament, a necessary object you take along to shows and parties. The thing is — and you should all hear this — a child knows. They know when love isn’t reciprocal. They know when a parent or grandparent loves one child more than the other. They know at a very early age, and why would you, a grown-up, want to put an innocent child through that kind of trauma? The pain of realization. The pain of knowing. You will change them for life. I knew, and I cried myself to sleep every night. I fought it, denied it, finally accepted it. I tried to change them.” She shook her head, the memory causing a tear to sparkle in her eye. “Imagine that… a child so starved of affection she tries to change her parents. But I wasn’t strong enough. No child is. I ended up leaving them and never once looked back.”
She passed the bottle on. A raft of stars painted the lightless vault with a pale, glittering patina above their heads. Jemma was up next.
“I can’t match any of you guys. Honestly, I don’t deserve to share the same bottle. My upbringing was fine, my choices all good. Maybe I was a loner; some kids thought I was different. Shunned at school by the prom queen and her pals,” she said with a distinct eye roll. “I had normal kids’ problems, I guess. Go figure.”
Heidi wrenched the bottle from her. “You’re right. That’s not even trying. Spit that out right now!” She laughed and continued quickly. “Hard upbringing for me, but not dreadful. My father was tough, loud, and unfair. Taught me a lot, though, about life. He was a cop. Some gangbangers shot him in a convenience store. They didn’t have to. He didn’t pull on them. Didn’t even move, just told them he had a daughter waiting at home. They gunned him down for sport, for a scalp. Later it made me want to become a cop of some sort. Maybe… maybe it shouldn’t have. Because I’m sure not cut out to juggle work and family life. Not this kinda work, anyway.”
“They catch those bastards?” Gunn asked.
“Yeah, caught ’em. Judge and jury’d ’em. Of course, they’re back on the street while my dad rots in a grave.”
Heidi took a second swig.
Bodie looked around the circle. Only Gunn and Lucie remained, since Cross hadn’t joined them, and neither looked ready to accept the bottle. He sighed and took it again. “Best friends before the accident,” he said, smiling now, although he didn’t know it. “Scott, Brian, Jim, and Darcey. We formed this gang, a fun one. We did dares and had adventures and looked out for each other. We were the Famous Five, you know? We were untouchable, unbreakable, like all happy kids are. We were the Forever Gang.” He raised the bottle.
“To you, my friends, wherever you are now.”
“You never told us about them before,” Cassidy said, interested.
“I know, and the more I think about them the more I understand why. You guys remind me of them, and the memory is… painful.”
Heidi took the bottle back, draining another mouthful. “My daughter, the best thing that ever happened to me, the one who holds my heart in her hand, thinks I do this job because I don’t love her.” She stared at Cassidy. “I do. More than life. More than breath. But she’s reading it wrong.”
Cassidy held up a hand. “Then tell her. Face-to-face. There’s no instant messenger or text between true family and friends. Between real partners. It has to be personal.”
One of the SEALs came up to them. “Keep it down,” he said. “Or go to bed.”
“Yeeees, Dad,” Lucie said to everyone’s surprise, and gave him a salute.
She reached for the bottle.
Heidi kept it from her, staring, and lowered her voice. “You get it, right? You can only drink with us if you share something intensely personal.”
“I understand perfectly.” Lucie plucked the bottle away and swigged deeply. The circle sat forward, curiosity high.
She placed the bottle between her legs and stared at the ground. “My whole family are dead,” she said. “My entire lineage. Every one of them has died from either natural causes or accidental death. Nothing sinister. But now, every day, every minute, I expect to go next.”
Bodie swallowed hard, seeing the personal effort it took for Lucie to get those words out. He also saw what she felt: expectation, knowledge, and fear. How could you ever move on and forge a life, a career, friendships when you expected to die any moment.
“You can’t let what happened to them ruin your life,” he said. “No matter how bizarre.”
“I know that,” Lucie said. “And yet here I am.”
“No.” Heidi scooted over and shared the rest of the bottle with her. “Here we are. Broken souls. Tortured, even. Where do we go from here?”
Cassidy spoke for them all. “Fuck it,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”
“Yeah, who brought the fucking bottle out, anyway?” Heidi threw it aside.
Bodie rolled over to get comfortable under the tree and tried to get some sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The third night of diving took them to the area around Lucie’s waypoint. The entire team was antsy by now. The SEALs were itching for action against the Bratva. Bodie was entirely sure that if the Chinese hadn’t been present, the SEALs would have taken them out that very night.
Still, his focus remained on the underwater quest, and although he wasn’t scared of drowning, with every hour that passed beneath the surface he began to feel as if the black waters were eager to claim him. The grid was barely two-fifths explored. The Chinese were still hard at it, and left Bodie wondering if, sometime soon, they might actually run into each other. He crouched in the black depths and sifted dirt and rocks and sludge and tried to see through clouds of silt. He knelt, he sat down, he walked along rocks. Time passed without meaning down here, eternity lasting a lifetime. He was aware divers had been using the Azores for many years, but knew they were mostly part-time and recreational divers who wouldn’t generally stray beyond thirty meters. The deeper they went, the less traveled the lakebed should be.
The dive’s halfway point passed with no success. Bodie’s air tank signaled that it was below half full. He checked another gauge to verify but dropped it, then reached along the hose to retrieve it and caught his hand inside a fissure.
He pulled gently, but his glove snagged on something. Slowly, he crouched, worked his fingers around, and managed to extricate it. That was close, but I guess I could live without a glove if I had to. He moved on, still searching, but then a thought occurred to him. Quickly, he moved back to the fissure, finding it after more than a minute of searching, and followed it down the sloping bedrock. The depth gauge read eighty meters, and he guessed he was fifteen out into the lake. The next drop-off was sharp and the fissure opened up. Bodie decided to follow it, relaying his movements back to Cassidy and Jemma.