“Hey, it’s okay, El. I’m not surprised. You went out like a light. All that wine.” He paused. “On top of those pills.”
Heat deepened in my face. I didn’t remember more wine—any wine. But I had tasted old alcohol in my mouth this morning. And I couldn’t argue the pills. He angled his head, watching me intently. “Are you sure you’re doing okay?”
No, I’m not sure of anything right now.
I nodded. “I . . . I think I’ll start unpacking some of my boxes in the studio.”
I needed to ground myself. Those boxes I’d shipped over the ocean contained my art supplies and paintings and sketches as well as framed photos of friends and family, plus other knickknacks that helped define who I was, what I did. I wanted to unpack everything, hang the pictures and photos up on those clinical white walls and stamp something of myself on this place—something that might help make me feel more real, because I couldn’t shake the growing distance I felt between my normal self and reality. I couldn’t quite absorb this new land yet, the scope of this adventure, and how I’d gotten to be here so fast. Neither could I shake the lingering fuzziness in my brain. Perhaps it really was just a serious wallop of jet lag, but I didn’t like the cool fingers of paranoia starting to scratch at the edges of my consciousness again, trying to get in. I didn’t like the disquiet I was feeling about my own husband.
“Great idea,” he said, and turned back to the fish.
I cast another glance up at the neighbor’s window. No one was there. I proceeded down to my studio on the water, trying to shake the sensation of being trapped and watched. Like prey.
THEN
ELLIE
Martin took me to the headlands first.
“It’s a good place for surfers to come check the swell,” he explained. “You also get an amazing view of the small boats trying to get in or out of the Bonny River when the bar is breaking. It becomes quite the spectator sport. See down there?” He pointed to where the mouth fanned brown into blue sea. “That’s where the boat launch is. And over there—” He swung his arm northward. “Those sheer orange cliffs in the distance—that’s the Point of No Return.”
“And straight out ahead of us?” I asked.
He grinned. “The Tasman Sea pretty much all the way to New Zealand.”
We left the lookout and wended along the cliff path that ran in front of high-end houses full of glass windows overlooking the sea. Exotic birds darted everywhere. I stopped to watch a “cocky” drink from a stone birdbath. It was bombed by a flock of lories. Everything seemed to be fighting here, and loud about it. Martin pointed out a kookaburra pecking in the grass among a flock of pink galah birds. He took me onto a little trail that led down to the beach, carving switchbacks through the cliff scrub. A rabbit darted across our path and Martin explained how domesticated rabbits had gone feral and become a problem.
“Shooters are occasionally hired to exterminate them—safer than poison.”
“What did you do with the funnel-web?”
“Killed it. Before it kills us.”
I shot him a glance.
He laughed. “The funnel-web might be responsible for all spider-bite deaths in this part of Aus, but no fatalities have actually been recorded since the introduction of an antivenin in the eighties.” He took my hand and helped me down the last steep pitch to the beach. Small stones dislodged by our feet rolled down the incline to the water.
“You’ve just got to be cognizant of your surroundings, that’s all. You can see its web easily if you know what to look for. It spins a series of fine trip lines that radiate out from a lair which is shaped like a funnel. The spider lives deep inside the funnel, and when an insect stumbles into one of the trip lines, the spider rushes out at extreme speed, grabs and bites the prey, then drags it down to the bottom of the funnel into its home, where it sucks the living juices out of its prey.”
The idea of being murdered after innocently walking into a soft line of silk gave me a dark feeling. We reached the sand, took off our sandals, and strolled hand in