Inland - Softcover

Rosenfield, Kat

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0147511259 ISBN 13: 9780147511256

Verlag: SPEAK, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The psychological labyrinth of a young woman’s insidious connection to the sea, from the Edgar Award nominated author ofAmelia Anne is Dead and Gone.

After nine years spent suffocating in the arid expanse of the Midwest, far from the sea where her mother drowned, Callie Morgan and her father are returning to the coast. And miraculously, Callie can finally breathe easily. No more sudden, clawing attacks and weeklong hospital stays. But something is calling to her from the river behind their house and from the ocean miles away. Just as her life begins to feel like her own, and the potential for romance is blossoming, the intoxicating pull of the dark water seeps into her mind, filling her with doubt and revealing family secrets. Is it madness, or is there a voice, beckoning her to come to the sea? To answer the call of the dark waves. To come home.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Kat Rosenfield (www.katrosenfield.wordpress.com) is a copywriter and journalist whose debut novel¸Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone was an Edgar Award Finalist for Best Young Adult Mystery. Bookpage praisedAmelia Anne for blending “elegant writing and brutal behavior into a sharp and haunting novel.”

Kat’s work has appeared in publications both nationally and internationally includingInteriors, Grazia (AU), Wend (cover story), and Girls’ Life, and can currently be found on websites and in newsletters for organizations across the country. She is currently a regular contributor to pop culture websites such as MTV.com’s Hollywood Crush blog, and she is also Auntie SparkNotes on Sparklife.com.

Kat Rosenfield (www.katrosenfield.wordpress.com) is a copywriter and journalist whose debut novel¸Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone was an Edgar Award Finalist for Best Young Adult Mystery. Bookpage praisedAmelia Anne for blending “elegant writing and brutal behavior into a sharp and haunting novel.”

Kat’s work has appeared in publications both nationally and internationally includingInteriors, Grazia (AU), Wend (cover story), and Girls’ Life, and can currently be found on websites and in newsletters for organizations across the country. She is currently a regular contributor to pop culture websites such as MTV.com’s Hollywood Crush blog, and she is also Auntie SparkNotes on Sparklife.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2014 Kat Rosenfield

CHAPTER 1

15 YEARS AGO

 

IT IS NOT YET SUNSET when the tall young woman who lives on the cliffside makes her way down to the beach. Sure-footed on the wooden steps, worn smooth by sand and weather. She treads lightly, her feet naked and white against the earth, leaving only the barest impressions as she steps over the driftwood remains of a tree and around the jagged cluster of rocks, where the small, pale body of a crab floats idly in a tide pool and its brothers sidestep hastily out of the way.

The beach is empty in all directions, the only sign of life a trio of seagulls wheeling high arcs overhead. Other days, summer days, there are people here. Children playing in the shallows; a young man and his dog sprinting through the surf; the elderly couple who lives down the beach, wearing matching Windbreakers, strolling hand in hand. Their names are Peter and Polly, but she doesn’t know this, nor do they know her name. Theirs is a passing acquaintance. They only smile and wave, nodding their white-topped heads in polite recognition at the woman with broad shoulders and striking blue eyes and waist-length tumble of hair, so wind-blown and wild that only its own weight can keep it under control. Some days they see her on the beach, on her way to or from the water, and pause to say hello; others, she is in, swimming, when they pass by. On those days, they’ve learned not to bother with greetings. She never looks back at the beach, never seems to notice them, not even if they stand at the water’s edge and call out across the waves. Peter, who used to work as an electrician and still prides himself on figuring things out, tells his wife that he thinks the young woman must wear plugs to protect her eardrums, that she probably has tubes in her ears.

“I’m sure you’re right, dear,” Polly says, and they walk on down the beach. But later, when she’s alone, Polly will think to herself that she’s not so sure, not at all. She has seen the young woman’s face peering out from the water, as still and blank in the sunlight as a silver coin. Even from twenty yards away, there is something unsettling in the way she gazes back—as though from across a great distance, and without seeing anything at all.

—

There are days, too, when she doesn’t appear, and the couple wonder out loud to each other where she is, if she might be ill. It never occurs to them that she’s not like them. Like most creatures of the earth, Peter and Polly keep time by the sun, enjoying the way its last rays warm their backs as they make their way back down the beach. They like to watch comfortably from their porch, a bottle of wine between them, as it sinks below the horizon in a blaze of pink and crimson.

The woman, though, keeps time by the moon, and the way it holds the oceans in its inescapable thrall, bringing them up to cover the coast and then rolling them away, back and back, to expose the briny mudflats, the gleaming beds of deep blue mussels, the slick and slippery rocks crusted over with barnacles like small, brittle teeth. She comes when the tide is highest.

 

Today, the beach is empty. Peter and Polly have long since passed by, and no children play in the surf. Autumn has cooled the water, chilled the evenings, driven away all but the most intrepid swimmers. But she has never minded icy water. When she peels off her dress and steps into the waves, it is like cool silk brushing her skin. She places her palms on the surface, and breathes deeply of the sea.

“I’m here,” she says softly. “I’m yours. Yours as I have always been, as I always will be.”

The answering voice seems to come from everywhere, rising up from the depths of the water, ringing out from inside her own head. She doesn’t look around, not anymore; after so many trips to the water’s edge, she knows that no one can hear it but her.

You are mine.

“Yes,” she says gently, lovingly. Her fingers stroke the undulating surface, leaving tiny furrows in their wake that vanish as fast as they appear. Her voice is a purr. “Yes.”

The child is mine.

“Yes. She will love you as I love you, always.”

The man is nothing.

“Nothing,” she breathes, and the word sends a chill through her heart. She steels herself, and says it louder. “Nothing. He is only a man. A means to an end. He gave me the child, but I have given him nothing, and nothing is what he is.”

It isn’t the first time she’s said these words. She has been saying them for years, offered them up willingly every day, ever since that first moment when she stepped into the waves with the sun glinting like fire off her wedding band. She speaks them like vows, from the depths of her heart, a promise she has always intended to keep.

She can still remember when she meant it. When she believed every word that crossed her lips, because she believed so deeply in herself, in her own brilliance, in the solution that seemed foolproof and sure. She had done her research. She had taken her time. She knew the rules, and so she had carefully picked a man with whom she could follow them—a man she was sure she could never love. She had selected him, and then seduced him, all with a surgeon’s skill and clinical detachment. This passionless bore of a professor, all hard facts and cool logic. He was the kind of man with whom it was impossible that she’d fall in love. In fact, she’d strongly suspected him incapable of the emotion himself. Of deep feeling of any kind, for that matter. He was too cold, too staid, too set in his ways to let another person into his stony heart. He was buried in his books, his rocks, his papers.

Entirely safe, just as she’d planned. Just as she knew he would be.

She’d also believed, truly, that she was as perfect for him as he was for her. It had always been her intention to find a man who would be to her just what she needed, no more, but it had been her good luck to find one for whom she was sure that she would be the same. She could tell just by looking at him that this man, long past the age at which most men married, had no true need of a wife, no deep yearning for a woman to share his life. You could see that in the way he lived, alone, no family or friends close by, his few social connections merely professional. There was no loneliness in him; he did not ache to love, or be loved. It wasn’t in his nature. But he would appreciate what she had to offer: a well-kept home to come back to at night, a companion when he was lonely. A nubile, young body to warm his bed. And in return, he would give her the things she desired: a ring, a home, and—most importantly—a baby. Her daughter, her baby girl. The marriage, the man, were merely vessels for the child she’d always longed for.

Her husband could have her body, but not her heart. Never her heart. That was how it would happen, because that was what she’d planned. Because her heart had been claimed by another. It always had been, and would be forever. It was as she had promised, that first night on the shore, still in her bone-white wedding gown.

I’m here. I’m yours. Yours as I have always been, as I always will be. I will never leave you, and when the time comes, I’ll come willingly.

A gust of wind lifts her hair from her shoulders, sending a shudder down the length of her spine.

The rising tide rolls in, as it did on the first day and each day since, churning in lace-froth eddies around her ankles. The sand drags away beneath her feet, as it always has.

She makes her way...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: SPEAK
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0147511259
• ISBN 13: 9780147511256
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar