Siren Read Online Free Page A

stroll up the beach his feet hadn’t gotten wet more than once, and yet now, his footprints suddenly glimmered with the wash of a strong surge of surf. Every few waves surged closer to his path.
    After dinner, he’d walked the long stretch up Safe Harbor and now sat on a cold, blackened boulder that marked the beginning of Gull’s Point. He looked back toward the twinkling lights of Delilah. The glimmer of his hometown barely registered against the brilliance of the night sky; the stars were out in full tonight, and the beach flickered with secret reflections.
    Evan leaned back and stared at the sky, as he absently fingered the half charm chained around his neck. Josh had worn the other half, after presenting it to him one Father’s Day, just a couple years before. A show of their solidarity, to wear two halves of a medal.
    He looked down the empty stretch of beach and wondered, how many days and nights had he and Josh crisscrossed this sand? How many times had Josh tried to lure him into the water? How many times had he refused to go?
    Josh had been a Pisces, and lived his sign; he’d always been in the water. As close as they’d been, that was one thing that father and son had never shared. Because while Evan loved the look and smell of the ocean, ironically, he was also an aquaphobe. Afraid of the water. More than afraid. Phobic. It was a crazy phobia for someone who lived near the ocean and worked at a port. But Evan had never been able to shake the paralyzing fear. He’d had it since he was a kid. It was more than that he couldn’t swim; while he could walk along the beach and admire the view, if you asked him to take a swim, his heart began to pound, and sweat leaked from his pores like rain. His legs grew palpably weak at the slightest suggestion of walking into the ocean to let the waves carry him. Even at home, his bathing consisted solely of a shower…he would never relinquish his body to a bathtub. Friends never understood why he refused invitations to their hot tub parties, and he could never have admitted that it was because he was afraid of immersing himself fully in water. At least, he couldn’t have explained before last year.
    Evan had lived with the phobia all of his life without needing to explain it to virtually anyone…until the day that Josh had died.
    He shook the water from his eyes and tried to think of something else. Something that had been good with him and Josh, something that had nothing to do with water. Some last thought he could console himself with, before he put his plan in action. Because he’d decided before kissing Sarah good night that he was actually kissing Sarah good-bye.
    Evan looked out at the place in the bay where Josh had gone under for his last time and considered the distance between there and where he stood. At the same time, thehappy memory of him, Josh and an acoustic guitar took shape, and he blinked back saltwater as he remembered the day that he and his son had sat alone on the deck behind their house, singing “Daydream Believer” and whatever other simple songs Evan could figure out on the acoustic guitar.
    He began to sing “Forever Now,” remembering one of his favorite songs from Psychedelic Furs. Josh was into more modern stuff, but he had always liked how Richard Butler’s voice had rasped and twisted in time to the fuzz guitars and wild saxophones of that ’80s band. Oddly enough, Evan had been able to both play and sing some of the band’s signature songs without too much embarrassment on guitar.
    Evan stared up now at the night sky and sang. The song’s bitterly hopeful lyric—a wish to hold one moment in time forever—rang true in his heart, and he felt himself choking up. At the same time, in a bit of a mental “bait and switch” maneuver, he steeled his legs and courage and prepared to run—for as long and as far as he could—straight into the ocean. Evan had considered drowning himself in the place where Josh had died so many times;