Castle of Water

by Dane Huckelbridge

  As for Sophie Ducel’s own version of a premature memorial service, it had occurred only six months after the Cessna was swallowed by the sea, the government of France being a little less stingy with its death certificates. The ceremony commemorated both her life and the life of her husband, at the very same church in Toulouse where they had been married. Both families were in attendance; Sophie’s drove in from their village just outside the city, and Étienne’s took first-class flights down from Paris. It was short, sincere, and followed by a meal of cassoulet at a restaurant on the edge of Le Capitole square, directly across from the big Occitan cross where Sophie had played marelle as a young girl. The portions were huge, and few of the guests were able to clean their plates, leaving her parents and her brother to clear away the sad sight of all that uneaten duck. The next day, feeling that the memorial had been only half complete, they decided to give it some closure with a hike in Gavarnie. The three of them parked in the town and followed the path up into the mountains, taking note of how the wind at their peaks stirred up a delicate curtain of snow: The sunlight caught it in glorious suspension, a pall of pure and crystalline white, and it was done. They were at peace with it, as only those born of mountains ever truly can be.

  Who among them—honestly, who—could have ever guessed that the “dearly departed” from that crash, at least two of them, anyway, were not returning to dust at all, but resting instead on a bamboo cot two feet above it, curled up together at the world’s blue end, not subtracting from the great sum of humanity but quietly adding to it? Love, hope, renewal—such things all spring eternal, and although it was still far too small for Sophie to feel, the diminutive heartbeat in her belly bore testament to that fact.

  Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump …

  And so on and so on goes the cardiac beat in this polka called life.

  39

  The first few months of the pregnancy were among the very best Barry and Sophie spent on the island together. True, the fact that a perilous and forever life-changing event loomed half a year down the line did hang over their heads, with the steady swell in Sophie’s middle a fail-proof reminder. But they had each other when solace was needed, and they wanted for little in the little life they had made.

  Perhaps “little” is a bit of an understatement, but their condition had improved by leaps and bounds over the course of their third castaway year. Thanks to Sophie’s tireless work and impeccable architectural design, they not only had a house, but something that one could actually call a home. Inside her postmodern bungalow of ‘ohe and palm thatch there was a sturdy table to sit at, a comfortable cot to lie on, and even a covered kitchen area complete with a functioning stone oven. Hanging from the wall were shelves made of palm wood, upon which sat flare canisters and clamshells carefully arranged, holding various combinations of sea salt, coconut vinegar, dried fish flakes, and squid ink—the seasonings she used when preparing their meals. Coconut-oil lamps with fiber wicks provided illumination at night, and while it had long since ceased to cough out any maritime transmissions, the rechargeable Grundig did issue forth a steady stream of music and bulletins, in languages both familiar and shockingly arcane. And without fail, by mutual decree, set as both snack food and centerpiece in the middle of their table, always a single bunch of green bananas—the only thing on the island, excluding sand and sunlight, that was always in an abundant supply.

  All of this, when partnered with Barry’s newfound success on the sea, made for a life that was at the very least bearable and at times one might even daresay pleasant. If the island had one thing going for it, it was some spectacular sunsets, rendered with a palette that boggled the mind. And for the first time since they’d set feet on its sand, Barry and Sophie started to enjoy them. Far from ending there, new details and fresh observations began to add richness and beauty to their days. The graceful glide of the terns, the ordered march of forest aphids, the patter of rain upon palm fronds, and the fleeting spark of shooting stars—discernible or not, there was a meaning to these things, and both appreciation and assurance could be gleaned from that fact.

  If there was a highlight from that period of calm on the island, a time when all came closest to feeling right with the world—or as right as it could be considering the circumstances—it was unquestionably their third Christmas Eve there, December 24, 2003. They feasted on a banana-stuffed sooty tern roasted in their very own stone oven, familiar carols came cresting and falling from across the globe, and gifts were exchanged beside a makeshift Christmas tree, fashioned from ‘ohe bamboo and tapered layers of fronds. Barry presented Sophie with a mother-of-pearl comb, and she gave him a cape of dried grasses to keep off the rains. Then, full bellied and content in the flickering light of oil lamps, “The Little Drummer Boy” purring quietly from the Grundig, they lay side by side on their narrow cot. They didn’t speak for some time—words were superfluous—but they held each other tightly, as tightly as they dared, and a novel idea occurred to Barry, although Sophie had known it for quite some time.

  Three. That magical number. For two and a half years, their world had been a binary system, a yin and a yang, a single masculine and a single feminine. But as they were gathered about their little Christmas tree that night, it dawned on Barry that they were actually three. Their party was growing; a human being, the most endangered species in their insular world, was soon to be born. As an only child, Barry had never put his ear to his mother’s stomach to detect the first shudders of a heartbeat, and he had never held a newborn creature whose countenance resembled his own. He trembled at the prospect, for the first time with anticipation and joy rather than anticipation and dread.

  “We’re going to have a baby, Sophie.”

  “Je sais, mon amour. I know, my love.”

  And one day, we’re going to go home.

  He didn’t say that last part, but in the bobbing lamplight of their tiny house—that feeble ember encircled by an ocean of dark—he thought it. He would care for them, and he would fight for them, and if need be, he would die for them. Somehow or other, no matter the cost or how insurmountable the odds, he would keep that flame burning, and he would not let the darkness win. And if they stayed the course and weathered the storm, it seemed only logical that there would be daybreak yet. A touch melodramatic, perhaps, but parenthood can bring that out in people, and Barry Bleecker was hardly exempt.

  For her part, Sophie experienced very much the same rich, complex, and at times conflicting emotions as Barry. She in turn fantasized about the baby—smelling its powdery fresh skin, listening to it mew, watching it grow—and dreaded, like an imminent guest too important to offend, the colossal responsibilities of its impending arrival. The idea of holding a child to her breast that they together had conceived was a source of indescribable joy; the possibility of listening to it wail in the black island night filled her with unnerving dread. Unlike Barry, however, she did not feel that on the day of the baby’s birth, she would be anxiously greeting a total stranger. She knew her child; had known it since that first morning when a queasy, almost electric warmth first emanated from what could only have been her womb. Longer than that, even. In one of those great maternal mysteries that Barry and his ilk would never understand, the connection, if one may call it that, between her and the life within felt not like a spontaneous combination of chromosomes, but like a revelation of that which had been part of her all along. It seemed she had known her child for as long as she had known herself, a single-celled witness that had been her companion—the same way she surely had been her mother’s companion and her grandmother’s before that—since the very beginning of time. The totality of womanhood nested within her like an infinite conglomeration of Russian dolls. She carried not just a life, but the very story of the whole human race.

  There was something else, though. One concern that she did not share at all with Barry. A small but pesky worry that traced its origins not to any romantic, sea-swept encounter beneath Polynesian stars, but rather to a drab and cheer
less waiting room in the Hôpital Saint-Louis.

  The Centres de Dépistage of its free STD and sexual health clinic, to be precise, where, exactly four months before the Cessna took its plunge, she had sat amid the stale periodicals and almost palpable regret, waiting for the nurse to call her name. To say the experience was unsavory would be an understatement—it was absolutely humiliating. But with their joint bank account and her birth control pills both thoroughly depleted, she didn’t have much choice. Étienne had suggested borrowing a few thousand francs from his parents until their new architecture firm was up and running, but Sophie Ducel, with the defiant pride of the French southerner, had staunchly refused. She’d been keenly aware, in that way only daughters-in-law ever are, of their quiet displeasure when the announcement had been made that their brilliant son with the “de” in his surname was marrying a swarthy cassoulet eater from the Hautes-Pyrénées. And although she had forgiven them for it, she had never forgotten it, and she’d be damned if she was going to beg those parigots for a single centime. Of course Étienne said that she was being ridiculous and that she was imagining things. To which she responded that she certainly had not imagined the joke his mother made about their whole apartment smelling like Piment d’Espelette. To which Étienne responded with an exasperated groan. Fine, they would figure out some other way to get by until the first clients came.

  And when it came to completing her examen gynécologique and refilling her birth control pill prescription, that other way was the bleak waiting room of Saint-Louis. Sophie did her best to hide her face behind a rumpled Paris Match and tried to avoid eye contact with the other patients—a number of whom she recognized from the late-night street corners of Strasbourg–Saint-Denis.

  “Sophie Ducel,” a nurse at last called out into the waiting room. Merde. Sophie set down the magazine, gathered her coat, and followed the nurse down a corridor of twitching fluorescent lights, right into the doctor’s office. She had prayed not to get the stubbly internist with the liquor-laced breath, and in that regard, at least, she was lucky. The attending physician was a matronly woman clad crisply in white.

  “Bonjour,” she greeted Sophie, her eyes never leaving the open file she held in her hands.

  “Bonjour,” Sophie replied, taking a seat on the examination table.

  “I have all of your test results here. Everything came back normal.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “Yes, it is. And I have your prescription as well. It should last for six months, and if you need a refill this time, all you need to do is call.”

  “Thank you.”

  The doctor extended her hand with the slip of paper. But when Sophie reached over to take it, she sensed a hint of resistance. An afterthought, something remembered. “Just out of curiosity,” the doctor added. “Are you planning on having children anytime soon?”

  The question caught Sophie off guard; she folded the prescription into the pocket of her jeans and settled back on the crinkled paper of the examination table. “To be honest, I haven’t given it much thought. Maybe in a few years. I don’t really know.”

  The older woman nodded wisely, smoothed out a crease in her white doctor’s coat, and took off her glasses. “Be sure to talk to an obstetrician before you do.”

  “Is there some kind of problem?”

  She removed a printout from the file and showed it to Sophie. “Your uterus is slightly bicornuate. Do you see the shape?” She pointed out the abnormality with a ballpoint pen, haloing the grainy image in a circle of bright blue.

  “Yes. But what does that mean?”

  “It’s fairly common, and usually it’s nothing to worry about. But in some cases, it can cause complications for the baby.”

  “Complications?”

  “Breech births, preterm delivery, even malformations. But those are all relatively rare. Just make sure you mention it.”

  “Okay, I will. Thank you.”

  “Of course. Have a good day.”

  The soles of Sophie’s Adidas squeaked across the sterile linoleum and out the rear exit onto rue Bichat. The temperature had fallen, as had dusk; she could see her pale breath against the gray-pink sky. She turned up the collar of her winter coat and fixed her wool Saint James cap on her head, suppressing as she did an involuntary shudder. Well, what did it matter? she thought to herself. I’ll have plenty of time to worry about that when the time comes.

  She did not tell Étienne then because the time had not yet come, and she did not tell Barry even when it did. She thought about it—in fact, she almost mentioned it in the panic that followed their first night together, and she came close again when she told him she was carrying their child. But in both cases, she ultimately chose not to. They already had enough on their plates with simply staying alive, and besides, the doctor had made it sound inconsequential enough.

  So Sophie kept that secret. Not because she didn’t want Barry to know, but because she knew there was no way to manage that parcel of information. In all likelihood, there was nothing to worry about. And in the event that there was, there was absolutely nothing either of them could do.

  C’est la vie, as Barry often told her, a French phrase that she found herself constantly reminding him wasn’t really French at all.

  40

  And of course, there was still the pressing issue of choosing a name. Barry and Sophie were as at odds on the matter as parents anywhere can possibly be. He found her suggestions to be effeminately French (Pierre-Marie? For a boy? Are you serious?), while she dismissed his preferences as petit bourgeois (Brandon? Sharon? Dégueulasse!). It appeared for the first half of the pregnancy that no name would ever suffice. Several unpleasant arguments ensued, with neither parent willing to compromise or retreat. And while recent developments in their food situation should theoretically have eased the tensions of oncoming parenthood, in the end, they seemed only to complicate things further. Because while Barry’s fishing net still provided the bulk of their protein, Sophie’s diving was beginning to augment their diet in no small way. In addition to the dozen or so fish Barry strained out of the sea on a weekly basis, Sophie was dumping a healthy assortment of crabs, lobsters, and clams into the mix. Her contribution provided a reliable buffer against the risk of starvation and filled in nicely on the days when the fish were nowhere to be found. Full bellied they were not, but comfortable, yes, that they were.

  This all changed, however, as soon as Barry learned of the pregnancy. He couldn’t give a precise reason, yet he felt strongly that bobbing among wild reefs one hundred yards from the safety of shore was not the sort of thing a woman with child ought to be doing—especially a woman with child whom he loved very much. The inevitability of fatherhood had brought out his protective side and made him far more cautious in his various nautical pursuits. Sophie pfffed him aplenty and chastised him for being overprotective, but she eventually gave in. Things had been going well as of late, naming issues aside, and she was in no mood to upturn whatever precarious equilibrium they had achieved with yet another pointless argument. D’accord, Barry. She sighed. I won’t go out with you on the boat anymore.

  And for a couple of months, that worked out just fine. Barry compensated by increasing his fishing trips, from two or three a week to one almost daily. He began to brave the perimeter of the reef, piloting the Askoy III past the shallows to the open sea beyond, where the sandy seafloor—white as ivory beneath the shallow turquoise of the lagoon—vanished abruptly into a black abyss. By chumming the waters with leftover offal, he was able to summon strange fish he had never seen before. Bat-winged rays, serpentine eels, gape-mouthed groupers—things that never failed to give him a shudder. Each time he entered their domain, he was reinstilled with the wisdom of staying close to the island and reminded of all the horrific uncertainty that lurked just a short ways from it. He ventured past the reef only as long as was necessary, and as soon as a fat dolphin fish or two was netted, he would paddle furiously back to the shallows.

  But th
en Sophie got the hunger. Or perhaps craving is more accurate. Four months in, when the morning sickness had finally faded and the bulge of her belly was really starting to show, it came. Without cause, without warning. Just an excruciating yearning beyond anything she’d ever known. She didn’t feel it so much in her gut as in her bones and her molars. It wasn’t for pickles and ice cream, or even cornichons and a cornet de glace. It was a fearsome hanker for … well, at first she couldn’t place it. Then, like a thunderbolt, it struck her. Something leafy, chewable, and rich in iron. Greens. She wanted greens, which wasn’t totally inexplicable given that their diet consisted almost totally of bananas, with a few fruits de mer thrown in for good measure.

  Racked by her craving, Sophie clenched her teeth and clutched at her stomach. There were no greens on the island. Nothing full of fiber or teeming with vitamins. No epinards, no chou vert, no mâche, no frisée. Absolument rien.

  Nothing except seaweed, that is. Beds of it, both rich and green, clustered on the forbidden side of the reef, just before the ocean floor dropped off into darkness. She had seen it from the canoe when she had gone out with Barry; she had watched its emerald dance through smoky shafts of light. She had even tasted it, when rough seas had uprooted a stalk and left it bunched on the tide line, although such occasions were exceedingly rare. And while she had no way of knowing for sure if the limu, as it was known to ancient Polynesians, or Ulva fasciata, as it is known to modern scientists, contained all the minerals and vitamins she needed, she was confident in her hunch that alleviating the craving was within her grasp.