“Should be on the five o’clock ferry.”
“If he’s got the balls.” Eli grinned. “Lost everything but, the last time.”
Tonight was poker night. By seven o’clock, half the men in the cove would be crowded around Rubicon’s long, galley table, shouts of laughter ringing from the open portals, the odor of grilled fish, coconut, and rum drifting in waves across the cove.
“We’re dealing you in, too, right, Sport?” he called to Leon, rapping his knuckles on the cabin top. “Buddy?”
“Honey,” Bernadette said. “Let him sleep.”
“He’s been sleeping all day.” Eli climbed from the hatch like a bear emerging from a hollowed-out tree. “Bud? Leo-the-Lion?” He squeezed Leon’s shoulder; the child’s eyes fluttered beneath his closed lids. I sat up, and it struck me how pale Leon was, despite his dark-tanned skin. For a moment, I thought he’d stopped breathing—but, no. There was the faint, frail motion of his ribs.
“Christ, he’s really out,” Eli said.
“It’s the heat,” Bernadette said, briskly. “I should have taken him inside, but then Meggie came by—”
Meggie. No one in the world ever called me that, now. Only Bernadette.
“It isn’t the heat,” Eli said.
“He’s been sick, that’s all. He just needs a little more time.”
Eli said nothing. He stroked Leon’s hair.
“We’re keeping him hydrated. We’re giving him antibiotics. We’re doing everything that a hospital would do. Even Dr. Matt says so.”
Dr. Matt was Leon’s pediatrician and, also, I gathered, an old family friend. Prior to Rubicon’s first offshore passage, he’d taught Bernadette how to start an IV, perform an emergency tracheotomy, administer injections. Between her medical library and her eye-popping assortment of pharmaceuticals, she was certainly better equipped than, say, the walk-in clinic at Echo, where Rex went to get the new pain medications he was taking for his shoulder. The difficulty was contacting Dr. Matt—or, for that matter, anybody else—during emergencies. The pay phone at the marina had been broken for as long as anyone could remember. There was a so-called Internet café at the back of the island liquor store where, for a ten-dollar purchase, you could log on to the owner’s aging desktop for ten minutes at a time. But the dial-up connection was unreliable, slow; more often than not, it took the full ten minutes just to connect. If you wanted to send mail, research something on the Internet, you had to pony up for another bottle of rum.
Eli knelt down beside the hammock, pressed his mouth to the palm of Leon’s hand. “Rest then, Sport. It’s okay. You can stay up for the game later, how about that?”
“Which reminds me,” Bernadette said, turning to me. “There’s a bunch of poker widows meeting over at Island Girls later.” She wiped her hands on her paint-spattered shorts. “Audrey Mueller and Pam Thomas for sure. Maybe Carole Daniels, if she can get the twins to bed.”
“As long as she doesn’t bring them this time.”
“She won’t. Pam made her promise.”
I laughed. Pam, a retired mortgage broker, was nothing if not direct.
“That new girl might come, too,” Bernadette said. “The really young one, you know, who’s been coming to yoga? Sailed in alone on that Cape Dory?”
“Jeanie Mc-something,” I said.
“Jeanie McFadden,” Eli said. He was standing now, squinting at something out in the bay. “Quite the sailor, from what I hear.”
“She plans to go around the world,” Bernadette said.
“Alone?” I said.
“Worse,” Eli said. “With two goddamn Jack Russell terriers.” He shaded his eyes. “Isn’t that T-Rex? There. Nine o’clock.”
A small, dark shape seemed to hover in place. No, it was moving after all. Moments later I could see it was approaching the channel, and there were the points of the bandana Rex tied, pirate-style, over his head. He was sitting to the right of the outboard, guiding the tiller with his left hand, and I couldn’t help but notice, as he came into the cove, that it was his left hand he raised in response to Eli’s hail. Some days, the troublesome right shoulder was better; other days, it was worse. In Bermuda, we’d had it x-rayed, but the plates had come back negative. The clinic doctor had prescribed anti-inflammatories, more painkillers, a single shot of cortisone, as well as a series of exercises, which Rex was supposed to do twice a day.
“Shoulders can be tricky,” this doctor had said. Beneath his white coat, he’d worn bright Bermuda shorts, black socks pulled up to the knee, leather wingtip shoes. “Especially at your age.”
Afterward, Rex and I had laughed about it. Especially at your age became a running joke between us. But Rex’s shoulder had never fully healed. And he’d stopped the exercises, the anti-inflammatories, everything except the pain medications, which were nearly as easy to get, in Echo Harbor, as rum. Now I watched as he cut the outboard, drifted in, kissed the edge of the dinghy against Rubicon’s hull. He looked exhausted, his cheeks red with sunburn, and I felt sorry for him, yes, but I also felt annoyed. Once again, I’d volunteered to make the trip to Echo, but Rex had insisted, as he always did, that it wasn’t safe for me to go alone. Whenever supplies ran low—or if we needed to check e-mail, use the telephone—he was the one who dinghied north to hop the King’s Point ferry, while I stayed behind, kept an eye on the boat. It was true that the harbor was a rough-and-tumble place, choked with waterfront bars, liquor stores, foul-smelling conch stands. Set back from the water, up a steep road strewn with dog waste, was the grocery store: a windowless warehouse, constructed from a series of hinged, aluminum sheets. Beside it stood a strip mall, shops selling marine supplies, chart kits, cheap clothing. There were rough, paved roads, a few taxicabs, scooters you could rent by the hour. A single-strip airfield, where—so we’d been told—you could look down on the wreckage of half-submerged planes, even as your own struggled to rise above the water. The harbor was shallow, littered with trash, wandering moorings, rusted-out hulls. The only time we’d tried to sail Chelone through the narrow inlet, we’d wound up running aground.
“Good trip?” Eli called.
“Ferry ran on time, for a change,” Rex said. “Got something here for Buddy. How’s he feeling?”
“Better,” Bernadette said, just as Eli said, “Not great.”
They looked at each other, looked away.
“He’s sleeping right now,” I said.
Rex handed Bernadette a package. “Can he eat Junior Mints? They’re nice and squishy.”
“He loves Junior Mints,” Eli said.
“I’ll say he does,” Bernadette said, laughing. “Look.”
We all turned toward the hammock, and there was Leon, clear-eyed, smiling. What? he signed eagerly, eyes fixed on the package, as if he already knew what was inside. And for a moment, I thought that Bernadette was right. Leon was going to get better. All he needed was rest and time. Just like Rex’s shoulder.
“Anything special for me?” I asked, climbing down into the dinghy. Fresh fruits and vegetables were hard to come by, but occasionally Rex would find a bunch of carrots, a few battered apples, a single orange, priced like gold. Last time, it had been three dark plums, sweet, though hard as stones.
“Maybe.”
“What?”
“Wait and see.”
He raised his eyebrows mysteriously, and wrinkles I’d never noticed before erupted across his forehead. Lately, he’d been putting on weight; his beard was grizzled with curly gray hairs the texture of wire. An old man’s beard. I’d told him so. I’d pleaded with him to shave it.
“He’s toying with you,” Bernadette said, laughing, and she hiked her upper body out over the rub rail, leaning down to kiss me goodbye. “See you at ’Girls, okay?”
“What should I bring to the game?” Rex asked.
Eli laughed wickedly. “Just your cash.”
As we motored away, I waved to Leon, but he didn’t look up. He was just like any other eleven-year-old boy, intent o
n the promise of candy. The sky was blue. Out in the bay, the Gulf Stream shimmered green. There was nothing in that moment to suggest I would never see him again.
By now, it was low tide. The shorebirds were out, herons and snowy egrets, sandpipers and gulls, multiple species flocked together on the newly emerging sandbars. Idly I watched them from Chelone’s stern until Rex started handing up the groceries. One by one, I swung the bags over the safety lines, deposited them on the cockpit floor. There were tinned meats and packaged cookies, powdered milk and peanuts, onions, potatoes, plantains. Too many bottles of scotch, rum. Diet cola, Gatorade.
“SpaghettiOs!” I said, lifting a supersize can from one of the bags. “I haven’t had these since I was, like, ten.”
Rex climbed the swim ladder without looking at me, and for the first time, it occurred to me that something might be wrong.
“What is it?” I said.
He sat down beside me on the cockpit bench, worked his hand into the pocket of his shorts. “I thought about not giving this to you,” he said, and he pulled out a quartered envelope, smoothed it on his knee. It was constructed from homemade paper, oversize and square, and even before I saw Toby’s and Mallory’s names in the corner, I understood that it was an invitation, guessed what it probably meant. It had been sent care of our cottage in Bermuda. It was postmarked the thirtieth of July. Who could say how long it had been in transit before it had actually arrived? Someone had added the name of the boatyard where Chelone had been repaired. But how had it wound up at Echo Island? Perhaps another cruiser, someone we’d met at Freddie’s, had carried it south, looking out for us, hoping our paths would cross. Rex told me he’d spotted it at the Echo ferry dock, pinned to a bulletin board along with dozens of other lost letters, want ads, notes. That couple struck by lightning—Houndfish? had been written in bold capital letters across the bottom.
I remembered, then, my father saying that Toby had something to send us. I’d imagined—what? Something for the boat? Some small, useful gadget? A good-luck charm? But nothing had come, and as soon as Chelone’s repairs were complete, I’d forgotten to think about it.
Until now.
“I got through to your mother,” Rex said. “She assumed we already knew. Everyone thinks we know about this, Meg.”
“So why didn’t she say something in her e-mails?” I began, then stopped. Even at the Internet café in Echo Harbor, you had limited time to download your mail, respond, surf the net for a bit of news. There were only three computers. There were restless lines of people, waiting, and you paid, of course, for each minute. Are you going to congratulate Toby? my mother had written, shortly after we’d first arrived in Houndfish. When Rex relayed the message, I’d assumed—we’d both assumed—that it had something to do with his fish, his cichlids, perhaps another breeder’s prize. Obligingly, on his next trip to Echo, Rex had sent Toby a line that read Why should we congratulate you? Something to that effect. When we hadn’t heard anything back, we’d blamed the distance. My mother, being my mother, hadn’t mentioned it again.
I opened the invitation.
Toby and Mallory’s wedding would take place on the day after Christmas. The actual exchange of vows—led by a justice of the peace—would be held aboard the Michigan Jack: sleet, snow, or freeze. Afterward, there’d be hot tea and a vegetarian lunch at the Indian restaurant downtown. At the bottom of the card, Toby had written a single, sloping line: Hope you can be there. Below it, in a back slant that must have been Mallory’s, two simple words.
Please come.
Rex was reading over my shoulder; now, he made a sharp, sarcastic sound. “Right. You, me, Cindy Ann and her kids, all sitting down for a nice dish of curry.”
“Are Mom and Dad going?” I asked.
“They’re driving up next week. That’s all I know because we got disconnected. When I tried to call back, the seven wouldn’t dial.”
“There’s more than one phone at the ferry dock, Rex!”
“Actually, Meg, there are four. One had no dial tone. One dialed spontaneously when I picked up the receiver. One had no receiver.”
“She probably thinks you hung up on her,” I said, imagining my mother replacing the receiver, waiting for Rex to call back. Imagining Toby, reading Rex’s e-mail, his face flushing dark with hurt. “I suppose it would all be even worse if we were there,” I said, speaking more to myself than Rex, and Rex said, “Do you ever wish we hadn’t dropped the civil suit?”
The question took me by surprise.
“Why?” I finally said.
“I want to know your answer.”
“If we hadn’t dropped the suit,” I said, avoiding the question, “we’d be meeting with Arnie every other week. We’d be in and out of court.”
“Not necessarily.”
A dinghy approached Chelone’s stern; it belonged to a neighboring ketch. Two men sat on the forward seat while a third, Paulie Mandler, clutched the tiller.
“T-Rex!” he called. “Losin’ again tonight?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Okay, then. See you at the game.”
We waited, smiles fixed to our faces, until Paulie pulled away.
“The thing is,” Rex said, “I’ve been in touch with Arnie. I talked to him today, in fact.” He shrugged. “No sevens in his number.”
I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d confessed to having an affair. Stunned, I picked up two bags of groceries, carried them down the companionway. Rex followed with an armload of clean clothes, which he tossed into our stateroom. Then he poured himself a drink—the last of the scotch from a bottle he’d promised, three days earlier, would last him at least a week. He took a sip. Another. He said, “Anyway. Remember, before we left, I told you that he’d hired this private detective?”
I said, “Could you bring down the rest of the grocery bags?”
“Don’t you want to know what the detective found?”
“It doesn’t matter what he found.” I was sorting and stacking cans of food, slapping things onto the countertop: green beans, fruit cocktail, soup. “We withdrew the suit.”
Rex went topside, returned with the last of the groceries. Then he squeezed past me into our stateroom and shut the door. I could hear him opening drawers, putting away our clothes as I unpacked the perishables from their melted ice packs. When I looked up again, he was dressed in fresh shorts and a short-sleeved polo, his uncut hair slicked back into a nub of ponytail. The ponytail appealed to me about as much as the beard. It emphasized his high forehead, with its receding hairline, its chronic peeling sunburn. “Cindy Ann’s attorney wants to settle, Meg.”
“I’m not getting dragged back into this.”
“So give Arnie permission to handle things for you.” He paused. “That’s what I did. Before we took off, in fact.”
I couldn’t stop shaking my head. “We dropped the suit. That was six months ago. You told me I could tell my brother, and I did. Don’t tell me what I told him wasn’t true.”
It was not a question.
“Six months ago,” Rex said, “I told Arnie that you’d—we’d—developed certain reservations. And Arnie advised me, as I would have advised any client of my own, that people often make these decisions in haste. Then, later on, when they’ve had some time to think, they change their minds. They get a second wind.”
I stared at him. “You’re telling me we didn’t drop the suit?”
“But wait until you hear—”
“You’ve been talking to him all along!”
“—buying liquor at the discount store! Shit-faced drunk in her kitchen, lit up like a goddamn diva in a spotlight! The detective got photos, Meg, dozens of them.”
And that was all it took. Instantly, all the old anger kicked and bit and punched its way out of my heart. I was coming down County C toward the Point Road. I was watching the Suburban slow for the yield, and I did see it slow, I made certain of it, before I glanced away. I was staring at the cemetery plot that would
hold the body of my child as soon as the ground thawed enough for the backhoe. I was rocking, naked, in the same bed where Evan had been conceived, screaming into my pillow, unable to let Rex touch me.
“I know,” Rex said. “I know.”
Again, we heard the sound of a dinghy drawing near. There was a knock on the side of the hull.
“Ahoy, Chelone!” This time, we recognized the voice of Marvin Thomas, Pam’s husband, a retired ophthalmologist. “Rex-man, need a lift?”
“Be right up,” Rex called. To me, he said, “You can have the dinghy. I’ll catch a ride with someone after the game.”
“How much is it?” I asked, softly. “The settlement?”
“Two hundred thousand.”
“Peanuts.” I spat the word. “To someone like her, that’s pocket change.”
But Rex shook his head. “She’s uninsured. Her trust is nearly spent. She took out a loan on the house before the accident.”
“She must have equity there.”
“The first forty thousand is protected by Wisconsin statute. She walks away with that much, at least, no matter what we do.”
Outside, Marvin’s dinghy motor flooded, choked, died. You could smell the belch of gas fumes as it started up again. Rex downed the rest of his drink in a gulp.
“I want to see those photographs,” I said. “I want—”
But then my throat closed up. I couldn’t say anything more.
“You know what?” Rex said. “The hell with the game. Let me run up and tell Marv I’ve decided not to go.”
“No,” I said. “If you don’t go now, half the cove will be stopping by to ask if something’s wrong.”
“You shouldn’t be alone with this.”
“I’ve got the dinghy,” I said. “I’ll head over to the ’Girls. I’m okay, I’ll be okay,” I said, turning my head to avoid the sour taste of scotch.
“Sorry,” Rex said, and then I was sorry, too, but it was too late. He was already up the steps.
Gone.
I tuned the single sideband to the BBC, tried to focus on world news as I dumped the perishables into the sour-smelling well of the refrigerator. The postelection scandal was heating up in Florida. The Middle East peace talks were falling apart again. Blood-colored liquid sloshed around at the bottom; the trap was blocked with a butter wrapper, eggshell, bits of cheese. It was time to clean it properly, thaw the layer of ice that was clinging to the cold plate. It was time to take everything out of the lockers, wipe the shelves down with diluted bleach. The trash bags were full. The floors needed washing. The brass grab rail in front of the stove begged for polish, as did the compression post. Outside, in the cockpit, the teak was overdue for staining and sealing. The hull’s gel coat had lost its shine.
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