Until now.
“I told Bernadette about Evan,” I said. “Some other people, too.”
Rex passed his hand across his face. It was raining harder now, and water dripped from the corner of the overhead hatch.
“It doesn’t matter,” he finally said. “I told Eli a few weeks ago.”
“You did what?” I shook my head, couldn’t stop shaking it. “Jesus, Rex, is there anything else you’re not telling me?”
“What’s the big deal? It’s not like he would have told anyone.”
“He would have told Bernadette. My God, she knew, Rex, she knew all along—”
“Why would he tell her? I told him in confidence.”
“Because that’s their relationship.” I was shouting. “They don’t keep secrets from each other. They don’t have that kind of marriage, the kind of marriage we clearly do.”
“Listen to yourself,” Rex said, and he was shouting, too. “Their relationship. What relationship? What do they have beyond that poor child? He’ll be dead in another six months, and what will they do with themselves when that happens? What are they going to do?”
His voice broke. He was crying. The rain was gusting, hammering the cabin top.
“It’s been a year, Meg, and nothing gets better. What are we going to do?”
The anniversary of Evan’s death had started out like any other day. Yoga class, followed by a quick dip in the ocean. Back to the boat to tidy up, punch down the bread dough that I’d left to rise, finish the week’s baking before the sun got too high. Midmorning, Bernadette had shown up in Rubicon’s dinghy, Leon settled into an old beanbag chair, his wheelchair folded up in the bow. Wasn’t it a perfect day, she called, for snorkeling at Hunter’s Cay? She’d already packed a picnic lunch. All we needed were our flippers and masks.
Rex was still in his boxers, sipping coffee from a chipped china mug. “Go ahead,” he said. “Have a good time.”
“Come, too.”
He shook his head. “I need to work on the bilge pump.”
I couldn’t object to that. “Okay.”
Five minutes later, I was perched beside Leon. Bernadette steered us out into the channel.
Hunter’s Cay had originally been developed as a day destination for cruise ships, complete with covered gazebos, wooden boardwalks, tikki huts, outdoor grills. But the narrow passage from the ocean side was routinely treacherous. Passengers aboard the ships arrived too seasick to eat the waiting conch salads, too queasy to purchase the tropical drinks from the open-air bars. They were not in the mood to dance beneath the tents set up along the water. They certainly were not in the mood to recommend the trip to friends. Within a few years, the venture went bankrupt; the cruise ships left the area for good, abandoning everything when they went, down to the generators, the lightbulbs, the pots and pans, the woven rattan chairs. Rumor had it that the company was based out of Scandinavia. There was no chance, now, that they’d ever return to clean up the mess they’d made. Cheaper just to write everything off. Cheaper to let the rust and rot return everything, over time, to the jungle of scrub palm and poisonwood that had been there in the first place.
But Hunter’s Cay, ruined though it was, was something close to paradise for Leon Hale: the cleared paths meant we could push his chair across the island to the outer beach, which was protected by a wide, curving reef. We ate our picnic lunch beneath the shade of a grassy-thatched gazebo; afterward, we sat at the water’s edge, waiting for Bernadette’s mandatory hour to pass before we could lace Leon into his life preserver, float him out toward the reef. Bernadette was sketching a sea biscuit that had washed up a few yards away; Leon sucked on a grape-flavored lollipop, which I held for him, mopping at his chin. Just inside the reef, terns were diving at things in the water; farther out, something large and shiny jumped, then landed with a flat-bellied splash. The wind must have shifted, because, precisely at that moment, a wave of artificial grape-smell hit me—
—and I found myself thinking of Evan’s bronchitis during the weeks before his death. He’d first gotten sick after Halloween. A cold, we’d thought, but it came with a cough that lingered on up to the week of Thanksgiving. His pediatrician had prescribed one antibiotic, another, another still. “If this one doesn’t work,” she told me, “we’ll send him to Mercy for a workup, maybe have him spend the night. So it’s really important he take every dose, all of it, on schedule.”
But this last antibiotic only came in a cherry-flavored base. Evan loathed cherry. Flushed, furious, he gagged up the first dose I forced between his teeth, shrieking as if I were trying to make him swallow human blood. Leaving him with Rex, I’d driven to a ma-and-pa pharmacy thirty-five miles west of Fox Harbor, where Mallory—yes, it had been Mallory—had heard there was a pharmacist who could disguise the taste of anything, borrowing flavors from the old-fashioned soda counter.
The pharmacy was on Main Street, and its front window displayed an eclectic mix of items: crutches, a coffeemaker, a wedding dress. Inside, the cashier explained that the pharmacist, Doc Worthing, was out walking his dog, but if I wanted to wait at the counter, she’d make me a root beer float. How could anyone object to a root beer float? I sat down to wait for Doc. Half an hour later, he finally arrived, slightly out of breath. He was an old man, tidy in a bow tie, and he stroked his white mustache as I told him about the length of Evan’s illness, opened my coat to show him the streaks of cherry-flavored medicine I still wore.
“If I can’t get him to swallow it, they’ll put him in the hospital,” I said, swiping at the sudden, ridiculous tears that forced their way down my cheeks.
But Doc nodded sympathetically. “I tink I can help,” he said. Was the accent Luxembourg? Dutch? Ten minutes later, he’d disguised the nasty cherry with a grape-flavored syrup, plus a drop of lemon oil.
“It still smell like da cherry,” he said. “But I bet he like all da same.”
Evan, in fact, had loved it. By the next day, that terrible cough had finally begun to subside. Licking a drip from the edge of the dropper, I’d thought of grape Kool-Aid, grape Popsicles, smooth grape bubble gum, the kind that comes in fat, purple cubes and doesn’t lose its flavor, no matter how long you chew it, no matter, even, if you leave it stuck, overnight, to the side of your bed. Later that night, creeping into his room, I could still smell the sweetness of his breath.
“Life is too short,” Doc Worthing had said, “to swallow da taste of bitter medicine.”
Leon had been watching me closely; now, he pushed the sucker from his mouth with his tongue.
“Laa-laa,” he said.
It was his comfort word, equally meaningless and meaningful. I bent to him for a sticky kiss, and to my surprise, he hugged me, one skinny elbow locked behind my neck. I closed my eyes, and it was Evan who clung to me that way, smelling of shampoo and boy-sweat and grape. Evan, dead one year now. Evan, gone for good. I felt as if I’d made it all up: his birth, his infancy, the years he’d spent toddling into steady, sturdy childhood. Perhaps Rex felt the same way. Perhaps this was why the date had gone unmentioned between us.
“December third,” I whispered to Leon. “Today is December third.”
“Hour’s up!” Bernadette called, cheerfully. “Anybody ready for a swim?”
That night, aboard Chelone, Rex was in a foul mood. He hadn’t worked on the bilge pump. Instead, he’d spent the day fishing with Eli on Rubicon’s dinghy, a bottle of rum in the cooler. They’d managed to catch a few mutton snapper, but they were small, and the fillets had come out raggedy, unappealing. The propane grill refused to light, and then, when it did, one of the fillets slipped between the rungs, landing in the flames. Rex was jabbing at it with a fork when I stuck my head out the companionway, holding a pair of tongs.
“Here,” I said. “Try these.” And he snapped, “If I want your help, Meg, I’ll ask for it.”
The fillets were burned, but we ate them. There was nothing else to eat. Rex poured himself a scotch—his second drink since I’d co
me home, or was it already his third? I hated myself for counting. I hated myself for not calling him to task for the way he’d spoken to me. But it seemed easier just to let it go, try to forget about it. He was tired, after all, from an afternoon on the water. I was tired, too. Later that night, after supper, after the dishes had been washed and put away, I was getting ready for bed when Rex appeared at our stateroom door.
“You go ahead,” he said. “I think I’ll just sleep on the settee.”
I looked at him. “Are we mad at each other?”
He made a funny sound, the spark of a laugh that didn’t quite catch. “The berth mattress bothers my shoulder, that’s all.”
“You should start doing those exercises again,” I said.
“They didn’t help.”
“You didn’t give them a chance.”
“They only made things worse.”
“Then come with me to yoga class. Or the marina pool. You need to get more exercise.”
“Especially at my age,” Rex said, quoting the Bermudan doctor. Only there wasn’t a trace of humor in his voice.
For a moment, neither of us said anything.
“Well,” I finally said. “Get a good night’s sleep.”
“You, too,” Rex said, and then: “Look. I’m sorry about before. I didn’t mean to be cross.”
“It’s okay,” I said, and it was. It didn’t seem important anymore. We even kissed good night before he turned away, and in the morning, it was as if the previous day had never happened.
But that night, again, he stayed up late, drinking. Slept on the settee.
And the night after that.
And the night after that.
part three
BLUE WATER
Nine
the Echo Island airport was roughly the size of a living room. It consisted of two rows of plastic chairs, a liquor stand, an artificial Christmas tree, and a gate shared by a half-dozen airlines, none of whose names I recognized. My poisonwood rash had stopped blistering; now it was starting to peel. A man approached me, standing too close as I studied the spidery scrawl of available flights on the chalkboard.
“You burn yourself?” he asked, staring at my forehead. It was nine in the morning, but the liquor stand was open. I could smell the rum on his breath.
“Long story,” I said.
He laughed. “I’ve got time. C’mon, let me buy you a drink.”
“Look,” I said, pulling at the neck of my T-shirt. There, across my collarbone, the rash had formed a necklace of scabs, the healing skin around each one like a crown of neon pink. “It’s flesh-eating bacteria, okay? Highly contagious.”
The man backed away without another word.
The only flight north I could find was aboard a single-engine plane that appeared considerably smaller than Chelone. It was scheduled to depart for Great Exuma Island in less than an hour. From Great Exuma, I could fly to Eleuthera, then Marsh Harbor, where—the ticket agent assured me—I could get a connecting flight to Miami within a few days. It was already the eighteenth of December; still, with a little luck, I’d arrive at my parents’ town house in time to catch a ride north to the wedding.
“How much do you weigh?” the ticket agent asked.
Sneaking another glance at the plane, I inflated the figure by twenty pounds.
We took off—three passengers plus the pilot—so low to the ground that we could see inside the fuselage of another small plane that had crashed into the tidal pools just beyond the runway. I was beginning to think we might join it when my window blew open with a bang. Papers flapped around the cockpit like fierce, white birds. The pilot, cursing, turned us around and dove back toward the airport. Two of my fellow passengers were sportsmen returning from a bonefishing tour, and they cursed enthusiastically along with the pilot. The third passenger said nothing. He appeared to be asleep, although his eyes were open, fixed. The moment the plane stopped moving, he scrambled across my knees, punched open the side door, and jumped. We watched as he sprinted across the airstrip, disappeared behind two Porta Pottis into a stand of dead palms.
“Chicken shit,” the pilot said. He pointed to the backpack that the man had left behind; wordlessly, the fishermen pitched it out the open door. “Okay, lady,” he said to me. “Here’s what you gotta do.”
Ten minutes later, we were taking off again as I sat twisted sideways in my seat, pinning the window shut with my shoulder. Just as the pilot had promised, it stayed up on its own once we reached cruising speed, which we did much more rapidly with just the four of us, the fishermen joking agreeably now, even the pilot looking pleased. Below were the teal green waters of the Gulf Stream, the pale yellow areolas around each tiny island. The dark shadows of sand sharks nosing along the shallows. The deep blue strokes of the channels. Here were the sailboats with their white-tipped peaks, and the long, streaming wakes of sportfishers. Two trawlers in tandem, rocking like turtles. A container ship, heading north toward the United States.
Home.
I closed my eyes, sleepy with the noise of the engine, the steady vibrations like a big cat’s purr. At dawn, Rex had dinghied me to the ferry dock, kissed me—a kiss that made me sorry to be leaving—then headed right back to Ladyslip, not waiting to wave me off. By now, he’d be aboard Chelone, putting a second coat of varnish on the teak. In the afternoon, he’d dig out his flippers and mask, clean the bottom of the hull. Barely a week had passed since Rubicon’s departure; still, he’d managed to repair the bilge pump, change the engine oil, fix the leaky hatch. He was doing his shoulder exercises. He was going for a swim every morning. He’d cut off his beard, shaved the remaining stubble down to the soft, pale skin. By the time I returned from Wisconsin, he promised, both he and Chelone would be shipshape, ready for another passage. Perhaps we could hop southeast through the Turks and Caicos, follow the curve of the Dominican Republic until we reached Puerto Rico. We might continue on to the Virgins, Antigua, St. Lucia. Who could say we wouldn’t decide to follow the northern coast of Venezuela, reserve passage through the Panama Canal, spend next summer in San Francisco Bay? If all went well, if conditions were right, we could even consider Vancouver for fall. Nights would be chilly, but we had the propane heater, and the turning leaves would be fantastic!
“I’m ready for a little cool weather,” he said as we lay on our backs, shoulder to shoulder, in our berth, looking up through the open hatch at the pale flush of stars overhead. “A change of scene. Aren’t you?”
“Vancouver,” I said. My hands were pinned beneath my thighs. The healing rash itched fiercely; I was trying not to scratch. “How long would we stay?”
“Till the butter gets too hard to spread.” Then he laughed. “I don’t know. Not more than a week or two. That was our mistake here, Meg. We got too comfortable, stayed too long.”
He’d flushed his painkillers down the head. He’d emptied his scotch overboard. Things were going to be different, he assured me, when I returned from Wisconsin. Thinking it over, he’d decided it wasn’t such a bad idea for me to spend a few weeks in the States. I could visit our tenant, review our accounts with Lindsey Steinke, pick up more traveler’s checks at the bank. I could stop by Arnie’s office in Milwaukee, have a look at those photographs, sign the settlement agreement. Or, if I didn’t want the hassle, Arnie would send the paperwork to Fox Harbor, or Miami, whatever was most convenient. All I had to do was ask him. All I had to do was make the call. It would be like having a tooth pulled. I’d wonder why on earth I’d ever waited.
“Well, I’m sorry to see you go,” Audrey said when I arrived on the beach for a final yoga class. “The whole community seems to be breaking up early this year.”
We lay on our towels in corpse pose, waiting, but nobody else arrived. Carole had stopped coming. Pam, along with Marvin and their dogs, had taken off for Cuba with a group of Canadians. Bernadette was gone, of course, as was Jeanie McFadden. Some people had flown out for the holidays; others were busy preparing for visits from relatives and fri
ends. Audrey herself seemed absentminded, unfocused, as we moved through our warm-up routine: mountain pose, staff pose, seated sage.
“Make sure you carry enough cash,” she said, startling me from my own wandering thoughts. “Scatter it through your bags. Twisted sage.”
We each bent our right knee, hugged it, turned slowly to the left.
“I’m bringing a backpack,” I said. “That’s it.” Packing had taken me all of five minutes: a pair of jeans, a change of shirts, sweatshirt, underwear, passport. From inside the liner of my foam berth mattress, I’d extracted my wedding ring. “I can borrow whatever I need from my mother. And I’ve got winter clothes in Wisconsin, in the attic. We boxed everything up in cedar chips before we left.”
Audrey exhaled deeply; we twisted the opposite way. “Winter,” she repeated. “Do you know, it’s been over twenty years since I’ve seen snow?”
I studied Audrey’s back and neck, the long, lean sinews of her body. She’d recently celebrated her seventy-sixth birthday; her husband had sweet-talked her onto the beach, where we’d all surprised her with sparklers, cupcakes, funny little handmade gifts. As the plane chattered and rattled its way through the clouds, I tried to imagine myself in thirty years, still living aboard Chelone. Bright-eyed (I hoped) and brittle-boned (perhaps), my hair tucked up in a bun. Childless. Homeless. Destined to move from place to place, just like the nymph Chelone, carrying everything I owned upon my back. Not that I’d be alone, of course. Rex would be with me, his high cheekbones sharpened with age, his gray eyes dulled with sun. He’d refused to come with me to Wisconsin. He’d said he couldn’t imagine returning to any kind of life onshore: not now, not anymore, not even for a few weeks. He advised me not to speak to Cindy Ann, to avoid eye contact should we happen to meet—which we would, of course, at Toby’s wedding. Any kind of interaction could, potentially, complicate the settlement. If she spoke to me, I should keep silent. To Mallory, I might say “Congratulations,” but it would be better to say nothing at all.
Blue Water Page 16