“You’re going to bleed to death if you don’t lie down,” I insisted. The Rubber Duck lurched and he lost his balance. Max was not a small man and I had a firm grip on him. We came down on the deck in a tangle, me on top of him, holding him down.
“Enough,” I said. “Max, I gave him a massive whack with that bolt cutter. He’s been in freezing water for a long time. He’s not alive, and you won’t be alive for long either if we don’t stop that bleeding. We’re going in.”
Max could navigate around the islands as easily as around the furniture in his office, and he guided us back past Graves, past Spectacle, then Peddocks and Georges and Thompson, back to Charlestown and the docks. We cut the engines and tied up.
“Don’t move any further,” I admonished him when I’d gotten him to the end of the dock. “Stay right where you are. I’ll get a car and swing back to pick you up.”
Twenty minutes later we were in a white-curtained examination area in Mass General’s emergency room, Max’s pants scissored away and three interns swabbing, stitching, and setting up a transfusion. Then a gunshot wound drew them away and Max and I were alone.
“Did you know?” I asked. “About what he did to your sister, I mean?”
“No. I couldn’t know that.”
“So you called it an accident?”
“I called it my fault. My parents called it an accident, but that was only because it was less horrible to think it was an accident than anything else.”
“You said your sister’d been left in a bath by herself lots of times. Didn’t you wonder? Didn’t you think that Ricky…?”
“I don’t know. I know I left the house for a few minutes of pickup ball. I know I told Ricky I’d be right back. I was gone maybe twenty minutes. I know that.”
“He said you knew what he was,” I said. “Did you?”
“Sometimes you can’t know what you know,” he said. “You know that.”
I did.
We sat side by side for another half hour, waiting for a doctor to return and decide what to do with him next. I said, “Max, what happened tonight on the Rubber Duck, nobody’s going to blame us. And nobody’s going to find Ricky’s body.”
Max had managed to get blood in his hair as well, and now it stood out from his skull, matted where it had congealed and dried. I patted a clump of it down. I slipped my fingers along the bloody line he’d left on his cheek, down to his throat.
“Justice is done,” I said to him.
* * *
Before our hospital stay ended, we laid out the facts of the evening’s events for the authorities as thinly and plainly as we could. The interrogators looked at Max’s condition and asked him if he wanted to press assault charges against his brother, which made him laugh, not in a sane-sounding way. The staff left again, a nurse saying that Max would have to be admitted for the night because he needed another transfusion. Stay put, she said as she walked away.
“Thank you,” he murmured. “For saving me. For getting me here.”
“You’re welcome.”
Max Luhrmann looked as ravaged and windblown as a man coming from a storm at sea, which I guess is exactly what he was.
“Neave?”
“What?”
“You are so beautiful.”
The words sent a little electric trill through my chest. “Max, you took that painkiller the nurse gave you? The little white one?”
“Yes. It’s why I can say what I think. It doesn’t mean I don’t think it.”
I looked at him so carefully, so afraid I’d see a man who was too drugged to say what he meant. The man I saw looked entirely like himself, only bleeding and disheveled and a little slowed by the painkiller. He looked like he was in charge of his mental faculties.
He said, “You’re in my head almost all the time.”
I was still wearing the bloodstained pajamas I’d driven to the hospital in. My hair was jammed in a lumpy ponytail. I’d found a pair of old sneakers on the boat and slid my feet into them. There were holes in the toes. One of my hands lifted like the movement was its own idea and went to his lips. He stayed very still and then, slowly, put his hand on my neck. I pulled his whole body directly, entirely, against mine. I drew his head down and kissed him. He kissed back. I pulled away.
He reached for my hand and caught it. He pulled me onto his gurney. “Again,” he said. So I kissed him again.
NEAVE
Message in a Bottle
Ricky Luhrmann’s body was never recovered. They stopped looking when no trace of him surfaced over a ten-week “search.” Now he is a missing person who is missed by no one. Nothing will ever mark a grave or commemorate a date. His feet could be on a beach in Ballybunion and his head could be on its way to Reykjavik. Nobody has been accused of his murder because there is no body. There is only Max, who thinks that if he hadn’t walked out of the house that afternoon when he was ten and Ricky was eight and a little sister played in the bathtub, that everything could be different. He’s looking for something that will explain his brother.
I’m not. The world has Ricky Luhrmanns in it and sometimes there’s no explanation for what they are. They hurt people because it feels good. If Ricky Luhrmann had been fished out of the water and dried off, he would have gone and gotten a piece of wire and wound it around my neck. Then he would have nailed my hair to Max’s office door.
Max sold the Rubber Duck out of the hydrography department and bought a science research vessel he found in Woods Hole named Boogie Woogie. The oceanography department used it for salinity and current tracking, recreational fishing, and (unofficially) for parties. Six months after Max and I became lovers I was along on a party-boat ride on the Boogie Woogie to celebrate Charlie Healey getting a paper published in Scientific American magazine. His subject was MIBs—messages in bottles—which everybody had told him was not only an unpublishable topic but an embarrassing one for a serious researcher. After three or four beers, Charlie cornered me and repeated most of the article verbatim. I’d been the only one at the party who hadn’t glided out of his path when he’d come at them, so I learned that the American, British, and German navies had been tossing MIBs into the ocean for more than a hundred years, using them to track currents—the first human-made drifters to bob along the entire Northwest Passage. “Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days,” Charlie said drunkenly, poking me in the shoulder with the hand that wasn’t holding a beer. “Ecclesiastes. Biblical flotsamology.” He told me about an alcoholic preacher named George Phillips who put anti-drinking sermons into forty thousand bottles and pitched them into the Pacific. They reached Mexico, New Guinea, Australia. Fifteen hundred people who’d found them wrote to Phillips—lots of them promising to stop drinking. Those sermons inspired a Capt. Walter Bindt to start throwing bottles that he called Gospel Bombs anywhere he sailed—sometimes fifteen hundred of them in a single voyage. Then he told me Daisy Alexander’s story.
“Daisy was a Singer Sewing Machine heiress who moved to London and started putting messages in bottles and tossing them into the Thames. When she died, nobody could find her will. That’s because it was in a bottle. Twelve years later a newly bankrupt restaurant owner named Jack Wurm was walking on a beach in San Francisco, wondering if he should kill himself. He found the bottle, broke it open, and unfolded Daisy Alexander’s will. It said, ‘To avoid all confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle and to my attorney, Barry Cohen, share and share alike. Daisy Alexander, June 20, 1937.’ The estate was worth twelve million dollars. The Singer family challenged the will in court and lost. Doesn’t that make you feel better about the way the universe works?” Charlie laughed. “Isn’t the universe wonderful and weird?”
Yes, I thought. It could be.
“All you have to do is bend over and pick up the bottle!” he went on.
I turned to Max, who was behind me listening to somebody going on about harmonics and the music of the gyres. I said, “Max, will you
marry me?”
THE PIRATE LOVER
Pirate Wedding
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, they say, and oh how many enemies Judge Henri Le Cherche had made in his short and brutal life. News of the battle between the brothers spread from the closer shores to the villages, the towns, and the cities where the judge had acted directly or through his many layers of subordinates to have his way: sexually, legally, financially. He had ruined countless lives, and now that the judge was dead and far beyond revenge they closed ranks against him and appeared in courts to say that Basil Le Cherche—a man holding a letter of marque and no pirate at all but a noble servant of his country—had been attacked by his brother Judge Henri Le Cherche’s forces, who sought to take his prizes for themselves. Thief! Thief and whoremaster, they cried, for the women who had followed Electra Gates up and out of the darkness of their prison appeared also in those courts, dressed demurely with their hair bound modestly, describing Henri Le Cherche as a monster who had essentially purchased them into slavery.
Invitations came cautiously, and then in a rushing stream. Society waited and gauged its response against its most powerful members and when one of the royal family requested Basil Le Cherche’s presence at a ball in his honor, all Paris opened its doors to him. He declined the invitations. They had not invited Electra Gates, whose status was much more vulnerable to scandal than any man’s—and he would go to no palace, nor any hovel, that did not welcome her.
“You know they will not invite a woman whose presence could compromise their wives’ reputations,” she said to him. “You are a hero, but I, I am consort to an adventurer—I am fallen.”
“I will force the issue!” he cried. “Every door in society must open to you, or I will seclude myself!”
She laughed. “Basil, do you think I care what the bejeweled harpies of society do or think? You should move about freely if you choose—but I am free to avoid the world, and I treasure that freedom. You must accept these invitations and remain in the world. You have shipyard managers to bribe if you are ever to set sail again, politicians you must encourage to sign the documents that make you free to go where you will. Remember that you have men to help or hinder. Be sure that if I wished to go somewhere, do something or be something, I would see it done. I will go where I wish, or not. You need clear no way for me.”
How could any man or woman resist her? he thought. This woman who only a few months ago had been an obedient girl—an offering on the table of the season’s balls, something set on her mother’s hook to cast into pools of wealthy men. That young woman was gone, and here in her place was a creature who could embrace both battle and lovemaking, and the only opinion in the world besides her own that swayed her was his—because he was hers, chosen with the full freedom of her heart and soul, given to him with the surging fullness of her own desires.
“I do what you will me to do,” he told her. “But know that I will brook no disrespect towards you—anywhere from anyone.”
“Their opinion does not move me and it should not concern you, Basil. We are not of their kind, and will be gone from them soon. We have a ship. Two hours in Shelmerston’s port and you can put together the best crew afloat. And then, perhaps the West Indies. The Sargasso. Spain.”
He laughed. “Say the word, little witch,” he said, “and we set our sails to please you.”
“We will circle the Earth together, Basil Le Cherche. We will be each other’s world, complete unto ourselves.”
He pulled her into his arms. “If you say so, Electra Gates,” he said, “it shall be.”
In the next weeks no visitors but Madame de Lac came to the rooms she and Basil had taken while the Cat was being refitted. Electra had not seen Madame de Lac since the night of the ball, but she was not surprised to see her card. She told Trotter to admit her. Madame de Lac had never had much interest in the moral issues that any sexual affair presented, and Electra’s ostracization from polite society meant nothing to her. She was married, wealthy, and, perhaps most important, she knew the secrets of virtually anyone in Paris or London who could harm her. They would have nothing to say to her visiting a fallen woman.
“You are a fool, Mademoiselle Gates, but I understand. I too was a fool for the briefest time. A little window that closed before I could leap through.”
“You refer to my relationship with Basil Le Cherche?”
“Of course.”
“And what was this little window? The one you declined to leap through?”
“I loved someone once. I let him go.”
“Are you saying that you regret it, Madame de Lac?”
“Do you serve tea in this house, Mademoiselle Gates? I long for one of those cinnamon cookies from the new shop that everyone is raving about.”
Electra understood this to mean that her interesting, and interested, guest was willing to speak frankly but she was gathering herself, flushing the servants from the room before she spoke openly. The servants, in this case, were Basil Le Cherche’s bosun, and Trotter, his personal valet, who followed him on shore as well as at sea. Electra smiled. “Trotter and Joe discovered that little shop within an hour of touching foot on land. Sugar is their siren call. I’ll send them off to lay waste to its riches. Again. They’ve been there three times this week—most excellent servants.” She rang her little bell and sent them off, their departure leaving an echoing silence for the minutes before Madame de Lac spoke again.
“The world can be an ugly place, Mademoiselle Gates, and I know you have seen some of its darker corners. I knew Henri’s habits very, very intimately.” She opened her light silk coat to expose the soft flesh. A jagged red scar sliced down and around one perfect breast. Electra gasped. The jacket was buttoned again.
“Henri Le Cherche did this?”
“No. Another of his kind. There are many of his kind, my dear, as I suspect you already know. Mine happened to be one who loved a sharp blade. He was my first and I hope only complete lapse of judgment.”
“Was this the man you were in love with?”
“He was.”
“Did someone help you … escape him?”
“I destroyed him myself.”
“I am sorry,” Electra whispered.
“Perhaps I am, too, but not very much. From him I learned to recognize any number of monsters—all kinds of monsters—and most of them expressed their hatred of the world through their relations with their women. Strange. Yet they are fairly legion among us, hiding sometimes behind judge’s robes and sometimes in ragged simple oilcloth cloaks. We walk among them, and they hate us.”
Electra waited quietly. She knew that what Madame de Lac said was true, but she also knew that it was not the only truth.
Her visitor went on: “I know you know this about the world. Yet you are not held captive by fear. You do not withhold trust. You are free of cynicism and loneliness. I am not.”
“You could be the same.”
“I cannot. You have experienced something that I no longer believe I ever will know. I no longer even seek it.”
“What is that, Madame?”
“You fell in love. And you fell in love with a man who was worthy of it.”
“Madame de Lac, I have heard of your lovers, who are legion. You are married to a rich and powerful man. You seem to seek love with a passionate intensity.”
“Many of them are the kinds of conquests that a woman collects as amusements or insurance—decent men who can offer protection from the monsters, so to speak. Others, men that are not merely conquests … I have hoped to change, to love one of them. But I cannot. To change, one must cast aside self-protection, all the while knowing what could happen if one does. I live surrounded by luxury and flatterers. But I live deeply alone.”
“Madame de Lac, I remind you that your life is not over. You speak as if from the grave.”
“You are young. You do not understand the binding quality of decisions that have been reinforced with decades’ worth of other very small, apparently
insignificant decisions. They gather momentum and carry you so far that you cannot go back. I am not saying I regret my life, Electra Gates. I am only looking at the beginning of yours with great interest.”
The cookies arrived, carried in by a grumbling Trotter, who dropped the tray between them and left.
“I take it your man is not familiar with the niceties of pouring?” Madame de Lac said, one eyebrow arched. “Yet he understands a mistress’s desire for privacy—a valuable skill in any servant. Allow me.” She served them. “Electra, I see your mother’s card sits on the table in the front hall.”
“It does.”
“I take it from your tone that you did not receive her.”
“My mother understands nothing. Speaking with me would only upset her more.”
“Perhaps. But pity is seldom wasted and you might offer some to her. Like many before her, she can only see a daughter who betrayed her mother’s highest hopes for her. She does not see the daughter who is faithful to her own self, her own hopes. The woman lacks courage, but so do most of us. And after all, my dear, you are in love—you glow in the wake of what it has brought you—and you can afford a little generosity to one who has never known such a state. Pity her.”
So uncharacteristic were these compassionate words from Madame de Lac that Electra took them to heart and the next time her mother came to her door, Madame Gates was admitted. She entered weeping, clutching her bosom. “I have tried to forgive you,” she cried. “I have suffered, and I have wondered, and I cannot understand. And you know this but do not care!”
“No. I do not.”
“Because of you I have been shamed and impoverished—I live on the crumbs of the few who allow me into their homes simply in order to pity me!”
“Reject their pity. Scorn them,” Electra advised, her eyes narrowing.
“You think that is a simple matter without money? Heartless creature! Soulless wanton vixen!”
“Wanton, perhaps. Heartless and soulless, no. Mother, I have access to a great pool of material wealth and can easily divert a stream of it toward you. An excellent address, some beautiful clothes—these things will silence most of the harsher judgments directed at you now.”
The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Page 29