Still on his back, he inched to the left, careful not to move his head too suddenly. The boat rocked in the gentle Pacific swells, a sure sign that the tide was rising, and the contents of his stomach seemed to rock right along with it. He extended his left arm, got the drawer open, stuck his fingers inside. He couldn’t see the contents of the drawer without raising his head and there were too many bottles inside to do it strictly by touch. He scooted slowly up against the pillows, raising himself inch by painful inch. The throb in his forehead tilted into his left temple and hammered relentlessly.
Finally he was sitting high enough to see into the drawer, but it was so jammed with shit that he couldn’t distinguish one bottle from another. Angry, he swung his legs over the side of the bunk, jerked out the drawer, and turned it upside down on top of the bed. Stuff tumbled out: bottles, pens, pads of paper with phone numbers and e-mail addresses jotted on them, wads of dollar bills, a pair of pliers, a wrench, rubber bands and paper clips, an extra cord for the laptop, CDs... Christ. Everything that had no other home ended up in this drawer.
Curry pawed through the bottles, found the papaya enzymes and the aspirin, but by then it was too late. His stomach heaved and he leaped off the bed and ran for the head. He made it, but barely.
You sorry sack of shit. The voice of his old man always came to him at moments like this. You’re wasting your life. And behind this came the voice of his sister: You’re such an incredible idiot. Or: Grow up, Keith, face it. You’ll never amount to anything.
Curry pushed to his feet and went over to the sink. He turned on the cold water, held a washcloth under it, then pressed it, dripping wet, against his face. He felt a little better afterward, and cupped water in his hands and sipped it, washing the sour taste out of his mouth. He found a bottle of papaya enzymes and Advil in the medicine cabinet and helped himself to half a dozen of the first and two of the last. They had become his staples in life, both of them remedies for hangovers.
He caught sight of himself in the mirror: vivid blue eyes that were—on better days than this—his best feature, blond hair that had grown a bit too long these past months, a blond beard that looked ragged, and a weathered face that carried a lot of emotional baggage. Born with good looks, health, and intelligence, he had abused all three with a kind of relentless determination, as though it were his mission in life.
“Welcome to another day in paradise,” he muttered, and got into the shower, wondering exactly what day it was.
The curious thing about living in Panama was that he lost track of time here. It wasn’t just the booze, although that helped, but that the entire country seemed to exist in a permanent warp where the passage of days held no more importance than the current government administration. Life bumped along, following the familiar grooves of cultural habits and patterns. Poverty and corruption flourished, cheap booze and even cheaper drugs flowed, boats entered and left the canal, and the Pacific tides rose and fell, marking off his life in twelve-hour periods.
He knew he’d met a new woman last night, that they’d done some serious drinking together, but he couldn’t remember her name or her face or what had happened to her when he’d left downtown Panama City to return to the yacht club. He didn’t have any idea how he’d gotten back here. Had she been American or something else? He couldn’t remember that, either. Women came and went from his life with a regularity as predictable as the tides.
Most of them were nomads, like Curry, except that a few of them owned the boats on which they traveled. They usually worked on the vessels, hitching rides from Europe and Asia and the States and ended up here in Balboa while they waited for their turn to go through the canal. Many were headed west to the Galapagos, Easter Island, Australia, a route Curry had taken four or five times. Others headed south for Brazil or east to the Canary Islands, the coast of Spain. They generally went where it was warm and the living was easy.
Some came for that easy living, others were drawn by the weather. But nearly all ended up here because of the canal, a passage of fifty-one miles that took you from one ocean to another in about ten hours and shortened your voyage by about eight thousand miles.
Twelve years ago when he’d first sailed down here, a gringo in his late twenties, he’d fallen in love with the easy living. It was rather like a seductive woman who got under your skin and into your blood. Now, it was simply the country that he loved, the passion and warmth of the people, the hot, sultry air filled with music, and, of course, the proximity of the oceans.
The Balboa Yacht Club stood on the west side of the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal, just south of the Bridge of the Americas. North latitude 8 degrees 56 minutes, west longitude 79 degrees 33 minutes, for anyone who cared. The place had changed considerably since he’d first come here. Twelve years ago, the clubhouse, restaurant, and the open-air bar never closed. It rocked with music, noise, chaos, and people from all over the world. Expatriate Americans sat around drinking tequilas and cheap Panamanian beer, trading gossip and stories and tales of paradise in Ecuador, Tahiti, New Zealand.
Much of the old life at the Balboa ended on February 18, 1999, when the clubhouse, bar, and restaurant had burned to the ground. He’d been moored here that night and had awakened around three in the morning by the choking stink of smoke. The fire was so far along by then that even the bomberos—the firemen—couldn’t stop it By the time the sun had risen, the place was nothing but a smoldering, blackened heap. Then, two years later, 9/11 had happened, just one more nail in the Balboa’s coffin.
In the last several years, though, some of the old spirit had returned as travelers had taken to the sea again. The clubhouse, bar, and restaurant had been rebuilt and the number of boats that moored here increased every month. Curry, who lived here at least six months out of the year, was now considered an old-timer. He knew his way around the considerable bureaucracy, was rich, and spoke the language like a native. And he had plenty of government contacts who were always on the take for the almighty buck.
He supposed that was why he’d found a wad of money in the bedside stand. Bribes. At least once or twice a week, he bribed someone for something—a good table, faster laundry service, a new parking sticker for his VW, faster service on the boat, faster this, better that. Money got things done here.
As soon as he was dressed, he pocketed the bills, then went into the galley. It looked wrecked—beer bottles everywhere, ashtrays overflowing, someone’s shorts and a bikini bathing suit top on the floor, dirty dishes stacked in the sink. Sticking upright in a plant was a large, fat spliff with a blackened tip that whispered, Smoke me, Keith. C’mon, Keith, get a little high, start your day off right, and I promise I’ll make you feel better.
He plucked the joint out of the plant and set it inside a large conch shell in the window. Before he tackled the kitchen, he needed to eat something. A mango, he thought, and plucked out the largest and the ripest one from a basket on the counter. He peeled and ate it over the sink, delighting in the feel of the warm juice sliding down the inside of his arms.
His cell phone rang again. He washed off his hands and went into the cabin to answer it. Every time he got a call from the States, unknown caller appeared in the window.
There were only a handful of U.S. callers for Curry: his housekeeper in Key West, his sister in Savannah, a couple of women in various parts of the States, his stockbroker in Miami, a property manager in Aspen, the guy in northern Georgia who looked after his riverside home.
“It’s hot and sticky in Panama this morning,” he said as he answered his phone. “This is Keith.”
The person on the other end laughed. “Well, it’s colder than a witch’s tit here in Prescott this morning. Hey, Keith, it’s Nick Whitford. Can you hear me okay?”
Whitford owned the bed-and-breakfast half a mile upriver from Curry’s place. For the last six years, he’d been taking care of homes along the river that were owned by part-timers like Curry. He picked up mail, plowed driveways, checked pipes, did whatever peop
le asked him to do. It had turned into a nice sideline business for Whitford, especially in the winter, when business at his bed-and-breakfast was slow.
“Like you’re next door, Nick. Don’t tell me the damn pipes burst again.”
“No, nothing like that. We had quite a bit of snow and I went over to your place early this morning to check the pipes and what all, but the chain was on the door. Turns out your sister’s staying there. I just wanted to let you know. I think she’s going to call you, too.”
My sister? “Could you, uh, describe her, Nick?”
“Brunette, five foot eight, I’d guess, slender, reminds me of Catherine Zeta-Jones. Gorgeous, Keith. Absolutely gorgeous.”
Shit. It’s her. Curry hadn’t spoken to Allie since... when? He couldn’t remember. ‘How long’s she been there?”
“She said she’d driven most of the night through the storm, so I guess she’s been there since before sunrise.”
Driven from where? For what? Alarms shrilled in his head. His sister never had taken him up on his open invitation to use the riverside house or his place in Key West when he wasn’t there. This break in her patterns disturbed him. But then, she’d disturbed him for as long as he remembered.
“Did she say how long she’s going to stay?”
“A few days. Is there a problem, Keith?”
Maybe. But not a problem Whitford could do anything about. “No, it’s fine. But you should keep picking up my mail and plowing the driveway. Did you get the latest check?”
“I did, thanks.”
“Listen, Nick. Let me know when she leaves. She’s an ER doc, high-stress job, you know? She’s probably burned out and won’t do much of anything except sleep and relax.”
That was a lie. His sister never relaxed. Even when she slept, Curry imagined that her mind churned, struggled, argued, fought, plotted, and strategized. When you mixed a classic type A personality with a compulsive-obsessive, it spelled control freak.
“Kind of check up on her, will you?” Curry asked.
“Sure thing. I’ll check in on her tomorrow. So how’s Panama treating you?”
Whitford always asked this question. It was part of his repertoire and had voyeuristic overtones, Curry supposed, since Whitford rarely went anywhere. His wife had died some years back, shortly after they’d bought the bed-and-breakfast. And a woman like Allie would chew this guy up for breakfast and spit out his remains without blinking. “The living’s easy, Nick. Hot and easy. Is it still snowing?”
“It’s stopped for now. But they’re predicting another two inches tomorrow sometime, then a major cold front. We’re going to have some power outages, for sure.”
“Could you make sure Al has firewood?”
“I already put some by the side of the house. I didn’t know you had a sister. You’ve never mentioned her.”
“We’ve never been close.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a sister like that,” he said with a laugh. “But Allie is one beautiful woman, my friend.”
Watch your step, Nick. “Yeah, she is. She’s also tough as nails. Hey, I’ll check in with you tomorrow.”
“You take care, Keith.”
After they disconnected, Curry tackled his kitchen with a vengeance, the conversation with Whitford eating away at him. He kept imagining Al in his house, cooking on the stove, using the washer and dryer, watching TV relaxing—and nothing added up. His sister rarely cooked, didn’t do her own wash, watched maybe one TV show a year. Aside from two failed marriages and occasional intense affairs with basically nice men like Whitford, her life was about work and responsibility. It was about the ER and tending to their father, and when their brothers and mother had been alive, it was tending to them as well.
When Al tended, when she was fully into her responsibility mode, she sought to control everything and everyone in much the same way that she probably controlled her ER. Do this, do that, we’re going here, going there. And when people didn’t comply, her face muscles tightened, her eyes darkened, the air around her seemed to crackle with static discharge. But that was just the surface stuff. Her need for control went deeper than that.
When he had decided to sell his business in Miami, Allie had grilled him about his plans. Where’re you going? What’re you planning to do? Why’re you leaving? What about the family?
Yeah, it always came back to that. The Family. As though the Currys were a kind of Mafia where bloodlines were everything. But from the time Curry had been very young, he’d never felt what she had about the Family. She was older than Curry by just two years, but the differences between them might as well have been two hundred years. Dean used to remark that Allie probably had been grown up at the age of four, with her life planned out, her career goals set, already prepared to assume the mantle of responsibility of their old man’s brilliance.
No one lived up to his sister’s expectations.
No one, not even their parents.
For awhile, it looked as if Dean might be the one who would surpass Allie’s expectations, but in the end he had broken away from the Family more radically and permanently than Curry himself. All Curry had done was change his last name to Cunningham—the name by which Nick Whitford knew him, and left the country.
None of this answered the central question: why was she at his place on the river?
And suddenly he snapped upright, jerked open a drawer, and went through the papers inside, searching for a calendar. The date, what the hell was the date?
He snatched up his cell phone and scrolled to the date: Sunday, December 28.
She said she’d driven most of the night through the storm, Whitford had remarked.
Yesterday was December 27, the thirteenth anniversary of Dean’s sentencing.
Curry leaned back against the edge of the counter and knuckled his eyes. She blew, she finally blew.
And did what?
Ridiculous. She was stressed, ER had finally gotten to her and she had taken some time off. Good, that was what she needed. But even as he thought this, an image surfaced in his memory of Allie a year ago Christmas, the last time Curry had seen her. They’d been sitting in their father’s room at the nursing home, trading gifts, when she’d suddenly said, In two days, it will be twelve years since Dean was sentenced.
Dean the bean, their father had said, smiling stupidly.
Someone should pay for it. She said this with such vehemence, looking straight at Curry, that he’d been shocked into muteness.
Let it go, Al, Curry finally managed to say.
And Allie had exploded, accusing him of deserting Dean, of never visiting him, of fleeing the country right after the trial and divorcing himself from the entire family. It was all true. Every goddamn thing she’d said was true. But when he’d fled, he’d done so with the desperation of a man who had no other choice.
Hey, he was sorry the old man had lost his mind. But their relationship had sucked from day one. The old man never liked Curry very much because he was conceived after he and Curry’s mother had separated, during a night of weakness and lust. But once Curry’s mother was pregnant, his father had felt obligated to move back into the house and try to make a go of the marriage. Curry was a constant, thorny reminder of where the old man’s life had diverged, where doors had slammed shut, where his options had shrunk.
Dean, born eight years later, had been the golden boy, a brightness in Bill Curry’s life that had coincided with the FDA approval of a drug that he had developed that now saved millions of lives each year and fed the Curry family coffers. Little Ray, born eighteen years after Allie, was the late-life child, a shock, a surprise, and a delight to everyone—except Allie. Why not Allie? He didn’t know.
Had never known. Maybe it was just the vast difference in their ages, or that Ray had been a reminder of her inability to conceive. One summer afternoon when Ray was just five, he had dived off a diving board in the family pool and had never come up.
That event, Curry knew, had marked the beginning of their mother�
��s addition to pills, which had culminated in her suicide shortly before Dean’s arrest. Now here they were, a disintegrated family, with just the old man, Allie, and himself left to remember. Except that the old man could barely remember who he was, much less who anyone else was. What the fuck, he thought. The Kennedys didn’t have an exclusive on family tragedies.
So when Curry punched out his sister’s cell number, he did so for many reasons—guilt, curiosity, and a morbid fear that she finally had cracked like a nut. But the bottom line was that the bonds of blood were the most difficult to sever.
“Dr. Hart.”
Her voice sounded as though she were drugged or emerging from a place so far underwater that he would need gills to get there. “It’s Keith.”
“Oh. Hey. Keith.”
“I just wanted to wish you a belated merry Christmas. Did you and Dad get the package I sent?”
“Yeah. We did. Thanks. We opened gifts on Christmas Eve. Did you get our package?”
Had he? He didn’t remember. He couldn’t even remember if he had celebrated Christmas. “Yes, thanks. I got a call from the guy who takes care of my place. He said you were staying for a couple of days. You okay?”
“I meant to call you. Sure, I’m okay. I just needed some time off from work. It gets nuts in the ER during the holidays. I hope it’s all right. I mean, I had the key and the garage opener you sent and...”
“It’s fine. I’m glad someone is using the place. Nick said he left you some wood for the stove. Did you find it?”
“I got in kind of late. I haven’t been outside yet. I turned on the electric heat. I’ll pay you for the utilities.”
“Forget it. The heat needs to be used sometimes. So how’s your love life these days, Al?”
“It sucks. How’s yours?”
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