Lemon Reef

by Robin Silverman

  I said under my breath, “Ass backward!” Then a little louder so only Katie and Gail could hear, “That’s like counting to a thousand to get to a hundred.” They laughed. Tar Baby’s eyes fixed on us, the laughter making him nervous. “I’m just saying,” I said louder, addressing Tar Baby directly, “seems like a lot of work for a lot of risk.” He pressed his lips together, narrowed his eyes, and studied me momentarily, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that doing drug trades underwater might be stupid. “So,” I asked, “why did they use a boat if the whole point was to swim in?”

  Tar Baby shrugged. “Don’t ask me.” He wiped his nose. “All I know is I used to go with Tal on these runs, and we always swam in. You know, didn’t want to call any attention to ourselves. I told Nicole the boat was weird.”

  “Maybe Del wasn’t healthy enough to do a beach dive,” I said, remembering her physical condition. I pulled the copy of the report from my back pocket and began studying it. “The boat they used belonged to this guy, Sam Kramer. Do you know him?”

  Tar Baby nodded. “He’s the owner of a bunch of sleazy properties. Tal’s his manager—The Collector, they call Tal.”

  “His boat is berthed at the Skyline Marina in Coconut Grove,” I said. The Collector? It pounded in my head.

  “Why go to the trouble of getting a boat to do this dive?” Gail asked me as if the question hadn’t already been asked. “If Del wasn’t feeling well, just do it with someone else.” She suddenly remembered her supposed disinterest, looked caught, twisted her lips.

  “Maybe the boat had the drugs on it.” Tar was feeling around for another cigarette. “Could be it was a lot. A lot of heroin would require a boat.” Katie gave him one of hers, even lit it for him. I watched him watching her.

  My cell phone rang. Now Tar Baby was watching me.

  The caller said, “How’s the heat?”

  “Doug!” I was glad to hear his voice.

  “She was your first love, huh?” Without waiting for a response, he continued, “Geez, that’s too sad. I don’t know anything for certain yet. This isn’t my area of expertise. But the connection between smoking and diving complications is more tenuous than is stated here.”

  I moved away from the group, turned my back to face the ocean.

  “Funny,” Doug continued, “you know, carbon monoxide poisoning is getting a lot of attention right now because of the terrorism hype. We just investigated a case of carbon monoxide poisoning in a suspected terrorist incident in Boston. That’s why I know the amount of COHb—carboxyhemoglobin, that is—in your friend’s blood, twenty percent, is low to be the cause of death. Again, I’m not sure yet, but I think something else contributed to the death. I’ll give the report to our toxicology guy in the morning. He’ll be able to tell us more.”

  The call ended. I dropped my phone to my side and stared at the horizon for a moment to think. I decided I wouldn’t mention Doug’s comments yet because I didn’t want to agitate Nicole with further doubts until we had more information.

  Tar Baby said to Nicole, “You think he murdered her?” I took a breath and moved closer. “He killed her on the boat and threw her over?” Tar shot Ida and Nicole a knowing look, said, “What an asshole.”

  “No.” I knew from the report. “Del was alive when she went into the water.”

  Shaking his head from side to side, he said more to himself, “Sid went to prison and Tal killed her anyway.” Tar Baby laughed oddly. “Who woulda thought?”

  “What? What do you mean by that?” I knew as I asked it I’d sounded too eager. With paranoid people one must be painstakingly matter-of-fact, or they dash. He dashed by ignoring me. I dropped it, telling myself I’d find another chance to return to this.

  A black Jeep had pulled up to the entrance to the parking lot. Tar Baby’s eyes pegged Nicole. “Were you followed?”

  Gail’s face twisted; she clamped her palm to her forehead in a gesture of both disbelief and ridicule. The lot was closed, and when the driver of the car realized he couldn’t enter, he backed up, turned around, and left.

  “Well,” Tar Baby said to Nicole and Ida, “the thing I came here to tell you. The guys Tal was making the trade with, they say they didn’t see no boat anchored on the reef. And Tal was alone.”

  Nicole took it in for a moment, then turned to me and said, “So where was my sister?” Her vigilant eyes turned downward, as if they were suddenly the heaviest part of her. “Did she just stay on the boat?” Her pace from foot to foot increased, her face reddened, and I had the impression she was starting to rage.

  I put my hand on her shoulder, which seemed to calm her, and repeated to Tar Baby, “We know Del went in the water alive.” Privately I was trying to assess how credible this Tar Baby and his sources were, since the two bits of information, if true—that they hadn’t seen a boat and that Talon had been alone—raised a critical question: Did Del die on Lemon Reef? Talon had told the police he and Del were diving on the reef when Del had a heart attack. If she’d died somewhere else, Talon’s whole story was blown; he’d lose all credibility. More importantly, he’d look implicated.

  Tar Baby nodded, shot smoke through his lips like they were a straw. “Tal was alone when he made the trade. They risked a lot to tell me that.” He paused. “They’re not lying.”

  “Why are they doing this?” I asked. “Why are they helping?”

  Ida chimed in, “Jenna, a lot of people hate Talon. He’s got his foot on a lot of people’s necks and if they could hurt him they would. Putting him in prison would be like killing the wicked witch.”

  Nicole blurted out, “Blow fucking Toto. Can we just get back to Del?”

  “If the boat wasn’t on the reef at the time of the drug exchange,” I said toward Katie and Gail, “then where was it?”

  Tar Baby said, “Don’t know.”

  I was searching the crime report. Phone call to police at 11:05, body submerged approximately seven hours. She had been taken from the water at 5:30 p.m. That put her entry into the water at around 10:30 a.m. “Time,” I said, “we need the exact time the trade took place.” He eyed me head to foot once and nodded—maybe he’d get the information for me, and maybe he wouldn’t.

  We dropped Ida and Nicole off at Pascale’s. On the way back to Gail’s that night, both she and Katie suggested we go by Mel and Norma’s house to say hello. I didn’t want to. I wanted to go over the autopsy and crime-scene reports more closely. And I wanted to call Madison. And I was tired. I hadn’t slept or eaten since this thing had begun. Those were the reasons I offered for why I didn’t want to stop by Mel and Norma’s. The reason I didn’t offer: Del’s body pressed against mine, which this beach had encrypted in its granules. The feeling that being here for her funeral had everything to do with what had gone so terribly wrong between my parents and me fifteen years earlier.

  *

  On the last night I spent with Del—Christmas Eve in 1983—we roasted marshmallows, played games, and then watched It’s a Wonderful Life on TV. Once Del’s sisters and brother were asleep, Del and I made our way into Del’s room. At some point, we made love and then fell asleep. I woke up a few hours later in a panic. I turned and looked for the time, drew instant comfort from realizing it was still dark. I delicately worked my hand away from Del’s, disentangled our naked bodies, and covered her with the blanket.

  I picked up the gold crinkly paper in which I had wrapped Kalki and his horse, folded it, and placed it neatly on her dresser next to her statutes. Then I wrote a note to her on it in velvety blue ink that bled a little at the edges. On her dresser, too, I noticed the ticket stubs from the Stevie Nicks concert Del had taken me to for my fifteenth birthday. I quietly got dressed. She had her face to the wall. She was crying, but I pretended not to notice. I did not cry that last night with her. I think I was still simply refusing to believe it was my last night with her. And I was scared and adrenaline-rushed, and getting dressed and home before my parents woke up and found me missing felt urgent and at the same tim
e tedious to me. Trying to beat the sunrise, I jumped on my bike and headed back to my parents’ house.

  I was in my window, undressed, and in my own bed before I realized my dresser drawer was open. Its contents—Del’s letters to me, our photographs, all the poems and stories I’d written—were gone. My heart pounding, I pulled on sweats and opened my bedroom door to see the light from the living room on. I could hear my parents whispering. I made my way down the dark hallway to find my mother and father at the kitchen table. Their bodies were a triangle, their heads the point. My photos, love letters from Del, and other writings were widely exposed.

  “Those are mine,” I said, mortified but unwilling to let them know that. They ignored me. “Those are mine,” I said again.

  “This whole thing has gone much too far,” my mother said. “Your friendship with Del is too serious, it isn’t healthy.”

  She was holding—had just been reading—a card Del had given me after our day at the beach.

  “You’ve read the letters. Obviously, we’re more than friends,” I said.

  “You were more than friends,” my father threatened. He tossed a photo on the table.

  I watched it slide a few inches. It was a photo my brother Lance had taken in the summer, of Del and me on the beach just after a dive on Lemon Reef. We had our masks perched on our heads, and we were hauling our tanks in one hand and our flippers in the other. I loved that photo. We were looking up at Lance and smiling, our bikini tops a little askew, our faces tan, our legs long and muscular.

  “As long as you live in this house,” Mel said, “you’ll act like a lady.”

  A lady? Shocked and instantly, deeply contemptuous toward him, I shot back, “You mean like one of those ladies that stars in the porno flicks you have lining your bookshelves?” For as long as I could remember, we had as a family gingerly navigated around this topic. I mostly ignored the magazines, books, and tapes stacked waist high in Mel’s bedroom that bore such titles as Liberties with Little Girls and Beauty Does Beast. On a few occasions in middle school, Gail and I had sneaked in and watched the tapes on Mel’s Betamax machine. Some of them were dramatic and violent, some of them were mundane. All of them had women with freakishly huge tits and fire-engine-red lips, deformed, I realize now, from early experimentations with Botox.

  Mel was out of his seat and back in it again, having slapped me hard in the face by the time my mother went on, ignoring both of our outbursts. “We’ve been nothing but good to you,” Norma said. “Would you rather we were bums and drunks or if we beat you like Del’s parents? Would that make you happy?” Now she was crying.

  My hand on my cheek, I looked at my mother. He just hit me in the face, did you not see that? Was that not a beating? It was not worth saying out loud. She would never understand. In fact, I already knew from previous encounters like this one that in the morning she would be in my room to extend Mel’s apologies, encouraging me to go and give him a kiss.

  My cheek was pulsating. I felt my own breath enter and leave my body, and caught the swivel of the ceiling when I tried to land my gaze on something other than them.

  Now strangely resolute, I asked, “What is the big deal, even if I am gay?”

  “It’s sick,” Norma said.

  “No it’s not.” I repeated what Elaine Fernandez, our tenth-grade English teacher, had said. “Even Sigmund Freud said being gay isn’t a mental illness.”

  Norma’s chin dropped, and her brows nearly closed in over her eyes with suspicion. “Was that man a homosexual?”

  “Freud?”

  “You are not homosexual, Jenna,” Norma insisted. “If you are, God as my witness, I’ll tear my clothes.”

  “Mom, you would rather your kid was dead than gay?” She didn’t answer.

  “Okay,” my father said. “I’m gonna tell you what happens next. You don’t have anything to do with Del or her family until we decide you can. If you do, we’ll talk to her parents about these letters and what’s been going on with you.”

  “Dad,” I said, starting to cry and hating myself for it. “You know how they are. You know what they would do to her. You can’t involve them.”

  “I can and I will. You’re my first priority, so if you don’t want Del’s parents involved, then stay away from her, and I mean it.”

  “Dad,” I pleaded. “Dad, wait.” Just his eyes moved. I felt divided in two, half of me filled with disgust and hatred for this man, the other half strangely hopeful. I begged. “Please give me those back. They’re my short stories. I wrote them.”

  “We’ll give them back when we’re good and ready. Now, go to your room. Del,” he said, “is personon grahtor.”

  I looked to my mother for support, but I knew this whole thing had been her orchestration in the first place. Sometimes it seemed like Mel couldn’t have a thought concerning me that Norma hadn’t given him permission to have. It was as if I—the other girl in the family—could not exist for him except in the very precise and limited way Norma could tolerate. Any attempt at an independent relationship was a betrayal.

  As I turned to leave, I heard her say quietly, “Persona non grata, Mel.”

  I went to my room, leaving behind our photographs, all of the stories I had written and all of the letters Del had written to me. They were photos and writings I would never see again. The only concrete evidence of a crime my parents felt desperate to have go away, they unilaterally chose to discard the photos, writings, and letters, and they informed me of this several days after it had been done.

  *

  I resisted them, I did. It was the last night I spent with her; it was also in many ways the last night I spent with them. Everything changed after that. I never forgot her, and I never forgave them. But we did go on, if only on the surface. In the end, it is my parents who I drop in on, pick up at airports, call on holidays, and with whom I continue to share the day-to-day details of life. We go on as if there was never a night like that night, never a rupture that swallowed us whole and spat us out again in some hollow, mutilated version of our former selves, diminished by our willingness to carry on. And it is Del who, no matter how long I live, I will never see or speak to again. There will be no by-chance meetings, unexpected phone calls, spottings from afar.

  I try not to see this in so simple terms as they won and we lost. And after many years, I confess, I am more able to get beyond feeling every loving exchange with my parents as a capitulation, to see things from their point of view, and to be with them in pleasant and appreciative ways again. But on that night, driving back from the beach with Gail and Katie, all I wanted was to preserve for a little longer the sand from the dunes still in my shoes, the sound of Del’s voice carrying “Gypsy” in the nagging breeze, the memory of her face backlit by dappled sunlight. I wanted to know again, if only briefly, the exhaustion from sex and swimming and too much sun, to mold my body with hers, nuzzle into her hair, fall asleep with her in a secret cave on a bed of sand and sea grape leaves. I wanted to feel the day grow old and the weather change with the feeling of being with her undispelled.

  Chapter Ten

  Wednesday

  I’d been lying awake for hours, suffering the intermittent trickle of cold air streaming from the vent over the bed. Central air-conditioning: I was ten or eleven when my parents finally could afford to install it in our house, replacing the bulky metal boxes that sat in the windows of each room. The unit in my bedroom ran so cold, ice would form on the blades. The ice eventually did damage to the cooling grid, causing a clanking sound—metal against metal—with each blade rotation. It was loud but rhythmic and, somehow, I got so used to it, that when we did put in central air-conditioning, I couldn’t sleep for weeks because of the quiet. Habituation is an amazing human capacity.

  Relieved by daylight, I flipped open my cell phone to see the time, six a.m., and then I retrieved two voicemail messages. The first was from the local Kinko’s—I had received a fax. Very few people knew I was in Miami, so I assumed the fax was work rela
ted, probably from Bea McVee or my clerk, and had something to do with Flint and Baxter and Margaret Todd’s challenge of my findings.

  The second message was from Pascale. She’d called to let me know the medical examiner was releasing Del’s body today, Wednesday. Talon, she said, was planning on cremating Del as quickly as possible, and then leaving for Texas with Khila.

  I left a message for the medical examiner, asking to speak with him. I wasn’t sure yet what I would say, but I’d been awake most of the night thinking about it. There were too many questions: the weight belt; the timing, coinciding with Del’s decision to leave the marriage; Del’s bruises and hygiene; Talon’s other crimes and exploits; Tar Baby’s information, which called into question where Del died; and Doug’s doubts about the cause of death.

  A drizzle tapped rhythmically on the sliding glass doors leading out to the patio of Gail’s ground-floor condo. Outside, the drenched ground was carpeted with wilted leaves. In the corner of the patio there was a lemon tree spotted with lemons varied in shape and shade—small dark green to large bright yellow. A few lemons, those that had overstayed their welcome, lay strewn on the ground around the tree, turning pulpy. A colony of ants had appropriated one lemon, the yellow-to-brown skin practically liquid, cracked open or simply eroded in places. I sipped my coffee and stared at it, watched the ants make their way in and around the oozing, sun-yellow craters, cliffs, and canyons.

  Gail’s phone rang. It was Norma who had called early in the day in hopes of catching me. Gail, despite my protests, handed me the phone.

  “So, are we going to see you?” Norma asked.

  I noticed the one lemon sunk into the soft ground, wondered how much lemons weigh. “Yes,” I said. “Can I call you later and make a plan?”