by Andre Dubus
Rusty and Cal and Gina and Ryan attended the memorial service for the mate, who was from Rhode Island, whose family arrived on five planes: two sisters, a brother, the mother and her husband, the father and his wife. Rusty sensed that the mate had not had a lover on the day of his death, but there were two young women, one in blue, one in gray, in the pew behind the family, and something about the way they entered together, and sat close, and glanced from time to time at each other, and lowered their faces to cry, either simultaneously or the tears of one starting the tears of the other, made Rusty believe they had at one time, separately but probably in quick succession, been the mate’s lovers; and whether the one in blue had taken the place of the one in gray in the mate’s heart, or the other way around, they were joined for at least this bodiless service, perhaps even because it was bodiless, and for these minutes in the church were somehow united as sisters are, even sisters who dislike each other but despite that are bound anyway because they will never again see or hear or touch someone they both loved. The memorial service was the day after the captain’s funeral, and the questions and answers and signing of statements for the Coast Guard lieutenant from Puerto Rico were done, but the family stayed for the remainder of the week, because they had planned to.
They had planned those fourteen days while eating dinner in Massachusetts, when the thermometer outside Rusty’s kitchen window was at twelve degrees and there was a wind from the north and Cal had said: “If we wait till the off-season I can pay for the whole thing. For everybody.” Gina and Ryan, both working, renting apartments, buying cars, had happily, gratefully, protested; and agreed when Cal said: “Or we can all go Dutch this week.” During those final days at St. Croix they swam in the small pool at the hotel, but none of them went into the sea, whose breakers struck a reef a short distance from the beach, a natural shield against both depth and sharks, so that only a tepid, shallow pool with the motion of a lake reached the sand at the hotel. One evening, from the outdoor bar, Rusty watched Gina standing with a tall sunset-colored rum drink on the beach, near the water; she stepped toward it once, and stopped paces from where it touched the sand. Then she stepped back and smoked a cigarette and finished her drink, looking beyond the reef at the blue water and the half-disk of red sun at its horizon. Rusty watched the sun until it was gone, and green balls rose from the spot where it sank; they seemed shot into the sky like fireworks, and she thought of the mate scattered in the sea.
That fourteenth of July had waked Rusty on nights in the final months of last year’s New England summer, and in the autumn, when she could smell the changes in the cooler air coming through the windows: a near absence of living plants and trees, the air beginning to have the aroma of itself alone, as it did in winter, when still she woke, not every night or even every week, and lay in the room with the windows closed and frosted, her face pleasantly cold, and listened to the basement furnace, its thermostat lowered for the night, pushing heated air through the grates in the house. In that first spring she woke in the dark and breathed air tinged with the growth of buds and leaves and grass beyond her windows. Now it was the anniversary of the day itself, and she and Cal and Gina and Ryan had decided, again in winter, again eating dinner on a Sunday night, not to let it pass as though it were any other day, any set of two numerals on the calendar, but to gather, either at home or wherever she and Cal chose to be in the middle of July.
She left the bed, and by that simple motion of pushing away sheet and summer blanket and swinging her feet to the floor, her breath and heart and muscles eased, and softly she left the bedroom and Cal’s slow breathing it held, went down the hall and into the kitchen, everything visible though not distinct in this last of darkness and beginning of light her eyes had adjusted to while in bed she listened to birds and saw the fins of sharks.
She still did, standing at the sink in her white gown and looking through the window screen at dark pines, and she heard the mate’s scream just after he tied the knot lashing together the two orange life preservers and she had looked up from buckling her life jacket, looked at his scream and saw a face she had never seen before and now would always see: his eyes and mouth widened in final horror and the absolute loss of hope that caused it; then he was gone, as though propelled downward, and his orange life jacket he had waited to put on, had held by one strap in his teeth as he wrapped the line down through the water and up over the sides of the life preservers, floated on the calm blue surface. She saw, too, in her memory that moved into the space of lawn and gray air between her and the pines, the young blond captain bobbing in his jacket in the churning water beneath the helicopter blades. He helped Gina first onto the ladder; Rusty, holding the swinging ropes, watched Gina’s legs climbing fast, above the water, glistening brown in the sun; then the captain lifted Rusty and pushed her legs to the rung they were reaching for, and then Ryan and then Cal, and Cal’s wet hair blew down and out from his head. Rusty was aboard then, on her hands and knees on the vibrating deck of the helicopter, calling louder, it seemed, than the engine, calling to Cal to hurry, hurry, climb; then she saw the shark’s fin and in front of it the rising back and head, its blank and staring eyes, then its mouth as the captain reached for the ladder, but only his left arm rose as she screamed his name so loudly that she did not hear the engine but heard the bite as she saw it and blood spurting into the air, onto the roiled water while the captain’s right shoulder still moved upward as though it or the captain still believed it was attached to an arm.
Cal heard her scream. He looked down over his shoulder, then sprang backward into the water, and then she could not scream, or hear the engine, or feel the deck’s quick throb against her knees and palms; she could only see Cal’s feet hit the water and his legs sink into it, and his body to his ribs before the jacket stopped and lifted him, one arm straight upward, his hand gripping a rung and pulling his arm bent as with the other he reached underwater and pushed the captain up and held him while the captain moved his left hand up the vertical rope to the next rung. Then Cal lifted him again and the captain’s feet were on the ladder and she could see Cal’s hand pushing his buttocks, and the captain’s hand moved up to the next rung and pulled, the sunburn gone now from his face more pale than his sun-bleached hair, and blood fell on Cal and spurted on the water where a fin came with the insouciant speed of nature and her remorseless killing. Cal was looking only at the captain’s back above him; he bent one leg out of the water, its thigh pressing his abdomen; then his foot was on the ladder; he straightened his leg and the other ascended from the water as quickly it seemed as it had entered when he jumped over the captain, into the sea. Below him the eyes and head rose from blown waves, then went under, and the fin circled the bound orange preservers turning and rocking and rising and falling in the water and downward rush of air from the huge blades. Their loud circling above her made Rusty feel contained from all other time and space save these moments and feet of rope that both separated her from Cal and joined her to him.
Then quickly and firmly, yet not roughly, a man removed her from the hatch—pushed her maybe; lifted and set her down maybe—and went backward down the ladder. She crawled to the hatch’s side: Cal stood behind the captain, his head near the middle of the captain’s back, his right hand holding the vertical rope beneath the slowing spurt of blood, his left pulling the captain’s hand from a rung, pushing it to the one above; then the man descending stopped and held on to the swinging ladder with the crook of his elbow, and hung out above the water and the fins—four now, five—and lowered a white line she had not seen to Cal, then tied it around his waist and held the captain’s wrist while Cal circled and knotted the line beneath the orange jacket and the face that now was so white, she knew the captain would die. But her heart did not; it urged the three men up as Cal, with his body, held the captain on the ladder and pushed his hand up to a rung, then lifted his left leg to one, then his right, and followed him up while the crewman, with the line around his waist, slowly climbed until he reache
d the hatch and leaned through it, his chest on the deck, and Gina and Ryan each took an arm and pulled, and Rusty worked her hands under his web belt at his back, and on her knees she pulled until he was inside, kneeling, then standing and turning seaward, to look down the ladder and tighten the rope and say to any of them behind him: “First-aid kit.”
Hand over hand he pulled the rope, looking down the ladder at his work, keeping his pull steady but slow, too, holding the captain on the ladder and between it and Cal. Then at the bottom edge of the hatch, against a background of blue sky and water, the captain’s face appeared; then the jacket, and the shoulder she could not look away from but she saw the other one, too, and his left arm that did not reach into the helicopter but simply fell forward and lay still. The crewman stepped back, leaning against the rope around his waist, pulling it faster now but smoothly, and though she could not see Cal, she saw the effort of his push as the captain rose and dropped to the deck. She bent over his back, gripped his belt at both sides, and threw herself backward, and he slid forward as she fell on her rump and sat beside him, on the spot where his right arm would have been, and she felt his blood through her wet jeans. The blood did not spurt now. It flowed, and Cal was aboard, crawling in it, before Rusty or Gina or Ryan could move around the captain to hold out a hand; blood was in Cal’s dark brown hair, flecks and smears among the gray streaks and the gray above his ears and in his short sideburns, and on his hands and sleeves and jacket and face. But what Rusty saw in a grateful instant that released her into time and space again was his own blood, pumping within his body, coloring his face a deep, living red.
The helicopter veered and climbed and turned and the crewman rolled the captain onto his back and, without looking, reached up for the compress Gina had removed from the first-aid kit. Rusty looked at her hand, holding the compress as limply as with guilt, then Rusty looked up at the tearless futility of her daughter’s face. The compress did not change hands. The crewman was looking at the captain’s face and reaching toward Gina’s hand; then he lowered his arm and placed his fingers on the captain’s throat. Rusty knew from the crewman’s eyes, and from the captain’s face while he was still on the ladder, that this touch of the pulse was no more than a gesture, like the professionally solemn closing of a casket before its travel from the funeral home to the church service. Her legs lay straight in front of her, and she bent them and with her palms she pushed herself up, stumbling into the imbalance of the helicopter’s flight, rising from the captain’s blood and wiping it from her palms onto the legs of her jeans.
“And it was his own fault,” she said at the kitchen sink, surprised that she had spoken aloud, in a voice softly hoarse, after the silence of sleep. She cleared her throat, but it was dry, so she left the sink and the window and the images between her and the pines of the dead captain in the helicopter, and the first fin—the second: no one had seen the shark that came up under the mate—and poured a glass of orange juice and drank it in one long swallow, her hand still holding open the refrigerator door. She stood looking at the turkey, covered with plastic wrapping, the pan holding it set parallel to the length of the shelf. Last night she had removed the shelf above it to make room for the turkey’s breast. She had put in the ice chest the random assortment of food from the shelf that leaned now against one side of the refrigerator. Some of the food she had thrown away—a peach and two oranges molding at the rear of the shelf, a tomato so soft her fingers pierced it, some leaves of rusted lettuce, and a plastic container of tuna fish salad she had made last week—and was angry again at her incompetence, after all these years, at maintaining order in a refrigerator, at even knowing what on a given day it contained. She gazed at the turkey and saw Gina’s long bare legs beside hers in the water, bending and then kicking the soles of her sneakers against the noses of sharks.
It was what the captain had told them to do—had shouted at them to do—and for forty-seven minutes, according to the Coast Guard, Rusty had kicked. Her arms were behind her, down through the life preserver, her hands underwater holding the bottom of its rim, which she squeezed against her back. Gina, holding the same preserver, was to her right. Rusty could glance to her left and see Cal’s back, his head, and his arms going down through that preserver; Ryan and the captain were behind her. She wore jeans, tight and heavy with water, and when a fin came toward her she drew in her legs, then kicked between the eyes as they surfaced, those eyes that seemed to want her without seeing her. Later when she told the story to friends at home, she said the eyes were like those of an utterly drunken man trying to pick you up in a bar: all but a glimmer of sentience and motive invisible beneath the glaze of drunkenness, so that he did not truly see you, but only woman, bar, night. Those were the men, she told her friends, that even Cal handled gently, saying they were not responsible for anything they said or did. Each time she kicked, and while she readied herself for the next shark, she waited for her blue-jeaned legs to disappear in a crunch and tearing of teeth through her flesh and bones. But more than her own legs she had watched Gina’s, or had been aware of them as though she never stopped watching, for while her memory was of Gina’s legs and her waiting to see them severed, memory told her, too, that she could not have looked at them as often or for as long as she believed. She had to watch the water in front of her; even to hope for a fin there, because she waited, too, for a shark to come straight up beneath her, to kill her before she even saw it, kicked it. So she had glimpsed Gina’s legs, had sometimes looked directly at them when Gina kicked and kicked until the shark turned; but always she had felt those legs, more even than her own; and she had not felt—or had she? and would she ever know?—Cal’s legs or body, or Ryan’s, though she had called to them, every minute, or so it seemed now: Cal? Are you all right? Ryan? She had not felt the captain at all.
She closed the refrigerator, thought of making coffee and starting this day. But it was too early. She wanted the day to be over, wanted tomorrow to come, Monday, the day that since she was a little girl and went for the first time to school, not even school yet but kindergarten, had asserted itself on her life, as an end to weekends, an affirmation of their transitory ease. The turkey held for her now no expectancy: it was only a dead fowl, plucked of its feathers, ugly. She was too cool, and the linoleum floor chilled her bare feet. She went quietly to the bedroom, stood on its carpet, and looked once with loving envy, nearly pride, at Cal sleeping; then she stepped into her slippers and put on her summer robe and dropped her cigarettes and lighter into a pocket, and went out into the hall, where on the wood floor the skidding and slapping sound of her slippers made her halt and for an instant hold her breath. Then lifting and lowering her feet in a slow creeping walk, she went to the bathroom, knowing for the first time since the day woke her that she wanted Cal asleep; she wanted to be alone. She eased open the medicine cabinet and lowered a sleeping pill into the pocket of her robe.
In the kitchen she filled a glass with ice from the chest that held beer, jarred food, and a carton of milk, and pulled a Coke from under ice, and went through the living room and unlatched the screen door. The wooden door had been swung open all night. At home they had an alarm system that four times in three years had frightened away housebreakers. She sat on the old porch swing hanging by chains from the ceiling and looked at the lake, sixty-five feet from the cabin, the owner had said; in the faint light it was dark blue and smooth. On both sides of her were trees, so she could not see the cabins that flanked theirs nor, at this hour, hear the voices and music that later would come through the woods, and around them, too, as though carried by the lake’s surface. The lake was very large and around its perimeter were cabins, houses, wharves, boat landings, all separated by woods. Most of the trees were old pines, tall and straight and durable; far across the lake, they were absolutely still, piercing the windless morning light. She poured Coke fizzing over ice and when the foam settled she poured again. She pinched the pill out of her pocket, blew off aqua lint; then, holding it at her mouth, she
paused. She would sleep till noon. Then she placed it on her tongue and drank.
Soon she would feel it: the dullness in her legs and arms and behind her eyes, so they would see then only what they looked at, objects and doors and rooms and hall; free of sharks and blood, they would steer her to bed, where she would wake a second time to the fourteenth of July, a day in history she had memorized in school; but a year ago, in a sea as tranquil as this lake, that date had molted the prison and the revolution. As when Vietnam had disappeared in 1968, burned up in Gina’s fever when she was nine and had pneumonia. Then Rusty’s passive sorrow and anger about the war, harder to bear because they were passive, so on some nights awake in bed she saw herself pouring her blood on draft files, going to jail; and all the pictures of the war her heart received from television and newspapers and magazines; and her imagined visions of the wounded and dying, and the suffering of those alive, first the Vietnamese children, then all Vietnamese and those American boys who were lost in false fervor or drafted and forced to be soldiers so they could survive—all were cold ashes in her mind and heart while for three days Gina, her firstborn, lay on the hospital bed with a needle in her vein and every six hours a nurse added an antibiotic to the fluid, and every four took Gina’s temperature. Rusty stayed in the room, watched Gina, read, fell asleep in the chair, ate at the hospital cafeteria; when Cal got home from work he and Ryan came and sat with Gina, while Rusty went home to shower and change clothes, then she returned to spend the night sleeping in the leather armchair. There was no extra bed for her, but two orderlies carried in the larger chair from the sunporch.
On the fourth day Gina’s fever was down and Rusty brought her home, to her bed with fresh sheets Rusty had tucked and folded, and for the next ten days she ministered to her, gave her the medicine Gina could swallow now, sat and talked with her, gave her socks and slippers and helped her into her robe when Gina wanted to watch television from the living room couch, where she lay on her side and Rusty covered her with a blanket and sat at the couch’s end, with Gina’s feet touching her leg, and did not smoke. For those ten days the foolishness Gina watched was not foolishness; their watching it was ceremonial. During these days Rusty’s life drew her back into it: she became married again, she cooked meals, and received the praise of Cal and Ryan, who gave it to her by joking about their cereal and sandwiches and Chinese dinners while she was at the hospital. Three times she and Cal made love, and she guided him to long tenderness before she opened herself to him, and did not tell him that his lover’s slow kissing and touching were exorcising the vapor of death above their bed, stirring her passion until it consumed her, and left no space in the room or bed or her body for the death of Gina. She did not tell him this because she did not know it herself until months later, and by then she did not want to remember it with him through words, for their sound in her throat would become tears she had already wept at the hospital those three days and three nights when she could not place herself in 1968, could not convince herself that she was living in the age of cures, and that Gina would not die. The word pneumonia came to her as though she and Gina lived in 1868, sped at her with the force of a century behind it and struck her breast with a fear she knew but could not feel she ought to reserve for leukemia or some other death knell. As Gina became strong and cheerful and finally restless, the Vietnam War seeped into Rusty’s days and nights and she began reading the Boston Globe again and watching the news on television, and within the first week of Gina’s return to school, her old thwarted sorrow and anger distracted her quietude, and rose in her conversations with her friends and her family.