Open Water

by Maria Flook

  He was bleeding from a cut over his eye where a branch had gouged his forehead in the fall. The storm was throwing everything at him; tags of yellow sea foam like rancid shaving cream clung to the high rocks and sometimes lifted up and caught him. The winding path along the granite cliffs was mostly unlit, and he rolled through the dark from rote memory, past the historic houses whose names he knew by heart, Hopedene, Seaward, past Forty Steps. He veered too near the perilous edge only once or twice, enough to shock him from his drug daze, which kept him moving numbly against the wall of rain. The sound of the sea was assaultive and wearying as he steered the bike toward Château-sur-Mer. He began to understand that he wasn’t taking his stepmother anywhere without finding a proper vehicle. He knew it was a shot in hell, but Willis thought that he might find Debbie at Salve Regina College and she could arrange to get him a loaner.

  The campus was two doors down from Rennie’s new home in the Château-sur-Mer Life Care infirmary. Willis could get Rennie over to the college and put her into a borrowed car. He looked for Debbie in the college snack bar. He strolled through the blazing laundry room where girls were sitting astride the Whirlpool washers reading swollen coin-op copies of Stephen King. He finally found Debbie in the library, where she was staring at a five-pound volume of Gray’s Anatomy. She wasn’t alarmed to see him. She was glad to be distracted. Willis saw the pages spread open to a detailed diagram of the peritoneum.

  “Look who it is. Mister Wonderful,” she said.

  He stopped in front of her and smiled his invaluable smile.

  “What are you doing here? This isn’t a 4-F Club meeting.

  “Don’t you mean 4-H?” he said.

  “No. I mean what I said, 4-F. Find ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, and forget ’em.”

  “That’s nice. Sass and more sass.” He was puffing from the bike ride.

  She looked at him hard. His pants were soaking wet and sliding off his hips. He didn’t have the time to grab some underwear, which might have helped to keep them up. His cast was sodden, like a swollen loaf of rising bread dough. His hands and face were red as beets from the cold, crashing rain. She looked at the spongy cuff of his cast where his sore red fingers protruded.

  “God,” she said, after she completed a nurse-style up-and-down.

  “You know what, Debbie? I need a favor.”

  “I guess you do. Have you looked at yourself?”

  “I need a car for a half hour.”

  “A car for a half hour? I should get you a car?”

  “Okay, okay,” he told her. “Look, our trouble is ancient history, right? I never said sorry. I’m saying it now.”

  That’s all she seemed to want to hear. She was satisfied.

  Willis leaned against the institutional library furniture as if he couldn’t stand up without it. His pupils were tiny as specks from his fading dose of morphine and she couldn’t tell what he was seeing through those tiny pins when he looked at her. She didn’t like the feeling.

  “I saw your mother in the infirmary. On second shift, I go around and do the blood pressures. I’m really sorry, Willis.”

  “That’s where I’m heading now. Want to help me out, or not?” he told her.

  “Maybe I can get a car,” she said.

  “That’s beautiful,” he told her, “that’s my girl.”

  Some of the other students had started to take notice. Willis was making a puddle from his saturated clothing. Debbie leaned over and kissed him. She must have been wild about him for one little duration of time, and her tenderness was genuine. She straightened up and walked him past the girls who were ogling him. He was amazed that she had any regard for that short-lived spell that had come and gone between them. She stood outside the building with Willis. The violent rain was knifing through the streetlights like drawers of shiny flatware spilling from the sky.

  “Can you bring a car here, say, in a half hour?” he asked her.

  “There’s nowhere to park tonight. Look at this, it’s packed. It’s a concert. Chamber music at The Breakers mansion. A big deal.”

  “Hell, just double-park it somewhere right here,” he told her.

  She agreed to do it. Then she warned him, “They have at least three toughs on duty at Château-sur-Mer. They carry aerosol deterrents.”

  “They don’t wear a gun?”

  “Look, these aerosol deterrents are nasty. That’s oleoresin pepper gas. That stuff can stop a grizzly. You better watch yourself.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Willis got back on the bike and rolled past the last mansion before Château-sur-Mer. Debbie was right, a big gala was happening at The Breakers. Floodlights were cranked up illuminating the flashing rain. Newport elite were filing inside, everyone wearing black tie underneath their raingear. The weather must have shattered people’s expectations for glam photos; the society page was a washout. Willis pedaled through; the tricycle spokes twirled wheels of rainwater on either side of him. Willis sighted drifts of women on the marble steps, their hems skimming the puddles. The ladies lifted their long skirts in a collective perpetual-motion curtsy. When the steps were empty, workers passed brooms along the underside of the canvas awning to keep the water from welling. The water slid off in sheets. Water, water everywhere.

  He rode the bike past the rococo pile-up and onto the quiet grounds of Château-sur-Mer. He located Rennie’s Life Care wing, but he couldn’t find the entrance to the building. He walked around the ground floor, peering inside the windows wherever he could. He saw a grey head, another grey head. A bald dome. He recognized the eerie blue light and looked inside to see quite a sizable TV room.

  He found a door and walked into the building. He asked a woman resident to direct him to the Life Care unit. She looked back at him, baffled. After a moment, he realized it wasn’t his question that had puzzled her. She was lost in a labyrinthine brainteaser of her own.

  He didn’t wait and walked down a long hallway. His wet boots squished on the polished tile. He knew his boots were ruined, and it cut him down some. The battered, swollen footwear was a peculiar, subliminal threat to his well-being.

  Willis searched the doorway of each room and saw whatever it was his fortune to see: a man hunched in a chair, a woman attached to a dialysis machine, another had a tiny television on an expanding arm positioned two inches from her face, her nose against the screen. His heart was in his throat. Only now could he actually picture Rennie in this forbidding place.

  He turned a corner and reached a nursing station. It looked odd to Willis, the lamps were too soft. The illumination came from indirect sources. It looked like mood lighting. Silk flowers were abundant in muted vases. He knew he had reached the right location: the hushed interiors of the dying.

  Rennie was at the end of the hall. She was propped up; a green tank of oxygen stood on casters next to the bed. Her skin was an alarming, deep ochre. She pulled the nostril clip tubing from her face and let him kiss her. She had an IV drip of some kind, the needle inserted and taped to the back of her hand right above the knuckles. She was woozy but awake. She looked him over.

  “Oh, mercy, what happened to you?” she said. Her voice was tight.

  “Today was hell. If I ran it down for you, you’d shit.” He looked her in the eye.

  “I bet it would make a good movie. You were born for it. A spaghetti Western.”

  Willis was glad to see her teasing him. He laughed at her joke and then he suffered a sudden round of startling, convulsive shivers, as if he’d been holding them off until then.

  “You’re catching pneumonia,” she said. “Get under the covers.” She motioned to the empty bed next to her own. He climbed into the tall bed and pulled the blankets to his chin. He was trembling from an unfamiliar cold. The cold seemed generated from within, as if a transfusion of icy blood was circulating through him, tip to toe, and all his intestines churning a frozen gruel. He shivered violently. “Look at us,” he said, his teeth chattering.

  She studied him as if she
relished every speck of what she saw, despite his bedraggled condition.

  Willis fell back on his bed, the room started to revolve slowly the way the Tilt-O-Whirl wrenched into gear at Rocky Point Park. He knew he should be getting on with it, but his limbs felt loosely sewn to his torso. He had a strange sensation, as if his trunk was stuffed with powdered glass. He felt like a cloth doll, his muscles had diminished into a granulated essence. Most of all, he felt the sensation of lying abreast of Rennie, both of them aiming in the same direction, into the wind of oblivion.

  Rennie tried to rouse him. “Are you flying or dying?” she said. “Who’s baby-sitting who?”

  He leaned up on his elbow. He shook his head like a dog with a gnat in its ear. He felt everything sifting. “Shit. Wait. I’m getting you out of here. Hold on a minute.”

  A nurse came into the room. “What have we got here?” Her voice was amicable.

  “My son. Caught in the rain.”

  “Your son? Hey, I thought you had only one son.”

  “Two,” Rennie said. She tried to clear her throat to explain, but she couldn’t get her breath behind her words. Her trachea rattled and sputtered.

  Willis sat up on the edge of the bed.

  The nurse looked back and forth between them. “So this is your other son? Well, you’ve got the same eyes,” the nurse said.

  “I hope he sees a different picture than I do.” Rennie croaked the difficult multiword sentence, leaving wide spaces.

  “Now, Miss Hopkins. I don’t want to hear you give up,” the nurse said as she walked out of the room.

  Willis sensed that the nurse was going to announce him to the world. He wiped his face with the palm of his hand and lowered himself off the thousand-dollar bed. He told Rennie, “It’s raining out there, so you’re going to get wet.”

  Rennie was grinning through her plastic mustache.

  Willis said, “Can you breathe without this?”

  She nodded.

  “Are you sure? You better be sure.” He unthreaded the oxygen leader from where it was hooked around her ears and lifted it over her head. He yanked the IV needle from the back of her hand, the tube came free, but its needle stayed inserted in the vein where it was taped. He left it in for now. He took Rennie in his arms and collected her blanket, but the blanket was too clumsy and he let it drop.

  “Don’t forget my book,” she said.

  He saw the tiny suede square on the table arm and he stuffed it in his back pocket. Two women appeared at the door to block his exit. He shifted Rennie in his arms so her feet wouldn’t knock the door frame and he kept walking. He made his apologies to the stunned medics. They followed their training—or they had an instinct—and didn’t try to stop him. He saw a row of motorized carts, Little Rascals there for the taking, but he decided against swiping one. He marched down the hall through the ambient lighting. He navigated the double swinging doors, kicking each panel wide and rotating through, Rennie in his arms, in a smooth, choreographed moment as steady and fluid as Balanchine.

  Rennie hardly weighed anything, but it was awkward walking in the dark, over the slippery manicured lawns. He searched through the impenetrable curtain of rain for the bike, but someone had moved it. He decided to go on foot the half-mile to the college, where he hoped Debbie had cribbed a car.

  At first, Rennie tried to hold on, looping her arms around his neck, but it was too much effort for her and she let her arms fall. He stumbled through thick clumps of clover and fell to his knees, but he didn’t release his cargo. Rennie bossed him, “One foot in front of the other.”

  Willis was parallel the great sloping lawns of The Breakers mansion when the security personnel came up behind him. They scrolled a floodlight against his back. His alarming shadow rose up in front of him. He saw an exaggerated image with extra appendages. A towering man-insect. A stiltlike human form carrying its broken human likeness. Willis looked over his shoulder once. Two men were riding an electric cart. Willis didn’t stop walking. The driver came alongside Willis and told him to release the patient.

  Willis began to trot along the Cliff Walk. The men were cautious and tracked Willis at his own jogging pace. The next thing, Willis darted off the path, tumbled over a low fence of privet and beach roses. He was running across The Breakers’ wide lawn. Rennie’s nightgown snagged the rose thorns and he jerked it loose. The men couldn’t drive the cart after him; they wheeled around, heading for the mansion’s street entrance.

  Even in the rain, Willis could hear the musical switch-backs of a piano sonata. He climbed the marble steps that led to the first-floor terrace. Beyond the wide terrace he saw the crowded hall, rows of perfectly coiffed heads; a woman wore a heavy necklace like a diamond-studded garden claw across her daring neckline. All the men wore monkey suits. The sea of faces was tilted at an angle, chins set, eyes peeled on the stage, where a page turner and a pianist worked together. Willis listened to the Steinway throbbing above the percussive rain. He found a side entrance to the building and brushed by a startled female usher who stood at the final row of velvet chairs.

  Willis had walked into the Great Hall, the central ballroom of the famous turn-of-the-century mansion. The large room was dominated by a sweeping double staircase, Palladian colonnades, and chandeliers the size of inverted treetop canopies. It was two stories high with a fantastic trompe l’oeil ceiling of blue sky and cotton wool clouds.

  Everyone in the audience displayed their commitment to social elegance and avoided craning their necks around at the sudden intrusion. Willis saw an empty chair and plopped down, twisting Rennie face front. He looked at the ceiling mural, its fantastic blue heaven. The fair weather up there seemed like an ingenious invention to counter the usual Newport scud. He threw his head back to admire it; his profile was startlingly pale, his skin white as an ice sculpture. Yet he looked resolved, peaceful beneath that one-hundred-year-old sky.

  Rennie was half-conscious and she complained when he shifted her weight to his other knee. She settled against his shoulder. People could no longer help themselves and started to twist around in their chairs to stare at him. He picked up a program from the empty seat beside his own. He began to read the list of “Twenty-four Preludes, Op. 28, by Frédéric François Chopin.”

  C MAJOR—AGITATO

  A MINOR—LENTO

  G MAJOR—VIVACE

  E MINOR—LARGO

  Then Rennie started coughing.

  Ushers appeared and stalked the rows. Willis was pulled to his feet by two alarmingly beefy young men hired for that specific purpose. Willis reorganized Rennie in his arms and walked with the young ushers to the street door. There he saw the Château-sur-Mer security officers in a line, their aerosol deterrents strapped prominently to their belts. Willis turned around again and ran across the oriental rugs, tripping on unpredictable humps. He carried Rennie to the opposite end of the huge mansion. The music stopped abruptly, the pianist put her hands in her lap and stared across the hall. Voices surged in a roar of indignation. People shouted after Willis as if Willis had burgled their personal possessions, as if these recreational minutes were priceless. Willis exited through the French doors on the north side, which had been left ajar so that the big fireplace in the Great Hall could have better draw.

  Pounding down the slope, his trunk tumbled ahead of his legs and he fell. Rennie spilled out of his arms. He picked her up, collecting her skewed limbs and arranging her nightgown. He didn’t think he could carry her for very much longer. He ran as far as he could before coming upon a chain-link fence at the perimeter of the property. It almost took the heart out of him. He trotted its length until he found a gap where a twenty-foot privet hedge merged with a galvanized metal fence pole.

  The security men were in the street around him and he tucked behind a car. The electric cart purred up and down the length of the block. Willis crouched behind the fender of a luxury automobile. He waited. The hem of Rennie’s nightgown swirled open in a puddle. When the cart moved one street over, he inche
d his way back to the library at Salve Regina College. Debbie was waiting in a Ford Taurus. She had taken the time to adjust the climate control and the car’s interior was steaming.

  He huddled Rennie into the backseat and pushed her over on the upholstery. He sank below the window ledge so he wouldn’t be seen. “Drive!” he told Debbie.

  “Who are you shouting at! Shit. You want to go to your house?”

  “No,” he said, “not the house.” He couldn’t take Rennie home again. He was taking her to a “transfer station.” He imagined all the soulless places where the dead are temporarily deposited. The refrigerated morgues, the unsuspecting Dumpsters, the countryside crematoriums like the one at White’s Monument Village. Who manufactures these secret kilns? He was seized by a cold hysteria. His lungs ached after his physical exertion. A wild loneliness stirred through his chest cavity, all the pink airways and tender alveoli caught in a speechless throbbing.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Holly looked down the row of cottages at Neptune’s Hide-A-Way. Choosing the right one for Rennie was almost too great a responsibility for her. She decided on Verbena, the second to the last shack. Two of its windows had been left unboarded and she knew Rennie would be grateful for the natural light. Holly had turned on the circuit breaker in the office, and she was relieved to see the light come on when she walked into the cottage and flicked the wall switch. She had more difficulty figuring out the right connection to get cold water in the shack; she had to tighten all the bleeders before she opened the shut-off valve and the water whined into the pipes. Even with most of the windows boarded up, the gusts of wind stirred through, fingering the curtain hems. The gas stove was the only source of heat and she lit the oven.

  She was in the shack for only ten minutes when she smelled something funny drifting up from the stove. A nest of mice had ignited on the broiler pan where they had organized their winter home. She found a potholder and took the pan with the burning nest outside where she rinsed it in the rain. The charred rodent-stench remained, and she left the pan on the stoop.