Blue Water (11 page)

t
hree weeks in Bermuda while Chelone
sat on the hard, scorched electronics strewn across her deck. Rex at the pay phone, hour after hour, arguing with the insurance company. Our small, rented cottage with its wide front porch, flowerboxes bursting with jacaranda, honeysuckle. The luxury of clean sheets. The daily paper. Ice. White painted rooftops, pink hotels, towering cruise ships like fat, layered cakes. At the center of the harbor, an ancient shipwreck, its metal hull eaten into lace.

Calling my parents, our first night ashore.
Yes, we're okay. Yes, we miss you, too
.

My father's voice so old, frail, positively shaking with relief.
Make sure you give Mother your address. Toby has something to send you
.

Logging on at the Internet café, sending brief, timed messages to Toby, Lindsey Steinke, Evan's former classmates at Harbor Elementary, giving them the coordinates so they could follow our progress on a classroom chart. Afternoons talking with the other cruisers, people from Sidney, Barcelona, Quebec. From Fernandina Beach, from Fort Lauderdale. From Cedar Falls, Iowa. The inevitable questions:
You guys have kids? How old are your children? Any grand-
children yet?
Evenings at Freddie's, a waterside restaurant, listening to the whispers as we passed through the bar:
That's them. Struck by lightning.

Cold beer. Fish and chips.

Nothing in those whispers about a dead son.

We walked the cobblestone streets holding hands, deliciously anonymous.

And then, the Bahamas, a trouble-free passage—
We've earned this!
Rex said, jubilant—from Saint George to the Abacos. We followed sand paths the color of cream to a shallow beach studded with starfish and conch. A series of leisurely day sails south: to Green Turtle Cay, Great Guana, Marsh Harbor. Million-dollar sport fishing boats, rocking lightly in their manicured slips; Bahamian fishermen out on their skiffs, hand-casting nets, poised as herons. Weathered conch shells, the color of paste, piled into low-lying fences, like stones. Single-room houses, built on stilts. A flock of young girls in their Sunday best: white dresses, white frilly socks, white shoes.

Cracked, careful singing. Old English hymns.

A week hunkered down in Man O'War Cay, waiting out a category two hurricane. Roiling skies, bursts of wind. Everybody drinking, playing cards. The harbor so crowded we hopped between the boats like gulls, blown from deck to deck.

Man O'War birds floating high overhead. Dark crosses. Red throats like fat, broken hearts.

But don't you regret not having children?

“Meg and I are each other's children,” Rex said.

A swift, clean passage southeast to Eleuthera, where local guides led us through the Devil's Back Bone. Taunted by pods of pilot whales, schools of gray dolphin, pale, speckled young. Pink sand beaches. Bonefishing tours. Raw conch salad, pickled in lime. Another passage, this time to Cat Cay. To San Salvador. To Rum Cay, where we plucked spiny lobster from the ocean floor. Nights anchored comfortably in ten feet of water, no other cruiser in sight. Mornings awakening to water so clear it seemed as if
Chelone
's hull were resting on the bottom.

A sea turtle, wide as a tabletop, surfacing off the bow.

Flying fish, sand sharks, leopard rays.

Less than a mile off Houndfish Cay, we saw our first houndfish, thick as my thigh; it tail-walked twenty feet across the surface of the water. An omen, I decided, as we closed on the narrow channel—marked by a single, half-rotted buoy—into Ladyslip Cove. And there she sat, anchored just off the marina, in the midst of a cluster of twenty-odd boats. No mistaking those alley cat lines. No mistaking the belly, the tattoos, the dreadlocks of the man in the cockpit who stopped, stared, raised his broad hand, as if they'd been expecting us all along: Eli and Bernadette Hale.

August passed into September. September passed into October. We were invited to cocktail parties, a pig roast. We were shown the best snorkeling spots, the deep holes to jig for grouper. Rex joined the men for their weekly poker game; I dinghied to shore for morning yoga on the beach. Halloween night, we walked down to the tip of the island, where the boat kids took turns reciting
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
.

No children,
we explained.
Just each other. Just us
.

We thought we might stay for the Thanksgiving pageant.

We talked about sticking around until after the New Year's Eve bash.

I still have the charcoal sketch that Bernadette made of us during that time, sitting in a tidal pool, babying cups filled with Junkanoo soda and rum. Beneath the clear green water, our legs are intertwined into a single, stout mermaid's tail. We are smiling. We are deeply tanned, fit, even fierce. We look exactly like the people I'd hoped we might become, back when I first imagined the warm Gulf Stream, open skies, a citrus sun. The sort of people who have never experienced any real disappointment.

The sort of people who always have gotten exactly what they've wanted.

 

By the time we learned of Toby's engagement, it was the middle of December. Rex carried the wedding invitation back from Echo Island, twenty-five miles from Houndfish Cay, along with fresh provisions, liquor, and a refill on the prescriptions he'd been taking for his shoulder. I'd spent the morning doing laundry: washing it in one bucket, rinsing it in the next. It had rained the night before, and all across the cove, women were pinning wet armloads of T-shirts and shorts to safety lines. Radios were playing. You could hear laughter, an occasional sneeze, the intermittent buzz of a dinghy heading to shore. The odor of detergent drifted through the air, shimmering in a thick, sweet cloud, as if the smell came from the island itself, from the jacaranda trees that surrounded the marina.

In the afternoon, when the tide had turned, I put on my swimming suit and dove overboard, swam the five hundred yards to
Rubicon,
where Bernadette and Leon were fishing from the cockpit.
Kicking around the bow to avoid their line, I nearly plowed into the resident dolphin, Alvie; he gave me a hard-nosed bump, plunged, vanished in a rising rush of bubbles.

“Look what the tide washed in,” Bernadette said as I pulled myself up the swim ladder. She and Leon were nestled together in the oversize hammock. Leon's face was listless, drawn; still, when he saw me, he raised his fist.

Hello
.

“Leo-the-lion,” I said, wringing out my hair. “Catch anything?”

“Not yet.” Bernadette got up to check the pole, which sat in a mount on the combing. Even before she'd reeled the line in, I could tell that the bait was gone. “That's the third time in ten minutes,” she said, with an unhappy glance at the bait bucket.

“I'll fish with Leon for a while,” I said, “if you've got other stuff to do.”

Bernadette's face brightened. As always, the cockpit was cluttered with tubes of watercolor paints, brushes, sketch pads sealed in plastic. A half-finished painting, something new, was taped to the portable easel.

“I'd work a little more while there's light,” she said, turning her face toward Leon. “If you don't mind, Bud. And you know how I feel about using live bait.” She gave a little shudder; the gold in her red braids caught the light. “It's that little crunch when the hook goes through the shell—”

“So work, then. We'll crunch.” I bent over Leon, tickling his bare arms and chest with my still-dripping hair. A smile passed over his mouth, though it never quite reached his eyes, and I felt something harden at the back of my throat, an ache that I couldn't quite swallow. A few weeks earlier, in the middle of the night, he'd spiked
a fever high enough to send him into convulsions. Since then, he'd been sleeping more and more. He didn't want to swim, or play video games, or push around the marina in his chair. When his friends came by, he closed his eyes, signed
No
and
Go away
. Day after day, he dozed in the hammock or stared idly at the dimpled water, watching Alvie romp among the boats like a friendly dog.

“What do you think keeps grabbing the bait?” I asked him. “Crab? Barracuda?”

I watched his lips closely, the way he'd been watching mine, until I caught the shape of a
B
. Leaning over the safety lines, I spat into the water. A four-foot barracuda shot from beneath
Rubicon
's hull, tilted its round, black eye toward the surface. Half a dozen needlefish appeared as well, clustering around the floating coin of saliva. Each time I swam in the cove—or for that matter, anywhere along the cay—I knew that there were barracudas, nurse sharks, jellyfish. But true to my promise to Rex, I'd stopped imaging the worst thing that could happen. I'd taken off my jewelry, my wedding ring, anything that might beckon to an underwater eye. Beyond that, I simply didn't allow myself to think about it, the way I didn't think about Toby, or my parents, or even—most days—Evan.
This is your life now,
I told myself fiercely, chanting the words like a prayer.
These people are your family. This beautiful place is your home
.

“Guess we won't catch much with him hanging around.”

Leon blinked once, deliberately.
No
.

“We could take the dinghy over to the pier. Try there for a while.”

No
.

“Tired of fishing?”

Two blinks.
Yes
.

“Tired in general?”

Yes
.

“You're not feeling great today, are you?” I said, and I slipped into the hammock beside him. Bernadette had made it out of thin, silky line; she knew how to weave and macramé, sew clothing and canvas, twist rags into rugs. She braided fat ropes out of split palm fronds, which she worked into baskets and bowls. There wasn't an inch of
Rubicon
's interior that didn't shine with her touch, from the earthenware cups and plates she'd thrown, to the paintings that covered the bulkheads. Eli, on the other hand, could make absolutely anything run: pumps, compressors, electronics. He was also a crack fisherman. Mornings, he took off early on the dinghy, returning with flounder, snapper, grouper. Afternoons, Leon at his side, he puttered with
Rubicon
's systems, planned alterations and improvements.

“You romanticize things,” Rex said, whenever I talked about the Hales.

“Between them, they can do just about anything.”

“Most people who've been cruising as long as they have can, too.”

“And look at how they are with Leon,” I said. “The way they accept him for who he is. No bitterness. No disappointment.”

“You don't know that, Meg.”

“Of course I do. I see them every day.”

“They see us every day, too,” Rex said, and he paused to let his words sink in. “Would you say they really know either one of us?”

I bit my lip. “I feel bad about that.”

“Don't. It's a kindness. You don't come all the way out here because you want to wade through other people's baggage.”

“But Bernadette and Eli don't
have
baggage,” I said. “That's what I'm trying to say.”

“Everybody has baggage.”

Still, there was something between them, an open contentment, a satisfied warmth, that spilled over onto the rest of us who knew them, during that time. It was in the way Eli touched Bernadette whenever he passed her on deck. It was in the way she took her time rubbing sunblock into his shoulders. It was in the way they called each other
honey,
as if the endearment were still new to them, sweet. Nights, as Rex and I sat in
Chelone
's salon, reading by the light of our kerosene lamp, we could hear Bernadette's lazy chuckle, Eli's Popeye laugh. And I'd look over at Rex, sipping a scotch, lost in another game of solitaire, and I'd feel as if we were ghosts, shadows, people who'd lived so long in the world we had nothing left to say. I tried to remember what it was that we'd talked about once, Rex and I. Work, of course. Family and friends. Things we'd read in the paper. Things we'd seen on TV. Evenings after supper, we'd go for long walks along the bluff, and though I couldn't remember having said much during those times, I couldn't remember feeling lonely.

“They have a child between them,” Rex said, getting up to pour himself another drink. “They have more to talk about than we do, that's all.”

“The way we used to,” I said.

“Right. When we had Evan.”

“I'm talking about before we had Evan.”

“You romanticize things, Meg.”

The conversation had come full circle. Rex sat back down, took another sip of scotch.

Now the hammock swung to and fro, settled into the gentle motion of the hull.
Hmm,
Leon said.
Hmm,
I said. The vibrations traveling between us like a whisper, like a song, and I remembered Evan
crawling into our bed on Saturday mornings, smelling of pilfered corn chips, snuggling his body against me. The sharpness of his toenails, the boniness of his feet. The fragile birdcage feeling of his ribs as they expanded against my own. The one-year anniversary of his death had come and gone. A year had passed since we'd cuddled up this way. A year since he'd lifted his face to mine, demanding a
kiss-kiss
—never just a kiss.

“It's because he gets so many,” Rex had liked to say. “He doesn't know it's possible to get only one at a time.”

Bernadette glanced over at us, smiled slightly, returned to her work. She was painting, I realized, the laundry; bright smears of color seemed to ripple off the page. Something about the way she leaned forward, the slope of her strong, young shoulders, reminded me, abruptly, of a dream I'd had: Cindy Ann Kreisler and I, walking together along some nameless road. Other women were walking, too, and there was a feeling of…heat, was it? Shame? But the air was cold, the distant clusters of trees gone gold to brown to skeleton-bare. Hoarfrost covered the ground. From time to time, Cindy Ann would pause, stoop, poke with a stick. There was something, in the dream, that I wanted to do for Evan. There was an overwhelming desire to put things right.