Blue Water (8 page)

“Not without water,” I said. “And we can't run the water maker without electricity.”

Rex lifted the flask, drank in slow, musical swallows. When he finished, he popped a whole cookie in his mouth, then gave me a forced, messy grin. “I ran it yesterday during my first watch, okay? We've got a hundred gallons. We could stay out here another two months—”

“Two months!”

He swallowed. “If we had to.
If
. Jesus, Meg. That's just what I'm talking about.” He took another swig from the flask, then shook it at me, a command. “The point is, we've got plenty of water. C'mon. Bottoms up.”

I turned it over in my hand. “Where did this come from?”

“Toby. He said I should save it for a time we really needed it. I'm thinking that might be now.”

Even before I tasted it, I knew it was Maker's Mark. The bourbon warmed my throat, opened a smooth, clean path through my chest, and I was back at the fish store, sitting on a crate as Toby glued thick panes of glass into a long, rectangular frame. It must have been well before Evan was born. It was certainly long before Mallory. For a moment, I felt better again, safe, as if I were a child, awakening from a bad dream to feel the comforting weight of his
hand on my back—
shh-shh-shh
he'd say, drowsing me back into sleep—but then my eyes flew open, and I wasn't in bed, I wasn't a child, I was far from home, surrounded by thousands of gray miles of water, the black dome of the sky falling over me like an executioner's hood. I became acutely aware of my breathing. It seemed to me that, somehow, there wasn't enough air. By now, we'd been at sea for nearly five weeks—three of them becalmed. Soon Toby would have to notify the Coast Guard. Perhaps he'd already done so. Perhaps there were vessels looking out for us: tankers, cruise ships, customs patrols. And if one of those vessels should pass within range, I'd send up flare after flare. Let Rex go around the world, if he wanted, with his sound hull and good sails, his one hundred gallons of water. Let him survive without electronics and propane. I, for one, had had enough.

“Squalls like this one?” Rex was saying. “They're wrinkles in the weather. I'll bet you the rest of this bourbon that we'll be under way in another few days.”

I wasn't certain I could make it through the next few minutes. The ocean like a flat black quilt all around us. The pure, cold gaze of the rising moon.

“Take it,” I said, and I put the flask down. When Rex touched my shoulder, I flinched, jerked away.

“Look,” he said, relenting a little. “You're spooked, that's all. It's natural, under the circumstances, to feel a little anxious.”

“Anxious,” I repeated. My teeth were chattering. I'd broken out into a cold hard sweat.

“We're fine, Meg. Really. When we get to Bermuda, we'll have everything repaired. I'll even see a doctor, have an X-ray if you want.” He tipped his head back, looked up at the sky. “In the meantime, what a moon! And that must be Venus—there, do you
see? You could spend your whole life onshore and never see a sky like this one.”

Which sounded just fine to me. But Rex was rocking on the balls of his feet, the way he did whenever he'd been seized by an idea. “I know,” he said. “Let's go for a swim.”

I could have killed him. “Right.”

“I'll knot a couple of lines, trail them over the side. When we're finished, we'll just climb back up again.”

Good god, he was serious. I peered over the side. “What if something's down there?”

“You mean, like,
Jaws
? I think that happened closer to shore.”

“I am not going swimming in the middle of the goddamn Atlantic.”

“I told you, we're not in the middle. Nowhere near—”

“Stop saying that! Stop making everything a joke!”

“Then stop complaining! You think I don't wish we were under way? For Christ's sake, do you think I'm not sick to death of you, too?”

He was still holding the flashlight; now he took aim, as if it were a gun. Click. The world went blind with light. I lunged at him, twisting the beam back into his face. The flashlight spun up into the air, splashed overboard into darkness. We froze at the sound, dogs startled into reason. Gradually, my vision returned. A long spill of moonlight parted the water, ebbing and swelling like an elegant vase.

Rex held his shoulder, panting. My forearms burned where they'd twisted in his grip.

“Come for a swim, Meg,” he said. “You'll feel better, we'll both feel better.”

But the very thought of being separated from
Chelone,
floating
like a dust mote in the eye of all that space, made me feel, again, as if I couldn't breathe.

“I can't,” I told him. “No.”

I climbed out of the cockpit and walked to the bow, the teak decks wet, cool, beneath my bare feet. Something I'd read once popped into my mind:
The distance to the ocean floor is farther than Mount Everest is high
. Don't think about it, I told myself firmly, taking deep gulps of air. Instead, I concentrated on the moon overhead—after all, wasn't that solid land? And I found my way back along a wandering path I hadn't taken in years, following the edge of the water treatment plant, skittering down to the beach below. The lights of Fox Harbor like a quiet glow. The sand littered with pop cans, plastic rings, crumpled bags. The Dairy Castle smell of Cindy Ann's uniform as we sat, side by side, on our slab of sandstone. Gorging on burgers, soft ice cream. Salt and sweetness, grease.

The taste of that adolescent hunger in our throats, powerful as sex, as secret.

The game that we played, looking up at the moon.

Keep your eyes open. Don't blink, no matter what.

The sandstone still warm beneath our shoulders. The only time, I realized now, the two of us ever touched.

Chastely, holding hands. Willing ourselves up out of our bodies, rising high and higher still, until—
don't blink
—we'd made it, we were there, we were walking on the moon's bright surface. Stepping over blue craters, floating on the vast Sea of Tranquillity. Breathing together with our new moon lungs. Whispering in our soft moon voices. Looking down at the whole wide world with our blank moon eyes. There was nothing that world could have hidden from us. No way it could have shocked us, disappointed us. We knew everything,
saw everything, Cindy Ann Donaldson and I, and we were not afraid.

It was then that I heard the splash.

“Rex!”

By the time I'd run back to the cockpit, he'd surfaced, whooping, sweeping the hair out of his eyes. “This is great!” he hollered, and then he dove, flashing his bare, white bottom. I sat down on top of his discarded clothes, knowing he was lost to me forever. Already, his lungs were filling with water. Already, the great white jaws were opening beneath his feet. Already, his body was being carried away, piece by microscopic piece, the walls of the coffin split with moisture, roots working their long, cold figures through the seams. Beetles and sow bugs, mealworms and microbes, circling around and over again like the words to the childish rhyme I'd taught Evan myself, innocently, horribly, tickling his stomach, his armpits and chin:
the worms crawl in the worms crawl out…

A wall of blackness seized me. My pulse thrummed in my temples and ears. As if from a great distance, I heard the sound of feet scrabbling against the hull, and then Rex pulled himself up over the cap-rail, one-handed, landing on deck with a messy wet flop.

“Look,” he said, eagerly.

“Damn you,” I said.

“No, Meg.
Look
at me.”

And I did. Saw the strange, sparkling outline of a body, Rex's body, otherworldly as any ghost. Every inch of his skin was glowing emerald green.

Phosphorescence.

The beauty of it stunned me. I'd seen it before, in
Chelone
's wake: millions of tiny organisms, salt water's answer to fireflies. But I'd never imagined it could be so bright. Almost before I understood
what I was seeing, the colors had started to fade. Still, when I rose to touch Rex's shoulders, my palms sparkled briefly, and the drops of water falling from him sparkled, too.

“I thought,” I began, but Rex pressed his fingers to my lips, salty and cool.

“Just this once,” he said.

I waited.

“I'd like you to do something for me.”

At that moment, I would have promised him anything.

“I want you to stop imagining the worst thing that can happen.”

A soft sound escaped me; I was startled into the truth. “I can't.”

“Why not? What would be so terrible?”

The question hung between us, giving off its own peculiar light.

“If you imagine the worst thing,” I said, “then it can't happen. Because you've already thought of it.”

Rex stared at me. “Oh, honey,” he said.

And with that, I understood.

From the moment of Evan's birth—no, from the moment he'd first trembled inside me—I'd been on my guard, alert, anticipating every possible danger. I ate carefully, avoiding preservatives, additives, artificial flavors and colors. I stopped using the microwave. I ordered a special monitor so I could listen to the terrifying gallop of his heart. After he was born, I purchased another monitor—this one had a small, wireless receiver that blinked every time he took a breath—and I placed air purifiers around the house, washed his clothes, and ours, in hypoallergenic detergent, took a three-year leave from Lakeview because I couldn't find anyone I trusted enough to care for him in my absence. Of course, I locked up all our cleaning supplies, moved matches and knives to high cupboards, glued padded bumpers to the sharp edges of the hearth, the coffee table.
Of course, Evan always rode in his car seat. Of course, I buckled the straps in his stroller, his high chair, his baby swing. As he grew older, I taught him about stranger danger. I made him memorize his name, address, phone number. When we went to the mall in Milwaukee, he wore a little harness with a tether I kept wrapped around my waist, to hell with the dirty looks people gave me, the comments about overprotective mothers, about people treating their children as if they were dogs.

My
child was not going to be lured away by a pedophile.
My
child was not going to dash out into the parking lot, onto the street, to be crippled by a passing car. Evan wore a helmet and training wheels whenever he rode his bicycle, and at the beach, I stayed beside him when he went into the water, never mind that he didn't go past his knees. I taught him to lie down during electrical storms, should he find himself out in the open; I taught him to crawl out of his bedroom, on his belly, in case of fire. I roused him from his bed during thunderstorms, in case there was a tornado, and led him to a nest of blankets in the basement, where we slept for the rest of the night. When walking along the lakefront park, if a strange dog happened to approach, I put my body between us, and I warned him, possibly frightened him, yes, about rabid raccoons and foxes and skunks.

And, of course, I expected there'd be broken bones, a tumble down the stairs, a fall from a backyard tree. I'd expected a stay in the hospital with a bad case of tonsillitis, a nasty dehydrating flu. I'd expected—and indeed, this had actually occurred—that one night, at supper, he'd stop breathing, a wild, shocked look on his face, and I'd have to turn him over and whack his back, hard, to dislodge a partially chewed piece of meat. And car accidents, okay, they could happen, did happen, and that was why we avoided I-43 during rush
hour, on holidays, during bouts of sleet and ice. That was why we didn't drive on New Year's Eve, or Superbowl Sunday, times when, as my mother liked to say, the
crazy drunks
were out. Middle-aged men, I imagined, with beer bellies, noses swollen red as stop signs. Teenagers crammed into a beat-up car, goofing around, the radio too loud.

I'd never imagined the face of someone who'd sat, in fourth grade, in the desk behind my own. Someone who'd driven me home from a party on the night I turned sixteen. Who'd become, after that, for the summer which followed, the closest friend I'd ever had. Who'd confided something that had struck me then as so unthinkable, so terrible and strange, that I'd pushed it out of my thoughts, sweeping our friendship right along with it, but wasn't that just part of being young, falling in and out of friendship in the easy, fluid way that kids all around us fell in and out of love, day to day, week to week? Someone I hadn't really thought about in years—in truth, tried not to think about—because thinking about Cindy Ann Donaldson still triggered the same feelings of uneasiness, shame. And perhaps Cindy Ann herself felt the same way, for never once, in all the court documents, the police reports, the careful transcriptions, did she mention, even obliquely, that we'd ever been more than acquaintances. Neither, for that matter, did I.

Certainly, I'd never imagined a crisp December morning, Christmas presents already wrapped and hidden, the first pink blush of sunrise in the air. I'd never imagined, nudging Evan into his booster seat, that the kiss I left on his forehead—more a hasty temp check than a true mark of affection—would be the last one I'd ever give him. As I'd approached the intersection, I'd never imagined that the vehicle to my right was slowing out of inebriation, inattention.
That it would accelerate to ninety-five miles an hour as soon as I looked away. That the face of the driver belonged to a woman. That this face could have been my own.

This was the thing for which I could not be forgiven, for which I could not forgive myself. I'd never seen any of this coming. Even in the split second before the crash, I hadn't so much as suspected that it was, already, too late.

I wiped my eyes, stared into Rex's face, saw my own pain mirrored there. Magnified. He looked away, stared out across the water, and for the first time, I thought about what it would be like: to literally jump ship. To leave everything behind.