Lemon Reef

Synopsis

What would you risk for the memory of your first love?

When Jenna Ross learns her high school love Del Soto died on Lemon Reef, she refuses to accept the official Miami medical examiner's report of death from natural causes.

Lemon Reef is a realm of glimmering beauty, where marine life triumphs over industrial waste. Del and Jenna dove on it every day during the summer before their tenth grade year, their love for the reef deepening as their passion for each other grew. It is a site of tenacity and wonder that mirrored their own, until they were outed and forced to separate. Even fifteen years later, Jenna knows that Del's heart could not have given out there.

Heartsick over Del's death and fearing that Del's young daughter may be in danger, Jenna risks all she has worked so hard for to return to Miami where she must dive into an excruciating past so that the truth of the present may surface.

Lemon Reef

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Lemon Reef

© 2012 By Robin Silverman. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-717-2

This Electronic Book is published by

Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

P.O. Box 249

Valley Falls, New York 12185

First Edition: July 2012

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Credits

Editor: Ruth Sternglantz

Production Design: Stacia Seaman

Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

Thanks to Mera Granberg, Thaai Walker, David Lenoe, Brian Crawford, Kat Meltzer, Jim Wood, Linda Lucero, and Cheryl Ossola for patiently reading and commenting on many chapter revisions. Wendy Brown, Crosby McCloy, Hillary Read, and Carol Hirth read full drafts and provided generous and thoughtful suggestions. I can't thank my editor Ruth Sternglantz enough for her dedication to this story, as well as her editorial guidance. Thanks to Radclyffe for finding a chapter of
Lemon Reef
among a pile of contest submissions and encouraging me to send the manuscript to Bold Strokes Books. My parents, Stan and Marilyn Silverman, are supportive and loving and bear no resemblance to the parents in this story. My friends Todd Jailer, Sarah Shannon, and Celia Jailer-Shannon have been a second home for us and an extended family. The same is true of Wendy Brown, Judy Butler, and Isaac Butler-Brown. I'm not sure what I or my family would have done without them these past years.
Lemon Reef
would not have been written without the support of Karen Bjorneby, the facilitator of our dynamic San Francisco writer's group and a Bay Area treasure. Noah Silverman-St. John, my sixteen-year-old son, truly is, in the words of Zora Neale Hurston, “Drenched in light.” He is the most loving and courageous soul I've ever known, and I thank him with all of my heart for his unwavering encouragement while I wrote
Lemon Reef
and for his beautiful presence in my life every day. Finally, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to Maria St. John, who was my life partner and dearest friend for twenty-one years. Maria, your fingerprints are on every page. Thank you for helping me tell this story.

For Maria and Noah, toward moonlight.

Monday

As Del was dying, I was going about my morning. As the ocean's surface closed in over her, erasing any remains of a last stand, I buttoned my blouse and tamed errant curls, mindful to be quiet so as not to wake Madison. As Del began feeling air starved and disoriented, I drove north on South Van Ness Avenue toward the San Francisco courthouse, noticing bright fissures in an otherwise gray sky and thinking about the cases I would hear that day and what directions they would take. As Del grappled with the invisible monster standing between her and her last breath, I sat in traffic, trying to breathe through fumes emitting from the SUV in front of me. And as I entered the secured underground parking lot reserved for judicial officers, Del left her body thirty feet under the sea, tethered to a metal chain pulled taut against a fitful and unforgiving gravitational tide.

*

The call about Del came that afternoon from our mutual friend, Gail Samuels, who still lived in Miami. I was in chambers during a fifteen-minute recess, recovering from the last family-court case I had heard. The mother alleged the father had submitted someone else's urine to show a negative result on a drug test so he could see his kids unsupervised. The father insisted the urine was his, despite my exhaustive attempts to explain to him that the depositor—as the test incidentally revealed—was pregnant.

I sat at my desk and stared at my bookshelves, still empty but for the few books I had brought with me on my first day: A read and reread
Gender Trouble
stood shoulder to shoulder with an equally worn hardcover copy of Kafka's short stories, which Del had given me in high school. Beside them,
The Interpretation of Dreams
,
Men in Dark Times
, and
Bastard Out of Carolina
lay horizontal in a pile.

On the shelf below was a recent photo of Madison and me at a party for the seventh anniversary of our commitment ceremony. Madison was looking at me and grinning. I was looking down and away, my impish smile suggesting the intensity of her blue-lit gaze made me feel happy but shy. The rest of my office was bare except for boxes yet to be opened, a stack of framed pictures waiting to be hung, and a couple of chairs. I was considering where the couch would go when the phone rang.

Gail, my oldest childhood friend, had visited Madison and me in San Francisco two weekends before. On the plane coming, she'd noticed a mole on the back of her leg. Convinced it was getting larger by the minute, Gail could think of little else for the rest of the trip. So when I heard her voice now, I fully expected to get the results of the biopsy she had raced back to Miami to have done. But what I heard her say instead was that my high school love Del Soto—her real name was Adeline—was dead. Her death had occurred while she was scuba diving with her husband Talon on a dive site sardonically referred to by Miami locals as Lemon Reef. Unofficial word from the medical examiner's office was Del had died of a heart attack.

I was stunned speechless by the news, numbness drawing down like molasses.

“Thirty-one seems young for a heart attack,” Gail said, the phone now taking on the effects of a wind tunnel, Gail's voice having to fight to be heard. Then, in response to my silence, Gail did what many people do when delivering news like this—rushed to provide more detail. “Del's husband Talon told the police they were diving and the next thing he knew, Del was trying to get to the surface and then went unconscious.”

*

Talon.
Del had shown up at my parents' house after she'd started dating him. She'd walked casually past my mother, who'd hyperventilated at the sight of her, and into what had been my childhood bedroom. We were nineteen, and this was the first time she'd set foot in this room since we were outed in the tenth grade, the first time she'd initiated contact in almost as long.

“I see Norma hasn't mellowed.” Del was referring to my mother, who was still sucking air in the living room.

“Uh, Del”—my back pressed against the just-closed bedroom door—“what are you doing here?” She was standing closer to me than a friend usually would, wearing jeans that displayed her jutting hipbones. Her copper hair hung long and loose. Her button-down blouse pulled tight at her breasts.

Del's gold eyes fluttered and then fixed on me. She'd wanted to tell me about him.

“Talon?”
I laughed, until I realized she was serious.

He'd decided on the name himself when he'd turned eighteen. Del shrugged to say it made no sense to her either, explained further it was the finishing touch in a larger effort to reinvent himself with steroids, Sun-In, and a tattoo of a falcon's claw over his left eye. She allowed herself to look around in fleeting glances as she spoke, as if titrating how much she absorbed of this room we'd made love in as teenagers and from which my parents had banished her overnight.

Del had been with a lot of guys since we'd been together, and she'd never felt the need to tell me about any of them. I soon realized why this time was different. “Please tell me you're
not
pregnant.” No response. “Del,” I pleaded, “what about school?”

That was enough to make her vanish again.

*

The receiver grew heavy in my hand, my throat tightened, sadness and confusion welled. I began to grasp what Gail was saying: Del had died on Lemon Reef. I remembered the summer before our tenth grade year. We dove on Lemon Reef every day. Then at night we hung our suits to dry in the window above her bed like flags from our own private country. And with the rest of the house asleep, Del and I, two fifteen-year-old girls, popped the elastic corners of the fitted sheet up over the edges of her mattress one by one, our naked bodies folding into breaths and winces and whispers and giggles that stifled on the edge of being caught.

“Jenna?” Gail's tone was reaching.

“Yeah.”

“If you decide to come for the funeral, I'll take a few days off.”

A brief silence followed. Gail had never been very close to Del, so I was curious about how affected she seemed. Then she said, “They have a daughter. She's ten. Del wanted to leave Talon, but he threatened to take the kid away from her if she did.”

Gail's tone went from informative to entreating, and I knew this was the real reason for the call.

“Now Talon's moving to Texas and he's taking Khila with him. That's her name,” Gail said.

I'd met Khila once. The night before I was leaving for San Francisco I ran into Del at a gas station on Miami Beach. Khila was two months old. She was sleeping in the backseat of Del's car, snuggled tightly in a soft blanket, secured in her car seat. She had light, wispy hair, long eyelashes, flushed cheeks, and pale naturally puckered lips. Her head rested against the car seat, and she had her tiny hand tucked under her soft chin like a little
Thinker
.

“I just think it can't be good for her,” Gail said, “to be raised by that man. Well, and”—she paused, took a breath—“Del's family is wilder than ever. There's no way they can fight for Khila on their own.”

I hung up and leaned forward in my chair, resting my face in my hands. Phones rang in the distance, officious voices crowded and dispersed, and a clock ticked a rhythmic blur. My afternoon calendar was only half over, and I was telling myself not to focus on this news now. I had to finish my day. At the same time, I found myself crying, the tears strangely disconnected from any thoughts or feelings I'd had about Del in recent years, as though a remote pipe, long thought to be inoperative, had suddenly sprung a leak.