The Emissary (16 page)

By the time she showered and dressed, and then walked out onto the main deck, the sun was bright and unexpectedly warm, considering the season. She stood at the railing, gazing out at the water, loving how the sun threw itself over and under the waves, bouncing light through the ocean like diamonds of the gods: Apollo’s jeweled laughter. So very few people in the world really ever saw light that way, and she was filled with gratitude that she was blessed to be one who did.

Without a trace of wind on the water,
The Deepwater
drifted like a feather on gentle waves, in the soft morning light of early spring. Jamie saw Sam and Philippe, both dressed in trunks and T-shirts, busily pulling scuba gear out of the hold and checking the tanks. The main door swung open and Liz stepped out in an exotic bikini, with a diaphanous leopard-print scarf tied loosely over her hips—looking like she had just finished shooting the cover of
Sports Illustrated
. Both of the men stopped talking and gawked as Liz took center stage. Distracted, Sam tuned out Philippe and approached Liz. He had still barely noticed Jamie was even there.

“Can you help me suit up?” Liz asked, knowing how good she looked.

Sam could not resist ogling her body. “I can, but what a shame to cover all that up in rubber.”

“Now, isn’t that something a girl should be saying to her date?”

“Well, yeah, that might just be what she’d be saying.”

“Are you going to come with me, then?”

“Oh yeah … I’m coming, for sure.”

An unintentional intruder, Jamie tried to ignore the sexual banter.
She turned one of the deck chairs to face the water, and lay down with her back to them.

“Ah! I didn’t see you there—good morning to you!” Liz said, calling over to Jamie.

Jamie waved from her chair, her back turned towards them.

“We’re floating for a while. The captain’s letting us take advantage of this amazing weather and the calm, so we’re going in.” As an afterthought, Liz added, politely, “Would you like to join us?”

Sam cringed. To his relief, Jamie thanked Liz, but said she had only just woken up and was still recovering from the night before. The two proceeded to the supply area, where Liz struggled into the wetsuit, with Sam watching lasciviously from behind as she bent over to get the difficult wetsuit pulled up on her legs and then over her hips. Sam could not help but stare, feasting on her sensuous curves and perfect body—just like she wanted him to.

“Are you going to help me out here?” She motioned to him to zip her up. With his hands on her back, slowly pulling the zipper up from her lower back, all the way up to her neck, the sexual tension between them sizzled.

Just when Jamie had decided to escape to the dining room to find herself a cup of coffee, Jimbo magically appeared, carrying a thermos and two mugs. He walked out to Jamie and greeted her. “Rumor has it we both missed breakfast this morning.”

“I was hoping no one noticed,” she said, looking up at him.

“Coffee?”

She reached out to take one of the mugs from his hands. “You must have read my mind.”

He opened the thermos, and filled her cup. “I hear I got a little out of my head last night.”

“So did I.”

“I mean, I fell asleep with my clothes on … kind of more than just a little out of my head.”

She took a sip of the coffee and grimaced. “Jimbo, this is the worst coffee I have ever drunk in my life!”

Jimbo winked at her. “Made it myself.” He took a deep breath of sea air, which provoked a fit of phlegmatic, almost asthmatic retching—the smoker’s cough. “I gotta tell you, though, I never met a woman who knew her way around a good cigar … don’t you take that the wrong way, neither.”

Farther back, near the gear locker, Sam got into his wetsuit. He and Liz disappeared down the stairwell to the lower deck and minutes later they appeared out on the Zodiac boat with Philippe, who was driving them a short distance from the ship, for safety.

“I guess those two didn’t get the part about the big whites. They are sure as hell out there, lurking around.”

“How is it that a master sailorman like you is so uncomfortable with the sea? It’s kind of a paradox, don’t you think?”

“Yeah? I suppose it is, Miss Jamie … I suppose it is. Think of it as ‘respect.’ I have seen enough to know you have to respect the deep and never, ever underestimate the sea. People don’t realize it—not even the crew. We’re on automatic pilot all the time; the ship is top of the line, pure navigational wizardry. But there is so much that could go wrong out here. The ocean is a wild, untamed rhapsody. And them big whites are always out there, roaming around, looking for something. Lest you forget—my best friend was almost shark bait.”

Fin appeared out of nowhere. He walked in between their two chairs, greeting them playfully, and then he leaned up on Jamie’s chaise, with his front paws over her legs.

“He sure is enchanted with you.”

Again, Fin bolted over to the ship’s railing and stood up against the railing, staring out at the water, and whining. He looked back at them, waiting.

“What do you want, boy? Your friends back?”

Fin was excited again. He came up to Jimbo’s side, nudging him.

“You mean to tell me he goes out swimming in open ocean with divers?”

“No ma’am. He goes out when the dolphins come.”

Fin barked repeatedly.

“I’m not thrilled about him going out there either, let me tell you that … but what am I supposed to do? When they come calling for him, I can’t contain him.”

“You mean to tell me dolphins come looking for Fin? Get out!”

“You’ll be seeing it with your own eyes in a minute.”

Fin kept insisting, whining and nudging, until Jimbo stood up.

“Oh yeah. He’s been jumping into the ocean ever since he was a pup. I don’t think he even knows he’s no fish!” Fin bit the cuff of his master’s jacket, pulling him towards the stairwell. “All right, all right, boy—let’s go. You just remember to stay close now, you hear?”

Jamie picked up her camera and asked to come along, and they both walked Fin down to the lower deck, where Jimbo opened the dive hatch. Fin leaped out into the water, where, to Jamie’s amazement, two dolphins had just surfaced, about fifty feet from the ship. Fin swam out to them, adeptly, swimming and diving with them in the deep waters of the Pacific, just as comfortable in the ocean as he was running around on deck.

“Oh my god! Look at him—he’s out there with dolphins! That is too much!” She slipped the camera band around her neck and started snapping pictures like crazy.

“Oh yeah. Ever since he wandered into my life he’s been trying to swim away. Man, he loves them dolphins. They love him, too. That’s how he got the name ‘Fin.’ ”

Fin played with the dolphins, so comfortable in the water that he looked more like a seal than a dog. Jamie could feel Jimbo’s anxiety building, though, and she knew he was afraid, with Fin out there in deep water.

“I figure he must have been a dolphin in another life.”

“In another life? Did you just say that?” Jamie teased. “Now, would that qualify as a woo woo point of view?”

Jimbo never took his eyes off Fin. “Yeah, I guess so. I had this girlfriend, Ling, back in ’Nam for a little while. She was a Buddhist—she helped me understand a lot of things—taught me a lot.”

Jamie held her camera on Fin and the dolphins, giving Jimbo space to talk about it if he wanted, or to run from the memory, without having to bare his soul to her. She just listened.

“In the middle of all that hell …” he said, his voice trailing away. Jimbo caught himself, showing too much, opening the valve—and he slammed it shut. “I realized … if more than four billion people on this planet believe in reincarnation, there has got to be something to it.”

“Well, whaddya know?” said Jamie, affectionately. She understood that he wanted to take the conversation somewhere else, far from that time. Veterans of that despicable war never really wanted to talk about what they saw in Vietnam, or worse: what they did there. “I knew there was a kindred spirit down there, deep behind that crusty facade.”

“Yeah …” he said, looking far away, his gaze fixed out on the horizon.

Without warning, the dolphins started leaping in and out of the water, appearing agitated. One of them kept slapping his tail down hard on the water, as if suddenly he was trying to scare off Fin, who was confused and unsure. Two other dolphins appeared from the below and at once the scene shifted from serene to threatening. Fin looked back at the ship, barking—and they disappeared, as quickly as they had come. Poor Fin was undecided whether to go out after his friends or swim back to the ship … and Jimbo could feel it.

“Okay, dude, get your ass back over here right now!”

Fin started swimming towards the ship. He had drifted farther
out with the dolphins, and he was struggling to get in, breathing hard. Jimbo threw a buoy out into the water, which Fin grabbed hold of with his teeth. Jimbo pulled him in, closer to the edge of the dive well, and then reached into the water with his strong hands, lifting Fin, who by now was panting hard and shivering uncontrollably, out of the deep, by the collar.

“Damn, boy. This has got to stop,” Jimbo said. Trembling uncontrollably, Fin shook himself off from his head down to his tail, dowsing them both in a shower of cold ocean water. Jimbo removed his jacket, and threw it over the dog, wrapping him in it tightly. “Easy, boy …” he said, holding Fin close to him in his arms, trying to get him to warm up.

“May I?” Jamie asked. She didn’t want to interfere, but she did know what to do.

Reluctantly, Jimbo released his protective hold on Fin, and Jamie took over. Kneeling on the wet deck floor, she removed the jacket, then placed one hand on Fin’s back and the other on his chest. Utilizing the power of the focused mind over matter, she brought immense heat through her palms, and then sent it into his body, through the tissues, and down into his bones. In less than a minute, he stopped shaking completely, and his breathing returned to normal.

Fin jumped up on her; he made sounds Jimbo had never heard him make before, as if he were speaking to her. The two of them were completely connected, in a sort of mutual trance, communicating across species lines. Jimbo still didn’t know all that much about Jamie Hastings, but he knew his dog. He was witness to something extraordinary being exchanged between them and it was unmistakably real, and powerful.

From being curious and sunny, Jamie suddenly became very serious, as if a dark cloud had passed over her. The agitation that Fin was experiencing had something to do with the dolphins, and their state of anxiety. But there was more to it—something deeper.
As the thoughts ran across the screen of her mind, Fin barked, acknowledging that she was on track. He was that tuned in.

“He wants to show you something, but he can’t—there’s something hidden,” Jamie said, curiously. “Something important.” She squeezed Jimbo’s hand. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

Jimbo reacted evasively to Jamie’s touch, or was it the words? He pulled his hand away and bent over to speak to Fin, shutting her out completely. “Yeah, you’re hungry. That’s what you’re talkin’ about … I hear you, boy—let’s get some grub.” Fin shook himself again. “I need to get up there and see what Alberto’s got going on for lunch,” Jimbo told Jamie, ending the conversation before it even really began. Whether something was hidden in the message of the dolphins, or deep in Jimbo’s soul, he didn’t want to know about it. Jamie knew she had accessed something he wasn’t going to talk about, and she knew well enough to let it go. Perhaps she had crossed the boundaries, touching him that way.

Jimbo excused himself and led Fin back inside, leaving her, pensive, out on deck. Something called her to the bow of the ship—Mother Earth herself, no doubt. She watched the white cumulus clouds gather on the horizon. There, way out on the distant waves, she saw the first whale spouts, blowing high into the darkening sky.

While Jamie was lost somewhere in thought, drifting around between the waves and the clouds, trying to get a better view of the whales through her zoom lens, she heard the Zodiac approaching the ship and then what sounded like a winch, hoisting it back onto the platform on the lower deck. Minutes later, Sam and Liz reappeared from the stairway, carrying their fins and dive masks. Liz was noticeably upset. She handed her gear to Sam, and walked right up to Jamie.

“Did you see us out there? We were surrounded by at least twenty bottlenose dolphins.”

“No! Where were you? I was watching Fin right near the ship—he had three or four of them with him. I never saw you.”

“How could you have missed us? We were only about three hundred feet away—starboard.” As she stood dripping water from her wetsuit, Liz started shivering. “The water is freezing cold.”

Jamie pointed out to sea. “Look out there—I’ve seen three spouts so far … are they Orcas?”

Liz didn’t even turn to look. “They were behaving so strangely. I’ve never been afraid around dolphins before.”

Jamie didn’t say anything, but she couldn’t understand how anyone could ever be “afraid” of dolphins.

Sam walked up behind her with a big beach towel that he’d pulled from the hatch and he handed it to Liz. “I tried to tell her she was just freaked out over Jimbo’s ‘Tales of the Deep’ last night,” he said.

Liz snapped at him. “No, that’s not it at all. I’m telling you they were aggressive—I felt threatened out there.”

He went back to the locker and was quick to unzip the back of his wetsuit and step out of it, showing off his noteworthy physique. Dismissing Liz’s concern, he called out to her, teasingly. “Maybe they were in the middle of a mating dance. You know what they say about dolphins.”

Liz was no longer in flirtation mode and she was put off by his cavalier attitude about something that clearly had her so upset. “Sam! I dive all the time and I’ve never experienced anything like this. It was almost as if they were trying to trap me in their circle … it was just too weird.”

“Where was Sam?” Jamie asked, just ever so accusingly. “Weren’t you there?”

“I couldn’t even see him. I was just surrounded by these huge creatures, swimming around me in circles.”