“Whatever you like.”
He shook his head. “I’ll buy the hot dogs.”
I shook his giant paw. His middle knuckle had taken seven stitches after he punched the flesh-trader in the face. He admired his handiwork. Before he climbed aboard, Clay turned and said, “Mr. Murphy.”
I smiled. “Yes.”
“Most of my life I been angry at men that look like you. With skin color like yours.” A pause. “They took so much. Everything.” He sucked through his teeth. “I lost count of the number of fights in prison.” He glanced at his hand. “But then that man took Ellie and . . . I thought she was gone and I couldn’t bear the thought of that little girl being . . . and then you stopped him, and he came running at me, and I reached back some sixty years and I took all the anger I ever knew and I sent my fist through his face.” He straightened his jacket and his hat. “And now I’m not so angry anymore.”
“That’s good, ’cause they had to wire his jaw back together. He’s drinking his meals through a straw.”
Clay’s face changed. “Prison won’t be fun for him.”
“Nope.”
He shook my hand again. This time holding it. “Thank you.”
From inside the plane, Ellie was laughing at Angel, who had just said, “You know, you never really get used to that new-plane smell.”
I nodded. “Watch out for those two.”
Summer was last. She stood beautiful against the evening sun, the wind tugging at her dress. Her legs tanned and firm. She lifted her sunglasses off her face, held my face in her hands, and kissed me. Once. Twice. Then a third time. Her lips were soft. Tender. Inviting. And gone was the tremble. She pushed my hair out of my eyes. “Dancing is better when two people do it.”
“I’m not much of a dancer.”
A sly smile. “I am.”
I laughed.
She climbed a few steps, twirled once, then again, and disappeared into the plane. When she did, I felt a part of me go with her.
The pilot appeared from the cockpit. Bones. He stood in the doorway, broad chested, chiseled. Smiling like the Cheshire cat behind mirrored aviators. He loved this stuff. Now in his late fifties, he was fitter than most CrossFit fanatics. His face was tanned from too much skiing at Vail and Beaver Creek. He and I needed to have a conversation, but this was not the time nor the place. The look on his face acknowledged this. He gave me a thumbs-up, followed by rapid and practiced finger motions. When finished, they’d said, “91–11.”
He shall give His angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways.
The plane taxied, the jets roared, and within seconds they were little more than a speck.
I turned to Gunner, who was sitting next to me. Wagging his tail. “You ready, boy?”
He stood, ears trained on the disappearing plane, tail moving at six hundred rpm’s.
We walked from the airport across the street to the water where Gone Fiction was tied up at a dock. Standing on the dock, wearing an enormous hat and sunglasses, stood a familiar face. She’d made her yearly trek to Key West. She was holding a drink in one hand and the printed pages of a manuscript in the other. I lifted Gunner, placed him on the beanbag, and wrapped him in a blanket. She stared down at me and gestured with the pages. “You sure?”
I shrugged. “One half of me says yes. The other half says no.”
“Doesn’t have to end this way.”
I took a look inside. “My well is pretty dry. I don’t know if I can . . .”
She nodded. “You want me to speak to you as your editor or your friend?”
My mind wandered to the six hundred miles ahead of me. “Think I need a friend right now.”
“Write it out.”
I stared out across the water, finally letting my eyes come to rest on the battered orange Pelican case strapped to the bow. The one that held Marie’s ashes. My editor sipped from her drink and then pointed at the box. “I can hold the press.” She weighed her head side to side. “Expensive but . . . you’re worth it.”
I cranked the engine. The water stretched out like glass before me. The breeze cooled my skin. Snook darted beneath the hull. Behind me, I heard Marie’s echo, Walk me home. I nodded. “Maybe you should hold it.”
She smiled, lifted her drink in a toast, and disappeared up the dock toward the next watering hole.
Gunner and I reversed out of the slip. I throttled into drive, and we idled up the south side of Key West, where the sun shone on that orange box. Six hundred miles stared us in the face.
And that was good.
Chapter 52
Bones released the videos of the men captured on the Sea Tenderly and Fire and Rain. Authorities began making arrests up and down the coast of Florida. Over fifty men. Famous people too. Most lawyered up and tried both to buy their way out and to silence the media circus, but it’s tough to argue with video. Especially when little girls are involved.
Despite their attempts, the media couldn’t sniff me out. All they could uncover was a mystery man who had rescued some twenty-six girls over the course of a week and driven a stake through the heart of a mafia-run sex-trafficking racket that spanned the East Coast. Several of the girls required medical attention, but each had been returned to their lives and their parents. A few were unable to be contacted as their numbers had been disconnected. Theory was they’d been relocated to parts unknown. Each was a bit wiser. The captain of the demon boat had been offered a deal if he talked. Reduced sentence. “Softer” prison. He was singing like a canary.
The ride home took a week. We idled much of the way. Nothing about me was in a hurry. Most nights I slept in my hammock, cradling the jar that held Marie.
The island had survived much as I’d left it. Over two hundred citrus trees fared well given that they’re individually watered with automatic sprinklers. The weeds had returned with a vengeance, so I spent a few days beating them back—spraying or uprooting them. When I finally garnered the gumption to return to the chapel, my note still hung on the door. I thought about taking it down but couldn’t bring myself to do it.
So I left it.
Gunner was hands down the peeing-est dog I’d ever seen. Marked every tree on the island. To speed his therapy, I got him out swimming. At first, I held him while he paddled gently in my arms, getting his strength back. Slowly, I let him go and he swam on his own. I knew when he started swimming against the current he’d be okay. A good sign.
I lifted Gone Fiction out of the water and spent several days giving her a deep cleaning. She’d earned it. I even pulled off the wrap, restoring her to her original color.
Sunset found me staring over a cup of coffee out across the shallow water where Marie and I had met as kids. Somewhere in the next few days, I grabbed my laptop and opened a white page. For the next month, I wrote the me I wanted us to be. I wrote the story I wanted to read rather than the story I’d lived. Proving once again that writing is an amazing transaction, and that the most powerful thing ever is a word.
When I’d finished, I read out loud to both Marie and Gunner as the sun dropped behind the palm trees. Then I read it again. Gunner wagged his tail and rolled over on his back. Maybe Marie liked it too. I knew my editor had bitten her nails to the quick, so I clicked Send and waited a few hours, and when my phone rang near midnight, she couldn’t even talk. Usually a good sign. She managed two words. “Thank you.” Followed by, “The wedding . . .” She paused. Blew her nose. “Most beautiful thing I’ve ever—” She couldn’t finish. Proving that while she was my editor, she was a reader first.
I hung up, stared at a full moon, and felt the tug. I walked out to the bank, and Marie and I sat beneath a blanket and watched the sunrise.
Gunner sniffed me out at daylight and said hello by licking my face. “Okay, okay . . . I’m coming.” He ran around me in circles, splashing, sinking his muzzle to his ears, chasing schools of mullet.
Standing on the beach where we’d searched for sharks’ teeth as kids, I opened the box and lifted
the jar. Then, holding her hand, I waded into the knee-deep water. Gunner paused, tilted his head, and stood wagging his tail. Below me, the outgoing tide tugged at my skin. Bait fish nibbled at my toes. I clutched the jar for some time. Remembering how the water glistened on her skin and the wind tugged at her hair. And how her hand found mine when we were snorkeling. A homing beacon. I closed my eyes and let the water wash over me.
Ellie told me the story her mom had told her after I’d rushed out to rescue Summer. The day of our wedding, she’d left ashamed. A betrayal unlike any other. While she knew I could forgive her, she could not forgive herself. So she ran. Medicating and drowning her pain in drink, drug, and people. Always one step ahead of me.
Seven years in, she tired of running and walked back into my life. We spent that night talking, and just before daylight, she’d given herself to me. The honeymoon we’d never had. Seven years to the day, and the only time I’d ever been with my wife. She left before dawn, then climbed into a rented boat and turned on the camera. Yet, sitting in that boat and tying herself to a concrete bucket, she had a problem. Her body felt different. Something was off. Or new. And like most girls, she knew what the “new” was.
So, wanting to complete the ruse for the camera, she followed the bucket. Twenty feet down, the knot came undone. Had she tied it loosely or was it something else? Hovering below the boat in what was to be her watery grave, she watched the bucket disappear. Darkness below. Light above. Something new inside. For reasons she had never been able to understand, she chose light.
Yet walking up to shore, how could she return to me? How could I ever trust her? After so great a betrayal. Twice. At least, this was her thinking. She returned north to the Hamptons and waited tables until the baby came. While there, she learned of an adoption agency that catered to the wealthy. Maybe they could give the girl a better life. So she gave birth to Ellie, signed the papers, and left the Hamptons on, of all things, a Greyhound bus.
During delivery, she’d had complications. They ran tests and determined she had several problems, the worst of which was an incurable virus that attacks the lining of the heart of otherwise healthy individuals, suffocating it. It comes in through needles and sex. Of which she’d known her share. They said she was lucky to be alive. Gave her a few months to live. Incidentally, the virus did not pass through the womb. Host only.
Having committed suicide twice, she couldn’t bring herself to do it again. So she searched the yellow pages and found a convent in, of all places, Key West. She figured she could hide and die there. She inquired under a false name, they accepted her as a candidate, and she made the trip south. Burdened with guilt, she left bread crumbs along the way in the event her daughter ever wanted to know about her beginnings. About where she came from—without all the pain and betrayal. Marie arrived at Sisters of Mercy and was met by Sister June. Fast friends ever since.
She explained her life and situation to Sister June and asked permission to die in that cottage. Sister June obliged while telling her, “I have a feeling what’s about to happen isn’t going to happen the way you think it’s going to happen.”
So she walked the beaches. And waited. Feeling her ability to breathe and fill her lungs lessen with every day. But then a funny thing happened. One evening, nearly a year to the day she’d left me, she was walking the beach and found herself near the southernmost point. Breeze at her back. People-watching. Then this one guy caught her eye. Suntanned, sitting on a rock, scribbling in a notebook.
Handsomest man she’d ever seen. Day after day, she stood at a distance and peered through trees and disguises. Big hats and sunglasses. When he finished writing in his notebook, he’d walk to work, serve drinks, and keep writing—long into the night. Several nights she’d followed him home and waited ’til he turned out the light. Then she stood at his open window and listened to him breathe.
She knew his shifts, so one day, while he was at work, she let herself in his unlocked apartment and opened the oldest notebook. Over the next few days, she read each one from beginning to end. In dumbstruck amazement.
This man, this tortured creature, was writing a story he had not lived. A story he could only dream. Of love known. Shared. Of a woman unlike any other. He wrote of how she moved, how she smelled, how the wind dried the water on her skin, and how goose bumps rose around her hair follicles when she got cold. And he wrote of how when she slept, he’d place his hand on her stomach and feel its rise and fall.
Torn and tormented by her own life’s decisions, her own selfishness, she photocopied the first notebook and sent it with a note to a woman she’d met in the Hamptons. An editor for a New York house. The note read, “There are sixty more of these. He tends bar at the ‘End of the World.’ Key West. You have one week to order a drink or I’m sending elsewhere.” Five days later, she watched from the second-story window of a dilapidated bed-and-breakfast as the woman who would become my editor sidled up to the bar.
A year later, lying in the bed at her cottage, a bedside table full of steroids and medications, Marie and Sister June read the first release. Out loud. Five times.
When Sister June pressed her about telling me the truth, Marie shook her head and squeezed the hardcover to her chest. “I want his heart to heal.”
Sister June had challenged her. “That all?”
Marie had shaken her head. “I want our love to live forever.”
And she was right. It had. Until it didn’t. Until thirteen years had passed and I could write no more. So I burned every book, loaded into my Whaler, and intended to return to my rock where I would walk out into the water and scatter our ashes and our memories and our hope and all my love into the waters where the Gulf kissed the Atlantic.
But love is a difficult thing to kill. Actually, it’s the only thing in this universe or any other that you can’t kill. No weapon that has ever been made can put a dent in it. You might punch it, stab it, whip it, and hang it out to dry—you can even drive a spear through it, pierce its very heart. But all you’re going to get is blood and water, because love gives birth to love.
Marie settled into what she thought would be her last months. But with four book releases over a two-year period, the process slowed. There were days when she sat by the water’s edge, her toes digging into the wet sand, my words in her hands, and felt as though she strengthened. As though the very words I’d written had reversed the virus. She watched in amazement as millions upon millions of copies circled the globe, movies were made, and yet this anonymous writer never came out of the shadows. Never stepped into the limelight. He simply wrote for love. She said there were days when her joy squeezed more tears out of her eyes than she thought humanly possible. But in the crying there was a washing. A cleansing.
Water does that.
Thirteen years passed, and she was still hanging on. Weakened, breathing extra oxygen, skin and bones, a shadow of her former self, paying the consequences of years of bad decisions—and yet there she was, just like the rest of the world, awaiting the next installment. An injection of words from his heart to hers that would give her a few more months.
But internet rumors suggested the author had come to his end. That he’d written his last love story. She and Sister June, oxygen tank in tow, boarded a train, rented a sleeping car, and didn’t get off until the Hamptons. They rode into the city and took the elevator to floor seventy-something, and Marie introduced herself. At first, the editor was standoffish. Disbelieving. But only two people ever knew about the package of photocopies she’d received in the mail. Herself and the person who’d sent it. That person was sitting in front of her.
Marie confessed that she knew the identity of the writer and that she’d heard he’d written his last. The editor glanced at a printed manuscript sitting on her desk. Stained with tears. Marie asked to read it.
The editor responded, “And if I don’t?”
Marie shook her head. “I’ll go home. Brokenhearted. Same as you.”
The editor agreed, and Mari
e spent the day wrapped in a blanket in her office staring down over a blanket of snow covering Central Park. When finished, she dried her eyes and sat shaking her head. The editor said she had begged me not to do this, but even she could hear it in my voice. I, the anonymous writer, was done. Well empty.
Marie ran her hand across the pages. “He’s saying goodbye. He has come to the end of us. The end of me.”
When Marie stood to leave, the editor asked, “What are you going to do?”
Marie had stared out the windows at the snow falling. “Give him a reason not to.”
Then the waiting began. She did not know about Angel, Ellie, or Summer. She simply knew I was returning to Key West with a box and the ashes of our love. Fourteen years ago, love had brought me back to her. Now, some twenty-one years since our wedding day, maybe love would bring me back again.
When we’d appeared at Sisters of Mercy that afternoon, asking questions, she’d looked in the mirror and chickened out. Instructed Sister June to deny her existence. Turn us around. Then she saw us on the rock. Saw Ellie and found herself mesmerized. Knew her immediately. Saw me wade out into the water and spread the ashes. Saw the names tattooed across my back. Saw me trying to be strong for everyone else when she knew I was cracking.
When she saw Summer she knew I’d be okay.
When she finally made up her mind to summon us that evening, the virus struck with a vengeance. Given her weakened condition, it left her with hours rather than days. She spent her last hours with her daughter. Telling her who she was. Who I am.
I stood in the waters around my island, tears cascading off my face, clutching two jars. In one, I held Marie. My love. My heart. The middle of me. And in the second, the purple urn from the kitchen table, I held all the words I’d written about her over thirteen novels. It held everything I’d ever wanted to tell her.
The breeze washed across my skin. I stared across the water at my island. The upstairs of the barn I call an office. The window I look out of when I’m staring across the top of my laptop. There was so much left unsaid. Not knowing what else to say, I spoke out loud some of the words of Marie’s obituary:
The Water Keeper Page 32
