Water Memory

by Daniel Pyne

  Bulk paper?

  Stop. Sentro’s growing weary of having to remind herself.

  “What’s it like?” Jenny asks, out of nowhere.

  “What? Oh. Strangely serene,” Sentro says. “Odd. Singular. Not beautiful yet. I’m hoping we’ll see something beautiful, but that’s not why I came.”

  “Running away from us again.”

  “The only running I remember is back to you.”

  “That’s so wrong.” Jenny wants to talk about her wounds again. The purported crimes her mother has committed against her, the hole in her heart. How her father raised her to believe the world was fair, and how she’s come to discover that it isn’t. And somehow that, too, is Sentro’s fault. She can’t change the past or the grievances her children have gathered on their own; she settles in to let Jenny vent and lets her own thoughts drift.

  For one glorious summer season, when they thought Dennis was in remission, Jenny turned thirteen and played softball on a travel team, at first in rebellion against her mother, who was indifferent to sports, while her father had been a high school shortstop phenom and she was a daddy’s girl, all the way. But once Jenny discovered the game came easily and that she was quite good at it, mother and daughter found common ground in simple rituals, the pregame braiding of Jenny’s hair and tying a ribbon in, the strangely intimate long dawn drives to weekend tournaments, radio karaoke, the shared rooms. Sentro had a rare, long break between assignments, and as Jeremy was touring colleges with his dad, Dennis made a point of “giving his girls some space.”

  It was, for Sentro, ten weeks of wondrous détente with her daughter that she has never quite found again. In the championship game, Jenny’s playing was otherworldly. Sentro had the dizzying sensation of living life’s adventure through someone else, someone she loved, marveling at her daughter’s ferocity, which Dennis insisted was pure Sentro. And her icy calm when—three and two, two outs, game on the line, just like in the movies—Jenny smacked a single down the line and drove in the winning run and was mobbed and buried by her screaming teammates when she crossed home plate.

  Afterward, a number of sharklike parent scouts from better teams approached Sentro about Jenny’s future. An elite national travel team even offered scholarship funding in the event Sentro and her husband couldn’t afford the steep fees.

  Jenny disappeared from the celebration. Sentro found her in the car, hiding, sobbing, insisting that they needed to go home. Now. No goodbyes.

  It was more than a hundred miles before Sentro dug the reason from her inconsolable child.

  “You were amazing,” Sentro told her.

  “I wanted Daddy to see it,” Jenny said.

  “I took pictures. I took videos. I was on the phone Skyping with him when you got your last hit.”

  “But he didn’t see it,” Jenny wailed.

  Sentro said that there would be lots of other times for that. That this was only the beginning.

  “No,” Jenny snapped. “I don’t want to play anymore. I’m quitting.”

  Sentro was stunned. “But why? You were great.”

  “Yeah. And now I’ll have to do it again. And again. And again. No.” She wrapped herself in a blanket and turned her head away to cry into the pillow she’d brought, wedged against the door. The weird part was Sentro understood her. And thought, naively, Give her time; she’ll change her mind.

  They didn’t talk the rest of the way home.

  And after Jenny ran inside and hid in her room, Sentro and Dennis discovered that Jenny’s equipment bag in the back seat was empty. She’d thrown her glove, bat, and cleats away at the field.

  There’s dead air on the phone. How long has it been since her daughter stopped talking? Sentro vamps, “Twenty days, Jen. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  A fifth man joins the four on the Savannah quay. Light haired, a hipster, miscast here. Sunglasses, skinny cuffed pants, and a Vince Vaughn porkpie hat. Sun dusts a downy chin nimbus of beard. Sentro almost laughs. Jenny seems to sense the inattention and asks if her mother has heard anything she’s said.

  “Yes. And I’ll email; I’ll send pictures. I’ll call you whenever I hit a port where I get cell service.”

  The ensuing silence on the other end of the line is Jenny’s favorite current expression of deep skepticism where her mother is concerned.

  Then Sentro says, “Promise,” before she can stop herself.

  Jenny makes a cutting observation that Sentro’s promises have always been mostly empty, and it’s not an unreasonable criticism, but the next awkward pause between them is Sentro’s fault because she’s followed the upward tilt of the hipster’s gaze to the gunwale of the Jeddah forecastle, where Fontaine Fox stands, leaning forward against the rail, hips cocked, with shiny black jeans and an untucked shirt, sexy hair blown everywhere, staring back down at him.

  This strikes Sentro as odd. Could they know each other?

  She forces herself to back off from speculation: it’s none of her business. Shut the sensors off. Her business is what she’s set sail to leave behind.

  Her business and all it engenders.

  Focus, Aubrey.

  The men are walking away. Getting into their mobster motorcar. And Fontaine Fox is gone from the deck rail.

  A skip in the record, dust on the needle. Wait. Did she finish her call with her daughter?

  Sentro looks down at the phone clutched in her hand, its screen dark. Then she gazes out and down again at the empty quay, where a minivan has arrived and drawn close to the gangway and her fellow sea travelers are spilling out with shopping bags ready to reboard the ship. Sentro shoves the phone in her hoodie pouch and worries a hand through her hair, fighting back the disquiet that’s overtaken her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was stupid, taking the scooter. Just like he’d told his brother. Even when the road is dry, the village of San Ignacio is a jarring, tooth-loosening half-hour ride from Porto Pequeno, and in the current downpour, the spattered mud cakes the legs of his pants, and water rivers off the cheap poncho over the hump of his backpack and right down the crack of his ass, and his eyes ache from blinking away rain and struggling to find safe passage between the potholes and furrows and exposed roots and fallen palm fronds. Castor should have fucking come himself if he was so anxious to off-load their haul.

  Or they could have borrowed the Colombian’s Land Cruiser and come here together.

  “Closing the bloody books on that yacht noise,” Castor insisted; they already have their next play schemed—contract work, easy peasy—half in advance already wired to Western Union, cashed, and banked. A big flashy job Pauly is proud to have found and finessed. His brother still can’t believe it.

  He squeezes both hand brakes to cross the narrow stone bridge a swollen stream has already breached, brown water sheeting across it in surges. The bike skids, but he manages to stay upright by using his boot like a mud ski. Brown sludge rooster tails behind when he throttles up. He can see dull light from the few structures that remain around the overgrown Ignacio plaza up ahead. The tiny village is nested in steam rising off the ground.

  A signless corner bodega offers a single man framed in the front window: middle aged, unremarkable, European. Merino suit, expensive watch, no tie; it’s his sleek crimson Jaguar parked right out front, the back of which Pauly leans his scooter against, because the kickstand is busted.

  The man looks up from a smartphone and his chicken and rice as the thickset figure in a hooded rain poncho splashes across the street and enters. The door has a jingle on it. Pauly’s boots, dripping wet, squeak across the unfinished floor to the table.

  “Robbens?” Pauly has never met him.

  “Don’t bother to sit. I told your brother—we have no business to discuss.”

  It’s always a pissing contest with the Dutchman, Castor says. An imperious white man determined to prove his birthright of Anglo exceptionalism, whatever that is. Pale forearms are thatched with coarse hair, and slack muscle wobbles whe
n he lifts them from the table to gesture his disdain. The trick, Castor told Pauly, is to just push past it. So, stubborn, he lifts the poncho and shrugs off his backpack, unzips, and empties its contents on the table. Watches, jewelry, credit cards, wallets, and cash and coin from the United States, China, and the European Union scatter, violently. Booty from the weekender yacht the Zemes lately plundered.

  “I also have account names and passwords.” He shows the soggy piece of paper, with handwriting already smearing.

  Robbens stares at it all, unmoved. “Question. Do you know, mijn zoon, how young men survive to be old men in this world?”

  “My brother said to tell you we got an even bigger play coming up, yeah?” He allows Castor the credit for it, since he’s five and a half minutes older and claims to be the alpha. Sons of Zeus, their mother would coo, to feed their old man’s ego.

  Robbens talks over him. “I’m well aware of the bloody source of this shit. Okay? Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

  “We burned the boat.”

  “In water.”

  “What?”

  “You set the yacht afire in water, which, what a surprise, tends to extinguish flames. Debris washed up on Lorenzo Key. Along with the remains of many passengers and crew.

  “They were important people, boy. With important friends. And said friends, you can tell your doppelganger, said friends would pay me considerably more than I could get for this plunder, were I even able to find a buyer, in exchange for the names of the lowlife reprobates who thought it was a good idea to rob and kill their good friends.”

  Pauly stares at him, not sure he’s understood everything, but he’s understood enough to know that this isn’t going to go the way his brother told him it would. Pauly resents always being sent on these fool’s errands. Never knowing the full story, always feeling like he’s playing catch-up.

  “Where is Castor?”

  “Busy.” Still stubborn: “So are you interested or not?”

  “Are you deaf? Have you been listening to what I am saying?”

  “What?”

  “I suggest you call Colonel Silva and swear to him the cock-up on the yacht was an unfortunate accident and beg him not to kill you, because that is, in fact, the only rational option you have.”

  The name Silva means nothing to Pauly, but the rank worries him. It’s been his experience that the rich tend to look after each other, that the military and the criminal are often separated only by their chosen uniforms. He guesses that the colonel is in the drug trade, connected to the 1 percent of the 1 percent by the very fact of their all being absolutely filthy fucking rich.

  Pauly stews. “You told him who we were?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not ever.” Pauly reaches under his poncho for a gun but hesitates when Robbens scolds him, clearly irritated now.

  “Stop! Pointless! Think! Kill me, and you will not only have federales and the colonel crawling up your ass; you’ll have everyone who relies upon my services coming after you.”

  Using his arm like a blade, Pauly sweeps his bloody bounty back into the open pack and zips it shut. “We can sell ’em on eBay. And you’ll be kicking yourself for pissing on us when you see what else we got going.”

  “This is a business. Yes? You are not remotely pirates; you’re high sea sociopaths, and you are out of your depth.”

  Now Pauly pulls the gun.

  Robbens flinches; his slender hands come up to shield his face. The clip empties. Pauly can see the heat of its discharge singe the hairs on the back of the Dutchman’s arm as the bodega window behind him shatters and falls in a curtain of glass. Across the street, the bullets thunder off the bulletproof Jaguar like raindrops.

  Then it’s quiet again. Rain sheets in. Robbens pushes back from the table, slips some folded money under his coffee cup, and stands up. He’s already soaking wet. His legs tremble, but he’s trying to pretend he’s unimpressed.

  Pauly is breathing hard, glaring at him.

  Robbens says, “How much better you must feel.”

  He doesn’t. Castor should have done this himself. Chastened by their need for this imperious knob, angry at everything, and feeling like a sorry stand-in for his brother, Pauly runs back out into the storm.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Dinner is served on tilting tables, chairs creaking with shifted weight, half cups of coffee sloshing, and there’s a lot of picking at the flattened chicken on flash-scalded kale, but nobody’s much interested in eating it. Outside their squared steel refuge, fierce rainfall races in Cristo-like curtains draped over a surging gray sea and splatters against the windows.

  They’re all given journals, compliments of the captain. “Proteus blesses the seafarer with marvelous insight,” he intones over boulevardiers at cocktail hour. “Unfetter your inner poet.”

  (“Hell’s bells,” Fontaine groans.)

  The black Moleskine fits easily in Sentro’s hand and includes a very nice ballpoint pen that, lingering alone after dinner when the table has cleared, she holds poised over the blank page for longer than she wants, waiting, but no words flow. Back in middle school, she remembers, as a writing assignment, she was required to keep a diary, but she managed only two weeks before stopping and later more or less made up, in a panic, the subsequent three months of entries the night before the project was due.

  She ditches the journal and runs the U-deck twice a day instead. Sleeps. Eats. Banters here and there irreverently with her new friend Fontaine when they cross paths. Tries not to worry too much about the momentary blanks, hesitations, unwanted recall, daydreams, every minor tremor of distraction that may disrupt her thoughts. Is that an early sign? Should I be making plans?

  The crewman with the scar watches when she runs.

  What’s that about?

  More than once she’s discovered him watching—from the observation deck, where he appears to be wrestling with one of the microwave antennae; from inside the containers while he tightens the straps. She considers confronting him, but the next run he’s gone. Working below, somewhere, she tells herself. False positive; move on.

  The wide Atlantic pitches and heaves; waves split by the bow explode upward and away in white, foamy madness. They’re fighting the north equatorial current, Mulligan tells her. “We’re gonna lose at least a day.” An albatross follows the Jeddah for almost four hours, magnificent, riding thermals without ever straining its wings.

  Her headaches ease; her Cyprus scrapes and bruises heal. She doesn’t dream.

  She thumbs through dog-eared paperbacks and pulp fiction from the shelves in the community room in order to avoid the book she brought from home; the plots of these abandoned tomes all run together. Most involve hard, handsome, haunted men with secret government jobs that require them to rack up the body count to save the world from conspiracies of evil; some involve hard men whose worthy distrust of government requires them to rack up the body count to save the world from evil secret government conspiracies.

  Lord Jim, according to its introduction, is about a flawed, humble man tortured by his own fallibility. This does sound promising to Sentro, but she somehow can’t bring herself to start reading it. She’s never thought that what she does is special or heroic. Just necessary, sometimes. Or so she hopes.

  Hours spent on the observation deck leave her sunburned and mesmerized by the juddering of the mountainous waves, the miracle of dolphins, the ruler-straight horizon, same in every direction, but with an infinite presentation of white clouds piling, shifting, blooming, folding in on themselves like her thoughts and her memories and the nagging suspicion that her work was all that tethered her to the world.

  She’s a snow globe somebody has picked up and shaken, and she just has to see how everything will settle.

  The remaining pages of the Moleskine stay blank.

  At a Thai-themed supper, seated between Charlemagne and the carnal Swedes, who are deep in discussion with the Swedish helmsman in, well, Swedish mostly—causing Charle
magne to act interested and nod at intervals as if riveted—Sentro glances to the other table and finds Fontaine staring at her as the captain winds out another of his inexhaustible archive of tramp-trade yarns for the newlyweds and Bruce Bologna.

  Sentro holds the Englishwoman’s gaze this time until it’s Fontaine who looks away.

  A gloomy, sunless day sends the passengers and some of the senior crew to watch Titanic in the common room, which Sentro finds unsettling. Meg Gentry is sniffling back tears before the main titles end; she’s seen the movie more times than she can remember. “They both could have survived if Rose had just let him get up on that goldarn door,” she insists, with a quaking certainty.

  The Swedish woman’s knitting needles clack. Her man does Sudoku, ignores the movie, lips moving as if in silent commentary on his math. The Swedes, Sentro has learned during the captain’s cocktail hour, are product-branding specialists from Malmö and trying to “make a child.” Multiple positions are required, proper temperature, deep penetration, and Kegels plus unbridled enthusiasm, followed by the female pelvis held elevated by the male partner at a forty-five-degree declining angle, ass above head, for no more than twenty minutes. And ginger-ginseng tea. Sometimes Jesper brays like a donkey when he ruts. Asta admits she finds this stirring. This is way more information than Sentro wants.

  “The baby will have vigor,” Jesper insists.

  Fontaine seems mesmerized by DiCaprio. She keeps murmuring asides like, “Jack’s got a bit of a stonker, yeah?” and “Sweet Fanny Adams, I should think she’d devour him in a matter of minutes, left to it.” She also keeps bursting out in laughter whenever Billy Zane shows up on screen.

  Sentro leaves when, during the sex scene in the Model A, Meg pauses the DVD to demonstrate how Kate Winslet’s hand could have done what it does on the fogged-up window.

  The forecastle is shrouded in a humid darkness. Distant flares of lightning; the summer squall they weathered has passed but still stalks the easing sea. Star dustings glitter through jagged gaps in the clouds. Sentro leans against the forward railing, feels the grease on her hands, the wind against her face, listens to the torque and moan of the cargo ship, the bump and spray as the sharp prow below knifes the Jeddah southward to the rumble thrum of the engines.