Altar of Bones

by Philip Carter

  Zoe ran her hand over the satiny wood, thinking of the great deal Aisle had given them, because they were newlyweds, he’d said, and because they were just beginning their charter-yacht business and he was sure they would succeed with his “beauty.” Had he guessed that it was more than the simple desire to run a charter business that had brought them here to the Virgin Islands? Guessed that their lives were now brand-new as well?

  She glanced out the galley porthole and spotted Ry in the silver dingy, bouncing through the waves toward her. He was wearing only low cutoff jeans, a sleeveless white T-shirt, a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, and flip-flips on his big feet. He looked brown and healthy and beautiful, and she sure hoped he’d remembered mayo for the sandwiches and Barney’s cream cheese.

  Zoe grabbed the plates and brought them up on deck, just as Ry killed the motor, letting the dingy drift up to the yacht’s port side. He’d only been gone a couple of hours, but he beamed up at her as if he’d been away at sea for a year.

  “Got both the mayo and Barney’s cream cheese. The little greedy Gus.”

  “Thank God. He’s been meowing all morning, in between giving me dirty looks to let me know what he thinks about a charter yacht that doesn’t have any cream cheese in its galley.”

  “Foxy had the TV on down at the Bar and Grill,” he said as he tossed her the mooring line. “The stock market nose-dived over nine hundred points yesterday. They had to suspend trading, and everybody’s panicking. Your hero Senator Jackson Boone was on CNN, talking about how it could impact the election.”

  “He’s not my hero.” She laughed. “Okay, maybe he is a little.”

  She had met the handsome, charismatic senator in a room at the Watergate Hotel one night last March. It had just been the three of them, she and Ry and the senator, and Ry had turned the film over to him then, trusting him to do the right thing with it. But so far there had been nothing about it on the news anywhere, and maybe that was for the best.

  He had used his juice to get them taken off the terrorist watch list, though. So at least there was that.

  Ry handed her the canvas sack full of groceries, then climbed on board. “I’m telling you, everyone on the island was in Foxy’s, glued to the TV. I thought I was going to have to offer Jigger a bribe to get him to open up his store.”

  Ry planted a wet, sloppy kiss on her cheek. “So, babe. What’s for lunch?”

  THEY ATE THEIR flying-fish sandwiches, with mayo, and drank two Painkillers from Foxy, his specialty rum drink that was more lethal than dropping acid, he liked to say. They spent the afternoon sailing, Ry steering the helm with one hand and his toes, Zoe nestled in the crook of his free arm. The water was turquoise beneath a clear sky, the wind soft and warm on their faces.

  “Sasha Nikitin called while you were onshore,” Zoe said. “He said he wanted to curse you for sticking him with that gig in Norilsk.”

  With the help of Svetlana and her cousin, they’d concocted a story to explain Ry’s gunshot wound—that he’d been hit by a stray bullet from the gun of a caribou poacher. A story the police hadn’t believed for a minute. In the end Ry had bought them off by offering to use his influence to get Russia’s most famous rock star up to Norilsk to give a concert there.

  “At least I didn’t promise them he would show up in winter,” Ry said.

  Zoe remembered the hideousness of minus thirty-five degrees in Siberia and shuddered at the very thought. “He gave me a message from his father, too. The roundworms finally died, but not before lasting three times their normal life span. A hundred and twenty-five days. That’s the equivalent of four hundred human years, if the bone juice works on human DNA the way it worked on them, that is. What’s more, he said the roundworms kept their youth, wriggling happily to the very end. He wants to publish a journal article about it, but he’s afraid no one will believe him.” She twisted around so she could look into his eyes. “He’s going to try to replicate it. He thinks he might be able to get us humans up to living a hundred and seventy-five to two hundreds years, and with no crazy gene.”

  She thought about the icon, sitting right now on a shelf in the cabin below them, with what was left of the altar of bones back in the secret compartment behind the skull cup’s right eye.

  “All through the centuries,” she said, “the Keepers kept the altar hidden from the world because they didn’t think the world was ready for it.”

  He brushed the wisps of windblown hair back off her face. “You think the world is ready now? I just wasted fifteen minutes of my life watching a bunch of talking heads posturing and pontificating and politicizing over the dire straits of the global economy. The governor of Arkansas, or maybe it was Kentucky, got caught in bed with a hooker yesterday. Some terrorists set off a bomb in a bus stop in Rome, and North Korea’s saber rattling again. Human nature doesn’t change, Zoe.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  She watched two seagulls swoop down for dinner, cutting the surface of the water like sharp knives, then she sighed and settled back into the crook of his arm.

  She hadn’t realized she’d gone so quiet for so long until she felt the brush of his lips on her cheek. “What?” he said.

  “That night in the hospital in Norilsk, after you were shot, I snuck into your room and stood by your bedside, and all I could think about was how I didn’t want to go on living if you didn’t.”

  “You were going to give me the bone juice.”

  She nodded. Her throat felt tight, and an ache was inside her that was both relief and a remembered horror. A horror that she knew she might one day have to face again.

  “I was going to put it into one of your IVs. But before I could, the doctor came in and told me your vitals were starting to improve, and that she thought you would make it. I know I promised, I swore it on my love. But when faced with the actual thought of losing you, I would have done anything, sold my own soul and yours, to have you live.”

  “I don’t blame you for that. I probably would have done the same thing had it been you. We’re human, Zoe. Our hearts take over our heads and keep us from considering the consequences.”

  “Oh, no, Ry, I considered the consequences. And I realized the only one I cared about in that moment was whether you lived or died.”

  “Then maybe that’s your answer right there. Think about this moment, right here, right now. The sunset’s got the sky all purple and pink and orange, the wind’s so soft and sweet it makes you ache inside, and you’re in my arms wearing nothing but a bikini and a tan and looking more lethal than any of Foxy’s Painkillers. Do you think this moment would feel so wonderful, so, I don’t know … precious, if we knew all our tomorrows were infinite? If we knew there would be another hundred trillion moments just like this one, how much would we care?”

  He turned her around to face him, and she saw the love on his face, and she knew what he meant about a thing being so soft and sweet it made you ache inside. “I think what makes life matter, what makes it good, is knowing that someday we’ll die. Maybe death is God’s joke on us, but I think it’s also his gift. We have our allotted time and then it’s over. It’s up to us to make it meaningful and special.”

  She leaned into him and brought her lips to his, softly at first, like the wind, and then deeper, harder, hungrier. “All I know,” she said when at last they came up for air, “is that for however many days we have, I’m never gonna let you get away from me, Ry. After all, I’m the Keeper.”