by Rachel Lee
“God,” he said into the microphone, not caring who heard him, “this thing is a sardine can.” Nobody responded.
“We’re off then.” Butch hit the ignition, and the plane’s two engines started turning. A few minutes later they had clearance to taxi.
Secretly, Dugan liked this part of flying best. He liked the power of the takeoff and the way it made him feel. But he’d have felt a whole lot better if he’d been doing the flying.
A few minutes later they were over the green waters moving in the general direction of the Marquesas. “It’s better when you sail,” Dugan couldn’t resist saying into his mike.
“You’re just attached to the ground, Dugan,” Butch replied. “Got lead in your feet.”
A snappy retort eluded Dugan as he thought about that. Some part of him agreed with Butch’s assessment, he realized. His divorce from Jana had clipped his wings in a lot of ways. In retrospect he could see that he’d been too young to handle it.
But then, what was there to say in favor of getting old? Most of the people he liked were still kids at heart.
He glanced over his shoulder at Veronica, and saw she was intently looking out the side window. “We’re not there yet,” he said into his mike.
She nodded, but didn’t say anything, and he found himself wondering if she had understood him at all. Probably not. And she probably wasn’t at all interested.
From what he could see of her expression, he figured she was on tenterhooks, thinking of only one thing: what they might see from up here.
And, almost in spite of himself, he felt his own excitement growing. What if they saw something artificial down there? What if they saw a straight line in coral that could only be there because the coral had grown on something man-made? He’d seen plenty of that in his wilder, younger days when he’d dived the reefs. The wrecks he’d found hadn’t been particularly interesting, but this time it could be different. Very different.
The water wasn’t as clear as it had been a decade ago. Runoff from the sugar cane farms that filled the Everglades had gradually clouded it, and he found himself thinking of the way it had been, when the water was so clear the bottom looked close enough to touch.
But cloudy or not, they could make out the major features of the sea bottom from this altitude, and he was beginning to get a kick out of it.
“Hey,” he said, “this is neat.”
“Yep,” said Butch, “Never could understand the passion for flying high. You can’t see a damn thing from way up there.”
From up there, when he looked in the right direction, the reflections off the water weren’t as obscuring as they could be from a boat, and he could see quite a large area of bottom. Not bad at all.
“Reminds me of my drug-running days,” Butch remarked. “Flying below radar.”
Dugan hoped Veronica couldn’t hear that. He suspected she wouldn’t at all approve. “Why’d you ever give that up, Butch?”
“Because the Colombians got involved. Used to be a friendly cottage industry. Then it got serious. No thanks.”
About an hour into the flight, Veronica spoke for the first time. “Look! To the left. See it?”
Butch swiveled his head to the left, and Dugan tried to look across him. Being helpful by nature, Butch ignored his promise to fly straight and level and tipped the plane on its wing.
Dugan swallowed hard. “Where?” he said.
Veronica’s answer was to point. Extrapolating as best he could, he picked out a spot of water. He couldn’t see anything.
“Where?” said Butch. “Give me a direction.”
“Ten o’clock,” Dugan guessed.
“Let’s go take a look.”
Butch headed in that direction, blowing the search grid totally out of the water. Veronica practically had her face pressed to the window of the plane.
Then Dugan saw it. Long and narrow. A lump of mud, basically. A high point in the sand. Except . . . except that it looked a little too straight along one side. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”
But Veronica was busy checking her GPS and scrawling coordinates down on a pad.
“Got it?” Butch asked.
“Yeah,” Dugan answered. “Let’s go back to the grid.”
But they didn’t see anything else during the rest of the flight. When they climbed out of the plane, Veronica was looking tired, and Dugan instinctively reached out to help her down. She accepted his hand readily.
“You sure you want to go again this afternoon?” Butch asked. Dugan noted that he was avoiding speaking to Veronica, but was treating Dugan as if he were leader of the expedition. It troubled him, and it if was troubling him, it must be annoying the shit out of Veronica.
He looked at her, catching her attention, noticing the pinched look around her eyes. “Do you still want to go out this afternoon?”
“Yes. The light will be different.”
“Good point.” He looked at Butch, but didn’t reiterate what Veronica said. The man could damn well take his orders from a deaf woman. Especially when she was paying him.
“Okay,” said Butch. “Three o’clock then.”
Veronica nodded and turned abruptly to the car. Dugan wanted to follow her immediately, but he waited a moment, turning to Butch. “Ask her what she wants to do,” he said.
“She can’t hear me none too well.”
“She’d hear you a whole lot better if you looked at her when you talk, okay? So from now on, you got a question, talk to her.”
Butch held up a hand. “Okay, okay. Christ.” He stomped off in the direction of the hangar, leaving Dugan to stare after him.
Jeez, he thought, Veronica may be deaf, and she may be stubborn, but she sure as hell isn’t stupid.
Muttering under his breath, he went toward the car where she was waiting for him, wind blowing her hair about. She looked good in cotton coveralls, too, he thought irritably. And why the hell did he give a damn how some turkey treated her? It was her problem, not his.
He unlocked the car and threw the doors open, letting the heat out before he climbed in to turn on the ignition and the air conditioner. What the hell am I doing here anyway, he wondered. It was hot nearly all the time. Tropical breezes bedamned. Once, just once, he would like to be cold. It was as if his Yankee-raised body started screaming every now and then that there was supposed to be an occasional winter in life, goddammit.
And why the hell was he feeling so fucking irritated anyway?
Veronica slid into the passenger seat and closed the door. After a moment he closed his own. The air conditioner was still blowing warm air, but it was at least dry warm air.
He had planned to drop her off at her place and tell her he’d pick her up again at two thirty. But somehow he found himself driving right past her gate and finally pulling into his parking place at Green Water.
He turned to look at her and found her watching him with narrowed eyes. She must be wondering why he was acting like a jerk, grumbling to himself and taking corners like a madman.
“I’m hot,” he said to her finally. He wasn’t, really. Not anymore. And those few minutes on the hot apron at the airport didn’t account for his mood either.
She nodded.
“Let’s get lunch,” he said finally. “We need to talk.”
“I need some quiet,” she said.
He opened his mouth to speak, then it struck him that was a remarkably odd thing for a deaf woman to say. She needed quiet? Didn’t she already get too much of that? “What do you mean?”
“I’m exhausted from all the noise on the airplane. I want to take my hearing aids out and not hear for a little while.”
“Oh.” He didn’t quite know what she meant, but he had a feeling this wasn’t something she explained to everyone. “Okay. Tell you what. You take your hearing aids out, we’ll go to lunch, I’ll keep quiet, and then after lunch you put your aids in again and we’ll talk.”
She cocked her head, looking at him as if he were a strange puzzle. “Talk abo
ut what?”
“Nothing, really. I just want to talk.”
She looked away, probably just thinking, but for the first time it struck him just how much she was shutting him out when she looked away. She wouldn’t be able to understand a thing he said to her, so there was no point in even speaking to her.
He felt an urge to touch her, to make her look at him again, but he had no right to do that. He simply had to wait until she decided to come back. And that compounded his frustration even more.
But finally she did look at him again. Maybe just because he’d been so silent and unmoving for so long. Maybe because she was coming back from wherever she had gone to.
“Yes, I’d like lunch,” she said. “And I’ll leave my hearing aids in until afterward. I guess I need to get used to all the noise.”
“Whichever way you want to do it.”
They walked a short way up the street to the place he’d taken her for lunch the other day. For some reason, it was quieter. They got a comfortable table in a corner, away from everyone else.
“How’s this?” he asked her.
She smiled. “Not bad. I’m sorry, but all the noise on the plane, and the static on the radio . . . my hearing aids make all that so loud, it starts to wear on me. It’s not like before when I could hear. It’s . . . different. Maybe because a lot of that noise is in ranges where I haven’t lost much hearing, so it gets really loud.”
“I thought they had hearing aids that could work in certain frequencies.”
“They do. But they’re not perfect. Just like my hearing.”
She looked down, as if embarrassed, and he felt himself wanting to reach out to her. Uh-oh. Not a good response. Not a safe response. And God knew Jana had taught him all the reasons he shouldn’t trust another woman.
“Well, when it gets too much, go ahead and pull them out. Not that I have any right to give you permission,” he added swiftly, as her expression started to change. “I just want you to know it won’t bother me. But let me know when you’re doing it so I don’t flap my jaws pointlessly.”
A smile flitted across her face again, and he suddenly didn’t feel quite so irritated.
They pored over the menus, Veronica finally settling on a baked flounder. He ordered a burger.
While they waited, he watched her relax, and watched the strain seep out of her face. Seeing the transformation, he got a pretty good idea of how stressful the noise had been for her. He kept silent, giving her time and space.
By the time their meals arrived, she looked much better. All the tension was gone from her face and body. She looked at him after the waiter departed. “What did you want to talk about?”
It burst out of him, almost before he was aware of what he was going to say. It was as if what had bothered him hadn’t become fully conscious until this instant. “Does everybody treat you like you’re stupid?”
She looked startled, then comprehension dawned. “You mean because I’m deaf?”
He nodded.
“Well . . . yes. A lot of people do. I probably wouldn’t notice it as much if I’d been deaf all my life.”
“You haven’t been?” That bowled him over. He had just assumed she had been. “What happened? To your hearing?”
“I was in a car accident about a year ago.”
He didn’t know what to say. The words, “I’m sorry,” just didn’t cut it. Finally, he said, “That’s rough. That’s really rough.”
“Other things were rougher.”
“Well, you’re doing remarkably well for someone who developed this problem a short time ago.” Although even as he spoke, he realized he didn’t have the background to say that with any certainty. He meant it only as a compliment.
Apparently she took it that way. Looking a trifle embarrassed, she said, “I’ve been really motivated.”
“It must be irritating if people are treating you differently now.”
“They are. But I kind of understand it. I won’t say I never get annoyed, but basically I think people are just sure I won’t understand them.”
Or that because she was hard of hearing, she must be stupid. He remembered the way Butch had turned to him for the decision. But then, he’d known men who would never take orders from a woman, either, deaf or not. But Butch ought to be smarter. He knew who was paying for his time.
Finally, he said, “It would drive me crazy.”
“It doesn’t exactly thrill me, either.”
They ate in silence for a while, Dugan thinking that he was getting too involved in what this woman thought about things, and how she felt. He needed to treat this like a straight business relationship. Her problems weren’t his unless they had to do with their deal. Everything else was none of his business.
So why did he seem unable to do that? He gave a mental shrug and put it aside.
“When’s the equipment arriving?” he asked her.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“The equipment. For the search. When is it arriving?”
“We have most of it here already. The metal detectors should be arriving tomorrow.”
“What exactly do we have?”
“I think I told you. The metal detectors, the magnetometer, and some underwater cameras. You have the diving equipment, right?”
“Yeah. I have it. And what we haven’t discussed is how you want to do this. I’m figuring we can save a lot of time if we go out for a few days at a stretch, rather than coming back to port every day.”
She nodded. “So you think we should stay out for three or four days at a time?”
“Yes. I’ve got a cabin you can have to sleep in.” It struck him then that she might be nervous about being the only woman on a boat with two guys. Come to think of it, he wasn’t too thrilled with the idea himself. But how else were they going to do this? Her father had already said he wouldn’t be joining them. “Can’t your father come along? I’ll give him my cabin, and Tam and I can share the V-berths.”
“The what?”
“The berths in the bow of the boat. What about your father?”
“He’s not well.”
“So? All he has to do is sit in a deck chair and enjoy the view. The rest of us will be doing all the work.”
“I’ll ask him again.”
Then she excused herself, saying she was going to remove her hearing aids. He watched her walk away to the bathroom, and wondered what he’d said wrong. Because he had a strong feeling she was bailing out on their conversation for some reason other than noise overload. And whatever it was had to do with her father.
But he didn’t give a damn, he reminded himself. He absolutely, positively, did not give a damn.
Emilio Zaragosa was enjoying the late-afternoon sunshine in his hothouse. He puttered among the rosebushes he tended as if they were small children, humming quietly because he believed the plants liked music.
His pride and joy was getting ready to bloom, he noticed. The golden-edged pink rose that he intended to name for his first granddaughter, Emilia Maria. The bud was small yet, but the golden edging was already visible, a thin yellow line at the tips of the petals. Yes, the plant was breeding true to form. The first one had not simply been an accident.
He felt triumphant as he studied the bud, and considered whether he’d be ready to present it at a show soon. Or whether he wanted to keep it a delicious secret for just a little while longer. Emilio enjoyed secrets, as long as they were his own.
Feeling suddenly generous, he decided to cut a half dozen of his yellow roses for his wife to place on the table at dinner. He ordinarily waited to cut the flowers until they were on the verge of becoming overblown because he far preferred to see them on the bushes and watch them bloom at their natural pace.
But tonight he was feeling expansive and good, so he decided to cut some of the opening buds. His wife loved rosebuds, seeming to enjoy their perfect promise more than its fulfillment.
He thought about that sometimes, considering the differences between them, bu
t Elena had always been something of a puzzle to him. He loved her heart and soul, and was sure she loved him equally, but on matters other than family their minds rarely met. He enjoyed their differences a great deal, probably because Elena always deferred to him when it was important. Otherwise he was quite content to let her have her head.
But it was only natural that they had different outlooks, he reminded himself. Elena hadn’t been raised on the streets. She’d been a privileged child, and had been at university when he met her. She was also better educated then he, but he took pride in that fact. Pride in the fact that a woman who could have chosen any man had chosen him, uneducated child of the gutter though he was. Of course, by the time he’d met her, he’d been becoming relatively successful, but he didn’t think that had weighed in her decision.
And if anything, Elena seemed to consider it every bit as important as he that they ensure none of their children or grandchildren ever do without.
Thinking of Elena always made him smile, and he was smiling as he cut the six delicate rosebuds and put them in a vase of water. She would like this.
Just then, Emilia came prancing into the hothouse, the door slamming behind her as it always did. Eight years old, she pranced rather then walked, her long dark hair bobbing around her shoulders.
“Abuelo?” she said. Grandfather.
“Yes, my child?”
“Grandmother wants me to tell you that Señor Gallegos is here to see you.”
“He is, is he? Well, tell him to come out here, will you?”
“Yes, Grandfather.”
“No, no, wait,” he said, as she started to turn away. He clipped the last bud and put the stem in the vase. “Take these in to your grandmother for me. And be very careful.”
Emilia beamed up at him, proud to have such an important task. She accepted the vase gingerly, then walked very carefully back to the door to the house.
He watched her and thought, as he did many times every day, that God had truly blessed him. He had so very much to be grateful for.
Five minutes later, Luis Gallegos joined him. Luis hated the greenhouse, complaining that it made him feel hot and claustrophobic, but Emilio ignored his complaints. If this was where Emilio was and what Emilio was doing when Luis came to see him, then Luis would just have to survive. And so far the man had managed to.
