Blue Water

by A. Manette Ansay

  And this was only the beginning of all the things that needed to be done, tasks we’d fallen behind on since landing in Ladyslip Cove, since deciding we might as well stay until the end of hurricane season, until Rex’s shoulder had enjoyed all the benefits of a good long rest. Engine maintenance, through-hull checks. The head had developed a leak. There was a short in the bilge pump motor. Chelone’s batteries weren’t charging as efficiently as they should. Perhaps I would stay in tonight, put some time into the boat. Clean the galley properly. Reinventory supplies. But suddenly, it all seemed overwhelming, and I threw myself, facedown, on the settee. Of course, I still thought about the civil suit. Of course, I still wondered if we’d been right—if I’d been right—to insist we let it go. Of course, I’d been hoping all along that Toby’s stubborn attachment to Mallory would fade, that we’d return to Fox Harbor in a year to discover Cindy Ann had moved away. Somehow, we’d step back into our lives as if we’d never left them. Our tenant would vanish. Our jobs would reappear. One night, we’d come home from work to find Evan sitting at his place at the table.

  Bullshit.

  I was crying so hard I bit my tongue, tasted my own salty blood. Evan was dead, he’d been gone a whole year; still, I couldn’t believe it. Toby and Mallory were engaged to be married. Cindy Ann still lived up the road, where she’d probably live forever and ever.

  Unless she were forced to sell.

  I thought, again, of the dream that I’d had, the two of us, walking by the side of the road: silent, stooping, rising. I imagined the photos the detective had taken, Cindy Ann with her head thrown back, raising her glass in a toast. Cindy Ann laughing, like a woman in an ad, lips parted, wet with shine. She looked nothing like Rex looked when he drank too much, and he had been drinking too much, night after night, there was simply no way not to see it. A couple of drinks before supper. A glass of wine with dinner, maybe two. The glass by the sink as he washed the supper dishes—I’ve got it, he’d say, why don’t you go for a swim?

  Come with me, I’d say.

  I’m fine right here.

  Want to play cards?

  Not really.

  A walk on the beach, then?

  Ask Bernadette.

  Drunk, his features unhinged themselves. His eyes grew puffy; his jaw lengthened, slack. Want anything? he’d say, pouring himself another drink, another scotch, always another scotch. Sitting in the amber-green glow of the kerosene lamp. Playing solitaire. The soft slap of cards against the table. Maybe, it wasn’t just the alcohol. Maybe it was the combination of alcohol and the painkillers he’d been getting from the clinic. Or maybe it was just that he was aging so fast. Chronic pain could do that to a person. Make him seem older than he actually was. Make him drink more than was good for him. Make him seem like a stranger, someone vaguely unappealing, the friend or family member of a loved one you must, as part of the package, put up with at birthdays, holiday gatherings.

  “We could fly back to the States,” I’d said. This had been several weeks earlier. “Get your shoulder looked at by a specialist.”

  “What would we do with the boat?”

  “Put it in a slip. Eli would watch it.”

  “That’s too much to ask during hurricane season.”

  “It’s just that I’m worried about your—” I began, thinking I knew where the sentence was going, “your drinking.” Quickly, I amended myself. “Self-medicating, I mean. That’s what it’s called, when you drink out of pain. It’s not that I don’t understand why you do it.”

  To my surprise, Rex laughed. “If it’s true that I’m self-medicating,” he said, “then there’s no need to travel three thousand miles to see a doctor, is there?”

  “Rex.”

  “Meg.” He poked my arm teasingly. “Aw, c’mon. Look around. If you’re worried about how much I drink, take a look at Eli.”

  “He’s not on medication.”

  “Those warnings have more to do with legal protection than anything,” Rex said. Then he shrugged. “But okay. After we’re under way again, I’ll clean up my act. I promise.”

  “In January,” I said.

  “January, February, whenever we get Chelone back in shape.” He gave me a quizzical look. “What’s the rush? We’re happy here, right? And it’s not like we’re expected anywhere else.”

  But I wouldn’t have called it happiness that kept us in Ladyslip Cove. It was something closer to inertia, a deepening sense of ennui. Weeks had passed since we’d taken Chelone out for so much as a day sail, and when I thought of Jeanie McFadden, traveling alone with her dogs, her plans, I was envious. Restless. Longing to be back on the water, in motion, skimming across the surface. Falling into sleep at the end of each watch with such fullness, such force, that there was no room for thought, no choice beyond necessary oblivion, the closest thing I’d found, since Evan’s death, to peace.

  Now, breathing in the musty odor of the settee, everything seemed pointless. Worthless. I couldn’t think of a single thing I truly wanted to do. It was exactly the way I’d felt before Rex and I had purchased Chelone, sailed off into what, I’d hoped, would be a new life, far from shore. Only now, here I was again. Here we were. Right back where we’d started.

  No.

  I got up, pumped water at the galley sink, splashed at my tear-swollen face. Then I went into our stateroom, searched through my locker for clothes. A miniskirt with a tropical print. A bright tank top. My old swimming suit to wear underneath. I threw off my torn shorts and faded T-shirt, dressed, put on earrings, pinned back my hair. Lipstick, eyeliner, mascara. Bronzer, which I dusted over my shoulders and cheeks.

  I would go to Island Girls, damnit. I’d meet up with Bernadette and Pam, Audrey and Carole, whoever else was there. I’d drink and I’d dance and I’d have a good time, the hell with Arnie and his photographs, the hell with Cindy Ann and Mallory, the hell with Toby, too.

  Why should we congratulate you?

  It had been, I decided, the perfect response. What else could we have said? As long as you’re happy, we’ll overlook the fact that your fiancée’s sister murdered our son.

  I could feel the flames of my anger building, burning my regret, drying my tears. When I looked in the mirror one last time, there was no trace of sorrow anywhere.

  “Got to get my game face on,” Rex used to say, facing a full day of arguments in court. Unlike most other attorneys we knew, he seldom had a drink when he came home from work, though he’d certainly enjoyed a glass of good scotch, a shared bottle of wine, on the weekends. Instead, in the years before Evan was born, he’d fix himself a stack of peanut butter crackers, then head upstairs to his study. The crow’s nest, he called it. There, sitting at his father’s antique drafting table, he’d page through his collection of nautical magazines, his chart kits, his scrapbooks of neatly sketched sail plans, hull designs. I’d come home from work to find him studying lists of boats for sale, items circled, underlined, margins thick with notes.

  After Evan was born, I’d find both of them up there, Evan tucked into the baby sling. By the age of two, Evan could tell you the difference between a sailboat and a motorboat. By four, he could talk about the Gulf Stream, point out the Caribbean on a chart. At six, he and Rex were making plans to build a wooden skiff in the garage. I’d follow the trail of cracker crumbs, the smell of peanut butter, to find them in the crow’s nest with their heads bent over a set of blueprints, each of them holding an identically chewed grease pencil, Evan talking, talking, talking.

  “Look at this one, Mom, look at her lines,” he’d say, spraying me lightly with crumbs, and Rex would say, smiling, pleased, “Isn’t she a beauty, Meg?”

  “She’s a beauty, all right.”

  Both of them would beam as if they actually believed I could see the difference between one little rowboat and another. What I liked to look at were the couples on the sailboats in Rex’s collection of magazines. And there always were couples, women and men, roughly the ages of Rex and me. There were clasped hands, gla
sses of wine. There were sunsets the color of oranges. A sense of connection that seemed to run as deep as the ocean itself.

  How close, I often thought, two people like that could be. How well they might come to know each other. No distractions. All that time. What a wonderful thing for a relationship.

  Seven

  there were three places to meet friends for a drink on Houndfish Cay. The first was the Ladyslip marina, which operated its own bar and restaurant, complete with white tablecloths, candles, good wine. It catered to the owners of the long, sleek yachts that occupied most of the slips, and the only time Bernadette and I had eaten there, we’d felt out of place with our sunburned noses, our calloused hands, our salt-scrubbed clothes. The second restaurant, Glory, four miles to the south in Martin’s Cove, was run by a Bahamian couple who specialized in what I’d always considered midwestern food: pork sandwiches, Jell-O salad, baked macaroni and cheese. Getting there required a long, sweaty hike, too rough for Leon in his portable chair, so we didn’t go often, although when we did, we spent the entire afternoon: diving for lobster off the rocky beach, shopping at the island market, enjoying homemade ice cream sold, by word of mouth, out of an elderly woman’s kitchen. As we licked our cones, she’d pack a pint of peppermint into a bag of ice. “For that boy of yours,” she’d say, and she wouldn’t let Bernadette pay for it, either.

  And then there was the Island Girls Pub and Grill, which was actually a grounded yacht, flung thirty feet ashore during a hurricane. Two women had claimed it, along with the tractor that washed up beside it, and proceeded to fix it up. They installed a generator, added a porch to disguise the ruptured hull, decorated everything with red Christmas lights. Finally they painted the tractor in swirls of green and neon pink, hung a matching sign from its bent steering wheel, and declared themselves open for business. Patrons could sit inside at the bar, or else claim a rusting metal table outside. Open barrels served as grills, arranged in a glowing crescent, and when the ’Girls got crowded, Gaylee might ask you to pull your own hot dog or burger. Miriam, her partner, seldom spoke, not even when you spoke to her first. She handled the cash, kept an eye on the bar, while Gaylee circulated brightly among the tables, teasing the regulars, helping out the staff, which on weekends included three waitresses, in addition to a grill man and cook.

  Every now and then, there was live music, too. Tonight was one of those nights. Even before I stepped off the dirt road that wound past the marina, following the path toward the beach, I could hear the thud of overamped bass, the wandering strains of “Margaritaville.” A few shouts of laughter, like shouts of rage, came from somewhere—the Cove, perhaps, or the honeymoon villas for rent behind the marina—falling all around me like a meteor shower. Sound carried differently, unpredictably, out here, especially on the outskirts of twilight. You might call to friends thirty feet away, and receive, in response, shrugs and gestures. You might pass the swim-up bar by the pool and overhear, in excruciating clarity, the whispered argument of a newlywed couple hunched against the bright, tiled wall.

  Of course, my parents would be going to the wedding. Driving all the way there and back because my mother refused to fly. Bundled head to toe like arctic explorers, both of them complaining, bitterly, about the cold. Neither of them had come north since Evan’s death, and it had struck me more than once that, without a grandchild to entice them, it was likely they’d never set foot outside of Florida for the rest of their lives. Of course, all that would change if Toby and Mallory were to have—

  Children.

  Mallory wasn’t young anymore; still, it was a possibility. The thought was like a violent cramp, and I walked faster, trying to escape it.

  Sandburs caught in my sandals. Lizards rattled through the dry leaves, darted across the wide, flat surfaces of the scrub palms. Wild pigs lived on this island. So did bright flocks of parrots, descendants of exotics that escaped from captivity, survived. So did approximately 150 Bahamians, most of whom fished with hand-cast nets, worked at the marina or the villas. One family was known for the boats it built; another made custom sails. Women sold baked goods, seashells, crafts. There was a one-room schoolhouse. There was a Pentecostal church. The closest full-service hospital was a ferry ride plus a single-engine flight away. Still, a land developer had purchased most of the western arc of the island; a few weeks earlier, a barge had arrived, depositing bulldozers, backhoes, sacks of concrete. Now there was talk of the Echo Island ferry coming directly to the Cove. I’d spoken about it with Glory’s owner, a woman everybody called Hal. In fact, her name was Halleluiah, which she’d tell you, if you asked, each syllable rolling from her mouth like clear water conjured from stone.

  Praise God, she said, that everything go forward. Praise God there should be work for us all.

  But aren’t you afraid that the island will change? All these foreigners moving in?

  Her smile was that of the victor, inscrutable and sly. Every person that come here among us come that much closer to God. Every man, woman, and child that eat my good food get a little bit of Jesus inside them.

  I dropped back to a walk. Breathing hard, I ducked to avoid a low branch, dark with sap. Poisonwood. The rash it triggered, so they said, made poison ivy seem no more significant than a mosquito bite. Bernadette had warned me, early on, about the poisonwood trees, the same way she’d warned me about nurse sharks, about jellyfish, about the half-wild dogs that prowled the island in rough-coated, glittery-eyed packs. Potcakes, the Bahamians called them. A little of this, a little of that, unlikely scraps cooked together in one pot. Harmless, people assured one another, but still. Out on the paths, alone, it was best to keep a stone in your pocket.

  Considering this, I bent to scoop up a fist-size King’s crown, heavy as a mug.

  Sharp claws scrabbled against my hand.

  I dropped it with a muffled yelp. Hermit crab. It motored away. At the same time, something crashed through the underbrush, trailing a rippling green wake. Spooked, I stopped. Listened. The thrum of the band, the thick bass beat, had been swallowed by the hush-hush-hush of the surf. A twig snapped. A banana chit startled, wings scissoring the air. Though I’d walked here dozens of times before, the waning light—tinged with shades of cobalt, steel—made everything appear sharp-edged, unfamiliar, shadows lolling like tongues. Something was watching me. Following me. I began to walk again. Rounding a bend in the path, I saw another stone, mottled like coral, the size and shape of a robin’s egg. I bent down to grab it, and as I did, I was swept by the sense, no, the certainty, that I’d done this before, not once, but hundreds of times. Reaching for the bag slung over my shoulder, my arm rasped against the orange vest I wore, only it wasn’t my arm, my vest, my body. I was looking down at someone I didn’t recognize. Beyond the blinking yellow light, on the other side of the intersection, a small, white cross poked up through the weeds. It was tilting to the side, one arm propped against the ground, which was littered with paper cups, plastic bags, curling strips of blown tire. The sky was low, overcast. The cold wind failed to stir the dull, frost-tipped grass.

  My god, I thought, understanding where I was, and for the second time in my life, lightning passed through my body. I could not see. I could not recall my name. I fell, facedown, on the sandy path as a great wailing rose all around me.

  Rough hands pulled at my shoulders.

  “What the hell,” a man said, his face close to mine. “What was it?” he said. “Where did it go?”

  Blinking, I could just make out the baseball cap he wore, a boat logo stamped on its brim. top billing. Beside him was a woman; she clutched at his arm, crushing it against her full breasts.

  “Are you hurt?” she said. “Was it some kind of animal?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, struggling to my feet. I was still holding on to the egg-shaped stone; I dropped it as if it had scorched my palm. Overhead, the sky had passed from twilight into darkness.

  “Probably a goddamn wild dog.”

  “Or a panther,” the woman sa
id, nervously. “I think there are panthers. Are there panthers?”

  “Where are you headed? We’ll walk you, won’t we, Iris?” the man said. He was pink-cheeked with sunburn, his neck haloed by a thin, gold chain. I realized he was waiting for me to answer. Iris waited, too.

  “Island Girls,” I managed to say.

  “That’s where we’re going,” the man said, and he put a fatherly arm around each of us, propelling us along the path. “Nowhere in the world like the ’Girls. I told Iris, you’ve never seen anything like this place.”

  “I’ve never seen a panther either,” she said. Her pants were the kind issued in travel magazines, little zippers sewn around each thigh so the legs could be removed in hot weather. She wore a pink fanny pack and matching pink sneakers. Tooth-colored braces on her teeth. I clung to each precise detail, proof that I’d returned from wherever, whoever, I’d been. Still, I was afraid to look down at myself, afraid I’d see a body that wasn’t my own. Taller, fuller through the chest and hips. Pale hands with long fingers.

  A chunky silver ring.

  “There’s a lot Iris here hasn’t seen,” the man said, conversationally.

  “Teddy’s right about that,” Iris agreed.

  “We met at the ticket counter.”

  “I’m supposed to be visiting my sister in Cleveland.”