Surface Tension

by Christine Kling

  The sun was about thirty minutes off the horizon, and the gray-green scrub on the key looked inflamed in the golden rays. Around the south side of the island, on the ocean side, the little breakers foamed bright white, almost luminous. In close to the island, the shallows glowed pale lime, gradually deepening out in the channel between the keys to a deep cobalt blue. A little dark pointed head lifted out of the water over the seagrass beds—a sea turtle surfacing for a breath.

  “Are you okay?”

  BJ.’s voice startled me.

  “Yeah. I was just looking at these old pictures.” Actually, I hadn’t looked yet, I was just holding them— clutching them so tightly, I suddenly realized, that I was bending the paper.

  Around the south side of the island, the surface tension caused by currents of the swiftly rising tide smoothed the water to a glassy sheen and was broken only occasionally by the fins of a large school of tarpon as they rolled in the pass.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about my past. You know, how I got here to this place, today. How things might have been different if I’d made other choices.” The school of fish moved closer to our anchorage on the inside of the pass. “My mother always wanted me to be an artist. I wasn’t really all that good, though.”

  “Very few of us ever turn out to be what our parents want us to be,” he said. “They try to do the best they can, but it’s not about them in the end. It’s about us.” He put his hand on my shoulder and began massaging the knotted muscles in my neck, trying to knead away the tension. His voice was soothing, but I felt my stomach muscles tightening at his touch. I opened my fingers and looked at the smiling faces in my hands. In just a few years, I would be the same age as my mother when this photo was taken. For the first time, I saw the resemblance that people often remarked upon, the maple-colored skin, the same-size white tank suits, the shoulder-length sun-streaked light brown hair.

  She was staring directly at the camera, and I noticed the deep lines at the corners of her eyes, the furrows in her brow. Though the weather in the photo was bright and sunny, in her eyes I saw the dark squall of her painting.

  “We have expectations,” he said, “but then we discover life is full of hurts and disappointments and shortcomings.”

  I nodded and took a swig from my beer. “Yeah, I’ve had a few of those lately.”

  “What makes you so hard on yourself?”

  “Me?” I cocked my head to one side. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a smart, funny, talented, beautiful woman. Aside from being a terrible cook, you’ve pretty much got it all.”

  A smile touched the corners of my mouth for a little while, but as we sat quietly watching the sky turn violet, the sour taste returned.

  Neal looked so damned cocky and happy and pleased with himself in the other photo. We’d made love that morning and made pancakes for breakfast before going ashore and exploring the ruins of an old fort down in the Dry Tortugas. It was funny that I even remembered we’d eaten our last papaya that day, feeding each other spoonfuls of the juicy pink-orange flesh dripping in lime juice.

  “Neal saved my life down there, B.J. He didn’t have to come back and put that regulator in my mouth.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “It’s funny in a way. Crystal said he was a romantic, that he would come back for me—and he did. He died because he came back to save me.”

  “Yes, I know.” He kissed the side of my head and smoothed back my hair. “And you should be happy for him.”

  I turned to face him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Seychelle, do you really think Neal was all that content with who he had become? The Neal we knew back when you first met him was a guy who was struggling with lots of inner demons, but he was trying, really trying, to be good for you. I don’t know all his history—I don’t even know if his history would explain it—but for a while there, with you out of his life, the demons took over. He did things that he could never erase. I think he went a little crazy hiding up there in the Larsens’ house watching you and thinking about all that money out there, with him the only one who knew where it was. Finally, at the end, you gave him a chance to get his senses back, to do an honorable thing.”

  I reached over my shoulder and stilled his hands. “So you’re saying I should forgive Neal, is that it?”

  He laughed softly and exhaled in a deep sigh. Before he could say anything more, I turned to him.

  “Please, don’t say anything for a few minutes. I want to tell you something. Just listen, okay?” I took a deep breath. “The summer when I was eleven, my mother asked me to go to the beach one day,” I began.

  When I’d finished, we both sat in the netting, quiet for several long moments. Finally I said, “I was just a little kid.” I squinted at the horizon. “I didn’t know much about who my mother was. These past few weeks I’ve come to see just how dark her bad days must have been. No wonder she couldn’t climb out.” My voice cracked, but I swallowed and licked my lips. I felt like a huge stone was pressing on my chest, preventing my lungs from inflating. Clutching the photos and knowing in my own way that I was speaking directly to them, I said, “I miss her so much.” The school of tarpon had reversed their direction and were moving off, back toward the slick water of the pass. “I forgive ...”

  I couldn’t get the rest of it out, but he knew what I meant. I forgave all of us.

  The photos fell into the netting when I stood up and clambered out of the bow hammock and dove off the starboard hull. I had to get away, be alone. As though in one of the annual lifeguards’ qualifying races, I swam the crawl stroke with everything I had, all out, feet pumping, arms arcing out of the water and slicing back in with barely a splash. Each breath felt like burning sandpaper in my throat as my head rolled out of the water, gasping out of the corner of my mouth. I was headed out to the pass, to the dark, swift-moving currents, to the blue-hole depths where shadows lurked.

  When I could no longer see the bottom and the surface of the water bulged smooth and taut, I kept at it, swimming with every ounce of energy I possessed, and still I stopped making any progress through the pass. The incoming tidal current sweeping through the narrow cut was just too swift. I flailed with all my strength, but I did not move an inch over the bottom. Finally, I took several short quick breaths and dove, angling downward, ears popping, lungs straining.

  I opened my eyes and saw the huge silvery silhouettes gliding around me, unafraid, oblivious to my presence. Without a mask and with very little light underwater the enormous fish seemed to appear as if by magic, looming out of the shadows swirling and swimming around me in an underwater ballet. The tarpons’ scales, great round glistening disks, shimmered in the dark water finding and reflecting the last rays of the dying day. With their low-slung jaws and big dark eyes, the huge fish might have looked evil were it not for their total indifference.

  I reached out to touch a fish as it passed so close to me, but as if with some unique schooling perception, the fish’s impressive body turned just out of my reach. As he turned, so did the dozens of others around him, and I wondered if it was that primordial cooperation that we’d given up to gain our free will.

  My head broke the surface, and I let out a whoop so loud, it startled the egrets nesting in the mangroves on the bayside of the key. The two birds took to the air, bouncing off the tiny elastic limbs of the tree. I floated peacefully, surrendering to the current carrying me back to the boat.

  B.J. stood up forward on a pontoon, leaning out over the water, his arms wrapped about the lower shrouds. Even at this distance, silhouetted against the coral-colored sky, his white grin glowed against his dark skin. He lifted an arm in a wave and hollered that dinner was ready. I began to stroke my way back to the boat with a different sort of urgency. All my appetites had returned.

  THE END

  Thank you for purchasing and reading

  SURFACE TENSION

  If you enjoyed the book, please consider posting a review on the s
ite where you purchased it. And tell your friends!

  Christine is always pleased to hear from readers, and she welcomes comments and feedback.

  ck@christinekling.com

  Bonus Material

  Read the first chapter from

  CROSS CURRENT (Seychelle Sullivan #2)

  Cross Current

  I

  Looking down at the old wooden Bahamian cruiser Miss Agnes, resting on her side on the white sand bottom, it was hard to imagine that people had died here. Every detail, from the peeling, eggshell-colored paint to the frayed wire at the base of the radio antenna, was so sharp, it was as if I were peering through a camera lens in crisp focus. It didn’t look as if it were underwater. The cruiser and the water above were so still and clear that as I leaned over the bow of my boat, I felt like I was floating in air.

  “I just can’t picture a vessel that size carrying over fifty panicked people.” I turned and saw B.J. standing outside the tugboat’s wheelhouse door, dripping seawater, his wet suit unzipped to the waist, his long black hair slicked straight back. He joined me at the rail and stared down into the crystal water. “You know, Seychelle, it was like three generations— old people, young, even kids—all jammed in there like cocktail wienies in the can. Hell of a way to go.”

  “Cocktail wienies, B.J.?” I turned around and squinted at him, my elbows propped on the aluminum bulwark behind me. We both had to shout to be heard over the rumble of the generator on the barge. “I didn’t think a guy like you even knew such things existed.”

  B.J. was my sometime deckhand and mechanic, a sort of New Age natural foods surfer, the only one I’d ever known who didn’t make all that seem kind of fake and wacky. He certainly was not your typical blond surfer dude, since he had at least two college degrees compared to my zero—and an ancestry that was mostly Samoan but included a dash of every other ethnic group that had passed through the Pacific in the last hundred years. Though he’d never been to his islands, you could see in his smooth brown skin and almond- shaped eyes that he carried part of his homeland in him. “Natural” was not a fad to B.J., it was how he lived his life.

  “You’re right, I’d never eat such a thing, but I do like to observe the habits of the people around me. Take those guys, for example.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the men working the crane on the barge to which Gorda, my forty-foot tugboat, was moored. We were anchored a couple of thousand yards off the Hillsboro Inlet lighthouse. “Between them, they have three completely different ideas as to where I should put the straps under the hull so that when we lift this wreck to the surface, we won’t break the back of the old derelict. Not a one of them is willing to compromise.”

  I looked at the characters he was referring to, and I suspected that not a one of them was hangover-free or had used a razor within the last three days. They looked like a labor pool collected from the Downtowner Saloon at closing. “I gather we’re going to be here awhile?”

  B.J. nodded, then moved into the shade, sitting on the deck box at the front of the wheelhouse. He began to scratch Abaco’s ears. She was the black Lab I’d inherited along with Gorda and the Sullivan Towing and Salvage Company when my father, Red Sullivan, died not quite three years ago.

  “I got tired of swimming around while they try to make up their minds,” B.J. said, “so I came out here to bug you.” He peeled the wet suit off his broad, brown shoulders. “It’s too early to be this hot.”

  I turned away from the view of his chest. Today I had to concentrate on business. After working with B.J. for years, and swearing to myself I would never allow the relationship to change into something different, something romantic, it had changed. The how and why were a long story, but shortly after finding his toothbrush and coconut soap in my bathroom, I’d asked for a hiatus. I wasn’t sure yet I was willing to give up my precious solitude.

  The business at hand was a much-needed insurance job. Working for the corporate world beat working for the little guy—you gave them the bill and they paid it. They didn’t cry and complain and try to wheedle you out of every nickel. Gorda and I were here to take the Bahamian cruiser under tow once these guys from Gilman Marine brought her to the surface and got her pumped out. Gilman’s tugs were all huge monsters designed for moving ships, so while they had the barge crane to get the Miss Agnes off the bottom, they had subbed this towing job out to me. My father had designed Gorda and had her built specifically for the small boat and yacht trade back in the early seventies.

  I had deck loaded two big thirty-gallon-per-minute gasoline pumps, and as long as she wasn’t holed, we should be able to keep Miss Agnes pumped out and get her down the coast, into Port Everglades, and up to a boatyard. Old planked wooden boats like her would usually leak through their caulked seams, but my pumps should be able to stay ahead of the flow.

  I leaned out over the water again to examine the wreck resting on the bottom. The sand beneath her looked as though it had been raked into neat furrows, the product of the swift current that flowed through the inlet. The illusion of flying was harder to maintain now as I spotted a school of smallmouth grunts darting in and out of the open pilothouse windows and a foot-long barracuda hanging motionless over the wreck. “Are you sure they said fifty people, B.J.?”

  “Yeah.”

  Neither of us said anything for a while. That was one thing about B.J.—he never felt the need to fill the silences with unnecessary talk. When he spoke, finally, his voice was quiet, and I had to lean in closer to hear him. “See the jetty back there, off the north side of the inlet?”

  I looked to where he pointed. The Hillsboro Inlet lighthouse stood back from the broad beach tucked in among the scraggly pines and low sea grape trees. The nearly one- hundred-year-old skeletal frame had been painted recently, white on the bottom half, black up top. A small rock jetty jutted out into the Atlantic along the sandy point at the base of the lighthouse.

  “Seems the Coast Guard patrol boat was sitting back in there,” he said, pointing to the small cove formed by the point. “It was a moonless night. The smugglers prefer that, but the bad news for them was it meant they didn’t see the patrol boat until they were almost into the inlet. When the Coasties turned their spotlight on, the Haitians panicked— tried to push their way to the far side of the boat. The weather was real quiet that night, and the crew had left all their windows and hatches open. She just rolled over and went glug."

  “I heard six people drowned,” I said. I also had read in the Miami Herald that two of them were children, little girls, ages ten and twelve, but I didn’t say it out loud. I knew that B.J. knew, just as he knew that I knew most of the details of the events that had taken place here the night before last. It was our habit, though, to talk about these salvage cases, to rehash the details when we were working. All too often when salvaging wrecked boats there were also ruined lives, and B.J. and I usually did what we could to get around that, joking and laughing and avoiding the image of how it had happened. Those images would eventually catch up with me, often in that twilight moment that comes between wakefulness and sleep, when my imagination would sneak in the vision of those girls struggling in the water, surprised at the sudden cold, screaming for their parents, gasping what they thought was air but sucking in the sea in its stead.

  “Fifty people is really only an estimate,” he said. “These days, Haitians will do or pay anything to get to the States, and the way the smugglers pack the boats, it could have been more.”

  “I hope they catch the bastards and charge them with murder.”

  B.J. was staring at the little strip of sand inside the jetty.

  “Some of them made it to the beach and managed to lose themselves into the city. Probably got into waiting cars. Immigration picked up twenty-seven. They’re either in Krome Detention Center or already back in Port-au-Prince.”

  “The Land of the Free,” I said, “but only if you come from the right island.”

  “Gorda, Gorda, this is Outta the Blue, over.” The transmi
ssion from the tug’s VHF radio was barely audible above the rumbling of the generator on the barge.

  “Damn.” I slapped the palm of my hand against the top of the warm aluminum bulwark. “Not again.” When I turned around, B.J. was laughing. “Stop it, you,” I said. “It’s not funny.”

  “Bet you he did it again.”

  “No way I’m taking that bet.”

  I swung around the door into the wheelhouse and grabbed the VHF radio mike hanging above the helm. “Outta the Blue, this is Gorda. You want to switch to channel six eight?”

  “Roger that.”

  I punched the numbers on the keypad. “Hey, Mike, this is Gorda. What’s up?”

  “Hey, Seychelle, isn’t this a scorcher of a day for June? Not a breath of wind out here.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Mike. I know you didn’t call to discuss the weather. What’s wrong?”

  “Well, I’ve been out here fishing all night with my buddy Joe D’Angelo. Him and me, we go way back. Used to work together. We had some good times back in the eighties, boy.” I made a circling motion with my hand to B.J. when he shot me a questioning look through the wheelhouse window. Mike rambled on.

  A former Fort Lauderdale police officer, Mike Beesting had walked in on a disgruntled city maintenance worker who had brought a shotgun to argue an issue with his boss. The end result was that Mike saved several lives but lost his lower right leg to a short-range shotgun blast. Rather than work a desk, he retired from the department and, thanks to a nice settlement from the city, he now lived on his Irwin-54 sailboat at a dock on the Middle River and ran sunset cocktail cruises and chartered day sails.