Open Water

by Maria Flook

  Willis said, “The Tercel? Fuck, she’s razor blades. Her engine’s fouled. That boat doesn’t run, all she does is float. Even that’s a temporary condition.”

  “He must have a dinghy to get out to his boat, maybe it’s better than the Crouton.”

  “Look, two things. He’s way over at Warwick Neck, and two, he’s a fucking scoundrel. Rennie wouldn’t want him at her bon voyage. We’re going in the Crouton, is that all right with you? You don’t have to come along.”

  Holly didn’t think Willis could row all that way with his bad arm. She thought about love, its many tests. So far, she had failed each one. Her father had died before she could straighten things out. Her marriage to Jensen erupted in a humiliating local scandal. If she helped her lover bury his mother at sea, what couldn’t she conquer after that?

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Rennie was in Wydette’s beautiful dress, but the tire chains were wound around her hips and her body was folded awkwardly so it would fit on the floor of the pram. Willis had wrapped her in Fritz’s Indian blanket. With the blanket Willis could reel her out slowly, with a little courtesy.

  At full dark, First Beach was empty and they waded into the icy surf on either side of the dinghy. They angled past the breaking waves and pushed off. Holly sat on the forward bench, Willis sat between the oarlocks. The oars were different sizes and Willis had to compensate; his strokes were irregular and the boat wasn’t pulling as fresh as he wanted. Their weight was slowing them down. He thought about the Sears chains twisted around Rennie’s waist. It was a gruesome sight. They couldn’t even talk about it. Willis had brought a light, but they didn’t need it. The moon put a sheen on the water. Willis watched the texture of their wake across the stern, shiny black whorls stirred out.

  “They went to sea in a Sieve, they did. They went to sea in a Sieve. The water it soon came in, it did.” Willis recited the poem in his head; its metered form helped him roll the oars.

  “Open the Gate, Open the Gate, Here comes Rennie, the Grad-u-ate.” Already the rowing was tough; his sore arm throbbed and died out, throbbed and died out.

  Willis had studied his opportunities according to the tide chart and they had headed out exactly at the ebb. He rowed straight out parallel the Cliff Walk. They saw the mansions from a new perspective, their interior rooms were dark behind brilliant façades. Each house was lit with strategically placed floodlights, strings of lamps across the lawns, beams honed on gargoyles perched across the eaves. This fierce, external illumination when the cavernous homes remained empty seemed eerie to Holly. Empty hulks. Salve Regina College was the exception, its windows clotted with yellow honey. When they rowed past Château-sur-Mer, with its dim, violet panes and oversized awnings, half country club, half mortuary, Holly thought of the man with the invisible noose and wondered if he could see them from his prime vantage point.

  Willis rowed for an hour. The sea wasn’t calm. It made no alterations to advance their progress. Its indifferent silver sheet stretched wide in all directions and was the most sobering aspect of their journey. An occasional swell tipped the Crouton into a valley and drew them up again. Holly’s face was a terrified mask.

  Willis saw her fear and he started to sing “Volare.” It was the reliable melody but he had changed the lyrics. He was singing, “Ren-a-te, oh, oh. Ri-cot-ta, oh, oh, oh, oh. Your love has given me wings—”

  Holly giggled in tight, painful drifts that hurt her frozen diaphragm. Despite the difficult sea, Willis’s voice sounded clear and strong even as the hull was smacked by stiff swells, one after another. Then the lip of a wave shot up vertically, sucking the bow up and over, pitching Holly against Willis. Holly screamed. She grabbed the oars from Willis. He took the oars back. He told her to take it easy.

  He knew what he was doing. He worked at the lopsided oars and tacked against the waves so they wouldn’t have another surprise such as that one. He rowed past Gull Rock, trying to get as far as Haycock Ledge. He heard the bell at Brenton Reef and he knew he was clear of the cove and in the open channel. He rested the oars when the lights on shore lost their singularity and flattened into a golden line. Then he rowed a tight circle and tucked the oars down below the gunnels.

  Willis stood up. “Okay,” he said. “Here it is,” he announced. He was telling Rennie.

  Holly lifted her face to him. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  He stood, straddling Rennie’s corpse. He kept his balance—she didn’t know how—the boat was shifting sideways. He wrenched the hem of the Indian blanket, with gentle adjustments, until Rennie’s body rolled free from its shroud. She went in feet first. In another second, the water closed over her face like black saran.

  Willis watched Rennie vanish. He wasn’t just setting her loose, he was returning her. Rennie and the sea were one and the same, one seamless element, souls of the same fabric.

  Holly said, “Willis, look over there—”

  The body had surfaced on the other side of the dinghy. Her face lifted in the swell, matching the oval husk of moon riding the same water. Her face drifted a few inches beneath the surface. Willis rowed parallel. The Sears chains must have slipped free from her hips. The current pulled hard but didn’t swallow.

  Holly wondered if Rennie’s septicemia had made her oddly buoyant. For several minutes Willis steered the dinghy alongside her body, following her out with the tide. The wide black mattress lofted the tiny figure until it was almost vertically astride it. Her white hair fanned across the water. Wydette’s gauzy dress billowed around her waist like the pulsing veils of a hydra.

  Willis was beside himself. He wondered if he should haul Rennie’s corpse on board again, yet he couldn’t bear to think of putting her in the ground at White’s Monument Village with Lester and Sheila Boyd’s infant. Then, as quickly as she sank the first time, Rennie disappeared again. Willis rowed in a circle searching the black water. He turned on his light and panned it back and forth over the frothy chop.

  Holly had the palms of her hands flattened against her face. She couldn’t bear to witness the next frightening panel in that mural. But Rennie’s corpse didn’t reappear on the surface.

  “I think she’s all right,” Willis said.

  “Are you sure, Willis?” Holly kept her hands over her eyes. Her voice shook with fear-induced hiccups. They were so far out in the water, she wasn’t sure she would see her familiar surroundings again—her duplex, the percolator clock, the knotty-pine dresser, her hand mirror where she left it, its ghostly circle splashed upon the ceiling.

  “She’s safe,” Willis said, “she’s with the Jumblies.”

  Holly reached out to touch his arm. She kept her hand on his shoulder as he rolled the oars. His arm felt strange, it was vibrating. She watched him closely. His posture became inexplicably rigid. He dropped the oars. He was having some kind of attack, a slow convulsion, a dreamy disintegration. He tipped forward into her arms.

  She held his suffering weight, trying to decide what to do, when a floodlight advanced, a brilliant skewer through the dark, illuminating their dinghy.

  A Coast Guard utility boat had been waiting, blacked out. It awakened with untangled precision; its engine kicked in and its running lights flickered wide open. Holly remembered their Latin motto: Semper paratus. Always ready. A loudspeaker crackled with an officer’s firm, instructive narrative. “Good evening, Crouton, come aside.”

  Holly sat in the little boat feeling the waves shift the hull.

  Of course, they weren’t going to come to her, she should go to them, but she couldn’t shift Willis from her arms to pick up the oars.

  The loudspeaker crackled again, “Identify your captain, Crouton.”

  The officer’s words were strange yet comforting formalities, and in ready submission, Holly shouted their names. “Captain Willis Pratt,” she hollered. It sounded ridiculous. She wondered if the Coast Guard officer was serious; it might be yet another formula of ridicule exercised by this particular branch of the authorities. Th
e officer told her to wait where she was. She obeyed the officer’s directives and stowed the oars.

  A diver had lowered himself into the water to retrieve the waiflike corpse, wherever it was. Another diver came over to Holly and towed the dinghy to the ship by its frayed painter. Then the divers turned on underwater lamps and kicked off. Their rubber frog-feet slapped the surface and disappeared.

  Willis regained a little ground and started to protest. “Grave robbers!” he shrieked at them. The divers surfaced thirty yards out and sank again to continue searching. The divers came up once and again, their rubber skullcaps gleaming under the moon. They weren’t having any immediate luck. Holly and Willis were ordered on board the sparkling white utility boat. Willis fell to the deck and rested on his knees. They tugged his wrists behind his back and bound them with plastic drawstring handcuffs.

  Holly couldn’t get her legs back after almost two hours in the Crouton. She stumbled across the glistening deck into a huddle with the authorities. She was so relieved to be rescued, she found pleasure in their uniforms, in the hash marks on their sleeves, in every sign of conformity to military routine. They didn’t cuff her and let her hug herself and shiver. The divers climbed back up the ladder, admitting defeat. They would search again at daylight. The body was free to drift into Rhode Island Sound, and from there maybe anywhere. Holly told Willis that Rennie was loose, but he had collapsed. She screamed at the officers to remove the handcuffs, couldn’t they see he was sick.

  It was apparent that Willis was very ill. An officer snipped the handcuffs and put Willis on a stretcher. They pulled the blanket high and folded the hem at his chin. His wet jeans bled through the fabric.

  An officer asked Holly, “Can you tell us the order of events this evening?”

  “The order of events?”

  “Can you tell us what drugs are involved?”

  Holly said, “I guess he might have something in his system.” She kneeled beside Willis and plucked his hand from under the sheet.

  Other young recruits lined up to peer over the stretcher in a polite queue, perhaps according to their rank. Holly couldn’t believe their attention to protocol.

  She yelled at the men, “Christ, can’t you get someone on deck to help him.” Willis had passed out. Under the bright floods, his smooth profile looked pale and cold as limestone with a charcoal smear across his jaw where his whiskers were concentrated. Holly understood he was taking an illicit turn at rest. It was a violent sunken dream from which he would have to surface. She hated to revive him. Then she shook him.

  Chapter Thirty

  The next morning, Holly sat in the duplex with Nicole’s copy of the Newport Daily News. The paper was too heavily inked and the headline throbbed: COUPLE DUMPS BODY FROM ROWBOAT NEAR BRENTON POINT … LOCAL WOMAN IDENTIFIED … COOKS AT PREP SCHOOL. After her notoriety as a suspect for arson, the story didn’t alarm her. How many times would her life be put on display? She wondered if all the harassment she had endured might have to do with the fact that she lived on an island—everything was blown out of proportion. Anywhere else, her small, irrelevant crimes would surely be ignored by the busy mainland, the sane interior.

  The Coast Guard released Willis to the Newport police. From there, Willis was admitted to the state detox unit at Roger Williams Hospital in Cranston. He spent the night in a lighted room, where aides could watch him. He turned his face into the rubber pillow to avoid the glare. All night, he saw the final transposed image of Rennie and Wydette, one immutable seraph, her floral dress pulsing in the waves.

  The next morning, two aides brought him into an office and sat him in a chair across from a counselor. He cooperated and answered as many questions as he could find corresponding thoughts or associations for, and when Willis was satisfied with his interview he closed it off. He told the drug counselor, “That’s a wrap. Mission accomplished. Touchdown.” He rolled off the chair and limped back to his bed. All his joints were aching, even the balls of his feet were throbbing.

  When Munro learned that Willis had been taken from the Newport County Jail to the state detox hospital, he placed phone calls all morning. Munro’s attorney successfully made arrangements to have Willis transferred into a substance-abuse program at the swank private hospital Edgehill Newport. The county agreed to the alteration of locale, but it depended upon Willis. If Willis didn’t accept Munro’s generosity, he’d have to remain in the Cranston facility, where there was often a distinct, razor-sharp urine smell in the stairwells and landings.

  Munro went over to Cranston to insist that Willis agree to the transfer. Munro told him, “Look, little brother, I’ll pony up the costs, and you can stay on the island. Where you belong.”

  It was the first time Munro had ever implied that Willis had any place or station in this world.

  “Sure,” Willis said. “That’ll be fine.” From the moment Rennie drifted away, Willis had lost his bite, but he had regained his equilibrium. Other than a plague of vacillating cold-turkey symptoms, he felt calm. It didn’t matter if Munro wanted the upper hand, and said, “Look here, little brother.” Willis was Teflon. Munro’s burden was lighter now that his mother was taken care of. Rennie was “safely dead.” It means different things to different people, Willis thought.

  Willis faced two charges; the first one reflected his violation of the Federal EPA Ocean Dumping Act, a provision of the Clean Water Act. Munro’s attorney was informed that the charge would most likely be dismissed due to the sensitive nature of the case and the actual low-risk effects resultant of the crime. People buried loved ones at sea several times a year despite the Clean Water Act, and the EPA took a humanitarian stance. The second charge was “larceny of an item worth more than two hundred fifty dollars.” Willis had been charged with the theft of the Crouton, not Fritz. The restaurant’s management wasn’t willing to drop charges. They claimed to have lost revenues during the period their mascot was missing.

  Munro told Willis that Showalter had repoed his totaled truck without raising an eyebrow. Munro chuckled and told Willis, “Showalter visits Fritz in the hospital, mornings and evenings. It’s all in the family.”

  Willis nodded at this news. He tried to remember any early mannerisms or clues that could have revealed a love connection in Fall River. He thought of the chewed InstyPrint pencil Fritz wore tucked behind his ear all winter, the Burberry scarf Fritz appeared in one day, as if he’d collected it from a bus seat. The cashmere muffler was so out of place on him, it had to be from a wardrobe in someone’s lovesick dream.

  When Willis completed the detox program in the upscale hospital, he’d be released on his own recognizance to await his EPA hearing and his court date for larceny of the Crouton.

  Holly went back and forth between Willis’s glamorous setting on Ocean Avenue and Newport Hospital, where yellowed linoleum tiles were glued waist level along the hallways. Fritz was recuperating from a cracked sternum, broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and general malnutrition. His poor diet was a side effect of Fritz’s nervous condition and had nothing to do with his accident. Fritz pushed down the scooped collar of his cotton johnnie and showed Holly where doctors had wired his breastbone together.

  “They used staples?” she said.

  Fritz told her, “This isn’t fingertip embroidery.”

  Holly sat beside Fritz, the TV buzzing at the end of the bed. It was a singles game show. Fritz had a perverse hunger for these blind-date panel discussions.

  She looked at Fritz. His skinny shape looked worse in the hospital bed, like a hat tree under the sheet. The thin thermal hospital blanket didn’t look warm enough, his knobby knees erupted through the fuzzy crossweave layer.

  Showalter appeared at the door with a box of doughnuts from Store 24. Fritz introduced Holly.

  Showalter lifted Fritz’s pillow from behind his head and wedged it back straight. Then Showalter folded back the lid of the doughnut box and she and Fritz marveled at the pastry selection. They shared the greasy wheels of sugared dough, and w
aited for the TV show’s conclusion.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Willis stood on an extension ladder, starting at the third-floor gable with the Rent-All pressure cleaning gun. The tool had a stiff recoil and five weeks ago he would have been too gooned to hold on to it. He swiped at the bees, hating to dislodge the ancient wisteria vines that were in full flower, but the house wanted restoration. It screamed for it. He hoped to paint the Victorian to the specifications of the Newport Historical Society. They gave him a chart of authentic nineteenth-century colors for the clapboards and another chart for the contrasting trim. He wanted the new paint to match the first coat put on at the turn of the century when the house went up.

  Munro had decided to rent the house during the tourist season. Summer rentals paid for themselves. He wouldn’t have to let go of the waterfront property. Munro told Willis he could add a kitchenette upstairs and close off the third floor for Holly and himself. Winters, they could have the run of the whole house. Munro wasn’t concerned about Willis’s court appearance scheduled for the end of August. People were sympathetic to the story of a local cancer victim and her loving son who only needed to borrow a rowboat for the evening. The whole town looked forward to the proceedings. Already the Newport Daily News had run two feature stories; one of the headings read: RESTAURANT MASCOT DOUBLES AS FUNERAL BARGE, and public opinion remained on Willis’s side of it.

  Willis was gaining some color working out in the sun. His cast was finally removed, the chalky husk sawed up the middle. A fluffy down was growing back on his bare arm where the hair had been rubbed off.

  Earlier that week, Willis had called the Coast Guard to ask about finding another Fresnel lens. They invited him to come over to the station at Castle Hill, where they had a mint specimen displayed on a pedestal. The lens was a peculiar notched barrel the size of a watercooler. Willis fingered its cool planes. A recruit told him that these antique Fresnels were getting few and far between. Willis might be able to find one, but he should get working on it right away.