Bliss (38 page)

Audrey walked over with her usual tins. Pritz didn’t know what to say.

Audrey sat cracked conch and coleslaw on the patio table, and took the paper from Pritz and read it.

“I thought you hated me, Audrey,” Eva said, and she started
laughing. Eva snatched the letter back. “It’s funny to me. Now that you know my mother left, you can like me.” Eva shook off an embrace from Pritz and walked out onto the beach. She climbed out onto a reef and when Pritz got up to go after her, Audrey in her best sagelike tone, told Pritz to be still. Eva sat out there on the pointy rocks and set her mother’s letter on the water. It floated quickly forward, then back farther, in and out with the waves. Eva watched it.

This is dumb, but I’m going to jump in
.

Audrey and Pritz both jerked when Eva jumped into the water after the paper. More than the fact that she had lied about it, more, even, than the fact that Elaine was dead, Eva had the bile and shame and overly compensatory ways of one abandoned. Elaine had parted quickly and enigmatically, and so ruthlessly left behind a tinfoil dream of her return for Eva to chew on.

Eva had to swim out, and the note eluded her like it had a motor and mind of its own. At one point, she was underwater for what seemed to those on shore like too long a time. But she came up, took a breath, and swam toward the letter again.

This is so corny. Setting the letter out like some message, and not even in a bottle. Diving in like some kind of self-baptism
.

Eva dove under the water again, felt it pressing in against her and all her passages. When she came up, Eva stood in the wet pink sand and blew what seemed the last of her cold from her nose. Coughed everything out of her chest. She put a hand to her stomach and went under the waist-deep water again, swimming strongly toward the floating paper.

In what seemed a panic, Audrey yelled for Dart, who’d emerged from the shower smelling like the starchy steam of rice. Eva wasn’t there to inhale him, but the dank apricot smell was gone. Barefoot in boxers, he walked onto the beach.

“Get to her, D’Artagnan,” Audrey said too breathlessly “Hurry! She’s going up and down too many times.”

Dart ran to the water and was up to his knees when Eva stood in front of him, clothes dripping, hair plastered around her face, her mother’s words running in indigo streams on her palm.

“I’m fine,” Eva said, panting. “I got it.”

“I knew you did.” Dart looked at her wrist. “You lost the bracelet, though.”

“Nah,” Eva said. “I let it go.”

Eva walked through the sand, back onto the patio.

“I thought you wanted to keep him,” Audrey said, handing her a towel. “You should have let him save you, Eva.”

“I know how to swim.” Eva was exhausted and irritated. Her leg was stinging, but felt better. The wound was lightly foaming with salt and felt clean for the first time. “I was all right.”

“We’re all
all right
. But what else can he do for you?”

Eva said what she knew Audrey already knew. “Because I’m not flailing in the ocean drowning doesn’t mean I don’t need somebody.”

Dart walked past them. “I’m out of here,” he said, tramping pebble-stone and water into the Rowe House. “Peace.”

Pritz had the look—worried, but completely comfortable—of a hip hop Euro-girl around a whole lot of negroes. Eva could almost see the papers flipping on Giada’s old clipboard. She was putting to-gether a plan.

“Eva,” Pritz said, like she was road managing her, “you’ll be fine here for a minute? I have to make a few things happen.”

“Pritz. I know shit seems ridiculous right now. Do what you gotta do.”

“E
ven with how you lie,” Dart said, putting things in his pack once again, “I want you to know I think you’re extremely decent.”

Eva wanted off Cat Island. The sea was closing in on her.

“Really decent the way you were for a while here,” he said. “The ways you’ve dealt with me, tried to help me, in your way. I gotta get myself back. I don’t know if I’m built for the kind of stuff I asked of you.”

Eva decided to say what she thought. “Why are you going?” She didn’t want him to stay. She wanted his reason.

“I thought I could do it,” he said. “But I feel one-down in most situations with most people, and—”

“And what?”

“I feel that way even more so when I’m with you. I’m gonna go to San Diego—to a spiritual gathering. This thing they have every first of the year.”

Eva looked at him.

He said, “Stop being tough. So tough you lie about your own mother dying. Without a blink. Without a blink for three years.”

“How can I seem tough when I can see myself in the mirror looking like I’ve had some kind of breakdown?”

“You don’t let anybody help you.” Then Dart grabbed Eva’s hands. “I love you, though,” he said. “Platonically, in the true sense of affection for someone. Virtue. Truth. I have so many high hopes for you, Eva.”

“Let go of me.” And she yanked her hands away. She thought of the Police’s “Message in a Bottle”:
Seems I’m not alone at being alone/Hundred billion castaways looking for a home
.

He said, “I’m no villain. Just like I’m no musketeer. You think I took from you? Took advantage? If I took, I only took what I needed.”

“You’re not supposed to take without giving back.”

“You’re not supposed to give with the expectation of receiving.” He paused. “What all did you give, anyway?”

“I gave myself, asshole.”

“I’m not capable of all what I thought.”

“You’re capable. You just don’t want to be.”

He sucked on that. Like maybe it tasted right. But “You need more” was his final answer.

“Than what?

“You know I want only the best for you. For you and for—”

“Mention this baby and I will maim you,” Eva said, channeling Tupac the gangsta, half real and half fake. All wound only half healing. “I’ll do my best to hurt you.”
Hutch from Above The Law says, ‘Cause see, once in a lifetime/Everybody did some dirt. Can’t nothing change those four times. Not even this baby in me right now can change those four times. I’m never going to be all right with that. Never. That’s just what the deal is. I did my dirt. I gotta live with that shit. But try to really live with it. Actually live
.

“You’re going to be alone.” It was as if bugles preceded Dart’s statement. Like he was delivering a proclamation from some distant, shrewd king. “Even with the baby, you’re always going to be by yourself and unhappy. I’ll be by myself, but I’ll be free.”

“I’ve been free, dick. Free is cheap and breezy.”

He took off on a bicycle, Eva guessed to the dock.

Tired of this goddamned island. Tired of being one
.

T
he next afternoon, Pritz jumped waves in the salty blue. From the shore Eva watched her, and then watched as Audrey came out in a bulky orange one-piece and joined in. A crusty iguana stood near Audrey’s starfish and Eva stared it down. Eva wanted to see Jeeter before she left Cat Island, wished he would just appear, so she could make a request, but instead Édouard walked onto the beach, Temptations music leaking from his headphones. Eva was surprised, and glad to see him. She wasn’t coughing. The area around her leg wound was tender, but it didn’t ache. Édouard looked at her like she had a ticket to ride.

“How come you’re not on the boat?” Eva said, “You didn’t take Dart to Nassau?”

“Skip took him. I came to see how you are, Miss Eva.”

“Getting it together.” She pushed hair back from her face. “Inch by inch.”

“Yes you are.”

“I liked that song. It’s good.”

“It can be better. Dart told me about your job, that you work with Sunny. That Sunny is his sister.”

“Not like it was a secret.”

“Not that you ever said it.” Édouard pulled his headphones down to his neck. “Dart said you make people into stars. You know how big he said it. That you made Sunny, Sunny. Sunny is everywhere.”

“Ha. I guess it’s about time for me to get back to it.”

“And leave your fairy-tale place.”

“It’s not a fairy tale to me.”

“You see us, this island. We’re like you here. If we’re smart or fortunate, we get out. At least to Nassau.”

“Édouard, if you want to leave,” Eva said, “you should.”

For the first time since she met him, Édouard’s voice was dark. “Don’t have me think different of you. Don’t act like the Rowes that live here.”

“Éd—”

“My sister and I—Haitian,” he said ferociously. “What they say here, she and me aren’t legal, shouldn’t be here. Her and Ben-the-native, not married by what they call the Commonwealth. Where am I going but waiting on Skip to die so I can take over the boat and even then they won’t recognize it as mine. What’s Audrey for but to take care of you and the Rowes. Don’t say stupid shit.”

“It’s not fair,” Eva said and knew it sounded foolish as she said it.

Édouard loosed his mammoth laugh, and this time it was twisted and hard as the ropes he always handled. “Come over by my sister’s, Miss Eva. There’s a surprise for you.”

Eva hadn’t seen that much anger and sour desire and pity in a man’s face since she’d been at Ripples pool watching a husband attend to his wife’s bird hand. Eva met Édouard’s gaze. Then she walked across the burning sands to Audrey and Benjamin’s small patch of lawn.

“Édouard,” Eva said, hesitant about imposing, but dead-set about her mission. “Can you tell me how to find Jeeter? Or I guess I could ask Audrey. I wanted to—”

You could have tipped Eva over with a feather when she saw Sunny, in overalls and sneakers, chatting with Audrey at the clothes-line. And Ron beside her.

So whatcha gonna do? Feel free? Or be free?

—“F
REE
A
GAIN
,” words and music by Soul II Soul

A
s Ron saw Eva, he walked toward the road, and Édouard trudged after him. Eva was overwhelmed. She was confused, and hated to hope. There were no lyrics or labels to fall back on.

She and Sunny hugged tightly, and for Eva, Sun was all the fragrance and familiarity of a home. Sun looked almost exactly like she had in Monterey, when Eva heard her for the first time. Sunny’s hair was in a puffy ponytail and her face was plain and tanned and frankly concerned. Sun’s speaking voice sounded like a song.

“Pritz called me,” Sunny said. She had a half-dozen of Audrey’s batik creations thrown over one shoulder. “So, yeah, stupid. I came over here for you.” They stood there for a moment. Eva still had a hand on Sunny’s arm, and Sunny put her own on top of Eva’s. “I heard your mother passed.”

Eva dropped her hand to her belly.

“I’m sorry for your loss. She’s in a better place.”

Eva thought that maybe her mother was in a better place, and that maybe she needed her mother to be truly gone—so she could stop wondering and lying. “You know I lied, Sunny.”

“Negress, I felt you weren’t telling the truth at the time. In Carmel. Not specifically about your mom. But the thing with the bracelet … I dunno. It was just—”

“Convenient.”

“And Hawk and Ron had already told me—”

“That I’d do anything.”

Hawk and Ron
.

Ron
.

“Yeah. I was new, Evey. Not dumb.”

“So you signed with me, why?”

“I liked you. What you represented. I figured, the way you handled me was the way you’d handle my business. Men get points for being slick. Even get points for lying. You can’t win in this business without doing that. It’s a simple fact.”

“I lied about everything but business.”

“Go to confession or beat your own ass if you want, but I also saw in your face two things that day in Carmel. I never stopped seeing them, even to right now. You love my music, and you care about my brother.”

“I don’t give a shit about him right now. And what about this cover album? You hate it.”

“I still hate it. But—”

“It’s good for you to have done.”

“I’ll lie and say I never said it if you tell anyone I admitted it, but yes, it’s good for me. Make us both a lot of dough. Let me live how I want for a long time. Make some more of the kind of music I want to, later. Not that you’re thinking about the last part.”