Blue Water (4 page)

“It could be worse,” he said. He was panting. I slicked my hair back from my forehead.

“Worse how?”

He forced a grin. “We're making good time.”

Almost as he spoke, a watery light broke through the clouds. The squall line passed to the east, slipping across the surface of the water like the shadow of some great, dark bird. The wind gusted lazily now: twenty knots, fifteen, ten. Above us, the sun swelled like a blister. Steam rose from the cockpit benches as Rex, moving slowly, took the reefs out of the mainsail. A raggedy clatter came from below; I pushed back the heavy hatch cover. Books and plastic dishes covered the floor, canned goods rolling to and fro, apples and potatoes scattered everywhere. We'd gotten careless, leaving things out, neglecting to secure locker doors.

“That'll teach us,” Rex said. One front tooth was chipped.

“Your mouth,” I began, but he shook his head, peeled his wet T-shirt away from his shoulder to reveal a red and purple bruise the size of an open hand. I stared at it, appalled. It seemed to be getting
larger, angrier, spreading from within, and I remembered, suddenly, horribly, seeing my face for the first time after the accident: two black eyes, a bridgeless nose, a protruding tongue. I hadn't been able to recognize it.

“It popped out of the socket,” Rex said, “but then it went back in. We've got some of those instant ice packs, don't we?”

“In the first aid kit.” I was already scrambling down the companionway. Rummaging through the mess, I couldn't stop seeing, again and again, the arc of Rex's body as it fell. Only this time, it missed the safety lines and landed in the water like a sack of grain. What could I have done to save him? Thrown him the life preserver we kept in the cockpit. Turned on the engine. Lowered the sail the rest of the way, secured the boom, brought the boat around. All the while keeping him in sight, because once you lose sight of something in the water, you're not going to find it again. Especially in the midst of a squall, when you can't see as far as the bow.

The large, orange duffel with our medical supplies had been flung from the locker above the forward berth all the way to the aft chart table. I thought of the force it must have taken to hurl such a heavy bag thirty-odd feet, and then I sat down, covered my mouth with my hands. I remembered thinking, after Evan's death, that I'd never be afraid of anything again. Suddenly, I understood how ridiculous that was, how childish, how petulant. We were still roughly four hundred nautical miles northwest of Bermuda. We might meet another tanker. We might be faced with more storms. We might strike a floating barrel or some other piece of rubbish, knock a hole in
Chelone
's hull.

“Why are you doing this?” people had asked in the weeks before we left Wisconsin: Toby, my parents, Lindsey Steinke, the parents of Evan's school friends. Because there's no reason not to, I'd say.
Because this is something we talked about doing, years ago, before Evan was born. Because we want to escape all the things that remind us of what we've lost. At the time, each of these explanations had seemed perfectly reasonable. Now, I was asking myself the same question, and none of the answers I'd given made sense. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to turn the boat around, head back home.

Instead, I cracked open two packs of instant ice, carried them back to the cockpit, held them against Rex's shoulder. As it turned out, we were lucky. The bruise didn't get any larger. He was able to move his arm. Soon it was clear that the bleeding had stopped.

Still, Rex spent the afternoon slumped in the cockpit, shifting painfully, while I reorganized our supplies, stowed everything back inside lockers and hatches. Gradually, the winds died down, dwindling away into random, lazy puffs. Without a breeze, the sails luffed; the bow swung to and fro. Water gurgled in and out of the through-hulls—the small, round openings at the waterline—and the sound was like a deep, plucked string, a hollow pop-pop-pop. With each rise and fall of
Chelone
's hull, our canned goods settled and rolled.

Thump, scrape,
thump
.

Bang, luff,
bang
.

At last, I lay down across from Rex, but it was too hot, too noisy, to rest. The ocean a molten circle around us. The very air shining, as if each molecule had caught fire. We had always been here, would always be here, in this small teak cockpit, the slow swells lifting us, dropping us, lifting us again.

Thump, scrape,
thump
.

Bang, luff,
bang
.

A discordant waltz that went on and on. Like a heartbeat. Like the slow, steady pulse of grief.

 

“Are you sure this is the hill you want to die on?” Toby said. He paused before a tank of angelfish, selected a net from the wall, and began to push it slowly, deliberately, through the water.

“Nobody's going to die,” I said. “Besides, lightning doesn't strike twice.”

Toby cornered the angel he wanted, trapped it against the glass.

“Actually, it does.”

It was early June, the first time I'd been to the fish store since Mallory's letter had appeared in the
Pilot
. Toby didn't let on that he was surprised to see me, but I knew, as I perched on an overturned bucket, that he, too, was considering just how long it had been. He was, and is, a bear of a man: broad-shouldered, heavy-boned, his face partially, deliberately, concealed beneath a lion's tawny beard. When Evan was alive, we'd visited several times a week—Evan had loved the African fish, the piranhas and Jack Dempseys—and it was difficult, now, to look across the tank room and not see his determined little baseball cap gliding between the long rows. To keep myself from dwelling on this, I told Toby what Rex and I hadn't told anyone else, not yet: that we'd found a tenant to rent our house. That we'd just signed a contract on a sailboat in Maine. That, if everything went according to schedule, we'd be living aboard by the end of the month. I also told him that Rex and I were withdrawing the civil suits we'd filed, including the one against Cindy Ann.

“Rex said it was okay to let you know,” I said. “If Cindy Ann hasn't been contacted yet, she'll be getting a letter soon.”

To my surprise, Toby shook his head. “Rex will never withdraw that suit,” he said.

“I told you he just did. We did.” I was annoyed. I'd expected—
what? Not thanks, exactly, but some kind of acknowledgment. The decision, after all, couldn't help but affect his relationship with Mallory, ease what I could only imagine was an awkward situation for them both. “Look, we're leaving Fox Harbor,” I said. “We just bought a sailboat. Didn't you hear what I said?”

Of all people, I'd assured Rex, Toby will understand. After all, whenever he wasn't in the fish store, he practically lived aboard the
Michigan Jack:
trawling for coho and sturgeon, netting smelt in season. He traveled to national breeders' conventions, fish shows, tournaments. He'd been on snorkeling and scuba-diving trips all over the world. He also knew what it was like to stand out, to hear people whispering in your wake. He'd been born with a birthmark that covered his cheek, pinned his ear to the side of his head. His eye didn't open fully. His left nostril didn't match the right. It was, I'd often thought to myself, the reason my brother lived the way he did, drawn to things that lived silently, simply, under water.

“Tell me you're kidding,” Toby said, now.

“Do I look like I'm kidding?”

“Jesus.” He carried the angel, dripping, to the counter, where he held it beneath a UV light. Rough white patches appeared along its sides. “You've got no offshore experience, and Rex is hardly any better off.”

“Rex has experience—” I began.

“Working on a cruise ship? Sailing with his dad? Come on.” Toby flicked the angel into the sick tank, where a stunned-looking molly already swam in circles. “This is the big, bad ocean, Cowboy. People die out there.”

I glared at him, the age gap between us swelling—a deep, dividing stream—from a trickle to a roar. He wasn't taking me seriously. He wasn't being fair. As a child, I'd idolized him, longed for his
approval, blushed helplessly at his rare, lasting compliments.
Cowboy,
he'd called me then, called me now whenever he wanted my attention, and the sound of his voice gliding over the word made me long to curl up again, young and small, swinging in the strong, snug
V
of his arm. Always, I'd been secretly, shamefully happy that Toby never dated, never seemed to have friends, beyond the distant correspondence of his breeding clubs and dive teams. Even after Rex and I were married, I'd often walked over to the fish store after work, joined him for a snack of summer sausage and cheese from a refrigerator crowded with fish heads, bone meal, bait. It was actually cleaner—and more wholesomely supplied—than the ancient, leaking fridge in his apartment over the mill. There he'd lived, alone, since he'd left my parents' house at twenty-five, accumulating miles of plastic tubing, broken aerators, aquarium pieces, artificial grasses, stacks of fishing bulletins, brochures, magazines. A table saw stood in the dining alcove. The bedroom held buckets in which he bred mice, mealworms, brine shrimp; the kitchen housed his dive gear and assorted boat parts. Somewhere beneath all the rubble was the broken-backed couch where he slept. The landlord, Mr. Dickens, turned a blind eye to the lifestyles of his tenants, provided they turned a corresponding eye to the boarded-over windows, the broken appliances, the fact that the temperature seldom rose above sixty degrees in winter.

That hellhole,
my mother called it. I myself hadn't seen the inside of it, now, for several years.

But I'd always loved spending time at the fish store, watching Toby putter about with his tanks, traffic passing by outside the window. “How about a splash of something?” he'd say, pouring us each an inch of Maker's Mark. The two of us sipping that good amber fire. Feeling myself to be first and always chosen. The truth was that
Toby knew me better, loved me better, than anyone, even Rex—Rex, who'd accepted this from the start, with remarkable, generous grace.

All of that had changed after Evan was born. And then, the year before Evan started kindergarten, Toby had begun seeing Mallory. She'd rented, it turned out, the efficiency across the landing from his place, four hundred square feet that had stood, unoccupied, for as long as I could remember. Through the open door, I'd seen the cracked walls, the ancient gas stove, the bathtub sitting in the middle of the kitchen, and I worried about her—or anyone, for that matter—trying to make the place habitable. Though Mallory, it turned out, was remarkably resourceful. She borrowed Toby's hot plate while she, herself, refurbished the stove, stored goat's milk in his fridge while she scoured the dumps for an antique ice chest. Soon there were reports that he was dropping her off for work at the Cup and Cruller. Shortly after that, Anna Schultz—my parents' former neighbor—phoned my mother, in Florida, to let her know she'd seen them at the Dairy Castle.

Together, you know,
Anna had said.

I figured it was time to ask.

“I've been helping her out, that's all,” Toby said. “I suppose the grapevine has us married.”

“No,” I told him. “Just sleeping together.”

To my amazement, he'd blushed, blood rushing into his birthmark, leaving the other side of his face as pale as naked bone. I phoned my mother immediately.

“Well, you've got to admit, she's brave.” My mother spoke in her usual matter-of-fact way. “Tackling a seasoned bachelor at her age. What is she—thirty, thirty-one?”

“Thirty-six,” I said. “It isn't quite that bad.”

“Which makes her twenty years younger than your brother.”

“Nineteen.”

“Somebody's doing her math.”

“I'm an accountant. Math is my job.”

“Of course, it is,” my mother said.

Now, I turned to face Toby slowly, deliberately, keeping my voice steady. “People die anywhere and everywhere,” I said. “Driving to school at eight in the morning, for instance.”

“It wasn't your fault, Meg.”

I bristled. “You're damn right, it wasn't my fault!”

“So why
do
this? It's as if you're trying to punish yourself. I'm just trying to understand why.”

It was like being fed a precise, round pill. Tears filled my eyes, but I swallowed it down, swallowed and swallowed until the ache in my throat was gone.

“If I really wanted to punish myself,” I said, “I'd be trying to figure out what you see in Mallory Donaldson.”

“Okay.” His voice, unlike mine, had stayed even. “I guess it's none of my business what you do.”

“It's none of my business what you do, either,” I said, staring at the chunky silver ring on his third finger. It was one of Mallory's peculiar designs, something she'd hammered and soldered into being. It surprised me, surprised my parents, too, that Toby would actually wear it. Then again, nothing about the relationship made sense, unless you considered—as Rex pointed out—that, before Mallory, Toby had always been alone. He'd seemed self-sufficient to me, perfectly complete, but perhaps this had never been true. After all, I'd seen the stares people gave him, women gave him, not to mention kids my own age when he'd pick me up at school. Arriving home from Madison on fall break, freshman year, I myself had been
startled by the sight of his face. Try as you might to pretend otherwise, it would always be the first thing strangers noticed.

Suddenly, I was tired. I'd spent the whole day working on the house, steam cleaning rugs, recaulking the bathtub, getting the place ready to receive a tenant. Evan had been dead six months. Driving into town, I'd seen Cindy Ann's three daughters bicycling along the J road in tank tops and bright, summery shorts.
Amy, Laurel, Monica
. Each of those names a poisonous flower.