Dead in the Water (4 page)

He was dead.

She screamed, “911! Emergency, somebody!” But she
knew that wouldn’t help. She did everything she could, laid him down and tried to jumpstart his heart, and Daniel came around and started swearing at her.

Dead from drowning in his own vomit.

She had watched the kid die, stiffen and struggle and go; but before that, she had watched him spin in a slow, lazy circle, like the wheel of fortune at Caesar’s Palace as it spun around to zero.

Like the bottle at a teenage party, and you had to kiss the one it pointed to; and it was always the guy you really, really liked, and to your utter shame he groaned when you puckered up, your own small heart hammering wildly out of control.

And if Donna could have cried—God, if she could have, maybe she’d have been able to let him go.

That night, in the bathtub, with a hot washcloth over her eyes, listening to Billie Holiday singing the blues in a drunken whiskey voice. Slugging back Scotch with her eyes covered, pretending to daydream about her singing career (what career, Donna?). Replaying last month’s gig at a joint in Santa Monica, where none of the guys on the force would see her. Smoke and a tight dress, black and low, and a rose in her hair; holding back, because there was so much inside, too much …

No, there wasn’t. She was a big girl, a big, regular girl with a regular girl’s problems. A cop, which was a bit unusual maybe, but not given the way she grew up, Marine Corps pop and four brothers. Tomboy. And maybe a torch singer, when she grew up. A cop who happened to lose somebody. Hell, they all lost people now and then. Glenn had lost a little old lady once, smoke inhalation. Arson.

The hot rag on her eyes, and that was sweat trickling down her temples and into the tub, because tears weren’t in her vocabulary. Drinking and singing, and feeling so very sorry for Miss Billie Holiday, who’d had a hell of a life and had suffered through it, really suffered. The woman had had no idea how to shut out the pain.

The pain that people like Donna didn’t have.

Back at the station house, the guys had made sure she was
all right, some ski trip, eh, Osmond? (Her name was Donna Almond; in the time-honored tradition of cops and nicknames, they called her Donny Osmond.) As soon as she had assured them her rock-solid cop
cojones
were still hard as golf balls, they started in with the Natalie Wood jokes and ghoulish stories about other “floaters” and general CPR horror shows. Topped each other unmercifully. Told her the story of the Tahoe school bus, just in case she hadn’t heard it up there in Squaw Valley.

Red mittens. The boy’s mother hadn’t made a sound, simply collapsed into her husband’s arms. The child had been deaf. It was likely he hadn’t made a sound, either, when he had fallen in while reaching for something, God knew what. His dog, a beagle named Dottie, was never found. Donna had searched for hours, joined by the paramedics when they got off duty. Perhaps she had fallen in, and he’d been trying to save her.

Donna didn’t remember the glinting object until much later—saw it when she fell in, some bottle or something—but it seemed unnecessary to amend her report over it.

While packing, Daniel had called her a cunt and a dyke.

“Jesus, where would I go?” Donna said again, standing beside Glenn’s white-as-a-charger Mustang. She held her real champagne bottle in her right hand and her suitcase with the left. The plastic bottle was stashed in her oversize purse. Glenn frowned at her and she quickly added, “Say hi to Barb and the little shitheads.”

“Will do. Over and.” He took a step toward her. She lifted her chin, just enough.

As he sped away, her throat tightened. She watched him go, and she knew she should let him go. Really. She stood alone, as he took the corners too tight and heated up the rubber. Off to his Disney life, his Disney kids and wife, tra la, and she stood there.

Alone.

She swallowed. Well, girl, she thought, here was some grist for the mill. A lady wanted to sing the blues, she had to suffer, feel it way down in her gut, that sorrow, that pain, that …

No. As his car disappeared, she could sense the walls rising inside her. Thick armored plates closing over, making her mouth twist into a half smile as she murmured, “Blowjob, you drive like an asshole.”

Cutting it off. Tamping it down.

Alone
. And helpless to do anything …

No. Never helpless.

She turned on her heel and started looking for her ship.

Dr. John Fielder wasn’t sure about this whole deal. He leaned against a dirty, rusted railing of the
Robert X. Morris
, absently pushing his glasses up his nose as he watched his son, Matt, scrabble along the pitted deck. The
Morris
was, to put it mildly, a bucket of bolts. Rusty bolts. Bolts he wasn’t sure were riveted together very well. If at all. Would it hold together long enough to get them to Honolulu?

A tall, muscular man hailed Matt. It was Ramón Diaz, the suave first mate. Matt leaped and bounded over pieces of chain and boxes and joined Diaz. They began to talk, Matt gesticulating wildly.

Sighing, John looked down at the glossy brochure in his hands. An elderly couple in nautical attire touched champagne glasses as they leaned against a pristine white railing. A Hawaiian sea spread behind them. He looked up at reality: a sailor in filthy dungarees hung over the side, which was spotted with mint-green paint, Rust-Oleum, and rust proper, a Mountain Dew in his fist, and hocked a loogie. Another sailor joined him, pulled out a cigarette, flicked the match into the filthy waters of Long Beach.

John cocked his head. The superstructure, all seven uncertain stories of it, loomed above him. More mint, more rust, splattered with guano. Radar and masts bristled from it at all angles, so that it looked like an upside-down centipede.

Another sailor loped past him, calling to the other two. He sported a spectacular handlebar mustache.

“You seen Chiefy? We gotta check the starboard bilge pump.”

Chiefy. Bilge. Would they talk like that on the
Island Princess
? John doubted it. Heck, if it was just him, he’d probably
stay on the
Morris
if only for the sake of adventure. But he had the Mattman to think of.

As if on cue, Matty whirled around and waved at him. The pale little face was glowing. Christ, he was all mouth and eyes these days. John had hoped he’d fatten up in remission. He ate a lot; damn, he was a bottomless pit. But somehow, his metabolism …

The cancer …

John waved back. Smiled brightly as tears sprang to his eyes. How, in all the unfair unfairnesses of life, had his son contracted the very disease for which John was paid inordinate amounts of money to discover a cure? His psychologist had tried to make him understand it was just a rotten coincidence, but John still had the hand-washing compulsion; still worried about touching his boy, breathing on him. Somewhere, in the back of his mind (to be honest, not so far back at all), he thought he’d infected Matty by something he’d brought home from the lab.

Deeper back, he thought he was being punished, through his son, for giving up his practice with AIDS patients and moving into pure research.

Couldn’t take it anymore.

Dear God, couldn’t take this, either. He was terrified that in these five short days, somehow Matty would sicken and die. Waves of guilt washed over him at the thought of taking him away from the safe harbor of the hospital.
You’ve got to let him live while he’s alive
, Dr. Eling had told him, over and over and over.
If you spend every moment afraid that he’s going to die, he may as well be dead
. Harsh words, but very true. He had counseled the families and lovers of his former patients with a litany very like it.

He watched the boy jogging along, hopping over an open can of something, skirting a jumble of large, crumbling chain.

“Everything all right, Dr. Fielder?” Mr. Saar, the second mate, paused beside him. He was carrying a clipboard and he looked harried. Fine-trimmed red beard, sunglasses, a snappy white uniform. More brochurelike than the sailors. That was something. “Are you settled in your cabin?”

John deliberated a moment. Should they bail out? Or was
he overreacting? He needed to talk this over with Matty. After all, this trip was for him.

Because it might be his last …

Christ, stop it! “I … I’m fine,” John blurted out. He turned his attention to Matt and the first mate. “If he gets in the way, you let me know.”

Saar nodded, glanced at his watch, and made a notation on his clipboard.

“Well, we’ll resume loading in about five minutes, sir. It would be fun for him to watch for a while. They’re serving tea for the passengers in the dining room.”

John raised an eyebrow. The
Morris
couldn’t be all that bad if it served afternoon tea, could it?

“Thank you,” he told the second mate, who nodded and ambled toward the trio of sailors. They all rolled from one foot to the other, these seafaring men. As if the boat perpetually rocked. Must be hell on the inner ear.

“Matt!” he called. “Hey, Mattman! C’mere!”

Matt didn’t hear him. The boy sauntered along with the first mate, making broad motions with his hands. Looked so cute, in his baggy black shorts and black running shoes and military green T-shirt. His hair was too long for his flat-top; it folded over on the right side like an Elvis pompadour. Should have had it cut. That was another hangup of John’s: hating to trim Matty’s hair, because finally (thank you, God, again, and please, again) Matty
had
some hair. Chemotherapy was rough on everybody, but roughest on dark-haired nine-year-old boys who liked baseball and heavy metal and paging through their fathers’ gross surgery textbooks.

Another man joined Matt and the first mate, stepping over the grimy metal lip of a heavy, round door painted the same mint-green. He was an old hippie, with gray hair down to the middle of his back, a braided leather headband, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and a stained white apron. He cradled a metal bowl against his chest and stirred the contents with a wooden spoon as he talked. Then he bent down and offered a taste to Matt. Ye gods, he must be the cook.

Matt tipped back his head: the turned-up nose, the freckles, the long lashes that were Gretchen’s.

“Matt!” The name came out too frantic. John flushed and tempered his outburst with a smile.

The trio turned toward him. He motioned Matt to him, feeling his stomach clench as the boy parted from the men and scampered toward him. Dennis the Menace, the Beaver, Matty the Mattman.

“Hiya,” John said as Matt approached, and held out his arms for a hug. His stomach burned. Matt had (
had
had) cancer, and his old man had (still had) an ulcer.

“Oh, Dad.” Matt held back. “C’mon. I’m too old. There’s dudes here.”

John grabbed his wrists and pulled him against his body. Matt’s T-shirt was damp; the body inside it so damn skinny.

“Listen, buckwheat, when you’re
twenty-nine
, you still won’t be too old for hugging.”

“I’ll never be that old,” Matty shot back, and it took John a second to understand that he wasn’t being serious. That he wasn’t talking about
that
.

“Listen,” John said, crouching down so he was at Matt’s level. He made a face. “This boat. It’s kind of older than I thought it would be.”

“It was in Viet Nam!” Matty announced. His eyes widened. All eyes. No flesh. He looked like a commercial for one of those save-the-starving children funds they advertised on TV. “It was loaded with ammunition so they could blast the gooks!”

John blinked. “Oh? Did Mr. Diaz tell you that?”

Matt shook his head. “Cha-cha did.” He frowned impatiently. “You know, the old guy. He’s the cook. He was on it when it was in Viet Nam. Isn’t that on fire?”

On fire. John was keenly aware of the crow’s-feet around his eyes when he grinned faintly at his little boy. The Haight and the Summer of Love had never seemed so long ago. Isla Vista, too—burn down that Bank of Amerika—if you wanted to talk about fires. Never trust anyone over thirty, hell; and now his kid used the sacred and arcane vocabulary of the newest new generation, and he was stuck in his own time zone like some old geezer, trying to translate, if not keep up.

“Well, you shouldn’t say gooks. You know about that. But
listen, do you like this boat?” He grew serious. “If you want to do something else, we can. We could take another boat to Hawaii. Or we could—”

“No way! This is neat!” Matt turned to race off.

John caught the neck of his T-shirt. “Cool your jets, Jack. They’re going to load the deck and they want us out of the way. We can watch from the dining room.”

“All right! Cha-cha’s making a cake. It’s Mr. Diaz’s birthday.”

John started to hold Matty’s hand, brushed his shoulder instead. Tea and cakes. Okay, maybe. It wasn’t the brochure, but maybe it was okay.

In the dining room of her temporary home, the
Robert X. Morris
, Ruth Hamilton sat on an overstuffed chair and sipped her tea, eavesdropping on the argument two of the other passengers were having on the opposite side of the room, not ten feet away.

“It’s my vacation, too. And I’ll be damned if I’ll spend it on this wreck.” That was Ms. Elise van
Buren-Hadley
, as the lady had said it.
Hadley
, as in, forget to say that and I’ll turn you to stone with a mere gaze.

Quite possible, Ruth thought, and went on placidly stirring her tea.

“I mean,
really.
” The woman wrinkled her nose and moved her shoulders in a gesture of complete and utter distaste. She practically raised her lizard-skin flats off the ground.

Ruth could understand her disappointment. The
Morris
was not as advertised, and the dining room was a particular disaster. Small and gloomy, despite two sets of large square windows that framed the profiles of sleek, blond Ms. van Buren-Hadley and her husband, Phil, whose sandy brown hair and short, trimmed beard reminded Ruth of Stephen. The windows were covered with yellowed venetian blinds that muffled the sepia sunbeams of Long Beach, a long-polluted suburb of Los Angeles, and cast the combatants in a drab olive light.