Lemon Reef (14 page)

Other people were starting to arrive to offer their condolences. They were Del's Cuban relatives from her father's side. The women wore fancy black dresses and hats with veils; the men wore suits and ties. They fussed over Ida and Nicole, their voices quivering. The women wiped their noses and dabbed at their eyes. The men stood behind them, hands in their pockets, eyes toward the ground.

Katie, Gail, and I waited in the car. Katie was in the front passenger seat tuning the radio to her favorite classics station. Gail was in the driver's seat, smelling first her hands and then under her arms, her face pinched like a prune. She had detected an odor and couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Between sniffs, “So you think Pascale manipulated us to get you here?”

“I wondered when you called me how you had found out so quickly that Del had died. Hadn't they just found her body? Definitely, she told Nicole to call you, knowing you would call me.”

“So why not just call you herself,” Katie said, as she landed on “Gypsy” by Stevie Nicks.

The song cracked my heart open like a dropped melon. I pushed aside my sadness to say, “Because, then coming wouldn't have been my idea. And you know how this family is about asking for help.” I stared at the autopsy report I was holding in my hand, noticed again the words “bent hands” and “gasping while submerged.” I tried to take a deep breath but found I couldn't. Ida and Nicole were standing on the lawn, nodding and commiserating. Nicole stepped from foot to foot, grimacing. She had her hand on the strap of her leather purse, rolling it between her thumb and her index finger—an action I'd heard psychiatrists refer to as pill rolling. Ida's heels kept getting stuck in the grass. It looked like she was balancing on a high wire even though she was just standing still. The air in the car was stifling. As we waited for the air-conditioning to win the battle, Stevie sang of dreams and memories and chances lost.

Now Gail had her nose in every vent, and Katie was staring at her curiously, sliding her eyes toward me, trying not to laugh. Katie lit a cigarette; the smoke filled the car before either Gail or I could act quickly enough to lower our windows.

I sank into the seat, pressed the now-warm beer bottle against my cheek, and said several times to myself, “Breathe. Just breathe.”

*

We stopped at Kinko's on the way to meet Tar Baby, and I faxed a copy of the medical examiner's report to Doug. I also made a copy of the original, which I rolled up and put in my back pocket. Then, roof down, we headed over the Seventy-Ninth Street Causeway in the direction of the beach.

Collins Avenue: four lanes dividing the ocean to the east from the bay to the west. On one side, the beach side, were small two- and three-story motels with neon signs that held out promise of “Deluxe” side by side with “Vacancy.” On the other side were multistory condos set back behind high concrete walls. Spaced between them were fast-food restaurants, tourist shops, and seedy bars. When I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, Haulover Beach, where we headed now, was the most popular public beach for local teens. The bay side had parking, boat ramps, berths, picnic areas, restaurants, and the like. The “tunnel,” a cement walkway running underneath Collins Avenue, connected the ocean side to the bay side. These days, wealthier white locals frequented beaches to the north in Hollywood or Fort Lauderdale or to the south in South Beach or the Keys.

As a favor to me, we parked at the Sand Dollar Motel and planned to walk to the pier. The Sand Dollar was the last motel on the strip, bordering the edge of the public beach. For many years my parents had managed the place for my mother's wealthy aunt, who lived in New York. She had purchased the motel so she and her friends would have a place to stay in the winters. When my great-aunt died and unexpectedly left the motel to my parents, it was a shocking windfall, delivering them overnight from being working poor to being defiantly middle class. As happy as they were about the inheritance and the hope it gave them for their future, it was also stressful for them, and it was confusing for my brothers and me. My parents now owned a valuable piece of property that they couldn't afford to maintain. Eventually it would become the gift to her favorite niece that my great aunt had intended, but initially and for many years after—our entire childhoods—my parents did nothing but work hard and worry about money.

My brothers and I grew up going to the motel with our parents. We entertained ourselves from sunup to sundown by playing on the pool deck or swimming in the ocean. Our mother ran the office. Our father did the maintenance and ran the pool concession, which included a small dive shop. An expert scuba diver, our father Mel encouraged my brothers to follow along. He taught them to dive, certified them, and then took them with him on ever deeper and farther-away diving adventures. When I—the girl—asked Mel to teach me, he was far less enthusiastic. In fact, he refused. In my early childhood, I learned running around without a shirt on and scuba diving were things my brothers could do that I could not. In my adolescence, the list was expanded to include enjoying food and loving a girl.

The prohibition against loving another girl lasted until the moment I laid eyes on Del; the diving prohibition lasted just a little longer. As we were becoming more adventurous sexually, Del and I were also sneaking off and teaching ourselves to dive, throwing together whatever gear happened to be around the shop and hoping it worked. While home on spring break from college, my brother Brian discovered Del and me experimenting with tanks and regulators in the ocean on our own and decided if we were going to do it anyway, he ought to show us how to do it correctly. Lemon Reef, located a hundred yards off the shore of the Sand Dollar, was our training site.

*

Lemon Reef had been created in the early seventies, when the Miami Coast Guard began experimenting with artificial reef construction by submerging a bright-yellow 1967 Volkswagen bus in twenty feet of water on Miami Beach. The idea was to sink something substantial enough to allow for various sea animals and vegetation to adhere, forming a man-made reef to revive and sustain indigenous sea life. It was the beginning phase of the now ever-more-common artificial reef projects, and the enlightened municipality sank just about anything, including cars that would rust. Rusted metal, it turned out, was not conducive to generating plant growth. Thus the nickname, Lemon Reef: a large, roundish, bright-yellow vehicle that rusted under water. The project was abandoned in '78, a few years after it had been initiated, but the bus was never removed from the water.

Calling it a reef was a little controversial; the site wasn't exactly a point of Miami pride. In fact, some people referred to Lemon Reef as a junkyard because after it was determined to be defective as a reef, a major construction company used the site as a dumping ground. The company had to pay a fine, but the cleaning-up part was forgotten and the ocean left to fend for itself. Authorities discouraged diving on “the project,” as city officials referred to it, because the rusty metal and sharp edges were considered unsafe. But the spot was accessible from the beach, so it had become a favorite—an attractive nuisance, so to speak—for local kids who were without access to a boat. For Del and me, explorations of Lemon Reef were a conquest, the reef itself our ironic playground, with squeaky swings and rusty climbing structures, graffitied walls and sandboxes filled with broken glass, syringes, and used rubbers. But we didn't care. To us, the reef was beautiful, some days in spite of its defective status and some days because of it.

By the time we began diving on the reef, in April of 1983, tiny elkhorn and staghorn coral had begun to grow in places where the sand met the cement. The concrete pieces lay in piles without logic, some still connected by rusty iron rods protruding from their exposed centers like broken flower stems in cracked pots. Anemones and other mollusk-like creatures covered exposed surfaces, giving soft movement and iridescent color to gray stone and rusty metal. Crabs pretended to be stones, eels found the cracks and crevices, urchins guarded the bus's exits and entrances, an octopus holed up in a heating vent.

A baby nurse shark making a brief appearance scared us out of our wits once. All we noticed at first was a several-foot-long shadow, which swiveled in sync with what we presumed it was attached to. From where we were inside the VW bus, we couldn't actually see. One of us had to go out there. Del poked her head up. When she saw the wide nose, the silly mustache-like feelers, and the three-foot-long physique, her cheeks rounded into a deep smile and she giggled into her regulator. With a kick of her legs, swing of her arms, and twist of her torso, she nimbly maneuvered in her bulky gear and swam up to see if she could play with it—if it would play with her.

*

The placid ocean glowed in the sunset; a pelican plunged and then surfaced, its beak pregnant with fresh prey. From where I was standing on the motel deck, I could see the place in the ocean where Del had died, stared at it, as if in looking harder, I'd find some clue to explain my increasing disquiet. Not that death ever makes sense. But I just couldn't reconcile Del, nimble and strong—as she chased baby nurse sharks, searched for sea turtles, traced every new life-form and nuance—with the image of her drowned body floating lifeless in that same place. A sharp pain moved across my chest, then settled into a leaden throb at my center. I recalled how Del's and my passion for the reef grew as our love for each other had deepened. Explorations of the reef the summer before our tenth grade year happened with explorations of each other's bodies, our emerging sexual feelings as delicate and at the same time determined as the baby coral taking hold on strewn cement.

*

Nicole decided not to bother with the stairs to the beach and led Ida and then Katie in a shortcut over the banister. As I waited for my turn, I looked to Haulover Pier, a mile south. There was nothing between the motel and the pier but ocean, sand, sprawling sea grapes, and a lone abandoned lifeguard stand. This place, I thought, as I climbed from the deck to the sand, had been my other home for the first fifteen years of my life. I remembered us—the same people I was with now—as kids on that same beach, girls in bikinis holding still in hot sand for photographs or indulging in fearless sunbathing and shameless expenditures of time. It was amazing to think of it now, knowing how rapidly life had closed in on us all.

“So,
where
are we going?” Gail was the last one to climb over the railing. Katie, Nicole, and Ida were already starting to walk. “
Who
are we meeting?” She coordinated climbing, twisting, wiggling over, and talking at the same time, exaggerating the physical difficulty in an effort to appear more stereotypically feminine. In fact, Gail had girth and strength, and she moved with athletic command and confidence. “Tar…
who
?” As she stepped down, she grumbled about getting sand in her shoes.

“Take them off,” I said.

“No. I just got a pedicure.” She stepped gingerly between the cactus and the fern fronds that lined the motel railing. She was wearing baggy yellow-and-white shorts and a sleeveless yellow shirt. Her brown hair was thick from the humidity, curly in some places, frizzy in some places, zigzag in between. The sun found the lighter strands among the darker ones, creating natural highlights. She moved her wide shoulders, large breasts, and full hips as if they resisted her.

When we caught up to the others, Gail said irritably to Nicole, “Phone? Have any of your friends ever heard of a telephone?” Then she said to me, “Don't drug dealers usually have cell phones? What, we have to
walk
to talk to this drug dealer? He's the only drug dealer in Miami who doesn't have a cell phone?”

Nicole looked back over her shoulder and said, “He doesn't want to talk on the phone. He's scared he's being watched. He thinks his phone is bugged.”

Gail came to an abrupt halt. Her eyes large with alarm, she said, “Okay.” She was nodding, taking it all in now and giving it a true appraisal. “And we are going to
rely
on Mr. Tar ‘my phone is bugged' for
information
?”

Katie and I looked at each other, studiously keeping our faces from cracking. “She does have a point,” Katie said matter-of-factly, her white-blond hair moving with the breeze. She slipped seamlessly into this atmosphere with her jeans rolled to her calves and bare feet.

Nicole's face twisted and her eyes grew more severe. She was getting frustrated. Ida put a hand on Nicole's shoulder to calm her.

“Come on.” I tapped Gail on the shoulder, tenderly. “I haven't been to Haulover in a really long time.” I smiled at her and shrugged. “It doesn't matter if this goes anywhere,” I said quietly and just to her. “It's nice to be here again with you guys. It's special. I really just wanted to go for the walk.” Gail looked at me, irritation pinching her features. She shook her head in protest, and then she continued on in the direction of the pier.

The five of us made our way along the ocean shoreline that evening in the day's afterglow, warm water lapping rhythmically over bare feet, the receding waves leaving behind moist mountain ranges etched in the sand. The August breeze pulled gently at my shirt and jeans, as if trying to remind me of something—persisting, pestering even. And the salty air carried sharp scents: beached sea creatures left stranded at low tide, now in varying stages of decomposition, and sun-dried seaweed braided into lumpy strands entrapping trash, lone flip-flops, and broken bottles.

From where I walked, I could see edges of recessed sea-grape-thicketed landscape providing what was now a thin, trim barrier between the beach and Collins Avenue. At one time, the sea grapes extended far out onto the beach. In some places—like near the motel—the thick, twisting branches spread to near the shoreline. The bent trunks and knobby branches covered over by thick, round leaves looked like solid bushes from the outside, creating large recessed caverns and leafy caves. When we were younger, my friends and I explored the sand dunes and sea grape thickets, followed sandy paths winding through knotted and twined bramble covering the beach for half a mile, providing a common dwelling for squatters and horny beachgoers alike. In fact, many of us had, either intentionally or by happenstance, had our first full sexual encounters in the “Hobbit holes,” as we affectionately referred to the leafy caves peppering the dunes.