Open Water (27 page)

“Shit,” she told Willis. “Look who it is. It’s that no-neck back from Kanpur.” She was trying to make light of it, but her nerves were jittering. She wanted Willis to come out there and take stock of it.

Willis walked out of the shack to take a look.

Jensen called to Holly, “Hello, you.” He walked right over to their circle and slapped his two hands down on Holly’s shoulders. He kissed her forehead. “Missed you a little bit,” he told her. His shearling coat looked small on him. He might have gained some bulk since they were first married.

Jensen said, “Jesus, I heard about what happened to our old apartment. That sinkhole. Weird—”

She looked at him. She imagined that he was insinuating something.

“Well, Holly. I’m glad you found yourself a new place.” He didn’t look impressed.

“Where’s Sarojini?” Holly said.

“Setting up.”

“Where would that be?” She hoped it was off the island.

No such luck.

Jensen said, “We’ve got a nice spot on Catherine Street. Sycamore House. It’s kind of an investment property.”

“What about your Carvel franchise?”

“I’m still there for now, but I’m not staying there forever.”

“You finally got tired of dishing up soft serve? You bought that big place? That mansion they turned into apartments?
She give you Indian money for that?” Holly said.

Willis said, “I know that place. That’s a busy chicken ranch. Vaseline on every doorknob.”

Jensen said, “It was in the wrong hands. We’re renovating. We’re gutting it.”

Holly winced. The term was common construction jargon, but when Jensen said “gutting,” he seemed to enjoy the double consonants.

“Why aren’t you at your Swami ice cream shop?” Willis said.

Jensen turned around to face Willis. “Who’s asking me questions?”

“This is my neighbor.” She kept his name to herself. “And, that’s Fritz.” She pointed to Fritz who looked pretty awful, like a Hollywood punk. He was wearing a new pair of skintight jeans, like he had just robbed them off the rack. “You can memorize their pretty faces and clear off.”

She walked back inside the shack and Jensen followed her in there. He started telling her that he had come to a realization. He said he realized that a girl didn’t burn up a bed without there being a trace of feeling left in her heart. He told her that he had come to appreciate that, and he wanted to tell her she wasn’t alone. “I’ve got a speck of emotion for you too, girl. I guess it clings for a while.”

“Sorry to hear that. It can cling to the bitter end,” she said, “but I don’t feel anything.”

He picked up her hand and rubbed his knuckles over it. He dropped it again.

“What the fuck do you want? You want something, I know it,” Holly told him.

“Thing is. I heard Neptune’s for sale. I might want to buy it. I wanted to be the one to tell you. You wouldn’t want to hear that news from a stranger.”

Holly looked at Jensen. She knew that he wasn’t telling
her the truth. She knew when Jensen was lying, his lips looked tight, as if a smile was fighting at the corners.

“Salvatore hasn’t said a word about this to me. I say you’re full of bullshit.” Yet she felt her heart pounding. Her summer job was the glue on her calendar; the other months tore away in the wind. Holly figured that Jensen was alarmed to see Willis and had come up with something to get her in a lather, something to provoke her. Holly said, “I say the day you buy Neptune’s, I go down on the beach and part the sea.”

“You can still have your job. We’ll keep you on.” Jensen pressed his thumb against the glossy truck. It left a little print on the wet finish, intricate as a scarab.

“I’m through listening to this,” she started talking so she couldn’t hear him. “We open up in three weeks. Salvatore gave me my keys yesterday. Double sets. We’re ordering two hundred new towels, waffle-weave, all sizes. He’s putting in a washer so we can do our own sheets instead of sending them on the truck. He didn’t mention anything about selling the place to you. That’s a nice fantasy you’re having.”

Jensen said, “Will you calm down? You’re shrieking. You should have your tonsils out, you know that?”

“Are you finished?” she said.

“Holly, I’m just saying I’m going to be your boss.” His smile was running high from one end to the other.

“Fuck off, Jensen.”

Jensen was looking back and forth between Holly and the two men holding the wet brooms. “What have you got here, a chop shop?”

Jensen took a hold of Holly’s elbow and he tried to steer her outside. He had a funny gloss over his eyes, as if he had just peeled onions.

Jensen told her, “Let’s take a little drive together. Old time’s sake. Let’s ride over to Neptune’s—”

“Get serious,” she told him. “You’re not getting any.” She might have been speaking for herself or for Sarojini. Her tone suggested a universal consensus.

Willis didn’t like what he thought was happening and he shoved Jensen out of the shack. Fritz pulled the old cedar plank doors shut and Holly tucked the board into the wooden rests. Jensen knew he was banished and he bowed at the waist, sweeping his arm through the air. He turned and started walking away.

Holly yelled, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” It was a babyish thing to say, and she enjoyed saying it.

Her ex-husband turned around to face her, shrugged, then kept walking away. She watched him get into an expensive new car fully financed by his Indian connection. He cranked the sun roof a notch to entice the fickle spring sunshine.

“I guess he’s not through with you,” Willis told Holly.

“Please don’t say that. He gives me the creeps.”

“No question about it. He left that calligraphy,” Willis said.

“What calligraphy?” Fritz said, letting the garage door swing open again.

“Nothing,” Holly said. She didn’t want to talk about it. She thought Fritz had a funny look. He was almost smiling. As much as she knew about Fritz, she wasn’t sure if it was Jensen who wrote those two silver words.

Fritz dribbled mineral solvent onto Willis’s hands as he rubbed a rag over his knuckles, then Fritz took the rag and Willis splashed the solvent onto Fritz. Except for the harsh fumes of the petroleum distillate, it looked like a loving anointment of some kind. Afterward, their hands looked clean, but Willis’s cast was spattered, a loose spray of black paint like watermelon seeds.

I
f she sat on the radiator by the window, Rennie could see the channel off Brenton Point. She folded a velour towel over the uncomfortable plumbing ribs and she had a warm, pleasant seat from which to look out. She removed a pair of German binoculars from a leather case. She lifted them in one hand to watch, but she was having trouble squinting through the lenses. The magnifications were off. She turned the focus one way and turned it back; she found something. A dragger was steaming in, just west of Elbow Ledge. She saw its doors hanging, stowed on the gallus. The bridle and towing warps were winched tight on the net reel, still puddling underneath. She was steaming into State Pier Number Nine, or into Parascondola’s, where lumpers swarmed on board to sort and offload the catch for the processors. Rennie thought of Bill Hopkins on the
Teresa Eve
coming back loaded to the rails with nary any freeboard left, her skipper a fool for money. She looked back at the water and followed the dragger stem to stern to see if she could identify its skipper or any of its crew. There was one man working on deck, cutting through a fouled piece of net and laying it in strips. Two crew stood outside the pilothouse, gripping mugs of coffee or maybe it was Cup-a-Soup.
Sonny Costa had changed to soup when too much dragger coffee had his stomach acting up. Then Sonny quit taking instant soup on board because the MSG made his fingertips tingle. After all his caution over what he fixed himself in the galley, she blew right out of the water.

Rennie was surprised to discover that she couldn’t tell if the boat she watched was coming in or going out. She rubbed her thumbs into her eyes and watched again. The boat seemed to waver, drifting above, then below the horizon line. Her eyes were acting funny. When Rennie used to watch a boat come in, she could almost always identify its crew, and she could see it in their faces if the trip had been worth it or not.

She pressed the glasses against her eyes until the bridge of her nose started to ache. The boat started to hopscotch across the water. She didn’t know if she was losing her mind or just losing her vision. She shuffled back to her bed across the room, hardly making headway. She shoved one foot ahead of the other, afraid to lift her feet from the floor. Normal ambulation had become precarious. The floor shifted like a porch glider. She got back into bed and pulled the sheet over her knees. Rennie started to recognize that the transition wasn’t going to be an easy thing, after all.

At one o’clock, Willis brought her a bowl of cream of chicken soup with a dollop of sherry. She was grateful for the mild chicken scent, which transformed the room. He sat beside her and made sure she swallowed it all. Willis looked splattered with tar and she asked him if he’d been riding the roller again, or did they have him raking.

“Rennie, I don’t have that job anymore. Remember? I’m driving at WASTEC now.”

“You’re not tarring roads?”

“A long time ago. I didn’t much like it.”

“That’s right. Tar has a bad smell.” She seemed to be thinking hard. Perhaps she was imagining the acrid scent of tar when she sat up straight in bed and projectile-vomited. Her chicken soup laced with sherry shot across the covers. Willis stood up and looked at what had happened. It was one of the first times anything like this had occurred in his presence and it took him a minute to act. Rennie flopped back against the pillow and groaned. Willis collected her feather comforter where the vomit had pooled. He took the quilt into the bathroom and put it in the bathtub. He didn’t know if he should wash it or if it should be saved for the dry cleaner. He made a final decision and ran the shower over it, then he shook it out and took it to the hall window. He pushed it through the window and shut the sash on its tail. It luffed on the wind like a huge, swollen sail. He went back into the bathroom and moistened a washcloth and took it back to Rennie. She was lying on her side, her knees drawn up, her arms around her ankles. He touched the washcloth to either side of her mouth. She had vomited with such force, her lips weren’t even soiled.

“I’m having a little bit of pain,” she told him.

“I’ll get a doctor for you. Who do you want me to call? Do you want to go the hospital?”

“None of the above,” she said.

“What doctor do you want?”

“Ask me tomorrow. Maybe that suicide doctor.”

Willis said, “Rennie, please don’t joke.”

“That suicide doctor? I think he’s a scream.”

“How about your morphine?”

“Now, tell me, if I’m pudding from the waist up for very long, who’s going to watch this place?”

“What needs watching?”

Rennie sighed and pulled herself up on her elbow. “Do me a favor. Pick up my binocs and see what’s out there. I think it was the
Christy and Roland.
She’s worse for wear, but I was glad to see her. Look about two o’clock, west of Elbow.”

Willis went to the window and twisted the binoculars. He told her, “Flat calm. Flat as a plate. Everyone’s out. Lots of privateers seeing what they can do. Must be mackerel, slews of tinkers this time of year.”

“The
Christy and Roland
?”

“She’s gone in,” Willis told her. He knew that the
Christy and Roland
hadn’t been launched for at least five seasons or more.

Rennie said, “That was my hunch. She was going in.” She dropped back against the pillow.

The room smelled unpleasant and Willis lifted the window and propped a book under the sash.

“Hey, that’s my book. You’ll break its spine,” Rennie told him.

“Are you reading this book? Who’s going to read it?” “Don’t be so rude,” she said.

“Well, I’m not going to read it,” he said. His feelings were jangled. He felt his eyes burn. He cupped his hands over the bridge of his nose and secretly dabbed his eyes. He looked back at her, over his glistening fingertips.