Open Water (28 page)

“Give me that book. I’m writing in it.”

He lifted the window sash and picked up the book. He thought she was teasing him, but when he opened the tissue paper pages he saw her large, looping script. He read a few lines:

“What is this? Limericks?”

“A little bit of everything. It’s my high school autograph book. I’ve been revising it.”

He flipped the pages. The passages were in various different inks and were signed by strangers.

He turned another page. He recognized Rennie’s script, a lopsided stanza, scrolling at a thirty-degree angle across the discolored paper.

Willis said, “I remember that one.”

“The Jumblies,” she said.

“This is your autograph book from high school?”

“It had lots of room, so I’ve been writing in it. These words have been coming into my head from everywhere. If I don’t write them, they get louder and louder.”

He looked hard at her. “You hear voices?”

“I think it’s my own voice, but it starts up whether I know it or not. Maybe I’m thinking out loud.”

“That’s right. That’s good. If you think of something, put it in here.” He handed her the autograph book.

“It’s really nothing,” she said, “some poems and nursery lyrics, but I was thinking it will need a title when I’m finished.”

Willis told her she should try to invent one. “How about this for the title:
Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.
”

Rennie blinked, shocked by his ability to ignore available evidence. “I don’t know. Maybe it should just stand on its own.”

“There you go,” he said.

She could see the pain she was causing him. He massaged his chin with the heel of his hand to erase some trembling nerves. Rennie realized that she had never seen Willis cry. Not one tear. Not even for Wydette. She felt moved by his blurry eyes, but like one of the two women before King Solomon, she didn’t want his tears even if they belonged to her.

Willis stayed near Rennie for the rest of the day and he didn’t invite Holly to come over. When Holly called him on the telephone he agreed to see her for only a half-hour. She watched him come out of the house, kicking the crushed shell ahead of his feet as he came across to the duplex. He lay down next to Holly in Holly’s bed, but he didn’t remove his boots.

She couldn’t hide her disappointment. “You’re a pill tonight,” she told him.

“Swallow me.”

“You’re poison,” she said.

“Take a sip.”

She thought it was love talk, but it wasn’t.

He was lying on his back with his arms crossed behind his head. He didn’t look happy. She tried to nibble his throat, but he pushed her chin away. Sometimes Willis seemed to invite sex and a second later not want it. Holly recognized his darty eyes and sheepish face; it was the morphine. Sex was a thinning penumbra around his busy world of fighting off pain. A little pleasure with Holly wasn’t worth scrimping on his medication. If his arm didn’t ache his head was always full of horrors. Holly wondered about morphine; where did it get its name? It sounded like a chorus girl—Doreen, Nadine, Morphine. The drug heroin, too—why the homonym for the female protagonist? These feminine names alone made Holly jealous when Willis had to choose between her and Miss Emma, which was, of course, morphine’s little nickname.

She didn’t force the issue; she knew Willis was worried about Rennie. After a few minutes, he walked back to the other house. Holly let him brood on his own. If Rennie was beginning the dying process, who was she to jump in? She told him, “If you need me.”

When Willis was gone, she got out of bed and wrapped the blanket around herself. She went out to the front room and turned on the portable television. She watched the Weather Channel. They predicted a nor’easter coming through in the next day or two. She listened to the Weather Channel until they gave the automated offshore buoy reports for Hudson Canyon, Cashe’s Ledge, and George’s Bank. She didn’t want to hear about the weather out in the middle of the ocean, it gave her a queasy feeling to imagine the seas building. She flipped the channel and found “The Movie Loft.” A picture was just starting. The familiar RKO radio tower twirled slowly at the crest of the globe; its signal
flashed tiny lightning bolts. It didn’t matter which film came after, Holly loved that radio tower. Its dramatic perch at the top of a desolate world seemed eerie and thrilling at the start of every RKO picture.

She thought she heard Willis return, but it wasn’t anybody. Five minutes passed and she heard it again. Footsteps on the front porch, the hollow thud of someone walking over the planking. She felt her scalp tighten; the roots of her hair ached where the follicles contracted. Someone was moving around outside the duplex. She telephoned over to Willis’s house. He didn’t pick up. She dialed again. The same hollow jangle. She turned on all the lights and went back to her bedroom. She couldn’t tell if it was more than one person, but she heard the clamshells chatter under a sneaky procession. She didn’t know why Willis didn’t answer the phone, maybe the ringer was turned off for Rennie’s sake. She would ask about it in the morning. She listened for footsteps but the wind had picked up, sucking the screens and whistling around the corner eaves. Perhaps the noises she had heard had not been real. Holly hated how fear was sometimes manifested in a presence: a shrub’s dark profile, footfalls audible in the rain, shadows shifting across the windows like someone’s loose jacket and slacks.

S
aturday morning, Holly was reheating a pan of coffee. There was a tall ship out on the water. She watched its white sails stiffen like a bullet bra, the wind corseted in its tight sheets and rigging. She recognized the ship. It was the
Eagle
, a Coast Guard training vessel from New London, but that knowledge stole its romance only slightly. It was heading back before the squall. She sat at the kitchen table and rested her coffee mug. She was surprised to see a tiny book centered on the built-in lazy Susan. Where the book had come from, she didn’t have a clue. She picked up the miniature book and read the title,
The Red Pony.
She thumbed its pages; the print was almost too small to read, but she found a highlighted passage. Bright yellow ink exaggerated the miniature text, but she couldn’t decipher it. She went into the next room to find her sewing box. She used the dime-size magnifying disc on a needle-threader and she read the highlighted passage. It was a place in the book where a ranch hand cuts an airhole in a horse’s throat. She felt a sudden chill roll across her shoulders and down the small of her back. Who had underlined this graphic paragraph and placed the book on her table? She remembered that she had wiped the lazy Susan clean with a dishrag just the night before.

She walked into the front room where the little TV rested on a straight-back chair. She pulled the knob and waited for the picture. It was
Sunrise Semester.
A car drove into the lane. Holly saw it was Munro Hopkins driving a Vista Cruiser station wagon. A woman sat in the seat beside him. Holly thought she must be Munro’s wife. It must be her Vista Cruiser that Munro was driving. Holly watched them get out of the car and take a moment to look out at the sea. They stared at First Beach for a minute, but it didn’t seem to transport them as it always did Holly. They turned around and started walking into Rennie’s place. Munro’s wife was attractive; she had a perfect frost, her blond strands expertly integrated with chestnut waves. A frost such as that took a lot of time and effort at the beauty salon; they have to tug individual clumps of hair through a tin-foil colander.

Holly pulled on her jeans in such a hurry, her toenail snagged the tight cuff and she felt it split away from the cuticle. She sat down on the bed and looked at the tiny edge of blood framing her big toenail. It wasn’t serious and she limped to the closet to find her shoes. Holly wanted to meet Munro’s wife. She might be a key, she might be the seed of good or evil that inspired her husband’s quest to remove Rennie from her Land’s End refuge.

Dressed in her sweatshirt and jeans, Holly walked right into Rennie’s kitchen. She acted as if she was there out of habit; she belonged there. She heard Munro’s wife calling instructions from upstairs. Munro was in the front parlor dialing the telephone.

Holly feigned a businesslike importance and started emptying dishes from the kitchen drainer, trying to hear what Munro was saying.

“—probably in the next half-hour. That’s terrific. We appreciate it,” Munro spoke into the telephone.

Holly went over to stand beside Munro. “You’re taking Rennie to Château-sur-Mer?”

“Carole and I think it’s best.”

“Where’s Willis?”

Munro sliced his fountain pen through the air in an emphatic Z. The swooping Z translated into: Who knows? Who cares? He returned to his telephone conversation.

“Willis!” Holly called through the house. Perhaps he was sleeping, but she knew he wasn’t around.

Munro was finished on the telephone.

“You haven’t seen Willis?” Holly said.

“He’s probably down at the Needle Exchange. Never mind about him.”

Holly ran up the staircase and found Rennie sitting up in bed, her legs dangling over the side. Carole was trying to tug a sweater onto Rennie’s arm. Rennie resisted or she was just too weak to assist, and the woman was finding it hard to dress such a floppy doll. “Give me a hand, will you?” Carole asked Holly.

“Rennie, you don’t have to leave this house,” Holly said.

“Who do you think you are?” Carole said.

“Have you got the legal papers to haul her off like this?”

The woman ignored Holly and finished buttoning Rennie’s sweater although one arm still dangled.

Rennie’s eyes looked blank. She was drugged into a stupor.

Holly said, “What did you do to her?”

“That’s what we’re concerned about. She’s self-medicated, who knows how many of these things she’s been using.”

Holly saw the milk glass candy bowl on Rennie’s bedside table. The bowl held several opened cards of morphine
suppositories along with her Coffee Nips and lemon balls. Next to the bowl, a pyramid of wrappers, twists of colored foil ripped in half, resembled exotic fishing lures.

“She might be trying to kill herself with these,” Carole said.

Holly looked at Rennie’s face. Rennie returned the look. Or did she? There wasn’t a twinkle coming or going.

Holly kneeled beside the bed and took Rennie’s hands. Her hands were warm. Holly gently pinched Rennie’s cheeks; her face seemed slightly puffy. “Are you okay, Rennie? Are you all right?”

Rennie mumbled a sentence, but it didn’t sound right. It sounded like the five vowels in a creaky sequence, “A, E, I, O, U.”

“Rennie, it’s me.”

Carole said, “Maybe the cancer’s hit her brain.”

“Shit,” Holly said. She didn’t like Carole’s indifferent tone.

“Or, maybe she’s just doped up. Like that Willis. She’s high,” Carole said.

Rennie shifted her posture when she heard about Willis. She brightened, perhaps at the sound of his name. Rennie told Carole, “High as a churchmouse in the communion cup.”

Carole was alarmed to hear Rennie’s voice, but Holly sat down beside Rennie and fingered the collar on her nightgown. She squeezed her shoulder.

Carole told Holly, “Don’t squeeze her so hard.”

Rennie said, “Who says so?”

“Well, dear, your bones are brittle, aren’t they?” Carole fingered the foil wrappers and let them sift onto the floor.