Open Water (39 page)

Holly’s boss, Joseph Salvatore, arrived at the door. His eyes looked dark and switchy, his whole face showed the concern and discomfort of someone forced to use his authority. “You can’t be here,” he told Holly. She walked outside with him. He shook his head in two gentle movements, suggesting that he didn’t hold it against her but he believed she should know better. “This friend of yours in there—well, Munro Hopkins tells me he is in trouble.”

“Did that busybody call you?”

“He knows you work for me. This isn’t good for my business.”

“I know it looks bad,” she told him, “but his mother is dying. She’s almost passed on, can’t we wait?”

He told her, “Please, sweetheart, take them somewhere else.”

She lifted her chin to hide her hurt feelings. She didn’t understand why her old friend couldn’t see them through. She walked with her boss back to the office. She telephoned Jensen. He told her they could come over to Sycamore House if they didn’t mind the confusion and temporary furnishings. He and Sarojini were starting interior renovations and half the house was a shambles. He would rent them a room.

She thanked Jensen, ashamed of the relief which washed through her, head to foot, and over the wire. She hated to be indebted to her ex-husband and give Jensen the feel of it. When she told Willis where they were going, he stood up and told her, “Rennie’s not spending her last moments at that chicken ranch with your old Butane flame.”

“Well, we can’t stay here.”

Holly walked over to Rennie’s bed and picked up her hand. “Rennie? We have to play musical chairs again—Rennie?”

Rennie didn’t display a fleck of comprehension.

Willis walked over. “Holly’s not in charge. We don’t break camp, we’re not going anywhere.”

Rennie stared at the boarded window across the room.

Holly leaned over the pillow. Rennie’s eyes were wide open in an entirely different way, her pupils dime-size and flattened. Her mouth was slightly parted as if releasing a small puff of air, as if her last breath might have been a soap
bubble with a pithy caption, but her last word was what? They hadn’t paid attention.

“Willis,” Holly whispered. “This is it.”

Holly realized that “This is it” was something pregnant women said when they suffered their first contractions. They had not heard a peep from Rennie, no death rattle, no final round of coughing. Rennie had slipped free without an addendum of wasteful emotion. Willis kneeled beside his stepmother. He lifted her hand. He leaned over her body and rested his forehead against Rennie’s. His tangled bangs swept her face. His goodbye to her could not have been more straight forward than that, face-to-face, brow-to-brow, an exchange of some wordless essence. It was as if a pneumatic substance lingered in the air until Willis reabsorbed it.

The two of them, faces joined, reminded Holly of those “kissing fish.” Holly was surprised to find herself thinking of such an oddball thing, “kissing fish,” fish who drift for hours eye-to-eye, in love or aggression, she couldn’t recall which.

Willis shifted and sat up. He watched the body for a long time. Holly sat next to him. She was aware of Joseph Salvatore walking back and forth in front of the cottage, waiting for them to leave, yet he was showing some consideration about it. She went outside and told him the news. They would be getting out of the shack. He looked immediately relieved and he asked her to forgive him. It was a simple matter of protecting the business. “Holly. What are you going to do?” he said. “You shouldn’t get yourself in these situations, with the wrong people.”

“Give us a little more time,” she said.

W
illis washed Rennie’s face and hands with the moistened corner of a towel. Touching a lifeless face was an awakening. Life, its miracle element, was never clearly realized or taken into account until it was evacuated. Her flesh in its dull, impersonal frailty seemed almost an intrusion to his communion with Rennie’s disencumbered spirit.

“She needs some decent clothes,” he said.

Holly saw Rennie’s stained nightdress. “What funeral home are you using?”

Willis looked at her. His teeth were clacking in a new bout of convulsive arctic sensations. “I’m not using a mortuary. Christ, Holly, I’m taking her out myself.”

“Out where?”

“Out there,” he said.

She remembered the water the way it had looked when she stood outside with her boss. A tipping disc of shivering light, still quite aggravated from the passing storm. “You’re not kidding, are you?”

“How long have you known me? When did I kid around?”

“Just a couple times, I guess. I sure loved it.”

She had made him smile despite the circumstances, despite their proximity to an actual corpse.

He told her, “Maybe you won’t like me when I’m a straight arrow. When I’m the real me. ‘Just a-hunk a-hunk of burning love.’ What then?” He looked at her.

She liked it when they were two minds with one thought.

They left Rennie alone in the cottage. Holly drove the Toyota to Easton Pond. Willis went into the weeds and came back dragging the
Crouton.
The dinghy was snagged and Holly got out of the car to help him.

“It has only one oar,” she told him.

“I know that,” he said.

They put the little boat on the roof of the Toyota and Willis tied it down with bungee cord.

Willis said, “Drive on over to the house. Rennie has an oar in the garage.”

“You think we should go to the house?”

“If they haven’t fussed with us yet, they aren’t planning an ambush.”

Holly obeyed his instructions. She parked at the duplex and Willis walked over to the tiny garage. She left the Toyota idling, even if it was a giveaway. She almost wanted someone to stop her. She didn’t want Willis taking that tiny boat out on the water, with a corpse.

She had no trouble getting inside the house, the door was unlocked. The last of the rainwater was still pooled on the vinyl flooring in the kitchen. Holly saw how it caught the western sunlight streaming in the fanlight. It was funny how refracted light could affect her—best of all, the Fresnel. Holly liked the fact that boats far out on the water saw the same lighthouse beacon she could watch from the safety of her kitchen. One metronomic measure of white light repeated for the lost, the same deaf swirl for those at shore.

Holly went through Rennie’s closet, sliding the hangers
across and tugging the dresses off their dancing wire shoulders. She had been thinking of the temperature outside when she remembered that it didn’t matter to Rennie, the dress could be thin and flouncy, she wasn’t going to feel the bitter cold.

She picked out a floral midlength gown, something summery in a fine, silky fabric. She put the dress in an Almacs bag and went down to the car. She stopped at the mailbox and collected some letters before driving Willis and the
Crouton
back to Neptune’s.

There was a letter from Norfolk. Willis tore the letter down one side and blew into the envelope. He inserted his finger and pulled out the photograph of Wydette. A note told Willis that the picture had been found behind a box spring when a new recruit was setting up his bunk. Someone had been nice enough to send it on. Willis looked at the photograph of his young mother, younger than he was at that very minute. It didn’t have the force it once had. He flicked it onto the dashboard and Holly retrieved it. She looked at the exotic face. It was Willis through and through—ethereal, erotic, peppery.

Willis unloaded the boat from the roof of the car while Holly went into the shack with the dress. Holly didn’t wait for help and when Willis came in, Rennie was ready. The dress looked good; it had a high neckline with a ruffle collar. Willis stared at Rennie in her funeral outfit.

Willis told Holly, “That’s Wydette’s dress.”

“Are you sure? It was in Rennie’s closet.”

“That’s not Rennie’s dress.”

“Well, what’s the difference?”

“I can’t bury her in that. Wydette’s dress,” he said. He looked utterly confused, as if he couldn’t make a moral decision about it. He sat down holding his stomach.

She went over to him and tried to embrace him but he
was too hunched over. Tears were streaming down his face, and she couldn’t tell the nature of those tears. It might have been acute intestinal cramps. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing to comfort him.

“Rennie looks okay, though, doesn’t she?” Holly said.

He looked down at the body in the gauzy dress. “What the hell,” he said. He shrugged. Holly admired his sudden show of strength.

“Wait a minute,” he told Holly. “Do you want that ring?”

“Her wedding band?”

“It’s her first one. She always wore it. What good is it now?”

“That little ring?”

“Well it’s not exactly an anniversary diamond.”

He tried to twist the gold band from Rennie’s wedding finger. It wouldn’t come off.

His small use of force was upsetting to them both.

“I can’t take Rennie’s wedding ring,” Holly told him sternly.

“That’s good, because she doesn’t want you to have it. I guess she belongs to Bill Hopkins after all these years. Maybe just her little finger belongs to me.”

He walked into the bathroom and closed the door. He opened the taps. The pipes screeched.

Willis wanted to row out two miles, as far as the channel, and release Rennie’s body. “I can’t have her drifting into First Beach again,” he said as he showed Holly the Sears tire chains he had brought from the garage. He coiled them on the kitchen linoleum at Neptune’s. The ugly automotive accessories gave Holly an uncomfortable feeling.

“You’re putting those things on her?”

“What am I going to do?” he said. “I have to.”

“I think you can throw ashes in the water, but don’t you have to get a permit, don’t you have to be a certain number of miles out at sea to release a corpse?”

“Well, I’m not going very far in that six-foot Winterport. It’s still choppy.”

“What about your friend, Carl Smith. Doesn’t he have a boat? Maybe he can take you out.”

Willis said, “The
Tercel?
Fuck, she’s razor blades. Her engine’s fouled. That boat doesn’t run, all she does is float. Even that’s a temporary condition.”

“He must have a dinghy to get out to his boat, maybe it’s better than the
Crouton.
”

“Look, two things. He’s way over at Warwick Neck, and two, he’s a fucking scoundrel. Rennie wouldn’t want him at her bon voyage. We’re going in the
Crouton
, is that all right with you? You don’t have to come along.”

Holly didn’t think Willis could row all that way with his bad arm. She thought about love, its many tests. So far, she had failed each one. Her father had died before she could straighten things out. Her marriage to Jensen erupted in a humiliating local scandal. If she helped her lover bury his mother at sea, what couldn’t she conquer after that?