Where Is Janice Gantry? (28 page)

We had our own private honeymoon habit of swimming naked in the warm shallow sea, and finding that buoyant incomparable love in the shallows whenever there was no surf. She would ask me solemnly if I thought there was very much danger of our toes becoming webbed.

That brings me to the best memory of all. It was a September night on LaCosta Key, a night of a full moon. She was curled beside me under the mosquito bar, but I could not sleep. There was enough of a west wind to keep the bugs away, so I slipped out quietly and walked down to the edge of the water.

I began to think of the
Sea Queen.
They had not yet given up looking for her at that time. I thought of her out there in the deeps. Maybe she had opened up enough so that the currents moved through her, so that Charity and Captain Stan Chase were at that moment doing an infinitely slow dance down there where the moonlight would never reach, taking a full five minutes for each bow, each random pirouette.

It struck me with horrid force that four of us could be down there, in that black minuet, touching, turning, spinning with a slow rotten grace.

It was a moment of nightmare so real that I could not believe in that moment that my Peggy existed. I turned to go back to her and saw her coming slowly down the slope of the beach toward me, reaching a sleepy hand in a woman’s habit to pat her shining hair, moving toward me in slender, silvered loveliness.

“I lost you,” she said in a grumpy sleepy voice. She stood close and peered up into my face. “
That
’s a strange expression.”

“I started thinking about … where we might have been
tonight, and what it’s like down there. And suddenly all this didn’t seem real.”

She put her arms strongly around me and held herself tightly against me. “Oh, darling, it’s real. It’s very real.”

“It just made me feel strange.”

“You come with me,” she said. She took my hand and we went back to the blankets and lifted the edge of the mosquito bar and crawled under.

“I’ll show you how real it is,” she said.

And she gave of herself with a completeness, a tenderness and a yearning strength that brought my world back into focus, back to sweet reality.

After it had ended, we shared one cigarette in that earthy and comforting silence which only love can create. She did not have to ask me what she had done for me. She knew.

After I reached out to stub the cigarette into the sand she sighed and took my hand and held it against her trim stomach and said, “Do you think he shows yet?”

“He won’t show for months.” (He was what you could call prominent when we had to testify at the murder trial in March.)

“Do you think he’ll have fins?”

“What!”

“Considering what you’ve put me through, mister, the little son of a gun will probably have gills, fins, scales and he’ll love worms.”

“You’ve carefully concealed your reluctance.”

She nestled her head against my throat and said comfortably, “I’ve hated every living minute of it. Mmmm. Seems as if every time I turn around, slosh, there I am flat on my back in the surf. Golly, I’m learning all the constellations, though. But in the daytime, I think you ought to give me a chance to put on my sunglasses. You know, darling, some women actually rub their faces with sandpaper as a beauty
treatment, and if sand helps, I ought to have the most beautiful …”

“Shut up and go to sleep. I love you.”

“Yes sir,” said my bride.

In a little while I was able to reach down and pull up the sheet without putting a hitch in her deep and regular breathing. I admired Orion’s belt for a little while and then slid down into sleep, grinning like a fool, thinking something about the longest way around being the shortest way home.

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.