Where the Stars Still Shine (24 page)

The bikini is pretty basic—blue-and-white gingham checked with pale-green ties—but Kat declared it The One. The way Alex is looking at me now makes me wonder if she wasn’t right. “Happy now?”

“Absolutely.” His curls bobble as he nods. He leans forward to kiss me again and I come away with a rash of
goose bumps, and I’m not sure if they’re from the cool breeze sweeping in from the gulf or his hands on my bare hips.

“The water temperature is about seventy-five, which is fine for splashing around in shallow water at the beach, but it gets cold when you’re in the water for an extended period of time, so this will help keep you warm.” He hands me a wet suit, but instead of being the full-body style the divers are wearing, it has short sleeves and thigh-length legs. “You do know how to swim, right?”

Mom taught me one summer at a lake in Indiana, and there was a lifeguard at the community pool in Michigan who let me in free so he could stare at my chest. Not that Alex needs to know about that. “Yep.”

We put on the suits at the truck and carry the rest of our gear down to the water. We leave the dive bags, beach towels, and cooler far enough up in the sand to keep them from being washed away. The borrowed boots are the right size for me, and once I have them on, we move out into waist-deep water to put on our fins. Tiny streams of cold trickle up my thighs, taking my breath away, and I have to stop to let the water in my suit warm up.

“Oh my God, how do you do this every day?”

“This is a picnic compared to what I do.” He puts on his fins, and I watch and do the same. “There are a lot of
mornings I’d rather stay in my warm bunk than jump into water this cold and then spend hours walking along the bottom of the gulf, most of the time against the current, cutting sponges off the sea floor. It’s hard work, but more than that, it’s boring and lonely. But calling in sick doesn’t pay the bills, and you’ve seen what happens when the harvest isn’t enough.”

“I’m sorry.”

The tilt at the corner of his mouth absorbs my apology. “Warm enough yet?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Now take your mask and spit in it.”

“Seriously? That’s a real thing?”

“It helps keep it from fogging up.” Alex spits in his own mask, smears the saliva around the lens, and then rinses it in the water. “And before you ask, I have no idea why it works. It just does.”

I do the spit-smear-rinse technique, then peer at him through the lens. He looks exactly the same. “How will I know if it worked?”

“If your mask starts fogging up, it didn’t work,” he says. “Then surface and do it again.”

“Now what?”

Alex positions his mask on his face. The strap mats down his curls where it circles around his head. He shrugs. “Swim.”

“But—”

He takes my mask and eases it down over my head, being careful not to tug my hair. When it’s centered on my face, he moves his hands away. “Does it feel okay?”

“How would I know?”

“It would feel loose here”—he gestures toward the sides near his temples—“or the strap might feel too tight around your head.”

“I think it’s good.”

He holds the U-shaped end of the snorkel out where I can see it. “So now all you do is put this end in your mouth and use it to breathe while you swim.”

I lift my legs and put my face in the water. The world goes green and quiet, except for the sound of my own breathing. At first I breathe too fast, as if I’m somehow going to run out of air, even though the snorkel connects me to the world’s supply. In shallower water, the sand is dotted with puffy brown sand dollars that look nothing like the bleached white ones we sell in the shop. Tiny minnows hover and dart just above the bottom, and prehistoric-looking horseshoe crabs bulldoze tracks in the sand. For yards, the only change to the landscape is the addition of larger fish and coral fans that look like lone trees in an underwater desert.

Then we reach the Spanish Rocks.

The reef is covered in green and red algae, and corals of white and yellow and even orange. The water around the reef is teeming with silver-striped fish, flashing in the muted sunlight and moving together as if they’re dancing to their own silent song. It feels as if the world has gotten so much bigger and I start to understand—if even just a little—why Alex doesn’t want to be confined to one small part of it.

“Oh my God,” I say into my mouthpiece, but the words funnel up through the snorkel and are lost to the sky above me. I stretch my arm out toward the fish, but the water is deceptively deep and I’m disappointed they’re not close enough to touch.

I lift my head out of the water and pull the snorkel away to catch my breath. Alex surfaces beside me as I push the mask up onto my forehead.

“Everything okay?”

I nod. “It’s just—this is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. It’s—there are so many fish and it looks like they’re right
there
—” I know I’m babbling, but I’m so overwhelmed that I can’t stop. “—and I could touch them, but they’re too far away. And it’s so beautiful. I want to get closer. I want to see it all.”

His smile is so wide and through his mask his eyes are half-moons of happiness. “Diving is even better.”

“I want to do that.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever converted anyone that fast before.” Alex laughs as he slides his mask up and kisses me with saltwater lips. And this time it’s not my imagination, because mine are saltwatery, too. “Lucky for you, I happen to know a guy who can teach you.”

“Thank you for bringing me.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” He positions his mask over his eyes again. “We’re just getting started.”

I move my own mask back into place and lower my face into the water again. We swim together over the colorful reef, silently pointing out brown stingrays as they ruffle along the bottom, wings dancing like a dress on a clothesline. Alex dives down and brings back a crab that tucks itself up into the shell on its back, refusing to come out until it’s returned to its home beneath one of the ledges. On his next trip to the bottom, he returns with a sand dollar.

“Do you want to keep it?” he asks, when we break the surface.

I shake my head as I hand it back. I don’t tell him that I won’t need any souvenirs to remember this trip. “It might have a family that would miss it.”

He laughs. “You might be right.”

The sand dollar tumbles end over end through the water until it lands on the sand, and we continue along the reef.

Alex catches my arm and points at a brown shark moving at a lazy pace near the bottom. He submerges and swims toward the fish and I feel my heart slide up into my throat. Although the fact that Alex is swimming after it should be reassuring, I’ve never seen a shark anywhere but on television. It jets away, and when Alex comes up from the bottom, we surface again.

“How do you do that?” I ask.

“Do what?”

“Swim down like that.”

“You just hold your breath as if you’re in a swimming pool,” he says. “It’s exactly the same.”

“I’m afraid I’ll accidentally take a breath through the snorkel and drown myself.”

“It’s pretty unlikely,” he says. “When you’ve already got lungs full of air, there’s not really room for more.”

“I never thought about it like that.”

“Maybe start slow,” he suggests. “Draw in a breath, hold it, and just swim down until your snorkel is completely submerged.”

I try it once, then again, and it is exactly like holding your breath in a swimming pool. On my third attempt, Alex takes a picture of me underwater, my hair fanning out around me like sea grass.

“See?” he says. “Easy. Next time try to go a little
deeper, until you’re able to gauge how long you can stay down. And with practice you’ll be able to stay down longer.”

We snorkel until the sun is high and warms my back through the neoprene skin, and I ache in places I never knew I had muscles. The swim back to the shore is easier with the waves pushing us from behind, but by the time we reach water shallow enough to stand, I’m trembling from exertion. Alex removes his mask and fins and walks the rest of the way to shore, shaking his head like a wet dog. Water sprays out in every direction as his curls spring back to life. I swim until my belly scrapes the sand, then flop on my back, letting the waves lap at my legs.

Alex laughs as he brings me a bottle of water from the cooler. “You look like a mermaid.”

“A tired mermaid.” The first sip is brackish from the salt on my lips, but the next is cold and clear, and I can almost feel it moving through my veins. “How do you say ‘mermaid’ in Greek?”

“
Gorgóna
. Or maybe, for you,
seirína
would be better.” I’ve never heard him speak the language before. “
Deleázontas tous naftikoús stin katadíki tous
.” The words flow easily, warmly. I love how it sounds.

“What does that mean?”

“Luring sailors to their doom.” He sits down on the
sand beside me. “And then, in Greek mythology, there are
nýmfes
.”

“Nymphs.”

“Right.” He nods. “But they are more like sea goddesses.”

“I think I like the idea of being a sea goddess rather than someone who lures sailors to their doom,” I say.

“I can see that about you.” He shoulder-bumps me. His skin is warm against mine. “You don’t strike me as a vengeful mermaid.”

“Could I lure you into taking me to lunch?”

Alex laughs. “
Den tha íthela na apogoitéfso tin theá
.”

“And what does
that
mean?”

“Wouldn’t want to disappoint the goddess.” He ignores the sand on my skin as he kisses my temple, then moves into the water at my feet and removes my fins. “One of your more wrathful family members might try to smite me.” Alex lifts my leg and kisses the inside of my knee. Heat flashes through me like summer lightning. Remembering. He grins and I know we’re remembering the same thing.

“I’d never let anyone smite you,” I say.

He winks at me as he peels off my boots and helps me to my feet. “If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard
that
.”

“And here I thought I was your first mermaid.”

“Goddess,” he says. “You are my first goddess.”

As I follow him up the sand to the truck, warmth rises up in my chest. It’s silly, I know. Just a joke. But I kind of like the idea of being someone’s goddess.

My shirt doubles as a cover-up, and my hair is knotted and thick with salt, but I’m not out of place among the sandy feet and dripping swimsuits on the patio of the beachfront snack bar. We order baskets of fried clams and shrimp at a pass-through window, and eat them at a plastic picnic table beside a group of tourists speaking a language neither of us can identify. Alex squirts ketchup on his french fries, oblivious to the trio of teenage girls who stare at him as they walk past. His bare foot rests lightly on top of mine beneath the table and he offers me a fried shrimp in exchange for one of my bigger clam strips. When we finish lunch, we return the borrowed gear to Dave at the dive shop and head back toward Tarpon Springs.

The combination of fried food, fresh air, and
snorkeling takes its toll on me before we’re even through Bradenton, and I curl up on the bench seat to sleep, my head against Alex’s thigh.

I dream I’m a mermaid, my lower half a tail made of iri-descent blue and pale-green scales, washed up on a Florida beach. Around me, people are basking in the sunshine, playing Frisbee, and applying piña colada–scented sunscreen. I close my eyes, enjoying the kiss of the air and the warm sand beneath my back, until a shadow blots the sun. I open my eyes and Alex is standing over me with my old, familiar Hello Kitty nightgown in his hands. It’s only then that I’m aware that my top half is naked, so I pull the too-small nightgown over my head and squeeze my arms into the sleeves. Alex kneels down on the sand beside me and leans in to kiss me. His face morphs into Frank’s as the whiskers under his lower lip brush against my cheek, making me scream
.

I wake as the truck swings wildly off the road and skids to a halt on the shoulder. My heartbeat is wild, and although I’m almost certain it’s Alex behind the wheel, I don’t trust my own eyes. I’m pressed against the passenger door, as far away from him as I can be.

“Jesus Christ, Callie.” It’s Alex’s voice I hear as he throws the truck in park. “You just scared the shit out of me.”

My fingers scrabble for the door handle. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything,” he says. “I just put my hand on your cheek and you freaked out.”

I grab his hand and examine his palm. There’s a frayed callus at the base of one of his fingers, one that could easily feel like whiskers against a sleeping cheek. “I’m so sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize for having a nightmare.” He twists his wrist to hold my hand. The callus feels normal now. Familiar. Like Alex. “But you screamed as if you were terrified. What the hell was that about?”

“I need some water.”

I get out of the cab and take a bottle of water from the cooler. The label, wet from soaking in melting ice all day, disintegrates into tiny blue-and-white bits in my hand. Alex lowers the tailgate and sits, waiting patiently as I take a long drink. The steel of the tailgate is warm against the backs of my thighs as I slide up next to him—and tell him all about Frank.

Tears stream down my face as I talk, but it feels as if some of the poison inside me has been released. I don’t feel clean, exactly, but cleaner. Lighter. Alex has left the tailgate and is pacing a path in the gravel on the side of the road, his fist clenching and unclenching, as if he wants to hit something. Or someone.

“That bastard is so goddamn lucky I don’t know where he lives,” he says. “I’d slit his fucking throat with my dive knife and laugh all the way to prison.”

A tear-soaked laugh escapes me.

“That’s not meant to be funny,” Alex says.

“It’s not.” I wipe my face on my sleeve. “It’s just—I don’t know. In a weird way that makes me happy, because he said no one would believe me if I told.” Fresh tears fill my eyes. “And for so long I thought it was true.”

“I believe you,” he says. “And even though he has issues with me, I think Greg—”