Chapter 35
CAMILLE
I sat on the low stool by the quiet room, still counting breaths. What else could I do?
“One,” I said into the soft air, and the calf’s ribs lifted obediently under my palm as if we were working this problem together. “Two.” The pump thrummed like a tired heart with good intentions. “Three.”
Behind me, Papa leaned his shoulder to the doorjamb.
“Ma fille,” he said again, and the sound of it put water in my eyes faster than any siren could.
“I’m fine,” I lied … again.
He nodded like we were discussing weather. “You will be,” he said. “Even if he does not come back.”
I turned then. The words hit something raw and shining in me and I didn’t want to be noble about it. “Don’t say that,” I said. It came out quieter than I felt. “Please.”
He didn’t apologize.
“Camille,” he said, almost gently, “you are made of other things than loss. I have watched you breathe life into animals that were already halfway to the other side. You can survive this. You will survive this.”
I shook my head and felt my braid thump my back like a stubborn metronome. “I don’t want to survive it,” I said. “I want him.”
Papa’s mouth softened at the edges. I could see him weighing the impulse to tell me not to go fast against the part of him that had been twenty-two with a chest full of certainty about a dark-eyed girl at a party.
“It’s fast,” he said.
“It is,” I agreed, and the relief of saying it let my breath come easier. “And I don’t care. I know what I know. It’s fast, Papa, but it’s true.”
I felt my mouth tilt into a smile that wasn’t pretty.
“If he walks through that door,” I said, and the door was the whole world all of a sudden, “I’m done leaving Charleston.
I’m not a contract anymore. I’m not a fill-the-gap-and-go.
I want a life, ici. Near you and Mama. I want dinners where you pretend not to cry when little feet run down your hallway.
I want a porch that remembers our coffee cups.
I want a dog that sheds on your truck seat and you don’t complain.
I want kids who know your whistle and my tide charts and the difference between a good wave and a bad one. ”
I swallowed. The calf breathed. “I want him in that picture,” I said. “All the way in.”
Papa’s eyes did that glassy thing that only happens to him when he listens to Louis Armstrong or when Mama walks into a room. He cleared his throat and tried for gruffness and missed. “Bon,” he said. “Alors. We will buy another chair.”
I huffed a laugh that would have broken if the calf hadn’t taken a perfect little breath right then like she was keeping time for me. “You’ll need more than a chair,” I said. “You’ll need fencing.”
“Fencing?” He pretended scandal. “My fence is perfect.”
“Your fence is a suggestion,” I said. “Our children will not be.”
“Nos petits-enfants,” he corrected softly, and the words came into the room like a flock of bright birds I did not dare reach for.
“We will teach them to pull a net and to listen to a story and to hold a wrench the way my father taught me. We will show them the river. We will tell them their mother is braver than most men I have met.”
I pressed my mouth to the calf’s flank because I could not survive looking at him and hearing that at the same time. “Stop,” I said into warm skin. “I will break.”
He came in then—one step, two. “If he does not return,” he began again, because he is a man who closes circles, “you will still have the chair, the fence, the river. And?—”
“And I will have you,” I said, because I’m not cruel. “And Mama. And my work.” I let the list stand in the air like scaffolding. It wobbled. “But I don’t want to practice surviving. I am tired of being good at it.”
Papa’s face turned toward the floor for a heartbeat as if he were letting the room admire the top of his head.
When he looked up, there was a memory on his mouth.
“When your mother was carrying you,” he said, “she would stand at the sink and make a small sound when you kicked. Not pain. Wonder. Every time. Like the world had surprised her again by doing the right thing.”
I swallowed. “Papa.”
“That is the sound you made three days ago when this man said your name. Même chose.” He shrugged, small. “It is not fast. It is simply the correct thing.”
I laughed, ugly and grateful. “You would have hated him if he had been wrong for me.”
“I would have,” he said. “And I do not.”
The door to the aisle banged open before I could answer. McGuire came fast, hairline damp, uniform creased into importance. The faces behind her—two sailors I didn’t know—had the wary look of men who expected to be told to stand somewhere and take the weight of someone else’s moment.
“Doctor,” she said, and then, to her credit, she didn’t make a speech.
“Your Marine is okay,” she told me, like a human being who has watched other human beings fall apart and has learned to give the one sentence that matters first. “He’s on a Coast Guard chopper. He’ll be through those doors any minute.”
I stood up too fast and the room tilted, then righted. The sound I made could have been a laugh or a sob and was probably both. Papa’s hand found the back of my shoulder for exactly two heartbeats and then left me to do this alone.
McGuire kept talking, details stacked like sandbags. “We don’t fully understand what the platform was emitting,” she said. “Low-frequency interference, possibly broadband harmonic content. Whatever it was, it spiked again during the operation. We saw what looks like at least one more pulse.”
My stomach dropped like an elevator with a cut cable. “So there may be more strandings,” I said, already hating my own calm.
“There might,” she said. She didn’t pretend otherwise. “But that was the last pulse. It’s done.” A beat. “It won’t happen again.”
I had the absurd urge to hug her.
“Okay,” I said, because that word is a raft when you can’t find land. “Okay.”
“You’ll have time with him here,” McGuire went on, already sliding into the next problem because that is a kindness, too. “We can chat later, if you’d like. Salvage is underway. For now—he’s coming.”
I heard the door to the front slam the way a good wind slams it. Boots. A voice in the outer hall I would have known underwater.
“Camille?”
I didn’t run. Running would have broken the spell. I walked fast, like a woman who has decided to meet her life with her spine straight.
The aisle seemed three miles long and half a step wide. Tamika was at the end of it, mouth open, hand over her heart. Miguel stood hip-deep in the pen and let go of the sling line to clap once, wet, loud. Becca cried with her whole face and then tried to wipe it away and made a mess of mascara.
My Marine filled the doorway like he was made for it. Wet hair. Wetsuit peeled to his hips, a blanket thrown over his shoulders. A bruise along his jawbone like a fingerprint of the sea. Eyes hunting me and then finding me and then not leaving me ever again, if I had anything to say about it.
I didn’t think. My body knew the math and solved it. I crossed the last yards and put my hands on his face like it belonged to me, and he said my name exactly right and then again, like he’d been bargaining with the dark using that word.
“I’m here,” he said, breathless, laughing, wrecked. “I’m here.”
“You’re late,” I said, and then I was kissing him, salt and metal, and the room clapped again because people like to be present when the world does the decent thing.
He pulled back enough to get breath and looked at me like he was learning my face for the first time all over again. His hands were shaking—he didn’t try to hide it. He tucked one against my cheek as if he could steady himself on my bones.
“The ocean and I …” He swallowed, and there was Lily in the motion—her ghost, her gift, the way his eyes go soft and break you for him. “We have a complicated thing. It took everything from me and then it gave me you.” He laughed once, helpless. “It let me out tonight. I know what that means.”
“Say it,” I said, because I wanted to hear him build a bridge out loud and walk me over it.
“It really is my turn,” he said, the words coming simple and all at once. “Lily told me and I’m not arguing with a child who knows better than I do. I’m living. I want to do that with you.”
My mouth made a sob out of a laugh again. He wiped it with his thumb, gentle, and then let his hand drop.
He didn’t kneel. He just stood there, blanket sliding, rivulets of water finding collarbone and falling, and placed the full weight of his battered, beautiful certainty into the air between us.
“Camille Allard,” he said, saying my last name like a vow. “Will you marry me?”
Somewhere in the doorway, a sailor made a sound he’d make later fun of himself for.
Tamika whispered oh, hell yes like she was trying not to get in trouble for ruining the moment.
Becca put her fist to her mouth. Miguel said ay in a way that meant about five good things.
McGuire looked at the ceiling like a woman remembering a better day and letting herself smile, anyway.
My father did not move for a long second. Then he made the tiniest of exhalations.
“Yes,” I said, obviously, because there was not a bone in me that didn’t already belong to the yes. “Yes.”
I said it again because sometimes you have to say a thing twice to hear it settle into the rafters. He cried then, wet and unwilling, and I did, too, and we made a small spectacle in a room that has seen worse.
Papa stepped forward, quiet, like a man approaching a wild animal with the right kind of respect.
He put his hand on Jacob’s shoulder, then both hands on both of us, and said in a voice I had only ever heard when he looked at my mother while she was sleeping, “Je ne peux pas attendre de marcher ma fille jusqu’à l’autel. ”
“I can’t wait to walk my girl down the aisle,” he translated himself.
Jacob nodded, eyes bright, undone in the good way. “Yes, sir,” he said, because Marines and fathers share certain dialects. “I would be honored.”
Papa squeezed once and then let us be a pair again. He went to the doorway and put his palm against the jamb.
“You don’t even have a ring,” I told Jacob, teasing, breath finally behaving again.
“I’ll get the ring tomorrow. Today I have you,” he said, shameless.
“Correct,” I said, and then, because I am who I am, I added, “We have strandings to brace for. One more wave, Leanne says. And then we fix what they broke.”
He sobered, nodded, pressed his forehead to mine like we were matching prayers. “We’ll hold the line,” he said. “You and me. Your crew. My—” He stopped and then tried again. “Our people.”
McGuire cleared her throat, professional even with damp eyes. “We’ll keep the gear out of your pens,” she said to me, back on job. “If you see anything—hear anything?—”
“You’ll be my first call,” I said, and meant it, even if trust still scraped on the way out.
The little Kogia took a breath then—bless her—and the room turned toward it like she’d decided to be the minister.
The bottlenose in the big pen exhaled a wet sigh that sounded like yes to me.
We all laughed because we were exhausted and saved and because animals do that—they see you and agree before you realize you’ve asked.
Jacob pressed his mouth to mine once more. He tasted like salt and relief and the beginning of a life I had already planned—my porch with the swing, my parents’ table, a child’s laugh bouncing down a hallway.
“Go get warm,” I told him, cupping his jaw and feeling the scrape of stubble like a promise. “There are towels in my office. In the bottom drawer.”
He kissed Papa’s cheek—my great big dangerous man kissed my father’s cheek, and I watched my father pretend not to become a soft miracle right there. Then Jacob went with a petty officer who looked like he wanted to tell his grandchildren about this night.
I leaned back against the doorway of the quiet room and let it all run through me—the fear, the relief, the ugly, the bright—until what was left was the thing I know how to hold: breath.
“One,” I said, and the calf answered. “Two,” and somewhere outside a helo thumped the sky like a big heart. “Three,” and in my mind a little girl with sea-salt hair poked her father in the chest and told him to live, and he listened, and he chose me, and I chose him back.