Chapter 5 #2
Underfoot, waves slap the dock, wooden planks warped and curved.
Shells and algae cling to pilings, ashen and still.
Wind bends off the water, and Cece shivers, cursing her insistence on wearing a pair of jean shorts and abandoning all practicality for the feeling of Morgan’s eyes on her legs.
By the time they board the imposing white powerboat, Cece’s teeth are chattering, and she does her best to smile while Morgan unties knots and tosses buoys.
He checks the outboard motors before pressing the ignition button, purple diesel fumes gurgling upward.
After throttling up, he bends down and digs through his backpack, moving invisible objects with ease.
“Here we go,” he says, and tosses Cece a pair of sweatpants.
“You might wanna throw these on, at least until the sun comes out.”
If she weren’t still waking up, Cece might have blushed, feigned ignorance, but for now she’s just grateful to be warm as she slips on the sweats.
The boat cuts a V down the Thames, sending ripples across the placid water.
Under the two steel truss bridges, I-95 rumbles overhead, steady and deafening.
The current swirls, turning back on itself and around the concrete piers to their right and left.
Morgan guides the boat with equal parts caution and confidence.
He knows these waters, where the river runs deep and the shallows rise up without warning.
Ahead, the sun hits the first Cross Sound Ferry departing New London, lighting it up like a polished cumulus.
Out into the Sound, past the lighthouse, Morgan opens up the throttle, the twin motors roaring to life.
With the wind in their ears, it’s impossible to talk, and Cece’s happy just to sit on the white leather seats in the stern, sun on her face, while Morgan takes them southwest, following the coastline.
On the port side, Long Island, slender and green, slips in and out of view.
An hour later, they drop anchor near Duck Island. Cece admires the flocks of great egrets nesting among the dark, junglelike foliage. With their slender necks and bright yellow beaks, there’s something prehistoric about the birds.
Morgan emerges from the hold wearing only his bathing suit and black flip-flops. “How about a swim?”
Cece turns away and looks intently at the water.
Nothing sounds better to Cece, which surprises her.
She can count on her hands the number of times she’s gone swimming since Bucknell.
She’s kept her promise, her petty revenge: never to dip so much as a toe in a pool again, but the ocean is different, dark, and endless, no lanes, no colored floats bobbing in uniformity.
Diving off the back of the boat, Morgan’s the first one in, his body surprisingly lithe and elegant as it knifes into the water.
For a moment he doesn’t come up, the water going placid and smooth.
Cece watches for air bubbles, strains to see into the murk, her chest suddenly tight, breath frantic.
Then he emerges, shoulders breaking the surface, thick black hair plastered to his skull, and Cece finds she’s relieved, which makes her feel foolish and flustered.
Before Morgan can recognize the look on her face, Cece crouches and launches from the deck, arms out in front, one hand over the other, chin tucked to her chest, hips high, like she’s done a million times.
The water is colder than Cece expected, and for a moment, gliding under the surface, eyes scrunched shut, it takes her breath away.
Then she’s emerging, everything sharp and bright.
They swim, tread water, do laps around the boat, dive under and come up on the other side.
Cece stretches herself, breaststrokes long and sweeping, legs thrumming.
Morgan spouts water at her, laughing as he crawls away.
The water tastes salty and good in Cece’s mouth, and for a moment, with the boat bobbing blissfully beside her, the sun cleaving up into the sky, she is present.
Lunch is egg salad sandwiches on whole wheat with a cucumber dill salad and potato chips, washed down with seltzers. They sit in the stern wrapped in beach towels, sunglasses shading their eyes.
“You swim well,” Morgan says, backhanding some mayonnaise from his mouth.
Cece nods and squints.
“Like, really well. I was practically doggy-paddling next to you.”
“I swam in college,” Cece says.
“I’m guessing that’s how you got those?” Morgan says.
Cece pulls the towel over her shoulders to hide the purple-hued scars in the shape of boomerangs.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to…Sometimes I talk without thinking.”
“It’s okay,” Cece assures Morgan because it is. She doesn’t mind how the scars look; she just doesn’t like being reminded of that life.
Morgan is standing and hiking up his trunks to reveal a gruesome burn scar on his thigh, the skin—pink and yellow—cratered and pocked. It takes all of Cece’s self-control not to gasp. From above, Morgan only grins. “Now we’re even.”
The logic isn’t entirely flawless, but Cece has to admit she feels better. Imperfect and damaged, the both of them. “How’d you get that?”
Morgan licks egg salad from his thumb. “Iraq. Basra, to be more specific. Humvee we were riding in got hit. We did okay, though. Everyone walked away.”
Cece still remembers the night the country went to war: missile strikes on television, the night vision footage grainy and green, sporadic explosions turning the screen a sickly yellow.
The chyron scrolling in patriotic reds, whites, and blues: Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Everyone knew there weren’t weapons of mass destruction, and yet, somehow, the country had still gone to war.
She’d participated in a high-school-wide protest.
Cece’s never met anyone who’s served in the military. Should she thank him for his service? For protecting her freedoms? She remembers when everyone in her town tied yellow ribbons around trees to support the troops.
“But enough of that,” Morgan says, seeming to sense a shift in the mood. “Now that we’ve both revealed our deformities, we can enjoy each other’s company.”
Cece snorts with laughter, sending seltzer up her nose.
“Hope you’re still hungry,” Morgan says, producing a cornucopia of crackers, cheese, and olives.
He lays out a red gingham blanket on the leather seats and starts setting up a crude charcuterie board.
Cece retrieves a bottle of chilled white from the hold, and they sit in the sun and eat with their fingers.
Morgan sends a few olive pits over the side.
“I wasn’t sure which cheeses were good, so I just got the ones with the names I couldn’t pronounce. ”
Cece thinks about saying something, about how she was terrible at French in high school, about how her pronunciation was awful, but that isn’t true at all. She was top of her class! Why is she compelled to minimize their differences? Morgan doesn’t seem bothered in the least.
Morgan cuts a mini wheel of Brie like a pizza with his multi-tool. “When I’ve got time, I like to come out here by myself and eat this sort of thing and pretend I’m on the Amalfi Coast, or somewhere in the south of France.”
Cece tries to imagine the sea warm as bathtub water, cerulean and glimmering. “Sounds nice.”
“This is nice, too,” Morgan says. “Long Island Sound. The Mediterranean of the East Coast.”
They laugh and eat and fall into silence. The boat rocks to the waves, and Cece leans back, skin tight from the drying salt water.
“I wish I could do this forever,” Cece says, before she catches herself. That word loaded and expectant, forever. She cringes, hoping Morgan isn’t listening. But of course he is listening.
“Which part?”
Cece crams a few crackers into her mouth to buy herself some time. What’s wrong with her? A boat trip and free lunch and she’s already planning their future?
“I’m just messing around,” Morgan says, like he means it.
“This just doesn’t seem real.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m happy, and until today, I don’t think I’ve ever really thought, I mean really thought, about what makes me happy.”
“You’re saying it like it’s a bad thing.”
“If sitting on a boat, eating sandwiches, and swimming all day is what makes me happy, I think I’m in trouble because last time I checked, there’s not much money in summering.”
“That’s the funny thing about money,” Morgan says. “The more you make, the more you worry about it. Not that I’ve ever had very much of it.”
The more time Cece spends with Morgan, the more she likes him, his unadorned behavior and rough edges, the way he speaks, directly, without agenda or self-concern.
Cece wonders if Morgan shares this newfound sense of hopeful intimacy.
She’s never been good at this sort of thing, navigating the liminal states, the precursors to dating and more serious endeavors.
Then again, she isn’t very good at those, either. Just ask Jonathan.
If Cece were younger, if she’d never become an actuary, she might call meeting Morgan serendipitous.
If she’d never put her faith in numbers and logic, she might be able to stop herself from calculating all the ways in which they will fail before they ever get started.
Oh, how cynical she’s grown! But is it really cynicism? Or is she just being a realist?
Morgan dries his sunglasses with a towel. “I don’t usually do that sort of thing. If you were wondering,” he says, keeping his head half-turned.
“What sort of thing?”
“Us. The other night.”
“I wasn’t wondering.”
“Then I guess I was,” he says sheepishly. “Silly, I know. I’m just having trouble calibrating things in my head.”
“Well, if you must know, then yes, every summer, I travel up and down the northeast coast visiting dive bars and sleeping with anyone who buys me a drink,” Cece says. Humor feels like the best defense. Laugh away the moment and all the real reasons.
Morgan chuckles. “Okay. Got it.”