Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
Fortunately, I don’t see Frank at breakfast. When I psyche myself up to text him, I get no reply. On my way out to see Harriet, I run into Aiden cantering down the steps.
‘Have you seen your dad this morning?’ I ask.
He says he hasn’t heard from him, that maybe he’s sleeping in and he’s going to knock on his door now. I tell him I’m heading back to the hospital to see what time they’re going to release Harriet, and that I’ll catch up with them later this afternoon.
When I get back around 11 a.m. – they said Harriet can get out at 4 p.m. after the doctor sees her – I’m half expecting Frank to be lying on the pool deck because the sun has finally managed to break out and it’s almost warm. But there’s not a human being in sight, only cats occupying various patches of sunshine. I knock on his door, but he’s not in his room. I put my ear to the wood, listen. No sign of life. Feeling more than a bit defeated, I go into my own room. Housekeeping has been so I try lying on the bed, try to surf Apple News, but I can’t focus.
I text him again: Are you angry with me?
I add some other stuff about how I didn’t just use him for sex, but then I delete it. Then I sit there waiting for the little moving dots. Checking and checking. Nothing. Finally, I grab my denim jacket and wander back down to reception, where I ask the guy at the desk if he’s seen any sign of Mr Lewis today.
‘Ah yes,’ he says. ‘Mr Frank. He asked about jet ski rental. I send him to see Nikos at the pier.’
Jet ski rental? I ask him how I can get down to the pier and he tells me where to go to take the cable car.
I spot him right away, the only person out there on the water. He’s standing on the shiny white and yellow craft, in his white T-shirt and navy shorts, taking the waves like a pro. I watch him for a while, but he just performs the same repetitive loop, the same turn at either end that kicks up a frothy wave on the one that was slowly fading. Behind me, the jagged edges of the caldera draw my eye up some four hundred feet of the cliff face, to the towns on the rim, etched in white like a French manicure. Frank looks so insignificant out there among all this, a solitary speck of energy and matter.
I walk to the end of a short jetty, and on one of his circles back I holler, ‘Frank!’ He doesn’t seem to hear me, so I shout a little louder. Still, nothing. I wait for him to come back again, and then I start hooting and jumping up and down.
I have no idea if he sees me. But suddenly he throttles it. The craft takes off like he’s Superman on steroids, its nose shooting into the air. A wheelie. His body is almost parallel with the water.
‘Frank!’ I scream, thinking, Jesus, he’s going to kill himself. ‘Please slow down!’
But the engine revs and roars. He circles in a doughnut. Then a doughnut inside of a doughnut. Some might say it’s just a guy out there showing off for the only person watching him, for a woman. But I know different. This isn’t a performance; this is psychotic. It’s reckless. I can’t watch, and I can’t look away.
‘For Christ’s sake, Frank…’
My voice has run out of power, and I’m hit with another ridiculous urge to burst into tears. What to do? I could rent a jet ski myself, blaze out there… And do what? I’ve never been even ten feet close to one, let alone ridden one. I could run for help. Nikos at the pier. I’m just deciding that both sound like poor options when…
There’s an ungodly splash. Like a pod of giant whales just landed from Mars.
He has flipped the jet ski upside down. He disappears beneath the water.
I wait for him to pop up. My eyes dart around almost convulsively. But I can’t see him.
I can’t see him. Where the heck did he go?
I search the surface of the water, yearning for any sort of sign. There’s nothing. Not a single indication of anything living beneath the slowly calming surface.
He is gone, just like Atlantis.
‘Frank!’ I shriek.
I don’t know how you know these things, but when he hasn’t popped back up after I’ve just tried to count to five, all my instincts say something’s very seriously wrong. I am a nervous swimmer. I love looking at the ocean, but not necessarily being in the ocean. But I dive off that jetty. I dive off that thing and I don’t even stop to think whether the water is deep enough, that I could break my neck, or drown. I am off that thing before either reason or common sense can weigh in. I am dropping down, down, down, the water filling my ears, my nose. The cold… Oh, the cold. I flap and flail, my dress billowing with my hair. My denim jacket is up around my neck, weighing me down and restricting my movement. I have to fight to get my head above the surface. I am gasping, wrestling with all this damned fabric, but I make it. Somehow. My head pops up. Air. I realise I’m alright. For hell’s sake, I shoot a glance around and I still can’t see him.
He’s dead!
A tremble riddles my limbs now. My body is shutting down in shock. I tread water, try to keep my head above the surface, but a cramp is building in my right foot. I tell myself that panicking is not helping. I mustn’t panic.
Don’t panic.
Do not panic.
Okay, panic.
‘For God’s sake, Frank, you fucker! Where the hell are you?’
No sooner do I almost give myself an aneurism from how hard I’m screaming, than… his head pops up. It pops up and…
It damned well looks straight at me, almost like he knew I was there all the time. Like he did this deliberately.
He did. He deliberately did it to freak me out. The realisation takes a while to sink in. We are but fifty feet apart. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t wave, doesn’t say, hey, I’m okay. He just keeps his eyes anchored on me – firmly on me – while we both tread water in the blue silence, the jet ski’s black hull bobbing behind him like a dead whale.
Then in one swift movement he flips the jet ski the right way up. He scrambles on board from the back. There are a couple of sticky tries of the engine before he gets it to start up. He potters around in a circle, like he’s trying the thing out, like I am not there again. Then it occurs to me: oh my God, he’s going to drive off and leave me, just like he did that day on the hike.
But instead, he turns its nose to face me, and after another suspenseful moment or two, putters over. I am shivering, and the cramp that was forming in my right foot now has me in its grip. Right when I could almost shout out with the pain of it, he is there, reaching out a hand. I stare at that hand, the wide expanse of it. The blondish hairs plastered down, salt forming thin white cracks on his skin. He thrusts it at me again. He still hasn’t said a word. Nor have I.
I grasp it, and he pulls me up. I am shivering and shaking. There’s nowhere for me to stand that’s far enough away from him, so I have to clutch him around his waist.
‘Frank,’ I say, my teeth chattering. ‘That was a very, very cruel thing for you to do. You selfish sod, you almost gave me a heart attack.’ I cling on to him for dear life, so I don’t fall off the back of this thing.
He doesn’t say a word. He just goes, ‘Hmph.’
I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.
The jet ski rental place is fortunately pretty close. I stand there under a tree, hugging my shivering body, while he returns the thing, tells the guy about his minor mishap – the edited version. In the taxi, we don’t speak a word. It’s absurd.
When I can’t stand his silence any longer, I say, ‘I could have died out there. Just so you know. I got a cramp in my foot. You can die from cramp in the water.’
He doesn’t answer, just makes a point of turning to look at me – scathingly. When I think it’s possible he’s literally never going to speak to me again, he says, ‘You can’t die.’ Then he scoffs, ‘Nice try, though.’
He stares straight ahead now, and I glare at his ear. ‘You absolutely can die,’ I assert. ‘You can one hundred per cent die. Google it.’
He Phuf!’ s. Then to make sure I’ve heard it, he Phuf! ’s again.
‘Er… what does Phuf! mean?’
He deliberately stayed under that water. He deliberately tried to get me to think he wasn’t going to come back up.
‘It means you can’t die from your foot going into a cramp in the water, you idiot.’
Now I am the idiot?
If he Phuf’s!’ s one more time I will open this door and Phuf him out of it. But he must decide that he’s done now. I catch him doing a small smirk, then he turns and stares out of the window.
We arrive back at the hotel. We get out like two drowned rats. Our feet slap-slap like flippers down the steep steps to the pool deck entrance.
The place is deserted, just like before. Except for one person who is standing with his back to us, staring out to sea. At his side, on the ground, is a mid-sized brown leather travel bag. It’s the luggage I recognise first. His battered, beloved old bag from his boarding school days – the very one his father used during his.
‘Rupert.’ I hear the mortification in my own voice.