Chapter 3 #2
A stranger looked back. A woman with a sharp dark bob, a bandage over one eye, and a face that had gotten thin in three days.
“Well,” Jess said from the doorway. “You look like a very tired French actress.”
Scarlett laughed. It hurt her head. She laughed anyway, and then she was crying, and Jess held her in the steam.
* * *
That evening, the news said the Coast Guard had suspended its active search.
The reporter said it gently. The survival window. The water temperature. The size of the search area. The words recovery and presumed.
Then they cut to Ryan.
He was standing on a dock in Nassau, with boats behind him. He had shaved, badly, and there was a nick on his jaw. He looked straight into the camera.
“The Coast Guard has done everything they can, and I’m grateful,” he said. “But I’m not stopping. I’ve hired every private search boat and plane I can find, and they’ll keep going. My wife is out there. We’re going to find her.”
Behind him, at the edge of the frame, Alexis stood with her arms crossed, watching him.
Jess switched off the television.
“He’s spending a fortune,” Cooper said. “Search planes cost thousands an hour.”
“He does that,” Scarlett said. “When he doesn’t know what to do, he spends money.” She didn’t mean it cruelly. It was true. It was how he loved people, and it was how he apologized, and for nine years it had been how he avoided ever having to sit still in a room with her and feel something.
Jess flew home the next morning. She had to. Her hospital was calling. And someone had to be in Miami watching.
At the airstrip she held Scarlett by both shoulders.
“You call me every night from his phone,” Jess said, jerking her chin at Cooper. “Every night. If I don’t hear from you by ten, I’m calling the Navy.”
“The Navy’s not in charge of—”
“I don’t care who’s in charge. I’m calling them.”
* * *
In the mornings, before the sun got high, Cooper drove Scarlett across the island to the far side.
There was one dirt road, and it went through low scrub and palmetto and came out on a long curve of white beach with nobody on it.
There was no dock and no harbor there. The water was shallow and clear for a long way out, and then there was a reef, marked by a single orange buoy that bobbed on the line where the pale water turned dark blue.
The first morning, Scarlett stood in it up to her knees and shook.
She hadn’t expected that. She had been in water her whole life.
But the gentle waves came in around her legs and her body remembered the black and the cold and the engines fading, and her breath went short and fast, and she had to walk back out and sit down in the sand with her head between her knees.
Cooper didn’t say anything. He sat a little way off and looked at the reef.
The next morning she went in to her waist, and then she swam.
She swam slowly, head up, a baby’s breaststroke along the beach and back.
Her arms were weak and her head throbbed when she put her face in.
But she swam. Soon she was swimming freestyle, short lengths between two rocks, and her body remembered what it was, and that felt better than anything had in days.
There were houses back in the trees on that side of the island. Just a few. And there were children.
They came down to watch her. Four or five of them, standing at the edge of the beach in shorts and T-shirts, staring at the strange woman with the bandage who swam back and forth like she was training for something. None of them went in past their ankles.
On the second morning, an older woman came down the path behind them. She was small and straight-backed, with gray hair under a straw hat.
“You swim good,” she said to Scarlett.
“Thank you.”
“These ones don’t swim at all.” She nodded at the children.
“Their mothers work. Nobody to teach them. We live on an island, and my grandbaby is scared to put her face in the water.” She pointed at a skinny girl of about nine with long braids, who immediately hid behind a bigger boy.
“Destiny. She’s scared of everything in that water. ”
Scarlett looked at the girl.
She knew that look. She had seen it on a hundred kids at SwimSafe.
The kids from apartment complexes with no pool and parents who couldn’t swim, kids who lived twenty minutes from the ocean and had never once been taught how not to drown in it.
It was the reason she had started the whole program, a lifetime ago, before it became a line on the Walsh Foundation letterhead and she became a woman who went to lunches about it instead of standing in the water.
“I could teach them,” she heard herself say. “If you want. In the mornings.”
The old woman looked at her for a long, careful moment. At the bandage. At the fresh dark hair.
“My name’s Mae,” she said finally. “Mae Knowles. You come to the house after, and I’ll give you breakfast.”
* * *
Scarlett taught them in the shallows every morning after that.
She taught them the way she had always taught. Starfish first. The water wants to hold you. Let it. Then blowing bubbles. Then kicking, holding onto her hands. The boys learned fast, splashing and yelling. Destiny stood at the edge with her arms wrapped around herself and watched.
On the second morning of lessons, Destiny put her face in the water.
That same morning, she floated on her back while Scarlett’s hand rested flat under her spine, and then, without being told, Scarlett took her hand away and Destiny didn’t notice, and she floated there by herself with her braids spread out around her head and her eyes squeezed shut.
On the third morning, which was a bright, calm morning with no wind, Destiny swam to the orange buoy.
Scarlett swam beside her the whole way. She didn’t touch her.
Destiny’s stroke was ugly and desperate and she kept lifting her head too high, and twice Scarlett thought she would stop.
But she didn’t. She reached out and slapped her hand against the orange plastic and hung on to it and screamed with joy, and the kids on the beach screamed back, and Mae Knowles on the sand put both hands over her mouth.
Scarlett floated beside the buoy with salt in her eyes and her heart slamming.
It was the best thing she had done in years. Maybe the best thing she had ever done. And it had nothing to do with Ryan Walsh.
* * *
In the evenings she ate with Cooper.
He cooked. Mostly fish, some rice, and once a lopsided key lime pie he’d made from a recipe on the back of a can.
They ate on the little balcony off the kitchen where nobody could see them, and he told her about the dive shop, and the tourists who threw up in his boat, and the life in Fort Lauderdale he had walked away from years ago because he woke up one day and couldn’t face another office.
She told him about SwimSafe. About Destiny and the buoy. He made her tell it twice.
That night, he said something dry about the pie, and she laughed. Really laughed, head back, for the first time since the Halcyon. When she looked at him again he was watching her with an expression she recognized.
It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t the careful look people gave the wife of a rich man. It was the way a man looks at a woman he likes.
She felt it land in her body. A small, warm shock.
She didn’t do anything with it. She looked away, and she thanked him for dinner, and she went inside.
But she lay awake a long time under the ticking fan thinking about it.
Thinking that she was thirty-five, and that she had forgotten what it felt like to be looked at like that, and that her husband hadn’t looked at her like that in years.
The next morning she woke up, went to the far beach, swam, taught, ate eggs at Mae’s kitchen table, and walked back along the harbor road in her cap with Cooper beside her. Somewhere on that walk, she realized she hadn’t thought about Ryan once all day.
It felt like freedom.
That was when Cooper stopped walking.
He was looking out at the harbor mouth, where the channel came in between two low points of rock. His face had gone tight.
Scarlett turned to look.
Boats were coming around the point. Five of them. Six. Big gray search boats with numbers on their sides, and a seaplane circling low above them, and at the front of the line, white and tall and gleaming in the afternoon sun, a boat she would have known anywhere.
The Halcyon was coming into Gull Harbour.