Chapter 4
Scarlett watched her husband step off the Halcyon through a crack in Cooper’s shutters.
The yacht had come in slowly and tied up at the end of the long public dock, because nothing else in Gull Harbour was big enough to hold it.
The gray search boats anchored out in the harbor around it.
The seaplane landed with a spray of white and taxied to a mooring.
Within half an hour there were people all over the dock.
Men in uniforms. Men with clipboards. Two boats full of reporters that had followed the fleet down from Nassau, and a man with a big camera on his shoulder walking backward in front of everyone.
Then the gangway came down, and Ryan walked onto the dock.
Her whole body went hot and then cold.
It had been nine days. She had seen him on television every night.
But television had not prepared her for the real man, a hundred yards away, in the flat white afternoon light.
He had lost weight. His shirt hung off him.
He had not shaved in days and his beard was coming in more gray than dark.
He walked like his legs hurt. He stopped at the end of the gangway and looked out at the water, and he stood there so long that one of the men with clipboards finally touched his elbow.
Scarlett put her hand flat on the shutter.
Behind her, Cooper said quietly, “You okay?”
“No,” she said.
* * *
That evening a man from the search company came up the dock to the dive shop.
Scarlett heard the whole thing through the floor. They needed local boats. They needed divers who knew the reefs on this end of the island, where the currents might have pushed something. Mr. Walsh would pay whatever Cooper charged, starting tomorrow, for as long as the search lasted.
Cooper said he’d think about it.
When the man left, Cooper came upstairs and stood in the kitchen doorway. “I can say no.”
“You can’t say no.” Scarlett was sitting on the couch with her knees pulled up. “You’re the only dive shop on this end of the island. If you say no, everybody wonders why.”
“If I say yes, my boat’s on his contract. Every day, all day, until they call it off.” He looked at her. “That’s your ride off this island, Scarlett. That’s the only way you get to Miami without a passport or a plane ticket or your face on a customs camera.”
She had not thought of that. She thought of it now.
“Say yes,” she said.
* * *
In the morning she didn’t go to the far beach.
Cooper’s truck was gone with him, and the harbor road was full of strangers.
She stayed inside with the shutters closed.
She did the exercises Jess had shown her for her neck.
She called Mae from Cooper’s landline to say she couldn’t come teach for a few days, and Mae said, “I know, baby. I saw the boats,” in a voice that made Scarlett wonder how much Mae had guessed.
From the kitchen window, through the slats, she saw the end of the dock.
Cooper’s white boat went out at seven with its blue canopy up. There were four people in it. Cooper at the wheel. Two divers from the search company. And a big man in a borrowed wetsuit with gray in his beard, sitting on the side with his elbows on his knees.
She watched the boat until it went around the point.
She watched the point all day.
* * *
It came back at dusk. Cooper came up the outside stairs an hour later, smelling of salt and gasoline, and dropped into a kitchen chair like someone had cut his strings.
“He dove,” Cooper said.
Scarlett set a glass of water in front of him. Her hand wasn’t steady.
“The company divers didn’t want him to. They said it was a liability.
He told them it was his money and his wife and his liability, and he went down on every site.
” Cooper drank the water in one go. “He’s not bad.
Rusty. He hasn’t been down in years, you can tell.
But he didn’t quit. Six dives. Most people are done after three. ”
“What were you looking for?”
Cooper hesitated. Then he said it plainly, because that was how he said things. “Anything. Fabric. A shoe. The dress.” He didn’t look at her. “A body, Scarlett. That’s what a search like this is looking for now. The company guys know it. Everybody on that dock knows it.”
“Does Ryan?”
“No.” Cooper turned the empty glass in his hands.
“No, he doesn’t. Or he won’t. Between dives he kept asking me about the currents.
Which way they run at night. How far something could drift.
Whether a person could make it to one of these cays.
” He looked up at her. “He said you were a distance swimmer. He said you swam the mile in college and you used to beat the men on the team in practice just to make them mad. He said if anybody in the world could have swum to land, it was you.”
Scarlett sat down slowly on the couch.
“He said something else,” Cooper said. “When we were waiting on the last dive. He said you taught him to float. On your third date. He was thirty years old and had a boat and couldn’t float, and you made him lie on his back in a hotel pool in front of everybody and you kept saying, make yourself a starfish. ”
She put her hands over her face.
She had forgotten that. She had completely forgotten it. The hotel pool, the tourists staring, Ryan in his ridiculous expensive swim trunks, sinking like a stone and laughing so hard he swallowed half the pool.
“I’m sorry,” Cooper said. “I didn’t know if I should tell you.”
“No,” Scarlett said through her hands. “Tell me. Tell me everything he says.”
* * *
He told her everything, every night, for the next two days.
Ryan asked how long the water stayed warm at night.
Ryan said his wife hated the smell of hospital sunscreen and made everyone use the good kind.
Ryan said his wife learned the name of every person on his crew and he never had, not once, in eight years of owning that boat.
He said it like a confession. He said it sitting on the side of Cooper’s boat staring at the reef.
Ryan did not eat lunch. Ryan slept on the Halcyon and not in the rented house the search company had found for him. Ryan got off the phone with his brother and threw it into the bottom of the boat.
And on the dock, every evening, Ryan talked to the reporters.
Scarlett watched it on Cooper’s little television while the real thing happened a hundred yards away through the shutters. It was a strange, doubled feeling, like hearing an echo before the voice.
“The Coast Guard has done its job,” Ryan said on the second night.
He had shaved, finally, and the lights made him look older.
“I’m told that after this many days, the chances are very small.
I understand that. I’m not a fool.” He stopped, and swallowed.
“But my wife is not an average swimmer. My wife is a distance swimmer. She could swim for hours. There are hundreds of islands out here. Some of them don’t have anyone on them at all.
She could be on one of them right now, hurt, waiting for someone to come. So I’m going to keep coming.”
A reporter asked him if it was true his wife had been drinking that night.
Something moved across Ryan’s face. Scarlett saw it, even on the tiny screen. It looked like anger. It looked like a man about to say something he couldn’t take back.
“My wife,” he said carefully, “is the strongest person I have ever known. That’s all I’m going to say.”
He turned and walked back up the gangway.
Scarlett sat on the couch with her hands pressed between her knees.
He was the only one. The only one in the whole world, besides Jess and Cooper and Mae, who thought she might be alive.
The Coast Guard didn’t. The news didn’t.
The man with the clipboard didn’t. Her husband stood on a dock in front of every camera in the Bahamas and said she could swim for hours like it was a fact, because he knew her.
Because under all of it, all the years of absence, all the one-in-the-morning phone calls, he still knew exactly what she could do in the water.
She didn’t know what to do with that. She didn’t know where to put it.
So she was angry instead. Angry that he knew her that well and had still said give me ten minutes. Angry that it took her being dead for him to talk about her like this. Angry that it was working.
* * *
On the second night she couldn’t sleep.
She went out onto the little balcony at two in the morning. The harbor was dark and still. The search boats rode at anchor with their small lights on. The Halcyon was lit at the end of the dock, soft white lights along the rails, a generator humming somewhere inside it.
A man was sitting at the end of the dock.
He was alone, with his feet hanging over the water. He was not moving. Then his shoulders began to shake, and she understood that he was crying, the kind of crying that has no sound because there’s no one to hear it.
Scarlett was down the outside stairs before she knew she’d decided anything.
She was barefoot. She was wearing Cooper’s T-shirt and a pair of his shorts rolled up at the waist. She went down the stairs and across the little yard behind the shop and out onto the harbor road, and she walked fast toward the dock with her heart pounding so hard she could hear it.
She was going to walk out there. She was going to sit down next to him. She was going to say Ryan, and let him look at her, and whatever happened after that would happen.
She was halfway down the road when she stopped.
It wasn’t a decision. It was the Halcyon.
From here, at the bend in the road, she saw the stern of the yacht clearly for the first time. The low back deck. The rail. The small gate in the rail. The swim platform sticking out over the dark water, lit from above by one yellow deck light.
The generator hummed. Somewhere on board, a gate banged softly in the breeze.
And the hole in her memory opened, and everything that was inside it came pouring out.
* * *
Careful. The gate’s open. Let me help you.
The warm, low voice. Close to her ear.
And the hand.