Chapter 8
Scarlett took her hand off his chest one finger at a time.
She slid out from under his arm so slowly that the mattress barely moved.
She stood up beside the bed in the morning light in her sleep shirt and looked down at him.
He was still asleep. His face was younger when he slept.
The worry lines between his eyebrows were gone, and his mouth was a little open, and there was a crease on his cheek from the edge of her pillow.
She wanted to lie back down. That was the problem. She wanted to lie back down and put her face in his neck and stay there all day.
She went into the bathroom and shut the door and turned on the cold water in the sink and held her wrists under it until they hurt.
When she came out he was awake, sitting on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees. He looked up at her. He looked like a man waiting to be sentenced.
“I didn’t—” he started.
“I know,” Scarlett said. “Go downstairs.”
He went.
Neither of them said a word about it at breakfast. Or at lunch. Or that night, when she went to bed, and woke at three from the dream, and heard him out on the landing, and did not open the door.
* * *
The call from the foundation came four days later.
It was Sheila Gaines, the chair of the Walsh Foundation board. Sheila was sixty, blond, nice, and good at making you feel you had already agreed to something.
“Scarlett, darling, we are all so, so happy,” Sheila said. “It’s a miracle. Everyone says so.”
“Thank you, Sheila.”
“Now. The SwimSafe summer kickoff is Saturday. At the aquatic center. The kids, the donors, the mayor’s office, all of it.
And I’ll be honest with you, because I love you.
People are talking.” Sheila lowered her voice as if someone might be listening.
“You’ve seen the papers. That awful quote from Luke.
Struggling for months. The donors are nervous.
They’re asking if you’re well. They’re asking if the program is stable. ”
Scarlett gripped the phone.
“So we’d love it,” Sheila said, “if you came. Just for an hour. Just to be seen. Smile, shake some hands, show everyone you’re yourself. And Ryan, of course. The two of you together. It would put everyone’s minds at ease.”
The two of you together.
Scarlett almost said no. She almost said I was dead three weeks ago, Sheila, and your donors can go to hell.
But it was SwimSafe. It was her kids. It was a hundred children from apartment complexes all over Miami standing in a pool on Saturday morning in their brand-new swim caps, and a room full of rich people deciding whether to keep paying for their lessons based on whether Scarlett Walsh looked crazy.
“We’ll be there,” she said.
* * *
On Saturday morning she put on a dress for the first time since the Halcyon.
It was a simple navy one, sleeveless, cut to the knee.
She stood in front of the closet mirror and looked at herself.
The short dark hair. The scar at her hairline, pink and shiny, which she had decided not to cover.
Her arms were brown from the island and more muscled than they’d been in years.
She had lost weight in her face, and her eyes looked bigger.
She didn’t look like the woman in the pearl-earring picture. She looked like somebody who had been through something.
She put on small gold earrings and no necklace and went downstairs.
Ryan was waiting in the front hall in a gray suit. He was looking at his phone. He looked up.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. She watched his face do something slow and helpless. She watched his eyes go over her, the dress and the bare arms and the dark hair, and she watched him swallow, once, hard.
It went through her like a current. Low in her stomach.
“What,” she said.
“Nothing.” His voice was rough. He cleared his throat. “You look—nothing. The car’s here.”
* * *
The aquatic center was loud and bright and smelled like chlorine, and the smell hit Scarlett so hard in the chest she had to stop in the doorway.
Not the bad kind of hit. The good kind. Like coming home.
The big pool was full of kids. SwimSafe kids, in red swim caps, with instructors in red shirts standing waist-deep among them.
The bleachers were full of parents. A long table on the pool deck had coffee and pastries and a banner that said WALSH FOUNDATION SWIMSAFE — SUMMER KICKOFF.
Donors in linen and sunglasses stood around the table in groups.
A camera crew from a local station was setting up by the diving boards.
And then people saw her.
It moved through the room like a wave. Heads turning. Conversations stopping. Somebody on the bleachers started clapping, and then more people, and then the parents were on their feet, and the kids in the pool didn’t know why everyone was clapping but they started splashing and yelling anyway.
Scarlett stood in the doorway in her navy dress and felt her face get hot.
Beside her, Ryan said quietly, without moving his lips, “Wave. Just one hand. Like the Queen.”
She almost laughed. She lifted one hand. The clapping got louder.
“Now walk,” he murmured. “Sheila’s coming in on your left, and she’s going to hug you, and she wears enough perfume to kill a horse. Hold your breath.”
This time she did laugh. It came out as a small snort. Ryan’s mouth twitched.
And like that, they were working the room.
* * *
It was so easy. That was the terrible part.
They had done this a hundred times. Charity dinners. Galas. Openings. For nine years they had walked into rooms like this side by side, and they had a system, and they didn’t even have to talk about it. Her body remembered the system before her brain did.
He took the donors who wanted to talk about money.
She took the donors who wanted to talk about kids.
When a man in a golf shirt cornered her and started asking questions about the night on the boat, Ryan appeared at her elbow out of nowhere and said, “Vincent. Good to see you. Did you ever close on that place in Naples?” and the man forgot her completely.
When Sheila Gaines wouldn’t stop holding Scarlett’s hands and saying miracle, Scarlett said, “Sheila, Ryan has been dying to tell you about the new wing,” and Ryan, who had not been dying to tell anyone anything, told Sheila about the new wing for ten minutes without blinking.
At one point Scarlett was talking to the mother of a SwimSafe kid, and she saw Ryan across the deck steer two big donors toward her.
He brought them right up to her. Then he said, “You should really hear about the program from the person who built it,” and he stepped back.
He stepped out of the circle and left her standing in the middle of it.
He used to do that, early on. She had forgotten. For years, he had been the one standing in the middle of every circle. She had forgotten that there was a time when he used to step back.
* * *
At the shallow end, one of the instructors was having trouble.
A little boy of about six was clinging to the edge of the pool, crying. Not a tantrum. The real kind of crying, the scared kind, where the child can’t breathe right. The instructor, a nice young woman, kept saying you’re fine, you’re fine, just let go, and the boy held on tighter.
Scarlett excused herself from the donors.
She walked down the pool deck in her navy dress. She stepped out of her shoes. And then, while every camera and every donor in the building watched, she sat down on the wet edge of the pool, and put her legs in the water up to her knees, and her dress hem got soaked, and she didn’t care.
“Hi,” she said to the boy. “What’s your name?”
“A-Andre.”
“Hi, Andre. I’m Miss Scarlett. Can I tell you a secret?”
He nodded, hiccuping.
“The water wants to hold you up,” Scarlett said. “It really does. It’s the nicest water in the world. But you have to let it. You have to make yourself into a starfish.” She held out her arms and spread her fingers wide. “Can you make your hands like mine?”
He could. Very slowly, still holding the edge with one hand, he made a starfish with the other.
It took twenty minutes. By the end of it Scarlett was in the water up to her waist in her good dress, and Andre was floating on his back with her palm flat under his spine, and then without it, and he was laughing, and a whole row of parents on the bleachers were watching and wiping their eyes.
She looked up.
Ryan was standing at the edge of the deck with the camera crew. He wasn’t talking to them. He was watching her. And he had a look on his face that she hadn’t seen in years. It wasn’t pride. It wasn’t the smile he wore for photographers. It was something much more open and much more painful.
Scarlett looked away first.
* * *
She was drying off at the end of the pool deck with a SwimSafe towel when the woman came up to her.
Barb Hughes. Big donor. Old Miami money. Sixty-something, tan, kind, with a voice that carried.
“Oh, Scarlett,” Barb said, and took both her wet hands. “I’m so glad. We all prayed. I want you to know that. Every day.”
“Thank you, Barb.”
“And I want you to know how wonderful Dr. Burke was to Ryan,” Barb said.
“Through all of it. I don’t know if anyone’s told you.
I saw her at the house when I brought the casserole.
She was there every time I came by. She was just so devoted to him.
Holding him together, poor man. We all said, thank God he had her. ”
Scarlett’s smile didn’t move.
She held it. She held it the way she had held it through the whole dinner on the Halcyon, with half a glass of poison in her. She said, “That’s very kind of you to tell me, Barb.” She squeezed Barb’s hands. She let them go.
Then she walked calmly to the women’s locker room, and went into the last stall, and locked the door, and stood there with her back against it and her whole body shaking so hard her teeth clicked.
She was there every time I came by. So devoted. Holding him together.
Give me ten minutes.