Chapter 15
The bay was pink at dawn.
Scarlett stood at the end of the dock in her old black racing suit and her cap and her goggles pushed up on her forehead, with a bright orange float clipped to her waist on a short cord.
The float was for boats, so they could see her.
Jess had insisted. Jess had also insisted on a whistle, a first aid kit, a waterproof bag with both their phones in it, and a life jacket, which she was wearing, bright yellow, over her scrubs, in a rented red kayak.
“You look like a traffic cone,” Scarlett said.
“I look like a woman who is going to pull your stupid body out of the ocean if she has to,” Jess said. “Get in.”
It was a still, clear Sunday morning at the end of October. The water was flat as a table. Across the bay the city was just waking up, the towers catching the first light, one of them blue glass with a name on the side in steel letters. The air smelled like salt and wet wood.
Scarlett hadn’t told Ryan she was doing this.
She had thought about it. She had picked up the phone twice. But she didn’t want him standing on this dock at dawn in a suit, holding his breath, watching. She didn’t want to swim for him. She wanted to swim for herself, and find out if she still could.
She pulled her goggles down.
She sat on the edge of the dock and slid into the bay.
* * *
The water was warm. Warmer than the pool. It closed over her shoulders like a bath.
For a second her whole body waited for the black to come.
It didn’t. She put her face in. She could see her own hands, pale green in the early light. She could see the dock posts, crusted with barnacles. She could see the sandy bottom, rippled, a few feet below her.
She swam.
It felt so good she almost cried into her goggles.
Her arms knew what to do. Her breath fell into its old pattern, three strokes and turn, three strokes and turn.
The water moved along her body. The sun came up over the far shore and lit the bubbles from her hands gold.
Jess paddled along beside her, a red shape at the edge of her eye every time she breathed right.
She swam past the end of their neighbor’s dock. Past the next one. Past the little sandbar where she and Ryan used to take the paddleboards, their first summer in the house.
You can do this, she thought. You’re doing it.
Out ahead, a green channel marker stood up out of the water on its post. Past it, the bay dropped away into the boat channel, where the big boats came through.
She swam past the channel marker.
* * *
The bottom disappeared.
One stroke, she could see sand. The next stroke, there was nothing under her but dark green. Then darker. Then no color at all. Just a deep, empty, bottomless dark going down and down below her hands.
And at the same moment, a cloud moved over the sun.
The gold light went out of the water. Everything went gray, and then, when she put her face down, black.
Black.
Her lungs locked.
She was not in the bay. She was in the Exumas. The engines were fading above her. The Halcyon’s lights were getting smaller. There was blood in her eye and salt in her throat and a hand, a flat, warm hand between her shoulder blades—
She came up screaming.
She thrashed. She swallowed water. She went under and came up and couldn’t breathe, couldn’t find air, couldn’t find up. Her arms wheeled. The float yanked at her waist. She couldn’t see. Her goggles were full of water.
“Scarlett!” Jess’s voice. Close. “Scarlett, grab the boat! Grab it! I’m right here! Grab the boat!”
Her hand hit something hard. Plastic. The kayak.
She grabbed it with both arms and hung on and coughed and coughed.
* * *
“I’ve got you,” Jess said. She was leaning so far over the side the kayak was tipping. She had a fistful of Scarlett’s racing suit at the shoulder. “I’ve got you. You’re okay. You’re in Miami. You’re in the bay. It’s Sunday. I’ve got you. Breathe. Breathe, sweetheart.”
Scarlett pushed her goggles up onto her cap. She hung on the side of the kayak and breathed in big, ragged, sobbing gulps.
“I’m going to tow you back,” Jess said. “Okay? You hold on. I’ll paddle. We’ll be at the dock in five minutes. You don’t have to do anything.”
Scarlett shook her head.
“Scarlett—”
“Phone,” Scarlett gasped.
“What?”
“My phone. In the bag. Give me my phone.”
Jess stared at her. Then she understood. Something went across her face, and she didn’t argue. She reached behind her, unclipped the waterproof bag, and pulled out the cheap phone with wet fingers.
Scarlett took it. Her hands were shaking so hard she could barely see the screen. She had Jess. She had the kayak. She was safe. She knew she was safe.
But it wasn’t Jess she wanted.
She pressed his name.
* * *
It was eight-fifteen on a Sunday morning.
She knew exactly where he was. He had mentioned it on the dock, two weeks ago, in passing.
The Atlanta couple from the Halcyon, the hotel people, who had stayed in when everyone else pulled out.
They were flying home at noon. So the signing was a breakfast at the tower at eight.
The biggest deal Walsh Development had left after Glen Pratt walked away.
The phone rang once.
“Scarlett.”
His voice. Right there. Not hold on. Not voicemail. Not his assistant.
Behind him, she could hear a room. Men’s voices. China clinking. Someone saying Ryan, the last page—
“I’m in the water,” she said. Her voice came out in pieces. “Off the dock. I went past the marker. I can’t—it went dark—I can’t—”
“I’m coming,” Ryan said.
She heard him stand up. She heard a chair scrape back hard. She heard a man’s voice say, sharp and surprised, “Ryan? We’re in the middle of—”
“I’m leaving,” Ryan said, not to her. “Sign it or don’t. I’ll call you.”
Then a door. Then his feet, running. The echo of a hallway. An elevator chime.
“I’m in the elevator,” he said. He was breathing hard. “Is Jess there? Is Jess with you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Good. Stay on the phone. Don’t hang up. I’m not hanging up. Twenty minutes. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“You were in the closing,” Scarlett said. She was crying. “The big one. The Atlanta—”
“I don’t care,” Ryan said. “I don’t care about the closing. I’m in the car. I’m pulling out. Talk to me. Tell me what you can see.”
* * *
He stayed on the phone the whole way.
Jess towed her in slowly, with Scarlett hanging on to the back of the kayak and holding the phone up out of the water in one hand.
Ryan talked. He talked the way he’d talked in the bathroom with his face to the wall.
About nothing. About the traffic on the causeway.
About the fifth-floor apartment and Mrs. Sosa’s parrot.
Hurry up. Hurry up. About the time Scarlett made him lie on his back in a hotel pool and be a starfish.
“You were so mad at me,” he said. “I kept sinking. You said, Ryan, the water wants to hold you, you just have to stop fighting it. And I said I didn’t know how to stop fighting it. And you said, I know. That’s your whole problem.”
Scarlett laughed into the water, and choked, and laughed again.
“I’m on our street,” he said. “I’m at the gate.”
Jess had her at the dock. Jess climbed out onto the boards, and grabbed Scarlett under both arms, and hauled her up out of the water like an ER nurse pulling a patient onto a gurney. Scarlett sat on the end of the dock, dripping, shaking, with her cap half off and a towel around her shoulders.
She heard a car door.
She heard feet on the lawn. Running.
Ryan came down the lawn in his suit. His tie was gone. His jacket was open and flapping. He was running flat out, across the grass and down onto the dock, the boards booming under his shoes, and he didn’t slow down until he was three feet from her.
Then he stopped.
He stopped dead, and dropped to his knees on the wet boards in front of her, and he held both his hands out, palms up, in the air between them. Not touching her. Waiting.
Scarlett reached out and took them.
* * *
Jess picked up her paddle and her kayak and walked back up the dock toward the house without a single word, which was the most loving thing Jess had ever done.
Ryan held her hands. His hands were shaking. Hers were too.
“You answered,” Scarlett said.
“You called.”
“You walked out of the closing.”
“Yes.”
“You might have lost it.”
“Probably,” he said. “I don’t care.”
She looked at him. At his face, gray and sweating in the early light, and his wet, frightened eyes, and his good suit pants soaked through at the knees from the dock.
“Tell me the truth,” Scarlett said. “About the ten minutes. The real truth. I don’t want an apology. I’ve had apologies. I want to know what happened inside you. On that sky deck. When I came up those stairs.”
He didn’t look away.
He was quiet. And then, kneeling on the dock with her hands in his, he told her.
* * *
“You came up the stairs,” Ryan said. “And you said you were sick. And you said you needed me. And I looked at her.”
“I know.”
“I want to tell you why I looked at her.” His voice was low and steady, and she could see what it cost him to keep it that way. “I didn’t look at her because I loved her. I didn’t. I didn’t look at her because I wanted to sleep with her. I didn’t.”
Scarlett waited.
“I looked at her,” Ryan said, “because I didn’t want to stop being the man she thought I was.
For two months, she’d been telling me I was a good man who was tired.
A good man under a lot of pressure. That was the man I got to be, at one in the morning, on the phone with her.
And standing up on that deck, under the stars, I was him.
” He swallowed. “And then you came up the stairs. And you knew me. You knew exactly who I was. You knew I was tired, and scared of my own board, and bad at being home, and small. You knew I hadn’t looked at you in a year.
And when you looked at me, I couldn’t be the good man anymore. I was just me.”
His hands tightened on hers.