Chapter 16
A year later, on a morning in May, Scarlett woke up on Gull Cay with her husband’s hand on her stomach.
The cottage was small and white, with a tin roof and a screen door, at the end of the dirt road a few hundred yards from the far beach.
They had rented it for the month. Through the open window she could hear the water, and a rooster somewhere, and the kids already down on the sand even though it was barely seven.
Ryan was asleep on his side facing her, with his face half in the pillow. His hand was resting on the round curve of her belly, where it always ended up at night. His hair had gone grayer this year. His face had gotten browner. He looked, she thought, like a man who slept well.
The baby kicked.
It was a good, hard kick, right under his palm. Ryan’s eyes flew open.
“Did you feel that?”
“I’m the one she’s kicking,” Scarlett said. “Of course I felt that.”
He sat halfway up on one elbow and put his whole hand flat on her stomach and waited, with a look of such total concentration on his face that she started to laugh. The baby kicked again. He made a sound like a kid at a fireworks show.
“She’s going to be a swimmer,” he said.
“She’s going to be whatever she wants.”
“She’s going to be a swimmer who does whatever she wants,” Ryan said, and bent down, and kissed the top of her belly, and then her mouth.
* * *
They didn’t get up right away.
There was no hurry. That was one of the things that still surprised her, a year on.
There was nowhere he had to be. Nobody he had to call.
His phone was on the nightstand with the ringer turned all the way up, the way it had been every single day since last October, and it didn’t ring, and he didn’t look at it.
She lay against his chest with the sheet tangled around their legs. He ran his hand slowly up and down her bare back while they talked about nothing. The day. The kids. Whether Jess would really wear the hat she’d threatened to wear.
His hand passed between her shoulder blades, and back down, and up again.
She didn’t notice. She realized, a long moment later, that she hadn’t noticed. It was just his hand. It was just her husband touching her in bed on a Sunday morning, the way husbands did.
She turned her head and kissed his chest, right over his heart, and didn’t tell him why.
“What was that for?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Scarlett said. “Everything. Get up. We’re going to be late to our own opening.”
* * *
It had been a big year.
In January, Alexis Burke had stood in a federal courtroom in Miami in a plain gray jumpsuit and pleaded guilty.
Scarlett had gone. She had sat in the second row with Ryan on one side of her and Jess on the other and Agent Kerr two seats down, and she had watched the woman who put her into the sea say the word guilty in a voice that shook.
Alexis’s medical license was gone. She would not be anyone’s doctor again, ever. She would be in prison a long time.
Scarlett had thought she would feel something enormous. She had felt, mostly, that she wanted to go get breakfast. So they had. All four of them. Kerr had ordered pancakes and eaten every bite.
Luke had moved to Atlanta. He worked for another developer now.
At Christmas he’d sent a card, just a plain card, with I’m sorry written inside it and nothing else.
Ryan hadn’t answered it yet. But he hadn’t thrown it away, either.
It was in the drawer of his desk at home.
Some days he took it out and looked at it.
Dr. Moss said he could take as long as he needed.
Walsh Development was smaller than it had been. Steadier. Ryan had sold two buildings and pulled out of a deal in Tampa. Glen Pratt had never come back. The Atlanta couple had stayed, and brought friends.
And Ryan came home.
Every night. By six-thirty. The first month, Scarlett had been waiting for it to stop.
By the third month, she wasn’t waiting anymore.
In December they had taken the long dining room table, the one she had sat alone at for a year, and they had sold it.
In its place they put a round wooden table that sat six, where nobody could be at the head of it, and they ate dinner there every night, and when he was late, which was twice, he called before she could wonder.
On Thursdays they went to see a couples therapist, a quiet man with a beard. On Tuesdays Ryan still saw Dr. Moss. Some Thursdays were terrible. Most of them were boring. They went to every one.
* * *
The far beach was already full of people when they came down the dirt road.
There was a banner strung between two palm trees. Destiny and three other kids had painted it. It said SWIMSAFE — GULL CAY — STARFISH FIRST, in huge blue letters, with a lot of lopsided starfish around the edges, and one very large orange circle that Scarlett knew was the buoy.
There were kids everywhere. Kids from the houses back in the trees.
Kids from the harbor settlement. Kids who had come across that morning on boats from two other cays, where there had never been anyone to teach them.
They stood in the shallows in brand-new red swim caps, dozens of them, shrieking and splashing and staring at the water with that look Scarlett knew so well, half excitement and half fear.
In the water, waist-deep, stood four young women and two young men in red SwimSafe shirts. Local teachers. Scarlett had flown down six times over the winter to train them herself. Two of them had been afraid of the water when they started.
And at the front of the line, bossing everyone around with her hands on her hips, was a tall, skinny ten-year-old with long braids and a red shirt that said JUNIOR INSTRUCTOR across the back in white tape.
“Miss S!” Destiny screamed, and came running up the beach, and crashed into Scarlett so hard Ryan had to catch them both. Then she stepped back and stared at Scarlett’s stomach with her mouth open. “Mama Mae said. I didn’t believe her.”
“It’s a girl,” Scarlett said.
“Is she going to swim?”
“Starfish first,” Ryan said.
Destiny looked at him with deep suspicion. “Who are you?”
“I’m the husband.”
“Can you swim?”
“I can now,” Ryan said, very seriously. “I took lessons. From a man named Tony. He says I’m finally competent.”
Destiny considered this. “You can help with the little ones,” she decided, and went back to the water.
* * *
Mae Knowles had taken over the picnic tables under the sea grapes and turned them into a kitchen. There were pans of fried fish and johnnycake and peas and rice, and three whole key lime pies under screens. Mae was in her straw hat, directing a line of women from the settlement like a general.
She took one look at Scarlett and put down her spoon and held Scarlett’s face in both her hands, the way she had in the dark at her kitchen door a year ago.
“Told you,” Mae said. “You were never anybody’s dead woman.”
Scarlett hugged her and didn’t let go for a long time.
Monique from the clinic was handing out sunscreen at a little table. Scarlett noticed that it was the good kind, the kind that didn’t smell like a hospital. She also caught Monique looking down toward the water every few minutes, where Cooper was tying up a boat, and Cooper looking back.
Cooper came up the beach to meet them. He was brown and barefoot and grinning. He shook Ryan’s hand. It was a long handshake, and a steady one, and neither man said anything during it, and they didn’t need to.
“Two boats this morning,” Cooper said. “Eighteen kids from the north cay. Twelve from the south cay. Their mothers came too. I’ve never seen so many people on this beach.”
“Monique looks happy,” Scarlett said innocently.
Cooper went a little red under his tan. “Monique is very dedicated to water safety,” he said, and walked back down to his boats, and Scarlett laughed so hard she had to sit down.
* * *
A third boat came around the point at nine.
It was not a big boat. It was a sturdy white boat with a blue hull stripe and a flat back deck made for loading kids and kickboards. On its stern, in blue letters, it said STARFISH. At the wheel stood a weathered man in a white captain’s shirt.
Troy Maddox brought the Starfish in gently to the new little dock and stepped off with a line in his hand.
Scarlett had bought the boat in February, with the first year of the Nassau grant and a check from Barb Hughes, and not one dollar of Ryan’s. Then she had called Troy, who had just finished selling the Halcyon and was about to retire, and she had said, I told you I’d buy one.
Troy had been quiet on the phone. Then he’d said, I’ll need a crew. And Scarlett had said, You’ll need to learn all their names.
He came up the beach now and took off his sunglasses and nodded at her stomach.
“Congratulations, Scarlett.”
“Thank you, Troy.”
“I know all their names,” Troy said, and nodded down toward the kids piling off his boat. “Every one. Asked them on the way over.”
* * *
Jess wore the hat.
It was enormous. It was straw and pink and roughly the size of a patio umbrella, and she wore it with huge sunglasses and a SwimSafe T-shirt and a pair of scrubs cut off into shorts, and she sat under the sea grapes eating fried fish and heckling everyone.
“Hey, Paddleboat,” she called when Ryan walked past with an armful of kickboards.
“I’ve asked you not to call me that.”
“I’ve decided to stop calling you that man. Paddleboat is a huge promotion.” Jess took a bite of johnnycake. “Also you’re doing the kickboards wrong. They go by size.”
“Nobody told me they go by size.”
“They go by size, Paddleboat.”
Ryan sighed and went back down to the water to sort the kickboards by size. Jess watched him go. Then she leaned over to Scarlett and said, very quietly, without any teasing in it at all, “He’s good with the little ones.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to deny I ever said that.”
“I know,” Scarlett said, and put her head on her best friend’s shoulder under the enormous pink hat.
* * *