Chapter 16 #2
The opening was short. Scarlett made them keep it short, because the kids didn’t care about speeches and neither did she.
A man from the tourism fund in Nassau said a few words.
Mae said a prayer. Destiny, as junior instructor, announced into a bullhorn that anyone who splashed during the safety talk would have to sit on the sand, and three boys immediately sat on the sand.
Then Scarlett walked into the water.
She walked in up to her waist, in her swimsuit and her red SwimSafe shirt over the top of her belly, and every kid in the shallows turned around and looked at her.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Miss Scarlett. Can I tell you a secret?”
A whole beach full of heads nodded.
“The water wants to hold you up,” she said. “It really does. But you have to let it. You have to make yourself into a starfish.”
And she held her arms out wide.
* * *
She didn’t teach much after that. She didn’t need to. The teachers took their groups. Destiny took hers, a cluster of small, nervous kids at the edge of the sand, and bullied them lovingly into putting their faces in.
Scarlett floated on her back in the warm water for a while, with her belly up to the sun, and watched it happen.
And then she watched her husband.
Ryan was at the far end of the shallows with the littlest group. There was a boy there, maybe five, who wouldn’t go in past his ankles. He stood at the edge with his fists clenched and tears running down his face while the other kids splashed around him.
Ryan got down on his knees in the water in front of him.
Scarlett couldn’t hear what he said at first. Then the wind shifted and brought his voice across the water to her.
“I was scared of the water, too,” Ryan was saying. “When I was a lot bigger than you. I was thirty. I couldn’t float at all. I sank like a rock. Do you know who taught me?”
The boy shook his head.
Ryan pointed, across the shallows, at Scarlett.
“Her,” he said. “And she told me the water wants to hold you up, but you have to stop fighting it. I didn’t know how to stop fighting it.
It took me a really, really long time to learn.
” He held out his hands, palms up, the way he had held them out on the dock.
“But I learned. And I’ll be right here. I won’t let go unless you say. Want to try?”
The boy looked at Ryan’s hands.
Then he took them.
* * *
At five o’clock the boats took the kids home.
The families packed up. Mae’s pies were gone.
Monique rode back to the harbor on Cooper’s boat, sitting close beside him at the wheel.
Troy took the Starfish out through the reef with a deck full of sleeping kids from the south cay.
Jess fell asleep under the sea grapes with the enormous hat over her face, and nobody had the heart to wake her.
The far beach was empty. The water was flat and clear and gold with late light. Out on the line where the pale water turned dark blue, the orange buoy bobbed gently on its rope.
“Swim with me,” Scarlett said.
Ryan looked at the buoy. He looked at her stomach. “Are you sure?”
“I’m pregnant, Ryan. I’m not made of glass. My doctor says swimming is the best thing I can do.” She took his hand. “Slow. Together. Out to the buoy.”
* * *
They swam out side by side.
She swam an easy, slow breaststroke with her head up.
He swam beside her, a clean, strong freestyle now, his strokes matching hers so he never once got ahead.
The bottom went from white sand to scattered grass to the dark shapes of coral.
The water stayed clear all the way. She could see her own hands. She could see his.
It took a long time. She didn’t hurry, and neither did he.
At the buoy, she reached out and put her hand on the warm orange plastic, the way Destiny had, a year ago, screaming with joy.
Ryan put his hand on it beside hers. They hung there together in the deep blue water, a long way from shore, treading water gently, with the whole island golden behind them and the kids’ painted banner a small bright stripe on the beach.
She wasn’t afraid. There wasn’t one single part of her that was afraid.
* * *
“I want to say something,” Scarlett said. “And I want to say it out here. Where it started.”
He looked at her. His wet face. His gray-flecked hair plastered to his forehead. His eyes, steady on hers.
“You’re my husband,” she said. “I chose you. I chose you when I had somewhere else to go, and I’d choose you again right now, out here, with nowhere to stand.
Not as a test. Not a day at a time. For good.
” Her voice shook. She let it. “You’re the person I call.
You’re the person I come home to. You’re my family.
You’re the father of this baby. And I love you.
I love all of you. The whole real man. I’m yours, Ryan. For the rest of my life.”
Ryan’s face crumpled. He didn’t try to hide it. He never did anymore.
“You’re my wife,” he said. “You’re the bravest person I have ever known.
You swam six miles in the dark and then you swam all the way back to me, and I will spend every day of my life being grateful for it.
” He took a breath. “I’ll answer every time you call.
I’ll come home every night. I’ll sit at that round table and look at you and ask you how you are, and I’ll listen to the whole answer.
I’ll teach our daughter to float. I’ll love you out loud, every day, so you never have to wonder.
” His hand found hers on the buoy. “I’m yours, Scarlett.
All of me. For good. That’s not a try. That’s a promise. ”
She kissed him.
They were treading water, and it was clumsy, and they both got a mouthful of the sea, and she laughed into his mouth, and he laughed back, and the baby kicked hard between them, and Ryan felt it through her belly and laughed even harder.
“She agrees,” he said.
“She’s a Walsh,” Scarlett said. “She has opinions.”
“What are we naming her?” he asked. “You said you’d decide by the time we got here.”
Scarlett looked back at the beach. At the painted banner. At the picnic tables under the sea grapes. At the dirt road that went back through the scrub to a small house where an old woman in a straw hat had once held her face in the dark and told her who she was.
“Mae,” she said.
Ryan followed her gaze.
“Mae Walsh,” he said. “That’s perfect.”
* * *
They swam back in together, side by side, slowly.
On the beach, Jess had woken up and pushed the enormous hat back and was standing at the water’s edge, waving both arms over her head. Behind her, the banner moved in the breeze. STARFISH FIRST.
Scarlett’s feet touched sand.
Ryan stood up beside her in the shallows. He held out his hand, and she took it, and they walked up out of the water onto the far beach on Gull Cay, together, laughing, her husband’s arm around her and their daughter kicking between them, home.