Surface Tension - Kling Christine - Страница 46

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Pit and I played dress-up next to the family’s Dodge Valiant, getting into Red’s navy footlocker, trying on his uniforms, the big brass latches on the locker gleaming in the late afternoon light, the garage filled with the odor of old motor oil and mothballs.

Standing in front of an easel, my mother’s arms wrapped around me from behind, her warm bosom pressed against my back. She was steadying my right hand and the brush it held, whispering in my ear “Light strokes, yes, that’s it, lovely,” as I washed in the blue sky around the white clouds.

All five of us were on board Gorda, probably the one and only time it ever happened. It was the Fourth of July and we were offshore waiting for the fireworks on the city barge. It was a night so dark and still, the sea looked like star-splattered black glass. Meanwhile, Maddy, the only one allowed to use the lighter lit Pit’s and my sparklers ever so slowly, and we were screaming at him to hurry up, to stop trying to be such a big shot. Red told us all to shut up. Mother went up to stand alone on the bow. He didn’t go after her.

We were in the living room and Red was crying. I’d never seen my father cry. I hadn’t said a word to anybody all day. Not to the lifeguards. Not to the police officers. Not to my brothers. Not to my father. “Didn’t she say anything?” he kept asking. “I don’t understand. Why? Why did she do this? She must have said something.” I didn’t think I would ever talk again. . . .

The summer burned up through my towel, sandwiching me between rays of the sun and the dry oven heat of the sand. On a radio, several blankets over Carole King was singing “Up on the Roof.” I was pretending to read the words of my book.

“Seychelle,” my mother said.

I didn’t answer her. I kept my eyes moving over the print on the page.

“Honey.” I was still mad. I wanted to be back with Pit and Molly. “Try to understand. Sometimes it’s just too hard to do what we know is right.

“Seychelle, will you ever forgive me?”

I answered her.

She stood up and walked down to the water.

"Did you fall asleep?”

B.J.’s voice brought me back. The pain was nearly gone. I felt rested and renewed.

I sat up, shifting the towel around me, and rotated my arm and shoulder. There was a little remnant, sort of a phantom pain, but I had regained 90 percent of the movement in my wrist and shoulder.

“That’s amazing, B.J. What did you do?”

“Just a little shiatsu. It’s like acupuncture, only using massage instead of needles.”

“That’s amazing,” I said, trying to stand gracefully without losing the towel. “Thanks.”

He shrugged. “What are friends for?”

I walked closer to him and watched his eyes. “You are my friend, aren’t you? I mean, after what happened the other night at your house ... I don’t know, I was kinda crazy.”

“Always, Seychelle.”

He was right. I could see it in there.

“You wouldn’t believe what I had started thinking about you. People have been following me, spying on me, trying to hurt me, and I haven’t known who to trust.”

“Trust your own instincts,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me.

My own arms were crossed in front of my chest, clutching the towel, and I folded into his embrace feeling slight and fragile in the circle of his arms. It was rare and remarkably pleasant for me to feel almost petite. I nuzzled my face into his chest, smelling him and feeling the thudding of my pulse deep in my tight throat. I wanted to say something, to explain that I’d never felt anything like his touch, but the words wouldn’t come. I pressed my body to his and was about to toss my towel and reach around those shoulders when he placed his hands on my arms and gently pushed me away.

Our eyes locked. He brushed the backs of his fingers across my cheek. Smiling, I playfully bit his pinky.

B.J. pushed out his lower lip in a playful pout and shook his head. “Seychelle.”

I loved the sound of his voice speaking my name. “How do you do that? I was in so much pain, and you just made it all go away.”

“No.” He sighed. “Not all of it.” He pressed his fingers against the tendons on the side of my neck, and I winced. “See that tightness? You are still holding on to something, something I can’t massage away. I don’t know what it is . . . maybe you don’t even know what it is. But until then”—he turned me around—“this is not the time,” and he pushed me through the bedroom door. He didn’t follow.

After kicking the door closed, I flopped facedown on my bed, grabbed a pillow, pulled it tight over the back of my head, and screamed into the mattress. Pain? Yeah, I knew pain—the pain of rejection. The fabric around my face grew wet with spit. I didn’t care.

When I finally got up, I took a few deep breaths and looked around my room. It was a mess, like my life. Why, oh why was I coming on to B.J. like this? I was behaving like an idiot. I sorted through several piles of wrinkled clothing before finally settling on a pair of jeans and a plain green T-shirt. When I walked out into the living room, still combing the snarls out of my hair B.J. was sitting on the couch drinking a glass of orange juice.

His smiling eyes watched me cross the room. “Jeannie called me,” he said. “She was worried about you—sent me over here to find you. I guess she’s been leaving messages on your machine and trying to reach you for almost twenty-four hours.”

I glanced at the machine. The red light was blinking.

“Did she say what she wanted?”

“Just that she’s pinned down the owner of the Top Ten. She said she needs to talk to you about it.”

I dialed Jeannie’s number but just got her answering machine again. I left a brief message so she’d know I was alive, and told her I’d call back later.

“Do you want to talk about what’s going on?” B.J. asked.

I opened the fridge and searched fruitlessly for something edible. I reached for the orange juice and got a glass for company’s sake.

Flopping down into my mamasan chair and tucking my feet under me, I considered how much to tell him. Not that I didn’t trust B.J., but I didn’t want to get him worried—or more worried.

“As near as I can tell, Neal was after something when he went out there on the Top Ten. He was diving for something on the bottom. Remember those two guys I told you had hassled me and Elysia?”

“Yeah.”

“Yesterday, after I got back from the memorial service, I took the Whaler and went back out to try to find the same spot where I found the Top Ten, and those two guys were diving out there. They were checking out some artificial reef wrecks. Neal knew where it was— whatever it is—so that’s why they were trying to find Neal the night they jumped us. I have no idea what Elysia had to do with it, but I’m sure her death is connected.

“So, anyway, last night I went aboard the Top Ten and got the last position out of the GPS. And it seems at least one of those guys had the same idea. While I was poking around the boat, I noticed something weird on the afterdeck. It was this big compressor. Maybe Neal was planning on using it as a hookah rig so he could stay down longer than he could on a tank. But I don’t know how deep you can go on a rig like that.”

“Me neither.”

“I thought maybe I would go over to Pier 66 and ask some questions, see if Neal had talked to anybody about it when he brought it aboard.”

“I think you need to leave things alone, Seychelle. Let the police deal with this.”

“Yeah, right. They wouldn’t even know the right questions to ask—that is, if they were even interested in asking them.” I punched the button on my answering machine to see if anyone had left messages besides Jeannie. As the third message started to play, I recognized Detective Collazo’s voice.

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