Surface Tension - Kling Christine - Страница 67
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“That means I have to testify?”
“You’ll have to no matter what, dear. They’ll just subpoena you. You might as well go to them first and get something out of the deal. So all I need is the thumbs-up from you, and I’ll be on my way. What do you say?”
I pushed my fruit bowl away. I’d lost what little appetite I’d been able to muster at the thought of looking again at Zeke Moss, Cesar Esposito, and Benjamin Crystal. Yet if I could help keep them away from girls like Sunny ... hell, yes. “Go for it, Jeannie.”
She came over, bent down, and gave me a smothering hug. “Just think, honey, the Gorda will be all yours. You’ll be able to buy your brothers out.” Standing and putting her hand on one hip, she asked, “Don’t you think it’s time you got back to work? I think you need to get outside and get on the water again.”
I nodded. “You’re probably right.”
She collected her things and turned toward the door. “You want to know something really stupid, Jeannie? I don’t think Patty Krix ever did double-cross Neal. I think this whole thing started to unravel because of Neal’s paranoia. When Neal surfaced that day out on the Top Ten, Patty was talking to the Coast Guard, but Neal didn’t know that—he just assumed she was calling Crystal. He didn’t have to kill her.”
“He didn’t have to try to steal that money, either. Don’t you think about him anymore. Time to move forward.”
I stood in the doorway watching her walk down the brick path. She turned, glanced down at the river, smiled, and waved, calling, “I’m out of here. She’s all yours.” Jeannie turned back to me. “On second thought, Seychelle, you could probably use a few more days off.” She winked and disappeared around the side of the Larsens’ house.
I stepped outside and looked toward the river. There, tied to the dock, was a nearly new thirty-six-foot catamaran, and B.J. was standing in the cockpit wearing only flower-print surfer trunks and a smile.
After examining the length of the boat, I squinted at him. “You didn’t steal it, did you?”
“Belongs to a lady friend of mine. She once said if I ever wanted anything, all I had to do was ask. So I asked. I’m headed down to the Keys for a few days. I sure could use a hand. You interested?”
With her shallow draft, B.J. was able to take that cat far into the backwaters of Florida Bay, anchor off little no-name keys, and zigzag back to the coast to find the few rare patches of sand along the Atlantic side of the Florida Keys. I slept in the spare cabin, alone in a queen- size bunk, and B.J. pretty much left me to my thoughts, giving me some of that infamous space he was noted for. We avoided people and civilization and ate what we caught, though my appetite for most good things seemed to have vanished. I had to admit that all that fresh food BJ. was making me eat, along with the fresh air and sun, was starting to make me want to rejoin the human race, but I just couldn’t muster up the desire for much of anything. There was something, some sour taste, in the back of my throat that I could not wash away no matter how many ice-cold Coronas I swallowed.
It was that black pit, taunting me again.
One afternoon when we’d returned to the boat after an afternoon’s snorkeling, and B.J. was down in the galley cooking up the grouper he’d just speared with his Hawaiian sling, I rinsed off under the sun shower we had hanging on the afterdeck, then toweled off my white nylon swimsuit. I helped myself to a Corona and, on an impulse, took the two photos out of the side zipper pocket of my shoulder bag: the photo of my mother and the three of us kids, and the picture of Neal and me in the Dry Tortugas. I went up forward to sit in the netting between the pontoons. I’d thought about those photos lots of times over the last few days, after Neal was really dead and finally gone. I’d thought about him and me and Ely and my mother and the choices we’d all made. I’d come close to pulling the photos out of my purse several times, but I just hadn’t felt up to looking at them yet. What was different now, I didn’t know, except that I wanted to make that sour taste vanish, and maybe I had to look at the dark places to make that happen.
The sun was about thirty minutes off the horizon, and the gray-green scrub on the key looked inflamed in the golden rays. Around the south side of the island, on the ocean side, the little breakers foamed bright white, almost luminous. In close to the island, the shallows glowed pale lime, gradually deepening out in the channel between the keys to a deep cobalt blue. A little dark pointed head lifted out of the water over the seagrass beds—a sea turtle surfacing for a breath.
“Are you okay?”
BJ.’s voice startled me.
“Yeah. I was just looking at these old pictures.” Actually, I hadn’t looked yet, I was just holding them— clutching them so tightly, I suddenly realized, that I was bending the paper.
Around the south side of the island, the surface tension caused by currents of the swiftly rising tide smoothed the water to a glassy sheen and was broken only occasionally by the fins of a large school of tarpon as they rolled in the pass.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about my past. You know, how I got here to this place, today. How things might have been different if I’d made other choices.” The school of fish moved closer to our anchorage on the inside of the pass. “My mother always wanted me to be an artist. I wasn’t really all that good, though.”
“Very few of us ever turn out to be what our parents want us to be,” he said. “They try to do the best they can, but it’s not about them in the end. It’s about us.” He put his hand on my shoulder and began massaging the knotted muscles in my neck, trying to knead away the tension. His voice was soothing, but I felt my stomach muscles tightening at his touch. I opened my fingers and looked at the smiling faces in my hands. In just a few years, I would be the same age as my mother when this photo was taken. For the first time, I saw the resemblance that people often remarked upon, the maple-colored skin, the same-size white tank suits, the shoulder-length sun-streaked light brown hair.
She was staring directly at the camera, and I noticed the deep lines at the corners of her eyes, the furrows in her brow. Though the weather in the photo was bright and sunny, in her eyes I saw the dark squall of her painting.
“We have expectations,” he said, “but then we discover life is full of hurts and disappointments and shortcomings.”
I nodded and took a swig from my beer. “Yeah, I’ve had a few of those lately.”
“What makes you so hard on yourself?”
“Me?” I cocked my head to one side. “What do you mean?”
“You’re a smart, funny, talented, beautiful woman. Aside from being a terrible cook, you’ve pretty much got it all.”
A smile touched the corners of my mouth for a little while, but as we sat quietly watching the sky turn violet, the sour taste returned.
Neal looked so damned cocky and happy and pleased with himself in the other photo. We’d made love that morning and made pancakes for breakfast before going ashore and exploring the ruins of an old fort down in the Dry Tortugas. It was funny that I even remembered we’d eaten our last papaya that day, feeding each other spoonfuls of the juicy pink-orange flesh dripping in lime juice.
“Neal saved my life down there, B.J. He didn’t have to come back and put that regulator in my mouth.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“It’s funny in a way. Crystal said he was a romantic, that he would come back for me—and he did. He died because he came back to save me.”
“Yes, I know.” He kissed the side of my head and smoothed back my hair. “And you should be happy for him.”
I turned to face him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
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