Dancing After Hours (6 page)

He was sleeping on his right side now, his face toward her, his left hand resting on her stomach. Below his hand her legs were tensed to spring from the bed, to run not from but at an intruder in the room, while her hand grabbed whatever weapon it could to swing at his face; beneath Cal’s hand her stomach rose and dropped with her accelerated breath, and she felt her heart beating with that adrenaline they now said could kill you, if you were sedentary, if your heart were accustomed to a soft cushion of quotidian calm. Hers was not; but even if it were, she knew the thought of a heart attack would still be as distant as their home among the pines and poplars and maples and copper beeches on the long, wide hill. For she knew it was not the birds that had alerted the muscles in her legs and arms and the one beating beneath her ribs, ready to fight the intruder her body was gathered for, the intruder she had known when she first woke was not there; it was the day itself that woke her: the fourteenth of July.

It had waked her before, while Cal slept as he did now, as he had on that night one year ago when the day ended and she and Cal and Gina and Ryan had showered the salt water and perhaps some of the terror
from their bodies, had eaten even, for they were very hungry, and their bodies were frail, too, with a weakness that food alone could not strengthen, and in the restaurant in Christiansted they had drunk a lot, all of them, before and during and after dinner. Then Gina had gone to her room in the hotel and Ryan to his, and she and Cal had gone to bed, and soon Cal was asleep, while she smoked and listened to Gina and Ryan settling in their rooms on either side of hers, and she knew Cal slept so easily not because he was oblivious but because his body was more in harmony with itself and life, and death, than hers. His family had survived. The young captain and mate were dead, the captain at least ashore now to lie beneath a monument marking his passage on earth and his possession of his final six feet of it, while the mate was forever in the Caribbean, swallowed by its creatures, parts of him—some bones, perhaps even flesh (where was his head, his face?)—left to sink, to become parts of the bottom of the sea, parts of the sea itself. Cal’s body and mind and heart had endured that, and in bed after dinner they demanded of him, as they should, as hers could not or would not, that he sleep. For a week after his mother’s death, when he was forty-eight, he skipped the evening drinks, ate early and with the effort of a tired child, and was in bed sleeping by seven.

For a long time that night a year ago, she did not sleep. Once she heard Gina flush the toilet and she looked at her traveling clock on the bedside table and it glowed two-fifteen at her; at three-twenty Ryan flushed his toilet. And both times she heard the children drop heavily into their beds and the sleep their bladders had barely disturbed; and each time she quietly
and briefly wept, for their sounds recalled to her the nights of Gina’s and Ryan’s growing up when she woke hearing them walking down the hall to their rooms, their light footsteps only audible when the flushing that woke her had ceased and she could hear the moving weight of their small warm bodies above the faint sound of water filling the tank. Her weeping that night in the hotel at St. Croix was soundless, her tears so few they did not even leave her eyes which she wiped dry with the sheet, and it was neither joyful nor frightened nor relieved: it simply came, as milk had once come from her breasts.

Sometime after three-twenty she slept. They stayed one more week on the island, to answer questions and sign statements, to attend the captain’s funeral, a young blond man from California whose young blond, tanned woman wore a white dress and sat with his family in the front pew—a father and mother and two older brothers, who arrived in three different planes from the United States and wore black—and all through the service she stared at the casket, her face still lax with the disbelief that for others becomes in moments a truth they must bear all their lives. Then at the grave, as the brothers at her sides turned her tall, strong body away from the open hole where the captain lay under flowers, the young woman having plucked the first from a wreath and dropped it onto the casket, she collapsed: her knees bent, her body fell, and the two brothers strained to hold her as, doubled over, her lowered face covered by the long blond hair fallen forward and down, she keened.

Rusty and Cal and Gina and Ryan attended the memorial service for the mate, who was from Rhode
Island, whose family arrived on five planes: two sisters, a brother, the mother and her husband, the father and his wife. Rusty sensed that the mate had not had a lover on the day of his death, but there were two young women, one in blue, one in gray, in the pew behind the family, and something about the way they entered together, and sat close, and glanced from time to time at each other, and lowered their faces to cry, either simultaneously or the tears of one starting the tears of the other, made Rusty believe they had at one time, separately but probably in quick succession, been the mate’s lovers; and whether the one in blue had taken the place of the one in gray in the mate’s heart, or the other way around, they were joined for at least this bodiless service, perhaps even because it was bodiless, and for these minutes in the church were somehow united as sisters are, even sisters who dislike each other but despite that are bound anyway because they will never again see or hear or touch someone they both loved. The memorial service was the day after the captain’s funeral, and the questions and answers and signing of statements for the Coast Guard lieutenant from Puerto Rico were done, but the family stayed for the remainder of the week, because they had planned to.

They had planned those fourteen days while eating dinner in Massachusetts, when the thermometer outside Rusty’s kitchen window was at twelve degrees and there was a wind from the north and Cal had said: “If we wait till the off-season I can pay for the whole thing. For everybody.” Gina and Ryan, both working, renting apartments, buying cars, had happily, gratefully, protested; and agreed when Cal said: “Or we can all go Dutch this week.” During those final days at St. Croix
they swam in the small pool at the hotel, but none of them went into the sea, whose breakers struck a reef a short distance from the beach, a natural shield against both depth and sharks, so that only a tepid, shallow pool with the motion of a lake reached the sand at the hotel. One evening, from the outdoor bar, Rusty watched Gina standing with a tall sunset-colored rum drink on the beach, near the water; she stepped toward it once, and stopped paces from where it touched the sand. Then she stepped back and smoked a cigarette and finished her drink, looking beyond the reef at the blue water and the half-disk of red sun at its horizon. Rusty watched the sun until it was gone, and green balls rose from the spot where it sank; they seemed shot into the sky like fireworks, and she thought of the mate scattered in the sea.

That fourteenth of July had waked Rusty on nights in the final months of last year’s New England summer, and in the autumn, when she could smell the changes in the cooler air coming through the windows: a near absence of living plants and trees, the air beginning to have the aroma of itself alone, as it did in winter, when still she woke, not every night or even every week, and lay in the room with the windows closed and frosted, her face pleasantly cold, and listened to the basement furnace, its thermostat lowered for the night, pushing heated air through the grates in the house. In that first spring she woke in the dark and breathed air tinged with the growth of buds and leaves and grass beyond her windows. Now it was the anniversary of the day itself, and she and Cal and Gina and Ryan had decided, again in winter, again eating dinner on a Sunday night, not to let it pass as though it were any other day,
any set of two numerals on the calendar, but to gather, either at home or wherever she and Cal chose to be in the middle of July.

She left the bed, and by that simple motion of pushing away sheet and summer blanket and swinging her feet to the floor, her breath and heart and muscles eased, and softly she left the bedroom and Cal’s slow breathing it held, went down the hall and into the kitchen, everything visible though not distinct in this last of darkness and beginning of light her eyes had adjusted to while in bed she listened to birds and saw the fins of sharks.

She still did, standing at the sink in her white gown and looking through the window screen at dark pines, and she heard the mate’s scream just after he tied the knot lashing together the two orange life preservers and she had looked up from buckling her life jacket, looked at his scream and saw a face she had never seen before and now would always see: his eyes and mouth widened in final horror and the absolute loss of hope that caused it; then he was gone, as though propelled downward, and his orange life jacket he had waited to put on, had held by one strap in his teeth as he wrapped the line down through the water and up over the sides of the life preservers, floated on the calm blue surface. She saw, too, in her memory that moved into the space of lawn and gray air between her and the pines, the young blond captain bobbing in his jacket in the churning water beneath the helicopter blades. He helped Gina first onto the ladder; Rusty, holding the swinging ropes, watched Gina’s legs climbing fast, above the water, glistening brown in the sun; then the captain lifted Rusty and pushed her legs to the rung
they were reaching for, and then Ryan and then Cal, and Cal’s wet hair blew down and out from his head. Rusty was aboard then, on her hands and knees on the vibrating deck of the helicopter, calling louder, it seemed, than the engine, calling to Cal to hurry, hurry, climb; then she saw the shark’s fin and in front of it the rising back and head, its blank and staring eyes, then its mouth as the captain reached for the ladder, but only his left arm rose as she screamed his name so loudly that she did not hear the engine but heard the bite as she saw it and blood spurting into the air, onto the roiled water while the captain’s right shoulder still moved upward as though it or the captain still believed it was attached to an arm.

Cal heard her scream. He looked down over his shoulder, then sprang backward into the water, and then she could not scream, or hear the engine, or feel the deck’s quick throb against her knees and palms; she could only see Cal’s feet hit the water and his legs sink into it, and his body to his ribs before the jacket stopped and lifted him, one arm straight upward, his hand gripping a rung and pulling his arm bent as with the other he reached underwater and pushed the captain up and held him while the captain moved his left hand up the vertical rope to the next rung. Then Cal lifted him again and the captain’s feet were on the ladder and she could see Cal’s hand pushing his buttocks, and the captain’s hand moved up to the next rung and pulled, the sunburn gone now from his face more pale than his sun-bleached hair, and blood fell on Cal and spurted on the water where a fin came with the insouciant speed of nature and her remorseless killing. Cal was looking only at the captain’s back above him; he bent one leg
out of the water, its thigh pressing his abdomen; then his foot was on the ladder; he straightened his leg and the other ascended from the water as quickly it seemed as it had entered when he jumped over the captain, into the sea. Below him the eyes and head rose from blown waves, then went under, and the fin circled the bound orange preservers turning and rocking and rising and falling in the water and downward rush of air from the huge blades. Their loud circling above her made Rusty feel contained from all other time and space save these moments and feet of rope that both separated her from Cal and joined her to him.

Then quickly and firmly, yet not roughly, a man removed her from the hatch—pushed her maybe; lifted and set her down maybe—and went backward down the ladder. She crawled to the hatch’s side: Cal stood behind the captain, his head near the middle of the captain’s back, his right hand holding the vertical rope beneath the slowing spurt of blood, his left pulling the captain’s hand from a rung, pushing it to the one above; then the man descending stopped and held on to the swinging ladder with the crook of his elbow, and hung out above the water and the fins—four now, five—and lowered a white line she had not seen to Cal, then tied it around his waist and held the captain’s wrist while Cal circled and knotted the line beneath the orange jacket and the face that now was so white, she knew the captain would die. But her heart did not; it urged the three men up as Cal, with his body, held the captain on the ladder and pushed his hand up to a rung, then lifted his left leg to one, then his right, and followed him up while the crewman, with the line around his waist, slowly climbed until he reached the
hatch and leaned through it, his chest on the deck, and Gina and Ryan each took an arm and pulled, and Rusty worked her hands under his web belt at his back, and on her knees she pulled until he was inside, kneeling, then standing and turning seaward, to look down the ladder and tighten the rope and say to any of them behind him: “First-aid kit.”

Hand over hand he pulled the rope, looking down the ladder at his work, keeping his pull steady but slow, too, holding the captain on the ladder and between it and Cal. Then at the bottom edge of the hatch, against a background of blue sky and water, the captain’s face appeared; then the jacket, and the shoulder she could not look away from but she saw the other one, too, and his left arm that did not reach into the helicopter but simply fell forward and lay still. The crewman stepped back, leaning against the rope around his waist, pulling it faster now but smoothly, and though she could not see Cal, she saw the effort of his push as the captain rose and dropped to the deck. She bent over his back, gripped his belt at both sides, and threw herself backward, and he slid forward as she fell on her rump and sat beside him, on the spot where his right arm would have been, and she felt his blood through her wet jeans. The blood did not spurt now. It flowed, and Cal was aboard, crawling in it, before Rusty or Gina or Ryan could move around the captain to hold out a hand; blood was in Cal’s dark brown hair, flecks and smears among the gray streaks and the gray above his ears and in his short sideburns, and on his hands and sleeves and jacket and face. But what Rusty saw in a grateful instant that released her into time and space again was his own
blood, pumping within his body, coloring his face a deep, living red.