Dead in the Water (16 page)

“The kitty’s scared.” He reached toward the shadows beneath the opposite side of the bench. A paw slashed; the cat yowled long and low and hard.

John had a horrible thought:

If the food ran out …

Kittens for breakfast.

His stomach burned as if he’d swallowed a flaming torch. He caught his breath and laid his hand across it.

“It’s okay, dear,” Ruth murmured to him.

Grace under pressure. He admired that.

Envied it.

Needed it.

When does a man have to be more than a man?

Right now, buckwheat.

Right now.

His stomach, a lava bed. He clenched his jaw and nodded at Ruth.

“I’m fine.”

And you’re finer, lady. We get out of this, I’m going to marry you. And Donna, too. Matt and I need as many mommies as we can get.

He looked at Donna through the fog. Her hand was in her purse and her fingers were moving around. He could see the ripples of her knuckles in the leather.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. She was loading her gun.

Not alone, not alone, not alone at all, on the wide, wide sea. The sea that is ruled by invitation only; the sea that awaits your RSVPs, a thousand times a thousand
.

Yes, you are not alone
.

As you sleep in the lifeboat, dear, dear Ruth, with your crew mates; as you drift merrily along (quoth he, a most, heh-heh, inviting man, oh, captain, your captain), as you sleep as I once did, open your heart and let me read it. And listen, me beauty, as I have listened to you. Attend to the message in the bottle that is for you, just for you. The one your fogbound heart has been praying to read. The one I have written just for you, because I heard you first
,

oh, my dear Ruth, the one that is just for you
:

This is how it will be when you drown:

You won’t inhale any water. That doesn’t always happen.

When you drown dry, your glottis reflexively closes tight—airtight—and,
ironically, you can’t breathe at all. No air goes in, nor out. It’s only later, much later, that the water creeps into your lungs,

on little

cat

feet.

Peaceful, and purring, and gentle, it doesn’t hurt at all, my darling. And the undertow doesn’t yank at you. That’s a misconception. You never feel a thing. The water curls around you, fuzzy cattail, a harmless garden snake. As the panic sets in, remember that, Ruth, my love: the snake is a friend.

And the garden is beautiful.

Remember the marshes where … we … went bird-watching? The reeds and the cattails. The fog-gray pussy willows. Remember how you and … I … brought a bag of Fritos and somehow, the Coppertone bottle got uncapped, and we joked about dipping the chips in suntan lotion?

We capsized the boat with our laughter. It tipped right over, and your coat spread over the water like a sodden pair of wings. I called you the yellow-hooded water-treader. And we laughed, though the weight of the coat dragged you under, no matter how hard you treaded. You grabbed the Coppertone bottle as if it were a life ring, and we laughed and laughed—

The boat tipped over, Ruth. That was how he—

How
I
—

But look, my darling. Look. This is how it will be when you drown:

And suddenly, Ruth was gliding into veils of pale jade and cat’s-eye green and henna that parted as she floated through them, tissues and oval tubes, and flat, silky ropes. The water around her shimmered deep blue, sparkling with golden sun, gilding the backs of her wintry hands, the autumn leaves of kelp.

Beautiful, beautiful.

The sun filtered through the curtains; they lifted, and she gasped. Kaleidoscopes of colors spun in slow motion as she descended toward them: carpets of orange, violet, scarlet,
pink, yellow, fans of carnation and white; fuzzy velvet shapes like hands that waved at her, tender crimson, shy, muted lavender. Hello, hello. Hello.

And fish, in riots of color no marsh bird ever sported: parrot-red and forest-green; robin-scarlet; the iridescent cobalt of a peacock; tendril fairy coronets like those of crown cranes. Jellyfish washed with the peach-blush of cockatiels.

Welcome. Welcome, Ruth, who desired
.

And desire, being a kind of Spirit, anguished yearning, and prayers made of tears were enough to bring her to this place. It was enough to call him to her side; him—

Ruth shifted, hazily aware of her own confusion. Who? Who, Stephen? Was it Stephen who spoke?

Oh, but see the walls of coral, curving through the water into inlets, coves, and forests; and harems and grottoes, reclining and opening before her. Glossy towns, and cities; and in the center of the universe, shielded by a lacy canopy, nestled on a pillow of rainbow anemones, a green-colored moray eel coiled in repose.

A bottle-green eel.

A glass snake.

The creature’s skin glistened like wet lips as the water caressed it. Waves of light rippled on its scales. As Ruth drew near, it opened its eyes. Rubies, rare and perfect, glittered in the sockets as it sleepily raised its head and watched her. She could see through its body, see the spinal cord, the teeth.

It reached toward her.

The snake is a friend—

A man’s hand moved through the dreamsea beside hers. The wide, flat back, the long, tapering fingers. On the ring finger, a simple gold band—

—inside, inscribed simply, “
Forever.
” It was his wedding ring.

We will laugh again
.

Stephen. Oh, Stephen. Tears rolled from Ruth’s eyes and skinnied down the aqueducts of her heavily lined face. She put her hand in his, warm and wet and hard fingers sliding against her palm. In the world beneath the surface.

Beneath the water.

*  *  *

And a voice said unto her, in her dream:

Christen the vessel, Ruth
.

What?

And everything flashed away from her, in a cloud of dust on the ocean floor.

Give Her a name, and a shape, and a form
.

Groggy, she opened her eyes. She lay in the lifeboat, her shipmates sprawled around her. Donna’s curly black head rested on the shoulder of John, the doctor. His glasses had slid to the base of his nose. Elise and Phil sprawled like puppets whose strings had been severed. Ramón, his head drooping over the side of the boat, his chest arched as if for that last, final breath.

Matty, curled against her breast, sucking his thumb in his sleep, and Ruth held him tightly—

No, she didn’t. That was part of another dream. Matty was actually across the boat, too far away to touch.

The world went hazy, as though she were peering through a cloud, a gray mushroom cloud of fog. Like the light the doctor shines in your eyes during an exam, and the world dandelions around the brilliant yellow, as you peer into a black-hole sun.

You’re dreaming, she told herself, but she didn’t think she was. Hallucinating, then, of Stephen, or maybe of someone very like him. It was confused now, and no wonder. The terror of their situation must surely be the cause of it. Incredible to accept, that she was cast adrift on the same sea—that vast mouth of sea, hungry and …

No. No. She blinked, hard. She was so disoriented she didn’t know what was happening, and what she was imagining. As in her cabin that day.

Yes, as in her cabin that first foggy day, when
someone
had told her to open the porthole, and she had seen … what had she seen? She couldn’t remember. But she did remember how the desire—

—even now, something about desire clung to her mind—

—to leave the ship had almost been insurmountable. She
could never have told Donna she had been dreaming about jumping off the
Morris
, could she?

Within the lifeboat, the world swam with dark silhouettes and a shifting gauze of gray; like a bad pair of binoculars or a movie projector lens out of focus. Images shifted fuzzily before her:

In her hand, she saw, but didn’t see, a bottle. It was, but wasn’t, green. And it was, but wasn’t, encrusted with chunks of precious stones around the neck.

And there was a note inside, addressed to her.

Oh, yes, there was. Of that she was suddenly sure; as she looked down at her hand everything shifted into hard, true reality and she saw that she actually did hold the most beautiful of bottles. It must have fallen into the boat, or perhaps one of the others had brought it along—some treasure, an expensive perfume bottle, a champagne bottle for a celebration.

Or to christen a vessel.

She jerked. Why had she thought of that? Why did it sound familiar?

She peeled off the gooey outer coating—wax?—and shook out a piece of thick, yellowed paper. It was decorated with a skull and crossbones, and there were words in an elaborate scroll that read,

The Captain, H.M.S.
?

As she puzzled over this, she heard a voice inside her head:
We need a name. We need a life
.

Then something flapped hard against the back of her head, oozy and ice-cold; she screamed and fell forward; something dug into her skull with a sharp, piercing cut that made her grunt low in her belly. With a limp hand she flailed behind her; but her head was so cold; her brains were freezing; she was losing herself, going

down,

down,

down, into the hazy place; she saw, and couldn’t see; smelled, and couldn’t smell; touched, and couldn’t touch—

—the neck of the bottle as it slipped through her fingers and wound around her waist, spiraling in a slow dance
around and around; it raised its head and looked at her with jeweled eyes, opened its mouth. A waxy coating of yellowed white dripped from its teeth—no, its fangs—in large bubbles toward her lap—

The world turned, around and around. The bubbles bounced inches from her face; floated sideways past her nose; stretched down, down, toward her forehead—

And the bubbles popped above her as they reached the surface that glowed above her once more, above her sea-dream world and the man of her dreams. And there he was. There, he was, and she was joyful, in a loose, disconnected way. Her happiness was expended practically before she felt it; it was diluted, dissolving.

But there he was. And as she reached for him, the world rippled and she saw—

Yes, she saw—

But Stephen, what happened to your beautiful hand?

Death and decay, it rotted away
.

No. No, no, no. She writhed in horror as the gold band sank into the black and purple and the bloat—

She turned her head and saw his face, a horror of rot, and the lips that chunked from the skull as they spoke, and the purple-black fingers pointed to the bottle in her hand:

Ruth, quick, Ruth, hurry. Christen us. Dip us in the water with the force of your need; baptize us in the name of your Spirit and make it so, make it real—

She looked toward the surface and effortlessly rose to meet it. And then, just as effortlessly she was inside the lifeboat, dry as a bone. Steaming through the fog, the huge carcass of the
Morris
bleated and bellowed. Layers of mist rose from the water and strangled the ship, smothering the hull and the outside deck and the superstructure—

—And a huge, grinning face dancing in triumph at the top of the bottle, the huge glass bottle that had entrapped the
Morris
. Gazing down at its wild work, then out at Ruth, with eyes that were whirlpools; and in them, fleets of ships struggled and sank: square-rigged vessels and gray frigates and pleasure yachts, and rafts and kayaks and deep-sea vessels, drowning in a pirate skull and crossbones that tipped its head
back, tipped it back to show the emptiness inside it, and laughed and laughed.

The fog gathered and thickened until the ship was invisible. The bottle pitched and rolled, and the sound of something huge battering its sides buffeted Ruth’s ears like the explosions of bombs. Screams and shouts and wails rose like a single membrane of smoke toward the stopper on the bottle, and pushed, and pushed. Cries for help, and prayers, that pushed, and pushed.