Firefly Beach (27 page)

After the talk at Yale, Joe couldn’t wait to get back to the wreck.

“You gonna teach there?” Sam asked, his left foot stuck in the right leg of his wetsuit.

“Doubt it,” Joe said, watching Sam tangle himself up even more.

“Why not?” Sam asked, yanking his foot free and banging it on a cleat. Joe reached over, undid his brother’s ankle zipper. He had a distant memory of stuffing the kid into a snowsuit.

“Why should I? I like what I do. Just because you want to teach at Yale doesn’t mean everyone does.”

At sea the sky was clear and the views were long. Joe took a deep breath and thought how that was exactly how he had liked his life to be: clear, with long views. Nothing crowding him. Just him, the wreck, the ocean, and the mud.

“You gotta grow up, man,” Sam said. “You’re out here being a pirate, and there’s a university filled with students waiting to learn about muck. You know? Fossil-laden rocks and mud, telling the story of time. Just like you said in your lecture. Beautiful, man.”

“Thanks,” Joe said dryly. Sliding off his shirt and pants, he put on his own wetsuit. Sam handed him a single air tank, which he strapped on. They were ready to dive.

“I mean it, Joe,” Sam said sternly. “Dry land’s where it’s at for you. Especially around here. Near Black Hall.”

“Why near Black Hall?”

“Think about it, idiot. Just think about it.”

Joe pushed Sam overboard. He watched him splash around, sputtering with surprise. Joe followed him into the cold water. The brothers spit in their masks, then slid them over their eyes. Sam blinked at Joe, tried to dunk him. His big brother pushed him away but he swam back good-naturedly. The water felt cold on Joe’s hands and neck. He took a sharp breath, then another and another, trying to get used to the temperature. Years of warmer waters had taken the New Englander right out of him.

“Black Hall,” he said to Sam, treading water. “Jesus.”

“Think about it,” Sam said.

They stuck the regulators in their mouths and dove.

Sunlight penetrates to a depth of two hundred feet, but to the human eye darkness takes over before that. Diving beside Sam, Joe sensed the wreck looming ahead. It hung on the reef, an outcropping of glacial moraine, a dead forest of black timbers. The three spars were broken in half, their yards and halyards trailing in the sand.

Divers, members of his crew, moved about their work like bees going in and out of a hive. There was an air of flight about them, the way they hovered and swerved, bubbles rising. They swam through a ragged hole in the ship’s bow, a dark cave yawning at the sea bottom. And they swam out, holding bits and pieces of the ship and its loot.

Sam zipped ahead, eager to enter. Joe put out a warning hand to hold him back. The spotlight illuminated Sam’s wide eyes behind his mask, and Joe was filled with a protective rush for his brother. The kid’s enthusiasm got him into trouble every time, riding his bike into traffic, saying yes to the first job that came along.

Joe motioned for Sam to wait there. The wreck was too dangerous. Sam’s eyes tried to argue, but Joe was firm. He made his face angry, his eyes threatening. Sam let out a big breath of air, backed off. Joe wished he could feel as if he had just won something, but instead he felt guilty for disappointing his younger brother.

Swimming through the silent deep, Joe felt somber—for leaving Sam behind, and because he felt as if he were about to enter a tomb. Which he was; swimming into the wreck of the
Cambria,
Joe felt a sense of duty. He wanted to honor Clarissa’s mother. In his mind Clarissa was frozen as a little girl, that eleven-year-old child whose mother had sailed away and never come home. Reading her diary, he had gleaned information that made identification of her mother’s skeleton possible. He tried to keep his emotions out of it.

Joe swam into the black hole. Down a long and treacherous path through the twisted and upside-down interior, he followed the dim light that marked the site. His heart skittered inside his chest, but he fought to remain steady. He was glad he hadn’t let Sam come in here. It took great calm to keep breathing correctly underwater. He had watched divers suffer the bends, nearly explode from a surfeit of nitrogen built up from gulping for air, giving in to panic. So he thought of Clarissa and made himself breathe right.

Blue-bright lights glowed up ahead. They illuminated the
Cambria’
s crushed stern, the old mahogany splintered and covered with barnacles and mussels, now part of the reef itself. Fish darted in and out; the sand machine pulled debris away from the treasure site. Divers worked meticulously, uncovering coins.

He saw the two skeletons. They were clustered together, off to the side. Their mouths gaped, their bones protruded. They might have been screaming for help, for forgiveness.

Joe told himself not to feel.

He hovered about them like a fish himself, striving for dispassion. He felt his heart beating madly in his chest. Taking too much air, he looked away. Then back again. These people had died for love. They had sailed away with dreams of escape, their desire for each other pulling them away from everything else. This lady had had a daughter.

Was it worth it? Joe wanted to ask her. Dying on this reef, taken by surprise, by some sudden storm. They hadn’t gotten more than twenty miles away from Elisabeth’s lighthouse. Joe thought of his father, dying fifty miles from home. Of his mother and Hugh Renwick, of the mess and madness their affair had created.

Joe felt his heart hammering. All his life he had used women as a port in a storm, one after the other, avoiding anything messy or long-lasting, and this was why: Just look at the agony. He swam closer to the skeletons. Taking a light from Dan, he shined the beam down on the two gaping skulls, searching.

There it was: the object that identified Elisabeth Randall. Joe’s hands were heavy, his throat ached. According to Clarissa’s diary, she had worn it always. Shreds of weed clung to the vertebrae, with a solid object thickly coated with algae and old barnacles nestled in the clavical bones. Joe reached in, gently dislodged it. Over the years and through the wrecks he had trained himself to be unsentimental about death. He had done it a hundred times, reached into a pile of bones and removed a gold chain or diamond pendant or pocket watch. Clinical, scientific. He had taken the loot and never looked back.

But Elisabeth’s cameo should have been Clarissa’s. Time should have passed the way it was supposed to between a mother and child, with the mother growing old and leaving her most precious things to her daughter. Joe thought of his father, his gold watch, how after he died Joe had never seen it again. Parents die far from home, and they take their things with them. The things that might give their kids comfort or solace or even an answer or two.

Not that things were enough, but they were something to hold on to. Objects to hold and examine, reminders of someone who had once loved you. And sometimes they were all you had.

Joe stared at the bones. He tried to pray for the woman, but somehow the prayer included Caroline and Sam. His throat burned. His weight belt dragged him down, his breath rasped in his ears. Restless, the cameo safely retrieved, he turned to leave the wreck.

As soon as he emerged, he looked around for Sam. Not seeing him right away, his heart started pumping.
Jesus,
he thought. Diving with someone you cared about was too fucking much work. He swam around the wreck, moving faster, looking through the groups of workers.

He found Sam at the reef. Away from the wreck, unimpressed by the gold, Sam was after his own treasure. Fish. A biologist, his interest lay in pelagic species, just as Joe’s lay in sea mud. A thought went through Joe’s mind: What if we did both end up at Yale? What if we found a way to live near each other instead of two oceans away? What if we both did what we were trained to do and taught at a good university?

Not forever, Joe thought, because that was too much to consider all at once. But for a while?

Sam was speaking. Two hundred feet beneath the surface, his brother was swimming among the fish of Moonstone Reef, forming words with his lips. He had taken the regulator from his mouth, and he was enunciating in an exaggerated way. His mouth moved, saying the same words over and over. Watching him form the syllables, Joe read his brother’s lips.

“Black Hall,” Sam was saying, the bubbles exploding toward the surface. “Black Hall.”

March 14, 1979

Dear Joe,

Okay, so I got a little carried away in my last letter. I think it’s bizarre, the way I can’t wait to see you and I don’t even know you yet. Ever since you mentioned sailing here, I keep watching the horizon for sails.

I think something’s happening to me.

Love,

Caroline

April 20, 1979

Dear Caroline,

Something’s happening to me too. Keep watching—I’ll come as soon as I get my mainsail repaired. It blew out in a gale last week. I shouldn’t have been on the water, but I thought I’d take advantage of the wind to sail to Connecticut (i.e., you).

Love,

Joe

S
KYE SAT IN HER STUDIO
,
TRYING TO FEEL LIKE SCULPTING
. Facing north, the room was cool. Her clay was ready. She sat in her regular place, on a tall metal stool pulled close to a smooth stone table. Her roughened fingertips trailed across the slippery surfaces. Her tongue felt thick. Her head pounded. She felt a constant, dull pain in her left temple; unconsciously, she kept touching it, prodding it, seeing if it hurt more when she pressed it with her finger.

She had fallen last night. Walking from the garden to the house, she had stumbled and gone down. She had skinned her knees and struck her head on a rock. The heels of both her hands were scraped raw. She had been covered with bits of grass; sand and tiny pebbles were pressed into her skin. When she came to, Homer was licking her face.

It scared her. She didn’t feel dizzy, and a look in the mirror had revealed no new bruises. But the side of her head felt different, almost as if she had cracked her skull. It ached. Her mother and Simon had been in the house, and she had gone off…for what? She hardly remembered now. She had been in some sort of huff, and she had stormed out to stare at the sea. Homer had just happened along, returning from one of his journeys.

Looking at her clay, Skye felt unmoved, uninspired. The connections she needed to sculpt were missing today. They had been harder and harder to find lately. Skye needed her passions to come through, from her brain to her fingertips, to give shape and emotions to the clay she held in her hand. Drinking blocked them. Liquor dulled the pain, but it also numbed the love.

Every morning she would wake up with a hangover and promise herself she would not drink that day. Even before her fall, her head had hurt. Skye had thought of the liquor crushing her head from the inside out. But at some point every day, she would get the craving. The emptiness inside was bigger than the ache in her head, and she would know a drink would take the worst feelings away. At least for a while.

She wanted one now. She looked at the clock on her table: three
P
.
M
. She made a bargain with herself. Just two more hours. Work till five, and then reward yourself with a glass of wine. You can do that. It won’t kill you.

Simon walked into the room. He smelled of cigarettes and turpentine, and his bleary eyes told their own drinking story. He stood over Skye’s clay, staring at it without speaking. What was he thinking? Skye wondered. Did he know she was in trouble? The word surprised her, and she wondered where it came from. Trouble.

“How’s it going?” Simon asked, pouring a tall glass of water and guzzling it down fast.

“Fine,” Skye said.

“Your mother’s downstairs, chirping about her costume.” Skye smiled at the image, and Simon continued. “She wants to know what we’re wearing to Caroline’s ball. Are we even invited?”

“Of course we are,” Skye said. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

“Because she hates me. And she’s jealous of you.”

Skye shook her head. It made her unhappy when Simon criticized her sisters, and today it made her feel particularly bad. What would Caroline have to be jealous of? A hung-over, bloated sculptor who couldn’t sculpt? Skye reached past her clay for one of the objects she kept on her desk. There was a flat gray stone, a pure white feather, the skeleton of a snake, a shotgun shell, and a pale and faded blue grosgrain ribbon.

“Why do you keep these things?” Simon asked, taking the stone out of her hand. “We’ve been married five years, and I don’t know half the story. These little mysterious things—your Renwick family fetishes—you never talk about them.”

“They’re just objects,” Skye said. “Things to look at.”