Open Water (35 page)

“Sometimes our bruises are on the inside.”

“Oh, Christ.”

Munro said, “I warned her about Willis.”

“Who gives you the right to warn me? What are you doing here anyway in Carole’s Vista Cruiser?” Holly hissed the four syllables,
Vis-ta Cruis-er
, showing her disdain for its undeniable suburban resonance. “Where’s your sports car, that red one?”

“The wagon is the family car. This weekend I’m involved in family business. I guess you’re family now.”

She wondered what claim to her he was making. “Are you through yet?” she said to Dr. Kline. “I don’t have to sit here all night?”

“Did I get my message across?”

Holly told Dr. Kline that she understood. She was supposed to steer clear of Willis Pratt.

Munro added, “Honey, you’re linked to a stolen truck, toxic waste, and maybe or maybe not that big old fire in town. I’d say you better cherish your days on the street.” He was trying to rattle her but she wasn’t whimpering yet. He reached under the table and pinched her knee. He kept his hand cupped on her knee. She felt its heat through the
denim. She suddenly realized that her delinquent behavior might be a turn-on to Munro. He might wait there forever, with his hand on her, until she agreed to do a little horizontal dancing. She pried his fingers off her leg and stood up. She took the broom from the kitchen closet and went into the parlor. She swept the broken Fresnel lens into the dustpan. The glass brushing against the thin tin plate made quite a racket. The gorgeous glass was scattered everywhere in tiny chlorophyll chunks and flowerets.

W
illis pedaled the oversized tricycle along the Cliff Walk. He was pumping hard. He reached through Rennie’s plastic flowers and grabbed the handlebars dead center to get the greatest traction. He remembered the line from a pop song: “You say plastic flowers never die, but I say plastic flowers never live—”

He was bleeding from a cut over his eye where a branch had gouged his forehead in the fall. The storm was throwing everything at him; tags of yellow sea foam like rancid shaving cream clung to the high rocks and sometimes lifted up and caught him. The winding path along the granite cliffs was mostly unlit, and he rolled through the dark from rote memory, past the historic houses whose names he knew by heart, Hopedene, Seaward, past Forty Steps. He veered too near the perilous edge only once or twice, enough to shock him from his drug daze, which kept him moving numbly against the wall of rain. The sound of the sea was assaultive and wearying as he steered the bike toward Château-sur-Mer. He began to understand that he wasn’t taking his stepmother anywhere without finding a proper vehicle. He knew it was a shot in hell, but Willis thought that he might find Debbie at Salve Regina College and she could arrange to get him a loaner.

The campus was two doors down from Rennie’s new home in the Château-sur-Mer Life Care infirmary. Willis could get Rennie over to the college and put her into a borrowed car. He looked for Debbie in the college snack bar. He strolled through the blazing laundry room where girls were sitting astride the Whirlpool washers reading swollen coin-op copies of Stephen King. He finally found Debbie in the library, where she was staring at a five-pound volume of
Gray’s Anatomy.
She wasn’t alarmed to see him. She was glad to be distracted. Willis saw the pages spread open to a detailed diagram of the peritoneum.

“Look who it is. Mister Wonderful,” she said.

He stopped in front of her and smiled his invaluable smile.

“What are you doing here? This isn’t a 4-F Club meeting.

“Don’t you mean 4-
H
?” he said.

“No. I mean what I said, 4-F. Find ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, and forget ’em.”

“That’s nice. Sass and more sass.” He was puffing from the bike ride.

She looked at him hard. His pants were soaking wet and sliding off his hips. He didn’t have the time to grab some underwear, which might have helped to keep them up. His cast was sodden, like a swollen loaf of rising bread dough. His hands and face were red as beets from the cold, crashing rain. She looked at the spongy cuff of his cast where his sore red fingers protruded.

“God,” she said, after she completed a nurse-style up-and-down.

“You know what, Debbie? I need a favor.”

“I guess you do. Have you looked at yourself?”

“I need a car for a half hour.”

“A car for a half hour?
I
should get you a car?”

“Okay, okay,” he told her. “Look, our trouble is ancient history, right? I never said sorry. I’m saying it now.”

That’s all she seemed to want to hear. She was satisfied.

Willis leaned against the institutional library furniture as if he couldn’t stand up without it. His pupils were tiny as specks from his fading dose of morphine and she couldn’t tell what he was seeing through those tiny pins when he looked at her. She didn’t like the feeling.

“I saw your mother in the infirmary. On second shift, I go around and do the blood pressures. I’m really sorry, Willis.”

“That’s where I’m heading now. Want to help me out, or not?” he told her.

“Maybe I can get a car,” she said.

“That’s beautiful,” he told her, “that’s my girl.”

Some of the other students had started to take notice. Willis was making a puddle from his saturated clothing. Debbie leaned over and kissed him. She must have been wild about him for one little duration of time, and her tenderness was genuine. She straightened up and walked him past the girls who were ogling him. He was amazed that she had any regard for that short-lived spell that had come and gone between them. She stood outside the building with Willis. The violent rain was knifing through the streetlights like drawers of shiny flatware spilling from the sky.

“Can you bring a car here, say, in a half hour?” he asked her.

“There’s nowhere to park tonight. Look at this, it’s packed. It’s a concert. Chamber music at The Breakers mansion. A big deal.”

“Hell, just double-park it somewhere right here,” he told her.

She agreed to do it. Then she warned him, “They have at least three toughs on duty at Château-sur-Mer. They carry aerosol deterrents.”

“They don’t wear a gun?”

“Look, these aerosol deterrents are nasty. That’s oleoresin pepper gas. That stuff can stop a grizzly. You better watch yourself.”

W
illis got back on the bike and rolled past the last mansion before Château-sur-Mer. Debbie was right, a big gala was happening at The Breakers. Floodlights were cranked up illuminating the flashing rain. Newport elite were filing inside, everyone wearing black tie underneath their raingear. The weather must have shattered people’s expectations for glam photos; the society page was a washout. Willis pedaled through; the tricycle spokes twirled wheels of rainwater on either side of him. Willis sighted drifts of women on the marble steps, their hems skimming the puddles. The ladies lifted their long skirts in a collective perpetual-motion curtsy. When the steps were empty, workers passed brooms along the underside of the canvas awning to keep the water from welling. The water slid off in sheets. Water, water everywhere.

He rode the bike past the rococo pile-up and onto the quiet grounds of Château-sur-Mer. He located Rennie’s Life Care wing, but he couldn’t find the entrance to the building. He walked around the ground floor, peering inside the windows wherever he could. He saw a grey head, another grey head. A bald dome. He recognized the eerie blue light and looked inside to see quite a sizable TV room.

He found a door and walked into the building. He asked a woman resident to direct him to the Life Care unit. She looked back at him, baffled. After a moment, he realized it wasn’t his question that had puzzled her. She was lost in a labyrinthine brainteaser of her own.

He didn’t wait and walked down a long hallway. His wet boots squished on the polished tile. He knew his boots were ruined, and it cut him down some. The battered, swollen footwear was a peculiar, subliminal threat to his well-being.

Willis searched the doorway of each room and saw whatever it was his fortune to see: a man hunched in a chair, a woman attached to a dialysis machine, another had a tiny television on an expanding arm positioned two inches from her face, her nose against the screen. His heart was in his throat. Only now could he actually picture Rennie in this forbidding place.

He turned a corner and reached a nursing station. It looked odd to Willis, the lamps were too soft. The illumination came from indirect sources. It looked like mood lighting. Silk flowers were abundant in muted vases. He knew he had reached the right location: the hushed interiors of the dying.

Rennie was at the end of the hall. She was propped up; a green tank of oxygen stood on casters next to the bed. Her skin was an alarming, deep ochre. She pulled the nostril clip tubing from her face and let him kiss her. She had an IV drip of some kind, the needle inserted and taped to the back of her hand right above the knuckles. She was woozy but awake. She looked him over.

“Oh, mercy, what happened to you?” she said. Her voice was tight.

“Today was hell. If I ran it down for you, you’d shit.” He looked her in the eye.

“I bet it would make a good movie. You were born for it. A spaghetti Western.”

Willis was glad to see her teasing him. He laughed at her joke and then he suffered a sudden round of startling, convulsive shivers, as if he’d been holding them off until then.

“You’re catching pneumonia,” she said. “Get under the covers.” She motioned to the empty bed next to her own. He climbed into the tall bed and pulled the blankets to his chin. He was trembling from an unfamiliar cold. The cold seemed generated from within, as if a transfusion of icy blood was circulating through him, tip to toe, and all his intestines churning a frozen gruel. He shivered violently. “Look at us,” he said, his teeth chattering.

She studied him as if she relished every speck of what she saw, despite his bedraggled condition.

Willis fell back on his bed, the room started to revolve slowly the way the Tilt-O-Whirl wrenched into gear at Rocky Point Park. He knew he should be getting on with it, but his limbs felt loosely sewn to his torso. He had a strange sensation, as if his trunk was stuffed with powdered glass. He felt like a cloth doll, his muscles had diminished into a granulated essence. Most of all, he felt the sensation of lying abreast of Rennie, both of them aiming in the same direction, into the wind of oblivion.