Open Water (38 page)

Willis leaned over Rennie to hear her breathless attempt to speak.

“He’s scared of just one thing.”

“What’s that?” Willis said.

“Cables. Oh, Bill has a terrible fear of cables. He saw a bad accident, a man lost his eye working the hydraulic winch.”

“That’s ugly.” Willis commiserated. He was excited to hear her voice after so long a silence.

“Cables always make him nervous, and there he is working the tows, every time out. Cables. It’s an unnatural fear. No, that’s unfair—
any
fear is natural, I guess.” She flopped back and shut her papery eyelids. Willis was stunned by the spontaneous oratory.

Holly’s mouth was wide open, she felt her tongue drying. She told Willis, “Nancy Brookens says they start seeing their dead; their loved ones start coming closer.”

“Jesus Christ,” Willis said.

“No, really, they start reaching out from both directions.”

Willis was alarmed by the idea of it. Bill Hopkins hovering somewhere in the shack. Willis had often imagined Bill Hopkins’ plight out on the ocean. How long did he last before he drowned or the cold got him? Did Bill Hopkins have any premonition of his fate when he worked the Hathaway winch and emptied tons of shellfish on deck, then set the rakes back out? With each tow, the rakes pulled in glistening slag heaps of variegated shell, until the mountain rose high as the rails.

When the
Teresa Eve
turned back for another tow, her crew knew it was greedy fishing. When at last she was steaming in, her diesel at full throat, just past Pollock’s Rip, the sea was too rough to shuck and bag the catch. Those days they would head into the harbor and do their shucking in lee
before off-loading it. That night when they started home, the combers were tight, one after another. The crew stood outside the wheelhouse tipping back D.W. Dante, the onboard brand for the last many years. Everyone had two or three hits from the bottle, enough to warm up. There wasn’t room to spread out after dredging almost seven hundred bushels of scallops. The weather was peculiar—black and airless on top, but the sea was running eight to ten feet, with oddball crests. They were out there in weird waters, in the lunatic fringe. The weight of their haul pulled the water up over the freeboard and she rode the chop like a gravy ladle; the sea dipped juices into the bowl. Freakers curled over the rails. Giant combers hit the quarter and shifted the tons of scallops. The next wave crested and rolled in behind her; its black wall plowed over the stern like a garage door slamming, crushing them under. The men were pitched abreast of her as she sank; the whole treasure spilled back. Thousands of notched mollusks twirled loose like Liberty dollars.

T
he whole day passed. Holly kept looking for any traffic, but Neptune’s was a ghost town. No one showed up. Rennie’s condition seemed worse.

Willis told Holly, “It’s good to talk to her even if she can’t hear me.”

“Read that book to her,” Holly said.

Willis started thumbing through Rennie’s tiny suede autograph book. He read some stanzas out loud to Holly, fragments of poems and other oddities.

“The cut worm forgives the plow.”
They looked at one another and shrugged.

“All wholesome food is caught without a net or trap.
” Willis said, “I wonder what Bill Hopkins would say about that.”

“Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.”

“That’s just common sense,” Holly said. “These must be wise sayings from the Bible or something?”

“Sounds like fortune cookies from Wall of China Take-Out. Look at this.” Willis showed Holly the page.

“That’s funny. She’s playing with her name.”

“It’s in here in lots of different handwriting.”

Holly said, “Her classmates called her these nicknames in her school days. They wrote it in her book and signed their signatures, see?”

“Renate, Regatta,” Willis tried it. “Ricotta. That’s cheese. I bet she didn’t like being called cheese.”

“But regatta means a boat race, doesn’t it?” Holly said.

“Well, that’s okay, then.” He kept thumbing through the little book, as if it might explain not only Rennie, but where he himself fit in. He found the nonsense rhyme he had known all along:

Willis stared at the page, letting the poem echo in his head. He saw himself. He saw Fritz. Holly too.

Holly looked over his shoulder and recited the next one.

Willis threw the little book on the table. He was thinking, That’s what it comes to. A small, cracked cowhide book of rhymes.

Nancy Brookens arrived at dusk. She looked back and forth between Rennie and Willis and learned the situation. She asked Willis how much morphine he was using for maintenance.

He told her.

“That’s a lot.” It was a professional assessment not a moral one. “Do you want your drugs more than your freedom from drugs?” she asked him.

It sounded like a rhetorical question, one of those public-service announcements on late-night television. Holly remembered an ad where they cracked an egg on a red-hot skillet. Nancy Brookens said, “This isn’t a good time to tackle it, but there’s never a good time. You’ll have to decide.” She patted his shoulder and Holly watched him stiffen.

The nurse went to Rennie’s bedside and took Rennie’s vital signs. She removed the little needle still taped to Rennie’s hand; a tiny drop of deep blood bloomed where the needle had been jerked loose. Nancy Brookens wiped it away with a tissue.

“An IV might keep her around a few more days, you don’t want a drip?”

Holly said, “I don’t think so. Do we?”

“No,” Willis said.

“That’s fine,” the nurse said in approval. “She’s okay, she has her
surround
, that’s all she needs.

“Her what?”

“Her
care-giver surround
, you and Willis. It’s better than a drip.” She wrapped Rennie’s arm in a cuff and took her pressure. Rennie’s blood pressure was perilously low and her heart rate was up. “Her heart’s making a last ditch effort against the poison tide.”

“Poison tide?” Holly asked. Nancy Brookens explained that Rennie was suffering from severe sepsis resulting from the advanced destruction of organ tissues. “There’s a lot of dead cell material circulating.” It was this final toxic assault that would bring on death.

Nancy Brookens recognized Holly’s bewildered expression and she put her hands on Holly’s shoulders and sat her down in a kitchen chair. “You are carrying a bit too much for one person.”

“Thank God you’re here.”

“I can’t stay long, then what? Look at yourself. You aren’t even aware of how this affects
you.
”

Holly followed Nancy Brookens’ eyes. She was staring at Holly’s crotch, where a cloud of bright blood had bloomed below the zipper of her jeans.

“Shit.” Holly sat down at the table with a burst of hurt laughter.

“See what I’m saying? You even forgot your time of the month. The first rule is: treat yourself like a queen or you can’t nurture your family members.”

Holly almost said, “These are not my family members. Remember?
My
father died two years ago, right after I called him ‘Worm.’ ” Nancy Brookens probably wouldn’t remember that particular detail, although Holly had confessed her story to the nurse when it had happened. How could Nancy Brookens keep track of everyone’s expired kin?

When Nancy stood up to leave, Holly accepted a tampon from her personal wallet, and the little basket of goodies from the hospice organization. Homemade brownies wrapped in tinfoil for the family members on vigil. Cans of strawberry Ensure for the patient. Aloe-vera hand lotion and a hairbrush with silky soft bristles, like the kind sold in baby layettes. Nancy Brookens handed her a new Grief Wheel in its cellophane sleeve.

“I have one of these Grief Wheels already.”

“Oh, it’s been revised since then.”

“It’s been revised?” Holly was incredulous. “How can they do that? I followed it to the letter the last time. Why did they have to change it?”

“Progress.” She handed Holly a hygiene aid in a plastic wrapper. It was a small, pink sphere, a serrated sponge on a lollipop stick. “You can brush her teeth with this,” Nancy Brookens said.

Holly recognized the unforgettable totem. She had used the same cellulose lolly to scrub her father’s gums with tender attention to the empty plateau where his bridgework had been removed.

“Watch your boyfriend, if he’s upset he might go overboard on his dosage. He needs to get into a program. I’m going to assign a bereavement coordinator for you and Willis, is that okay?”

“A what?”

“Aquidneck Hospice is offering you a bereavement coordinator to help during the next few weeks. It’s a wonderful service. I’ll put you on the calendar when I get back to the office.”

“I didn’t have a bereavement coordinator when my father passed away.”

Holly thought, I had to coordinate my own bereavement.

“This is something new,” Nancy Brookens said.

Holly watched the nurse drive away. She kept looking out the window, long enough for a seagull to land on the driveway right in front of the cottage. The gull had a trash fish. The fish was still slapping its tail as the bird began its feast; first it pecked out the soft bleb of the eye and from there it could tear the meat. She remembered the
hunk of seal hide that had washed ashore, its gorgeous dapples.

Willis was curled up on the single bed in the corner, exhausted. Holly was impressed by the effort he was making for Rennie. All that night, Holly listened to the tandem struggles of Willis and Rennie. Rennie’s breathing was getting more and more erratic; sometimes she awoke from her dead zone unable to inhale, her lungs were full. Holly propped her up. Her breathing sounded rough, like someone sawing through a plank. Willis was using the morphine to get through it, and still he shivered violently or threw his shirt off in a wave of heat. For a period, in the early morning, they all slept.

At noon the following day, Rennie lifted up in her bed. She whispered Willis’s name. He went over to her and squeezed her hand. She told him, “Walk around the house. Look at the shingles. See what needs doing. Get the right count. Buy white cedar not red.”

“Sure, I will,” he said. “I told you I would.”

She patted his knuckles.

He didn’t like her coming back and forth; when she talked sense and referred to their family house, his ordeal was worse. It was painful to lose her when she was still handing him orders.