Open Water (40 page)

R
ennie was in Wydette’s beautiful dress, but the tire chains were wound around her hips and her body was folded awkwardly so it would fit on the floor of the pram. Willis had wrapped her in Fritz’s Indian blanket. With the blanket Willis could reel her out slowly, with a little courtesy.

At full dark, First Beach was empty and they waded into the icy surf on either side of the dinghy. They angled past the breaking waves and pushed off. Holly sat on the forward bench, Willis sat between the oarlocks. The oars were different sizes and Willis had to compensate; his strokes were irregular and the boat wasn’t pulling as fresh as he wanted. Their weight was slowing them down. He thought about the Sears chains twisted around Rennie’s waist. It was a gruesome sight. They couldn’t even talk about it. Willis had brought a light, but they didn’t need it. The moon put a sheen on the water. Willis watched the texture of their wake across the stern, shiny black whorls stirred out.

“They went to sea in a Sieve, they did. They went to sea in a Sieve. The water it soon came in, it did.” Willis recited the poem in his head; its metered form helped him roll the oars.

“Open the Gate, Open the Gate, Here comes Rennie,
the Grad-u-ate.” Already the rowing was tough; his sore arm throbbed and died out, throbbed and died out.

Willis had studied his opportunities according to the tide chart and they had headed out exactly at the ebb. He rowed straight out parallel the Cliff Walk. They saw the mansions from a new perspective, their interior rooms were dark behind brilliant façades. Each house was lit with strategically placed floodlights, strings of lamps across the lawns, beams honed on gargoyles perched across the eaves. This fierce, external illumination when the cavernous homes remained empty seemed eerie to Holly. Empty hulks. Salve Regina College was the exception, its windows clotted with yellow honey. When they rowed past Château-sur-Mer, with its dim, violet panes and oversized awnings, half country club, half mortuary, Holly thought of the man with the invisible noose and wondered if he could see them from his prime vantage point.

Willis rowed for an hour. The sea wasn’t calm. It made no alterations to advance their progress. Its indifferent silver sheet stretched wide in all directions and was the most sobering aspect of their journey. An occasional swell tipped the
Crouton
into a valley and drew them up again. Holly’s face was a terrified mask.

Willis saw her fear and he started to sing “Volare.” It was the reliable melody but he had changed the lyrics. He was singing,
“Ren-a-te, oh, oh. Ri-cot-ta, oh, oh, oh, oh. Your love has given me wings—”

Holly giggled in tight, painful drifts that hurt her frozen diaphragm. Despite the difficult sea, Willis’s voice sounded clear and strong even as the hull was smacked by stiff swells, one after another. Then the lip of a wave shot up vertically, sucking the bow up and over, pitching Holly against Willis. Holly screamed. She grabbed the oars from Willis. He took the oars back. He told her to take it easy.

He knew what he was doing. He worked at the lopsided oars and tacked against the waves so they wouldn’t have another surprise such as that one. He rowed past Gull Rock, trying to get as far as Haycock Ledge. He heard the bell at Brenton Reef and he knew he was clear of the cove and in the open channel. He rested the oars when the lights on shore lost their singularity and flattened into a golden line. Then he rowed a tight circle and tucked the oars down below the gunnels.

Willis stood up. “Okay,” he said. “Here it is,” he announced. He was telling Rennie.

Holly lifted her face to him. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

He stood, straddling Rennie’s corpse. He kept his balance—she didn’t know how—the boat was shifting sideways. He wrenched the hem of the Indian blanket, with gentle adjustments, until Rennie’s body rolled free from its shroud. She went in feet first. In another second, the water closed over her face like black saran.

Willis watched Rennie vanish. He wasn’t just setting her loose, he was returning her. Rennie and the sea were one and the same, one seamless element, souls of the same fabric.

Holly said, “Willis, look over there—”

The body had surfaced on the other side of the dinghy. Her face lifted in the swell, matching the oval husk of moon riding the same water. Her face drifted a few inches beneath the surface. Willis rowed parallel. The Sears chains must have slipped free from her hips. The current pulled hard but didn’t swallow.

Holly wondered if Rennie’s septicemia had made her oddly buoyant. For several minutes Willis steered the dinghy alongside her body, following her out with the tide. The wide black mattress lofted the tiny figure until it was
almost vertically astride it. Her white hair fanned across the water. Wydette’s gauzy dress billowed around her waist like the pulsing veils of a hydra.

Willis was beside himself. He wondered if he should haul Rennie’s corpse on board again, yet he couldn’t bear to think of putting her in the ground at White’s Monument Village with Lester and Sheila Boyd’s infant. Then, as quickly as she sank the first time, Rennie disappeared again. Willis rowed in a circle searching the black water. He turned on his light and panned it back and forth over the frothy chop.

Holly had the palms of her hands flattened against her face. She couldn’t bear to witness the next frightening panel in that mural. But Rennie’s corpse didn’t reappear on the surface.

“I think she’s all right,” Willis said.

“Are you sure, Willis?” Holly kept her hands over her eyes. Her voice shook with fear-induced hiccups. They were so far out in the water, she wasn’t sure she would see her familiar surroundings again—her duplex, the percolator clock, the knotty-pine dresser, her hand mirror where she left it, its ghostly circle splashed upon the ceiling.

“She’s safe,” Willis said, “she’s with the Jumblies.”

Holly reached out to touch his arm. She kept her hand on his shoulder as he rolled the oars. His arm felt strange, it was vibrating. She watched him closely. His posture became inexplicably rigid. He dropped the oars. He was having some kind of attack, a slow convulsion, a dreamy disintegration. He tipped forward into her arms.

She held his suffering weight, trying to decide what to do, when a floodlight advanced, a brilliant skewer through the dark, illuminating their dinghy.

A Coast Guard utility boat had been waiting, blacked out. It awakened with untangled precision; its engine kicked in and its running lights flickered wide open. Holly
remembered their Latin motto:
Semper paratus.
Always ready. A loudspeaker crackled with an officer’s firm, instructive narrative. “Good evening,
Crouton
, come aside.”

Holly sat in the little boat feeling the waves shift the hull.

Of course, they weren’t going to come to her, she should go to them, but she couldn’t shift Willis from her arms to pick up the oars.

The loudspeaker crackled again, “Identify your captain,
Crouton.
”

The officer’s words were strange yet comforting formalities, and in ready submission, Holly shouted their names. “Captain Willis Pratt,” she hollered. It sounded ridiculous. She wondered if the Coast Guard officer was serious; it might be yet another formula of ridicule exercised by this particular branch of the authorities. The officer told her to wait where she was. She obeyed the officer’s directives and stowed the oars.

A diver had lowered himself into the water to retrieve the waiflike corpse, wherever it was. Another diver came over to Holly and towed the dinghy to the ship by its frayed painter. Then the divers turned on underwater lamps and kicked off. Their rubber frog-feet slapped the surface and disappeared.

Willis regained a little ground and started to protest. “Grave robbers!” he shrieked at them. The divers surfaced thirty yards out and sank again to continue searching. The divers came up once and again, their rubber skullcaps gleaming under the moon. They weren’t having any immediate luck. Holly and Willis were ordered on board the sparkling white utility boat. Willis fell to the deck and rested on his knees. They tugged his wrists behind his back and bound them with plastic drawstring handcuffs.

Holly couldn’t get her legs back after almost two hours
in the
Crouton.
She stumbled across the glistening deck into a huddle with the authorities. She was so relieved to be rescued, she found pleasure in their uniforms, in the hash marks on their sleeves, in every sign of conformity to military routine. They didn’t cuff her and let her hug herself and shiver. The divers climbed back up the ladder, admitting defeat. They would search again at daylight. The body was free to drift into Rhode Island Sound, and from there maybe anywhere. Holly told Willis that Rennie was loose, but he had collapsed. She screamed at the officers to remove the handcuffs, couldn’t they see he was sick.

It was apparent that Willis was very ill. An officer snipped the handcuffs and put Willis on a stretcher. They pulled the blanket high and folded the hem at his chin. His wet jeans bled through the fabric.

An officer asked Holly, “Can you tell us the order of events this evening?”

“The order of events?”

“Can you tell us what drugs are involved?”

Holly said, “I guess he might have something in his system.” She kneeled beside Willis and plucked his hand from under the sheet.

Other young recruits lined up to peer over the stretcher in a polite queue, perhaps according to their rank. Holly couldn’t believe their attention to protocol.

She yelled at the men, “Christ, can’t you get someone on deck to help him.” Willis had passed out. Under the bright floods, his smooth profile looked pale and cold as limestone with a charcoal smear across his jaw where his whiskers were concentrated. Holly understood he was taking an illicit turn at rest. It was a violent sunken dream from which he would have to surface. She hated to revive him. Then she shook him.

T
he next morning, Holly sat in the duplex with Nicole’s copy of the
Newport Daily News.
The paper was too heavily inked and the headline throbbed:
COUPLE DUMPS BODY FROM ROWBOAT NEAR BRENTON POINT
 … 
LOCAL WOMAN IDENTIFIED
 … 
COOKS AT PREP SCHOOL
. After her notoriety as a suspect for arson, the story didn’t alarm her. How many times would her life be put on display? She wondered if all the harassment she had endured might have to do with the fact that she lived on an island—everything was blown out of proportion. Anywhere else, her small, irrelevant crimes would surely be ignored by the busy mainland, the sane interior.

The Coast Guard released Willis to the Newport police. From there, Willis was admitted to the state detox unit at Roger Williams Hospital in Cranston. He spent the night in a lighted room, where aides could watch him. He turned his face into the rubber pillow to avoid the glare. All night, he saw the final transposed image of Rennie and Wydette, one immutable seraph, her floral dress pulsing in the waves.

The next morning, two aides brought him into an office and sat him in a chair across from a counselor. He cooperated and answered as many questions as he could find corresponding thoughts or associations for, and when Willis
was satisfied with his interview he closed it off. He told the drug counselor, “That’s a wrap. Mission accomplished. Touchdown.” He rolled off the chair and limped back to his bed. All his joints were aching, even the balls of his feet were throbbing.

When Munro learned that Willis had been taken from the Newport County Jail to the state detox hospital, he placed phone calls all morning. Munro’s attorney successfully made arrangements to have Willis transferred into a substance-abuse program at the swank private hospital Edgehill Newport. The county agreed to the alteration of locale, but it depended upon Willis. If Willis didn’t accept Munro’s generosity, he’d have to remain in the Cranston facility, where there was often a distinct, razor-sharp urine smell in the stairwells and landings.

Munro went over to Cranston to insist that Willis agree to the transfer. Munro told him, “Look, little brother, I’ll pony up the costs, and you can stay on the island. Where you belong.”