Red Tide (26 page)

Anna sat on the edge of the bed and took my hand again. “All these times you are in hospital,” she said. “I am thinking you will die. I am watching you, sitting beside you even at this bad time when there is the electronic noise and all the doctors run in.”

“Thanks,” I said. “It helped me to feel you there.”

“Piff,” she said. “You are saying politeness. I am trying to say true. Billy—” She paused and put my hand carefully onto the bed.

“Yes,” I said.

“All this time when I think you will die, I think also it is my fault, that I have killed you.”

“That’s a load of—”

“Please,” she said. “I know what this is loads of. I know this 
now
. But then in the hospital I do 
not
know. Watching your life go 
blip bleep
 on the machines. And is my fault. That you do this for 
me
because of you have these feelings for me. And I say myself, how am I feeling of this man? Am I feeling him love—or just guiltiness only?”

“Oh,” I said. For the first time I got an idea where she was going. I didn’t want to go there.

“And as more I think, as more I do not know,” she said. She lifted up my hand again, turned it over. “And as more I do not know, so much I am thinking how important it is to know this.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s important to know this.”

“And so I think when you are coming home again, I will know. And I do not know still. And I must.” She looked up at me. Her eyes were bluer than anything I’d ever seen before, bluer than the water from the Seven Mile Bridge, bluer than any sky had ever been. “All this things we are now going through, this evil things on the boat, this cannot be the thing to make us be together, yes? Only evil comes from evil. What is bringing us together, it must be from good. It must be here—” She touched her heart. “—and here.” She touched her forehead. “Because else, because if we allow the evil to make us together, this is another kind of evil which we cannot so easy go away from.”

“It didn’t seem that easy to me,” I said. She ignored me.

“Because is not looking to be evil, is two nice people together only, and so there is no way out.”

“Anna,” I said.

“There must always be a way out. I am knowing this since so big. Is not the freedom without. And without freedom is not the love.

“I must know first,” she said. “First I must know.”

She turned my hand over again, running the finger of her other hand along the lines on my palm. “And so I am feeling bad again. Because you are so much broken for this. For me. And I am saying thank you, very nice, please leave me alone now. This is the way to behave of a shit.”

“No.”

“Piff,” she said again. “Again you say polite. Let me be the shit, is more the better.” She smiled. It was only about half-mast, but it was the nicest thing I’d seen since I’d opened my eyes.

“All right,” I said. “You are the shit.”

“Good,” she said. “Now we are saying the true. And now say me the true of how you feel.” She put a hand on my chest. “In here.”

I looked at her eyes, those autumn blue eyes. She looked away. I thought of all that had happened; the end of whatever I’d had with Nancy, nearly the end of me. The Black Freighter and the black night on the Gulf Stream, and all of it in that terrible August heat.

It was too much. I could not live through all that so quickly and still have feelings, too. No human being could. Maybe that was Anna’s point.

“In here is empty right now,” I said. I touched her hand. “I’ve been through too much. I still feel too bad, too close to dead.” I closed my eyes and saw it again; the burning skeleton, the snake, the sound of the flesh flaking off my bones. The drums. I opened my eyes. Anna was looking at me, concerned and—I don’t know, something else, too. “Or maybe I’m just too doped up. Maybe I can’t think straight.” I wrapped my fingers around hers and held her hand tightly. “I want to be with you. I’m pretty sure of that. I feel better when I see you. I think I need you to bring some kind of feeling back.”

“And so I am to be your medicine?”

“Yes,” I said.

She didn’t flinch. She looked back at me without blinking.

“There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s what two people do for each other. They fill in the blank spots, help each other heal. I’m not sure I can do it alone this time. I don’t think you can, either. I can help, Anna. We can help each other. What else do you want from me?”

“But we are neither of us knowing, this is just the thing. This is why I say, is too much and also is not enough.” She put my hand carefully back onto the bed and stood up. “And so,” she said. “I am thinking one more thing.”

I closed my eyes and let it all whip through me. Through the layers of pain and frustration and medicine I could just barely make out that she was saying something about how we needed to find a way to be ourselves without distractions and be very sure and not jump into something that trapped us and on and on. 
Sure, Anna
, I thought. 
Let’s be friends
. I waited for her careful words of rejection, knowing they were coming, but not really listening. I couldn’t take it, not now.

And then she stopped talking and stroked my hand and what she had said finally filtered through. I blinked my eyes open and looked at her. She was smiling a funny smile I hadn’t seen before, and blushing bright red at the same time.

“What?” I said. “What did you say?”

“I say,” she said, trying hard to meet my eye, “perhaps we are knowing better if we try to be together with nothing else, and so can you get from your friend for a little while a sailboat?”

November brought cool winds down from Canada and the awful heat of August was finally gone. People started to remember why they lived in Florida. It was a time of long and mild days, spectacular sunsets and crystal clear evenings cool enough for a light blanket, a real luxury after the sweaty misery of the summer.

We left Miami in another of Bert’s rebuilt sailboats, a 36-foot Hunter this time. The first days were just for relaxing. We didn’t push it. We both had some serious sorting-out to do, and this was the first chance we’d had to do it. I was still troubled by a few short spells where I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do. I’d look down and see a rope in my hand and be filled with terrible anxiety. The feeling would fade after a few minutes, but it was bad while it lasted. The doctor had said it would probably go away, but he wouldn’t say when.

So we sailed, we ate simple meals, we slept side by side without touching in the big double bunk, and we tried as hard as we could to wake up from the nightmares we had come through, wake up to each other in the small separate world of a sailboat.

Our fourth day out was beautiful, but this was Florida. By noon a smudge of black clouds had appeared low on the horizon. By 1:30, the wind had gone from a pleasant ten knots to thirty, gusting higher, and the buffed green surface of the water had turned choppy grey, carpeted with white caps. We dropped the jib sail. The clouds blew closer, and soon we heeled far over under the surge of wind known as a squall breeze, which was just Nature’s way of saying, “Here I come.”

Within moments we felt the first stinging drops of rain, and then abruptly everything forward of the mast disappeared into a sheet of rain. We were leaning at a dangerous angle and taking on water from the rain and the waves. I shouted at Anna to take the tiller and jumped to the mast to double-reef the mainsail, something Betty had explained to me but I had never done before. It left us with only half the sail area for the wind to hit. We slowed a bit and lost the worst edge of our heel-over almost immediately.

For the next hour we fought the squall and couldn’t have seen the 
Queen Mary
 if it was lashed to the mast. According to the chart we had plenty of open water and good depth, so I wasn’t worried—until a quick break in the squall opened the sheet of water pouring down on us and I saw a sandy beach straight ahead.

Trying hard not to scream, I put the boat about and ran parallel to where I thought I’d seen the island. The storm tore at us, and even with our tiny scrap of sail we flew across the water like a foam cup. I saw breakers flash off to the right, put her over again, and suddenly the water was calm and the wind was about half the strength it had been. I turned our nose into the wind, ran up to the bow, and dropped the anchor.

I let the line play out fast, trying to gauge the depth; between ten and fifteen feet. I gave us enough scope, set the hook with a hard yank, and looked around, straightening my creaking back and taking my first breath of the last two hours.

We were lying in a lagoon sheltered by two fingers of sandy beach, each with a row of pine trees stretching back from the shore. The squall still blew furiously, lashing the waves with stinging rain, but inside our lagoon I would have felt safe riding out a hurricane.

The storm didn’t last very long. Another fifteen minutes and it had blown itself out, moved on to hassle Cuba. I went below with Anna and pulled on a dry shirt and waited it out. When the sun broke through we went up on deck to look over our harbor.

It was a small island, just big enough for a game of catch. There was a good sand beach, trees to block the wind, and a line of shrubbery and weeds leading into the interior. Off to our left a spit of beach curved around to form the sheltering arm of the little harbor. I couldn’t see any litter on the beach; no soda or beer cans, no broken coolers, old T-shirts, oil containers, pizza boxes, plastic bags, coffee cups, six-pack holders, candy wrappers—nothing.

“Paradise,” I said.

“Hmmp,” said Anna. “And if so where is ice machine?”

That night we made a driftwood fire on the beach and as it died to the embers we watched the sky, counting six falling stars and one moving light we couldn’t identify. We talked, sitting close but not touching, passing a bottle of wine back and forth between sentences. We hit an easy tone and just rambled, saying whatever popped into our heads, playing out mock debates about things that didn’t matter, just for the pleasure of hearing each other.

And with the gentle breeze, the dying fire, and the enormous Florida sky above us, everything that had happened on the Black Freighter started to seem like last summer’s blockbuster movie. When we finally rowed the small inflatable dinghy back to the boat Anna was giggling and I felt my face stretching into a smile for the first time since August.

• • •

In the night the snake came for me again and rattled my bones, bearing down on me with its huge rubbery grin. I tried to fly away but it ate my wings and as I smoldered and fell it moved closer, smiling, smiling—

“Billy!” Anna said. She slapped me and I blinked awake. She moved to slap me again.

“I’m okay,” I said, but she hit me anyway.

“Of all damn-ness,” she said. “Wake now!” And she moved her hand back to hit me again.

I grabbed her wrist and held it. “I’m okay,” I said again.

“Is not okay, to make such a noises,” she said. She sounded mad. “You are jumping this way, then that way, then you are saying no no no, then making such a noise as—Gikk-gahhhkk.” She made a face of strangling. “And the entire you is going flap, flap, all over.”

I closed my eyes again. The entire me felt battered, thrashed with steel rods and dipped in glue. “Bad dream,” I said.

“The snake,” she said. 

“Yes.”

She was quiet for a long minute. “I also have this dream,” she said. “Perhaps both we will always have it.” She pulled her hand away from mine and dropped it onto my chest.

“No,” I said. “Not always. But it takes time.”

She made no answer and I became aware of the weight and heat of her hand against me. After a moment it was all I could think about.

Then a small wet drop hit me beside Anna’s hand. I looked up at her face. A quiet tear slid out of her eye. Then some inner wall broke down and the tears came in a flood, along with great, ratchety sobs that shook her whole body. I held her for a long time, until the shaking stopped, and the sobs had slowed to huge, ratcheting breaths. And gradually the rough breathing smoothed and slowed, and soon she was asleep in my arms.

I held her, not wanting to move for fear of waking her. And at some point the sound of the wind, the slap of water against the hull and the easy rocking of the boat did their job. I fell asleep under the soft warm weight of her.

When I woke up her weight had shifted, and so had her breathing. Her head was nestled against my neck and her hand was now on my face, softly stroking it. And as I blinked awake I realized one other change.

Anna’s shirt was off.

Her bare breasts pressed against me, the nipples hard. My hand moved up to cup her as if it had a life of its own, and she trembled. I hesitated, but this time the trembling was not fear, or old dreams coming back. It was eagerness.

It had been a long wait for both of us and we made love with a fire hotter than any I could remember. It was not enough and we drove ourselves further, and further still, moving up on deck to be under the bright Florida stars, and further still, until the sun came up on two exhausted and happy people stretched out together on the cushions in the cockpit of the sailboat.

The breeze stayed out of the north for three days, which meant it would have been just a little too much work to push our boat back to Key West. Besides, we weren’t in any hurry. The anchorage we had found was a good one, in the lee of an island that wasn’t even on the charts. But it protected us from the wind. No other boat had found our spot so far, and that made us a little bit lazy about things like clothing.

There was a reef to explore within easy reach of the dinghy, and a small cut nearby stocked with uneducated mangrove snapper. They grilled beautifully, painted with lime juice and a few grains of salt and pepper.

And so there were days of sun, swimming, fishing, long lazy naps, and exploring the reef and the nearby island; and there were nights of strange rum drinks made with no ice and whatever supplies we had left; star-gazing, quiet contentment, and other explorations. My ribs and arm were still sore, and every now and then I would have to think a little too hard to remember a word like “potato,” but that didn’t seem important. There was the sun and the healing water and above all there was Anna, and it was as near a perfect time as I could remember.