Нэнси Пикард - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

When they had gone far enough that the sound of the surf was only a murmur, Mike threw a rusted, bowl-shaped anchor overboard. He handed Geri a pair of blue fins and a mask with a snorkel.

“You’re a good swimmer, right?”

“Pretty good,” she said, cautiously.

“You ever snorkel before?”

“Once.”

“Well, it’s great here. Whole mess of fish, especially by the reef. We jump in here then swim back.”

“By the reef?” There was no way she was going back anywhere near there.

“It’s calmer under water. If you’re a decent swimmer, you’ll be okay.”

“No, thanks. I’ll just stay here.”

“But you came all the way out—”

“No,” she said firmly. “I’ll be fine here.”

She watched him swim off. The boat rode higher, felt more skittish on the deep ocean swells with him gone. It rose and fell a good twelve feet with each wave. The water was a dazzling deep blue. In the troughs, the water obliterated half the sky. At the crests, the town, the beach, and the emerald mountain were arrayed in the distance more perfectly than ever. Geri took a deep breath, inhaling the fresh salt air. She felt herself loosening up. She felt less afraid. The roller-coaster ride was actually quite exhilarating. At the crest of one particularly big wave, she actually rose up a little way in the boat, still holding on to the gunwales, and let out a little yip of excitement. This was more like it. This was more of what she had gone on vacation for.

Unfortunately, after a few minutes of riding the swells, she began to get seasick. She was on the verge of vomiting when she remembered hearing somewhere that if you were in the water, motion sickness was not as much of a problem.

Had she been in a different state of mind, she might have found the trouble she had getting into the water comical. Every time she tried to step over the gunwale, the long, round-hulled boat threatened to capsize — or so it seemed. She tried going over at the bow, but it rose up too high. Same story in the stern, plus the outboard was in the way. There was the water, inches away, and she could not get into it. She clenched her teeth and closed her eyes, feeling the frustration that had dogged her since her arrival in the town. Feeling the hysteria lurking behind it. Wondering why her life seemed to have been diminished by her every choice, separated by each decision from other lives, reduced in momentum to the point where the foot-high side of a wooden boat could stop it cold.

At the top of the next wave, she pulled the mask down over her face, bit hard on the snorkel mouthpiece, and threw herself in.

She went under the surface a bit, then came up, blowing water out of the snorkel. The boat floated lightly next to her. The water was a marvelous temperature, warm but refreshing. Her nausea subsided almost immediately. She scissored her legs and felt the power of the fins push her shoulders out of the water. She bobbed there for a while, riding the swells up and down, feeling herself relax. Then she took a deep breath and put her face in the water.

It was not like anything she had experienced before.

She was floating over a field of tall sea grass anchored in a sandy bottom. The grass bent lazily over, each green blade drooping in the same direction. But as she watched, the grass began to straighten. She thought she might touch it, but felt herself being pulled away. Then she was accelerating upward, flying in the astonishingly clear water high above the reaching fingers of the grass. A moment’s pause, and she was plunging back down, racing toward the bottom, and the grass was drooping again, changing color as it flattened from a deep green to a silvery gray. Another wave came along and the cycle began all over again.

A school of small fish came along, silvery, like the flattened grass. They rose with the water, fell with it, hung motionless at the crests, never changing in their positions relative to each other, rigid in space, like some living crystal lattice. Geri kicked her fins and swam near. A simultaneous shiver passed through the fish, and the lattice translated itself — seemingly instantaneously — to a position several feet away. Geri kicked again, approached, and the school shivered out of reach. She kicked again. And again. Never spooking the fish. Never disturbing their precise order. But never getting closer than a constant distance — a little under three feet — either. She wondered if they were all following one fish, or one simultaneous impulse.

She was exhilarated and mesmerized, simultaneously. She felt something let go deep within herself. She allowed her arms and legs to float free, to go where buoyancy would take them. She felt her breathing slow down, the hollow whooshes of the snorkel tube coming easily now, a rhythm slower than her heart, faster than the waves, but in concert with them all.

She could see her shadow on the grass, cast with the clarity of a cloud’s shadow on dry land. And then she saw another shadow. And a hand touched the small of her back.

She surfaced with him. Smiling broadly — he really did look like Tom Cruise when he smiled — he held up out of the water four fat fish, a delicately pink color, their fins a deeper shade, almost red.

“Snapper,” he said. “We’re going to have one fine déjeuner this après-midi.”

“Mmmnh,” she said, imagining them sizzling fragrantly on the hotel stove. Then she imagined drinking wine with them and feeling a little drunk, and a warm, liquid feeling spread within her. And when Mike Godchaux threw the fish and his spear gun in the canoe and paddled back to her, she reached out and put her hands on his broad, muscled shoulders and allowed him to pull her, like a tugboat, back to the boat, into which they both threw their masks, snorkels, and fins. And as they floated in the warm water, she lifted the straps of the bathing suit he had given her from her own shoulders and allowed him to complete the job of pulling the stretchy maillot down off her body. And he shucked his trunks and they floated in the clear water, and she looked at his nakedness for a long, hungry moment before they fitted their bodies together.

They were both back in the boat and she was toweling her hair, when Mike said: “Well, you sure gave me a surprise.”

She twisted the towel around her hair and lifted her chin. “What do you mean?”

“Well, me and Bébé, when we saw you yesterday, we thought for sure you were trolling for dark meat.”

“Excuse me?” She frowned — impossible that she had heard what she thought she had heard.

“You know, a little dark island rhythm to liven up the old white clapboard house?”

He was smiling again, like Tom Cruise still, but with a cocked eyebrow. An insinuating, amused eyebrow.

Her back stiffened, and a hot pain shot up between her shoulder blades.

“Lotta girls do that, you know,” he said. “Want to try that devil’s food just once before they settle down to life with Mr. White Bread. When you had lunch with that trucker yesterday, I said to Bébé, watch if they don’t take a room. And when you did, I said to myself, ‘Well, there’s one girl who’s not going to be interested in this white Southern boy.’”

Her entire back was in spasm now, the pain shrilling through her muscles and bones. She imagined the fish that he had caught must have felt like this when the barbed end of the spear had slammed through their sides.

“Tell you the truth, I was pretty pleased when you had that little argument and he headed off. I’m glad it worked out like this. Aren’t you?”

It took Mike Godchaux five minutes to get the ancient, coverless outboard started. Staring at the tanned wedge of his back, watching him pull again and again on the cord, each time the muscles on the backs of his upper arms tensing into crisp ropes, she went a little mad for the second time. She saw herself back at the hotel, on the terrace where they dined, and all around people laughing at her. Bébé. Gerard. Mike Godchaux. Etienne Dalhousie. The woman to whom she’d addressed the question about sewage on the beach. The vendors whose awning she’d knocked over. Her coworkers back in New York, especially the poisonous Marta. Her sister and her sister’s lover. Her parents. All laughing, all amused at this woman who had reached thirty-three years of age without, evidently, learning anything about the basic process of connecting with other human beings.