Beatriz Williams - Along the Infinite Sea - Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read

Annabelle laughs. “Do you, now? Have you ever been in love, Miss Schuyler?”

“It’s Pepper, remember?”

“Pepper, then. Tell me the truth. I’m taking you home with me, so you’ve got to be honest.” She pauses, and when Pepper doesn’t speak, she adds: “Besides, it’s one o’clock in the morning. No secrets after midnight.”

“I don’t know.” Pepper looks out the side, at the shadows blurring past. “Maybe.”

“Were you in love with the father of your baby, or someone else?”

“I was very deeply in lust with him, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s not at all what I mean, but it can be very hard to tell the difference. Do you still want him?”

Pepper’s hand finds the neck of her cardigan. She thinks of the last time she saw the father of her baby, the day before she left Washington. “No. Not anymore. I’m cured.”

“If you say so. We’re very good at pretending, we women. And the heart is such a complicated little organ.”

A light flashes in the rearview mirror, and Pepper jumps in her seat. Annabelle glances into the mirror and slows the car a fraction. The light grows larger and brighter, resolving into two headlamps, and the drone of an engine undercuts the noise of their own car, their own draft. Annabelle glances again into the mirror and says something under her breath.

Pepper’s fingernails dig into the leather seat next to her leg. “What is it?” she says.

There is a flash of bright blue, followed instantly by red, and the shriek of a siren sails above their heads. Annabelle swears again—loudly enough that Pepper recognizes the curse as French—and slows the car.

“What are you doing?”

“What else can I do?”

The car drifts to the shoulder, and the siren reaches a new pitch behind them. The red and blue lights fill the air, throwing a lurid pattern on Annabelle’s cheeks and neck. She brakes gently, until the car comes to a stop. The siren screams in Pepper’s ears. She clenches her hands into balls of resistance against the authority of the roaring engine drawing up behind them, the unstoppable force that has found them here, of all places, in the middle of the night, on a deserted Florida highway next to the restless Atlantic. Two well-dressed women inside a car of rigid German steel.

The steel vibrates faintly. The lights and the roar increase to gigantic proportion, drenching the entire world, and then everything hurtles on to their left. The siren begins its Doppler descent, and the world goes black again, except for the flashing lights that narrow and narrow and finally disappear around a curve in the road, and the moon that replaces them.

“Holy God,” says Pepper, and she opens the car door and vomits into the sand.

The doctor arrived over the side of the boat just after I laid Stefan out on the deck and loosened the tourniquet.

“Why did you loosen this?” he demanded, dropping his bag on the deck and stripping his jacket.

“Because it had been on for well over half an hour. I wanted to save the leg.”

“There is no use saving the leg if the patient bleeds to death.”

At which point Stefan opened one eye and told the esteemed doctor he wanted to keep his fucking leg, and if the esteemed doctor couldn’t speak with respect to the woman who had saved Stefan’s life, the esteemed doctor could walk the fucking plank with a bucket of dead fish hanging around his neck to attract the sharks.

The doctor said nothing, and I assisted him right there on the deck as he dug into the hole and extracted the bullet, as he cleaned and stitched up the wound and Stefan drifted in and out of consciousness, always waking up with a faint start and a mumbled apology, as if he had somehow betrayed us by not remaining alert while the forceps dug into his raw flesh and the antiseptic was poured over afterward.

“You are a lucky man, Silverman,” said the doctor, dropping the small metal bullet into a towel, and I thought, Silverman, Stefan Silverman, that’s his name, and wiped away the gathering perspiration on his broad forehead.

The doctor asked for the sutures, and I rooted through the bag and laid everything out on the towel next to Stefan’s arm: sutures, needle, antiseptic. “What’s your blood type, nurse?” the doctor asked as he worked, as I silently handed him each suture, and I said I was O negative, and he replied: “Good, what I hoped you would say. Can you spare a pint, do you think?” and I said I could, of course, of course. I was glowing a little, in my heart, because he had called me nurse , and no one had ever called me anything useful before. And because I had brought Stefan Silverman safely to his ship through the dark and the salt wind, and the doctor was efficiently fixing him, putting his leg back together again, and the ball of terror was beginning to drop away from my belly at last.

The doctor stood at last and told me that he was finished, and I should dress the wound. “Not too tight; you nurses are always dressing a wound too tight. I will have to come back with the transfusion equipment. It may take an hour or two. Can you stay awake with him?”

Yes, I could.

“Then we will put him in his bed.” He signaled for one of the crew, who were hovering anxiously nearby, and somehow made himself clear with gestures and a few scant words of German. Two of the men hoisted Stefan up—he was out cold by now, his dark head turned to one side—and the doctor yelled at them to be careful. He turned to me. “Don’t leave his side for a second. You know what to look for, I think? Signs of shock?”

“Yes. I will watch him like a child, I promise.”

He did look like a child, lying there on his clean white bed, when I had tucked the sheets around his bare chest, and his face was so pale and peaceful I checked his pulse and his breathing every minute or so to make certain he hadn’t died. I turned off the electric light overhead and kept only the small lamp burning next to his bed, just enough to see him by. His skin was smooth, only a few faint lines about the eyes, and his hair was quite dark, curling wetly around his ears and forehead. He was about my brother’s age, I thought, twenty-three or -four. His lashes were long and dark, lying against his cheek, and I wondered what color his eyes were. Stefan Silverman’s eyes. When I touched his shoulder, his lids fluttered.

“Shh,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

He opened those eyes just long enough for me to decide that they were probably brown, but a very light brown, like a salt caramel. He tried to focus and I thought he failed, because his lids dropped again and his head turned an inch or two to the side, away from me.

But then he said, almost without moving his lips: “Stay, Mademoiselle.”

I smoothed the sheets against his chest, an excuse to touch him. He smelled of gin and antiseptic. I thought, It’s like waiting forever for the film to start, and then it does.

“As long as you need me,” I told him.

At half past eight o’clock in the morning, Stefan’s mistress arrived.

Or so I assumed. I could hear a woman on the other side of the cabin door, shrill and furious like a mistress. She was remonstrating with someone in French (of course), and her opponent was speaking back to her in German. Stefan opened his eyes and stared, frowning, at the ceiling.

“I think you have a visitor,” I said.

He sighed. “Can you give us a minute or two, Mademoiselle?”

“You shouldn’t see anyone. You have lost so much blood. You need to rest.”

“Yes, but I’m feeling better now.”

I wanted to remind him that he was feeling better only because he had a pint of Annabelle de Créouville coursing through his veins. I rose to my feet—a little carefully, because a pint of blood meant a great deal more to me than it did to him—and went to the door.