Seven Days Dead Part 3

In the midst of the storm's bl.u.s.ter, she stirs.

Sandra Cinq-Mars listens awhile to the wind, the rain, and her husband's even breathing, and while she can barely make out his form in the dark, she discerns that he's sleeping deeply and comfortably tonight. A sleep not agitated by nerves or stress or an onerous to-do list. For a change, there's no such list. Slammed by the gale, they endured a strenuous drive through the North Maine Woods from their Quebec farm. Normally, they might not have persevered through weather fit for Noah's Ark, but hotel reservations and a set time for a ferry crossing struck them as being as absolute as a sailor's embarkation orders. Miss the boat, and their island summer vacation-their first ever summer holiday-might be lost. En route, they did cancel one mainland hotel reservation and booked another, shaving a half hour or so off the first leg of the trip to add it on to the next, but still they arrived frayed, exhausted, hungry, and generally done-in. Through dinner, emile could barely keep his eyes open. Once back at the motel they had nothing to do. Even watching television was a pain as the electricity intermittently went off. So they tucked in early, and while it's still only the middle of the night, they've been sleeping for a solid seven hours.

Sandra rises and tosses a flimsy robe over her silky sleepwear and finds her way around the bed to the bathroom without banging her knees in the dark. She closes the door and flicks the switch from habit, only to discover that the power is out again. After her tinkle and a quick wash of her hands, she returns to the room but not to bed. Instead, she sits in one of two cushiony armchairs that front the broad window overlooking a small harbor and the sea. Boats moored in the bay, a few with a light on, bob in the waves. She curls her legs up under herself, then just about jumps out of her skin when her husband, invisibly seated in the companion chair, reaches out and touches her hand.

"Oh my G.o.d!"

"What?"

"I thought you were in bed! Alert a girl before creeping up on her! emile!"

He laughs. "I wasn't creeping. I was just sitting here."

"No but I-Jesus! Your icy fingers, man. So creepy!"

He tests his fingers against his own skin. If anything, they're warm.

"I thought that's why you sat here. What do you mean 'icy'?"

"Excuse me? What do you mean, why I sat here?"

"Because I was sitting here."

"I can't see in the dark. emile! I thought you were asleep!"

"I was."

"Good for you. I may never sleep again, however."

She laughs, too, now.

They're quiet awhile, mesmerized by the wind and the rain on the big picture window. Outside, waves break below their room. These are not the great waves marauding across the bay tonight, as the harbor is well protected by an isthmus. Yet the lesser waves still chuck stones on a beach, and drum a steady cadence.

"Actually," emile states, "I had my best sleep in months. Maybe we should risk our lives driving through a storm more often."

"Sure thing, for eleven hours straight. Do that too often, it'll put you to sleep permanently."

"Worth it, no?"

They share another quiet interlude, then Sandra interrupts. "It's so dark out. The power's still off."

"Romantic. I was sitting here thinking that before tonight, I've never slept by the seaside in my entire life." Given that he's nineteen years older than she is, they've shared less time together than strangers meeting them might a.s.sume. A later-in-life marriage not only for him but, in a way, for her as well. "Farm boy. Then big-city cop. No life by the sea. But the sound of the waves is mesmerizing. What about you, time by the oceanwise?"

Sandra straightens a leg out, holds it in midair, stretching, rotating the foot. "For a farm girl I'm pretty familiar with the coast. From the mountains of New Hampshire to the sh.o.r.e is a short hop. My parents made the trip most summers. Good memories. A kid on the sand. Bodysurfing. Collecting sh.e.l.ls. Then, my first summer out of college, I headed straight for Hampton Beach. Freedom! Waited tables by night, showed off my bikini bod all day long."

"If I knew you were exhibiting, I would've made the trip down."

"Perv."

They hold hands in the dark awhile, their fingers mildly attentive.

"Where we're going isn't beach country," emile mentions.

"Thank goodness. My bikini days are ancient history."

"I don't know why."

"Thank you, sir. But the skin cancer scare took away the appeal of spending whole summers on a beach."

"Maybe, but I'm thinking of you in a bikini. I'd risk skin cancer for that. You could stay under an umbrella, no? With me?"

"Oh shut up. But thanks. This is something though, isn't it? emile? Us? On vacation. The winter ones are fine but, I don't know, a summer one feels decadent."

"Get used to them."

"Okay. I will. But do I have it in me? Do you? Those are big questions."

emile laughs lightly again, flits a few fingers up the column of her forearm. "We're workaholics?"

She laughs, too. "Okay, if we both go out of our minds walking around the cliffs of Grand Manan, then, yes, that's who we are. Workaholics. If we go back home and find out that we're anxious to get back here again, or anywhere else, then, no, we don't qualify. But I think I'll pa.s.s the test. I've done summer before. But you, sir. You're the villain of the piece. I think you're doomed to fail, emile. If there aren't any local bank robberies, you might arrange for one just to go investigate."

"As long as there are no more dead bodies, thank you very much."

"With you around, emile, they'll fall out of the trees."

"Don't say that. That's one part of my retirement I'm happy about. The total absence of cadavers falling out of trees."

A spasm of laughter bursts from her.

"What?" emile asks in mock alarm.

"emile, true or false? You were never a homicide detective."

"Okay, okay. I know."

"True or false, emile?"

"Okay. I was not in Homicide."

"And-" she needles him.

"And what?"

"And-"

Reluctantly, he owns up to his record. "I spent my career solving murders anyway. But!" he fires back.

"But what?"

"I'm retired, but not only that, I'm taking time off for the first time ever in the summer. I can learn to relax. I'm a quick study, no? I can definitely learn to ignore bodies falling out of trees. Let them drop. I'll show you."

They squeeze hands, enjoying this nocturnal tease, and they're quiet awhile again, as though antic.i.p.ating the marvel of this experiment, the two of them off on their own in the summertime, responsibilities set aside. All has not been sweetness and light between them. They've had their tussles, a few vague issues that have proven difficult to get at or define, so that even in a moment of happy expectation they are both fraught with a dose of worry. Perhaps that's why Sandra adds a touch of the sultry to her voice when she suggests, "Maybe there's another part of your retirement you'll be happy about, emile. Besides the absence of corpses. Maybe I can teach you a few tricks. To relax."

"Meaning?"

She unwinds from her chair. The flimsy outer robe falls off. She's standing in the dark, but his eyes have adjusted. He sees her lower a thin strap on her nightdress and coyly lift a shoulder.

"Ah, sweetie, you know that I'm an old man. I need a pill first. Then a short time for it to take effect."

"You're in your prime with me, Mr. Man. But take the pill. I've leased the farm, you're retired, so go slow, emile. We have all the time in the world."

Cinq-Mars stands, although it takes a bit of a shove to get him up and out of his chair. Not the most elegant approach. Next to her, he's impressively tall, even in the dark, and by comparison she is small as she drops her nightie to the floor and steps free of the garment to slip wholly naked into his loving arms. She kisses his chest. His right hand rises up her rib cage to rest under her left breast and he loves its weight over the length of his fingers, time's delicate, beautiful sag, which might keep her off a beach in her bikini but inspires this intimacy in him every time. As deep as his sleep has been, he's that calm, that quiet, yet in another way he's equally as tempestuous as the wind outside. When he touches her chin, she opens her lips and presses the whole of her strong form against him to receive and return their first kiss by the sea.

FIVE.

When asked, she prefers to reply that she's five foot eleven. She'll say, "Around five eleven, give or take," sometimes adding that she's earned every inch. Yet Madeleine Orrock knows that she's a mere eighth of an inch less than six feet. That eighth gives her license, she believes, but either way she finds herself crouching in the wheelhouse of a lobster boat, the Donna Beth. She tests whether or not she can stand upright without cracking her noggin on the ceiling, and she can, easily, yet in the rise and fall and crash through the waves of this small, stout boat and in the ominous dark she feels the ceiling loom as near, ready to conk her cranium. When standing and lifted by the momentum of the boat dropping off a wave, she bends at the waist, tilts her neck down, and cramps her shoulders to avoid being knocked out-scrunching up, a reflex tall girls are taught to avoid in the proper care of their posture. At times, the wheelhouse feels as though it is compressing around her.

Once more, Maddy ventures back through the cabin and out the stern door to the aft deck. The sea is rollicking. Rain and salt water slosh underfoot. Salty spindrift mingles with the sideways deluge as she keeps one hand on the boat and backs her way to the railing to upchuck whatever remains in her belly.

After extraordinary retching to regurgitate a smidgen of fluid, she has the dry heaves awhile, her stomach squeezing as though she's bound in a constrictor's grip. As the spasms subside, and they don't go gently, she meanders back into the warmth of the cabin, mindful of the slippery footing and her rampant dizziness, and climbs up into Sticky McCarran's diving, dipping, spinning wheelhouse.

She's mildly embarra.s.sed. Being sick on a boat is an indignity she's loath to suffer, in part because it's too girlie for her nature and an affront to her background, although intellectually she knows that it can happen to anyone unaccustomed to the motion. In the lights reflected off his instruments, the captain of the Donna Beth notices that she's upset.

"I'll say this for you, Miss Orrock."

"Maddy."

"You're no landlubber. You remember the difference between the weather rail and the lee."

"That's not saying much."

"More than you think. You'd be surprised how many go to the weather side first, because it's higher, feels a bit safer. Until they try vomiting into the wind."

"We all do that once. But once only."

"You're not used to the sea no more is all. Weather like this, not many are."

"Christ, it's lumpy," she says, knowing that it's way more than that.

"Freaking A," he agrees.

She's curious if he'd use a different word if she weren't a woman.

They have close to eighteen nautical miles to cross and their progress against wind and current has been reduced to less than five over the ground per hour. The boat handles the conditions well enough, and early on Maddy is confident in that aspect. All things considered, the pa.s.sage is safe and straightforward. If only her stomach would settle, or, more particularly, the gyrating toss and swing of the mechanisms of her inner ear, which seek a balance, some level plane, finding none.

"When I was kid," she says, "I was taught to keep one hand on the boat and, if I felt nauseous, an eye on the horizon. That works. But only if there's a horizon. That advice doesn't do much good tonight."

"It's black out," Sticky concurs.

"Pitch."

"Turn around?" he asks her quietly. Blacks Harbour remains closer than Grand Manan, and the weather will be easier to ride in that direction.

Maddy shakes her head. She won't tolerate retreat.

Seated alongside Sticky McCarran at the wheel, she must hang on as the boat spills off the back of a tall crest and careens down a nearly vertical descent. The bow rears up slightly toward the base of the wave, but what's coming next is familiar yet always exciting as the bow buries itself and hard water surges across the deck to slam against the windows with all the violence of an automotive collision. She might well be driving her Porsche on a Ferris wheel through a car wash. In the darkness under so much water, one degree of blindness compounds another. The wipers swish uselessly a while, and as the buoyancy of the widely flared bow lifts the Donna Beth out of the sea again and they rise, the diesel never breaks its steady muttering pace, unperturbed by the matter. Maddy shakes her head as though washing the sea off herself, as though pushing squid and sardines and plankton back out of her ears and nostrils and larynx, as if during those many seconds while the boat is at its nadir she's in a whale's dark belly and now, as they scale the next roller, she's spewed out the blowhole into the black sky again, afloat above it all momentarily.

She fears smacking her head.

Similar scenes from childhood wash back over her, not unlike the water that rushes off the deck, and she feels a strange release and expiation, as though this limited and probably safe ordeal is a debt she pays, something she just has to get through, a way of making amends. But for what, and why does she feel so guilty? Because her father is dying? Old age does that to people. Because they've been estranged for so long? Whose fault is that, pray tell? she argues to the sea and to the blackness beyond the wheelhouse. Not mine. Yet she agrees with herself that she may not be the guilty party here, but neither is she free of her past, and especially not on this rambunctious crossing.

Maddy feels the need to break out of herself a little. Not only is she road-weary from the day and now storm-tossed, plagued by guilt and a lurking, impending grief that she cannot wholly understand or even begin to accept, but she's feeling claustrophobic and torn, and not a speck of her malaise, she fears, is related to being seasick. Yet being seasick is bad enough.

Being seasick is the worst thing there is or can be at the moment.

She turns to Sticky to see if they can talk, deflect the gloom, get something going to release her from a battery of complaints and afflictions.

"Have you worked for my dad, Sticky? Over the years? He gave me your number-I presume you know him."

"You don't remember me?"

"Should I?"

He shrugs off the question. "When I got my first boat, he helped me out."

"My father helped you out." If she weren't a seasick dog, she'd laugh. He had to be telling a joke.

"Sure he did. I got my boat young. It's not easy being a young fellow carrying that kind of bank loan, interest what it was back in the day. I had the experience, with my old guy, you know. I was at his knee nearly from the day I was born, so I knew I could fish or catch lobster or pull up whatever the sea was willing to provide. The bank seemed to agree with me, too, on account of my family. There's six of us boys and five of us got our own boats. I got mine at a younger age than any of them, and that's a risk. A so-so year early on and the whole idea is doomed. Your dad was a big help to me with that."

So this is no joke. "Sticky, I'm sorry, but my dad doesn't go around helping people out. What did he get out of it?"

At least, given his expression, he seems to understand her objection. He isn't living in some alternative world. "I know what people say. Your old man's a hard crust. But you ever deal with the folks in Dark Harbour? Some are good people, most are, but if it's not a harpoon between your ribs from a few of the men living there, it's a shiv. There's lunatics in that crowd, in my opinion."

"Maybe. But they might also have justification for their grievances. Some do. Anyway, what do you know about Dark Harbour? You're a mainlander."

"When I started with your father, I used to pick him up there."

Again, similar to his remark about her father's helpfulness, this makes no sense.

"Sticky, what are you talking about? My dad never lived in Dark Harbour."

"Of course not. But he'd like to go there. Down to that beach. He had business with the people harvesting dulse, for one thing."