“Seychelle, do you really think Neal was all that content with who he had become? The Neal we knew back when you first met him was a guy who was struggling with lots of inner demons, but he was trying, really trying, to be good for you. I don’t know all his history—I don’t even know if his history would explain it—but for a while there, with you out of his life, the demons took over. He did things that he could never erase. I think he went a little crazy hiding up there in the Larsens’ house watching you and thinking about all that money out there, with him the only one who knew where it was. Finally, at the end, you gave him a chance to get his senses back, to do an honorable thing.”
I reached over my shoulder and stilled his hands. “So you’re saying I should forgive Neal, is that it?”
He laughed softly and exhaled in a deep sigh. Before he could say anything more, I turned to him.
“Please, don’t say anything for a few minutes. I want to tell you something. Just listen, okay?” I took a deep breath. “The summer when I was eleven, my mother asked me to go to the beach one day,” I began.
When I’d finished, we both sat in the netting, quiet for several long moments. Finally I said, “I was just a little kid.” I squinted at the horizon. “I didn’t know much about who my mother was. These past few weeks I’ve come to see just how dark her bad days must have been. No wonder she couldn’t climb out.” My voice cracked, but I swallowed and licked my lips. I felt like a huge stone was pressing on my chest, preventing my lungs from inflating. Clutching the photos and knowing in my own way that I was speaking directly to them, I said, “I miss her so much.” The school of tarpon had reversed their direction and were moving off, back toward the slick water of the pass. “I forgive ...”
I couldn’t get the rest of it out, but he knew what I meant. I forgave all of us.
The photos fell into the netting when I stood up and clambered out of the bow hammock and dove off the starboard hull. I had to get away, be alone. As though in one of the annual lifeguards’ qualifying races, I swam the crawl stroke with everything I had, all out, feet pumping, arms arcing out of the water and slicing back in with barely a splash. Each breath felt like burning sandpaper in my throat as my head rolled out of the water, gasping out of the corner of my mouth. I was headed out to the pass, to the dark, swift-moving currents, to the blue-hole depths where shadows lurked.
When I could no longer see the bottom and the surface of the water bulged smooth and taut, I kept at it, swimming with every ounce of energy I possessed, and still I stopped making any progress through the pass. The incoming tidal current sweeping through the narrow cut was just too swift. I flailed with all my strength, but I did not move an inch over the bottom. Finally, I took several short quick breaths and dove, angling downward, ears popping, lungs straining.
I opened my eyes and saw the huge silvery silhouettes gliding around me, unafraid, oblivious to my presence. Without a mask and with very little light underwater the enormous fish seemed to appear as if by magic, looming out of the shadows swirling and swimming around me in an underwater ballet. The tarpons’ scales, great round glistening disks, shimmered in the dark water finding and reflecting the last rays of the dying day. With their low-slung jaws and big dark eyes, the huge fish might have looked evil were it not for their total indifference.
I reached out to touch a fish as it passed so close to me, but as if with some unique schooling perception, the fish’s impressive body turned just out of my reach. As he turned, so did the dozens of others around him, and I wondered if it was that primordial cooperation that we’d given up to gain our free will.
My head broke the surface, and I let out a whoop so loud, it startled the egrets nesting in the mangroves on the bayside of the key. The two birds took to the air, bouncing off the tiny elastic limbs of the tree. I floated peacefully, surrendering to the current carrying me back to the boat.
B.J. stood up forward on a pontoon, leaning out over the water, his arms wrapped about the lower shrouds. Even at this distance, silhouetted against the coral-colored sky, his white grin glowed against his dark skin. He lifted an arm in a wave and hollered that dinner was ready. I began to stroke my way back to the boat with a different sort of urgency. All my appetites had returned.
THE END
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SURFACE TENSION
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Bonus Material
Read the first chapter from
CROSS CURRENT (Seychelle Sullivan #2)
Cross Current
I
Looking down at the old wooden Bahamian cruiser Miss Agnes, resting on her side on the white sand bottom, it was hard to imagine that people had died here. Every detail, from the peeling, eggshell-colored paint to the frayed wire at the base of the radio antenna, was so sharp, it was as if I were peering through a camera lens in crisp focus. It didn’t look as if it were underwater. The cruiser and the water above were so still and clear that as I leaned over the bow of my boat, I felt like I was floating in air.
“I just can’t picture a vessel that size carrying over fifty panicked people.” I turned and saw B.J. standing outside the tugboat’s wheelhouse door, dripping seawater, his wet suit unzipped to the waist, his long black hair slicked straight back. He joined me at the rail and stared down into the crystal water. “You know, Seychelle, it was like three generations— old people, young, even kids—all jammed in there like cocktail wienies in the can. Hell of a way to go.”
“Cocktail wienies, B.J.?” I turned around and squinted at him, my elbows propped on the aluminum bulwark behind me. We both had to shout to be heard over the rumble of the generator on the barge. “I didn’t think a guy like you even knew such things existed.”
B.J. was my sometime deckhand and mechanic, a sort of New Age natural foods surfer, the only one I’d ever known who didn’t make all that seem kind of fake and wacky. He certainly was not your typical blond surfer dude, since he had at least two college degrees compared to my zero—and an ancestry that was mostly Samoan but included a dash of every other ethnic group that had passed through the Pacific in the last hundred years. Though he’d never been to his islands, you could see in his smooth brown skin and almond- shaped eyes that he carried part of his homeland in him. “Natural” was not a fad to B.J., it was how he lived his life.
“You’re right, I’d never eat such a thing, but I do like to observe the habits of the people around me. Take those guys, for example.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the men working the crane on the barge to which Gorda, my forty-foot tugboat, was moored. We were anchored a couple of thousand yards off the Hillsboro Inlet lighthouse. “Between them, they have three completely different ideas as to where I should put the straps under the hull so that when we lift this wreck to the surface, we won’t break the back of the old derelict. Not a one of them is willing to compromise.”
