Shining Sea (21 page)

He touches Eamon's arm gently then gestures toward a half-empty bottle of whiskey. “They got you fixed up?”

The bartender leans over the wooden bar. “We'll send you all to the mainland tomorrow, and they'll take him into the surgery. I did what I can meanwhile.”

“Did someone call the coast guard?” Eamon says.

The bartender nods. “Radioed.”

“They could send a helicopter,” he says.

“They're doing the best they can out there,” the bartender says.

He accepts a glass of whiskey and drinks slowly, letting the Scotch burn through him, down his esophagus, through his shoulders and chest, out to his hands, down to his knees. Georgina called that first rush “pouring boiled blood into the body.” If the force of the sea could do this to Eamon's thick arm, it must have killed Rufus instantly. Maybe it's best they don't find what's left of him. Maybe Rufus would prefer that, floating off among the sea creatures.

“Thank you, man,” Eamon says to him in a low voice.

“For what?”

“I'd be dead without you, wouldna? All of us. The girls are strong, but they could never have done it without ye. And Katie'd be gone.”

The shock of cold, the splashing, the confusion. The strange beauty.

“I had a little sister,” he says. “Have, somewhere.”

Eamon nods. “Still.”

“Let's call it even,” he says. “We all helped each other.”

The girls have apparently been given sedatives and sent straight to sleep. He and Eamon sit before the fire drinking Scotch, saying nothing but thinking about the same thing, until Eamon's eyelids begin to dip, then shut.

“I'll get him into a bed when I close,” the bartender says.

Back in the captain's house, he takes to bed also, listening to the sound of a motor in the sky, propeller wings slicing through the air over the sea. This is the first night he's spent without the others since they left Iona. A lifetime ago—in Rufus's case, literally. After dark finally falls, he sleeps fitfully, tossed between the trench of exhaustion and the discomfit of grief. Several times he jolts awake, thinking himself back in the sea, feeling the pressure of a mountain of water coming down on him. He's glad enough when morning light starts sneaking through the windows.

“John McCurdy will ferry you over to Ballycastle soon as tide's in,” the captain says over coffee, eggs, and brown bread with black currant preserves.

He shakes his head. “We're going to do it in the currach.”

The captain shakes his head also. “No.”

“Yes.”

If there's one thing he knows, it is that nothing will keep him from completing Rufus's journey.

Katie and Ghislaine are already down by the currach. All that is left inside are the benches, the sail, and his guitar, still lashed in its plastic barrel behind Katie's bench. The other barrels and the oars are gone. Still, there's nothing to make the currach unseaworthy. A few dents is all.

They're in Northern Ireland now. Some suitable oars should be easy enough to find.

“It's only six miles from here to the mainland,” he says. “Remember? Rufus said so. I checked the captain's charts this morning. If we hug the coast of Rathlin until we get to the end of its southernmost peninsula, we'll avoid most of the Slough-na-more tidal race, and what we do catch will shoot us right into Ballycastle.”

“You sound like Rufus,” Ghislaine says, looking away.

“He was an excellent teacher.”

“He was.”

They have moved into the past tense now. When they arrive in Ballycastle, there will be forms to fill out, police reports to complete. Rufus's family, or some emissary from it, will probably be waiting to speak with them.

“How about Eamon?” Katie says.

He thinks. “You're going to row, Katie?”

“Of course. What do you think?”

“Well, he can sit in your seat, in the back of the boat.”

No one is going to sit in Rufus's seat.

They find Eamon awake and dressed.

“How fucked up are you?” he asks Eamon.

“Pretty fecked,” Eamon says. “They gave me some painkillers…but I won't fall out the boat.”

“Okay, then.”

They set out under a perfect sky, the sun burning through the thick, long, low-lying clouds ringing its edges. The sea is a royal blue, as still as he has seen it since arriving in this part of the world. Harbor seals with mottled, prehistoric faces flop in the sun; eiders laze on the stone walls edging the marina. Auks and gannets and gulls fly overhead, filling the air with a flurry of white and black and shrill cries. The light wind ruffles his hair. They glide past a long beach, then a stretch of high cliffs, the sea crashing against their base, the water becoming a turbulent green-and-white fluff.

“What happened yesterday?” Katie says, looking around at the calm.

“I think a wave,” he says. “Or maybe a whale under us.”

“I think we hit something,” Ghislaine says. “A rock sticking up.”

“Then why wasn't the boat shattered?” Katie says.

“I don't know. Maybe the bitumen,” Ghislaine says.

Eamon leans to look at him over Katie's and Ghislaine's shoulders. “Ye thought he was using the journey to sell the bitumen. But he was using the bitumen to sell the journey.”

He dips his oars into the sea, watching the sun turn the drops of water into diamonds. So beautiful, the sea. How different it looks to him from the way it did a week ago. How different everything looks to him. “I know that.”

“I think Francis is right. It was a wave,” Katie says. “A big, huge wave.”

“We had just hit the tidal race,” Eamon says. “It can do strange things to ye. Toss ye up, play with ye like a beach ball. And at the same time the storm hit. It was a million-in-one chance. Of bad luck.”

Everyone is quiet, probably—as he is—remembering that moment when the currach suddenly evaporated from under them, replaced by walls of moving sea, the confusion, the shouting.

“I don't even know whether the boat rolled three hundred and sixty degrees or just flew up in the air,” he says. “But something knocked every one of us out of it.”

“I went flying,” Katie says. “It was like being a bird.”

“You weren't facing the same way as we were, with your feet against the foot braces. You weren't even sitting when it happened, were you?”

Katie shakes her head. “I went far.”

They lapse back into silence, rowing.

After a while, Ghislaine asks, “Are you okay, Katie? Not getting tired?”

Katie doesn't answer this. Instead she says, “I think he wouldn't have felt anything. If the force of the boat didn't get him instantly, he would have drowned before he woke up.”

Ghislaine stops rowing. “How can you know that? How could he have just disappeared, anyhow? He couldn't have sunk. He had his life jacket.”

“Katie's right,” he says.

“Ye, she is,” Eamon says.

They reach the end of the Rathlin peninsula. The water, still calm on its surface, tugs slightly on the boat, propelling them forward.

“You're a prostitute, aren't you?” Katie says to him. “That's what you do. We all saw how it was with you on the island. I knew how you paid for your coffee.”

The word is so ugly, so harsh, a slashing. He thinks about her mother, or the woman who he thinks is her mother, unless it was the other. The hearty laughter, the quiet mornings. He thinks about Georgina, too, and his panic when she tried to elevate their time together into something more than partying and pulling down his zipper. When he had to face whether he had it in him to stay and help someone he could love. How he ran, the farthest distance he could find. How he ran to Iona.

But that was before.
I am someone else now. I will
be
someone else now.

“Yes,” he says softly. “I suppose you could call me that.”

They enter the sound between Rathlin and the northern tip of the Irish mainland. In the distance, large tankers plow the sea between Northern Ireland and Scotland. The sun shines off their railings and sterns and smokestacks. A converted fishing boat trails not far behind them; this must be the so-called ferry they'd declined passage on. His father's canteen must be floating somewhere out in the ocean, or maybe sunk to the bottom. It feels oddly freeing to be rid of it. Once he needed it. He won't need it anymore.

“Did Rufus know?” he says.

“Yes,” Ghislaine says. “Rufus knew everything.”

A school of porpoises swims up beside them. They jump through the air, creating graceful half circles. How easy they look in that deep, unknowable water.

“I
hope
he knew everything,” Ghislaine adds.

“He did,” he says.

Tears fall freely down her cheeks. “Do you think he would have loved me?”

“He already loved you.”

Katie nods, shaking her brilliant curls. “Of course, he did. I'd already decided you'd be the godparents of my kid one day.”

Ghislaine gives a short laugh, more like a hiccup. She stops rowing for a second and wipes her face. “I was just cozying up to you, Francis, so you wouldn't leave the expedition. I knew it would keep you.”

He pulls on his oars, guiding the boat through the water. “Okay.”

She picks up her oars again.

The porpoises gather, then divide, then regather, disappearing under the water only to pop up again. Eamon uses his good hand to touch the plastic mound tied to the bottom of the boat behind him. “Yer guitar all right?”

“I haven't looked,” he says. “But Rufus said the plastic would protect it, even if it were dunked directly into the water.”

“It was dunked.”

“It sure was. But it'll be okay.”

“Are you going to use it to write a song for him?”

“Yes,” he says. The shore of Northern Ireland is directly ahead of them now. Soon they'll pull the currach up onto land for one last time. “I'm going to write a song for all of us.”

T
HEY REACH THE OUTSKIRTS
of Los Angeles after midnight, the sky darkened, the city a hum of disembodied lights ahead of them. Lit highway signs, a garish green and white, appear with increasing frequency.

Soon the signs are coming every few yards.

ALAMEDA ST. CENTRAL AVE.

Her heart pumps a little harder.

In the ghoulish light of the dashboard, the silhouette of Ronnie's face looks sharper than usual, his hair even whiter. “Hanging in there?” she asks.

“I'm okay.” He snaps the door locks down and adds gently, “But next time we really should fly.”

It was she who insisted they drive. But it was Ronnie who said they had to wait until 4:00 p.m. to leave Scottsdale, not so he could get a full day's work in but because the desert can still be broiling hot in autumn.

Somehow the drive across the desert seems to have gotten longer.

“I offered to drive after we stopped for dinner.”

“I'm okay,” Ronnie repeats. “Anyhow, we're almost there now.”

“Yes,” she says. “We're almost there.”

When they get to Santa Monica, they'll tumble into bed. She'll close her eyes, and next thing it will be tomorrow.

NORMANDIE AVE. WESTERN AVE
.

“I feel silly,” she says. “I feel like a kid the day before her birthday.”

Ronnie laughs. He reaches over and pats her shoulder.

ROBERTSON BLVD.

“I called the hotel this morning,” she says. “I told them we wouldn't be checking in until very late.”

Of course, she told him this already: before they left, when they stopped for dinner. It's just something to say.

“It's supposed to be a very nice restaurant, where we're meeting them for lunch tomorrow. It's hard even to get a reservation there.”

She's probably said that twice already also.

The cars on the highway have thinned out. Nearly all the trucks are gone. The brightest lights are gone, too. They are nearing Santa Monica. She rolls down her window. Warm, moist air whooshes in.

“Smelling the ocean?” Ronnie says.

“More like asphalt and car exhaust.” She rolls her window up. “I swear, Los Angeles just gets more and more polluted. When we first moved here, it was different. After San Francisco, it felt like one long beach vacation.”

“It was different when I first moved here, too,” Ronnie says.

“
We
were different,” she says.

CALIFORNIA 1. LINCOLN BLVD.

Ronnie puts his blinker on. “We sure were,” he says. “What's the number of the hotel again? It's at Ocean Avenue and Wilshire? Or California?”

She's startled awake. A strange room, a strange bed. Morning—there's light behind the drawn curtains. The hotel in Santa Monica.

That's it: the sound of sirens is rolling in toward the hotel, scores of successive car alarms. And then the deep rumbling, soon more like a roar.

“Ronnie!” she says, throwing back the top sheet on their hotel bed, grabbing her bathrobe. “Get up! It's an earthquake!”

Ronnie turns his sleepy face toward her, and the pallor under his tanned skin stops her for a half second. But only a half second. The floor has begun to move. “Come on,” she says, grabbing one of his hands and tugging. “Come on!”

He stumbles out of bed after her, fumbling with the front of his pajama shirt, almost falling as a land wave knocks him against a chair. The glass of water on the night table by his side of the bed topples and crashes onto the carpeting. She struggles with the door; he slides the lock and pushes it open. They huddle under the doorjamb while the earth shudders beneath their feet.

Ronnie draws her to him. “We should get out of the building.”

“Too far,” she says, glancing down the hallway toward the fire stairs.

Along the corridor, other hotel guests, some dressed and some also in their nightclothes, crowd together in their own doorways. Many, by the looks on their faces, have never been in an earthquake before. Somewhere someone is screaming. Others grit their teeth and grab on to their companions or whatever is closest to them, like the lap bar on a roller-coaster ride.

A woman one room down throws up her hands in front of her face, says something in a foreign language, and starts to weep.

“Shh, shh,” she says. “We'll be fine. This is a good building.”

And then it stops. The noise of the alarms is still there, but the earth is silent.

“What do we do now?” one of the hotel guests asks, running a hand through uncombed hair. “Is it over?”

The woman one door down has dropped to her knees. Whether to pray or be sick is unclear.

“You're supposed to go outside,” Ronnie says. “In case there's structural damage. Or a gas main has broken. Just a precaution.”

A guest takes the arm of the kneeling woman, helps her to her feet. The floor's occupants troop toward the fire stairs, a parade of jittery half-clad strangers. “This is why I brought my bathrobe,” she whispers to Ronnie, attempting a smile. This isn't the first quake she's been through. No one lives forty-three years in California without getting bounced around some. Still, she's shaken. Maybe because she's grown out of the habit, living in Arizona for so long now.

Or maybe because her heart has peeled back its skin already in making this trip to LA. Just a few hours now, and she'll see Francis and meet his girlfriend.

“Do you want to slip some clothes on quickly before we go downstairs?”

“No. I'm okay.”

“I'm just going to grab my pants.” Ronnie pops back into the room, shutting the door behind him. In a few seconds he emerges still in his pajama top but wearing slacks. “Sorry about that, sweetheart. Let's go down.”

They join the hotel guests filing down the stairs and through the lobby. A few paintings are askew; some lamps seem to have fallen. In general, the hotel looks pretty good. On the lawn out front, the Pacific Ocean stretching wide before them, a hotel employee is wandering among the guests, assuring them that everything is fine and that they will be able to go back to their rooms momentarily. Another is handing out blankets. Although it's already a hot and muggy day, a number of guests accept, swaddling themselves for comfort.

“That was a big one,” Ronnie says, rubbing his lower back.

“Is your back hurting again?”

Ronnie shrugs. “The driving. I'm sure it'll go away.”

There always seems to be some reason. Really, he should get that checked out. But she told him so already weeks ago.

“That place where Patty Ann is living now,” she says. “It looks like the big bad wolf would have an easy time blowing it down.”

Ronnie shakes his head. “It's made of wood. It's brick you have to look out for during an earthquake. Or adobe. Wood is flexible.”

With the morning sun on his face, Ronnie looks unusually tired, still handsome but older than his sixty-four years. When did that happen? He's made plans to retire on his next birthday, to hand the day-to-day management of the company over to his vice president. Not a moment too soon, in her opinion. He's become thinner also. His collarbones jut out under his twisted pajama top.

She straightens his collar. “I hope there hasn't been too much damage anywhere.”

“It was a big one,” he says again. He sniffs the air. “Smog but no gas. I'm sure we can go back in soon. I'll get us cups of coffee.” The hotel has set up a little station on a folding table.

“Better make that a double,” she tells him, retying her bathrobe.

The plan is to meet for lunch today after Francis's morning meeting. Francis has written a bunch of songs. A record label in Los Angeles wants to produce them.

Three years ago, on a quiet Monday morning, the phone rang.
Mom,
Francis said on the other end of the line, as though he hadn't dropped off the face of the earth for ten years. As though she hadn't even known most of those years whether he was alive or dead.
We've just gotten a phone hooked up. I'm glad you are still at the same number. How are you?

She didn't drop the phone. She didn't cry out:
Francis! Francis! Francis!

Francis,
she said, as calmly as she could, as though the past ten years weren't rushing in a torrent through her head and heart.
Where are you?

I'm in County Clare, Ireland,
he said.
In a little stone cottage.

Are you living there?
she asked.

He didn't answer for a moment.
Yes
.
I'm living here now.

And then there was a silence.

It was like being in the room with a mouse: any sudden movement, any sharp sound, and it might bolt. She racked her brains for what she could safely say next.

Sissy just graduated from college, and Kenny has just begun. And Ronnie is traveling.

So you are alone
.

Oh, no,
she said, although she did feel very alone suddenly.
Ronnie will be back soon. It's just a short business trip.

Ronnie hands her a Styrofoam cup. The coffee is lukewarm, hurriedly made by some poor soul frightened to be in the kitchen but even more scared of losing his or her job. Someone has brought out a transistor radio, and guests are gathering in a tight cluster to listen, bare shoulder to bathrobe, the sudden intimacy of disaster.

“We could just drive over to Venice and check,” she says. “Patty Ann's.”

A hotel employee approaches the group around the radio, saying something slowly and earnestly. Their circle breaks open, and guests begin to reenter the hotel. She discreetly pours the remainder of her coffee on the lawn.

Ronnie sighs. “Let's get some clothes on first, okay?”

It's an even shorter drive than usual from Santa Monica down to Venice Beach. Although now nominally rush hour, the traffic on both Ocean Avenue and Main Street is light. The world feels strangely still. They find Patty Ann out on the porch of her rickety wooden house, a stone's throw from the water. Her latest husband, Glenn, sits on a step beside her in a sleeveless undershirt, the tattoo on his upper right arm a flat bluish green in the morning sun:
LO QUE SEA NECESARIO.

Sean sits on a crate by the door. He gets up and goes into the house.

“Sean, come back out and say hello to your grandma,” Patty Ann calls. She reaches for Glenn's cigarette, takes a drag. “Hi, Mom. You all shook up?”

Glenn stands up and extends his hand. “Good morning, Mrs. McC., Mr. McC.”

“Good morning, Glenn.”

Glenn is three and a half years younger than Patty Ann, and Patty Ann met him at an AA meeting. But he, at least, seems to have stuck by the program. Most important, he treats Patty Ann decently. In comparison to Lee and certainly to Patty Ann's last husband, Troy, Glenn is a prince.

Troy was the worst of the worst. He left Patty Ann with two broken ribs.

She only wishes Glenn had a steady income. Patty Ann says he's begun training to be a stonemason, that being a sculptor makes him a natural for the work and soon he'll be “making a mint.” But who trains to be a stonemason at thirty-seven? That's the one—and
only
—thing anyone could say for Troy. He did pay the bills.

“Where are the other boys? Did the schools open?” she says, stooping to kiss Patty Ann on the cheek. Up close, Patty Ann smells stale and sweet and smoky, like last evening spilled over into this morning.

“Isaiah's with the SOB this week.” That's Patty Ann's code name for Troy. No one is allowed to speak his real name. In front of Patty Ann and Troy's one son, it's “your dad”—which makes her feel bad for Isaiah, as though somehow he's at fault for how awful his father was.
What's the hurry?
she told Patty Ann, but Patty Ann could hardly wait for her divorce from Lee to come through to get hitched to Troy, scared to be on her own with two small children and no job. Or maybe just angry—after all, Patty Ann gave up her future so Lee wouldn't be drafted.

It took less than three years for Patty Ann to get a divorce this second time. Troy told the judge that Patty Ann got those broken ribs falling down drunk. For whatever reason, the judge believed him, and though Isaiah was barely more than a baby, the court granted him joint custody. She knows Patty Ann was telling the truth, though.

At least Patty Ann waited another eight years before getting married a third time.

“And Lucas?”

Patty Ann shrugs. “Around.”

“How was it over in Santa Monica?” Glenn asks.

Ronnie shakes his head. “It was a big one.”

“But we're fine,” she says. “Less tossed than salad. We didn't see any damage on our way over here, either.”

“There was smoke rising downtown,” Ronnie says.

Glenn nods. “Fires.”

Ronnie looks the house over. “Did you close the gas main?” It's one of those wooden homes from the beginning of the century, three stories but with a low roof and fronted by a brick, wood, and paving-stone porch, shadowed by an overgrown sapote tree on one side and a coral tree on the other. The first time they visited, an evening shortly after Patty Ann and Glenn moved in, they heard what sounded frighteningly like gunshots down the road.

Oh, there's the gangs in Venice Beach,
Patty Ann said
. But we don't bother them, and they don't bother us.

“Of course we turned it off,” Patty Ann says now, sharply.

She can see Sean inside the living room. She steps around Patty Ann and Glenn and goes inside. She and Sean get along fine—it just takes him a while to get used to seeing her again. At nineteen, he's full-grown—dark-haired, round-faced, and freckled, like her side of the family—but in many ways still a little boy. For years, she tried to get Patty Ann to let her take him to see a specialist.
For what?
Patty Ann would say.
So they can treat him like the counselor did at school? Sean's fine. Sean's just Sean.
Secretly, she wonders whether Patty Ann refused to let her pursue it out of fear it would give her cause to take Sean, as she took Kenny.