Rise and Shine (25 page)

“You’re a sharp one,” he said and went back to reading.

Derek had a friend named Percy, who owned a small boat and took tourists fishing and snorkeling. He lived on a back street that seemed to exist completely apart from the carnival midway quality of the main drag. It was a small cinder-block house painted a clear blue with an immense sailfish stenciled across its front. The fish had been painted around the grilles that covered window openings, so he had a strange curve to his back, as though somewhere in his family tree there was an eel. Derek’s friend was dressed much like Derek except that his nicely pressed pants were shorts. His car was parked in the yard and had the words “Searching For Salvation” lettered across the top of the windshield. He offered to drive down to the grimy strip of beach where his powerboat was bobbing off a Styrofoam buoy, but we were just as happy to walk behind him after he’d changed into a pair of what looked like surfer’s trunks and a thin T-shirt. He had a pronounced hitch in his step; Derek said he had had a nasty run-in with a propeller. “Very bad,” he’d said quietly. In the bottom of his boat, Percy had a mesh bag with snorkel masks, fins, and a pair of water shoes he put on quickly, his back to us, as though it would be impolite to let us see his mangled foot.

After about a half hour of diesel fumes from his outboard, he made a wide U-turn and dropped anchor in perhaps twelve feet of water. The depth was hard to gauge because the bottom was as clear to me as his broad face, sand in remarkably even ridges with waving snake-grass here and there. Farther out we could see the suggestion of outcroppings beneath the surface, and he pointed in that direction as we stripped down to our suits and put our gear on.

Meghan has always liked to snorkel. She used to say it was the only time she really felt alone, although once over a reef in Anguilla someone had actually tapped her on the shoulder, startling her terribly, to ask if she was the morning show woman. (“I get that all the time,” she said and went under again.) I like it for exactly the opposite reason, because there’s so much company, but perhaps never as much as there was that day. There were snub-nosed fish so blindingly blue and yellow that they seemed to be lit from within, and puffer fish that would drift too close to my waving fingers and then inflate themselves in outrage at the intrusion. There were big schools of black-and-white angelfish, and some little bright yellow guys I didn’t recognize. One of them came right up to my mask and stared at me as though he was trying to place the face. They were nibbling at the coral, shifting in the currents, swimming through an outcropping and appearing at the other end. Near the base of the coral, I glimpsed a lobster and an orange eel with an evil under-bite.

Meghan stayed beside me for a while, then swam nearby and found a ray half buried in the sand. She dove deep and nudged it slightly with a finger, and it burst from its hiding place and began to propel itself rapidly, skimming the bottom with Meghan swimming strongly behind. I lost her in the fog of sand the ray kicked up, but I knew she would follow it until it had burrowed down again, then look for another. She loves to chase rays, something I’ve never understood. They frighten me, with their dark wings and their empty eyes.

I came up to look for the boat. It was drifting on its anchor, so it was farther away from us now. Percy had taken off his shirt and stood straight in the bow, then went into the water with almost no sound. He took a long time to surface, then went right down again. I saw Meghan’s snorkel tube up ahead and heard her garbled shout. I swam to her and into a vast school of small silvery baitfish, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of them, a bolt of rippling silver fabric unfurled in the water. The sun hit them like sparks. Meghan took my hand, and together we lay on the surface and watched them, so many of them that it seemed to take forever for them to pass us by. Then she pulled, and we were following, swimming with and among them. “Paillettes!” I called through my tube, but she couldn’t hear me. We swam in front of them and then back through them, separating the silver with our hands and our feet, little wriggles all up and down us until we were both laughing.

It took us a moment to mark the change, the sharper, grittier feeling on our ankles and a muffled noise to one side of our heads. I looked down, and a school of large metallic fish were coming up from beneath us, their mouths agape. And from above dozens of gulls were diving, their sharp beaks indiscriminate as they tore through the water. Birds and big fish, they were all around us, everywhere, tearing up, tearing down, the water a whirlwind of sharp hard biting things, and for just a moment, in a primitive gesture, we both thrashed in the water, our arms outstretched, pushing back. I was stunned by the violence, by the power of the natural world around us and how the birds and their prey were blind to the two impotent humans who had blithely intruded. I inhaled water through my snorkel tube, choked and coughed, surfaced to the sight of the birds, spit swiftly. Then I grabbed Meghan’s hand, took a deep breath, and dove down, pulling her with me, hoping she had had the wherewithal to hold her breath. The melee continued, and I prayed we could get free from it, all the boiling roiling water and the casual instinctive violence.

I got water in my tube again and started to cough, and when I came up the boat was in front of us. I pulled on Meghan’s hand. She felt like dead weight as I towed her behind me, and I held on to her until Percy pulled us one at a time into the boat, struggling to get me over the side. We both lay on the floor, which was a little slimy. Meghan had a divot ripped from the spot where her forehead met her scalp, and another on one hand. Both were trickling blood.

“Oh my God,” I said, and I started to shake.

Meghan lifted her hand to her brow. “I’m bleeding,” she said. “I’m bleeding pretty badly.”

“Me?” I said.

“I don’t think so. Wow. Wow. That was scary.”

“That is a very dangerous situation,” Percy said. “I am very sorry. I did not see the birds until they were already diving. Should we find the doctor?”

“No, no. It was just very frightening. Have you ever been in there when that’s happened?”

He shook his head. There were fine drops of water in his hair like crystal beads. “When we are diving and we see the baitfish, we move away. Soon there will be large fish, then large birds. One of my friends was once hit in the head by a pelican beak when he ventured too near. He lost an eye.” He started the boat hastily and ripped toward shore.

Meghan leaned in and spoke into my ear over the noise from the outboard. “Have you ever noticed that everything said in an English accent sounds intelligent and everything said in a Jamaican accent sounds copacetic?” Her voice turned low and musical. “Ya, mon, he lost an eye. No problem. Jesus.”

We were both quiet as the dock grew closer, both still breathing hard. On the shore, we pulled our clothes on over our wet suits. Derek’s car was waiting next to the sailfish mural. He was giving lollipops to three small children in the yard. When he saw Meghan, he said something in patois to Percy in a dark voice. The children scattered like frightened fish. In his trunk he had a first-aid kit, and he put cream and a butterfly bandage on Meghan’s forehead as she sat on the shallow front step of Percy’s house.

“It’s no big deal,” she kept repeating. “I’m fine.”

Back at the house, she walked directly from the car down the steps to the dock and stripped off her damp clothes. I followed slowly and sat watching her as she churned methodically, straight out into the setting sun and then back, out again and then back. After all those years of people counting off the seconds into her earpiece, I swear she has time wired into every bit of her body, so that it was almost exactly one hour when she climbed out. The butterfly bandage was somewhere floating in the Caribbean, and the triangular wound had stopped bleeding, but it looked deeper now. If she’d still had her old job, we would have been on a small plane to Miami and the office of a plastic surgeon, who would have dined out on saving Meghan Fitzmaurice’s looks.

“Bridget, it’s a cut. Stop looking at me as though I have forehead cancer.”

“When was your last tetanus shot?”

“I had one two years ago when I did the show from that neighborhood where the plane crashed.” She put her hands in her hair. “Jesus Christ, my whole life sounds surreal. I had a tetanus shot because I was talking into a microphone while standing in the wreckage of people’s lives.”

“It’s your job,” I said, picking up her clothes from the dock.

“That’s what I’m saying. How strange is that? How sad is that? Hello, Mrs. Smith? I hear your husband is burned over half of his body. Oh, you want my autograph? Sure—but how about a wedding picture as a swap? It’s a great visual! You want your picture taken with me? But what about your husband? Yep, still on the critical list.”

“You’re in a foul mood,” I said, starting up the stairs.

Derek’s wife had made some sort of fish in a pastry crust with rice and the callaloo again. For dessert there was banana ice cream. Meghan ate almost nothing. She drank nearly a full bottle of wine. She ate two spoonfuls of dessert, then wandered away from the table to stretch out on one of the chaises on the patio, one thin ankle over the other. And suddenly I did remember something about our mother, about the way twice a year she would make trips to New York for shopping and lunch, and how afterward she would be a flagrant dumb show of exhaustion, sighing, slumping, blue shadows beneath her eyes and at her temples, her soft white skin a faint gray. She would lie in bed wearing a pretty bed jacket for several days, shaking her head at the crowds, the crush, the end of the attentive salesperson and the well-made daiquiri. When I was little, I suddenly remembered, I had thought of going to New York as something like the time Meghan and I got lost in the woods behind the house and emerged on the wrong side of town, scratched, bitten, and bleeding. The saleswomen at Saks were mosquitoes, Fifth Avenue lined with brambles.

“That poor bastard,” Meghan finally mumbled. “He probably took one look at the blood and thought he was well and truly screwed for all time. Derek talks him into taking these important Americans out in his boat, and one of them pulls a Tippi Hedren and gets pecked to death by birds. I wish I understood patois. I figure Derek said, Yo, man, you want to kill the white she-devils and get me fired?”

“Oh, please,” I said. “They were both really worried.”

“Yeah, right. I’d hate us if I were them. You know what one of the guys in town said one morning? I was running past the jerk stand, and I hear someone say, ‘Get a job, missus.’ I turned around, and there were three guys smiling at me. I still think it was the one with the gold tooth. You have to be pretty sharp, to get a gold tooth all the way out here.”

“Everyone I’ve met has been really nice.”

Meghan looked over at me with a half smile. “Ah, Bridget. The pure of heart. The friend to all humanity.”

“Oh, shut up. I’m going inside if you don’t stop. You’re completely plastered and you’re also being a complete bitch. All I want to do is be with you.”

“No you don’t. All you want is for things to be the way they were.”

“Well, things were pretty good the way they were.”

Meghan laughed, a deep throaty sound that was as unpleasant as a death rattle must be. “You have no idea, Bridget. I hated my life. I hated almost everything about it. I hated what I did at work, I hated how I always had to play a role, I hated that Evan and I had to pretend in front of people all the time that we were the happiest people on earth. I hated that I had no one to talk to about how much I hated everything. And I hated it even more because everyone else thought it was so great and that meant I couldn’t even get out of it. Do you know what happened the week before it all blew up? I had a mammogram, and they came back in and said they had to shoot more pictures of one breast. And my first thought was Thank God, if I’ve got cancer I can stop. I thought that if I had cancer I could go home, get into bed, and watch old movies and cook soup from scratch. I could stay in my sweats all day and read trashy novels.”

“Oh, give it a break. You wouldn’t last a week.”

She looked over at me, and in her eyes was a combination of shock and fury. “You wouldn’t have taken a shot like that at me six months ago.”

“I wasn’t trying to take a shot. I was drawing an obvious conclusion.”

“And a wrong one. All I was saying was that I kept thinking if I was sick, I could have had a real life, a life like other people have.”

“How could you not have told me you were feeling this way?”

“How could I even admit it? The whole world is telling you you have the perfect life. How can you say that you’re trapped in a cage?”

“So get out of it. Do something else.”

“Oh, Bridget,” she said with a sour chuckle, picking up her rum punch. “What does someone like me do? Close your eyes and picture it, the way I have a million times lying out here. Meghan Fitzmaurice, covering the city council for the local network affiliate? Meghan Fitzmaurice, city editor of the local paper? Second-grade teacher? ER nurse? If you get too famous in America, you can’t go down, you can only go out. I’m on the ledge and the window is closed. I lie out here every night and I’m glad I’m not getting up while it’s still dark to read some crap off a teleprompter about some missing woman that no one’s going to care about in six months. I’m glad I don’t have to sit next to the governor at dinner and pretend he’s interesting when he’s the most boring man on earth. I hated that life. But it’s ruined me. It’s ruined my chances at anything else. I can’t even reject it now because the whole world would think it was an excuse.”

“Who cares what the world thinks?”

“Oh, honey, it’s a little late for that attitude now.”

“I feel as though you hid everything from me.”

“Of course I did. You got all the best parts of my life, Bridge. And you loved it. How could I tell you how I really felt? I used to watch your eyes, at the dinner parties, at the screenings, when someone would talk to me on the street. You loved it. You loved the movie stars and the VIP entrance and the greenroom and the First Class lounge. You were hypnotized just like all the rest.”