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He is counting on John or Diana being there. He wants that emotional triangulation in the high school parking lot. The seahorse pendant on the fine gold chain nestled in a gift box tied with a pretty bow, courtesy the easily-charmed girl at the jewelry counter. (He has begun to recognize this new magnetism he possesses, moving through his forties. The boyish face, lanky build, the freckles and sea-glass blue eyes all seem to make him slightly irresistible to a certain kind of younger woman. A mid-life bonus; he feels a dark kinship with those men who take the fact of this attraction as tacit permission. He thinks, briefly, and with a slight throbbing pulse of blood in his veins, of the young woman, her boyfriend, the public bathrooms and all that cocaine. His panting, open-mouthed desire a small punchline to a joke the universe is intent on telling him.)
And here is another cosmic bit of comedy. Janey has been forgotten by her parents and remembered by him. He finds the surprise of it exhilarating. The metal of the truck fender is a brand on his lower back as he leans against it, the two girls stand just in front of him. His niece and a friend, the twin-ship of teenaged girls trapped in the same lithe bodies, the same desire to flay the flesh of innocence off their bones.
What? he asks, desperately wanting a cigarette or a mixed drink or both. He smiles, all predatory teeth hidden behind sun-chapped lips. What is it? So much giggling.
Sophie says you’re hot, Janey tells him decisively. The set of her mouth a temptation, a sealed invitation. He can see the woman she will become.
Janey, hisses Sophie.
The two stand the ground they have gained. They want to ascend, climb higher. He hasn’t been around teenage girls since he was a teenaged boy. The years of his wounding, in body and spirit. He didn’t understand girls, didn’t have the strength to wrestle them beneath his thin body. Other boys had wet dreams of cheerleaders and library geeks while he woke from sweated dreams of being tangled in Sarah’s sopping wet hair, his mouth locked to hers, breathing air into her dead lungs.
Teenage girls had tasted of brine, salty on the tongue. Now he can sense the dangerous ambrosia of them.
Hey, he nods in agreement, showing a bit more pearly tooth, she’s damned right. I am hot. He swipes at the back of his neck and flicks heavy droplets of sweat off his long fingers. It’s warm enough to jump into the sea, right?
The girl, Sophie, laughs, relieved. Janey’s gaze locks to his, determined. Take us, she commands. Take us out on the ocean. So we can jump in.
My mom would kill me, Sophie says, whispering behind her hand.
That would be bad, Danny says. Don’t wanta make a murderess of your mom. Maybe next time. He walks around the truck and holds the door open for Janey.
Yeah, next time, Sophie, his niece says, smug and pleased.
He watches the scissoring movement of her long, bare legs as she climbs up into the truck and pulls the door shut, closing her young body in.
+
Uncle Danny is the forbidden. The forsaken. The forsworn. Fed lies, her teeth ache to bite into the truth and taste it on her tongue.
+
His head beneath the salted surface, gulping down lungfuls of sea water. Take me home. Take me home. The seahorse waits on the far edge of his peripheral vision. He closes his eyes, the grit of the sandy floor between his eyelashes, smearing his lips with pain. But all that pain is dissolving, into the water, into the ocean.
Let go, let go, give over. This is not my fate. This is the destiny of my brother. His hand on my head, forearm pressed into the back of my neck. The bones of my spine will imprint on the flesh of his body. He will wake at night with the muscle memory of this final act, feel the ridged vertebrae. Know the flesh-coloured bruises from the vertebra of my back.
The seahorse awaits. Carry me away.
+
She looks closely at his face, the freckles, the nose, the chin. Studies the familiar. He can see the skimming recognition in her eyes. Her beloved grandmother, her dead grandfather. All things that represent safety to her. He knows who he looks like on the outside of his body, there is no resemblance on the inside.
And the ocean is too fierce to ever be a mirror.
+
He is driving his brother's child in his father's truck. He's headed, without hesitation, to the Inn, the dock, the boat. To the calling of the dark waters beneath the sunlit waves. She is chattering beside him.
I had a dream about you, she tells him, all coquette, last night.
About me? Sounds like a nightmare.
She smiles, looking sideways at him, from the corners of her eyes. He looks away. It wasn’t a nightmare, she says.
Silence separates them, but beneath the surface of the quiet is something muffled and rhythmic, a current flowing between them, threatening to pull both under. He lips a cigarette out of the pack in the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, leans back and fishes a lighter out of the front pocket of his shorts. She snatches it from him and flicks it to a flame. He smiles crookedly, feeds the tip of his cigarette into the fire and inhales. She drops the lighter into his open hand.
I’ll bite, he says, blowing white smoke from the corner of his mouth out the open window. What was I doing in your dream?
She tries to roll down the window on her side. The crank is ancient, the Bakelite handle cracked and it hurts to twist it in her palm.
Here, he says, when they pull up to a red light, and he leans across her thighs, rolls the window down, his forearm brushing against the swell of her breasts. He sits back and she lets out a held breath. Air rushes into the cab of the truck, moist and warm, nearly summertime now. You gonna tell me or not?
You were sitting on the beach, at the Inn. It was night and I was walking along the edge of the water. I saw you and sat down next to you. You said you had washed ashore and it was hard to breathe out of the water, to breathe, you know, the air. So, I helped you get back in, to get back into the sea. She hesitates, remembering. We swam out so far we couldn't see the lights of the Inn, only the light of the stars and the moon.
He nods, drumming his long fingers on the steering wheel. Huh, he says.
Yep, she replies, suddenly self-conscious. She can feel the hot pink blush beneath her jaw, moving up into her face. She lays her head on the sill of the window and closes her eyes, the wind is buffeting strands of hair loose from her long ponytail and she reaches up and pulls the elastic out, rolling it over her hand and onto her wrist where it catches the hairs on her arms and pulls. Pinpricks of pain. Her hair is a wave of burnished brown, breaking all around her face and shoulders. She doesn’t know if she just now remembers, or if she knew all along, that in the dream she was nude and he told her she was more beautiful than the naked moon.
Are we really going to go swimming, she asks, her eyes still closed.
We are really going to go swimming, he tells her. Like in your dream.
She hears laughter in his voice and she laughs, too. She sits up straight and finger combs the glorious mane out of her face, catches it all in the elastic and braids it thick. She deftly whips the ends in as though she's a sailor and has been tying rescue lines all her life.
+
He doesn’t believe her. Not really. No one living dreams of him.
He doesn’t tell his niece, Rayburn blood inside her veins, the weight of their marrow inside her bones, that he dreams, too. And in his dreams, Sarah comes to him in a long white bridal gown. She is veiled. They stand on the edge of the sea, the waves crashing, the water rising around their bare feet, the sacred wedding, they hold hands and walk out into the ocean.
+
There are no cemeteries in the Keys. There simply is not enough abundance of land, and the land is not dirt. The dead are cremated, their ashes scattered on the waves. Sarah was cremated but his father could not bear to part with the grey dust of her body. The urn was kept locked away in the office of the Inn.
His brother sets fire to his corpse. The gasoline-fed flames burn, punishing his flesh and bone, but the sky is weeping bucketloads of grief, dousing his cremation.
How many times can one body drown.
+
She cannot believe he's dead, has died, is gone. No one knows the depth of her despair, sounding in the deeps of her body. Her face becomes unreadable. No one knows.
But then she licks and licks at her lips until they chap and split and bleed.
+
She kisses him underneath the waves, the clear blue skies above the rippled surface over their heads. She doesn't close her eyes and his eyes are open, too. She wants to reach for him but his hands are fast on her upper arms and she can’t hold him, but she can undulate her body, treading the dangerous waters they have submerged themselves in, creating a whirlpool that whips into a frenzy around their suspended bodies.
Her mind finds a dark cave and swims inside, she will not consider this a sin. Not this.
Her legs as though the muscular tail of the mermaid, her mouth hungry for his mouth.
+
It seems her grandmother cannot die. She is the barnacle dried and tenuous adhered to the ship of life. Her tenacity becomes a kind of joke between her progeny. Her eyes are ancient and hooded, she no longer sees the present, only the past. She calls for her dead children in a wavering thin voice. The lisp she shared with her eldest child is gone the way of her teeth.
She never speaks the name of their father. If he is mentioned, Daddy, Dad, Pops, Robert, her face twists in a grimace of pain and she becomes quiet for hours.
One evening as the sun halves itself on the sharp line of the darkening sea, Janey finds her on the veranda, rocking and staring unseeing at the distant horizon. She pulls up a wicker chair and sits beside her. She wants to make of her a confessor. She is a woman now, unmarried and childfree, running the Inn. Taking care of her grandmother.
Grandma Sally, she whispers and the old woman turns her head so sharply, so quickly, that it seems she has been waiting for this moment, too.
I miss Uncle Danny, Janey says, surprising herself with tears. She lets them fall, licking the salted grief from the corner of her lips, remembering the ocean kiss.
Is Danny missing? We’re all lost at sea, darling. There are no lighthouses here. Because ships don’t break on the rocks, they get cast adrift on the sand bars. We all miss the ocean when we’re stranded on the land.
This is what her grandmother says to her and she knows now that her secret is not a pearl in the oyster shell of her heart. It has only ever been a lost and forgotten treasure on the sea floor.
Years of life worn away, a moment suspended in time, the dark waters rising over her head, a hand reaching up from below to pull her under. And holding her there this time.
+
No one knows, no one has ever asked, but her first memory, her earliest recollection is of Danny, walking out of the ocean, water sluicing off his skin as though his body were the fount from which the waves originated.