Castle of Water: A Novel(15)

Not Providence, exactly, but providential indeed.





12

The night found the two fresh castaways in their designated positions—Barry cradled shirtless in the hammock, flare gun atop his belly, Sophie nested away in her shelter, trying to muffle her sobs. Barry considered checking in on her to see if she was all right but suspected such things would only result in another bilingual tongue-lashing. And frankly, he was a little afraid of her. Besides, he was an American, and a midwesterner at that—grief was far better suppressed than shared. So he remained in the hammock, staring quietly skyward, the moon above him a pearly chaperone to all manner of cosmic splendors, but sadly no blinking rescue planes or winking choppers. The closest thing was satellites, small reminders of civilized light, crawling their way through the tangle of constellations. Barry remembered them from the same Boy Scout camp that had taught him basic first aid and female anatomy. He’d received the astronomy merit badge following a full week spent under the night’s perforated ceiling, and his instructor had actually known each satellite by name. “G-47-X12 should be coming along,” and sure enough, a fleck of light would slip through the stars. And Barry found comfort in that, in their lingering presence, and he wished he knew their names as well.

At some late hour, he finally took out his contacts and surrendered to the darkness, closing his eyes, drinking in the breeze. But thanks to the roughness of the ropes and his evolving sunburn, he was unable to sleep. Itchy and restless, he decided to take a crack at the shortwave radio instead. It was a portable Grundig, very much like one he had received for Christmas when he was just ten years old. He’d spent almost every night of that winter with the little radio whirring beside his pillow, adjusting the dials with a Swiss watchmaker’s precision, navigating a vast ocean of static until the sweet whale song of some faraway station came rising from the deep. There was Radio Havana, Voice of Free China, Deutsche Welle, the BBC. Sure, it was no great shakes in hindsight, but to a ten-year-old Cleveland boy in a flyover state, such sounds were nothing short of magic, hints at what awaited beyond the bleak soot of the horizon. He would listen in secret, with the volume almost but not quite extinguished and the speaker pressed tightly to his ear.

And now he had at last ended up in exactly the sort of exotic, faraway locale that he had longed for as a boy, only to do exactly the same thing. But with considerably less luck. Perhaps because of solar winds or distant storms, viable stations were hard to come by. Like timid leviathans they refused to surface, remaining hidden below the rolling whitecaps of static. There was, however, something out there. Every so often, snatches of a disembodied voice, ghostly as sin, would come warbling through the crackling waves. Like a crossed telephone line, a conversation in the background thin as a whisper and too faint to hear. And each time it happened, Barry would press his ear even closer to the speaker, straining to make some sense of voices that he wasn’t entirely sure were voices at all. But he could not. There was no sense to make. The signals were too weak, too far away. Just comet trails, there and then gone again, drowned out and lost at sea. So he gave up trying to find them and settled instead for the comfort of static. Eventually, he dozed off and the charge on the radio wore down, the whistles settling out to a hum, the silver whiteness of that static fading into the blackness of silence. Then there was only the waves and the trees.

As for Sophie, she fell asleep shortly after Barry, after having spent most of the night gagging on her grief. She’d been able to keep it simmering quietly on the back burner for most of the day, but it came boiling back when she was all alone in the darkness. It was unbearably visceral, as if an essential organ, one that could not be replaced or transplanted, had been ripped with indifference right from her gut. Her étienne was gone—no, much worse than gone. “Gone” was resting peacefully beneath French platane trees in a velvet-lined box. The place he had been dragged to was the pure stuff of nightmares, the raw substance of dread. And at the one moment he had truly needed her, his face awash in fear and regret, she’d been unable to help him, powerless to do anything. She wondered if she’d made the right choice out there in the ocean—if perhaps she should have joined him, surrendered instead and gone down by his side.

So great was her sadness, she even considered going to talk to the American, to beg him for comfort, to let him tell her that everything would be all right. But she could not. No, a French girl could not do such things, never disclose there might be a cant to the perfect posture, a shaky wheel in the noble carriage. It was impossible. So instead she let her sobs rock her to sleep, terrified of the nightmares to come but giving in at last to whatever horrors midnight might bring.

But the strangest thing. When she finally dozed off, there were no dark things waiting for her there—no sucking whirlpools or circling sharks. Just her grandfather Jean-Pierre Ducel, the mountain guide from the Pyrenees with whom she had spent her summers all those years before. He had died from a heart attack back when she was in university, but in her dream there he was, dressed in his wool knee breeches and red Gavarnie socks, sitting beside her, shaving off slices of saucisson sec with his Laguiole knife. He smiled through the bushiness of his mustache, told her to eat up, it was time to go. Allons-y, ma chérie, he said. Il faut avoir la niaque. She finished the dried sausage slices and they stood up together, brushing the pine needles from the seats of their pants. Then they started marching upward, ever upward, clearing the spindled boles of pines, cresting the top of an ancient ridge, entering upon a field of pure white snow, mountains rising all around them, ancient things that feared no sea.…