Castle of Water: A Novel(63)
“T’as vu ?a?”
“Of course I saw it! Do you think I was practicing my swan dive for fun? It was as big as a goddamn bus!”
An especially grisly form of déjà vu gripped Sophie, glimpses of dark blood and burning seas, and she in turn gripped Barry with a strength he did not know she had.
“I’m sorry, Barry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“I don’t know. I just am.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s the sea. Sharks live in it.”
“Thank you, though,” she panted. “For scaring him away. I saw him from under the water and I was too frightened to move.”
“Pfff,” puffed Barry, who after two and a half years had appropriated more than a few of her habits. “I didn’t do much except get smacked in the face with its tail.”
Barry wiggled his nose tenderly, examining his fingertips for traces of blood.
“Is it broken?”
“No, I don’t think so. But you are going to have to paddle us back toward shore.”
“You’re hurt?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“I just lost my last pair of contact lenses. I can’t see a thing.”
41
“Can’t see a thing” may have been a slight exaggeration. But only slight. Barry could make out the powder blue of the sky and the azure blue of the sea and the verdant smudge of the island sandwiched in between. But beyond that, anything more than an arm’s reach away was little more than pigment and haze. For several months, he had been trying to postpone the inevitable by putting in that last pair of contacts only in the afternoons for fishing and painting—the two activities in which unclouded vision was more or less essential. And through careful conservation, coupled with judicious cleaning, he had hoped to extend the life of those lenses by at least a year or two. Maybe more. Only that whole plan of action had been contingent on not having to dive into the ocean after menacing sharks. Not that he regretted it—near blindness was nothing compared with the thought, too painful to even contemplate, of something happening to Sophie or their child. He would have plunged headfirst into a whole feeding frenzy of hammerheads to prevent such a thing. So no, there was no regret. Only a grim, spirit-sucking awareness that his position on the island, only recently stable, was once again tenuous at best. With his severely compromised vision, he could not spot the schools of fish before casting his net. He could not search the tide pools for clams or scour the rocks for tern eggs. Hell, he could barely grope his way through the trees and find low-hanging bananas. Maybe not even that.
Barry did his best to camouflage that fear with a few lighthearted quips about white canes and guide dogs, but Sophie could easily detect it. The first night of no-sightedness, she cranked up the little shortwave and fiddled with the dial until a station playing some semblance of American music came through the static. She lit the special coconut-oil lamp that he had made for her from a clamshell and began work on a batch of his favorite banana fritters, to accompany their bowls of fresh seaweed salad. They ate together in the lamplight around their new kitchen table, some Motown hit rising and falling on the whims of the stratosphere. To Barry, the room was nothing more than a half-lit smudge, and Sophie’s face just four feet across from him, an indecipherable blur. He chewed and stared blankly ahead, with eyes unable to find their focus.
“It’s going to be all right, Barry.”
“I know.”
“No, you’re just saying that. But I’m telling you, it will be.”
Barry nodded, exhaled, and kept on chewing.
“Are you worried about food?”
He nodded again. “I guess. Among other things. You’re five months pregnant, I’m basically blind, I don’t know how in the hell we’re going—”
“Shhhh.” Sophie rose from her palm-stump stool, stood beside him, and cradled his head. “Ne t’inquiète pas, mon amour. We’re both alive, we’re both healthy, and we will figure it all out together. You can take me out on the boat and teach me to fish with the net. I’ll be your eyes, and you’ll be my arms. And everything else I can take care of. It’s not hard to pick bananas or knock down coconuts.”
“But I can’t even see your face.”
“I’m right here, my love. And there’s nothing to see.” Sophie blew out the oil lamp, flooded their little house with rich darkness, and pressed her face against his. “And besides, you have to admit. A blind painter—it is all rather bohemian, non?”
At that, Barry couldn’t help laughing. He felt Sophie’s forehead pressed to his own, and her life-swollen belly warm against his, and he knew if nothing else, they had each other, and on more than one occasion, that alone had been more than enough.
“Do you feel it?”
“Hm?”
“The baby has the—what do you call it in English?”
He moved his hands from the lithe curve of her back to the taut curve of her stomach and felt for the first time the stirrings of their child. His face erupted in a fatherly glow. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s got the hiccups.”
And that was when Sophie gasped and pulled away. “Mais oui, c’est ?a! The name!”