The Water Keeper(104)

When I’d finished, I read out loud to both Marie and Gunner as the sun dropped behind the palm trees. Then I read it again. Gunner wagged his tail and rolled over on his back. Maybe Marie liked it too. I knew my editor had bitten her nails to the quick, so I clicked Send and waited a few hours, and when my phone rang near midnight, she couldn’t even talk. Usually a good sign. She managed two words. “Thank you.” Followed by, “The wedding . . .” She paused. Blew her nose. “Most beautiful thing I’ve ever—” She couldn’t finish. Proving that while she was my editor, she was a reader first.

I hung up, stared at a full moon, and felt the tug. I walked out to the bank, and Marie and I sat beneath a blanket and watched the sunrise.

Gunner sniffed me out at daylight and said hello by licking my face. “Okay, okay . . . I’m coming.” He ran around me in circles, splashing, sinking his muzzle to his ears, chasing schools of mullet.

Standing on the beach where we’d searched for sharks’ teeth as kids, I opened the box and lifted the jar. Then, holding her hand, I waded into the knee-deep water. Gunner paused, tilted his head, and stood wagging his tail. Below me, the outgoing tide tugged at my skin. Bait fish nibbled at my toes. I clutched the jar for some time. Remembering how the water glistened on her skin and the wind tugged at her hair. And how her hand found mine when we were snorkeling. A homing beacon. I closed my eyes and let the water wash over me.

Ellie told me the story her mom had told her after I’d rushed out to rescue Summer. The day of our wedding, she’d left ashamed. A betrayal unlike any other. While she knew I could forgive her, she could not forgive herself. So she ran. Medicating and drowning her pain in drink, drug, and people. Always one step ahead of me.

Seven years in, she tired of running and walked back into my life. We spent that night talking, and just before daylight, she’d given herself to me. The honeymoon we’d never had. Seven years to the day, and the only time I’d ever been with my wife. She left before dawn, then climbed into a rented boat and turned on the camera. Yet, sitting in that boat and tying herself to a concrete bucket, she had a problem. Her body felt different. Something was off. Or new. And like most girls, she knew what the “new” was.

So, wanting to complete the ruse for the camera, she followed the bucket. Twenty feet down, the knot came undone. Had she tied it loosely or was it something else? Hovering below the boat in what was to be her watery grave, she watched the bucket disappear. Darkness below. Light above. Something new inside. For reasons she had never been able to understand, she chose light.

Yet walking up to shore, how could she return to me? How could I ever trust her? After so great a betrayal. Twice. At least, this was her thinking. She returned north to the Hamptons and waited tables until the baby came. While there, she learned of an adoption agency that catered to the wealthy. Maybe they could give the girl a better life. So she gave birth to Ellie, signed the papers, and left the Hamptons on, of all things, a Greyhound bus.

During delivery, she’d had complications. They ran tests and determined she had several problems, the worst of which was an incurable virus that attacks the lining of the heart of otherwise healthy individuals, suffocating it. It comes in through needles and sex. Of which she’d known her share. They said she was lucky to be alive. Gave her a few months to live. Incidentally, the virus did not pass through the womb. Host only.

Having committed suicide twice, she couldn’t bring herself to do it again. So she searched the yellow pages and found a convent in, of all places, Key West. She figured she could hide and die there. She inquired under a false name, they accepted her as a candidate, and she made the trip south. Burdened with guilt, she left bread crumbs along the way in the event her daughter ever wanted to know about her beginnings. About where she came from—without all the pain and betrayal. Marie arrived at Sisters of Mercy and was met by Sister June. Fast friends ever since.

She explained her life and situation to Sister June and asked permission to die in that cottage. Sister June obliged while telling her, “I have a feeling what’s about to happen isn’t going to happen the way you think it’s going to happen.”

So she walked the beaches. And waited. Feeling her ability to breathe and fill her lungs lessen with every day. But then a funny thing happened. One evening, nearly a year to the day she’d left me, she was walking the beach and found herself near the southernmost point. Breeze at her back. People-watching. Then this one guy caught her eye. Suntanned, sitting on a rock, scribbling in a notebook.

Handsomest man she’d ever seen. Day after day, she stood at a distance and peered through trees and disguises. Big hats and sunglasses. When he finished writing in his notebook, he’d walk to work, serve drinks, and keep writing—long into the night. Several nights she’d followed him home and waited ’til he turned out the light. Then she stood at his open window and listened to him breathe.

She knew his shifts, so one day, while he was at work, she let herself in his unlocked apartment and opened the oldest notebook. Over the next few days, she read each one from beginning to end. In dumbstruck amazement.

This man, this tortured creature, was writing a story he had not lived. A story he could only dream. Of love known. Shared. Of a woman unlike any other. He wrote of how she moved, how she smelled, how the wind dried the water on her skin, and how goose bumps rose around her hair follicles when she got cold. And he wrote of how when she slept, he’d place his hand on her stomach and feel its rise and fall.