The Water Keeper(26)
“We’re talking about a book, right?”
“If I hadn’t read them, I wouldn’t believe it either, but those stories, the characters, the way they talk with one another, the way he thinks about her, describes her, the things he notices about her that she doesn’t even know—like a scar on her ankle where she cut herself shaving, or the sweat on the little hairs on her top lip, or how she moves when she’s walking. All of it just shows how much he values her. Defers to her. In the last book, I nearly died. Cliffhanger at the end. She’s leaning against the shower wall, listening to him, then without reason, she leaves a note on the table and disappears. Next morning, she’s gone. He starts looking. Finds the letter: ‘Dear Love, there is something I need to tell you . . .’
“This thing she can’t tell him is killing her, so she basically leaves a suicide note. He turns himself inside out trying to find her before she goes through with it. Book ends right there. So we’re all thinking this next book will be about how he and his mentor find her. Because everybody knows he’s not about to kill her off.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Which part?”
“The part where he kills the girl.”
“Don’t even talk like that.” She pushed her food around her plate with her fork and stared out the window. As she did, I saw where she’d soaked through the bandaging on the top and side of her shoulder. Throughout breakfast, she had yet to wince or even draw attention to what had to be painful, suggesting she had a high pain threshold. More importantly, she wasn’t working me. She wasn’t using the injuries to get something from me. If anything, it was the furthest thing from her mind. She’d rather talk about some silly book than herself, which told me a lot about her heart.
“Those two gave me hope when I didn’t have any.”
“Hope in what?”
She stared at her plate and shook her head.
I paused. Her eyes found mine, and I spoke softly. “Hope in what?”
She looked away. “Hope that I’m not condemned to live and die alone and unloved on this island. That no matter what I do, how screwed up I become, maybe someday, somebody will . . .” She faded off.
“Will what?”
She looked down and spoke barely loud enough for me to hear. “Ask me to dance.”
As we walked out I thought to myself that sometimes people need more than water to learn how to swim.
Chapter 9
Walking back to the marina, we passed a roadside cellular store. “Will you let me buy you a new phone?”
“Only if you let me pay you back.”
“Whatever. It’s just that if she tries to call and—”
“That’d be great.”
I bought her the phone. Once connected, she restored from the cloud and checked her voicemail and messages, but none appeared. Then she dialed Angel. No answer.
We walked back to the marina where my eager friend had just finished scrubbing down my Whaler. He stood with brush in hand, suds up to his elbows. Gone Fiction was spotless. I handed him another hundred-dollar bill. Doing so did not escape Summer’s attention.
He smiled. “Mister, you let me know if you ever do any hiring!”
I shook his hand, stepped into the boat, and cranked and warmed the engine. I looked up at her. She stood staring south down the ditch, then waved her hand across me. “If you give me your address, I can send you some money when I—”
“Forget it.”
I busied myself with my electronics, but in truth I was stalling. Trying to look busy when in fact I was just giving her space. She turned the phone in her hands, finally asking me the question that had been on the tip of her tongue since I’d knocked on her door that morning. “Where are you headed?”
The truth hurt too much. I dodged it and patted the steering wheel. “Wherever Gone Fiction takes me.”
She put two and two together. “Where’s Gone Fiction headed?”
“Couple hundred miles that way. Where the world falls off into the ocean.”
“Sounds perfect.” She shoved her hands deeper in her pockets. “Want some company?”
“Water can be dangerous when you can’t swim.”
“And life can be sucky when you don’t know how to dance.”
I liked her. She was tough in a tender sort of way. And I had a feeling she was a good momma who’d been dealt a bad hand. The cold breeze I couldn’t feel blew across her again, causing her to wrap her arms around herself. Her face was pale and she needed about three weeks of sleep. She pointed to Angel somewhere south of us. Tears appeared quickly. “She’s all I have.”
I spoke the obvious. “You realize that finding her is needle-in-a-haystack kind of stuff.”
She nodded and thumbed away a tear.
“Okay, but I have two rules.”
She waited.
“Two months clean, give or take, means you’re tougher than most. Means you did the hard part on your own. You just gutted through it. Books or no books, that stuff pulls on you. From the inside out. It’s like it wraps around your DNA. It can last months. So before you step foot on this boat and we go looking for your daughter who doesn’t want to be found, you have to promise me one thing.”
She waited as tears streaked her face.