The Water Keeper(5)

Life without Marie was like waking up in a world where the sun had been removed from the sky. I kept her letter close. Read and reread it ten thousand times. Set it next to my face when I lay down to sleep so I could smell her hand, but it brought little comfort. I could not turn back time. Nor could I, no matter how hard I tried, wrap my head around the finality. It didn’t seem possible. It wasn’t. How was she gone? The picture of her alone, terror-filled, a rope around her ankle, leaving this world consumed by shame and regret, was tough to stomach. I had exhausted myself in the search. Spent all I had. Come so close, and yet failed so completely. When she needed me, I had not been there.

Maybe that hurt most of all. I’d spent my life rescuing the wounded, and yet I could not rescue the one I loved the most.

Fort George Island sits north of Jacksonville, Florida, protected from the Atlantic by Little Talbot Island. Someone with knowledge of the waterways can navigate the Fort George River from the Atlantic Ocean through the sandbars and shallow waters around Little Talbot into the gentler waters surrounding Fort George. And while protected, Fort George Island is anything but hidden. The reason for this is a confluence of geography. The Intracoastal Waterway—which in North Florida is known to the locals as Clapboard Creek—runs north from the St. Johns River and the Mayport basin to Amelia Island and the Nassau Sound. In between the two, the Fort George River connects the Clapboard with the Atlantic.

That means the Fort George River is easily accessible by either the ICW or the Atlantic, and thereby party central for the boat culture of North Florida—which includes the wealthy who winter or weekend on Amelia, St. Simons, and Sea Island. At high tide, the Fort George River looks like any other. Water everywhere. But inches below the surface lies a different reality. As the tide recedes, the sandbars around Fort George emerge like Atlantis and become a playground the size of twenty or thirty football fields. High-traffic weekends will see a hundred boats anchored or tethered in daisy chains—boats ranging from twelve-foot Gheenoes to sixteen-foot Montauks to twenty-four-foot center consoles to thirty-two-foot triple engines to forty-foot go-fast boats and every variation in between. Even some sixty-or seventy-five-foot yachts will moor in the deeper water and then send their tenders into the playground.

Weekends are a kaleidoscope of color and an explosion of sound. Boat captains attract attention three ways: the color and design of their boat, the bodies filling the bikinis aboard, and the noise emitting from their speakers. Dotting the periphery are glass bottles in coolies, beach chairs resting in the water, kids on floats, dogs chasing bait fish, boys throwing cast nets, kids on jet skis, sandcastles in disrepair, straw hats of every size and shape, old men flying kites, barbeque grills, and generators. From sunup to sundown, the Fort George system of sandbars is a city that emerges and disappears with the tide.

My island is one of the many smaller ones surrounding Fort George. With the deepwater access of the ICW to the west and the shallower waters of the river to the south and east, I, too, am hemmed in by water. But unlike Fort George Island, my island is smaller and only accessible by boat. And while Fort George is dotted with homes and churches and clubs and tourists and an old plantation, I live alone.

Which is how I like it.

I sat at the kitchen table, sipped my coffee, and tried not to stare at the urns. To give my hands something to do, I cleaned Fingers’ Sig. Then I cleaned it again. And again. I liked the worn feel of it in my hand. It reminded me of him and the umpteen times I’d seen him holster or unholster it. I tried to remember the sounds of his and Marie’s voices or see their faces, but both were muffled and muddled; I couldn’t make them out. With each day, the regrets mounted, and I kept hearing myself speak the many words I’d left unsaid.

Fingers’ leaving was sudden, and while I always knew it might happen that way given his and my chosen line of work, I wasn’t ready for it. He was here, big as life itself, filling my heart and mind—and then he was gone. I thought through the details of that last day a thousand times over. “We’ll cover more ground if you take the coastline and I take the horizon,” he’d said. I knew we never should have split up. I knew if and when he found Victor’s yacht, he wouldn’t wait. Older and maybe a step slower, he’d charge in. Bull in a china shop. Sig blazing. He was stubborn that way. He knew the moment he grabbed the swim ladder that entering the Gone to Market was a one-way trip.

It’s why those he rescued trusted him. And why so many more loved him.

Stories were Fingers’ mechanism for dealing with the memories. They rolled off his tongue one after another—the scent of one pointing to the next. Of course, getting him to sit still long enough was the key, but pour him a glass of earth and the gates would open. When they did, I’d sit, listen, laugh, and cry. We all did.

I stood at the orange box and mourned the silence. I knew I needed to get going, but I was stalling. The loss of one was crushing. The loss of both was . . . No matter how hard I tried or how long I sat there staring down the table, I could not make sense of the fact that everything I knew about them and had experienced with them was now held in two containers sitting three feet in front of me. I would walk out of the kitchen only to walk back in and be amazed that they had not moved. Purple and orange still staring back at me.

It was a dream I did not like and from which I could not wake up.

Sunday afternoon meant much of the crowd had thinned on the sandbars, yet one boat emerged from the ICW pushing a wake against the outgoing tide. A twenty-eight-foot, dual-engine tender for a larger yacht moored in the channel. Two guys and ten girls. Piercingly loud music. They ran the nose up on the beach, and the girls and one guy exited while the captain secured a Bahamian moor so the wind wouldn’t spin him and beach him in the shallows, forcing him to wait about eight hours to nudge his boat loose. Evidently he knew what he was doing.