Duma Key(22)

I propped it atop the TV, against the sign reading THE OWNER REQUESTS THAT YOU AND YOUR GUESTS DO NOT SMOKE INDOORS. I looked at it a moment longer, thinking it needed something in the foreground - a smaller boat, maybe, just to lend the one on the horizon some perspective - but I no longer wanted to draw. Besides, adding something might f**k up what little charm the thing had. I tried the telephone instead, thinking if it wasn't working yet I could call Ilse on my cell, but Jack had been on top of that, too.

I thought I'd probably get her machine - college girls are busy girls - but she answered on the first ring. "Daddy?" That startled me so much that at first I couldn't speak and she said it again. "Dad?"

"Yes," I said. "How did you know?"

"The callback number's got a 941 area code. That's where that Duma place is. I checked."

"Modern technology. I can't catch up. How are you, kiddo?"

"Fine. The question is, how are you?"

"I'm all right. Better than all right, actually."

"The fellow you hired -?"

"He's got game. The bed's made and the fridge is full. I got here and took a five-hour nap."

There was a pause, and when she spoke again she sounded more concerned than ever. "You're not hitting those pain pills too hard, are you? Because Oxycontin's supposed to be sort of a Trojan horse. Not that I'm telling you anything you didn't already know."

"Nope, I stick to the prescribed dosage. In fact-" I stopped.

"What, Daddy? What?" Now she sounded almost ready to hail a cab and take a plane.

"I was just realizing I skipped the five o'clock Vicodin... " I checked my watch. "And the eight o'clock Oxycontin, too. I'll be damned."

"How bad's the pain?"

"Nothing a couple of Tylenol won't handle. At least until midnight."

"It's probably the change in climate," she said. "And the nap."

I had no doubt those things were part of it, but I didn't think they were all of it. Maybe it was crazy, but I thought drawing had played a part. In fact, it was something I sort of knew.

We talked for awhile, and little by little I could hear that concern going out of her voice. What replaced it was unhappiness. She was understanding, I suppose, that this thing was really happening, that her mother and father weren't just going to wake up one morning and take it back. But she promised to call Pam and e-mail Melinda, let them know I was still in the land of the living.

"Don't you have e-mail there, Dad?"

"I do, but tonight you're my e-mail, Cookie."

She laughed, sniffed, laughed again. I thought to ask if she was crying, then thought again. Better not to, maybe.

"Ilse? I better let you go now, honey. I want to shower off the day."

"Okay, but..." A pause. Then she burst out: "I hate to think of you all the way down there in Florida by yourself! Maybe falling on your ass in the shower! It's not right!"

"Cookie, I'm fine. Really. The kid - his name's..." Hurricanes, I thought. Weather Channel. "His name's Jim Cantori." But that was a case of right church, wrong pew. "Jack, I mean."

"That's not the same, and you know it. Do you want me to come?"

"Not unless you want your mother to scalp us both bald," I said. "What I want is for you to stay right where you are and TCB, darlin. I'll stay in touch."

"'Kay. But take care of yourself. No stupid shit."

"No stupid shit. Roger that, Houston."

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

"I still want to hear you promise, Dad."

For one terrible and surpassingly eerie moment I saw Ilse at eleven, Ilse dressed in a Girl Scout's uniform and looking at me with Monica Goldstein's shocked eyes. Before I could stop the words, I heard myself saying, "Promise. Big swear. Mother's name."

She giggled. "Never heard that one before."

"There's a lot about me you don't know. I'm a deep one."

"If you say so." A pause. Then: "Love you."

"Love you, too."

I put the phone gently back into its cradle and stared at it for a long time.

vii

Instead of showering, I walked down the beach to the water. I quickly discovered my crutch was no help on the sand - was, in fact, a hindrance - but once I was around the corner of the house, the water's edge was less than two dozen steps away. That was easy if I went slow. The surge was mild, the incoming wavelets only inches high. It was hard to imagine this water whipped into a destructive hurricane frenzy. Impossible, actually. Later, Wireman would tell me God always punishes us for what we can't imagine.

That was one of his better ones.

I turned to go back to the house, then paused. There was just enough light to see a deep carpet of shells - a drift of shells - under the jutting Florida room. At high tide, I realized, the front half of my new house would be almost like the foredeck of a ship. I remembered Jack saying I'd get plenty of warning if the Gulf of Mexico decided to eat the place, that I'd hear it groaning. He was probably right... but then, I was also supposed to get plenty of warning on a job site when a heavy piece of equipment was backing up.

I limped back to where my crutch leaned against the side of the house and took the short plank walk around to the door. I thought about the shower and took a bath instead, going in and coming out in the careful sidesaddle way Kathi Green had shown me in my other life, both of us dressed in bathing suits, me with my right leg looking like a badly butchered cut of meat. Now the butchery was in the past; my body was doing its miracle work. The scars would last a lifetime, but even they were fading. Already fading.