Duma Key(24)

That heart was a kind of pulling-away. I don't know how else to describe it. My wife had come to seem like someone... other. Most of the people in my life also felt other, and the dismaying thing was that I didn't much care. In the beginning I had tried to tell myself that the otherness I felt when I thought about my wife and my life was probably natural enough in a man who sometimes couldn't even remember the name of that thing you pulled up to close your pants - the zoomer, the zimmer, the zippity-doo-dah. I told myself it would pass, and when it didn't and Pam told me she wanted a divorce, what followed my anger was relief. Because now that other feeling was okay to have, at least toward her. Now she really was other. She'd taken off the Freemantle uniform and quit the team.

During my first weeks on Duma, that sense of otherness allowed me to prevaricate easily and fluently. I answered letters and e-mails from people like Tom Riley, Kathi Green, and William Bozeman III - the immortal Bozie - with short jottings ( I'm fine, the weather's fine, the bones are mending ) that bore little resemblance to my actual life. And when their communications first slowed and then stopped, I wasn't sorry.

Only Ilse still seemed to be on my team. Only Ilse refused to turn in her uniform. I never got that other feeling about her. Ilse was still on my side of the glass window, always reaching out. If I didn't e-mail her every day, she called. If I didn't call her once every third day, she called me. And to her I didn't lie about my plans to fish in the Gulf or check out the Everglades. To Ilse I told the truth, or as much of it as I could without sounding crazy.

I told her, for instance, about my morning walks along the beach, and that I was walking a little farther each day, but not about the Numbers Game, because it sounded too silly... or maybe obsessive-compulsive is the term I actually want.

Just thirty-eight steps from Big Pink on that first morning. On my second one I helped myself to another huge glass of orange juice and then walked south along the beach again. This time I walked forty-five steps, which was a long distance for me to totter crutchless in those days. I managed by telling myself it was really only nine. That sleight-of-mind is the basis of the Numbers Game. You walk one step, then two steps, then three, then four, rolling your mental odometer back to zero each time until you reach nine. And when you add the numbers one through nine together, you come out with forty-five. If that strikes you as nuts, I won't argue.

The third morning I coaxed myself into walking ten steps from Big Pink sans crutch, which is really fifty-five, or about ninety yards, round-trip. A week later and I was up to seventeen... and when you add all those numbers, you come out with a hundred and fifty-three. I'd get to the end of that distance, look back at my house, and marvel at how far away it looked. I'd also sag a little at the thought of having to walk all the way back again.

You can do it, I'd tell myself. It's easy. Just seventeen steps, is all.

That's what I'd tell myself, but I didn't tell Ilse.

A little farther each day, stamping out footprints behind me. By the time Santa Claus showed up at the Beneva Road Mall, where Jack Cantori sometimes took me shopping, I realized an amazing thing: all my southbound footprints were clear. The right sneaker-print didn't start to drag and blur until I was on my way back.

Exercise becomes addictive, and rainy days didn't put a stop to mine. The second floor of Big Pink was one large room. There was an industrial-strength rose-colored carpet on the floor and a huge window facing the Gulf of Mexico. There was nothing else. Jack suggested that I make a list of furniture I wanted up there, and said he'd get it from the same rental place where he'd gotten the downstairs stuff... assuming the downstairs stuff was all right. I assured him it was fine, but said I wouldn't need much on the second floor. I liked the emptiness of that room. It called to my imagination. What I wanted, I said, was three things: a plain straight-backed chair, an artist's easel, and a Cybex treadmill. Could Jack provide those things? He could and did. In three days. From then until the end it was the second floor for me when I wanted to draw or paint, and it was the second floor for exercise on days when the weather closed in. The single straight-backed chair was the only real piece of furniture that ever lived up there during my tenure in Big Pink.

In any case, there weren't that many rainy days - not for nothing is Florida called the Sunshine State. As my southward strolls grew longer, the speck or specks I'd seen on that first morning eventually resolved into two people - at least, on most days it was two. One was in a wheelchair and wearing what I thought was a straw hat. The other pushed her, then sat beside her. They appeared on the beach around seven AM. Sometimes the one who could walk left the one in the wheelchair for a little while, only to come back with something that glittered in the early sun. I suspected a coffee pot, a breakfast tray, or both. I further suspected they came from the huge hacienda with the acre or so of orange tiled roof. That was the last house visible on Duma Key before the road ran into the enthusiastic overgrowth that covered most of the island.

iv

I couldn't quite get used to the emptiness of the place. "It's supposed to be very quiet," Sandy Smith had told me, but I had still pictured the beach filling up by midday: couples sunning on blankets and slathering each other with tanning lotion, college kids playing volleyball with iPods strapped to their biceps, little kids in saggy swimsuits paddling at the edge of the water while Jet-Skis buzzed back and forth forty feet out.

Jack reminded me that it was only December. "When it comes to Florida tourism," he said, "the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is Morgue City. Not as bad as August, but still pretty dead. Also..." He gestured with his arm. We were standing out by the mailbox with the red 13 on it, me leaning on my crutch, Jack looking sporty in a pair of denim cut-offs and a fashionably tattered Tampa Devil Rays shirt. "It's not exactly tourist country here. See any trained dolphins? What you got is seven houses, counting that big 'un down there... and the jungle. Where there's another house falling apart, by the way. That's according to some of the stories I've heard on Casey Key."