Still Summer

  “I found you. I found you,” Janis whispered as Tracy collapsed, weak-kneed. Between them, Janis and Sharon half carried, half dragged Tracy into the tender. “I found you.”

  Tracy’s lips and tongue were so cracked and swollen, she couldn’t speak. Those words she spoke to call us would have been her last, Janis thought. She motioned for water.

  “A little,” Sharon said. “Too much all at once will make you sick.” She wet a clean cloth and let Tracy try to suck on it, but even then she could not fully close her mouth. Sharon ripped open a sterile package of lemony moisturizing gel, squeezing it onto Tracy’s tongue and smearing it over her lips.

  Tracy worked hard, but no sound came. Sharon gave Tracy a sip of Gatorade. Finally, making a sound that reminded Janis of gears grinding, she said, “. . . me.” Regin helped them get her aboard Big Spender.

  “I won’t let you go. You’re safe now,” Sharon said. “Lie down on the berth.” Regin pulled back the coverlet and revealed crisp striped sheets. Tracy fell back, motioning Janis to lean down beside her. Janis did, and Tracy reached up, her dirty hand like a paw. “Cammie,” she whispered. “Holly.”

  “She’s safe, Trace. She’s safe in a hospital in Texas,” Janis said, careful not to mention Holly. “They’re coming for you. Sharon’s called. To take you to Cammie.” Tracy nodded and made a noise Janis took to mean “good.”

  Janis stood up from her crouch and hugged first Sharon, then Regin. “Thank you for sparing me what would have been one of the most awful tragedies of my life, and my family’s,” she said.

  “When the cutter comes, you go now, with her,” Sharon said. “Go take care of your family. You earned it, you hung in there.”

  Janis was quiet and thoughtful for a moment. Then she said, “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stick it out. You said it would be a chore to get the Opus free. I’m no sailor, but I’m relatively young and tough, and I can help. I think I owe Lenny that. I don’t know what happened out here, but I know that if he was your friend, he must have been a fine guy. I’m guessing he would have done anything to save them. I think what happened must have been one of those things that are like being sideswiped by a car. You’re doing everything right and one thing goes wrong, and then everything goes wrong. Fate, I guess. He doesn’t sound like a man who’d leave his boat.”

  “You’re right there,” Regin said. “Lenny had a heart as big as his head. And a strong sense of responsibility. Sailing is like flying, Janis. It’s safe, but it’s not forgiving.”

  “So, I would like to do him the honor of helping you in any small way, to bring the Opus home to Lenny’s wife and little boy.”

  Sharon smiled. “I like that in a person, Janis. Spirit. Welcome aboard.”

  An hour later, a nurse opened the door to the darkened room where Cammie slept under light sedation.

  She had fought like a wolverine to get out of her seat for the whole trip to Texas. The Spanish nurse who sat beside her spoke gently, but her accent only made Cammie cringe away from her. She could hear only Ernesto requesting that she remove her clothing. Spoiled brat, the nurse thought. Yanqui bitch.

  At the hospital, they had marveled at Cammie’s sheer strength. It had taken a doctor and a burly nurse to drag her out of the emergency room, where she had been examined, again, for fractures and internal injuries—this time with a set of X-rays. There was no cosmetic surgeon on staff, but someone located a physician, a woman who was known to have good hands, who was willing to come in on her day off. She gave Cammie twenty milligrams of Valium, anesthetized her deepest cuts, cleaned the edges, and repaired the wounds with the precision of a pointillist. She was a beautiful girl. It was a beautiful leg and a pretty hand. The infection that had begun would have gone downhill fast, but IV antibiotics would chase it out within a matter of days.

  The doctor, whose own daughter was fourteen, anointed Cammie’s burns and applied gauze to the worst of them. A strong young immune system was on her side. This much damage was difficult to reconcile with having been out only three weeks. A great deal had to have gone wrong. After all, they’d had the protection of the boat, though the doctor had heard it was disabled. The doctor remembered a family she had once seen, a mother and two children, brought in by cutter from an inflatable where they’d spent three weeks exposed to the sun in the Gulf after their rented monohull flipped in Hurricane Daniel. How they’d managed to avoid running into land had been a mystery. The father, a Brit who’d once crewed on a racing yacht, was with them. One of the infamous bareboat captains, he’d been arrogant enough to attempt a long sail with skills that had been peak ten years earlier. He’d learned that sailing wasn’t like riding a bike. To his credit, what little water he’d managed to save he’d given to the children. Still, he and his younger child had died within hours, the child of hypothermia. The doctor saw the mother’s agony and thought, without charity, what a fool this woman had married.

  After the doctor had finished her work, satisfied that Cammie was stable and at least physically sound, she gave her over to two nurses. They did their best to sponge Cammie down from head to toe like a baby, avoiding the bandages and the worst burns. Somewhat subdued by the pain of being touched, she quieted. They mourned her long thick hair, which would certainly have to be cut. Finally, they tucked Cammie’s long mane into a surgical cap. They forced her down onto a clean bed. She promptly pulled back the sheets and got up, demanding her mother, dislodging her IV, demanding a phone to call her father. They forced her back down. She got up again. They gently held her down. She got up the moment they turned away. Finally they strapped on restraints, and exhaustion won out.

  The Spanish nurse stamped out of the room after Cammie yelped. In her place came another, one of those who’d helped bathe Cammie earlier. She shook Cammie’s shoulder lightly. “Honey,” she said in a melodious Jamaican accent, “I have a phone message here for you from a Janis Loccario. She says your mother is doing well.”

  “How many times,” Cammie asked dully, her eyes closed and fists clenched, “do I have to tell you? That woman who came in with me is not my mother. She’s my birth mother. My mother adopted me. My mother is Tracy—”

  “Kyle, of Westbrook, Illinois. Your mother is coming soon. Your aunt Janis and Captain Sharon Gleeman and the crew of the boat Big Spender, they found your mother. I know what I’m talking about, little girl. She was brought to Honduras by a fishing boat they hailed. In a few hours, she will be sent to this hospital on a jet. A fast one.” The nurse laughed. “They’re all fast, aren’t they?”

  Cammie lifted the nurse’s hand and pressed it to her tattered lips.

  When Tracy Kyle was finally brought in by ambulance, the doctors and nurses who worked over her determined that she had broken her wrist scrabbling up onto the shore of Bone Island, as the inflatable, having veered into an underwater reef, shrank from flimsy to flat. She was filthy, but they sponged her clean enough to slice away necrotic tissue from her burns. Some of the burns on her shoulders and nose would eventually need grafts if they were not to be disfiguring. She was dehydrated, but fluids would soon remedy that. Her electrolytes were out of whack. Her lips were lacerated, but lips healed. One badly swollen and infected eye required salve, a patch, and the best possible hopes. There was nothing more for that. They set her wrist in a cast that left her fingers free and started a drip of fluids, glucose, salts, antibiotics, nutrients, and sedatives.

  All in all, she was in pretty good shape.

  Finally, they wheeled her into the darkened room where Cammie Kyle lay sleeping and shifted her onto the second bed.

  One of the nurses began to draw a curtain around her.

  “No, no,” said the Jamaican nurse. “What we got to do is push this bed next to her baby. So when she wakes up, she sees Cammie.” So together, they maneuvered the metal nightstand from between the beds and pushed Tracy’s bed as close to the other bed as the cords that connected her to monitors and the call button would permit.

  In the night, Cam
mie woke and, her eyes adjusting to the gray gloom, her body protesting from the pain, looked around her. She reached up and felt her hair, her beautiful hair. It would have to be shaved, like Sinéad O’Connor’s. Someone had tried to comb it out. Her stitches throbbed. She had cut her hand smashing the mirror in Holly’s bathroom. And she was about to press the call button for more medication when she noticed her roommate, a still shape under a light blanket. Through the window blinds, moonlight shined just enough for Cammie to make out the distinctive profile, her mother’s short brown hair.

  “Mom,” she whispered. “Mommy.” Tracy didn’t stir.

  Cammie prodded the call button. A nurse answered efficiently, “Yes. How can we help you?”

  “I’m in a pretty fair amount of pain,” Cammie said. “And I want someone to tell me if my mother is in danger, please.”

  “I’ll be there in just a moment, Miss Kyle.”

  Cammie watched as her mother slept, measuring the slight rise and fall of Tracy’s breath. When the nurse came, she shined a penlight on Cammie rather than turning on the fluorescents. She shook Cammie’s IV bag and injected a potion into it that immediately spread like salvation through Cammie’s aching body. As she turned to leave, Cammie whispered, “Is my mother at least reasonably okay?”

  “She’s got a broken wrist and some bad burns, but the worst thing is her infected eye.” The nurse saw alarm in Cammie’s rolling glance and said quickly, “She’s going to live and be fine, Miss Kyle. And her eye won’t be damaged permanently, I don’t think. She’ll be fine, really fine. Don’t worry.”

  Cammie began to cry, the sting of actual tears on her raw cheeks a perverse comfort. “I love my mother,” she said softly as if this were a magic rune, a healing spell.

  “I love you, too,” Tracy rasped, and reached out so that the tips of their fingers touched.

  Day Twenty-two

  In a sensible skirt and a white lace shirt, Meherio Amato waited for the sight of her husband’s boat. She stood straight-backed, the tiny bulge at her waistline apparent only because she was so slender. She stood alone, impassive. Her sister had taken Anthony for the day, and Meherio had refused her sister’s offer to accompany her.

  As Big Spender motored into the harbor, towing Opus, a crowd slowly gathered, keeping a respectful distance behind Meherio. There were Marie, the baker, and the barkeep Quinn Reilly, the jeweler Avery Ben, and Abel, the knife grinder, as well as the owner of the dive boat for whom Lenny and Michel had crewed. All of them held to themselves mortal thoughts. They stood silent as Sharon Gleeman leapt ably over the side and Reginald tossed her the lines and then gave a hand to the woman none of them knew, who wore jeans and large sunglasses, her short auburn hair swinging forward to hide her face. Quinn Reilly wished he had opened the store on Sunday. The jeweler wished he had given Michel a better price on the necklace. Marie remembered Lenny’s foolish jokes and Michel’s quiet smile. And Abel, the knife grinder, considered whether it might be time to go home to Arizona and spend time with the granddaughter he knew only from a photo.

  Meherio stepped forward and offered Reginald her hand and accepted Sharon’s hug. An ambulance parted the crowd, and a small white parcel was loaded quietly into the back. “My dear, with the help of the fisherman who found us, I wrapped him in the mizzen sail from Opus and sewed it closed. I didn’t know what you’d want to do.”

  Meherio looked out, across the water. “I think that in a few days’ time, my brother and I will take a small boat out to where the porpoises play.”

  “Will you want us with you?”

  “I would like that, Sharon. I would like to bring hibiscus, which we wore on our wedding day.”

  “I’ll arrange for it, two woven wreaths,” Reginald said. “It will be our small gift. He was a good man, and we will miss his friendship.”

  “The sea doesn’t like us, sometimes,” said Meherio. “She would rather we leave her alone.”

  “That’s very possibly true,” said Sharon. “But I will not like this so much without Lenny. I may not want to do this any longer. This has taken something from it. I should tell you, Meherio, that Janis stayed with us, to honor Lenny.”

  “Thank you, Janis. I am sorry for your dear friend, and glad to the heart for your sister and her child. Is there any word of Michel?”

  Sharon shook her head ruefully. “I’m so sorry, Meherio. I know that you will help your babies to know their father.”

  “Yes, in memory. Or if I love another one someday. This doesn’t seem possible now; but Lenny would wish that I have a father for his children.”

  “Will you sell Opus?” Janis asked.

  “I don’t know,” Meherio said. “My brother has said he might like to own her, with me. And a part of her belongs to Michel, if Michel ever should come home.”

  “How could you ever stand to see her sail away again?” Janis cried before thinking.

  “Many women have done that,” Meherio said.

  Cammie ran down the hospital corridor into her father’s and brother’s arms, and Tracy insisted on walking, although she had a cane.

  For three days, husband and brother had taken turns at the bedside, but this was different. They were taking whole people home, whole people dressed in new plain khakis and shirts that hung on them as though they were scarecrows (Jim had bought the customary sizes at the local Dillard’s) but felt, to Cammie and Tracy, like designer rags.

  Ted was missing a baseball tournament that day. Instead, he sobbed in Tracy’s arms as though he were six years old instead of two inches taller than her.

  “I’m not going anywhere, honey,” she said as Ted tried to control himself and failed. “I’m not going anywhere anymore. Not for a long time.”

  “I guess I’m a big pussy,” he said. “Sorry, Mom.”

  “No, you’re wonderful,” Cammie said. “Girls think guys who cry are sexy.” Ted beamed at her. “Come here.” Ted started toward her, then stopped. “Come here, Ted, my cute little bro. I love you so much.” And she hugged her brother around the neck so hard, her feet lifted off the floor.

  Jim helped Tracy and Cammie carefully into the taxi they would take to the airport. They could see in his face a journal of the way their injuries looked to someone from the world. Jim marveled at how a description over the telephone had failed to depict the reality and tried to master his reaction. The burns on his wife’s legs were as shiny as pink plastic. Her face was ravaged. Cammie’s magnificent black hair was cut to a cap of feathers that lay flat against her skull. Jim touched it softly. “My baby,” he said. “Your beautiful hair.”

  “Dad, at least they didn’t have to shave me bald. There was no way they were ever going to get the matting out of it unless they cut it. It’ll grow back.”

  “That will take years.”

  “At least I’ve got years now.”

  “We have to hurry up, honey,” Jim said. “The taxi’s double-parked. What’s Janis doing again?”

  “She’ll be home in two days,” said Tracy. “She stayed for Lenny Amato’s memorial. He’ll be buried at sea tomorrow. In spite of everything, Jim, you know she loved it, the island. She did. She saw what it was that made it magical. Magical and treacherous.”

  “And Olivia?”

  “Well, there’s that,” Cammie said.

  “What?” Tracy asked.

  “She . . . it’s okay, Mom . . . came into our room the night we got here, right before you came, Mom,” said Cammie. Tracy stopped. “I was kind of out of it. . . .”

  “What did she say? And why didn’t we talk about this? As a family?”

  “I didn’t feel the need to have her in . . . our family. I was going to tell everyone. She said she was checking out of the hospital. She was fine. We knew that.”

  “That’s not all, and you know it,” Tracy prodded her.

  “Of course, she said she was sorry for everything.”

  “And?”

  “That someday if I wanted to see her, I could find her at this addr
ess on a slip of paper she gave me, her wire address or whatever.”

  “Of course you can,” Tracy said, and Jim nodded.

  “Well, I know I can. But I threw the address out, because . . . the truth is, I’m glad this happened. I’m not glad this happened. But I’m glad this happened the way it did. I saw her for real. How she is. I used to imagine her as a real princess, Mom, when I was little. She sent me beautiful things, and she lived in a castle. She promised I could come for the summer when I was sixteen, although she never asked me. If you’d told me, I might have wanted to know her better.”

  “It would have been like, Come into my parlor . . . ,” Tracy said.

  “Said the spider to the fly,” Cammie finished. “Kind of.”

  “So you weren’t scared?” Jim asked. He’d heard Tracy’s account and spent an unnecessary hour apologizing for not having come directly to Honduras: His passport had expired, despite Tracy’s constant reminders; and his wife and daughter were in Texas by the time he got an emergency exception to fly out.

  Now Cammie scoffed, “Scared? I told her to leave my room before my mother came because she had no right to be there. I told her she was nothing to me. And that I didn’t have questions about my ‘heritage.’”

  “Where do you think she went?” Jim asked.

  “Europe, she said. Back to Europe.” They all sat quietly for a moment, imagining Olivia wandering from resort to resort, a phantom in Michael Kors.

  “We’ll need to go to Holly’s as soon as we’re home and see Chris and the boys,” Tracy said softly.