Still Summer

  The young man wondered if she would be here when they returned after their drop. There had been another child, blond like this one but taller and older, who had been there the other time but was now vanished. The woman the young man assumed was the owner’s wife was kind to him, calling him “Brad Pitts” because he wore his hair cut short and treating him, he supposed, with a sort of maternal good humor. But when he used gestures to ask about the taller, older blond girl, she waved him away. Was there a place worse than this where girls went when their freshness crumpled and their eyes went void even of the fear? He supposed there was a place worse than anywhere. At least here he had seen the older woman, called Alita, dab salve on the girls’ cracked lips and lay towels filled with ice against the bruises on their necks.

  Why did he think about her? She was, the young man consoled himself, ruined anyway. Was there something of her that reminded him of his sister?

  All of them were lost. He was lost. He was done with this mess. The tent pole in his life had passed when he’d gone to state in the long jump. His mother had wept for pride. His father, who’d been the alternate on the Olympic team in the medley relay, had nodded.

  He wondered when his partners would be finished here. He wanted only to roll himself in his sleeping bag and mosquito netting and sleep in a hollow near the boat.

  The young man didn’t have sex with whores. He had been with only three women, one a good girl in El Salvador, one an American he’d met on a beach, one the girl he loved the summer after she finished high school. Last he’d heard, the girl, who rode her own horse, was at college in Massachusetts. She had always wanted to go to Massachusetts, she’d told him, to see what she could see in the sea, sea, sea. They had grown up more or less together, in upstate New York, near the Hudson River. He sat at the bar, nursing a sugar-rimmed gin and smoking, after Ernesto and Carlo crept up the narrow staircase. His book was boring. The other men began to laugh as the ceiling light swayed.

  The young man was through with this.

  This run to rendezvous with the man they knew only as Chief would be his last.

  Chief, a massive man, perhaps American Indian as well as African, met them in a rich man’s boat between New York and Honduras off an unnamed island that was little more than a heap of rocks and scrub, in a cigar boat the young man knew must have cost hundreds of thousands. It soared without ever seeming to touch the water, and the motor was a whisper. Their cargo was double bound in rubber wrap, then wrapped again in the tarpaulin that had covered the engine and stored in lockers meant to hold fish. Once they shifted it over to him, Chief would wordlessly hand them thicknesses of cash, also wrapped in waterproof rubber, and speed away to the deserted spot on the coast where he handed it off to the man who had originally involved the young man in this scheme, a lawyer who knew the young man’s father. The lawyer took it to his expensive house on Long Island and then into the city. He sold it to men in garish suits, thousands of miles from the Salvadoran fields where the poppies grew.

  It was at that moment, when they turned to make their way back, that the young man believed, the last time, that Carlo and Ernesto would murder him.

  But they had not. Perhaps it was because he was quiet and spoke English. Perhaps they thought he would be useful if they ran into the navy or Coast Guard with no papers and a boat painted with grainy black house paint. On the way back, they laughed and drank and grew sleepy and stoned, and the young man took the tiller and steered through a night and a day and a day and a night—it sounded like one of the books he had read to his little sister when she was small—back to Santo Domingo. After they drove a spike through the bottom of the yola to sink her, the young man would put on a wet suit. But Ernesto and Carlo, burly and agile as seals, would swim to land, sometimes as far as half a mile. When the time came, they would find another yola or a powerboat, a small sailing ship, perhaps this time without an owner who needed killing. After they divided the money, they would part. Some time would pass before Ernesto sent another note and the money for the young man to fly to Honduras to the post office box near the boardinghouse where the young man stayed, in relative luxury by the standards of Santo Domingo. Between these times, the young man went diving and hiking. He loved the quiet green splendor of the land. And the people were friendly.

  He remembered the late afternoon, the punishing sun just beginning to relent, when he was walking home from a swim at his parents’ summer house in the Hamptons. His father’s friend was headed in the opposite direction on the beach road of powdery sand. They had passed each other with a nod when the man called to him. The young man turned back.

  “What do you do?” the man asked. The young man shrugged. “You don’t go to school. You don’t work, your dad says, for more than a month at a time.”

  “He’s probably right,” the young man said.

  “You’re not a big talker. You keep to yourself. Maybe you’d like the chance to make some real money.”

  “How?”

  “I have a friend, a sideline. It’s not for . . .” The old man, his father’s friend, brayed, a laugh that made the young man’s flesh creep even in memory. “For the faint of heart. But it’s relatively safe, and it’s a chance to get away from Mommy and Daddy and see something. . . .”

  “What would I do?”

  “I’ll explain that later. Come and meet me next week at Circe, say, one o’clock on Tuesday? We’ll talk then. Get a haircut first.”

  The young man had gone to the restaurant. He hadn’t known why, but his resolve to do so hardened when, that night after they’d crossed paths on the beach road, he’d overheard the man and his father discussing “the boy’s future.”

  “It’s a little hard to see right now,” his father had said to the accompanying music of ice cubes chinking. “You might be able to see it with a telescope. It’s minuscule. Maybe future perfect.”

  He’d cut his hair and worn a sport coat over a cashmere turtleneck, though the day was sweltering. And when the friend told him what his “sideline” was, the young man realized he had known this, on some back shelf in his brain, for a very long time. And he loathed himself even as he agreed.

  In his room, now, which was clean and sparse, there was a line of books set up on the scarred table, held in place at either end by two beautiful, sea-polished rocks. Behind one book, identical to twelve others in a set, there was a notch in the wall. Beneath the notch was a tiny square of plaster the young man removed and repainted each time he went on a trip. Inside the little square cut, wrapped in a sandwich bag, was seven thousand dollars. With this and his part of the take from this trip, the young man would go and live in Missoula, Montana. It seemed like a good place.

  The next time a note came to the post office box near the hostel, the young man would not come to ask for it.

  The captain was handsome in his way, Olivia thought, balding but wiry and weathered, as her Franco had been. The young man with the French accent was spectacular, his arms and back rippling through his torn shirt as he tossed their duffels and even her soft-sided suitcase—Olivia did not own a duffel bag—into the little motorboat. Olivia saw the young man appraising Cammie and the way that Cammie, full-eyed, looked evenly back at him and then away, extravagantly and deliberately uninterested. Olivia doubted that. It was the oldest trick in the book, and Cammie clearly knew that it usually worked. Olivia couldn’t blame her. With a body like that . . . and such eyes! But she also caught the minute negative shake of the head from the captain, Lenny, and the younger man’s downcast acknowledgment. Cammie wasn’t jailbait, but it evidently was policy not to play with the cubs of such a mother bear as Tracy.

  They motored out to the yacht. It was beautiful, larger in size but equal in luxury to the one on which she and Franco sailed the Mediterranean with their friends the Antoninis.

  “The air is so good,” she said in French.

  The young man brightened. “Parlez-vous français?” he asked.

  “Pas mal,” Olivia replied.

>   “Welcome to your home for the next ten days, our home for all time,” Lenny said gallantly. “Before we leave, even before we toast, I want to give you the mandatory tour.”

  They put their things away quickly, and gathered on the seats where the life jackets were stored. “Opus is a trimaran,” Lenny told them. “You’re probably more familiar with catamarans, which only have two hulls. She has three fiberglass hulls. So she’s really a monohull with little helpers. And if you hear us refer to her that way, as ‘her,’ it’s not because we’re sexist, it’s because it’s a habit, a tradition. Every rope on a boat becomes a ‘line’ the moment you leave the marina. So when you hear us say to cast off the lines, this is ancient talk. It’s like what pilots say to air traffic controllers. We say the prescribed words, even to each other, it’s second nature. This is the mainsail, and this is what we call the genny. We’ll open them up for you and do some sailing out there, without the motor. Have any of you sailed?”

  “I’ve only traveled on motor yachts. With friends who lived on them, and a little one we had,” said Olivia. “I loved sleeping outside. They had hammocks with awnings over them.”

  “We have hammocks, kind of, but no awnings,” Lenny said. “But there’s no rain forecast.”

  Tracy raised a finger. “I just sailed my grandpa’s Hobie Cat when I was a girl; and my daughter has sailed a little. Is . . . Can she dive, too? Do you have enough? I know she wasn’t supposed to come. She’s a certified diver, too. We brought our cards.”

  “Sure,” Lenny said. “Before we cross to Grenada, we’ll go to Norman Island. Norman Island is the real Treasure Island, the model for Robert Louis Stevenson’s book. His grandfather went to sea when he was a boy, and they say Stevenson basically copied down his grandpa’s diary. You can dive into the caves there and then surface and see where pirates carved their names on the wall. They say there’s a cache of gold bars, Spanish treasure, still deep in one of those walls, with the insignia of the queen, Isabella, still on it.”

  “They say the buried treasure thing wherever you go. I don’t mean it’s not probably true,” said Cammie. “Maybe we’ll find it, Aunt Liv. We can buy our own island.”

  Holly grimaced. “Do you think anyone else has ever thought of that?”

  “Aunt Holly! You’d love your own island. . . . You could have a whole soccer team on it. But not little boys. Big boys!” Cammie teased.

  “Zip it,” Holly said, blushing. The way she stared at the boys’ soccer coaches was an old joke among them.

  “People do,” Lenny continued. “Buy their own islands, that is. Hermit millionaires or movie stars own some of these islands. Sidney Poitier owns one. He was born on Cat Island, I think. Mel Gibson owns one. He has his own church there. You can’t go ashore on those—except if you’re invited or you need shelter from a storm. That’s a covenant here. If you need help, none of the privacy rules apply.”

  “How do you know which ones are inhabited?” Cammie asked.

  “The charts say so, the maps,” Lenny told her. “The thing is, they change all the time. There’s one island out there . . . is it Salt Island? There used to be a whole colony of houses. Now they’re all boarded up. The government was selling them for fifty dollars. I should have bought one. If there’s a bad storm, sometimes people dump those places. Sometimes they even just leave. Leave million-dollar houses for the lizards. Think of that.”

  He moved on briskly to a discussion of the safety equipment. Olivia tuned out, offering herself to the sensual rocking of the boat. It was all just in case, as the man said. No reason, but they were required to do it.

  Tracy sharpened up, keen as a bird dog. Middle-school teachers followed directions.

  “These are the flares,” he said, “to attract attention if we should poison ourselves with my cooking. Every seat on this boat is a floating cushion. The radios. The VHF handheld radios. We communicate with each other and closer boats. The SSB. That has a channel for everything, from emergency to gossip. The GPS, not that you’ll ever need it, we have the main one right in the nav station. There are batteries, tons of them, in this rubber locker. They’re all fresh. The SSB and the handhelds use batteries. They can even run off the solar panel; if you hook ’em up, you’ll get a trickle of juice. The life vests are in here. We always wear some kind of shoes because it can get slippery. This is the emergency position-indicating radio beacon, the EPIRB. If you get lost and have to jump overboard in the inflatable, or if we just get sick of you and throw you over, turn this on, and when it hits the water, it’ll indicate where you are, so somebody might pick you up.” He grinned. “Kidding. The lecture is almost over, kiddies. You’ll never have to use it. Here are the beach towels. And sunscreen. If you run out, we have every kind under, well, the sun. And you really need it. Even dark-skinned people do. Here’s the first aid stuff, bandages, cold packs, antibiotics we’re not supposed to have, painkillers we’re not supposed to have . . .”

  “How do people really get in trouble, like, fall overboard?” Cammie asked.

  “Well,” Lenny said, “I hope this isn’t crude, but most guys who drown are found with their flies open, because they tried to stand up on the side and take a leak and took a plunge instead. A boat that doesn’t even seem to be moving goes pretty fast. And once you’re under a boat, you can get your head conked by the rudder . . .”

  Olivia’s attention drifted back when the tone in Lenny’s voice changed—clearly nearing the end of his speech. He was describing the wings of the trimaran, the amas, where they kept the emergency food, knives, and can openers, waterproof boxes of chocolate bars, opening the flat doors that closed with hasps on the outside. “I’ll only ask you to leave that one box alone,” he said with utmost gravity, gesturing at a padlocked white locker laid two feet by three. “That’s my emergency stuff. Otherwise, the boat is yours.”

  As he surveyed the amas, everyone detected a flat note fall in the captain’s voice. Something private had stumbled between him and the younger man, who looked down at his scruffy loafers. They all caught it. “In any case,” Lenny said after a thin cough. “We begin each voyage on Opus with a toast. Straight Moët or mimosas?” Only Tracy opted for the addition of orange juice. Olivia let one long, perfect finger touch Michel’s palm briefly as she accepted the glass, and he didn’t flinch. He smiled. White, perfect cubes of even teeth.

  “Mom?” Cammie asked, and Tracy nodded. Cammie accepted a glass of champagne.

  “Is the young girl your sister?” the young man with the accent asked Olivia.

  “She’s my friend’s daughter, Tracy’s daughter. She’s my goddaughter. But I think she takes after me,” Olivia replied. “I know that’s impossible. But her grandfather, Tracy’s dad, is a dark-haired Italian. Italian American, not like my husband. My late husband, that is.”

  “Ah,” Michel said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” Olivia inclined her head. To fill space with words, he said, “You should sleep in the trampoline, that’s our version of the hammock, on this warm a night, or at least sometime. I do. It’s the most wonderful feeling on your skin.”

  Olivia thought, with sharp pleasure, Is he making a pass? Does he know that Camille is clearly off limits?

  Not that she would take him up on it.

  But, heaven knows, she might.

  Didn’t what happened in the islands stay in the islands? Wasn’t that what Americans said now? She glanced at Holly and Tracy with sudden affection. She was an American, too, no longer the Contessa de Montefalco. A widow at forty-two. A rich widow, but that hardly mattered. Just a month after Franco died, a quick trip on a spa ship out of Milan had left her, following two weeks of seclusion, looking an easy five or ten years younger. But natural. Not like those horrible Kabuki faces she used to see in the streets of Paris. The physician was a wizard. She had been in seclusion, with no time to answer Tracy’s urgent notes, forwarded to her by the villa’s housekeeper.

  Franco had adored her every line and bump, but the rest of the world?
??s men were not as tolerant as Italians. Olivia did not intend to remain alone forever.

  Lenny would save the reprimand for the end of the crossing.

  They were only can openers. He would make sure Michel picked up extras in St. John, although he preferred American can openers. He didn’t see how Michel, whom he had trained like a son, could make such a stupid mistake. There were no department stores at sea, he had told Michel. Only sailing stores where passing boats could buy rum, crackers, and sweets. It was the first thing he had told Michel. He had read to the boy from Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, the part in which the starving old man wishes he had brought a rock to use with the knife to open the sustenance that sat in his hands, as closed and impenetrable as a dream.

  Michel knew that can openers could save lives.

  Can openers could prevent a man or a woman from slashing a wrist trying to break open a can of beans by bashing away at it, just as the old man had done.

  Still, Lenny would wait.

  As far as he could tell, Michel had otherwise done a splendid job, while he and Meherio lay naked under the apricot netting of their bed, diving and plunging together, laughing as Willie Nelson sang songs of longing they did not feel. Anthony had begun to crawl, and in the midst of one of their sessions of lovemaking, he had pulled himself up to peer at them. Naked, they had taken him into the bed with them, their small dolphin completing the pod.