“Do you like this baby, your son?” Meherio teased Lenny. He kissed her soft breast. “Would you perhaps like another just such as he is?”
“Someday,” Lenny answered. “Whenever you want.”
“Some babies come whenever they want,” Meherio said, placing her hand on her taut belly, which Lenny noticed suddenly was ever so slightly convex. “There is one in here who wants to come in perhaps five months to see his daddy.”
Lenny thought he would die from his immaculate joy. “You are too old a man to have many sons,” said Meherio. “But one child isn’t a family.” Lenny knew that Michel thought Meherio was a beach plum, a fuck bunny in her sarongs and baggy jeans. In fact, she spoke four languages and had a splendid education, given her and her sister and brother mostly by their missionary father, a Brit reserved to the point of parody who had died two years before. Meherio mourned her father, Arthur Midwell, extravagantly, because, she said, he loved the children with learning, the only way he knew. Meherio had learned merriment, composure, and music from her mother, Sela, who still lived happily, but now alone, on St. Thomas. So he and his wife had many ways to delight each other, many hopes for growing old in grace.
For this, he had Michel, in part, to thank. He would not upbraid him. These were kind women—so far as he could understand. He saw how Michel’s face opened when he met the young girl, the unabashed awe, and felt a gentle pity. He was also certain that the mother would break Michel in two if he even touched her daughter. Well, a nice, easy charter. He had made and frozen vegetarian chili and mushroom Stroganoff, as well as several key lime pies. Tonight, he would make wraps with braised tuna, vegetables, and peanut satay, and the puffs Meherio had taught him to concoct from bitter chocolate and rum. He would fire up the blender. He read the computer display. Fair winds at least through the weekend, open skies.
Lenny loved his boat.
He wrote in the log: “Norman Island. Dive tomorrow at Madwoman Reef and the caves. Weather fine.”
Michel could tell the girl was pissed off and that it had nothing to do with the other women. She was a little impatient with her mother—but then so was he, he admitted—and all over her aunts in moments of affection. But she kept mostly to herself. He caught her leaning over the rail, looking at something on the far horizon without, Michel suspected, seeing it. Lenny called this the “thousand-yard stare.” When he spoke to her, she answered politely but in sentences of two or three words. Probably just a coddled rich kid who thought she was too good to spend words on a beach bum. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. With her back straight, her shoulders low, as if balancing a weight, she walked like a tiny queen, even on a deck. And when she looked at him, it was full on, with an absence of pretended coquetry. And then she would smirk, as if annoyed or bored. Maybe she thought he was an old man and was disgusted by his obvious awareness of her movements. Well, he was getting to be an old man, out here. Oddly, the girl seemed most interested in the boat and in what Lenny said about it. She asked about weighting the amas, for one thing, and about the size of the motor.
Maybe she was gay.
Most girls at least looked at him.
But, in fairness, she was a real girl, educated, not an island girl. If he had chosen another life, perhaps even if he already owned half of this boat, perhaps this would be a girl he could do a real thing with, not a game. No, she was too good for him, except for play. And that would be her call. Playing around never did anyone any harm. So Michel worked hard at ignoring the girl. That usually worked. But she didn’t seem to be working at ignoring him.
But it was just the first day. Things could improve.
When she stood on her toes to clamber up onto the bow, he couldn’t help feeling those muscled calves tightening around his waist. Lenny, he pleaded telepathically, give me this break. He watched as the girl slowly, too slowly, applied oil to her arms, her fine, strong shoulders, the space between her breasts where she wore a tiny golden child’s crucifix. She saw him watching, lowered her glasses, and turned on a switch deep in the coal of her eyes. But that was it. She was opening her book and actually turning the pages. Michel had to slide down into the saloon. He needed ice in his pants.
For her part, Cammie was trying to figure out how old the man with the French accent was. He could be twenty; he could be thirty. And even when she did the mime business, applying her suntan oil—a trick that usually made boys hyperventilate—he just went right on cutting his jib or whatever it was they did. Well, screw him. He was probably as interesting to talk to as a wet life preserver. She thought of Trent, briefly, irresistibly, as people reconstruct the onset of destructive storms that descend without warning. She had never given in to adages; but, Christ, it might be true that men were all the same—universally hypnotized with their own needs and universally oblivious to the rest of creation.
Michel was wondering if Lenny just might be persuaded to cut him a break, if things went well and the girl’s mother seemed amenable. He had always ignored Michel’s other games—a tryst aboard with a party of bachelorette girls (not with the bride-to-be; Michel had his standards. So, for that matter, he supposed, did the girl—although American and English girls were pretty free). There’d been a German girl on holiday with her aunt who treated the physical transaction with all the passion involved in plugging in a blender, and the most touching, an older widow, not so cool and enticing as the strange, dark, older woman on this trip, but pretty in a soft, open way. She’d come on a charter arranged by e-mail, with a group of women she’d never met. Michel had ignored her age, twice his, and her thighs, twice the size of his, and taken her into his cabin and loved her; and she’d wept and said that it was the first time she’d imagined she could again feel such things. He had a card from her later. She’d married again and had a baby. He felt happy.
Only Lenny knew. There was nothing Lenny didn’t know. And he would know if Michel put moves on this girl—with the girl’s protective mother, and all her aunts, on board. While appearing to be absorbed in his work, Michel made a point of eavesdropping for a while. The girl, stunner or not, was only a teenager.
Off limits. For anyone.
They motored for a while and moored in Saltpond Bay for an afternoon of swimming and sun, then dinner and overnight.
Tracy took Lenny up on his offer to motor into town and send postcards to Ted and Jan; but Michel took Cammie diving at Rhone Reef, where two coral caves lay only twenty-five feet down. She wore a wet suit over a black one-piece, but Michel was mesmerized. She didn’t act like a fool, the way women did to charm a man, to invite him to touch them in the guise of helping. She had a steady, strong, horizontal stride in the water, and despite her childlike delight when a sea turtle flapped lazily past them, she didn’t move to disturb it, as so many others did. He pointed out the corals, their riot of minarets and turrets, their eerie pastels, meant for no one human ever to see.
“Thank you,” she said when they surfaced.
“You’re a good diver.”
“I’ve only done it a dozen times or so.”
“You’re a natural islander,” said Michel.
“Uh, sure,” Cammie said briefly.
“Where are you from?”
“Illinois.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“It’s not exactly a destination,” Cammie told him, toweling off. “Most people only see the inside of the airport.”
“I’d like to see Chicago.”
“It’s okay. It’s a great shopping town.”
Shit, Michel thought. She was a dumb, spoiled kid.
“Are you at school?”
Cammie laughed, and to his relief, it was a nice, munificent laugh. “Is that the French way of saying college? Yes, I am. I’m studying to be an engineer.” She sighed and went on, “I’ll end up working in Chicago in a big building that looks exactly like the big building next to it.”
“Do you want to do that?”
She laughed again. “Actually, I do! Ignore
me. There’s just something I can’t keep out of my mind, and it puts me in a foul mood.”
“This is a good place for forgetting,” Michel said, listening to himself sounding like a travel poster.
“That’s what I’m counting on,” Cammie replied with the pursed-lip parody of a smile.
A guy? Michel thought. A serious family thing? “So why engineering?” he asked, to keep things moving.
“Well, it’s like, people think of ‘the environment,’ that needs protecting, and they think of this. But a city is part of the environment, too. It has to be cared for. The neighborhoods have to be kept up. It has to be planned. It’s not really that interesting. . . .”
“No, it is,” Michel said quickly. “You’re right. You don’t think of a city as needing protection.”
“You would if you saw the Robert Taylor housing projects,” Cammie told him as she stripped off her wet suit. Michel swallowed hard, a fact Cammie noted, from the corner of her eye, with satisfaction. This guy was . . . really, really hot, whatever his age. She’d never let him know . . . but on the other hand, if she . . . whatever. Well then, next fall she could see Trent and think of his clothing-line-inventor debutante and think, Go swing on it, Trent. Maybe she could sink Trent like a shipwreck.
She slipped below to dress for dinner and came out with her hair straight and wet, without makeup, in shorts and an ordinary UM T-shirt. Michel observed that she ate with a lusty appetite. He couldn’t stand women who pretended that they had no appetites so that men would find them delicate. Later, after they’d polished off the last of the key lime pie, they gathered with their mugs of coffee like children around a hearth and asked Lenny for war stories.
Before he began, Lenny said, “I want you all to know that tomorrow I’m going to have to go in and bring all your passports, because we’ll be leaving the United States. By the time we get to Norman Island, we’ll be in British waters. We’ll go in for passport inspection twice more on this crossing. So if there are any items you need, tell me now or come along tomorrow. Okay?”
“Okay, but let’s have a story. Tell us about swashbuckling and walking the plank and all that,” Holly begged.
“They never did, for starters.”
“What?”
“Walk the plank. It would have been a waste of a plank. If you were going to kill someone, you’d just tie his hands and feet and push him over. I don’t know where the legend of the blindfold and the plank came from, unless it was personal for one of the crew, and they wanted to make it torture, to set an example.”
People always longed to hear the same things, Michel thought as he began washing the dishes, politely refusing Holly’s offer of help. And if you hadn’t heard them before, the tales of these mysterious islands, tossed among cultures for hundreds of years . . . he had to admit they were beguiling. They wanted to hear if anyone was ever tempted to roast and eat a shipmate, about ghost ships and buccaneers. They were disappointed to learn that modern pirates were the equivalent of L.A. gangsters and that most of the illegal activity in the islands was drug smuggling.
The good part was that the islands had been filled with layer upon layer of characters out of legend since Columbus’s time. They still were. And most of them were real. Blackbeard was real.
“Actually, some of the really weird things that have happened aren’t written down in books,” Lenny began as the women finished their second bottle of wine. Michel knew what was coming.
Lenny never tired of telling the story of the sailing ship Annabeth, which came alongside and hailed Lenny’s friend Lee Wikowsky in 1994 on a bright, cloudless night. Michel thought Lenny was jealous of Lee, a man as plain as brown bread—that it had been he instead of Lenny who saw Annabeth. The moon shone so clearly, Lenny told them, that Lee could read her name and all but see the face of the man who called out to him—a man, he noticed, who was wearing suspenders.
“My wife is ill,” the man called, according to Lenny. “Can you help? She’s giving birth. Do you have a cook aboard?” Lenny said his friend was puzzled: a cook? He fell silent, letting the suspense simmer. Then he went on.
“Lee told them he’d been a medic in the army,” Lenny finally went on. “He said, ‘I can help you, if the baby’s not breech, if there’s help to be had. Is she bad off?’”
“‘I don’t think so,’” said the man. “‘But she’s in great pain.’ That was what he said. Now, ‘great pain’ is a formal phrase. It’s not something you hear out here every day. And Lee noticed that.”
The women leaned forward, spellbound, as Lenny described how Lee ran downstairs to get his first aid kit and sharp scissors, twine, blankets, a pot for boiling water.
“I’m cold,” Cammie said, though the night was warm.
“Do you want me to turn off the air conditioner?” Lenny asked.
Michel, drying his hands, slid in next to her and put a shawl from the cedar chest around her shoulders.
“Thanks,” she said, reaching up. Their fingers met, his rough as horn, hers soft as petals. Damn, Michel thought. Cammie later would swear she’d seen the brief shake of the head Lenny gave—and wonder if this was his way of laying down the law to his partner. As it was, she didn’t know if Michel was gay or if Trent had busted her antennae. She could usually feel the chemical jolt when a guy touched her. This guy was taking pains to treat her the same as he treated her mother.
“Are you okay now?” he asked.
“I was okay before,” she said. “But thank you anyway.”
“The long and short of it was,” Lenny went on, “the night was dead calm. Not a breath of wind. Nowhere. And if the boat had a motor, Lee would have heard it starting. But when he came up, the boat was gone. Entirely gone. Now he was out there, where we’re going to go after tomorrow. There were no natural harbors or structures the man could have slipped behind, at least slipped a whole boat behind. As far as the horizon, he couldn’t see a thing, not a shadow.”
“So, who was it?”
“That’s the thing. We talk out here all the time, gossip and so on, using the SSB radio the way long-haul truckers do. Channel twenty-three is for emergencies. Next morning, Lee raised a guy we both knew, though he’s dead now, poor soul. I was there when he had his heart attack. Tried everything. We got a portable defibrillator that season.”
“Come on, come on!” Holly cried. “Not that, forgive me, I’m not sorry about your friend. I am.”
Lenny smiled that smile Michel knew so well, delighted he had set the hook, that tonight they would all crane their necks at the windows to seek the black schooner Annabeth. “Well, this friend of ours, Jack Trijillo, Lee swears he heard him get pale over the radio when Lee mentioned the man in the suspenders. And he said, ‘Let me guess, his wife was having a baby?’ And Lee says, ‘Well, did he come to you? Was the baby okay?’ And Jack says, ‘He never came to anyone. Not in this life.’ Lee sort of whispers, ‘What are you saying, Jack?’ And by then Sharon and Reg and half of us were listening in. Jack said, real slow, ‘Lee, that man is not real. Or he was, but not now. That ship sank in 1890. Check the VI files’—that’s our newspaper, the Virgin Islander. He said, ‘Check the files if you don’t believe me. Went down with all hands—Charles Quillen, a textile merchant, his sons and their wives, his five-year-old daughter . . .’”
“And his pregnant wife,” Holly said.
“And it was like . . . what? You’ve heard of the boat Mary Celeste. They found Mary Celeste adrift, the table set for breakfast, the food warm, the deck just covered in blood—”
“Oh, my God! I can’t sleep now!” Olivia was breathing hard.
“Well, I can, and don’t think you’re leaving the light on!” Holly cried. “It’s just a bunch of nonsense. Like the farmhouse with the lights in our neighborhood, that was there before Westbrook was a town, where the traveling preacher murdered the whole family on Thanksgiving night—”
“I’m going to sleep in the hammock,” Olivia said. “Do you have a . . . what do you call
it?”
“A tether?” Lenny asked. “Sure, but you might wake up all wet if we run into some waves.”
“I’m pretty sturdy,” Olivia said.
“Whose blood?” Cammie asked. Lenny shrugged. “It all smells to me. How could two ships so far apart see the same sailboat on the same night?”
“Were they attacked by pirates?” Holly asked.
“Nobody knows,” Lenny said, clearing the glasses. “That’s the most logical explanation. But, you see, it wasn’t the same night, Cammie. Jack Trijillo saw Annabeth a full year before Lee did—”
“Oh, come on,” Cammie said. “You just tell that to the tourists. It never happened, and you know it!”
“I only know what I was told,” Lenny replied with a shrug. “And Lee, well, you’ll meet Lee. He’s the bartender on Willie T., the most famous floating bar and restaurant in the Virgin Islands. Big freighter made over into a restaurant with a dance floor. We’ll stop there tomorrow after we dive. You ask him yourself. Lee never takes a drink. Never did after that. Never known him to lie. It was just the following spring that he sold his boat and went to work on Willie T., named after the pirate William Thornton. As far as Annabeth, this is no ancient legend. It wasn’t that long ago. She was a real enough boat. And Lee’s not the only one who saw her, either. I’ve talked to three or four people who did. Same story.”
“I’m completely creeped out now!” Tracy said. “Cammie, are you ready for bed? I’m not going anywhere alone!”
Cammie and Tracy settled into their cabin quietly, and Michel saw their lights go dark within half an hour. Holly’s never went on. He brushed his teeth and lay down on his neatly made bed to read.
Then he figured he should check on the countess and make sure she hadn’t gone overboard. So he edged his way silently out to the foredeck. She was leaning back on both hands, her bare back long and pale, her swimsuit top hanging loose where she had opened the knot.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Olivia told him in her husky voice. “Do you smoke?”