Kiss River

  “Bring a sweater,” Clay said as he closed the door. “And sunglasses.”

  She tore off the old T-shirt and pulled on her shorts and a tank top. In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth and ran a comb ineffectively through her tangled hair. Grabbing a sweater, she then raced down the stairs to find Clay, Lacey and Sasha in the kitchen.

  Clay laughed when she appeared in the doorway.

  “Do I look that bad?” she said, trying to smooth her hair.

  “I just never saw anybody move quite so fast,” Clay said.

  “Do you two want something to eat before you go?” Lacey had picked blueberries and was trying to wipe the stain from her fingers with a damp paper towel.

  “No time,” Clay said. “Dave said it’s perfect right now. The water’s really clear.”

  “Let’s go, then.” Gina headed for the door, but Lacey caught her arm.

  “Clay told me about the little girl you’re adopting,” she said, her wide blue eyes full of genuine sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you,” Gina said.

  “Come on,” Clay was already out the door, and Gina nodded to Lacey.

  “We can talk more about it later,” she said.

  The morning was warm and bright, the air unusually dry and filled with the scent of salt water and pine trees. In the parking lot, they climbed into Clay’s Jeep.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I told Lacey,” he said as she buckled her seat belt.

  “Not at all,” Gina answered. It had struck her as odd that it had been Clay she’d confided in instead of Lacey, but her talk with him the night before had left her feeling cleansed in a way, and less alone. She had no regrets.

  Clay turned the Jeep around in the parking lot and headed down the narrow gravel lane toward the chain. Gina had her own key for the chain now, and she got out of the Jeep to unlock it and pull it aside.

  “You can leave it unlocked,” Clay called to her through his open window. “Lacey will be going to work soon.”

  In her two weeks in the Outer Banks, she had not seen a morning so sparkling clear. Once they reached the main road, she could see the individual needles of the loblolly pines crisply silhouetted against the vivid blue sky, and beams of sunlight pierced the forest.

  “Do you like to fly?” Clay asked her as they drove south.

  “I hate it,” she said with a laugh. “And I don’t like small planes. They make me feel claustrophobic.”

  “Uh,” Clay laughed, “you shouldn’t have that problem on this plane.”

  “Why not? Is it big?”

  “You’ll see.”

  She suddenly remembered there would be a fee for this flight. “I forgot to ask you how much this will cost,” she said.

  “Dave owes me a favor,” Clay said.

  She should have known Clay wouldn’t let her pay.

  “Thank you so much,” she said.

  He looked different this morning. The sunlight cut right through the pale blue of his eyes, made them look like jewels beneath his dark lashes and heavy eyebrows. His tanned skin was smooth over his high cheekbones and the sharp line of his jaw. She knew he didn’t really look any different than he did any other day. The difference was in her, in how she was looking at him. She could not forget the way he had listened to her the night before, attentively and with compassion. The way he’d rested his hand on her back while she cried. And the way he had called his friend to arrange this flight of fancy for her. She glanced at him again. This morning, Clay was beautiful.

  There was no airport, and that was Gina’s first disconcerting surprise.

  “It’s just an airstrip,” Clay said as he pulled into the small parking lot in Kill Devil Hills, near the memorial to the Wright brothers.

  Her second surprise was the plane.

  “Hey, Clay!” A skinny man with wind-tossed red hair walked across the tarmac toward them as they got out of the Jeep. A distance behind him stood a very small, bright-red airplane.

  “Hi, Dave,” Clay shook the man’s hand. “This is Gina.”

  Dave grinned at her. “So you’re the one who wants to find the old lens, huh?” He was so thin that she thought she could knock him over with the touch of a fingertip, and his blue polo shirt and khaki slacks looked too large for him. His voice was a deep surprise, though, and he spoke with that thick accent she’d come to recognize as the mark of an Outer Banks native.

  She nodded at him, but her eyes were on the toylike plane. “There’s no roof on that thing,” she said.

  Dave and Clay both laughed. “Some people would give their eyeteeth to fly in a Waco biplane,” Dave said.

  “Did it belong to the Wright brothers?” Gina tried to joke.

  “I told you you wouldn’t get that closed-in feeling in it,” Clay said.

  She rolled her eyes at him. “How old is it?” she asked.

  “It’s a replica,” Clay reassured her. “It’s only…what, Dave? Fifteen years old?”

  “About that,” Dave said.

  “And where’s the runway?” Gina asked.

  “That’s the airstrip,” Dave said, motioning toward the narrow strip of macadam. She hadn’t really understood what Clay had meant by “airstrip,” and she cringed at the sight of it.

  “Don’t worry,” Dave said. “It’s plenty long enough for us.”

  “You don’t have to go with us,” Clay said. He sounded concerned about her reaction to the plane and the airstrip. “I can look for the lens for you.”

  “No,” she said, getting a grip on her fears. “I’m going, too.” She marched ahead of them toward the plane.

  Dave reached into the front seat and lifted out two leather helmets and some other paraphernalia. “Well, I have to tell you,” he said, handing one of the helmets to Gina, the other to Clay. “In all the times I’ve flown above Kiss River, I’ve never seen the lens. I have seen a bunch of stuff down there. Parts of the lighthouse, bricks and such, but never the lens. The water’s right clear today, though, so we’ll give it a shot.”

  “We should take a buoy with us in case we do find it,” Clay said as he buckled the helmet beneath his chin.

  “Already have one,” Dave said. He turned to Gina. “You need some help with that?”

  Her fingers shook as she tried to buckle the chin strap of the helmet. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Listen, you won’t do any loop-de-loops or anything, will you?” The little red plane looked like the type that might be used for aerobatics.

  “Not if you don’t want me to,” Dave said.

  “I don’t. Please.”

  “I will do a hard bank, though, over the Kiss River area,” he said, “so’s you can get a good look at the water.”

  “You mean you’ll tilt the plane?” she asked.

  “That’s right. So don’t be scared when I do it. It’s going to be fine, and we won’t flip over or anything.”

  Clay was holding two sets of goggles in his hands. He handed one of them to Gina, and she pulled them down over the helmet and her sunglasses.

  “And finally—” Dave handed her a large headset “—we can communicate through this intercom.” He helped her fit the headset over her ears and arranged the microphone near her mouth. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to her that they would not easily be able to communicate with one another in the air. In a little open plane like this one, it was sure to be noisy.

  Clay opened the door to the front compartment. “I’ll get in first,” he said. “That way you’ll have a better view of the coastline as we’re flying north.”

  “Doesn’t Dave fly up front?” She made no move toward the compartment.

  Clay shook his head. “Nope. We do.” He climbed into the passenger seat, then held out his hand to help her up. She settled into the admittedly comfortable leather seat and fastened her seat belt. A loud rush of static suddenly filled her headset. After a moment, there was a short pause in the static and she could hear Dave’s voice.

  “You two all buckled in up there?
” he asked.

  Clay raised his thumb in the air, and she did the same.

  Dave taxied the plane to one end of the airstrip. The propeller began to spin right in front of Gina’s face and the engine roared in her ears. Around their heads was a web of bars and wires that were probably very important but seemed terribly flimsy, and they began to vibrate from the buzz of the engine. Gina locked her damp hands together in her lap and drew in a long, shaky breath as the plane inched forward. No turning back now.

  Dave gave the plane more power, and Gina felt her body forced back against her seat as they sped down the airstrip. It was nearly impossible to take in a breath, her lungs were so compressed, and she shut her eyes and swallowed hard. She knew the moment they were in the air, because her stomach dropped down to her feet.

  “Open your eyes, Gina.” Clay’s voice came to her through the headset.

  She forced her eyes open, and saw blue sky both above and below her as Dave turned the plane in the direction of the northern Outer Banks. The roar of the wind was deafening despite the headset, and the web of wires shook so violently she was certain they would snap from their bearings at any moment. Whether she survived this flight or not, it was going to be her last in a small plane.

  Clay touched the back of her hand, rigid in her lap. “You all right?” he shouted into his microphone.

  She nodded. Oh, what a wonderful liar she’d become.

  He pointed toward the shoreline, and she looked down. The early-morning sun turned the sand into a broad strand of gold; the waves were white-tipped as they reached for shore. It’s beautiful, she told herself. Look at how beautiful it is.

  And it was. No one spoke, and the more she concentrated on the beauty below them, the more she felt herself relax. She began to recognize the areas they were flying over. There were the small cottages of Kitty Hawk and the beaches dotted with shell seekers and fishermen. She spotted the flat-roofed houses in Southern Shores. Then Duck came into view, followed by the long expanse of green that marked the wildlife reserve. Finally, she saw the white tower and the Kiss River promontory in the distance. The jagged line of bricks where the top of the lighthouse had been lopped off struck her anew from this height. The tower looked so fragile, like a small, broken toy, while the ocean was so expansive and powerful, that for the first time, she truly understood how the bricks and mortar—and the fragile glass lens—could have succumbed to the force of the sea.

  “I’m dropping down a bit lower now,” Dave said through the static as they neared the lighthouse.

  Good. She wanted to go lower. She shifted her focus from the lighthouse to the sea. The water was calm and remarkably clear. The day she had walked through it in search of the lens, she had barely been able to see her hands beneath the surface. Today, though, the water was a bluish green, so translucent she could make out the ridges in the sand near the shore.

  “Look at all that stuff!” Clay said, pointing, and she saw what he was talking about. There was a straight broad line of debris on the ocean bottom, as though the wind and sea had grabbed the top of the lighthouse and pulled it straight out into the ocean, dropping bits of it along the way. They were quickly past the line of debris, though, and Gina strained her neck to see behind her.

  “I’m turning around,” Dave said. “I’ll come at it from the other side.”

  The plane tipped dramatically to the left, but Gina barely noticed. She wished that Dave could drop even closer to the water.

  “Look there!” Clay suddenly called into his microphone.

  Dave banked hard again, and looking nearly straight down from the plane, Gina could clearly see what had caught Clay’s attention. Beneath the surface of the ocean, something captured the sunlight and sent it splintering into the water in shards of light.

  “That has to be it,” she said, although it was impossible to make out the shape of the object. But something was there. Something that glittered beneath the calm surface of the water.

  “I think you’re right, Gina,” Dave said, and she jumped when he suddenly tossed a red buoy and chain from the plane. She watched it fall to the water, not far from the object. And then they were past it again.

  “Ready to go back?” Dave asked through the intercom.

  “Right,” Clay said, and Gina held her thumb high in the air. She had found her lens.

  CHAPTER 28

  Clay leaned against his Jeep in the Kiss River parking lot, waiting for Kenny to arrive. They were going to dive the lens this afternoon, or at least they were going to try to, and he’d left Sasha in the house so the dog wouldn’t follow them into the water. The more he thought about it, the less sure he was that what they had seen from the plane had actually been the lens. The image from fifty feet up was still with him: a large, shapeless object made of or containing glass or some other light-bending material. It could be pieces of the windows from the lantern room. Even so, even if the object was not the lens, he was determined that he would find what remained of that giant glass beehive today.

  He eyed the gray sky. Gina had said it was sweet of him and Kenny to wait until she got home from work before diving the lens, so that she could be there. It may have been sweet, but it had also been stupid. Conditions had been much better earlier in the day for this. Now, at three-thirty, the clouds hung low above Kiss River, and the water visibility would be lousy, at best.

  Gina had looked perplexed at first when he told her he’d wait until she had finished her shift before making the dive. “Why are you doing all this for me?” she’d asked him. “Taking me up in the plane. Diving to find the lens. Why?”

  He’d told her that she’d made him curious about the condition of the lens himself, but the real reason was simply that it made him feel good to get his mind off his own problems for a while. Gina’s genuinely happy smile was rare and wonderful. He would do anything he could to see it. Since there was no way he could help her get her baby girl from the Indian orphanage, this seemed the closest he could come to making her happy.

  Kenny arrived, and by the time they had unloaded the diving gear and walked over to the lighthouse, Gina and Lacey were sitting on the tower’s concrete steps, waiting for their arrival.

  “Two very white women,” Kenny said under his breath as they walked.

  He was right. Both women were wearing bathing suits he recognized as Lacey’s, and neither of them looked as though they’d ever seen the sun. Lacey, with her fair, freckled skin, always had to be cautious about how much sun she got, but Gina had the look of a woman who simply didn’t care that her legs were the color of skim milk. They were beautiful legs all the same, not as toned as his sister’s, but long and slender and thoroughly distracting. She had on a red tank suit that Lacey hadn’t worn in years, not since their little sister told her it made her look like a giant bottle of ketchup because of her red hair. Lacey’s suit today was green, and her hair was up in a long ponytail.

  “Hey, girls,” Kenny said as he and Clay reached the water churning around the base of the lighthouse.

  “Hey, guys,” Lacey said in return. “The ocean looks cloudy today. Are you going to be able to see anything?”

  Clay climbed the stairs to get out of the water, setting his dive bag and tank in the open doorway leading into the tiled foyer. “We’re sure going to try,” he said.

  “You two are looking mighty hot today,” Kenny said, climbing the stairs to the foyer himself.

  “It’s not that bad,” Gina said. “There’s a nice breeze.”

  Clay grinned to himself at her intentional misunderstanding of Kenny’s meaning.

  Gina turned on the top step to watch Clay unzip his dive bag.

  “Do you need a wet suit?” she asked. He and Kenny were wearing their bathing suits and T-shirts.

  Clay nodded, pulling the light, short-sleeved suit from the bag. Gina watched as he unloaded his BCD and regulator and other paraphernalia. He raised his head to look at her. The red bathing suit dipped softly over her fair-skinned breasts.
br />   “You two have sunscreen on, right?” he asked, shifting his gaze to his sister.

  “Yes, Daddy,” she said.

  “I’ll be happy to rub sunscreen on either of you,” Kenny said, and Clay joined the women in rolling their eyes. He’d tried to fix Gina up with this bozo?

  “Is that some kind of harness?” She pointed to the BCD, which was lying next to his bag on the top step.

  “It’s called a Buoyancy Compensation Device,” he said. She watched while he put the BCD on his tank and attached the regulator. Then he reached into his dive bag again to extract an extra set of snorkeling gear and handed it to Gina.

  “This is for you,” he said. “Kenny’s got a spare set for Lacey.”

  Lacey laughed at the look of surprise on Gina’s face.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” Gina looked at the fins and mask and snorkel in her arms.

  “You and I can watch from above,” Lacey said.

  “Though you may not be able to see anything today.” Kenny handed Lacey her own set of fins.

  “I have no idea how to use this thing.” Gina held the snorkel in the air.

  “Come on,” Lacey said. “I’ll teach you.” She jumped from the side of the steps into knee-high water, her ponytail flying in the air. She looked like a little kid in a woman’s body.

  Gina hesitated, hugging the snorkeling gear to her chest.

  “Go on,” Clay said as he zipped up his wet suit. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

  Gina stood up, descended the three steps and followed Lacey into the water.

  Once Clay had hooked up the inflator hose to the BCD, he clipped the bright-yellow octopus to his vest. The octopus was used in case another diver was in trouble and needed to share his buddy’s tank. But Clay had another plan for it today.

  “If we find the lens,” he said to Kenny, “I’d like Gina to be able to go down to see it.”

  Kenny looked up from his work on his own BCD. “She’s never even used a snorkel before,” he said.

  “I know, but she really wants to see that thing. It might be her only chance.”