The Edge of the Water

  Her blue eyes rounded. “And anyway I was talking to the Lord, not to them. And please don’t call me ‘dude,’ okay?”

  “Fine. Whatever. Sorry. Courtney. Well, you were doing your talking to the Lord in front of fifteen eavesdroppers. And you should have frigging told me you were going to start talking about our stuff.”

  “But you know that I pray. I pray all the time about a lot of things. And I’ve told you I pray about us. D’you think it’s actually easy for me when we’ve got our clothes off and—”

  “Okay, okay!” He looked around furtively. This was insane. The last thing he wanted was a public announcement in one of the high school halls on the topic of how far they’d gone with each other. “So am I right in thinking that you’ve been ‘praying’ about us in that stupid prayer circle ever since we started dating?”

  “It’s not a stupid prayer circle.” Her voice was quiet and dignified, but her eyes were stricken.

  “It’s a group of high school kids, Court. They’re hearing something that’s none of their business. You’re telling them exactly . . . I don’t even want to know how much you’ve already told them while you’ve been ‘praying.’”

  “Don’t say it like that. You make it sound like it’s some big joke that I pray at school.”

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  “No, it isn’t. Not a single person in the prayer circle’s going to say a word about you and me. That’s not who they are. They don’t spread gossip.”

  “You got to be kidding. You’re not that lame.”

  “Gossip has no place in the work of Jesus,” she said.

  What he said was, “I got to get out of here,” and he left her standing in the hall alone. He walked off shaking his head. Either she was crazy or he was wrong. But one way or the other, things felt bad.

  Yet this wasn’t the reason he hadn’t flooded her with flowers. It was a good excuse, sure. It just wasn’t the reason. The reason was what was going on inside him. It was the pull of wanting her so badly his whole body felt sore. It was the push of knowing that something very essential was missing when he was with her in a way that didn’t involve making out.

  So what? he thought. What did that matter? They were good together. They were practically on fire together. When they saw each other, they eased ever closer to the edge, and if he had to fall as he wanted to fall, then he definitely wanted to fall with her.

  Didn’t he? That was the question. His gonads were yelling, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, bro!” His heart wasn’t that far behind. His brain was saying, “Come on be reasonable. You’re only human and there’s lots of protection available these days.” But his soul was saying, “Hey, Der . . . Maybe not.”

  And he didn’t know why his soul was saying that. Only . . . he did know why. Only . . . he wished that he didn’t because life would have been so much easier for him that way.

  What made everything so much more difficult was that Courtney turned out to be right about the kids who were in the prayer circle. Not a single one of them said a word. No one winked at him. No one leered. No one said, “Whoa, mama, are you guys hot or what?” There wasn’t—anywhere—the slightest indication that Courtney Baker was praying for the strength to keep Derric Mathieson from taking from her what she wanted to give to the man she married. So she’d been right and he’d been wrong and even that was something he didn’t understand.

  He wanted to talk about the entire situation. He wanted to look at it every way he could. But he found that the only person he wanted to talk to about what he was going through was Becca King, and no way could he talk to her.

  • • •

  TWO DAYS LATER he finally got the cast off his leg. Two days after that, Courtney suggested that they take a drive after school to a coffee place buried deep in the woods to the west of Langley. Mukilteo Coffee was a roasting establishment that sent clouds of an odd burnt-toast scent into the air, and since it wasn’t easy to get to without a car, it generally didn’t host a group of kids inside its woodland café.

  “We c’n celebrate your leg,” she offered. “I bet you’re relieved to get rid of that cast.”

  He said okay, and when they arrived at the place surrounded by forest, they found that they had the coffeehouse all to themselves. They ordered their drinks and took them to one of the wide windows looking out at the trees. Courtney was the one who started them talking.

  She said, “Actually, I sort of wanted to talk to you. I mean about a lot more than being glad about your leg.”

  “Okay,” he said carefully. He waited for more.

  “It’s that . . . well, I got carried away. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I mean, I thought you’d feel good about it. But . . . well, obviously, you didn’t.”

  Derric stirred his hot chocolate. He hadn’t particularly wanted it, but he felt bad about taking up space in the café without buying something, so he’d gone for it. He should’ve had something to eat instead. His stomach was rumbling. He would’ve liked to settle it. But her words relieved him with their suggestion that she was finally seeing the light when it came to talking about their private business in front of a group of kids.

  He said, “Thanks for understanding, Court. See, it’s not that I don’t pray. And it’s not that I don’t want you to pray. But when you told them what we—”

  “Oh gosh, oh wait.” She sat up straighter in her chair. “Did you think I meant the prayer circle?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “No. I still think . . .” She looked down at her coffee, at the plate next to it. She’d ordered a scone and she took a piece of it. He did as well, but to him it tasted like extra-dry sawdust with a sprinkling of sugar. She said, “Well, that doesn’t matter. I was talking about the flowers.”

  Oh, he thought. He hadn’t avoided having to make The Guy excuse after all. He said, “I’m sorry about that, Court.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You know. I only sent you two. What can I say? I’m a guy. Sometimes we don’t think—”

  “It’s not that,” she interrupted. “Well, it is in a way. But it’s more that I sent you thirty-seven. I went totally overboard, like I was out of control or something. I sort of knew it was nuts to send that many flowers, but I did it anyway. I thought . . . It seemed to me that you’d be all joyous, I guess . . . I mean to get all those flowers and notes from me.”

  “But I was,” he said, a little bit too quickly.

  She cocked her head at him. “No, you weren’t.”

  He bristled a little. “And you know this . . . how?”

  “Because you didn’t have them with you. When I saw you in the commons? What did you do with them? Did you throw them away? Or give them to someone? Did you read the messages? I mean, it doesn’t matter only . . . I mean, I shouldn’t have sent you thirty-seven. You must’ve felt like a . . . Oh I don’t know. But when they got delivered, you must’ve wanted to crawl under your desk.”

  “No way,” he said. “It was cool. Really.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “So what did you do with them, anyway?”

  Trapped, he thought. He looked out of the window. The forest trees, he saw, wore the tight red buds of spring’s unfurled leaves at the moment. In time they would be a wall of green. A guy could hide behind that wall, he decided. Hiding didn’t seem like such a bad idea. He said, “My locker.”

  She said, “You put thirty-seven flowers into your locker? Did you read the notes?”

  “Sure I read them!”

  “Then why didn’t you mention them to me? Why didn’t you . . . say anything, really?”

  That, Derric thought, was the question of the hour. It got right down to that soul thing that was bothering him. He only wished he had a decent answer, but he couldn’t come up with one so he said, “I don’t know. It didn’t seem . . . I wasn’t sure . . .”

  “A
bout what? Me? Us? Derric, what’s going on?”

  “Hey, you know how I feel about you.”

  “I thought I did. And I thought that you were proud that you and I are couple.”

  “I am proud.” But even he could hear the defensiveness in his voice. Why did he feel under some kind of attack when all she was doing was asking some reasonable questions? He said, “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t carry the flowers around. I guess I could have. Or I could’ve carried some of them. I don’t know why I didn’t. I just didn’t.”

  Courtney said quietly, “People usually know why they’re doing things. Or not doing things.”

  He felt bristly again. “Maybe you do,” he said irritably.

  “Maybe you do, too, underneath it all. Come on, Derric. You want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong!”

  “Yeah, something is. At some level you know. Maybe you don’t want to admit it to yourself, but you do know. I hope you figure it out.” She sipped her coffee, then, and joined him in looking out of the window.

  He wondered what they would talk about next. Then he wondered why he was wondering. Then he found himself looking at the sweater she was wearing, at its V-neck, and at the soft skin that descended to the heady sweet spot between her breasts. Then he wanted to kick his own butt. Talk to her, he told himself, say something, be someone.

  He said, “Sometimes I just don’t know the things I think I should know. Sometimes I feel like I’m caught between being a kid and being an adult. It’s like I’m in the middle of a web that I didn’t make, so I’m trapped somehow. That’s where I am now. D’you know what I mean?”

  She kept her gaze on the window as he spoke, but when he’d finished, she turned to him. “Trapped,” she repeated. “I guess that doesn’t feel so good, does it?”

  That was all she said, but he knew from her tone that she’d mistaken his meaning. At least that was what he told himself. Later that evening when he was alone and she texted him love you so much want this to be urs and sent him a picture she shouldn’t have sent anyone, he wasn’t so sure.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Becca thought about a lot of things after the meeting of the seal spotters that she’d witnessed in South Whidbey Commons. Mostly, though, what she thought about was Eddie Beddoe. Danger had seemed to roll off the man along with all the anger he displayed, and it didn’t take much for her to remember the day she’d run into him at Sandy Point. His whispers had spoken of kill her that’s what. She’d thought at the time he meant Diana Kinsale. But Diana had told her he meant the seal. The seal was responsible for his life’s hardships, he thought. The problem was, that didn’t make sense.

  Making sense didn’t matter much, though. She’d felt the atmosphere that Eddie Beddoe created, and she figured his intentions toward Langley, its townspeople, and the seal they loved were very bad.

  She hardly knew anything about the man, though. He’d lost a boat in a storm. He blamed a seal for that. At one time he’d been married to Sharla Mann. End of story. But after the seal spotters’ meeting, Becca wanted to know more. She just wasn’t sure how to discover it.

  “Hey, Ivar, where’s that guy Eddie from?” didn’t get her far the next time she was at work in the chicken coop at Heart’s Desire.

  “Lived in Possession Point for years,” was the extent to which Ivar illuminated her as he examined his pot plants and adjusted the grow lights over them. “Now he’s over in Glendale. Why d’you want to know?”

  “Because he wants to kill Nera” didn’t seem like a smart way to go, all things considered. So she said, jiggling the truth a bit, “Sharla said one time she was married to him.”

  Ivar nodded. “Oh yeah. They were married.” Head examined was his thought.

  Becca didn’t know if Ivar’s whisper meant Eddie or Sharla. She waited for more, hoping to learn something, but all she got was oil and water, which made her think of the old saying that oil and water don’t ever mix.

  But later, alone in her tree house with the wind kicking up a March storm outside, she thought of oil in a different way. She remembered the information about the oil spill that Jenn McDaniels had left on the computer in the library when Becca had sat down to see what was going on with Jeff Corrie. The spill, she recalled, had polluted Possession Point. Was that what Ivar had been talking about?

  At her next scuba lesson, she decided to brave the lioness’s fangs and ask Jenn McDaniels about it. She hung around in the locker room after her shower, trying to make it seem less obvious that she was stalling for time by spending extra minutes on her hair. When the coast was clear and Jenn was alone by the lockers, Becca sauntered in, pretending to be gathering her things. She said casually to Jenn, “Hey, Jenn, d’you know anything about that oil spill in Possession Point?”

  She might have said “D’you know there’re six aliens standing in the locker room doorway?” because Jenn’s reaction was about in line with having heard that instead of a simpler question. She turned slowly and examined Becca with so many swear words pounding from her head that Becca dug the AUD box from her backpack and slid it onto the waistband of her jeans, following this with making a very big procedure about screwing the earphone into place.

  “What d’you really want around here?” was Jenn’s demand. “I mean, aside from Derric Mathieson who, by the way, is totally inside Courtney Baker’s pants in case you didn’t know.”

  Becca took a few steadying breaths. She said to Jenn, “Thanks for the info, but he and I are way done, so he’s free to climb into anyone’s pants. He can wear them, even. So, what about the oil spill? D’you know anything? I know you live down there.”

  Jenn’s eyes narrowed. “And you know this, how?”

  Becca faltered under her gaze. “I don’t even remember. Derric must’ve said. I dunno. Why? Does that make a difference or something?”

  Jenn slammed the door of her locker. She was wearing only a towel, which she dropped to the floor. Becca, embarrassed, looked away. Jenn hooted. Then she began to talk.

  Yeah, there was an oil spill. Yeah, it was in Possession Point. It was bilge oil and it was bad and it wrecked a lot of sea life and a lot of the shore.

  So far so good, Becca thought. She asked, then, about Eddie Beddoe. He lived there, right? At the time of the oil spill?

  Jenn shrugged. “He has a trailer down there. He might’ve lived in it then. Hell if I know. And why d’you care?”

  Becca fiddled around with her backpack long enough to make sure Jenn had put on some clothes. Then she looked up and said, “It’s just that . . . I heard him going on at that meeting? The one in South Whidbey Commons? He was going on about the seal? I asked Ivar Thorndyke about it and he said Eddie came from Possession Point. So I just wondered. . . .”

  “What were you doing there?” Jenn’s eyes were narrow and her face was a scowl.

  “Huh? Where?”

  “God. Where else, Fattie? South Whidbey Commons. What were you doing there?”

  “Like, I wasn’t supposed to be there or something?” Becca asked.

  “Like, I like my life better when you’re nowhere near it and I was at the meeting. Why didn’t I see you?”

  “I was talking to Seth.”

  “Ohhhh. Seth. The new boyfriend Seth.”

  Becca sighed and tried to summon up patience. Jenn McDaniels had to be the most impossible girl on the planet. She said, “Look. I’m just asking. You don’t have to tell me anything, okay?”

  “Good because I’m not going to.”

  “I guess that means you don’t know,” Becca said.

  “Hey, I know lots. I know a hell of a lot more than you. There was an oil spill and he probably lived there then and if you want to know for sure, why the hell don’t you ask him? Or are you too scared? Yeah that’s it, I bet. He scares you, doesn’t he?”

  “I get the feeling he scares everyone
,” Becca told her. She gave up on Jenn and left the locker room.

  • • •

  BILGE OIL WAS bad, as Jenn had declared, and it didn’t take much effort for Becca to discover this. In the case of Whidbey Island, the bilge oil had been put into a ship in the wrong way, somehow. The result of this was pipes cracking in that vessel and oil leaking from it as it moved from the Port of Everett into the shipping lanes of Puget Sound. The leak happened at night, and no one knew about it until the morning when the tide had brought the sludge of it to shore and deposited it all over Possession Point.

  She got some of her facts from the biology teacher at the high school. She put together others by ducking into a white cottage on Second Street in Langley, where the historical society had set up a museum about the village and where other information was stored, including information in the memories of the volunteers who ran the place. There, Becca learned that the stuff that had polluted Possession Point had been toxic to whatever it came into contact with. People wore hazmat suits just to go near it, and all sorts of individuals from the island had been hired to help clean up the mess.

  Toxic meant deadly. Becca knew that. Wildlife died when it was covered by the oil. She wondered, though, what happened to people when they came into contact with the oil, too. Did it get onto their skin, into their systems, into their blood, into their brains? Did it eat at their minds? Was that at the bottom of what was going on with Eddie Beddoe? Why else, she wondered, would he see a seal as something he needed to kill? It’s not like he was a fisherman being robbed of his catch or something.

  She wanted badly to talk to someone who could answer her questions, but the only person she could think of was Sharla. And Sharla barely talked about anything at all.

  She said, “Oil spill?” and her whispers said too close past remembering happened and gone, which wasn’t helpful to Becca. She went on with, “I lived there, sure. My husband, he helped with the cleanup. Everyone did.”

  “It was bad, huh?” Becca said. They were doing the dishes on one of the nights that Sharla had invited Becca to stay for dinner after her work in Ivar’s chicken coop. “I saw pictures at the historical society. People had on hazmat suits.”