Acts of Nature

SEVEN

“What are we going to do, Max?”
I hear the question, but with only half of my attention. I thought Sherry had been reading, her back settled in the bow of the canoe, ankles crossed on top of the cooler, which held the last of the beer, a book of Ted Kooser’s poems I’d lent her in front of her face. I was at the other end, a hand line dropped over the side, daydreaming. Like the gentleman that I am, I’d kept the eastern sun to Sherry’s back and pulled down the brim of my baseball cap, the one stitched across the front with the reversed script letters that perplexed most people unless they figured out that it was simply “FOCUS” spelled mirror backward. After three days my eyes were getting used to the starburst glitter of sun off the slow-moving water.
“Huh?” I said, full of elocution.
“What are we going to do about us? When we get back, I mean, to civilization?”
It hadn’t all been small talk since we started this odd vacation, but tackling the future and the meaning of our relationship was not something we’d poked at. I’d decided the reason was because we were both, fundamentally, cops. We’d been trained, I suppose, to be more reticent than most people. Trained also, I believed, to be more careful with the people we met, be they citizens or suspects or potential trouble or all three at once. If you ever sat down in a diner with a few of us you would immediately feel it as an outsider. We’re trained to evaluate you, give nothing up until we’ve got some kind of take on where you’re coming from. It’s a broad ripple effect of the way we’re taught to approach a driver during a car stop when we’re all rookies: search the mirrors, look for hand movement, assess with your gut and let it tell you if you should have your own hand on the butt of your sidearm.
I had been on the force in Philadelphia for more than a decade. I’d grown up with the cop rules and what they brought home with them and had seen it turn my parents’ relationship ugly and violent. But I had also known my grandparents to be a loving and respectful couple despite the lifestyle.
Sherry and I had been dancing for a couple of years now. Granted, some of it had been very close dancing, but like the school chaperone, an emotional hand had always been measuring a space between us.
“Hike you, Max.”
It wasn’t the words that got my attention. Sherry’s eyes always had this ability to subtly change color depending on her mood—a green when she was loose and happy, but decidedly gray when she was being fierce and suspicious. I was trying to see them now, in the shade of midmorning sun.
“I think you might have said that last night, when it was my turn to look at the stars,” I said, stalling.
I could see her narrow those eyes, but still couldn’t pick up the color.
“I want you to move in with me, into the house in Fort Lauderdale. But I don’t want to ask.”
It was a statement. Clear and matter-of-fact, but I knew how much it had taken for her to let the words out of her mouth. I was trying not to overthink what my response should be. It has always been my burden, rolling questions and answers around in my head, probing them, searching for the rough edges, grinding the sharp spots, the dangerous possibilities, and trying to smooth them. Maybe she sensed my hesitation because I could see her face begin to change, like she was going to take back the invitation. Before she could say anything I leaned forward and gripped either side of the canoe gunwales and rocked forward and stepped to her. Now her look turned to a wary smile but before she could come out with anything I led with my mouth and kissed her fully on the lips, holding my body weight above her like doing a push-up.
“Oh, is that an answer, Max?” she said. “Because it’s very nice, but…” I know she did it. Because it sure as hell wasn’t me who suddenly threw my weight to the starboard side of the canoe causing gravity to take hold and barrel-rolling the whole boat and flipping us both into the water.
Later we spread out our soaked clothes on the Snows’ isolated deck and lay in the sun naked.
“I’ve never been dunked by a woman before,” I said into the sky and then immediately wondered where the words had come from. Sherry cut a look at me, a slight wrinkle in her brow. She too was caught by the oddity of the revelation.
“Dumped but not dunked,” I said, trying to recover.
“You would have stayed with your ex if she hadn’t been moving up?” she finally said. Sherry knew my ex-wife was a former police sniper who was now a captain running the internal affairs division for the Philadelphia Police Department. We had met while working on the same SWAT team.
“Not once I realized she was just collecting the pelts of men on her way up the ranks.”
Sherry laughed out loud.
“Bitterness does not become you, Max,” she said, reaching over to run her fingertips over my brow. “Honestly, she was a better shot than you, right?”
“That’s probably true,” I said.
She had no comeback and instead went quiet again, to gather a recollection.
“Jimmy was a terrible marksman,” she said and I could tell from her eyes she was seeing her dead husband. “He was always asking for pointers, ways to pass the next qualifier without practicing. I don’t think he ever drew his weapon out on the streets in his entire career.”
I let her think her own thoughts for a second, knowing there was another beat just behind her lips.
“But?” I finally said.
“I always knew he would protect me,” she said, her eyes coming back to mine. “You know what I mean? Not just back- to-the-wall, guns drawn protection. But protect me. Then he died and I think I actually felt betrayed by that, like it was his fault. So I hardened up, Max. I decided I could take care of myself and say to hell with the rest of the world.”
She rolled over onto her back, her naked body completely exposed to the sky and the sun. I rolled to one elbow and stared at her, the bridge of her nose, the new sun freckles on her shoulder, and I found something missing. The necklace from her husband that she never took off was gone. I could have been presumptuous, could have hoped for the meaning of its absence. Instead I asked.
“Do you know your necklace is missing?”
Her eyes remained closed. She did not reach to her throat, or show surprise.
“Yes.”
I reached over to lace my fingers through hers and rolled to my back.
“You want me to protect you, Sherry?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Then I will.”
“And love me?”
“That,” I said, squeezing her fingers between mine, “goes without saying.”
I saw her smile from the corner of my eye.
“No, Max, it doesn’t go without saying. Not with me.”
I turned my head to look at her profile. Her smile stayed, like she’d caught me at something.
“I love you, Sherry,” I said.
This time she turned her head and looked into my face.
Again there were those brow lines like she wasn’t sure where the unusual words had come from. Then she smiled.
“You know something, Max?” she said. “I believe you do.”
For another couple of hours we lay there, she on her back, and I finally rolled over onto a towel and watched the western sky, studying the cloud pattern that was building out there on the horizon. It was not a typical Everglades weather construction. During the summer months the heat of the day causes millions of gallons of water from the surface of the exposed Glades to evaporate and rise and start to build a wall of towering cloud in the sky above it. But I could tell from the lessons of Billy Manchester—my attorney friend and his sometimes annoying habit of knowing everything—that the cloud I was watching in the distance was blowing in much too high for that weather pattern. These were the kind that came from elsewhere, pushed by forces that were not homegrown. But I was watching passively, assessing nothing. I was also listening to nothing, literally. Our surroundings had gone silent. No chirruping of the midday insects that fed in the heat. No bird call. In fact, the owl that had made it a practice to come out of its roof hole and had afforded us such viewing pleasure for the past two days seemed to be absent. I rolled onto my side again and looked out to the east where Wally the gator would normally have been sunning himself on the low mound of flattened sawgrass. He too was missing. I also made a mental note that I had not heard a distant engine of an airboat during the entire morning. But I only contemplated the absence of sound for a short few moments and then reminded myself how odd and luxurious such an occurrence was for people like us to enjoy. Sherry seemed to be asleep. We seemed totally alone.