Nearly noon. Starving. Sole customer on the rooftop deck of the bar, she doused her chicken strips with malt vinegar and set to work on the near-year’s worth of padding between her bones and the yearnings her now-gone slenderness once yielded. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. Her sunburnt skin chafed against the wooden bench as she surveyed the marina’s scruffy local tugs and polished yachts up from the borders for the precious early fall colours. She sipped her beer. Metal clanked on the street below and she ignored it to flick at the meticulous cloisonné of a ladybug decorating the napkin draped across her spreading thighs. More clanking. Gas hissed and her ears shrilled. She leaned over the railing next to her bench and peered down at the street. Leo. He sprang into the bed of his flashy white truck and shut the leaking valve, his lanky hind-side poking out of his jeans. As if she hadn’t had her fill of him yesterday on his boat. But his dive shop was only three storefronts of caps and maple fudge past the bar—everything in this town was close to everything else. He shifted and exposed his dirty-blond soul patch new to her since she’d retired herself from diving, and in marked contrast to what must be his bottle-born light-blond mane. On the boat yesterday, she’d had little to do but study Leo alternately blustering and lazing while Jane and Rand reviewed maps of their cave. Little to do, like now.
Another tank shrieked. You cunting slut, Leo yelled at no one in particular.
More beer. She decided that when she finished she’d order another. Below her Leo reached with his sinewy arms for the offending cylinder and then straightened, slim-hipped and wide-shouldered, in Rand’s weathered Bend-A-Friend tee—what all the other wannabes wouldn’t give for one. It was a limited edition doled out at a cave-diving conference in the south attended by the usual elites. Like Rand—who literally gave Leo the sweaty cheapo shirt off his back when he’d fussed over it, pestering like an undeserving brat. She recalled that they’d been on a ride back from some northern dive site—some dive she herself had nailed, unlike Leo, she consoled herself by thinking now. But Leo fronted complimentary air fills and cookouts and boat trips. In exchange Rand adopted a shut-up, put-up arrangement. Something else she knew about, she thought, observing the glister of fat on her chicken until her appetite deserted her. She wished she were home, at her desk graphing stoma and denta divorced from anyone she’d ever met. She pressed the tines of her fork into her palm. She wished for canker and boil. For septicemia. For any rash undoing of the body in what used to seem to her—before her near-death in the wreck, before her parents’ deaths—an adventuresome unfolding, lush and wild although mostly these days she just worked grim and grimmer. But better that than playing tag-a-long. Guilting Jane. Wishing she could guilt Rand.
She took another pull on her drink and ignored the sharp mix of voices from the street. Light flared a few feet above her—sun banking off a circling gull. More voices. Leo was climbing from his truck. A few of his guys milled about while he pirouetted in the road, chest thrust forward. He’d always struck her as tightly strung, jittery and high-handed. She pegged him as a premature ejaculator—needy and pushy and unable to hold himself back and therefore not much fun to tease, perspiring overly onto the sheets. Even so she balled her paper napkin in her lap and plastered on a smile. Beggars can’t be choosers, her mother used to tell her.
She called from her belvedere. Much ado about nothing, Captain?
He shaded his eyes with both hands and looked up. Who’s that? he said.
Forgot me already? Marilyn?
He lowered his arms. Shit, he said loudly to his mini-militia. Gets worse, don’t it.
She considered tossing her glass but really she wished for thunderbolts, then more reasonably for bulbous tumours or raisin-sized nodes. Any kind of flesh-wreck. Special delivery, Leo. Even so she took a few seconds to rehearse her next line. What’s that? she finally trilled. Didn’t catch you.
He cupped his hands around his mouth. Something’s wrong, he bugled. Someone’s missing.
Sunlight ignited his hair. A burnt tang seared her nostrils. Her head rolled.
When she came to she was on her feet. Amber streamed onto the decking and she stepped out of its wake and righted the glass. Garble roiled her mouth. She wondered how long she’d been gone.
That’s all I know, Leo shouted, then his silhouette moved shiftily around as if facing a disagreeable decision. Yeah, he said after a moment. You’d better come too.
18