She nodded, similarly unamused. “Silver linings,” she remarked, and got up to go to her next meeting.
So that was one good thing. And another was Idelba, still staying on his office couch at night. They would get up in the morning and get dressed and go off and do their thing without a word to each other, and without communication during the day. Idelba was going to move her tug and barge back out to Coney Island soon, and there was a lot to do. But then at the end of the day, after dinner, there she would be, in his apartment, and then they would get ready for bed like castaways stuck on the same life raft. He could feel the pain in her, and then he could feel it in himself. They knew what they were remembering, and neither of them wanted to talk about it. He could still feel that crunch of the tug against the building, see the blood on the wall and in the water. The look on her face, the looking away ever since. Nothing to be done; nothing to be said. Just stay in his office at night, saying nothing.
And it wasn’t just those poor strangers they had crushed, of course. They knew that too. Back when their child had drowned, they had tried to talk about it. Had tried not to blame each other. There was no reason for blame, it had been an accident. Still it had driven them apart. There was no denying that. Vlade had felt blamed, and tried not to resent it. Drank more, dove more. Spent his life underwater, where unfortunately you couldn’t really forget a drowning, but it was his job, his life; and so when he came up he drank. And she had seen that and gotten mad, or sad. They had drifted apart as if on different icebergs, right there in the same apartment in Stuyvesant, jammed right on each other but a million miles apart. He had never been lonelier. If you are in bed next to a person, naked under the sheets, but alone, totally alone: maybe that’s the worst solitude. He had spent the years since then sleeping alone and yet felt far less solitary than he had that year in that bed. By the time Idelba had moved out they were both wordless, catatonic. Nothing to say. Grief kills speech, drives you down into a hole alone. Look, everyone’s going to die, he had wanted to say. But even so … but there had been nothing that came next. It didn’t help to say it. Nor to say anything. It would only add to the solitude.
Bad times. Bad years. Then more years had passed, and more still, in a kind of oblivion; it had been sixteen years now, how could that be? What was time, where did it go? Closing on twenty years, and here they were now, with all that still in them.
And at the end of every day she came back to his rooms. And one night she came in and hugged him so hard he could feel his ribs as a cage of bone around his innards. He didn’t know what was happening. He was bigger than her, but she was stronger. He resisted the squeeze, then felt it as her opening in a conversation that they couldn’t manage to speak. They were neither of them good at talking about things like this. Her native tongue was Berber, his was Serbo-Croatian. But that wasn’t it.
Maybe they didn’t need speech. That night they went to sleep in their different rooms. More days passed. One night she slept on his bed next to him, saying nothing. After that they slept together through the nights, barely touching, wearing night clothes. Autumn passed, the days got shorter, the nights longer. Sometimes in the middle of the night he would wake up and roll over onto his other side, and there she would be, lying on her back. Seemed always to be awake. Rigid, or sometimes not. She would turn her head and look at him, and in the dark he could see nothing but the whites of her eyes. Such dark and lustrous skin: she glowed darkly in the dark. He could see that whatever she was thinking, which was God knew what, she wanted to be there. Once he put a hand on her arm. They were the same warmth. She moved her head toward him and they kissed, briefly, chastely, their bunched lips just touching in a knot, like you would with a friend. She looked at him like a mind reader. She rolled toward him, pushed him onto his back, rolled halfway onto him. They lay there clutched together like drowning people going down. I’ll be with you when the deal goes down. She lay there for most of an hour, seemed for a while to be asleep, but mostly not, mostly awake, silent. Breathing into each other, rising and falling together. When she rolled back off him his left leg had gone to sleep. The rest of him fell asleep holding her hip.
One sunny day late in October she tugged the barge back to Coney Island and anchored the barge to the loop of cable still tied to massive bollards off the sunken boardwalk. Vlade went with her, towing his boat behind the barge, so he could get back to the city the next day.
As before Hurricane Fyodor, they were well offshore. The shallows below them were maybe more turbid than usual, and the shoreline to the north looked perhaps lower, more battered. When they were anchored they took one of Idelba’s pilot boats and a couple of her crew up Ocean Parkway to where Brooklyn now rose out of the ocean, to have a look around. They took it slow, as the canal was obstructed.
The intertidal exposed by low tide was thrashed, and above the high tide mark, heavily junked with rubbish of all kinds. Buildings had collapsed for four or five blocks inland. It was hard to see any sign at all of the many bargeloads of sand that Idelba and her colleagues had moved from the drowned beach up to the new shoreline. “Damn,” Idelba exclaimed. “That’s like five hundred bargeloads of sand, just disappeared! How could it be? Where did it go?”
“Inland,” Vlade supposed. “Or offshore. Do you want to go down and have a look?”
“I kind of do. Are you up for it?”
“Always.”
This was almost true. Stripping down, getting the wetsuits on, gearing up and psyching up—all this was a spur to the blood, always, and never so much as when prepping with Idelba.
Over the side they were lowered, into the cold water. Down into the murk, the stupendously powerful Mercia headlamps cutting short fat cones of illuminated water ahead of them. Low tide, so the bottom was just ten or fifteen feet under the boat’s keel, meaning there was a bit of ambient light too, which actually made the water seem more opaque rather than less. Water getting colder as it pressed on them. From cold, to colder, to coldest. Coldissimo, Rosario called it.