A moment later, the actual starts reintroducing itself.
There’s been an explosion. She seems to have been thrown clear. The pain in her left arm derives from a gash long and precise as the edge of a manila envelope. The idea of blood and sharks comes to her as a fact but only as a fact, a piece of long-remembered trivia, nothing actually threatening. It’s as if she’s recalling a story she heard about something awful that happened to a woman like her.
She seems to be surrounded by oddly random floating objects: a knob-ended length of mast, a baseball cap, an empty Diet Coke can.
She seems to see no one else.
As the ship begins its hissing descent into the water, it occurs to her that he’s not much of a swimmer. He’s refused the physical therapist’s contention that swimming is the best exercise for an amputee.
She’s surprised to find herself irritated with him. The irritation passes, and she’s looking around again, as if awakened in an unfamiliar place, seeing no one but herself.
Her condition of stunned remove stays with her as she treads water, unsure about what else to do. It stays with her as the dark-haired man, who does not speak English, attaches the harness that pulls her upward. It does not abandon her until she finds herself strapped to a gurney in a helicopter, wearing a neck brace that permits only a view of two scuba tanks hanging from straps, and a white metal box emblazoned with a red cross.
The red cross means, somehow (it seems clear, if unfathomable), that her husband is dead. She’s surprised (the baffled serenity of shock has not yet fully receded) by the piercing, inhuman wail she hears. She’d had no idea she could make a noise like that.
* * *
He will not be able to explain, because he will not remember, how he came to be lying in the shallows of a white-sand beach almost a full day after the boat caught fire. The medics who take him to the modest local hospital will merely say “Miracle,” their accents rendering it “Me-wrack-cowl.”
They bring her to him immediately. When she enters the hospital room he looks at her with chaste and monk-like calm, and then weeps as loudly and unabashedly as a three-year-old.
She gets into the narrow bed with him, and holds him. They both understand. They’ve visited a future in which for each of them the other has vanished. They’ve tasted separation. And now they’ve returned to the present, where a resurrection has occurred. They are, as of this hour, married forever.
* * *
Do you remember that story you read me?
What story? Hey, you’re not packing your Britney Spears hoodie, are you?
I like my Britney hoodie. You know, that story.
I read you hundreds of stories. You haven’t worn that hoodie since you were fifteen.
The story about the one-legged soldier.
Oh. Yes. Why are you bringing that up now?
Maybe because I’m leaving home.
You are not leaving home. You’re going to college two states away. It’s a six-hour drive. This will always be your home.
I’m not going to wear the Britney hoodie, what kind of dweeb do you think I am?
What is it about the one-legged soldier?
I knew what you were doing. I thought I should tell you I knew what you were doing. Now that I’m leaving home.
And what, darling, do you think I was doing?
Duh. You were telling me the story of you and Dad.
If you’re not going to wear the hoodie, why are you taking it at all?
Sentimental reasons. A reminder of my glory days.
Your glory days are still ahead of you.
People keep saying that. What point were you trying to make, reading me that story?
I don’t think I was trying to make a point at all. It was just a story.
It was just the only story there is about somebody who’s missing a leg, and gets followed into a fire by his ballerina girlfriend.
Do you really think I was trying to make some kind of point about your father and me?
I remember you asking me if I knew what the word “destiny” meant.
I guess I wondered … If you were worried. About your father and me.
Fucking right I was.
I’m not crazy about that word.
Tell me you never noticed that Trevor and I knew how miserable you both were. You seem to be getting better, though.
Leave the hoodie here, all right?
I’m perfectly capable of keeping it safe, all on my own, in my dorm room. This hoodie does not need to reside within the House of Safety.
Honestly? I’m not really sure what we’re talking about, anymore.
We’re talking about a paper ballerina who had two perfectly good legs of her own but flew into the fire anyway.
It’s silly for you to pack something you’re never going to wear. Dorm rooms have extremely limited storage space.
Okay, let’s keep the hoodie here. Let’s keep everything here.
Please don’t be melodramatic.
Trevor’s gone. I leave tomorrow.
And you keep saying that because …
That story was all about the paper ballerina. She didn’t have a destiny. Only the one-legged soldier did.
Do you want us to read the story again?
I think I’d rather eat glass.
All right, then.
I’m going to leave the hoodie here. It’ll be safer here.
Good. It’s nice to be told I’m right about something. Some little thing. Every now and then.
* * *
They’re into their sixties now.
He’s still selling cars. She’s returned to her practice, knowing she’s too old and yet too inexperienced to rise above the level of associate. The firm is doing well enough to have room for a competent-enough tough-but-compassionate mother figure. She’s not only there to litigate, but to be salty and irreverent for men whose own mothers tended to be prim, mannerly, and cheerful almost to the point of madness.
She minds, more than she’d thought she would, that she appears to others as a cantankerous, endearing old lady.
He’s worried about sales. Nobody wants American cars anymore.
The two of them are at home tonight, as they are most nights.
He’s become the only person to whom she remains visible, who knows that she hasn’t always been old. Beth and Trevor love her but so clearly want her to be, to always have been, grandmotherly: reliable and harmless and endlessly patient.
The next surprise to come, it seems, is true decline. The surprise after that is mortality, first one of them, then the other.
Her therapist encourages her not to think this way. She does her best.
Here they are, in their living room. They’ve built a fire in the fireplace. The movie they’ve been watching on their big-screen TV has just ended. His prosthetic (it’s titanium, beautiful in its way, nothing like the grotesque, Band-Aid-colored appendage of their college days) stands beside the fireplace. As the closing credits roll, they sit together, companionably, on the sofa.