She was all over me. She was crying. I started to cry. I couldn’ t help it. Tears ran down my face and I was holding her so tightly she couldn’t breathe and I was kissing her. I kissed her on the mouth and the boat rolled and it was the way it had been that other time with that sensation of falling through light-years of rose-colored space and the way it had been the first time with that feeling of drowning in her, of being overrun, submerged, lost, of never being able to come up again, nor ever wanting to. I kissed the tears on her face and kissed the closed eyelids, and at last I just held her in my arms with my face pressed to her throat, feeling her heart beat. Neither of us had said a word.
After a long time I raised my head so I could see her. Water had dripped out of my hair onto her face, mingling with the tears. I had got her dress all wet, holding her against me. There was a puffy and discolored bruise on her forehead, just at the hairline. The morning sun slanted across the closed eyes and the broad-cheekboned planes of her face, and with all of it she was so beautiful my breath caught in my throat.
Her eyes opened. They were wet and they were radiant, and the lashes looked darker, matted together with tears. She was somewhere between crying and laughing, and then the smile came and it trembled about the corners of her
“I—I didn’t think I was going to find you,” she whispered. “Oh, Bill! Bill—”
I leaned down and brushed the bruise on her forehead very gently with my lips. “You Swede,” I said. “You big, lovely, magnificent Swede. Hold still. I’ve got to look at you. I’ve got to touch you—”
It occurred to me I was both looking at her and touching her already and that I must be a little wild and not making much sense, but I didn’t really expect to. I was overloaded. I couldn’t handle any more right then. They were gone. We’d won. We were free. We were alone. The whole world was ahead of us. I loved her so much I choked up just looking at her. I tried to tell her all this, but I floundered and went dumb. I suppose you can take only so much of any emotion—even happiness—and then your circuit-breakers start to trip.
“I love you,” I finished lamely. “Maybe some day I’ll be able to make you understand how much—”
She nodded, and whispered, “I know. It’s the same with me. I have all the time, even before I knew what he’d done. I couldn’t help it. Don’t you see now why I couldn’t go off and leave him? The rest of my life I’d have felt I was the one who deserted him. And I couldn’t let it show in front of those two—pigs. I’d have died. I’d have felt naked.”
“They’re gone. Forget them.”
Her eyes grew suddenly grave. “There isn’t anywhere left in the world we can go, is there? But right now I don’t care. We’re alone. They’ll never take this away from us. We’re more alone than any two people have ever been in the world.”
I sprang up and caught her hand and pulled her erect. “What do you mean, there’s nowhere left we can go? Come here; I want to show you something.”
She looked at me as if I’d gone crazy, but let me hurry her down the companionway. I suddenly remembered I had nothing on but my shorts, but there was no time to worry about that now. I had to show her.
“Here,” I said. “Look.” I snatched away the top chart, the one of the Gulf of Mexico. The one below it was a chart of the whole Caribbean from Cuba down to the Windward Islands. “Look, Shannon. Honey. Look at it! That’s where we’re going. Nobody will ever catch us. We’ve got the boat. It can go anywhere. I could sail it around the world. All that money in that bag is yours—”
I put an arm about her and pointed at the chart, talking faster now, carried away with it, wanting her to see it. “Barbados—Antigua—Guadeloupe—Martinique. The small islands. Fishing villages. Just the two of us. Going places and doing things even millionaires just dream about. Think of it, honey: mountains and jungles rising straight out of the sea, water so blue you won’t believe it when you’re looking at it, beaches you never saw before, the trade winds blowing, and nights that almost make you drunk. And just us. They’ll never find us. Not the police, or anybody. They’ll forget us. We’ll change the name of the boat. Change her port of registry to—to—” I stabbed at the chart with a forefinger. “To San Juan. When we get tired of the Caribbean we’ll cross the Atlantic on the southern track and go through the Mediterranean and Suez to the Indian Ocean and down to the East Indies and the South Pacific. Java. Borneo. Tahiti—”
I stopped. She was watching me with the expression of someone listening to the babbling of a child.
“What is it, honey?” I asked. “Don’t you want to try it?”
“Oh,” she said. “Why—yes. Want to? Bill, I’d give anything on earth. Do you really think we can do it?”
“Do it?” I put my hands on each side of her face. “You big, beautiful Swede, of course we can do it! We’ll forget the whole world. You’re going to learn to sail a boat, and navigate, and swim, and fish off the reefs, and dive for lobsters, and you’re going to be tanned by every tropic sun there is, and made love to by moonlight off Trinidad and in the Malacca Strait and the Solomons and in tropical lagoons—”
“Bill—” She stopped. She couldn’t talk.
◊ ◊ ◊
At noon a little whisper of breeze blew up. We hoisted sail and I laid a course southeast toward the Yucatan Strait. We logged a scant two knots, but we were on our way. Toward sunset it dropped to dead calm again. I put the dinghy in the water and went around under the stern with a pot of white paint. I put a coat over the name and port of registry. When it dried I’d add a second, and a third, and then letter in the new name with black.
While I was working she came on deck in a rubber cap and a bathing suit that was just a brief pair of trunks and a bra. She dived over the side and swam around to hang onto the stern of the dinghy and watch me. When I had finished she helped me put the dinghy back on the cabin, and we sat in the cockpit and smoked, watching the afterglow fade.
“We’ll have to think of a name,” she said.
“It’s forgone,” I said. “Inevitable. It’ll be Freya.”
“Who was Freya?”
I grinned. “Another Swede. A goddess. The Norse goddess of love, to be exact.”
Her eyes were soft. “Bill, you’re sweet. And I hope you never change. But I’m just a big blonde.”
“So was Freya,” I said. “And Juno. And the Milan cathedral is a pile of rocks.”
She stopped me in quite the nicest way there is to stop anybody.
The last of the flame died in the west and there was a half portion of moon just past the meridian in the sky. The masthead swung in a lazy arc against the stars and we lay in the cockpit on a mattress from one of the bunks and looked up at it and made love and slept, and waked to whisper again.
I awoke late at night and the moon was gone and the deck was wet with dew. She lay very quietly beside me in the darkness, but in a moment I began to feel somehow she was awake. I put a hand on her bare thigh, and all the muscles were taut, and she was shaking. She was making no sound, but she was tight as violin strings.
“Shannon, honey,” I said. “What is it?”
It was a moment before she answered. “It’s all right, Bill,” she said. “I’m just a poor sleeper.”
I wondered if she had been thinking of Macaulay again, but I couldn’t ask her. I could feel the tenseness and rigidity flow out of her after a while and she lay quietly beside me. The stars began to fade.
“Let’s go swimming,” she said. “Last one in’s a landlubber.”
I sat up, and she was pulling the rubber bathing cap over her hair. We stepped onto the seat and dived, hand in hand, over the side. When we came up I caught her in my arms and she laughed. The shadowy form of the Ballerina rocked on the swell beside us and there was a splash of pink across the eastern sky. It was so beautiful it hurt, and so wonderful you wanted to tear it out of the context of time and put it in an album.