When he couldn’t take it any longer, he got out a life preserver and tossed it over. Ray took it and hung on, breathing hard. Becky pulled Sea Urchin up close, but Raymond just lay there, back heaving, looking up at Jim. Weir pulled the rope ladder from a deck well, hooked one end over the railing, and threw the rest down. It unfurled in the breeze and splashed down next to the ship.
Raymond was still looking up. “Next time,” he said. Weir could hardly hear the words.
Then Raymond took a deep breath and dove under, vanishing immediately in the gray water. Five minutes later — minutes during which Jim understood not a single thing on earth except the passage of time itself — Raymond rose, back first, escorted by a scintillant halo of bubbles that broke on the surface and then disappeared, as if their duty had been completed.
Weir eased the ship closer, lowered a lifeboat, climbed down the ladder, and got Raymond into it.
Becky watched from the near-distance. Then she tied up to Lady of the Bay and spent the trip back trying to talk Dave Cantrell into not dying.
The Coast Guard cutter Point Divide, summoned by Becky, found them two miles from the harbor. They got Cantrell onto a stretcher and took him aboard. Nobody seemed sure what to do about Raymond except for Jim, who said he’d take Ray back to port.
Chapter 33
It was evening by the time that Jim got back to the big house. Virginia was still gone. He showered, ignored the reporters on the phone, and walked down to Becky’s.
Becky was wrapping up a phone interview when Jim walked in. She told the reporter that what had happened was far larger than the games of politics, that C. David Cantrell was a man who had suffered at the hands of someone enraged by disillusion and betrayal. She looked at Jim as she hung up. “Enough,” she said. “Let’s go.”
They took Sea Urchin out into the harbor and anchored her on the lee side of Balboa Island. The breeze was strong enough to send the smell of the dead ocean past them. Becky had packed a dinner: good bread, a bottle of wine, cold steak for sandwiches, and some oranges. They sat on the deck and ate as the sun went down, finishing off the wine quickly. When the wind turned cool, they went below decks and squeezed into the little berth together. Jim dreamed that he was underwater and his eyes were closed forever, and no matter how hard he tried to open them, he couldn’t. A big anchor was chained to his feet, and he wasn’t struggling now, but simply descending with it, surrendered, giving himself over to a downward motion that promised nothing but its own irresistible velocity and the possibility that he might find someone he was looking for in this universe of water. It was nine o’clock before he woke up again. Becky was brushing the hair back from his sweating forehead, looking down on him in the near-darkness of the berth.
They watched the news in the big house. The local segments were all on Cantrell and Raymond: the DA’s office had already acknowledged that the well-known developer was “involved” with Lt. Cruz’s wife, Ann, and that the whole thing was possibly a “love triangle that ended in tragedy.” The reports were little more than abject confusion and speculation. Weir was referred to as the “grieving brother” of the dead woman. No one could explain the suicide of Horton Goins or the note he had left behind. Becky, her black dress still caked with the vermilion of Cantrell’s blood, pushed her hand toward a camera and walked away saying, “No comment.” Brian Dennison’s glum face appeared next, saying that a full investigation was under way, focusing on Lt. Cruz’s activities of the last month. He announced with an almost-sullen reluctance that the suicide of Horton Goins was now being “fully reevaluated. There are a lot of things we still don’t know.” Dennison looked like a man at the end of all conceivable tethers, but without the energy to care anymore. A spokeswoman for Hoag Hospital said that Cantrell was in intensive care but was expected to live.
An unrelated item from Newport Beach came in at quarter to ten: A man had been killed on the Back Bay at eight-thirty when his boat exploded on the water. Preliminary investigations indicated a fuel leak and an errant cigarette. Identity being withheld pending notification of relatives.
Jim heard the front door open, Virginia’s voice, then footsteps in the entryway.
“Oh my God,” said Becky.
Jim turned. Virginia stepped into the living room, Joseph Goins beside her.
Weir stood and stared at the young man, who glanced only briefly back at Jim. Goins looked to him like a man who had long ago adjusted to the reduced dimensions of confinement. His eyes lowered and darted measuringly to either side; he put his weight on one leg, then smoothly shifted it to another; he seemed to be immediately aware of the objects around him and their distance from him. He struck Jim as less a presence than a kind of absence — receding as he stood there, threatening to vanish. He emoted an almost-palpable apartness, a discomfort in just being. His privacy, his remoteness, seemed huge. He held a small backpack in his right hand.
“Jim, Becky,” said Virginia. “I’d like you to meet Joseph. He’s going to talk to the DA tomorrow, get all this straightened out. After that, I don’t know.”
She came to Jim, wrapped her arms around him, and hugged him longer and more tenderly than he could remember her ever doing before in his life. “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Where have you been?”
“Sit down. Listen.”
Over the next hour, Virginia told of Ann’s early pregnancy by college-boy Cantrell, Virginia’s belief that Annie — age fifteen — would best be served by believing her child was stillborn rather than alive, that Ann would never know what gender it was, that the boy be placed far across the country, that Ann be forever encouraged to forget the whole minor, ancient incident. Virginia had attended the delivery, to make sure her deceptions were convincingly created. It was only, Virginia said, when Jim showed her the photo of Horton that her imagination was fueled, thus her visitations to Emmett and Edith; the law firm in Los Angeles that had handled Joseph’s adoption; Lucy in Hardin County, who led her to Joseph’s original “family,” still operating the farm outside Dayton; and finally to a big widow named Kate Hanf, who told her of the conversation she had had with a California lawyer in an upstate New York hospital, where he had said to her late on a September evening long ago the simple words that Ann herself waited a lifetime and never heard: You have a son.
Weir listened, speechless. He felt new and uncomprehending, as if just born into a world that had been here for aeons, building up secret upon secret, truth upon truth, without him.
Ann had a son.
When she was finished, she looked at Jim, then away. The shadows of the room seemed to gather in the lines of her brow, along the downturn of her mouth. It was the first time in his life that he had ever seen Virginia register the emotion of shame. It was also the first time she had ever looked at Jim with the need for approval.
He thought for a long moment before speaking. “You must get tired sometimes, Mom, of trying to run the world.”
“I never meant to—”
“Nobody ever means to.”
“There was no other way to make things come out right.”
Jim shot a look at her and held it, but Virginia had already turned away.
“As if,” she said quietly, “this is right.”
“You should have said something. If I’d have known about Annie and Cantrell, maybe I could have kept it from going down this way. You should have just come out with it instead of sitting on everything.”