She dropped the suitcase and began to run, unencumbered, her arms churning. The dinghy was a hundred yards from shore and he was facing her, leaning into the oars, but he had the sombrero pulled down low so that his features were lost to her. She called out his name. Jerked her skirts high and bolted into the surf — she would swim, swim or drown — but he kept pulling at the oars, pulling harder and harder. The sea swept in. She was wet through, her skirts wound round her legs like the twisted chain of an anchor. She called out again. Twice, three times, bleating his name till the syllables ran up against one another and made no more sense than the inarticulate cry of an animal. The surf slammed at her, drove her down and jerked her back again till she was flung shivering on the beach in a white surge of foam and Rafael slid smoothly over the rail and melted away in the depths of Lawrence Chiles’ boat.
Then the sails unfurled and caught the wind and the boat was gone.
Inez Deane
Does life go on? It does. Though she sank low enough to consider the alternative, even going so far as to take her stepfather’s rifle down from its hook and caress the trigger where it shone silver from use, and she spent one dismal fog-haunted afternoon suspended over the ocean on a fragment of rock no wider around than the seat of a chair, daring herself to jump. She could hear the crash of the waves, taste the salt-sting of the spray. The damp penetrated her hair, slicked the rock till it might have been greased. There was a cold drip from above. She pressed her back to the wall, closed her eyes and let her mind wheel away from the voice that whispered, Let go, let go, let go. She saw herself dancing then, saw herself at the piano, and presently she imagined her fingers moving over the keys, working her way through the melody bar by bar as if it were an exercise and Mr. Sokolowski seated beside her on a platform of cloud beating out the time, and it was the music that held her there. And when finally she removed her shoes so that her naked feet could anchor her and she climbed back up the rock face above her, up to the plateau beyond and the sheep scattered there in all their blank-eyed placidity, she tested each handhold as if it were her last.
She was in the kitchen one interminable afternoon two months later, taking a cleaver to the unyielding carcass of the wether Adolph had shot the day before, her brain gone as dull as the blade she had to keep sharpening over and over, when there came a tap at the door. She looked up from the chopping block, the cleaver poised above the twisted red mass of muscle, skin and tallow. The stove creaked. The faintest distant rumor of the seals barking for the sheer pleasure of it inserted itself into the silence. She thought she must have been hearing things, but then came the second tap and she set down her cleaver. Caught her breath. Wiped her hands, very slowly, on the apron, her eyes fixed on the window set in the door.
There was a figure on the back porch, a hovering shadow, indistinct behind the drizzled panes of scoured glass. It took a moment to understand that this wasn’t her stepfather. That it wasn’t Jimmie or Adolph. That it was someone else altogether, someone new, a new face and form to align with the only three she knew because in all these hills and gullies and sea-battered coves, there were just the four of them, no one else, but for the shearers who weren’t due back till winter or the odd fisherman who came ashore to feel something beneath his feet besides swaying planks and the elastic give-and-take of cold salt water. And now a voice was attached to the form, a voice calling her name softly, a man’s voice—“Edith? Edith, is that you in there?”—and she knew that voice, didn’t she? Of course she did. It was, it was—
She was already moving toward the door, wiping her hands furiously now, the stink of the dead animal in her nostrils, the apron filthy, her hair a mess — and she couldn’t pat it in place, wouldn’t dare, not till she washed the offal from her hands — when it came to her: Robert. It was Robert Ord. The sealer. The jack-of-all-trades. The man — the young man — who possessed a boat, his own boat, a craft with a rudder, a sail and a hull that could slice the waves like its own kind of cleaver and carry anything or anybody all the way to the pale indented shore that hovered there on the horizon like a mirage. One more wipe of the hands and she pulled open the door, his name on her lips: “Robert, Robert, what a surprise. How are you?”
He was tall, levitating right up out of his sealskin boots, taller than she remembered, and he was grinning down at her with such burning intensity she wondered if he hadn’t been drinking. “Me?” A pause. “I’m just, well, I got a bad sore on my foot, the right one?” He held out his leg and shook it for her, his heavy cotton twill trousers spattered with white blotches that might have been paint, but then what would he have been painting out here — the cabin of his boat? “It don’t smell too good, but it’s nothing to worry over, nothing I ain’t seen before, though I told myself I should of took that splinter out of there the minute it went in, just pus, that’s all, and I guess that’ll teach me to go walking around in my bare feet… but what I mean to say is, how are you?”
She wanted to give him the conventional response, wanted to say she was fine, but instead she pulled the door wide for him and ushered him in, saying, “Crushed with boredom, because nothing ever changes here, you ought to know that. But come, sit at the table and I’ll fix you something. Are you hungry? Would you like tea? I can make you toast — and we’ve got some strawberry jam left from the last time the boat came in.” If there was a flutter in her voice, it had nothing to do with calculation, not yet, anyway. She was excited, that was all — transported — because here was something new, a break in the routine, the vast towering wall of the day suddenly crumbling to dust around her.
“Don’t go to any trouble,” he murmured, hovering, awkward, a bedroll under one arm and his coat patched at the elbows. In the next moment he was trying to ease himself into the chair at the stained table by the window, the space cramped, his legs too long, the slant roof of the kitchen angling down to confine him, and then he was seated. “I fried up some abalone on the boat this morning, so I…” He trailed off, then patted his pockets till he came up with what he was looking for — a bottle — and set it on the table. “Want a drink?”
“A drink?” Her stepfather didn’t allow her to take spirits. He didn’t allow her to associate with the opposite sex or go to school or pursue her musical studies or experience anything anyone would call living because he wanted her under his wing, wanted her to cook and clean and make his bed for him while he went horseback over the hills and sat playing cards at night and drinking from his own bottle. “What is it,” she asked, “whiskey?”
“Rum,” he said, pulling the cork with his teeth. “Fetch a glass. Two glasses.”
He watched her, grinning, as she eased down in the chair across from him and lifted the glass to her lips. So this is rum, she was thinking, the rising vaporous odor tearing her eyes, caustic, poisonous, like nothing so much as a solvent, and then the liquid itself burning her lips, her tongue, the back of her throat. She clamped her jaws tight. Let out a gasp of surprise. Next thing she knew she was blotting her eyes with the corner of her apron.
He laughed aloud. “No, no,” he said, “you don’t sip it, you just toss it down like this, watch.” He sat up straight in the chair and jerked his head back, draining the glass in a single gulp. “Go ahead, try it again.”
She laughed too because it was funny, tossing rum in the kitchen at four in the afternoon — he was a tosspot, that’s what he was. She’d always wondered where that expression came from and now she knew. It was funny. Hilarious. And then she followed suit, a tosspot herself, and the shock of it very nearly seized her up — it was as if a rake had gone down her throat, or one of those enameled back-scratchers they sell in Chinatown, and the heat was inside of her now. Again she felt her jaws clamp. She tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come.