Though Bette never said or did anything to make me feel unwelcome, I could tell by the way she lived that she was a private person, and probably didn’t revel in having a regular houseguest. I had the sense that she could snap shut at any time, that any bridge to her could collapse. To make myself useful while staying with her, I cleaned the apartment and left sandwiches in the refrigerator for when she came home for lunch. The apartment was across the street from Bette’s work. She was the groundskeeper for a private home called the Barnacle, which was owned by the family of the original owner, Commodore Ralph Middleton Monroe. Commodore Monroe had founded the first organization in the area—Biscayne Bay Yacht Club—in 1891, when Miami was little more than a fort. The Barnacle was nestled on the bay among ten acres of tropical hardwood hammock. No one lived there, but the family wanted someone on the property during the day, to make sure vagrants stayed out and the lawn was mowed and—most important—that the Egret, a schooner docked at the Barnacle’s pier, was kept free of growth and rust. The Egret was Bette’s main task, and the only one for which she truly was qualified—she had been sailing competitively since she was ten years old. There was a rumor that the family planned in the future to deed the Barnacle to the state and open the house for tours, and Bette hoped to continue to look after the Egret part-time and spend the rest of her time doing what she loved: scuba diving. Nights, she sometimes went into her room and closed the door, and I could hear music through the wall and the low tones of hushed speech as she talked on the phone. Two or three times, she’d stayed out all night—where, I didn’t yet guess—and had come home at dawn, tiptoeing into the living room where I slept. Once, she’d made so much noise coming in that I couldn’t reasonably pretend to sleep through it, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that she had dropped a large canvas bag filled with green and blue glass bottles. I helped her collect them—none broke—and the next day when I glanced into her bedroom from the kitchenette, I saw those bottles lined up on the windowsill, refracting the sunlight.
From time to time I kept Bette company while she did her chores at the Barnacle. This is how I ended up lying on the Barnacle’s pier one Tuesday afternoon during that last long visit, after losing my job in Atlanta. I’d been in Miami for almost four weeks straight. It was January, but still we wore swimsuits without covering up, and the heat on the wooden pier spread through my skin like a warm blanket. Dennis was at class. That morning, he’d stopped by the apartment after Bette went to work, and we’d necked on the couch until the cushions stuck to our skin. This is what I returned to, all day: the rushing, splitting-open feeling of touching Dennis, of being touched by him. My mother was right: it was not easy, staying out of his bedroom.
Bette wore a scarf over her hair and a neon orange bikini top and cutoffs with a red velvet patch on the thigh. She squinted while she polished the brass fittings of the Egret’s teak railing. I mistook the squinting for concentration—later I would learn that this was a side effect of her nearsightedness, which, in an uncharacteristic fit of vanity, she had not corrected with eyeglasses. “Those bottles,” she said. “I’ve been dying to tell you.”
I put aside the law journal I’d been reading, an article Dennis had published earlier that year. “Tell me,” I said.
She squatted on the gunwale of the boat. I shaded my eyes to look up at her. She said, “I found them on a wreck. A shipwreck.”
“Where?”
She pointed south across the bay. “Out there.”
My first thought was that surely it was not legal to remove items from a shipwreck. “Can you get in trouble for that?” I said.
She laughed. “I don’t imagine they’re worth much. But they’re beautiful. I found them in the forward cabin the other night. It took me two trips to get them all up.”
“You dove at night?” It seemed impossible that on those nights when she’d been out until dawn, she’d been scuba diving. I’d seen Bette’s boat—it was a seventeen-foot sailfish, a toddler of a boat. Surely it wasn’t fitted with dive lights. This meant she’d been diving with someone else, from that person’s boat.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I go with a friend. It’s safe.”
I thought of Benjamin, a ruddy-faced bear of a man who spoke softly and had the habit, I’d witnessed, of lifting Bette over his shoulder until she battered him into letting her down. I stood up and stepped over the railing of the Egret, and maneuvered until I was straddling the gunwale, facing her. “OK, tell me,” I said. It was a little awkward, I admit. She hadn’t ever invited this kind of gabfest, and I wasn’t sure we were suited to it.
For whatever reason, though—she was excited, bursting—this was not a secret she wanted to keep. “I met this woman,” she said, throwing me for a loop. “Her name is Jane. She’s a professional salvor. You know what that is?” I shook my head. “She has an engineering degree or something, and she works with dive teams to raise shipwrecks. They have to do it without hurting anything, inside the wreck or outside it. It’s very complicated work. Anyway, I met her at the club.” The club was the Coconut Grove Sailing Club, where Bette taught sailing lessons on the weekends in exchange for a discount on her boat slip. “I’m teaching her to sail.”
“And she’s teaching you to—salve?”
“Salvage,” she said. She looked off, as if remembering. “No, we just dive together. She knows the best spots. There’s a wreck she’s bringing up soon, and sometimes we just go there to hunt around, see what we see. It’s an old hull freighter that sank on its way from Venezuela. Nothing valuable aboard, just trinkets. Memories.”
I couldn’t think of anything I’d ever done that was nearly as exciting as scuba diving in a sunken ship. “Does Dennis know?” I said.
“Of course not. Are you going to tell him?”
“Not if you’d rather I didn’t.”
“Jane said we should keep quiet about it. I guess the state wouldn’t be too happy that she was diving the wreck before bringing it up.”
“When are you going out next?” I said.
“Tonight, probably. I don’t know why I told you.”
“I’m glad you did.” We sat quietly for a moment, and Bette returned to polishing the railing. “Are you ready to get married?” I said.
She dropped the polishing cloth onto the pier and stepped over the railing. “I guess not,” she said. “Are you?”