“We needed some time alone,” he said in his gruff half-asleep voice, sounding unconvinced.
“We’re not alone.”
“We’re with adults. It’s different. We’ll bring her next weekend.” His face was no more than an inch from my own. He said, “Aren’t you having a good time?”
I didn’t want to say no, but to say yes would have been a lie. I understood that for whatever reason, I wasn’t made for this kind of weekend, two couples on an island. I was too consumed by every little thing; it would’ve been impossible for me to enjoy myself. “It’s gone well,” I said, and felt Dennis relax. There would come a time, long after he and Paul were no longer friends, when I would tell Dennis that Paul had noticed my bruise. I would transform the story from what it was—discomforting but also thrilling—into just another anecdote. Did he watch us? Dennis would say. Or did he hear us from bed? Maybe he’d gotten up for a glass of water, I would say. Maybe he heard us sneaking back to bed and guessed where we’d been.
I never told Dennis what I believe happened, what I imagine when I recall the scene: Paul heard us rise from bed. He followed us. He stood in the kitchen window the entire time, watching us—watching me—from the darkness.
We were standing on the dock, getting ready to head out to Soldier’s Key for some snorkeling, when the Cessna returned. It was late morning, and we’d eaten breakfast and packed up in anticipation of leaving that afternoon. Dennis shushed us. “Listen,” he said.
The low hum turned into a louder hum with a putter in it, and then the plane appeared in the blue sky. “Holy shit,” said Paul.
Dennis didn’t say anything. There was a fierce, protective quality in his expression. The plane started to circle.
“It won’t drop anything with us standing right here,” said Marse. “Will it?”
“No way,” said Paul.
“I’ll get the binoculars,” I said, but Dennis caught my arm.
“Wait,” he said, as if he knew that at that moment, after circling the Becks’ house only two or three times, the plane would drop another rectangular white package. It did.
“Unbelievable,” said Paul.
“Call the Coast Guard,” I said to Dennis.
“I told you—the boat registration.”
We looked at each other, and suddenly I realized that I didn’t have the whole story. Something inside me seized up and brought to surface a fear I would experience only a few times during our marriage: What if everything was not as it seemed? What if all the walls fell away and revealed a world turned upside down, inside out, defiant of everything I’d taken for granted? Before that moment, I would have said that Dennis had no secrets from me at all. The sound of the Cessna’s engine faded as it headed, once again, out to sea. Dennis stepped onto the boat and I stepped after him, feeling it totter with my weight. Paul and Marse went inside.
“What?” I said, fighting the urge to cross my arms, to treat the moment like a standoff. I reminded myself that Dennis was my husband, whom I loved.
He flipped a switch to let fuel into the carburetor. “It’s no big deal,” he said, “but there’s a chance that if we call the Coast Guard, they might impound the boat.”
“This boat?”
“Yes, Frances.”
“Is it drugs?” I couldn’t comprehend why it would be, but these were my natural associations: boat, Coast Guard, drugs.
“Baby, of course not.”
We looked toward the Becks’ house. The wind was stronger and the bay choppier than the day before, and the white package was moving more quickly. I sat on the gunwale. “Why?”
He watched the compass on the console, the needle bobbing even though we were headed nowhere. “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d worry, and you wouldn’t want to use the boat, and we’d have to cancel the weekend.” I stared at him, my gut tight. He said, “I got a call from the police this week. Apparently, the guy who sold us the boat didn’t own it.”
We’d bought the boat from a man in Key Largo who’d just gotten divorced, who was, as he put it, liquidating his ass. I’d stood admiring the boat—our first!—while Dennis shook the man’s hand. Dennis said, “Technically, it belonged to his wife’s brother.”
“But that has nothing to do with us,” I said. “We didn’t know that.” He looked at me but didn’t say anything. “You knew?” I said.
He shrugged. “I had a hunch.”
“Oh my God.”
“I just need to prove that I didn’t know the guy before he sold me the boat.”
“You didn’t know him, did you?”
“I didn’t know him. I didn’t. But”—he lowered his voice—“I knew something was wrong. He was too eager to sell, and the boat was too cheap. Really, Frances, think about it—we couldn’t have afforded this boat. And I wanted it for us.” Dennis had known colleagues to be disbarred for less. It was nothing I’d worried about before. In the past year, we’d built an addition on the back of the house, a high-ceilinged family room with a wall of sliding glass doors. We’d hired Kyle Heiger, Marse’s brother, to be the contractor on the job, and though he’d done excellent work, the whole project had ended up costing more than we’d expected. Also that year, Dennis had been invited to join the Biscayne Bay Yacht Club, and though money was tight we didn’t feel we could turn it down. This was the year, too, that we’d become partners in the stilt house, and so had begun the annual lease payments, the taxes, and the sharing of upkeep and repairs. It was, I knew, typical of many Miami families to live above their means, to hunker under a mounting precipice of debt, but I hadn’t thought of us as the type.
“We should sell the boat,” I said.
“Really, it’s not that big a deal. I’m just not sure where the paperwork stands. It might be that technically, on paper only, we’re driving a stolen boat.”
“Are you concerned?” I said.
“No,” said Dennis, coming to comfort me. “It’s just a hassle, that’s all.” I turned away from him. Our boat wasn’t ours—it was some guy’s petty way of getting back at his wife, whom he had probably loved once, a long time ago. I stepped onto the dock and looked up at the stilt house. I felt cold and unsteady, as if I’d shed a more confident version of myself. I could already feel myself losing the version of me who’d wake to her husband’s mid-night caress, the girl who’d have sex against a porch railing, arms flung over the water, as if submitting to the sea itself.
Beneath the Becks’ dock, the white package continued its tortoise journey to sea. “Let’s go get it,” I said.
“Frances—”
I shouted for Paul and Marse, and they joined us on the dock. Marse read my face for signs of stress. I told them what I wanted. “Are you sure?” said Paul.
“If we don’t do a little research,” I said, “we’ll never know.”
“What if the pickup comes while we’re there?” said Marse.
“It won’t,” said Paul.
Dennis climbed into the boat and started the engine. Paul untied the spring line and threw it into the well of the boat.
“It’s the sharks or us,” I said to Marse.
“Us,” she said, stepping into the boat.
Paul handled the lines and we drifted from the dock. The channel was choppy and Dennis took it slow. I watched the horizon for planes and boats. My heart pounded. We coasted up to the package and Paul readied himself, an arm extended. The package seemed irrelevant now, a detail; Dennis’s deceit loomed. The boat tipped as Paul leaned over the side. To Dennis, I said, “I’m nervous.” Dennis looked at the package, then at me. He came to me and we looked around: the bay, the ocean, stilt houses in the distance, compact and still.