Marse stepped onto the boat. “How fast?”
“Fast,” said Dennis.
I stepped after Marse, but once I was standing in the boat, I didn’t know where to go. Dennis and Kyle and Marse were spaced out around the deck; I stood awkwardly in the middle. “Come look,” said Dennis, extending an arm. I followed him to the helm, and he positioned me in front of the steering wheel and stood behind me. If Marse and Kyle had been looking in our direction, they could have seen our necks and heads, but the console obscured our bodies. I put my hands on the metal wheel and jiggled it. It locked like a car’s. Dennis reached over my shoulder and touched a circular instrument in a teak case. “The most important piece of weather equipment on a boat,” he said. “A rise could mean strong winds or good weather. A drop means a storm.” He moved his hand to my hip. Then it seemed he wasn’t satisfied, and he pulled me against him, snaking his arm around my waist. “The quicker the drop, the bigger the storm.” I layered my arm over his. I could feel the rush of my blood, my beating heart. He spoke into my ear. “Come back with me. I’ll take you home.”
I turned to reply, but Kyle called out from the prow. “Let’s go if we’re going to go.”
Dennis released me. “Pack up,” he said loudly. “I’ll close the house.”
Marse’s bag was upstairs, so we went to get it and I followed her from room to room, checking for forgotten items. Dennis and Kyle closed all the shutters and dragged the rocking chairs inside and locked the doors. Dennis pulled a gate across the stairs and secured it with a padlock. We gathered on the dock, and Marse stepped onto her boat and started the engine, and Kyle stepped onto Dennis’s boat. To Marse, Dennis said, “Follow me to the second set of markers. You’ll know the way from there.”
“Got it,” said Marse.
I hadn’t realized we weren’t all headed to the same marina. I felt a flush of resentment toward Dennis because he seemed to hold all the cards. He could come to Snapper Creek to find us, but we might be gone by then, or he could call Marse later to find out where I was staying. Or—what? He most likely would do nothing. He would drop off Kyle and drive home alone, wondering what might have happened. I started to say good-bye, but then I didn’t. I untied the stern line and climbed into Marse’s little boat. Dennis tossed aboard the bowline, watching me. We drifted from the dock.
In the dark, Dennis’s body at the helm of the bigger boat was grainy and indistinct. We kept up with him for a while, trailing in his wake, but the water was choppy and soon it was difficult to distinguish wake from waves. I tried to keep an eye on his running lights, but I had to keep turning my head to avoid spray coming over the side of the boat, and eventually I lost track of him altogether. Marse shouted over the motor and the wind. “Shit,” she said. “He’s gone.”
She pulled back on the throttle. The boat slowed, slapping hard against each wave. I lost my balance and grabbed the gunwale. Without stars, the night was black and suffocating. Not until we stopped could I even tell that it was raining. The fall was light but the drops were large and warm. Tropical storm, I thought. Hurricane. This toy boat, this floating saucer. I could barely make out the dark snake of shoreline. A minute later, in the thickening rain, it vanished entirely.
Marse went to the prow and searched the darkness, then returned to the helm. With her wet hair and clinging clothes, she seemed to have shrunk. I shouted over the rain, “Tell me what to do.”
She wiped her face. “Get up on the bow, hold on to the rail. Don’t let go. Watch the water, make sure we stay in the channel.”
“What happens if we leave the channel?”
“We could run aground. I don’t want to be out here in a storm.”
I thought I could see her shivering. “Go slow,” I said.
At the prow, I crouched low and held on to the anchor chain with one hand and the metal rail with the other. The water was a roiling black tangle streaked with white and gray, and I couldn’t judge its depth. Lightning flashed to the north. For an instant, I could see the whole Miami coastline, from the Everglades to Cape Florida, in one electric sweep. But then night fell again. Rain slid off my hair into my face. Every time I took my hand from the rail to wipe water from my eyes, the boat tipped and I stumbled. There was another flash of lightning, then another. I used the bright seconds to try to assess the depth of the water. The light silvered the slopes of the waves. “Frances!” called Marse. I couldn’t turn toward her without losing my grip, so I looked up instead. Something ahead of us caught my eye: a red light. “Took you long enough,” shouted Marse into the rain.
The red light approached, followed by the bright white of a boat’s deck, nestled in the night like teeth in a dark mouth. I stepped down and made my way to Marse’s side. Dennis’s boat came closer, and then we could make out the captain himself, a solid figure with one hand on the throttle and one on the wheel. Kyle huddled under a raincoat at the stern.
Four weeks from that night, on a clear evening salted with stars, Marse would attend the Vizcaya gala in an enticing black cocktail dress, and Dennis would dance with her on the mansion’s limestone deck while I watched from our picnic spot on the grass. The heels of their shoes would click against the stone, and over Marse’s shoulder Dennis would meet my eye, and wink, and my heart would buoy. Dennis would say that love is like the electric eel, coiled wherever it happens to live, unflappable and ready to strike. We want to mess with it but we can’t. On that stormy night, though, as the big boat drew nearer, I stood so close to Marse that the rain skated off us as if we were one person, and when we raised our arms to wave, Dennis could not distinguish my hand from hers.
1970
Six months after meeting Dennis, I stood over the kitchen sink in his parents’ home, washing dishes. It was January. Beside me Dennis’s mother, Gloria, smoked a cigarette. She held it more than she smoked it, and it burned away in her pale, thin hand. Although her mouth was closed, every few minutes her jaw worked, as if she were thinking aloud to herself. She tapped the ashes into the sink. This was the house where Dennis had been born and where he’d grown up. I’d been given the tour months earlier, including the room Dennis had occupied as a child, where neatly made twin beds lay under thin navy bedspreads and a University of Miami pennant hung on the wall.
Through the back window, I watched Dennis and his father, Grady, cross the lawn toward the canal that snaked along the back rim of the property. Dennis, slim in faded blue jeans, loped alongside his father in a way that drew attention to his joints. When they reached the short pier where Grady’s boat was moored, Dennis reached across his torso to scratch under his shirtsleeve. Grady was doughy where Dennis was lean; for every step Dennis took, Grady took a step and a half. Grady’s corkscrew sandy orange hair thinned at the crown of his skull; his gestures when he spoke were controlled and deliberate. Grady stood with his hands in his pockets, and after a few minutes—though they faced away from the house, I could tell they were talking by the way their heads moved—he stooped to wipe debris from the pier’s planks with the flat of his hand. Dennis reached down and without bending touched his father’s shoulder blade with his fingertips. When Grady stood again, Dennis’s hand briefly rested at his father’s waist.