“I’m not a banker. I got bills to pay, too, you know.”
Maddy and I had never gotten along, and there was no way in hell I was going to admit I was wrong even if I was. It always took Pit, the middle child, to keep us from erupting and really hurting each other. “Have you talked to Pit lately?” I asked him.
“No. But you know he could use the money. I don’t know what he lives on as it is.”
I felt fairly confident Pit would side with me if it came down to it. He’d never cared very much about money and somehow seemed to live quite happily with very little of it. He supported himself with sponsorships and cash prizes, and he gave windsurfing lessons at various resorts in exchange for free room and board. The problem would be contacting him. I deposited his check in a bank account in Fort Lauderdale, and he used an ATM card to access it from wherever he happened to be. I was certain the bank would not release any information. And I knew next to nothing about the World Cup Windsurfing Tour. He could be anywhere from St. Thomas to Maui.
“I guess, until we hear from Pit, it’s just between you and me, Maddy.”
He lifted the can, chugalugged the rest of his beer, and belched loudly.
“Maddy, look at me,” I said, raising my voice. His desk chair was one of those swivel jobs, and he eased around to face me. I noticed the bags in the flesh under his eyes, and the paunch that pulled his T-shirt tight. God, it looked like he had a basketball under there. “Are you in some kind of trouble? Is that what brought this on?”
He looked away. “No, nothing like that. I just want out. That’s all.”
“I don’t think you’re telling me the whole truth.” Maddy was known in our family for his terrific temper. Pit and I used to harass him just to watch his face turn bright red. Maddy had always been chunky, even as a kid, and though he was the oldest, both Pit and I could outrun him by the time we were ten or twelve. As his face flushed, I could tell he didn’t take kindly to me calling him a liar.
“It doesn’t matter what you think,” he yelled, waving his arm in a dismissive gesture. “I knew this would never work. Face the facts, Seychelle. Guys don’t like to trust the safety of their big yachts to a woman. That’s the bottom line. You’re not getting the business, and you’re going to sell the goddamn boat.” He belched again and looked toward the bedroom door. “Either that or buy me out.” He tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a croak.
“You know I can’t do that right away.”
He shrugged. “Okay, so sell.”
“Maddy, you’re a shitheel.” He was goading me into name-calling, like he always used to do. “Just give me a few days and I might be able to buy you out. I’ve got something working.”
“This have something to do with the Top Ten?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“It’s in today’s paper. I figure the reason Neal didn’t show up is either he killed the girl and he’s running, or else he’s shark food.”
“Thanks for your sensitivity, big brother.”
“Well, I wouldn’t expect to get much out of that deal.” Instead of anger, Maddy’s face took on a calculating look. “I say take whatever they offer and get out of the towing business. Maybe you saved this boat this time. But you’re not always gonna have that kind of luck. We both know that. You can’t fool me, Seychelle, remember? I know you never ever talk about it, but refusing to talk about it won’t make it go away. You were there, but you didn’t do a goddamn thing for her.”
I couldn’t trust myself to speak. The anger that had been building up in my chest against Collazo, Burns, Maddy, and especially Neal, for being stupid enough to get into this mess and dragging me into it with him, all threatened to explode. I wanted to bury my fist in Maddy’s basketball belly, but instead I took the stairs two at a time, slammed the door on my way out, and ground the gears on my Jeep trying to get far, far away from there.
I drove blindly up A1A, over the Haulover Bridge, and on Collins Avenue into North Miami. Cars honked at me, and I honked back, a dangerous practice on the streets of South Florida, where over half the drivers surveyed confess to carrying a gun in their vehicles. Maddy would always blame me for what had happened that day on Hollywood Beach when we were kids.
Up until yesterday morning, I’d been reasonably content with my life—I’d thought I had moved beyond all that. I had mourned the many losses in my life, including the death of my relationship with Neal. I loved my job, and I’d discovered how much I enjoyed solitary life. I had gone from college roommates to taking care of Red and then to moving in with Neal. Now, coming home to an empty cottage and open evenings had grown to feel luxurious. No one expecting conversation, dinner, or clean laundry. No one leaving the toilet seat up or the cap off the milk jug. I would never be the domestic type, and after Neal left, I no longer needed to pretend. But now my cottage was a mess, I was broke, my livelihood was being threatened, and at least one more person was dead because I hadn’t gotten there in time.
When I got to Hollywood Beach, I pulled off into one of the side streets and parked next to a meter. I fed it a couple of quarters and walked up toward the beach. Ever since that summer when I was eleven years old, I have always been drawn back to this beach when I’m sad, or need to think, or just want to sit on a bench, alone, watching the freighters on the horizon. By now, the season was starting to slow down a little, but most of the people I passed on the Broadwalk were speaking French—Canadians fleeing the frozen north. This was the beach we had come to most often as children. This was where my brothers taught me to bodysurf, where we’d held birthdays and come for holidays dragging beach chairs, picnic baskets, coolers, and inflatable rafts. And this was the beach where my mother had drowned.
Kicking off my Top-Siders, I dug my toes into the cool, damp sand. The beach had changed very little in the eighteen years since it happened. There were still the funky low-rise family hotels along the Broadwalk and the hundred-yard-wide stretch of sable-colored sand that dropped down to the pale blue-green shallows. Now, after a long winter of northerly storms, much of the sand had washed away, leaving only a narrow band of aqua before the water turned deep Gulf Stream blue. To the south, in the direction of Johnson Street, the hotels gave way to pizza places, ice cream shops, and Greek takeouts with salads and falafel, and the beachfront always hummed with happy humanity like a carnival midway.
My mother and father probably never should have married in the first place. As an adult, trying to look at them objectively, it was clear that they were not well suited to each other. Red once told me that he had met Mother in a bar on the Intracoastal. His ship was berthed in Port Everglades, and he and some buddies met this group of girls up in the old Crow’s Nest Bar over at Bahia Mar, at the time a hangout for sailors and charter captains. Annie was the wild one, he said, talkative, vivacious, daringly throwing back shots of tequila to compete with the navy guys. She was a third-generation Floridian, the daughter of a prominent Fort Lauderdale doctor, majoring in art at the University of Miami, artistic, flighty, and wildly impractical. Red, thirteen years her senior, was a navy lifer and a sensible, orderly, dependable, entirely practical man. He had already done a tour in Southeast Asia and would probably play out the remainder of his twenty years on ships in the Atlantic.
They honeymooned on Staniel Cay in the Bahamas, and it was then they vowed to visit new islands throughout their married life. Eventually Red was able to buy a very modest little cinder-block canal-front home in the Shady Banks neighborhood of Fort Lauderdale. First it was finances that prevented them from ever carrying out their traveling dreams, and later babies, so they named each of us for the islands they’d intended to visit someday.