Through the gin-clear water at my waist, I noticed a starfish, tangerine-red and the size of a dinner plate, ghosting along the bottom on little tube feet. I held my breath, bent down and picked it up. The starfish felt hard and spiky under my fingertips as I turned it gently, admiring the intricate lines and dots that both delineated and decorated its five, perfectly symmetrical arms. Paul tells me that if enough of the central disk is included, a whole new starfish can be regenerated from each severed arm. Very cool. Too bad the same thing doesn’t apply to women, and breasts.
The drone of an engine shattered the silence. Wouldn’t you know it? The first time I decide to do something even remotely risqué, a plane flies by. I scrunched down, heart pounding, hoping the pilot was too far away to notice that I was naked. As I cowered in the water, the little Cessna strafed the palms on nearby Beulah Point, then skimmed the Sea of Abaco like a red and white dragonfly before alighting on the unfinished runway across the way. Danger past, I stood up, then laughed out loud when I realized I still held the starfish in front of me like Gipsy Rose Lee performing at Minksy’s. I released the remarkable creature and watched it drift to the bottom where it could get on with its work.
Fish, I understand. Starfish, I admire.
I adjusted my face mask over my eyes and nose, wrapped my lips around the mouthpiece of my snorkel and swam out, stroking steadily, toward Barracuda Reef. Beneath me, the sand gradually became a meadow of undulating sea grass. Above me, at the water’s surface, a ghostly school of trumpetfish parted politely to let me pass, then regrouped and continued on their way.
Before long, the reef came into view; a grey-blue mound at first, then a yellow splash of brain coral emerged, a red tree sponge, a purple fan. I trod water for a moment, gently bobbing, then kicked hard and swam off in a clockwise direction. I preferred to approach the reef from the east where a splendid rack of elkhorn coral arched, forming a natural gateway to the wonderland beyond. Carried by the tide, I drifted through.
Sun and clouds above, light and shadow below. I smiled inside my mask. It was like living inside the Monterey Aquarium, only a thousand times better. I floated over the secret underwater world until its inhabitants began to take me for granted.
Ink-black sea cucumbers waved at me from their crevices. Yellowtail damselfish frisked about, their electric-blue spots twinkling like jewels. A bright-orange squirrelfish, his eye a black-ringed target, pecked at something in the sand.
But I was looking for my friend, Big Daddy.
He was hard to miss, Big Daddy, a two hundred and fifty pound grouper as big as a college linebacker. I swam on, checking behind an outcropping of brain coral, peering down into ragged holes that damaging storms had torn into a delicate organism already bleached out and weakened by global warming. Corals grow slowly, painfully slowly, some no more than the width of a dime in a year. If something isn’t done…
I shook away the thought as a splash of green caught my eye. A moray eel gaped at me from his hidey-hole like a malevolent snake, displaying an impressive set of needle-like teeth. I gave the eel a wide berth, and swam on, still looking for Big Daddy.
I found him a few minutes later, lurking territorially behind a purple fan coral. He floated there soberly, considering me with large, lugubrious eyes, mouth turned down in a perpetual frown, like Winston Churchill after the Blitz, but without the cigar.
A school of yellow jacks flashed by; Big Daddy ignored them. He ignored a pair of stoplight parrotfish, too, as they nibbled away on the coral – algae for breakfast! – with an audible click-click-clicking sound. Suddenly Big Daddy shied away, ducking, squeezing his enormous body – unsuccessfully – under an overhanging coral shelf.
I barely had time to wonder what had spooked the big fellow when something flashed in the periphery of my vision. A dark shadow was speeding in my direction, sleek as a dolphin, fast as a shark.
I froze, heart pounding, wishing I had worn my swim fins so I could paddle out of there in a hurry.
False alarm! No need to panic. The newcomer was my husband, wearing only a mask, flippers and a weight belt, and carrying a Bahamian sling, the slingshot-like speargun locals used for fishing.
When Paul surfaced next to me, I yanked the snorkel out of my mouth so I could say, ‘I thought you were working.’
Paul grinned, his cheeks creasing handsomely around his face mask. ‘I got bored.’
‘You? Bored? With your buddy, good old Andy Whatshisname?’
With his free hand, Paul caught my arm and pulled me gently toward him. ‘It might have had something to do with looking out the window and seeing a naked woman on the beach.’
He planted his lips firmly on mine and drew me under the water. When we came up for air, I said, ‘What will Big Daddy think?’
‘I don’t know,’ Paul said. ‘Let’s try it again and see.’
I waved him off, indicating the speargun. ‘What’s that for then?’
‘Dinner.’
I splashed water in his face. ‘As tired as I am of frozen, oddly shaped cuts of could-be-pork, could-be-lamb, if you shoot any of my friends…’
‘Don’t worry,’ Paul said. ‘Until I get the hang of this gizmo, your friends are perfectly safe from me.’
An hour later as I was standing in the outdoor shower, rinsing off salt and sand under a jet of warm water, Paul called to me from the other side of the latticework screen that separated me from the outside world, in the unlikely event that peeping Toms were lurking in the mangroves.
‘Mutton snapper!’ he crowed.
I rinsed shampoo out of my hair and reached over the door, groping blindly for the towel I’d left draped over a hook on the dry side of the screen. ‘Mutton?’ I asked, thinking I hadn’t heard him correctly. Eventually, my hand made contact with the towel and I was able to drag it into the enclosure with me.
‘It’s a beauty,’ he said. ‘Come see.’
I toweled off vigorously, wrapped the towel around my body and tucked the loose end under my arm to secure it. When I stepped out on to the concrete apron surrounding the shower stall, Paul was standing so close that I nearly ran into the catch of the day. He held the fish by a gloved finger hooked into its open mouth and was turning the creature slowly, giving me time to admire its size, and the way the sun glistened on its iridescent, peachy-gold scales. ‘Ten pounds if it’s an ounce, Hannah. Dinner enough for four.’
‘You, me and who else?’ I wondered.
‘Someone’s home at Southern Exposure,’ Paul said. ‘Must have arrived on the ten o’clock ferry.’
We’d met only a few of our neighbors, the island being largely deserted during hurricane season, but I knew from the printout our landlords left tacked to the wall next to the telephone, that a family named Weston owned Southern Exposure, and that they came from somewhere in North Carolina.
I squinted eastward over the mangroves and fringes of casuarina that separated our compound from the Weston’s and noticed the Bahamian flag – turquoise, yellow and black – flying from what had been a bare pole that morning. As a courtesy to the host country, it was customary to fly the Bahamian flag any time one was in residence. A similar flag was beating itself to a frenzy on our flagpole at that very moment.
An odd custom, I’d thought, when we first arrived on the island. Why announce to potential thieves, once the flag was pulled down, ‘Hey, fellas, we’re gone! Come help yourselves.’ Good thing crime was practically unheard of in the islands. Hawksbill Cay had a constable, though, uniform and all. I’d seen him. He ferried over from Marsh Harbour, the capital of the Abacos, every Wednesday from ten to two, the only hours in the week that the bank was open.