The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [64]
The tide rose to her rib cage. Thinking of her children orphaned, both parents disappearing within days, brought tears. Her high cries for help had turned thin and hoarse by the time Nora and her companions, repelled by her yelling, lumbered out of the water onto shore and disappeared over a dune. More clouds blew in, no longer delightfully slow and white. Graying, then black-hearted. Increasing wind whipped the water into a steady chop. She grew chilly, then freezing, the water up to her breasts. She tried to turn to face shore, but the simplest movement sucked her under farther. An eighth inch was a precious plenty. Shivering, reciting the names of her children, the things she loved about each—Phillip’s bossiness, Amanda Jane’s prissiness, Alexander’s eternal sweetness—she watched a barnacled bottle bearing a message from her father float idly by. She let it go. He was dead, or perhaps the emperor of Mexico. It hardly mattered now, the water at her shoulders.
Then a frigate appeared so close she could see the muzzles of cannon from below deck portholes, dispatched two men in a dinghy. She saw them between waves, there and then gone, the truth and a lie, her blank present and her peopled past. The rower had his back to her; in the stern a man whose face, when she finally placed it, wrestled her to the floor in front of the fire, a wintry night in Whaley’s old lean-to. Daniels’s eyes, steel gray and unblinking. Then she understood, and what washed over her from the neck down was not seawater but shame. How could she ever have believed Daniels would leave them be? She sobbed Whaley’s name and those of her children, so dear to her, all she’d accomplished in this world, then closed her eyes to what might happen next.
When she opened them the water was flat and sun-touched. Her shoulders were exposed to the sun, and then her breasts, and finally her elbows. Behind her she heard the sibilant disturbance of water by rhythmically orchestrated oar. When he was in front of her, Hezekiah extended the oar to her, but rather than grab it she said, “I need you to pull me out, I’ve not the strength to do it myself,” and after some hesitation, he drew the dinghy close enough behind her to hook his arms around her just below her bosom and hoist her into the boat.
She lay there, exhausted, remembering her arrival on this island, similarly incapacitated at the bottom of a leaky boat, and when she could breathe again she cried out for Whaley.
“We have to find him,” she told Hezekiah, “they’ve come to harm him, we’ve got to dispose of that portrait, it’s all my doing, as ever my thoughtlessness is to blame.”
“Hush now,” Hezekiah said, but she could not stop talking, and when they reached shore she had told him everything: her father, the duel, Joseph, the head of the nag, Daniels sparing her, Whaley taking her in, her return to Daniels’s compound, the scars across her body. Hezekiah looked to shore and rowed while she talked. Bent to his task, he appeared burdened by the facts she imparted, though she knew he was listening. She knew that he heard her. He had come for her, after all.
“Whaley sent you to find me,” she said.
“No ma’am. The children came home from school and you never did come back. I seen you leave out this morning and I figured something happened. I borrowed this boat and I’m hoping whoever it belong to don’t discover it gone.”
She said, “Will you help me find Whaley?”
He’d helped her out of the boat and dragged it up under a wax myrtle where he’d found it, out of the way of the tide.
“You need to get back and tend to those children.”
“You’ll help me find him,” she said, careful to issue only statements.
“Get yourself dry, get you some food and water in you,” he said, as if he were listing everything