“I know. Because, it seems like your mind is made up.”
“I have other places I need to put this money.” Tom waved in the direction of their house as if it were made out of bricks of cash. For a moment he saw himself with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, full of bundled bills.
“Right. So it seems like there’s only one option here,” said Libby. Tom shrugged. He knew this was hard for her to face. She continued, “I want to buy you out.”
And somehow it was like she was dying again; or maybe he was. He was some fading apparition in their lives, and she, tearing a check from her checkbook, would snuff him out. He could hear the perforation of the check unzipping; he was fading into the fog. He rested his head on the small steering wheel. He wondered what happened if you passed out on a boat.
“Tom? You alright?” She had moved to kneel on the bench seat in front of the center console. She rubbed his shoulder.
“So, what would that even look like?” he said to the wheel. “Would you guys still come up for the Fourth? Would I not be welcome?” No place for me here, no Melissa for me at home. He looked up at her. “How could you even afford it?”
“I’ve been saving for a down payment. I have my 401(k). And I’m sure I could get a loan. If Gwen and Danny help, I know I could swing it. Eventually. We’d need some sort of installment plan.” And he wasn’t sure how to ask his question again. Was the idea of losing him so easy to accept? She wasn’t hearing him.
Libby had her fingers wrapped around the edge of the wheelhouse, and she was looking up at him, like a rabbit peeking out of a burrow, like his little sister.
“Do you remember when you jumped in the water at Bar Island?”
Her hair was lighter then, with a slight wave at the ends, which she had since outgrown. It had always seemed to bounce in the wind instead of snap. They had taken a day trip to Bar Island for a picnic and swimming. She was just ten, narrow and pale, still early summer. Tom had watched Libby from a rock where he sat leaning back on one hand, holding half a tuna sandwich in the other. He watched her talk to their father on the pebbled beach; watched her point at the big, whale-shaped rock jutting into the little cove; saw her plead and their father shake his head. Then she’d stomped right past Tom, nearly trampling his fingers under her demanding little feet. She kicked at a tide pool.
He could see the idea come to her, saw her looking from her father to the rock. The decision forming in her mind, “Why not just jump? The water isn’t that cold.” She tapped the surface of the pool with the ball of a foot, as if to prove it to herself. Tom laughed at her, though, let her catch it from their dad. Let her sulk in the back of the boat all the way home under the cloud of some infantile punishment, no candy for a week, no friends over this weekend. Let her see their parents’ dark side can come down on her too. He challenged her, dared her, silently. And she obeyed.
“I was just telling Melissa that story—Dad, the big hero, diving in and fishing me out. The rest of the details are kind of hazy.”
She had stood at the back of the rock, up on its tail for a moment and then had taken a running leap off its head and into the center of the little cove. It had to have been twelve feet deep. The rock blocked his view, and he stood to get a better look. Tom waited for her to surface, waited for her to come up shrieking from the cold. But he heard nothing. She did not rise, but he could see her through the flat surface adrift at the bottom of the cove. It was her hair and hands that he could see. Her hair dark as seaweed danced up from her head. Her hands were white and limp at the wrists, dead fish.
“When you came out of the water you were unconscious. You weren’t breathing.”
He remembered dropping the sandwich into the tide pool as he stepped fast from rock to rock. He ran the length of the whale rock too in two strides. And then he dove.
Before his feet left the rock he was aware that his father was wading in fast from the beach, the water parting around his waist like a launching ship. Tom didn’t feel the cold until his arm was around her, until he had to pull them both to the surface. The urge to gasp was hard to control; he pulled her heavy against the cold, against the dark of the cove floor. She did not move, not deep in the water and not at the surface. Swim, he told himself. You swim, she lives, you breathe, she lives.
Her hair hung over her face, a terrifying veil. He held her to his chest with one arm and used the other to pull toward shore. When he could touch the bottom his father grabbed her knees, and they held her high above them, out of the water, carrying her up, less drag. On the beach they laid her down, his father stepping to her side.
“I can do it,” Tom had said. “I know how.” He didn’t think of the failure at life guarding, he thought only, water out, air in, water out, air in.
She had already gone blue at the lips. So fast. He rubbed the hair away from her mouth and nose, rough and quick. He tasted salt on her lips. The water was hot as she coughed it up, pouring over his hands as he leaned her to one side. She started crying at once, maybe before she was completely conscious.
Their father squatted in front of her, and she rolled toward him, and he gathered her up in a towel. Tom had looked for his mother then; she was on the deck of the Misdemeanor, anchored just outside the cove, must have rowed past him as he swam. She had the ship-to-shore in hand, trying to get the Coast Guard, the sound of clicking and static came across the water. He waved at her. She had waved back, nodding her head. Gwen had watched the whole thing from a driftwood log on the beach, silent, tears running down her face. Libby had spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in the beached dinghy wrapped in a towel staring out at the whale rock.
“We almost lost you that day,” said Tom.
“I didn’t realize it was so bad.” She wrapped her arms around her shoulders. “Did Dad have to do CPR?”
“No. I did. I brought you out. I did CPR.” His eyes burned and his stomach went tight. “I was closer, I got to you first.”
She reached out and held his hand for a moment.
“I don’t want you up here without me,” he said. I need to be able to get to you.
She smiled. “We’ll figure it out. There are no rules. We’ll work it out together. We’ll still be together.”
She squeezed his hand, then tucked her hair behind her ears, looking at him like it was her birthday, all warmth and humility. Then she moved back to sit in the bow. She pulled on the anchor line to check it, shifted the life jackets beneath the bench.
“You know, Patricia,” she began—he nodded, still catching his breath, happy to talk about something else. “She and I aren’t just friends.”