Surface Tension - Kling Christine - Страница 7

When I unlocked the front door, I saw that the red light was blinking on my answering machine. I punched the button on my way to the fridge and listened while gulping straight from the jug of cold orange juice—just one of the benefits of living alone. It was Galen Hightower, the owner of the Ruby Yacht, a seventy-two-foot steel ketch, reminding me that I had to be at Pier 66 at “eleven on the dot” Saturday morning. He’d had this tow booked for weeks, but he was the nervous type who needed his hand held all the time.

The machine beeped and clicked to the next message. I immediately recognized the voice—my older brother, Maddy, who throughout my childhood had threatened to beat me up if I ever called him Madagascar in public.

“Look, uh, we gotta talk. I got some problems, money problems, and you still haven’t paid your February payment. It’s not working, Seychelle. Gorda’s gotta go. I want out, now . . . Call me.” The dial tone sounded. I jammed my index finger down on the stop button, rewound the machine, and listened to the message again.

“You bastard, Maddy,” I said out loud and rewound the machine one more time. I thought somehow if I kept on listening to it, maybe I’d hear something in his voice that indicated it was all some kind of a cruel joke.

It was skin cancer from all those years with the sun shining down on his fair freckled skin that had finally taken my dad. During the years that I was lifeguarding and taking a few classes at the local community college, when I’d moved out into my own apartment, leaving Red alone in the big house, the doctors kept cutting off big chunks of him. When I’d call him every few weeks, just to see how he was doing, I didn’t want to hear about his most recent trip to the doctors. Red and I never talked about the important things, not about Mother’s death, not about what his illness might mean. Toward the end, I moved back home, quit school, cut back on my hours lifeguarding. I did what I could, tried to make him comfortable, even though I didn’t want to remember him like that, but rather like the big barrel-chested man with the red suspenders, blazing beard, and mischievous grin I’d looked up to as a little girl.

Red’s will had left everything to the three of us equally. I was surprised he even had a will; as sick as he was at the end, he never let on that he considered his own death a possibility. The doctors’ bills and taxes ate up most of what we got out of the house. After Red’s funeral, my brothers and I sat down and tried to figure out what to do with the Gorda. Maddy already had his own boat business going, running a charter sportfisherman out of Haulover down in Miami. He’d developed a reputation as a fishing guide—he even gave the morning fishing report on a local AM sports radio station—and he wasn’t about to give up his charter business to go into towing and salvage work.

Pitcairn was the nomad in the family. Maddy and I couldn’t figure out how he supported himself, but he had fallen in love, first with surfing and then, when he grew taller, with windsurfing. We received his postcards from Maui, Costa Rica, the Columbia River Gorge, and when he came to Red’s funeral, it was the first time either of us had seen him in over three years. He said he didn’t care about the money, he’d leave any decisions to us. He just didn’t want to give up his life on the pro windsurfing circuit to settle in Lauderdale.

They both laughed when I said I’d like to take over Red’s business. Maddy said most of the yacht captains wouldn’t want to hire a woman, that I’d never make enough to pay the maintenance on the boat, much less support myself. But I was twenty-seven years old, and although I was still in good shape, I didn’t want to be a lifeguard in my thirties. I didn’t want to have to sit out there in a tank suit when the flesh started to sag and my reactions started to slow. I was ready for a career change.

Besides, most of the old-timers knew me, I’d argued. I practically grew up aboard Gorda, and I had worked for Red off and on ever since I was a kid. He was a great teacher, and he loved showing off how well his little girl could handle a boat. I’d spent so much more time on the boat than Maddy had. I knew I was the most experienced of the three of us, and probably the only one who could qualify for the commercial towing captain’s license. My brother Pit was all for me from the start, and finally Maddy relented. Although I ran the boat, we were still three-way partners in Sullivan Towing and Salvage.

I made mistakes at first, but eventually I got back most of Red’s river and waterway business. I hoped to be able to buy my brothers out in a few years’ time. I had a little nest egg—it wasn’t much, just a couple of thousand dollars, but it was my emergency money. I’d vowed not to touch it unless it was a serious emergency— something like a blown engine. It was my security fund, and I knew that once I started to dip into it to pay the bills, those thousands would become hundreds in a flash. Neither of my brothers had seemed to be in any particular hurry to get their money out of the boat, and I paid them each a small percentage of the business every month. Sure, things had been a little slow lately, but it would pick up. That was the nature of the business. And now I had a salvage claim to pursue against a multimillion-dollar vessel.

I was about to shut the machine off when a familiar voice started speaking on the third message.

“Hey, Seychelle, I just heard about the Top Ten” B.J.’s voice sounded unusually subdued. “I stopped in down at Sailorman to buy a rebuild kit for that head of yours, and everybody’s talking about it.” He paused, and in my mind I could see the way his eyes must have wrinkled as he tried to figure out what to say next.

“Sey, I know it must have been pretty bad out there.” I blinked back the pictures. “If you want to talk, I’ll be at the Downtowner around six. We could grab a bite. Later.”

For some reason that did it, hearing the sympathy in his voice. He was the first person who seemed to realize that the events of that morning had hurt. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by memories of Neal, alive, there in my cottage, making love on the floor, sitting up in bed talking all night, drinking beer and eating pizza by the window over there, listening to him whistle in the shower. I remembered that night we had slept in a sleeping bag on a little sandy cay down in the Dry Tortugas, swimming in the phosphorescent water at midnight and making love as the velvety trade winds dried the seawater on our skin. When we woke at dawn, Neal held me and kissed me, his tongue tracing the shape of my lips. His blue eyes glistened with unshed tears when he told me I tasted like rain.

The pressure inside my chest was building to the breaking point, and sour-tasting muscles pulled at the corners of my mouth, the back of my throat. I forced it back inside and blinked away the blurriness. Picking up my keys, I headed out the door.

First I locked up the boat and set the alarm from the electronic keypad I’d installed on the side of the wheelhouse. I checked to make sure Abaco had water, and then I crossed the grounds and passed through the side gate that led to the street side of the Larsens’ house, where my old white Jeep was parked in the gravel drive. Neal had nicknamed her Lightnin’ because she wasn’t any ball of fire. I’d bought her in my lifeguarding days, and since I usually didn’t drive a whole lot, she’d served me well in spite of her ever-growing collection of rust patches. Her original owner, back in ’72, had seen fit to put a Jesus on the dashboard, and none of the rest of us who’d owned her had been brazen enough to remove the thing. Now faded and cracked from years in the Florida sun, the pale pink figure stood in mute testimony to the effectiveness of ’70s adhesives.

I just wanted to get out of the cottage as much as anything else, but as soon as I got behind the wheel, I realized I had better get over to see Jeannie Black, my lawyer. If Maddy had made up his mind that we were selling Gorda, I needed a cash infusion right now. Somebody did own the Top Ten, and that somebody should be very grateful that I just pulled his megayacht out of imminent peril. Just how grateful, in terms of dollars and cents, was for the lawyers to figure out, but I certainly had not gone through all that out of the goodness of my heart. I intended to get every dollar I could out of it.