Accidental Happiness (2 page)

2

Gina

B
enjamin came up behind me, slid his arms around my waist. Heat from the late sun warmed the skin under my sweatshirt, rejected the chill of October. We stood in the open air. Around us, pumpkins of all sizes pebbled the field with orange, with bins of butternut squash and sweet potatoes off to the side. The farmer who owned the land presided over his yield. He was large and, it seemed to me, bored with produce. People wandered, trying to choose, and he watched, sitting on a stool beside a table that held nothing but a metal box filled with dollar bills.

Benjamin’s presence circled me like a cloak. His fingers moved just underneath the low waist of my jeans, traveled the surface of my belly, insistent, kneading soft muscle, tender skin. It left me shy. An older couple averted their eyes from us, but the farmer watched without apology, his ample monotony in need of diversion.

Benjamin’s boldness made me weak. My mind’s eye could see his hand moving over my body. He didn’t speak, but I wanted him to. I wanted to hear the hoarse register that would tell me we were leaving, going, perhaps, no farther than the car. But he said nothing. Then, as if something had jostled me out of my dream, I became aware. There was no breath on my neck, no comfort from his arms. I woke up to the hot August night and felt the loss new again. I wasn’t sure which was worse: the stray emotions that made their way in from time to time, laying me low all over again; or the rest of the time, when I felt that my brain had been neutered, all capacity to feel removed.

I’d been a widow for three months, though it seemed less because the season had yet to change. With nothing marking the time, it could have been a week or even a day before. I sat up, breathed only in spite of myself. The pumpkins were gone, were never there, in fact. I had fashioned a memory from air and longing.

I was hot—damp and unfamiliar in my bed. But I wasn’t in a bed exactly. It took me a moment to recognize the small quarters, the salt air smell. My boat. Benjamin’s boat. That was where I lived, where I’d run to when I couldn’t stay in our house anymore. I’d sold our house, hoping to find some peace. Even so, I rarely slept. Not since the funeral, anyway. When I did, the wakings were always full of confusion.

“Come on, Georgie.” The dog settled down beside me. The boat rested easy in its slip.

The scenes that occurred when I slept weren’t exactly like dreams. I saw them as
visitations,
but not of a ghostly sort. Until recently I had barely acknowledged God. I certainly didn’t buy into spirits, sinister or benevolent. But I’d had these images over the years, little wordless narratives involving Elise, my little sister. She died when I was twelve and she was eight. Sometimes in my visions she was at the pool where she drowned, sometimes at unfamiliar places. But always she was eager, her eyes begging me to see her, to watch.

With Elise, as I got older, she remained young and we drifted apart in my mind; my ability to manufacture her in my head seemed to weaken. Although, so often decisions in my life relied on her memory. I wondered what would happen with Benjamin. As an old woman, would I let him go; or would I continue to see him as I slept? A man eventually young enough to be a grandson.

The air off the water stood still, heavy as the tide, a terrible time for the onboard air-conditioning unit to be out. I considered walking the short path to Lane’s house. Instead, I abandoned the V-berth for the main cabin, where it was cooler, turned the small fan full on my face.

Stretched out in what amounted to my living room with hatches open to the air, the night became bearable. I tried to drift off, but by three-thirty in the morning sleep had yet to come again; one of the restless nights when Ben was everywhere and nowhere. Hours and decades became twins of time, especially at night. Who the hell becomes a widow at thirty-three?

I’d tried to work my way back to life. Ben’s mother said that I expected to feel normal too fast, that I needed to allow myself time to grieve; but indulgent grieving only took me deeper into the loss. So when I had a choice, I settled for a state that was more than dead, but less than alive. A zombie existence.

In my scarce efforts at recovery, I’d tried the disparate avenues of studied spirituality and casual sex. Both very new for me. Although they seemed to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, the two shared certain qualities of exhilaration, but neither helped for too long. I suspected the problems existed in me more than in the methods.

“What do you think, Georgie?” The dog kept a vigil at my side.

Even in the near-dark cabin, I could see the envelope, white and still sealed, sitting on the desk. Opening the check meant I went one step closer to accepting the money as a kind of apology for Ben’s death. It had come in the mail just the morning before. Maybe that had inspired my nocturnal thoughts of Benjamin, alive again.

The lawyers who helped me after the accident regarded the settlement as a victory, a triumph before we even saw the inside of a courtroom. A similar case with the same lumber company had hit the newspapers in a big way just months before. The story had gone national, and the exposure made them eager to settle with me before the publicity of a trial. I’d gotten the same deal as the earlier case, but with none of the work.

Looking through the shadows at the pale envelope, I felt everything that was missing, and nothing that had been gained. A leg or a lung would have been no more vital than Benjamin. How could a bigger bank account make any difference? I’d left the envelope intact so far, trying to decide what to do. The sale of the house would keep me going for a good while. And Ben had good insurance through his job at the marketing firm. He used to tell me I was lucky he’d decided to be a commercial artist instead of a starving one. He was wrong. Benefits or no, I didn’t feel lucky at all.

So I hadn’t dealt with the envelope yet, didn’t even remember the exact amount I’d been awarded. Maybe I’d never open it. On the other hand, depositing it and the others that were to follow over the course of eighteen months would make me rich, at least by my standards—a sight that Benjamin, of all people, would have enjoyed.

I imagined sleep; hoped seeing it in my mind would make it come. Nothing came but more pictures, genuine memories of Ben, alive and living in our house, absent the unwelcome discussions that surfaced regularly during our last weeks together. Ben, talking again about having children, long after I thought the subject had been put to rest. For the most part, I avoided the thoughts of those talks. When I focused on our time together, it was only the seamless days of partnership, of love.

I hadn’t done it in a while, had a night of the memory reels. The memories were of long before he was gone, before the sadness drove me to a smaller life on the boat. I wanted them and dreaded them in equal measure.

Georgie shifted, sat upright.

The dog’s ears perked up, her posture tensed. Even with the windows open, I couldn’t hear anything unusual outside.

“What is it, girl?”

Over the last two months, the miniature schnauzer had become my alarm system, my closest companion. Lane had given her to me, the dog already full-grown, when the owner, an older friend of Lane’s, had to give her up. Georgie had bonded with me right away. Or maybe it was more the other way around.

I shifted the fan to low, listened. The floating dock gave slightly, an occurrence magnified by the lifeless night. Georgie stood up, kept herself between me and the companionway.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, putting my hand down on the animal’s head.

I sat up, heard footsteps, and waited to see where they might be headed. Three-thirty was too late for Derek to be working security rounds, too soon for sport fishermen wanting to get an early start.

Maybe Derek was making a late-night visit to my boat. I closed my eyes, almost hoped that was the case. I listened for his absentminded humming, could see his dark hair, angular features. A mistake in judgment on my part—borne out of a lonely moment just the week before—had left him eager, gently insistent. But he was six or seven years younger, nearly a kid still—I put him just a few years out of college—and I was a widow. I figured anything I felt too embarrassed about to tell Lane defined a bad idea. I’d been putting him off on a daily basis since our single close encounter.

The footsteps kept an irregular cadence. Hurried and slow, coming toward the dock where my boat sat in the slip. It wouldn’t be Derek, not showing up in the middle of the night. That wasn’t his style.

Someone outside coughed. Who would be out there? Reaching in the drawer, I felt the pistol, reassured somehow that it was there.

“You need something to protect yourself,” Lane had told me when she gave me the gun.

I’d laughed, tried to give it back.

“People target live-aboards. You’re essentially sleeping in an open room. Put it in the drawer. It’ll be there if you need it.”

Soft steps sounded on the wooden part of the dock nearby. Probably
was
just someone arriving early, ungodly early, to go out fishing, but I couldn’t quite buy it. I kept my eyes on the porthole. Heart pounding, I lifted the gun out of the drawer, felt around quietly for the bullets.

“Hush, baby . . .” I whispered to Georgie. Her small sounds were escalating.

I waited, barely let myself breathe, then moved closer to the starboard porthole, strained to see outside. The light from the moon had shifted out, over the water, offered little help. I thought again of Derek, tried to fashion a scenario that would bring him out. A dockline that had come loose, needed securing. From his caretaker’s apartment above the Ship’s Store, he could see most of the marina from his window, would notice if something like that happened. But the night rested windless and still, nothing to cause a stir among the boats. Even working at it, I had a hard time making sense out of that theory.

Georgie growled again, low and uncertain. She knew her job, wasn’t given to false alarms. I sat back down, held the pistol loose on my lap, reached my other hand down to touch the dog. Vibrations of the growl traveled through the muscles of her neck. She tensed, shifted away from me.

Then I felt the footsteps, the delicate shimmy of the dock as someone stepped nearby. I saw a flash of shadows, close outside the porthole. Someone, maybe more than one person, had come onto my dock. The pulse points in my neck quickened and I found it hard to take in air.

“It’s okay, it’s okay . . .” I caught myself mumbling to the dog again. But it wasn’t okay and I knew it.

The instant the boat gave way, Georgie launched into a frenzy. The boat rocked as the intruder boarded, the dog lunging at the companionway. With loaded springs for legs, she tried and failed to scale the ladder, fell back hard at my feet.

I don’t recall pointing the gun, but the sound of it repeated over and over in my head.
Staccato.
The absurd musical reference occurred to me at the moment of the explosive pop, both small and deafening. Seconds froze and my pulse raced. I’d fired it, through the canvas-covered companionway of the boat. I hadn’t meant to.
Shit!
The gun hot, screams came from somewhere. Screams from just outside. Only the canvas drop fell between me and whoever was out there. My ears numb from the loud noise, I barely heard the cries outside. A woman’s keening wails sounded faint, distant. But they were there, on my boat. Someone was on my boat!

Georgie barked continuously—a high, terrified register—and my body shook, violent, trembling, as if illness controlled me. The gun clattered on the floor. I could still feel the vibration of the single shot in my empty hand.

These things must have happened all at once, no more than an instant; but my memory recalls it in long stretches of time.

As I pulled back the canvas to go into the cockpit, I saw her. A fictional character come to life. Kneeling, with blood everywhere.

“Reese! Jesus! Is that you?” My voice reached a high unnatural pitch, drowned out by her screams as she bent forward, her head down.

I don’t know how I recognized her, my husband’s ex-wife. Pictures, some videos, that’s all I’d seen of her in my years with Benjamin. But then, even so, she’d made an impression.

I scrambled up toward her, then fell, hard, as my bare foot hit something slimy, slick on the deck. My foot was red, covered with blood, and I sat there unmoving, stunned and unable to act.

“Oh, God!” she wailed.

Time slowed as I stared at her, at the red smears running up her bare arm. Reese Melrose. Her name presented itself, unbidden as I watched her—wondering in detached horror where the bullet had hit her, what I should do. In spite of the blood, she looked okay, unhurt if that was possible. She knelt over, rocked back and forth, and at first I didn’t even see the girl. Then my eyes registered the child, nearly covered by the cloth of the woman’s long skirt.

“Jesus Christ!” I lunged forward, put my hands out in an offering of help, but with no clear purpose in mind. “What do you need?”

“Do something. Help her, for God’s sake!” Reese Melrose screamed. Her voice rang low and raw as she cradled the child, a small creature, too little to have so much blood. The sight of the girl stopped me. A kid about the size of my sister when I last saw her. Memory paralyzed me somehow as old horrors stirred again.