Accidental Happiness (7 page)

6

Gina

W
ith Georgie as crew, I motored out of the slip and headed past rows of docks, toward the Edisto River. One of my few outings since Benjamin died. Moving to the boat, I thought I’d be out all the time. I imagined the healing wind, bringing me back to life again. But that hadn’t happened. I generally kept my distance from the river, stayed in the marina where life felt neutral.

“Takin’ her out?” Derek called from the haul-out dock. His dark wavy hair fell long around his face. He wore knee-length shorts that hung low on his hips and no shirt. The sight of his bare skin recalled that ill-conceived afternoon on the boat. I felt my cheeks go warm. But something had changed. His strong presence the night before had made me see him in a different light.

“Just a short one,” I yelled back. “Need to clear my brain after last night.”

“I hear that.” He shook his head, acknowledging the rough events of the early morning hours. The well-defined lines of his nose and chin lent his face a maturity that balanced out his youth. “That was pretty wild stuff goin’ on. How’s the kid doing?”

“She’s okay,” I called out, then gave an exaggerated nod in case I was getting out of voice range. He smiled again, then stood up.

“Hey!” he yelled, as if something had just hit him. “Can I hitch a ride to Ray’s Marine?”

I gave him a thumbs-up, maneuvered toward the end of the nearest dock. As I drew up near, I looped a line around one of the cleats and waited for him to run over and board. Ray’s was on the way out of the inlet. I’d just drop him off, but he was on his own getting back.

Derek had only worked at the marina for about six months, starting midwinter, before spring season got busy. But he’d grown up on the coast, near Savannah, he told me; felt more comfortable on water than on land.

He must have met Benjamin at some point, but Ben and I hadn’t taken the boat out much in the colder months. By the time spring came in full-blown, Benjamin was gone.

“Thanks,” Derek said, grinning as he stepped on board. Georgie growled as he came on deck, but settled when he rubbed her ears. “I need to bring a Bayliner over for haul-out.”

“Isn’t Ray’s the competition?”

He shrugged. “I guess. But there are too many damn boats on the water this time of year. John, the guy who runs the shop over there, called and asked if I could get to it. We’re all backed up with more business than we can handle.”

I freed the line, steered out toward the middle of the channel.

“I thought you just worked security at night,” I said. “You put in time at the marina too?”

“Just since I finished up my graduate courses. I’ve had more time this summer.”

I remembered then. He was working at the marina while he built up his clip file. Wanted to work for a magazine. He’d stopped by the boat to ask me how I broke into freelancing with major publications. That’s how our afternoon had gotten started before. I felt myself go shy. What the hell was wrong with me? I tried to think of something to say, but he beat me to the next line.

“So, how have you been?” he asked. “I mean, other than last night.”

“About the same,” I said, whatever that meant.
Good job, Gina. You’re dazzling him with your wit.
Why did I care anyway? I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened before. “I’m working through a lot of things. I’m not nuts, honestly.”

“I don’t think you’re crazy at all,” he said. Maybe I’d fooled him, or maybe he just wanted to get laid again.

Alone together on the boat, it was hard to ignore the fact that we’d had sex just the week before. I wanted to think I’d been drinking at the time, but I was stone sober and desperate to feel halfway alive again; game for anything that didn’t feel
widowlike.
It hadn’t been my first encounter of that kind since Ben’s death. But it was the first one with someone who lived in my own backyard.

“Listen, Derek . . .” I decided I had to tackle it head-on. “What happened before . . . I’m at a weird place right now. I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean to let it go that far.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said, his eyes green and impossibly kind. “Last week . . . I mean, I’ve watched you ever since you moved in. I’ve wanted to ask you out, but I didn’t know if it was too soon; how you’d feel about it. I was working up the nerve when things just . . . happened. I know it’s ass backwards, but I’d like to go on a real old-fashioned date. It takes a lot of courage to move on after what you’ve been through.”

Courage. That was me. Braveheart with breasts. I didn’t know what to say. A motor cruiser passed us, heading out to open water at an impatient clip. The sound of the boat’s substantial engine precluded any response I might have made. After it had moved on ahead, I decided changing the subject would be my best option.

“So what was your graduate work again?”
Ask something you know. Try to avoid surprises.

He leaned back against the lifeline, putting a comfortable space between us.

“Contemporary lit,” he said. He pretended not to notice the abrupt transition of topics. “I wish that I could have gotten journalism, but I decided to stay around here and it wasn’t offered as a graduate program. The closest degree that I could get without moving somewhere else was in the English department. I’ve gotten a few assignments here and there with smaller publications.”

“That’s what matters, anyway,” I said. “Getting some articles to show around. Starting wages at newspapers and magazines are the same no matter what degree you get—barely enough to feed a cat.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why I went for the big bucks—working two jobs at a marina.” He was grinning.

I could see Ray’s as we rounded a turn where the channel opened up into the Edisto River; was surprised to find that I felt disappointed.

“Your stop, sir.”

I maneuvered alongside the gas pumps. Derek moved up and off my boat in a fluid series of steps.

“Listen, maybe I’ll come by later this week,” he said, before I could head back out. “Is that okay?”

I nodded, unable to come up with a decent response. Finally, I managed, “Derek, I can’t say where my head is right now.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll have a beer. Hang out for a while. I don’t expect . . .” He stopped. “You know.” The color in his tanned cheeks took on a deeper color.

“I know,” I said, feeling my own face grow warm.

He offered a gentle push to get the boat off the dock, then turned and went inside the marina offices. Still, I could almost feel him watching me as I pulled away.

Around the bend, at the mouth of the channel, I saw a dolphin arching off the starboard bow, a baby following just behind. They were going toward an old shrimp boat just up the way, long wrecked and nearly submerged. A gathering of small fish lived among the algae growing on the ruins of the old boat. Benjamin told me about that. We anchored once near the wreck, split a bottle of wine, and watched the dolphins and the otters come and go.

I slowed the motor to watch them. The mother and baby were moving just under the surface.

“There you are,” I said out loud. At best, I was getting eccentric; at worst, crazy.

“Georgie, look.” I lifted up the dog to see if she would notice the dolphins. She didn’t. Instead, she squirmed to get down and resume sunning herself on the cockpit floor. It was the only home she’d known with me.

I thought about the house I’d sold, the rooms that Ben and I took for granted as we lived our normal life. If I’d stayed, could I have reinvented them and made them my own? I wondered if I’d done the right thing, moving. I’d made the decision a month after the funeral. The place was too sad, so full of Ben’s stuff. Only after he was gone did I realize how few things actually belonged to me.
Us
was mostly
him,
it seemed.

Even after the move, I hadn’t let go. Far from it. I’d kept everything in storage. On a good week, I went to the storage place once or twice, just to sit there for a few minutes and feel Ben’s presence. On a bad week I went every day. Lately, I’d had more good weeks. But whether I went there or not, knowing his things were in reach, that they existed somewhere, served as an emergency kit. I kept it there, safe and locked, but ready for that moment when I just had to smell him again, feel him somehow. His suits, pullovers, weekend sweaters. Jackets that carried his scent, maybe even a stray hair on the collar.

It’s funny that I needed to move out of the house where there were constant reminders, but I also needed his things to be waiting for me. Maybe the difference was the control I felt with the storage unit. It allowed me to choose when to have those feelings. Nothing to take me by surprise.

After
River Rose
cleared the inlet, I let out the head sail to make a show of sailing, but all I really wanted was fresh air and some space. The luffing as it unfurled into the wind sounded large, menacing. Georgie took a stance in the cockpit, barked loudly against the noise. I felt a surge, fell off the wind, and let the sail fill. The clean rush took the boat forward, and for a second my mind cleared of everything, felt momentarily at rest.

I turned off the motor and took in the silence. Torn clouds moving fast with the air offered occasional sun, both fierce and fleeting—and glorious. The world opened and I realized how confining the marina had become. And it would soon get worse. In a couple of hours I would pick up Reese and Angel. After that, what happened was anybody’s guess. But for an hour, maybe more if I pushed it, I could forget about Reese and Angel. I could even forget about myself.

I looked at my GPS, then checked the tides to make sure I stayed clear of the shoals. Benjamin knew the river by heart, and it occurred to me that maybe I avoided sailing because on the water, like in our home, he was so clearly absent. We’d met on a boat, crewing at a local regatta.

My worst fears lay in unanticipated memory—like the ice-cream shop in Charleston just a week before. I’d left the place in tears, no ice cream, nothing but a confused manager calling after me, asking what was wrong. The young man behind the counter had no recollection of me, but he would have remembered Benjamin.

“What’s your pleasure?” That was all the kid had said, just trying to be cute. The same kid, spouting the same line he’d used six months before when Ben and I had gone in.

Benjamin shot back, “I don’t know. Maybe a double devil with a halo, and make it insane.”

“Where the hell did you hear that?” The kid was grinning.

“I saw your T-shirt,” Benjamin said, and shook his hand.

Some club at State, I gathered, where ice cream had worked its way into the vernacular. At any rate, we were the only ones in the place, so the kid challenged Benjamin to make it himself, and I sat down for the duration because my husband never backed down. The delighted clerk gave him a hat and a paper apron, and Benjamin made both of us a fudge ripple ice cream and brownie concoction with pistachios and whipped cream. Then he added some kind of flavored syrup that had me nauseated for the rest of the night.

He was entirely himself that day—his mood high, his life easy. That was during the holidays. Sometime, not long, before he began focusing on having a child again. Bringing it up as if it was a new discussion we should have. The Ben at the ice-cream shop was the person I most wanted to see again.

The guy wouldn’t take money from us, so Benjamin said he’d work it off. He’d stayed on serving customers with the kid for another half hour, the two of them cutting up like eighth graders. I finally told him to either go with me or take a taxi home. He left wearing the hat, the apron on under his winter coat. The kid was still grinning as we walked out the door.

Benjamin was like that. People knew him as a friend in five minutes’ time. Loved him in ten. I loved him a lot longer, but it wasn’t enough.

I’d sailed too far, lost myself in thinking, and completely missed early signs of a squall coming in from behind. I started the motor again, but by the time I turned the boat around and furled the sail back in, the storm was on top of me.

“Damn.” I set the boat on autopilot, took Georgie below, and got my foul-weather jacket. Then I stepped back out into the fray, closed up the cabin hatch, and hunkered down to weather the stinging rain as it played out against the current on the slow ride home.

Except for the sling, Angel looked like any kid climbing around on a boat. I had tried to talk with her, but she seemed indifferent. At least she wasn’t scared of me. She could still use the hand on her hurt arm, but the doctors wanted to keep the shoulder stable, immobile. She’d already gotten adept at maneuvering her fingers for tasks without shifting the rest of her arm.

“Keep hold of the lifelines, please,” Reese called up to her from where we sat in the cockpit as the girl explored the deck. It was after five o’clock, but the August sun stayed high, had come out as bright as morning after the squall. Reese leaned back. Long curls of hair fell toward her face, so she fished beaded combs from her purse and secured the wild strands. My hair, too straight for combs, suffered a plain elastic band.

“I couldn’t believe all the blood last night. Looked like buckets, didn’t it? I couldn’t tell how bad her shoulder was.” Reese was telling me about Angel’s injury; her tone had a manic quality, a notch up from her usual drama.
Buckets of blood.
She might have been talking about a horror movie, or a news story she read. She seemed to hold nothing sacred. “But after they cleaned it up, it was much more of a grazing wound than anything else, they said.”