A reverential silence followed this grand gesture of devotion between these two women. If I'd been munching popcorn, watching this scene on my large screen TV, curled up on my comfy leather sofa the colour of soft toffee, in the company of my sweet Barbra and Brutus, a blazing fire in the grate, I'd have teared up. But not now, not here. Not in this murky darkness, feeling cold, wet, frightened, hurting from where I'd been punched and throttled. I had other things to think about. Even though we were all in this together, through none of our own faults, I couldn't help but feel responsible for getting us out of this mess. I was the rough and tumble P.I., used to danger, used to beating impossible odds. But who was I kidding? I wasn't
Spenser: For Hire.
I wanted to tell the others I'd been in tougher situations before and gotten out of them without trouble, but that would have been a lie. I should have lied.
"That's very sweet, Dottie," I heard Charity say, softer now. "But not very sensible. I think you should get back in the boat."
"Isn't this what these life jacket contraptions are for, to keep people afloat? I'm fine, Charity. I'm floating. It’s really quite lovely."
I love when people fib to make someone else feel better.
We hung on. Our plan, such as it was, was working. With less weight to support, the tender was taking on water at a much slower rate and managed to stay afloat, giving us a temporary buoy to hold on to. As we silently bobbed up and down in time with the waves, I knew that inside, each of us was fighting our own private battle, wondering if every second might be our last.
But none of them were and soon, we became like one with the water, just another co
llection of flotsam in the sea.
When we heard the foghorn blast of The Dorothy, our hearts began to sink faster than the tender. It could mean only one thing. She was leaving, preparing to depart the port of Palermo. Without us. She had places to go. Tomorrow The Dorothy's passengers expected to be in Messina, just a strait away from the Italian mainland. They couldn't wait for five wayward passengers who, for all they knew (the tender operator certainly wouldn't tell them otherwise), were whooping it up in some Sicilian pub having lost track of the time.
And, after one more blast, we watched in disbelief as the silhouette of The Dorothy began t
o move away, leaving us behind.
As cheerless thoughts and helplessness invaded our brains like a cancer, the talk around the slowly sinking tender grew sparse. We were growing tired. The wind had picked up and every so often a whitecap would wash by us with a hateful force. The Dorothy had disappeared from our view in shockingly few minutes, as if it had clicked its heels three times and been magically transported away. We were in dire circumstances.
I racked my brain for a way out, for a plan to bring us to safety, but found it distressingly empty. Flora was right: this wasn't right. How had I, a Saskatchewan son, ended up holding on for dear life to a scrap of rotting wood pretending to be a boat, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea with my best friend's ex-girlfriend and three other women I barely knew? If this wasn't my greatest nightmare come to life, I didn't know what was. I'd had doubts about getting on The Dorothy, sailing the seas when I was so accustomed to dry, prairie flatlands. And now, as feared, I'd been dunked, abandoned, my legs flailing under me in water deeper than I cared to imagine, solid land hopelessly out of reach. But in the end it was the wrong enemy I'd feared. The Dorothy wasn't my enemy, nor was the sea. It was a person, a person intent on killing my client, and me, and several others along with us.
I fought off bitter panic, rising up in me as surely as bile in a throat, threatening to pull me under and drown me faster than any water could. I couldn't let it. There was work to do. The work of staying alive as long as humanly possible. I wanted to live. These women wanted to live. But how? How could we possibly survive this?
I could hear Charity and Dottie whispering sweet nothings to each other somewhere on the other side of the boat. Flora was to my right, and had been silent for a long time. Errall was to my left. Every so often she spoke, mutterings mostly, more to hear her own voice than to offer any real solution to our situation. I too called out every minute or two, like roll call, asking everyone if they were still okay and holding on. I said useless things like, I'm sure someone will come by soon and find us, or the Coast Guard should be by any time, or The Dorothy's captain would have contacted the authorities about our being missing and they'll be looking for us by now. Lies. All lies. The shroud of relentless dark seemed to amplify my feelings of helplessness and fear and loneliness.
I realized I had been wrong earlier.
I wished I could see their faces.
A searchlight appeared in the distance and quickly grew in size and brightness as it neared our position.
Although I'm sure no one could hear us, we began to yell, if for no other reason than to prove to ourselves that we were alive and that we could.
Waiting patiently for my turn to be hauled aboard the luxury yacht, moving up and down with the water like a human cork, I looked up, way up, and spotted three figures looking down at us. One was a man, standing alone on the uppermost deck. I could barely make out the shape of him. He was standing slightly back from the railing, seemingly aloof yet very interested in the activity below him. The other two, on the lower deck, standing just beyond where the crew was valiantly toiling to bring us up, were a woman and a man. The woman was all in white, the light fabric of her clothing fluttering about her like the wings of an angel. Unlike the man on the upper deck, these two were pressed against the railing, intently peering down at us. I stared at them, glad for the distraction. As I did I thought I saw something familiar, something...
something...but I couldn't put my finger on it. The ambient light was low, the searchlight having been extinguished and all other lights trained upon the rescue effort. I shielded my eyes to get a better look at the couple and sensed that the woman was staring right back at me. But it was not until it was my turn to be hoisted from the roiling water that might have been our graveyard that I saw her clearly. In disbelief I beheld her face.
"Russell," her rich voice reached down to me like a helping hand. "Glad you could stop by."
I swallowed a mouthful of seawater. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Our saviour was none
other than Sereena Orion Smith.
The yacht was a fifty-metre from the renowned Benetti shipyard, one of only a handful in the flagship
"Golden Bay" series, designed by some guy named Francois Zuretti. She boasted eleven crewmembers, six cabins including a full-width master on the main deck, a nine-metre beam, and a MTU 396 TE 94 engine with a cruising speed of fourteen-point-five knots. She had a tender all her own, plus a couple of Jet Skis and two clear-bottom kayaks. Or so Richard Gray told me when I was dry and warm and settled in the warm embrace of the boat's considerable comforts. A fan of all luxurious means of travel-be it ship, yacht, jet aircraft or locomotive-Richard was fully versed on all the specifications of the Kismet, as she was called.
"Better?" he asked, as I downed a second snifter of warmed Courvoisier.
I went back to work towel drying my hair, sitting on the bed in my cabin-our cabin?-next to him. It was a trifle smaller than the one I shared with Errall on The Dorothy, but not by much. "Yes, thank you," I answered, giving him a grateful smile. With everything that had gone on, everything that begged for explanation, the stupidest thing came next to my lips. "Listen, about you seeing me with Nick Kincaid last night..."
He held up a hand to my mouth, the pads of his fingers soft on my lips. "Don't. You don't have to explain. I don't know why I reacted the way I did...running away like that...it was stupid, childish. I'm the one who should apologize. You can do whatever you want with whoever you want."
I kissed his fingers and brought them down to my chest, under the folds of my robe. He swallowed hard and I could feel his fingers begin to work on my nipple, as if by instinct. Our eyes were bound together.
We pulled the invisible string taut, our lips meeting but not kissing. For a glorious moment we simply took in the smell of each other and basked in the warmth of being so intimately near.
Being completely naked beneath my robe I was either at a distinct disadvantage or advantage, depending on how you looked at it. I decided it was the latter. I stood up slowly and with one easy motion let the robe fall to the floor. He wanted to feast, but I pushed him away. I stepped back and leaned back against the nearest wall, my hands crossed behind me and resting on the shelf of my buttocks.
Unabashedly displaying my wares for inspection, I told him, "Your turn,"
And he took it, standing to peel away the layers that covered his skin. Until the last one, the one that would show me what I hadn't seen around the pool. But before he could go any further I rushed him, throwing him back on the bed, falling with all my weight on top of him. I wanted to make that final discovery myself. It was a tumble for the top, a position of control, superiority, a position we both sought to win from the other. We somersaulted over and over making so much noise I hoped the others had already left their adjoining cabins for the main salon where we were promised food and drink once we'd cleaned up. But Richard and I were determined to get dirty. This was much better than food and drink, even to a starving man. We were equally matched for strength-for a while. He fought me off, but with little of the force I knew his bulging muscles were capable of. And then I won.
He may have let me.
By the time we found our way to the main salon, I was desperate to have him again. Something about the sea air made me...insatiable. I resisted. The salon was empty but through two sliding glass doors we saw an exterior deck overlooking the night lights of Palermo and two women sitting in lounge chairs even though the sun had long ago disappeared. Their heads were close together as they talked, a half-empty bottle of wine on a small table between them.
"I'm pleased you could join us," Sereena's raw-edged voice proclaimed as she rose graciously from her lounger to greet us, dark, romance-novel-heroine hair, eyes and face at their best in the seascape-tinged dim lighting.
I still found it difficult to comprehend that she was really there. She was a long way from her home, the one right next to mine on a quiet, dead-end street in Saskatoon. And, as always when I happen to catch sight of Sereena Orion Smith unexpectedly, I was momentarily taken aback. The rare handsomeness of her features is accentuated by the unapologetic signs of a larger-than-life existence. She has lived next to me for years, sharing, on rare occasion, shards and slivers of a once perilous and exotic lifestyle, and yet, still, remains frustratingly, alluringly, unknowable to me.
"Well," I quipped back, "we were passing by..."
She gave us a rare throaty laugh and guided Richard and me into chairs next to the one occupied by Errall. She too was freshly showered and had donned someone else's clothes, including a light sweater she had wrapped around herself like a blanket to ward off the sea's midnight chill.
"Tonight, I will serve you," Sereena told us. "You poor souls deserve it after what you've been through.
Whatever you want, if it's in the larder, it's yours. Starting with some champagne perhaps? Something stronger? And food I suppose?"
I was slightly abuzz from the cognac-or perhaps it was the apres-cognac activity-but it seemed neither was enough to sufficiently warm me up after marinating in the sea for so long. As for food, well we'd had a big dinner but that seemed millions of years ago. "If you have some rye.. .Coke? That would be terrific.
And I'm craving something meaty, substantial, like a hamburger or something."
"Richard?" Sereena turned to him, her steel eyes boring into him as if using the pretext of offering a drink to search his soul. "What reward would befit a hero?"
"I think he's already been rewarded." This from Errall, with an irritatingly knowing smirk on her face.
"Will the sex be sufficient for you then?" Sereena inquired dryly.
Richard blushed and bumbled a few words. Errall shook her head in mock disgust. I laughed.
"I'll just have some wine," he finally got out.
"Excellent." Sereena turned to address a figure that appeared out of the shadows the moment she said his name. "Phillipe, did you get all that? Another wineglass for Mr. Gray, and a rye and Coke, make it strong, and a hamburger for Mr. Quant." Her serving duties dispensed with, Sereena lowered herself back on her lounger and the crewmember, in a sporty white and blue uniform, jumped to it.
"Sereena, these clothes," I said, fingering the delicate fabric of the rich navy Yves Saint Laurent shirt I was wearing. It had probably set the owner back about four hundred dollars. Errall's new togs likely cost even more. They didn't exactly fit either of us, but at that price, who cared, and in the dim lighting of the deck they looked way fine. "Who do they belong to? Are you sure they won't mind?"
"Oh, of course not, darling," she said. "Besides, they're all ashore wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting Palermo. They'll never miss a piece or two out of their oversized wardrobes for one night."
At that point Charity and Flora joined us. We all rose except Errall. Sereena did her hosting shtick.
"Actually I've just come to deliver Flora to the young people. She was insisting on staying with Dottie and me but there's really no need." Charity looked spectacular in blazing purple silk, a turban wrapped about her hair and a dressing gown tightly fastened around her nearly non-existent waist with a thick sash.
"How is Dottie?" I inquired, concerned about the woman for whom the frenzy and physical toll of our experience was magnified by her age and body's limitations.
"Her heart is racing a bit faster than normal. But she'll be fine.
She just needs to rest." She turned to face Sereena. "And although we spoke briefly earlier, on behalf of my dear Dottie and myself, I'm also here to more formally express our deep gratitude to you and to the crew of this fine vessel. I don't even want to contemplate where we'd be right now were it not for your efforts tonight. I.. .well I just can't think about it or even speak of it."
I watched the exchange between these two women with great curiosity: Charity Wiser an imposing, dominating, at times tyrannical and cantankerous force of a woman; Sereena Smith a complex, fantastical creature with a mythical past that no one person knows the whole of. Would the two together result in a detonation of unimaginable power or would they coalesce into some rare exhibit of similitude?
How Sereena ended up in a little house next to mine on an unremarkable street in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan I'm not quite sure. Forty, maybe fifty, she's an imperfect, damaged, raving beauty who lives life without sham or deception and that's what I like most about her. And she has a soft, caring side as, I supposed, did Charity, at least in her dealings with her beloved Dottie and granddaughter Flora. So were Sereena and Charity...the same? Maybe.. .given thirty more years and a similar life history.. .but no. No.
Sereena is a creature all unto herself. I am convinced one similar never came before nor will ever come after her.
Sereena stepped closer to Charity and clasped the older woman's hands into her own, their eyes communing something private between two women who recognized each other as creatures of a certain sort. Then she asked, "Will you join us for a drink before getting back to Dottie?"
"I would love to and I would love to hear the circumstances that brought you to our rescue," she answered, "but I want to be with Dottie right now."
"Of course. I understand. Perhaps we can have breakfast tomorrow morning?"