Higher and higher the water rose, wrapping the hull in its cold embrace. Still the ship refused to budge.
“Flyers, this is killing me,” groaned Lore.
“That’s not an expression I’ve ever heard you use,” Michael said.
“Well, I kind of see the sense of it now.”
Michael held up a hand; he’d felt something. He willed all his senses to focus. The sensation came again: the tiniest shudder, rippling through the hull. His eyes met Lore’s; she’d detected it, too. The great creature was coming to life. The deck shifted beneath him with a deep moan.
“Here we go!” Lore cried.
The
Bergensfjord
began to lift from her braces.
At the end of the block, the Denali appeared, turning the corner with painstaking care. Carter stepped into the road and positioned himself in its path. He did not hold up his hand or in any way indicate his wish that it should stop. He stepped aside as the car came to a halt in front of him. With a hushed, mechanical purr, the driver’s window drew down. Crisp air and a smell of leather flowed out onto his face.
“Mr. Carter?”
“It’s good to see you, Mrs. Wood.”
She was wearing her tennis clothes. The silver packages in back, the baby seat with its mobile of plush toys, the sunglasses perched on her head: all the same as the morning they’d met.
“You’re looking well,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed on his face, as if she were attempting to read small print. “You stopped me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I don’t understand. Why did you do that?”
“Why don’t you pull into the driveway? We can have us a talk.”
She glanced around with confusion
“You go on now,” he assured her.
Rather reluctantly, she turned the Denali into the driveway and shut off the engine. Carter stepped to the driver’s side window again. The motor was making a quiet ticking sound. Hands locked on the steering wheel, Rachel stared straight out the windshield, as if afraid to look at him.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to be doing this,” she said.
“It’s all right,” Carter said.
Her voice sharpened with panic. “But it’s
not
all right. It’s not all right at all.”
Carter opened her door. “Why don’t you come and see the yard, Mrs. Wood? Kept it nice for you.”
“I’m
supposed
to drive the car. That’s what I
do.
That’s my
job.
”
“Just this morning planted one of those cut-leaf maples you like. You should see how pretty it is.”
For a moment she was silent. Then: “A cut-leaf maple, you say?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She nodded pensively to herself. “I always thought it would be just the right thing for that corner. You know the one I mean?”
“Absolutely I do.”
She turned to look at him. For a moment she studied his face, her blue eyes slightly squinted. “You’re always thinking of me, aren’t you, Mr. Carter? You always know just the thing to say. I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend like you.”
“Oh, I expect you have.”
“Oh, please. I have people, sure. Lots of people in Rachel Wood’s life. But never anyone who understands me the way you do.” She looked at him kindly. “But you and me. We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?”
“I’d say we are, Mrs. Wood.”
“Now, if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. It’s Rachel.”
He nodded. “Anthony, then.”
Her face opened as if she’d discovered something. “Rachel and Anthony! We’re like two characters in a movie.”
He held out a hand. “Why don’t you come on now, Rachel? It’ll all be fine, you’ll see.”
Accepting his hand for balance, she exited the car. By the open door she paused with great deliberateness and filled her lungs with air.
“Now, that’s a wonderful smell,” she said. “What is that?”
“Cut the lawn just now. I suspect that’s it.”
“Of course. Now I remember.” She smiled with satisfaction. “How long has it been since I smelled new-mown grass? Smelled anything, for that matter.”
“Garden’s waiting on you. Lots of good smells there.”
He made a circle with his arm; Rachel let him lead the way. The shadows were stretching over the ground; evening was about to fall. He steered her to the gate, where she came to a stop.
“Do you know how you make me feel, Anthony? I’ve been trying to think how to say it.”
“How’s that?”
“You make me feel
seen.
Like I was invisible until you came along. Does that sound crazy? Probably it does.”
“Not to me,” said Carter.
“I think I sensed it right away, that morning under the overpass. Do you remember?” A feeling of distance came into her eyes. “It was all so upsetting. Everyone honking and yelling and you there with your sign.
‘HUNGRY,
ANYTHING
WILL
HELP.
GOD
BLESS
YOU.’
I thought, that man means something. He’s not just there by accident. That man’s come into my life for a purpose.”
Carter opened the latch; they stepped through. She was still clutching his arm, the two of them like a couple walking down the aisle. Her steps were solemn and measured; it was as if each one required a separate act of will.
“Now, Anthony, this really
is
lovely.”
They were standing by the pool. The water was perfectly still and very blue. Around them, the yard made an effulgent display of color and life.
“Honestly, I can hardly believe my eyes. After all this time. You must have worked so hard.”
“Wasn’t any trouble. I had some help, too.”
Rachel looked at him. “Really? Who was that?”
“Woman I know. Named Amy.”
Rachel pondered this. “Now,” she declared, raising a finger to her lips, “I believe I met an Amy not too long ago. I believe I gave her a lift. About so tall, with dark hair?”
Carter nodded.
“A very sweet girl. And what skin. Absolutely
glorious
skin.” She smiled suddenly. “And what have we here?”
Her eyes had fallen on the cosmos. She separated from him and walked across the lawn to the beds, Carter following.
“These are just beautiful, Anthony.”
She knelt before the flowers. Carter had planted two shades of pink: the first a deep solid, the second softer with green flares, on long, tippy stems.
“May I, Anthony?”
“You go on and do as you like. Planted them for you.”
She selected one of the deeper pink and pinched off the stem. Holding it between thumb and forefinger, she rotated it slowly, breathing softly through her nose.
“Do you know what the name means?” she asked.
“Can’t say I do.”
“It’s from the Greek. It means ‘balanced universe.’ ” She rocked back onto her heels. “It’s funny, I have no idea how I know that. Probably I learned it in school.”
A quiet passed.
“Haley loves these.” Rachel was looking at the flower, gazing at it as if it were a talisman or the key to a door she couldn’t quite unlock.
“That she does,” Carter answered.
“Always putting them in her hair. Her sister’s, too.”
“Miss Riley. Cute as a bug, that one.”
A soft night was coming on between the branches of the trees. Rachel pointed her face to the sky.
“I have so many memories, Anthony. Sometimes it’s all so hard to sort out.”
“Things will come to you,” he assured her.
“I remember the pool.”
It was happening. Carter crouched beside her.
“That morning, how terrible everything was. The air so raw.” She took a long, mournful breath. “I was so sad. So incredibly sad. Like a great black ocean and there you are, floating in it, drifting, no land anywhere, nothing to want or hope for. It’s just you and the water and the darkness and you know it will always be like that, forever and ever.”
She fell silent, lost in these old, troubled thoughts. The air had cooled; the lights of the city, coming on, reflected off the cloud deck, making a pale glow. Then:
“That was when I saw you. You were in the yard with Haley. Just …” She shrugged. “Showing her something. A toad, maybe. A flower. You were always doing that, showing her little things to make her happy.” She shook her head slowly. “But that was the thing. I
knew
it was you, I
believed
it was you. But that wasn’t who I saw.”
She was staring at the ground, dry-eyed, beyond feeling. It would all pour forth now, the memories, the pain, the horrors of that day.
“It was Death, Anthony.”
Carter waited.
“I know that’s an old idea. A
crazy
idea. And you so sweet to me, to all of us. But I saw you standing there with Haley and I thought, Death has come. He’s here, he’s outside right now with my little girl. It’s all a mistake, a horrible mistake, I’m the one he wants.
I’m
the one who needs to die.”
The day was fading, colors draining, the sky releasing the last of its light. She raised her face; her eyes were beseeching, moist and wide.
“That’s why I did what I did, Anthony. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right, I know that. There are things that can never be forgiven. But that is why.”
Rachel had begun to cry. Carter put his arms around her as she collapsed into his weight. Her skin was warm and sweet-smelling, just a hint of her perfume lingering. How small she was, and he not a big man in the slightest. She might have been a bird there, just a little bit of a thing cupped in his hand.
The girls were laughing in the house.
“Oh God, I left them,” Rachel sobbed. She was clutching his shirt in her fists. “How could I leave them? My babies. My beautiful baby girls.”
“Hush now,” he said. “Time to let go of all the old things.”
They stayed like that for a time, holding each other. Night had descended in full; the air was still and moist with dew. The little girls were singing. The song was sweet and wordless, like the songs of birds.
“They waitin’ on you,” said Carter.
She shook her head against his chest. “I can’t face them. I can’t.”
“You be strong, Rachel. Be strong for your babies.”
She let him slowly draw her to her feet and took his arm, gripping it tightly with both hands, just above the elbow. With small steps, Carter led her around the pool toward the back door. The house was dark. Carter had expected it to be this way but could not say why that should be so. It was simply a part, another part, of the way things were in this place.
They stopped before the door. From deep in the house, more laughter and the creaking of springs: the girls were jumping on the beds.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Rachel asked.
Carter didn’t answer. Rachel looked at him closely; something shifted in her face. She understood that he would not be going with her.
“Have to be this way,” he explained. “You go on, now. Tell them hello for me, won’t you? Tell them I’ve been thinking on them, every day.”
She regarded the knob with a deep tentativeness. Inside, the girls were laughing with wild delight.
“Mr. Carter—”
“Anthony.”
She placed a palm upon his cheek. She was crying again; come to think of it, Carter was crying a little himself. When she kissed him, he tasted not just the softness of her mouth and the warmth of her breath but also the saltiness of their tears conjoining—not a taste of sorrow strictly speaking, though there was sorrow in it.
“God bless you, too, Anthony.”
And before he knew it—before the feel of her kiss had faded from his lips—the door had opened and she was gone.
76
2030 hours: the light was almost gone, the convoy moving at a creep.
They were in a coastal tableland of tangled scrub, the road pocked with potholes in places, in others rippled like a washboard. Chase was driving, his gaze intent as he fought the wheel. Amy was riding in back.
Peter radioed Greer, who was driving the tanker at the rear of the column. “How much farther?”
“Six miles.”
Six miles at twenty miles per hour. Behind them, the sun had been subsumed into a flat horizon, erasing all shadows.
“We should see the channel bridge soon,” Greer added. “The isthmus is just south of there.”
“Everyone, we need to push it,” Peter said.
They accelerated to thirty-five. Peter swiveled in his seat to make sure the convoy was keeping pace. A gap opened, then narrowed. The cab of the Humvee flared as the first bus in line turned on its headlights.
“How much faster should we go?” Chase asked.
“Keep it there for now.”
There was a hard bang as they rocketed through a deep hole.
“Those buses are going to blow apart,” Chase said.
A scrim of light appeared ahead: the moon. It lifted swiftly from the eastern horizon, plump and fiery. Simultaneously, the channel bridge rose up before them in distant silhouette—a stately, vaguely organic figure with its long scoops of wire slung from tall trestles. Peter took up the radio again.
“Drivers, anybody seeing anything out there?”
Negative. Negative. Negative.
Through the windscreen of the pilothouse, Michael and Lore were watching the seawall doors. The portside door had opened without complaint; the starboard was the problem. At a 150-degree angle to the dock, the door had stopped cold. They’d been trying to open it the rest of the way for nearly two hours.
“I’m out of ideas here,” Rand radioed from the quay. “I think that’s all we’re going to get.”
“Will we clear it?” Lore asked. The door weighed forty tons.
Michael didn’t know. “Rand, get down to engineering. I need you there.”
“I’m sorry, Michael.”
“You did your best. We’ll have to manage.” He hung the microphone back on the panel.
“Fuck.”
The lights on the panel went dead.
Twenty-eight miles west, the same summer moon had risen over the
Chevron Mariner.
Its blazing orange light shone down upon the deck; it shimmered over the oily waters of the lagoon like a skin of flame.
With a bang like a small explosion, the hatch detonated skyward. It seemed not so much to fly as to leap, soaring into the nighttime sky of its own volition. Up and up it sailed, spinning on its horizontal axis with a whizzing sound; then, like a man who’s lost his train of thought, it appeared to pause in midflight. For the thinnest moment, it neither rose nor fell; one might easily have been forgiven for thinking it was charged with some magical power, capable of thwarting gravity. But, not so: down it plunged, into the befouled waters.