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I thought I could see the blue light now. It was flickering around Doyle. I raised up my arms to move closer to the blue light. I’m coming, Jenny. My arms drifted slowly away from the pole. I opened my mouth to let in a long deep breath of beautiful, life-taking water.
The weight lifted off my chest and I frowned. That’s funny, I thought. I focused on the flickering figure far above me, the dim outline of Doyle-as-God. He was raising the pole straight up. He held it like a spear, ready to slice down through the water and end me once and for all, and I thought, okay. This solves everything. The pole started down.
And the world ended.
Lightning slammed into the pole. There was a tremendous explosion that I could hear even a foot and a half under the water, and Doyle disappeared. For one unbearably bright moment I saw him outlined in fire, and then he was gone.
I was thrown up out of the water, jolted back into choking, retching consciousness.
Up into life.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I stood in the shallow water with the storm howling around me for a full minute before I could make my body move towards the boarding ladder up into the sailboat. Small pieces of charred, blackened something littered the surface of the water nearby. I couldn’t tell if it was Doyle or boat pole and I didn’t want to know. I sloshed through to the boarding ladder.
I didn’t think there was strength enough left in my hands for them to tremble, but that’s what they did as I reached to feel for Nancy’s pulse.
She had one. She was breathing. I killed the engine, moved Nancy below to a bunk. I found a spare anchor in a locker and managed to drop it off the bow. It would at least keep us from drifting away into worse trouble. It was all I could manage.
I dogged the hatch and fell down beside Nancy.
There was nothing left in me. I felt as weak as a baby. The boat shook in the storm, but I couldn’t have done anything no matter how bad it got.
It didn’t get much worse. The blast of lightning that had wiped away Doyle had been the peak of the storm. We rocked and lurched for another hour and then things began to get noticeably better.
I checked on Nancy one more time. Her breathing was regular, her pulse strong and steady. By then I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, even if it meant that the boat would sink.
Just before I closed my eyes, completely drained of all energy and feeling, the last crash of thunder blasted in the distance and the pitch of the wind in the rigging dropped an octave.
I fell into sleep.
Art had grumbled. He’d called me a dick-brained butt-sucker. Said it was very bad for business to bring the charter back dead. I said at least I’d brought them back, and he’d grumbled some more, but it was just for appearances. He was impressed.
Nicky had hopped around with relieved anxiety, alternating between rubbing his face and giving me huge bawdy winks as he looked at Nancy. “Good one, mate,” he’d said, looking her over with approval. “A keeper.”
I told him I thought so, too, but that it wasn’t up to me.
Nancy had a mild concussion and the hospital kept her overnight. I had three broken ribs and a number of sprains, cuts, and bruises. They didn’t keep me, and Nicky drove me home in my car.
The storm had given Key West a thorough cleaning and knocked down a couple of old trees, but that was all. It was nothing compared to the beating Miami had taken, as we were learning from the news.
Many of the trees were stripped of leaves. Odd chunks of flotsam showed on the shore: chunks of wood, half a small boat, a five-foot shark, a bookcase, most of a piano, three cushions that didn’t match. There was a strange, brand-new feeling to the world, as if everything before yesterday had been erased.
There was a sensation of hopefulness in the air. D
riving through the strangely clean streets, people actually waved, spoke to one another, acted as though we were all in this together. The contrast to normal Key West was eerie.
I went back to the hospital on Stock Island the next morning to check on Nancy. She was sitting up in bed when I got there, chatting happily with one of the interns, a handsome black man from Jamaica. He grinned and sauntered off when I got there.
I sat beside Nancy. She was wearing one of those open-backed hospital gowns, and somehow she made it look glamorous. I wanted to take her hand but I felt oddly shy all of a sudden, as if the last few hours had wiped out what we had been through and left us the same people who had said goodbye in front of her apartment.
“Well,” I said, “you look—” And I stopped because what tried to come out was edible, or stunning, and to have that trail off into something like better didn’t seem right.
She seemed to understand. She gave me her second-best smile and said, “I am. They say the danger is past and I can leave today. Get back to my life.”
She said it in a funny way and I twisted my head to see her face a little better. She gave a half-shake. “I don’t think I want to get back to my life, Billy.”
“Whose life would you like?”
