Free Blue Water by A. Manette Ansay

it seemed too late to take it back.
    â€œIt won’t upset him?” I asked. “Seeing someone he doesn’t know?”
    Bernadette shook her head. “He loves people. Especially kids.” More thumps against the bulkhead; she crossed the salon, motioned for me to follow. “That’s why we want to make Houndfish Cay. He’s got friends there, real friends, boys his age. They come over on their parents’ skiffs, hang out with their Game Boys, listen to music. Boat kids, you know, don’t judge like kids onshore. I guess they’ve seen enough of the world to accept when someone’s different.”
    Her steady blue eyes found mine.
    â€œEveryone’s accepting out here,” she said. “Everybody has their story.”
    Before I could feel the need to reply, she opened the portal to Leon’s stateroom.
    I remembered Ricky Kolb, the smell of his room off the kitchen, close-walled, dark. Leon was naked, except for a diaper, lying on hisside. Not much bigger, at eleven, than Evan had been at six. His skeletal limbs wrapped around themselves as if he were made of a single muscle, everything clenched into a fist. Thick blond dreadlocks, like his father’s, covered his head, but the wide-set eyes were Bernadette’s. When he saw me, tremors of excitement nearly jolted him free of the thick foam wedges that propped him up, supporting his chest, cushioning his knees. It occurred to me that I was looking at the child Evan might have been, had he survived the accident. Your son would not have been himself . Doctors had stressed this, family and friends had alluded to it, Rex and I had repeated it to each other like a prayer. Better for him to be at peace than endure a lifetime of disability and pain. You grasp at such comforts the way a drowning person might reach for a piece of barbed wire. Because it is there. Because it is all you have.
    â€œSweetheart,” Bernadette said, leaning forward so the child could see her mouth. “I’ve got a surprise for you. This is Meg.”
    â€œHi, Leon,” I said, leaning forward, too, and then, to Bernadette. “What incredible hair.”
    She nodded, sweeping it off his forehead with the flat palm of her hand. “It was like that from the moment he was born. Just as thick.”
    I wanted to tell Bernadette about Evan’s hair—dusty-blond fuzz that had all fallen out, then grown back in, months later, darker than my own. I swallowed the words, tried again.
    â€œHe must have been a baby, still,” I said, “when you and Eli went to sea.”
    Bernadette had already changed Leon’s diaper, flipped the wet one into the diaper pail. Here, then, was the smell I’d remembered: hand-laundered diapers, hand-laundered sheets. A flushed, wasting body like an overblown rose.
    And, in this case, a broken water maker.
    No rain for weeks.
    What would have happened, I wondered, if Rex and I hadn’t drifted into view? But I was learning you simply couldn’t think that way. Not out here, where everything, it seemed, was a matter of chance, random luck.
    â€œHe wasn’t quite two,” she said, tugging a T-shirt over his head. “Everybody thought we were crazy.”
    I couldn’t imagine it myself. “Weren’t you scared?”
    â€œI’m always scared,” she said. “But he’s outlived every prediction. And he’s happy. That’s what’s important. Right, guy?” She bent to face him again. “You’re a survivor, isn’t that so?”
    Leon jerked his head. Once again, tremors ran, like ripples, through his body. I glanced at Bernadette, concerned, but she was smiling broadly.
    â€œDidn’t I tell you?” she said, jutting her chin at the portal overhead. “He always knows.”
    She pulled the thick curtain, revealing Eli’s sweating face. He gave us a thumbs-up through the salt-spattered glass, mouthed a single, jubilant