Free A Wild Swan by Michael Cunningham Page A

moment it seems she’s always been stroking through seawater, a mockingly tranquil, sparkling blue-green field on which, about thirty yards away, the boat’s black silhouette is suspended in flames, like a skeleton on an orange X-ray screen.
    A moment later, the actual starts reintroducing itself.
    There’s been an explosion. She seems to have been thrown clear. The pain in her left arm derives from a gash long and precise as the edge of a manila envelope. The idea of blood and sharks comes to her as a fact but only as a fact, a piece of long-remembered trivia, nothing actually threatening. It’s as if she’s recalling a story she heard about something awful that happened to a woman like her.
    She seems to be surrounded by oddly random floating objects: a knob-ended length of mast, a baseball cap, an empty Diet Coke can.
    She seems to see no one else.
    As the ship begins its hissing descent into the water, it occurs to her that he’s not much of a swimmer. He’s refused the physical therapist’s contention that swimming is the best exercise for an amputee.
    She’s surprised to find herself irritated with him. The irritation passes, and she’s looking around again, as if awakened in an unfamiliar place, seeing no one but herself.
    Her condition of stunned remove stays with her as she treads water, unsure about what else to do. It stays with her as the dark-haired man, who does not speak English, attaches the harness that pulls her upward. It does not abandon her until she finds herself strapped to a gurney in a helicopter, wearing a neck brace that permits only a view of two scuba tanks hanging from straps, and a white metal box emblazoned with a red cross.
    The red cross means, somehow (it seems clear, if unfathomable), that her husband is dead. She’s surprised (the baffled serenity of shock has not yet fully receded) by the piercing, inhuman wail she hears. She’d had no idea she could make a noise like that.
    *   *   *
    He will not be able to explain, because he will not remember, how he came to be lying in the shallows of a white-sand beach almost a full day after the boat caught fire. The medics who take him to the modest local hospital will merely say “Miracle,” their accents rendering it “Me-wrack-cowl.”
    They bring her to him immediately. When she enters the hospital room he looks at her with chaste and monk-like calm, and then weeps as loudly and unabashedly as a three-year-old.
    She gets into the narrow bed with him, and holds him. They both understand. They’ve visited a future in which for each of them the other has vanished. They’ve tasted separation. And now they’ve returned to the present, where a resurrection has occurred. They are, as of this hour, married forever.
    *   *   *
    Do you remember that story you read me?
    What story? Hey, you’re not packing your Britney Spears hoodie, are you?
    I like my Britney hoodie. You know, that story.
    I read you hundreds of stories. You haven’t worn that hoodie since you were fifteen.
    The story about the one-legged soldier.
    Oh. Yes. Why are you bringing that up now?
    Maybe because I’m leaving home.
    You are not leaving home. You’re going to college two states away. It’s a six-hour drive. This will always be your home.
    I’m not going to wear the Britney hoodie, what kind of dweeb do you think I am?
    What is it about the one-legged soldier?
    I knew what you were doing. I thought I should tell you I knew what you were doing. Now that I’m leaving home.
    And what, darling, do you think I was doing?
    Duh. You were telling me the story of you and Dad.
    If you’re not going to wear the hoodie, why are you taking it at all?
    Sentimental reasons. A reminder of my glory days.
    Your glory days are still ahead of you.
    People keep saying that. What point were you trying to make, reading me that story?
    I don’t think I was