Free Lemon Reef by Robin Silverman Page A

were doing so well, Jenna. You were with somebody else— finally . You were happy.”
    I knew Katie was trying to be supportive. Still, I felt alone and embarrassed at the idea of people handling me and devastated in realizing yet again, yet again the decision to see Del or not had been made for me. I fought my rage, trying to hang in there, forcing myself to notice how hard Katie was trying, telling myself she and Gail didn’t know Del would die, that I would never have another chance to…To what? There were things I wanted to say to Del, but I didn’t know what they were or why I hadn’t tried to find her before now if what I’d wanted to tell her was so important.
    â€œWe thought if we told you we were back in touch with Del, you’d want to get back in touch with her, too.”
    â€œSo what if I did?” I spotted my bag and grabbed it off the belt, then turned and began walking away without concern for whether Katie was following me. Over my shoulder I said, “It was not your decision to make.”
    â€œShe wasn’t in such good shape, Jenna.” Katie caught up to me, and we walked without speaking for a while. “Del asked us not to tell you.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œI don’t know why. Maybe she was embarrassed about how things had turned out for her.”

    *

    Heading outdoors to the airport curb was like entering a steam room filled with car-exhaust fumes. Bags disappeared into a slammed trunk, car doors closed, and we were moving forward, but were we really? Katie followed signs for I-95 North—I-95 North, the signifier that for the first twenty years of my life had marked my way home. The tires turned on the car next to us. They seemed to be getting somewhere, but were we? Should I trust this? Was there any traction left to be had on this highway home? It was like a freak attack of claustrophobia, my impulse to bust open the car window and climb out of it, to take some control over the feeling of backward motion or no motion at all. I was desperate for something to happen, some way to counter the static: the static of Miami gray; the static of idling planes and cars; the static of thick windows and recirculated air; the static of time loops, ash-colored corpses, and tires that only appeared to be turning.
    I watched the golf-ball-sized soccer ball hanging in a net from the rearview mirror. I hadn’t seen one since high school when we all had them. It was one of those identity objects like a keychain or a charm for a bracelet, an item one displays to mark a hobby or a favorite sport, or, for Katie, a period in time. A newspaper article about Del lay on the seat next to me, noticeable only because her picture was included. The article itself was short and buried in articles about the Republican primaries, which had begun to heat up in Florida. Del’s hair was full to her shoulders, her eyes were still, with pupils dark and round like the heads of iron nails. What once were subtle laugh lines now were herringboned wrinkles in sprawls around her pronounced eye sockets, cradled by shadowed crescents. She looked at the camera, but her familiar aversion to posing for pictures came through in her expression of capitulation and her typical sarcastic smile.
    The headline: “Local woman dies on Lemon Reef.” I held the paper in my hand and stared at her image. The article about Del was based on Talon’s report to the police. He said that while diving on Lemon Reef, Del suddenly started scrambling to get to the surface. Then she went limp. Del was reportedly too heavy for Talon to pull onto the boat, so he left her body on the swimming ramp extending off the back of the boat and swam to the shore for help. Her body, he said, must have slipped back into the water. She was found seven hours later, a quarter mile southeast of the Sand Dollar Motel on Collins Avenue. Her drifting body apparently had gotten caught on a metal chain attached to