Free Open Water by Maria Flook Page A

the waist and drummed her back with the heel of his hand; he bounced her over his bended knee until her dark bangs swept the littered asphalt. Finally, Lester ran out into the moving traffic. He tried to make the cars stop, as if stopping random vehicles could reverse his situation. Speeding cars screeched and sideswiped the inside guardrail. Lester cameback to his wife and son. He lifted Wydette upside down once again. She choked to death despite the force of gravity. The force of gravity, that monumental natural law, could not save her, how could Willis? Wydette’s face changed, its color deepened, and Willis had to look away.
    The winter following Wydette’s death, Willis discovered a ship’s figurehead from the nineteenth century at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford. The sculpture’s origin was a mystery, nor did they know from which ship she was salvaged. The figurehead was known simply as the “White Lady,” because she wore a snowy gown under a blue apron. Every Saturday afternoon Willis took the bus to New Bedford and paid student admission to go inside the museum, through the arching whalebones at the entrance, past the harpoons and the baleen corsets. He loitered for an hour near the subject of his erotic nightmares. The “White Lady” looked like Wydette. She was beautiful, an evocative wooden bust of a gargantuan woman. The figure was nine feet tall with full skirt draperies swirling around her legs, a blue bodice, and white diamond-shaped stomacher. She wore a large red stone brooch at her bust, a bracelet and two matching necklaces. Her hair was deep brown, and cascaded down to her waist but was bound at the top with a white crownlike headpiece. Like all classic figureheads, she kept her right hand over her bosom, her left hand down at her side. The sculpture stared over Willis. Her maternal gaze was both tolerant and lovingly chastising. For almost a century her face had watched the rough sea and remained sweetly forgiving. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Although the original paint was checked and alligatored, she had the honeyed skin and dark corona of a familiar beauty.The figurehead looked like Wydette as Wydette looked at her viewing.
    All winter the White Lady was his fixation. He wanted to place the palms of his hands on her rough wood cheeks, and with the raw, sensitive pads of his fingertips feel the weathered grain, the notched recesses of her mysterious eyes, her full lips. He couldn’t stand around in the museum very long without imagining knocking the figurehead from its permanent station. He looked so agitated, pacing back and forth, that finally the museum guides escorted him out of the building. When he came back inside, he stole an assortment of souvenirs from the gift shop. Humpback whale stamp pads, ships in tiny thumb-sized bottles. In the end, the museum director had contacted the high school in Newport to discuss Willis’s student profile. On the advice of the assistant principal, Willis was refused any further admittance to the museum.
    That same winter, Willis’s father met Rennie at her souvenir shop on Bowen’s Wharf. He was hired to fix a sliding glass door that kept jumping its track, and in just three months he and Willis were living at Easton Way. Lester and Rennie signed marriage papers at the courthouse, but there wasn’t a ceremony.
    It didn’t seem to bother Lester that Rennie’s first two husbands had gone down at sea. In fact, Lester had a perverse interest in the deaths of Rennie’s two husbands. He had lost his wife for no readable purpose; it was no different from the inexplicable seas and boiler eruptions that took Rennie’s husbands.
    Willis saw Lester trying to shake his guilt about Wydette. Willis didn’t think that his father deserved even a tiny snatch of peace, not even a smidgen, nor a fleck. For months he gave his father the cold shoulder, never letting up. He lost his mother and disowned Lester.
    When Willis and his father moved into