Free Open Water by Maria Flook Page B

Rennie’s big house above First Beach, Willis took the third-floor bedroom which had its own bath. An old clawfoot tub faced the bathroom window. The bathroom window was actually a full-sized storm door which framed a picture of the cold Atlantic, the rough surf breaking its green shingles on the shore. Rennie had a practical intuition about her new stepson. One night, Willis stood up from the tub, naked and dripping wet; he wanted to exit the tepid bath, exit the humid room. He wanted to go right through that storm door. Bathwater wasn’t enough. Soap was no use. Its lather was acrid, like white dung. He wanted the wet sea. He rattled the handle on the storm, but Rennie had nailed the door shut.
    He sat down again in the tepid water. His guilt expanded like an apron of fungus; it ringed him with layers of cold truffles. He spent hours. Rennie claimed that it was the best seat in the house, and sometimes Willis had to let her use the tub. Her lavender bath salts scented the hall long after she was finished.
    Rennie didn’t tolerate Willis’s obsessive nature or recognize his sickness. When Willis became agitated, she punched his shoulder and said, “Fiddle-faddle.” Such a tenderness in fool words startled Willis. Then, if Willis felt like an argument, Rennie too quickly conceded his point. She liked to derail him. She told him, quite simply, “Touché.” She bowed at the waist. She was closing it off before he could build up his case.
    Lester’s heart attack occurred in the car, during a freak Easter snow squall. Willis and Lester were driving home late from a boat show at the Boston Garden. They were on empty stomachs. Heavy snowflakes fell on the windshieldand collected like curls of white butter, mounding up in a solid mass. The wipers were working hard but they couldn’t fling the heavy snow. Lester pulled to the side of the road. He waited in the driver’s seat.
    “What are we doing?” Willis said.
    Lester looked at the white windshield as if he saw a face in the storm. He seemed to recognize this face but didn’t necessarily wish to greet it.
    “Why are we stopping? Here?” Willis said. Lester looked ready to answer Willis, but he cupped his shoulder in the palm of his hand and hunched forward in pain. It must have been a terrible crushing sensation in his chest, but worse than the sensation was the recognition. Lester knew what it meant to him, what it meant to his son.
    After it was over, Willis sat next to his father for several minutes. Willis tried to reconstruct events; he thought of the cabin cruisers in the Boston Garden. His father perished at this unexpected place, at an absurd moment, while they were tuned to the “Sports Huddle” on WHDH. For a long time, Willis sat listening to the voice of Eddie Andelman discussing Stanley Cup finalists. At last, Willis went around to the driver’s side and he shoved his father’s body out from behind the wheel. It was difficult to get him over on the passenger side, he was a big man. He was a dead man. When Willis stepped back into the car, the heavy snow sucked his shoes right off his feet. He explored the icy pedals through his wet socks. Willis thought of Lester joining up with Wydette. It wasn’t until then that he started screaming. He yelled to Wydette, “Look out! Look out! Look out!”
    He rode along the shoulder, testing the feel of it. He didn’t yet have his driver’s license. When he stepped on the brake, the car fishtailed on the fresh snow. He workedinto the traffic and kept driving until he saw a road sign, a blue square with a large, iridescent
H.
Willis believed that the sign had appeared out of nowhere to help him deliver Lester directly to Hell. Willis followed the blue signs; he recited what Wydette used to say, her polite, hypnotic formula:
H—E—two sticks, H—E—two sticks, H—E—two sticks, H—E—two sticks, H—E—two sticks.
    He kept spelling the word until he steered into the emergency entrance of a hospital in