Blanche headed down Gulf Drive toward Tuna. She had to get back to Sunny Sands. But now, she’d have to put it off a bit. A powder blue Cadillac convertible was parked in front of the cabin. Look what’s blown in from the North. He wasn’t in the car. Keys were in the ignition, top down. No sign of Jack.
She knew where she’d find him—in the water. He had to be part fish, and Blanche still had trouble imagining him in the big city. “It’s a living, Blanche,” he’d told her. “A good one, and it lets me get down here whenever I can.” Where he got the wheels when he’d suddenly appear, she never could figure. He had connections. She just wished he’d use them for more than a car rental.
He was wading in the Gulf, wearing expensive pants, probably part of a fine light-wool suit. Blanche sighed. He had a key. He could have gotten into the cabin to put on some shorts.
She came up behind him and threw her arms around his back. He must have heard her tromping over the sand because in an instant he scooped her up, and Blanche found herself in about three feet of water, the waves splashing them both. Jack laughed. “Jeez, it’s like bathwater. How you doin’, Bang!”
He splashed her again, and Blanche gave in. “Now look at what you’ve done to my outfit,” she yelled.
“Some outfit. Where’d you go? Goodwill?”
She flopped about, trying to gain footing—his foot—to pull him under. He was quick. He splatted a wave at her. But she caught him off guard, grabbed one slippery ankle, and he went down. The two of them were soaking wet and right back where they were twenty-five years before, two kids splashing around at the beach.
“B, let’s swim out.”
“You’re crazy. Look at the sky. Didn’t you hear a hurricane is coming?”
“It’s not here yet, won’t be for at least a day or so.” The water was lightly capped, the blue sky streaked white to the north, the bottle-green Gulf capped in silver to the south. Blanche thought of the day they’d almost drowned, the current between the point and Gull Egg Key deceptively calm.
“Jack, remember that day we swam out to the key? Thank God I talked you into a life jacket.”
“Yeah, and I had to pay you a dollar. I still can’t figure that one out,” he said. His shirt was plastered to his chest, his tie ruined, the trousers now rolled up and hopeless. “Oh, damn, my wallet.” He pulled it out of his pants pocket and squeezed the salt water out of the leather.
“No harm done. It’s all plastic.”
“Except for the picture of your mom.” They both stood up. Jack opened the wallet and carefully removed the photo of Rose Murninghan—Blanche’s mother, Jack’s aunt. Rose had cared for Jack like a son when his mother disappeared—“with the circus,” his dad always said. They knew it wasn’t true, but the family mystery was never solved, and Rose and Maeve took care of Jack until he was eight. Until her accident.
The Jacks. The story was never resolved. Jack’s dad had been in the merchant marine and was gone for most of the time. And then he all but disappeared; last the young Jack heard, his father was in Polynesia working in import-export. Jack Senior, Maeve’s brother, was a pirate of sorts who finally never made it back from sea. His was a nebulous occupation, maybe fishing, maybe guiding fishing charters. Maybe making deliveries he shouldn’t be making. Maeve had always been vague on the subject of the Jacks. She would tousle Jack III’s black curly hair and say, “Maybe we finally got it right.”
She was devoted to Blanche and Jack III and forgave them everything—their truancy, beer drinking, and swimming in dangerous current. Duncan had rousted them more than once from their hideouts along the beach and from the neighbors’ pools. “Stick together. And when you make mistakes, make them right,” she’d say. She didn’t dwell on the past.
But Maeve did look back to a time she had her beloved daughter, Rose. “An angel. That’s what she is,” said Maeve, who never got over Rose’s death in that senseless car wreck. She kept her memory alive. It was about the only concession she made to the past.
Jack held up the damp picture of Rose in one hand, and with the other, pulled Blanche into a hug.
They looked at Rose’s black curly hair, her laughing eyes, and the wide smile. It was the same photo that Blanche hung on the wall next to the fireplace. Next to a painting of a Miccosukee chief, the origin of which was never completely clear to Blanche. Gran would get uncharacteristically misty over that picture, and Blanche didn’t push it. Gran told them fragments of stories, but the truth remained buried in the lore of Santa Maria, and in the dunes and grasses of the keys along the coast. Blanche always wondered, why?
She looked at the photo of her mother. “You still carry her.”
“Wouldn’t be without her. Neither would you.”
“I always feel she’s around. Somewhere, watching. Maeve, too.”
“And the Jacks?”
“Oh, God, I hope not.”
“Maeve’s probably working some magic juju right now. Somehow setting them straight.” She looked up at a bright cloud so like her grandmother’s fluffy white hair and imagined her lining up all three Jacks. What would she say? Would she ask, Where have you been in all this?
Jack waved the photo in front of Blanche. “Earth calling.” He shook the picture of Rose in the humid Gulf air. “She’d understand. This mess we’re in. They all would, really, and they’d have our back. Now, let’s get dry and drink some cold wet beer.”
He held Rose next to Blanche’s face. “Twins.”
Jack and Blanche raced up the beach toward the cabin, Jack slightly in the lead. They carried pounds of sand in their pockets but happiness lifted their spirits. They were back at the cabin together. Rose ran along with them, just like they knew she always would.