Alexa hoped the hot, robust shower spray would wash away her longing for Bruce’s lips, hands, and all the rest of him. She wiggled her toes and watched the whirlpool vanish, like the kiss, down the drain. A small sign in the bathroom pleaded with guests to conserve water. That seemed strange to Alexa, what with all the rain, but she turned off the faucet instead of lingering and reached for a towel, dry this time.
She wiped the foggy mirror and examined her gaff wound. She’d have a new scar to add to the old one cascading across her back. The edges of the lesion were pink and puffy. She rummaged for her ancient tube of Neosporin and rubbed some in. The sting as the ointment went to work felt good, medicinal, an answer to a problem. She dabbed some on her sandfly bites for good measure.
Standing naked in front of the mirror, she took care combing out tangles and blow-drying her hair. Dad claimed she was the image of her mother. Mom had been only thirty-nine—two years older than Alexa now—when she died.
Crappy unfair, Alexa thought. Every day is a gift, and all. Is a glioma brain tumor in my future? Thinking of Mom made her think of her brother.
If she were the image of Mom, Charlie looked nothing like Dad. She pictured her brother in rumpled khakis and plaid flannel shirt. Shy of six feet, affable face, thinning hair, glasses. Charlie was a geotechnical engineer in Asheville, North Carolina, and liked to drill holes in the earth. His wife, Mel, bossed him around.
How old were Benny and Noah now? Seven and four, she guessed. Dammit. She hadn’t remembered to send them Christmas presents.
What time was it back home? She subtracted seventeen hours. Five a.m. yesterday. Charlie wouldn’t like it, but when else was she going to call?
She pulled on her pajama shorts and red N.C. State basketball T-shirt.
Her new phone surprisingly had a signal. She punched his number before she could chicken out. The phone rang and rang. Every time it went to voicemail, she hung up and dialed again. It rang across Foveaux Strait, across the Pacific Ocean, across the equator, across datelines, across time zones, across the United States, across the Blue Ridge Mountains, across loss and sorrow.
After four separate calls, Charlie answered.
“It’s me,” she said brightly.
“Who? What?” His voice was thick, groggy.
“Alexa. Me.”
“Lexi. Where are you? Is something wrong?”
Charlie was the single person on earth allowed to call her Lexi. “No. I’m in New Zealand. I wanted to say hello. See how you are.”
No way she could tell him that she was sorry for being mean to him when they were kids, that she missed Mom, that she had no one to love on the brink of death but him.
“But…”
Alexa could hear rustling and sighing.
“Okay. I’m in the kitchen—didn’t want to wake Mel. Why are you calling?”
“I told you,” she said cheerfully. “I wanted to see how you were doing. And the boys.”
“But it’s five a.m.”
“I know it’s early, but this is the only time I had. I’m busy.”
Silence.
Crap. She had offended him. “I know you’re busy too. How’s work?”
“Really?” Charlie said. “You wake me at five a.m. to ask about work?”
Alexa shoved her dirty clothes to the floor and sank into the chair. “I’m going down in a shark cage. I thought I better tell a family member in case I don’t survive.” Why in the world had she lied? What was wrong with her?
“Must be nice. I thought you had to work for a living.”
“I’ve always worked,” she spat. “No one paid for my graduate schools like they did yours.” This wasn’t going according to plan. Brotherly love was careening off a cliff. “How are Benny and Noah?”
The strain in Charlie’s voice lifted. “He wants us to call him Ben, not Benny. He’s reading chapter books. Like Magic Tree House and Nate the Great. I don’t think I could even read in the first grade.”
“Because no one read to you after Mom died. You made up for it. And Noah?”
“He says whatever comes into his head. He asked a man at the grocery store where his hair was.”
Alexa laughed. “How’s Mel?”
“She’s…well, things aren’t great. She has us seeing a counselor.”
“No way.” Charlie and Mel were her Norman Rockwell illustration. Their little family was proof of an ideal. Even if she didn’t aspire to that ideal, she liked to know it existed.
She waited for him to say something. Ask about her job maybe. As a kid, Charlie had perfected the wall of silence. He was still good at it. She counted to ten, tried to wait him out. “Why don’t you come visit?” she finally asked. “New Zealand has great hiking, and there’s crazy geothermal stuff on the North Island.”
“I actually looked into fares. I can’t afford sixteen hundred dollars a pop.”
“Well, I just wanted to say hi. Tell Benny and Noah I love them.”
I love you too, Charlie.
She stared at the curtain-covered window of her cozy room. Her mind was wired; no way she could sleep. Why had she told Charlie she was going down in a shark cage? What would it be like? She grabbed her computer and Googled shark cage diving YouTubes. There were loads. People liked to share their death-defying feats. Some were a minute or two long, and poorly filmed. She clicked on a twelve-minute one from Cape Town, South Africa, featuring a nauseatingly cute couple. “Hi. I’m Kara. This is my boyfriend, Nate. I can’t believe we’re doing this,” all young and sunglasses and bonhomie. The cage boat wasn’t as fancy as The Apex. There appeared to be two crew members and six or seven tourists. When the boat arrived at the shark grounds ten miles off the coast, the operator explained it could take minutes to hours to spot a shark. To lure them, he ladled chum overboard, and another crew cast a bloody fish attached to a buoy into the water and slowly reeled it back, over and over. Alexa laughed at Kara and Nate struggling into their wetsuits, thrusting and zipping, wiggling toes and teasing each other about hyperventilating and deathtraps. The crew members threw the cage, attached by ropes, overboard, and pulled it close to the side of the slightly rocking boat.
It looked flimsy.
The suited-up Kara leaned over the boat railing, pointing at a bird. A crew member yelled, “Back, back, back.” A great white shark erupted from the water, lunging for the bait, making Kara scream and Alexa jerk in the chair. Kara’s hands were shaking as she buckled her weight belt and strapped on her mask.
Nate, looking like a fat black seal now, sat on the side of the boat. A crew member shouted instructions: “Put your bum there, swing your feet over, get your left foot to touch that second bar.” Nate hovered over the cage. “Tell my mother I love her,” he goofed to the camera. He took a breath and slithered into the cage, which was three-fourths submerged.
The camera went with him and caught a damn white coming at the bars, jaws wide, ramming the corner, the camera jerky and whirling. Nate popped up like a seal head, and the crew asked if he was okay.
God almighty, Alexa thought. Say no.
Then the woman dropped down, and the crew lowered mouthpieces attached to tubes leading to the boat. The air. So, no scuba tanks, just hoses. The couple lowered their heads beneath the water, camera following into murky green. Their gloved hands grasped handles inches from the cage bars, and they tucked a foot each in a bar at the bottom. A crew member dropped a fish head on a line in front of the cage. Hadn’t Kana Duffy said baiting the cage was illegal? A shark swam straight at it and veered at the last moment, showing a massive ivory belly as it arced away.
The sharks were being teased. Alexa didn’t have the stomach to watch anymore and closed her laptop. She slumped in the chair, too tired now to bridge the floor to the bed and fell asleep. Her dreams were peppered with Bruce and Charlie and sharks and whales. A soft scritch—was it a knock?—startled her into stiff-necked alertness an hour later, according to the glowing numbers on the clock. A jolt of joy—Bruce was tapping to be let in. But what if it wasn’t Bruce? Fear made her heart gallop. She strained her ears, listened for more, heard only her rapid breath.
The wind, she thought. Must have been the wind. She stumbled to the bed, crawled in, and pulled the covers to her chin. Bruce was only a scream away.