Skye answered the door when I went over the next day to return the keys. Despite the heat, she was wearing tracksuit pants with a hooded jacket zipped all the way up, her whole body covered apart from her bare feet. I pushed away a memory of her golden skin against the leather chair in the studio. Her cheekbones glittered with powder.
“Come on in,” she said, and I followed her. Burning December sun poured in through all the glass. The bridge was a crisp piece of geometry across the water, the view fringed with drooping gums, a postcard. “Virginia’s at the gallery. Some kind of photocopier emergency? You can wait for her if you want.” I held on to the keys in my pocket, unreasonably disappointed. Skye folded her arms with her back to the light. “I was just about to take the boat out. Do you want to come?”
“Sailing?”
“Yes, stupid.” She went to the door and slipped her feet into canvas sandshoes. I had never learned to like sailing, the few times Virginia had taken me. But my hangover made me slow and pliant; I went along with it.
The sailboat slid through the water, out from the shade of the dock and into the bright afternoon. The deck was scrubbed clean and white, and I sat on a bench near the stern and closed my eyes for a moment. The harsh sun and salt spray felt kind for those long seconds, convinced me that they could scrub me clean too. Skye moved with compact assurance as she adjusted the sail, coiled ropes, tied complicated knots. I didn’t embarrass myself by trying to help. She stepped down into the small cabin and came back with a bottle of water.
“Thanks for yesterday,” she said, handing me the bottle. She said it as though it was any old thing, no big deal. “He’s fine, by the way. Apparently.”
Half my night had been spent fighting memories of March’s prone body, the terrible bluish slackness of his skin, and the other half dreaming of London. All night with the comatose and the dead.
“No worries,” I said.
The water around us sparkled and shined, giving away nothing of its true depth, and the boat rocked gently. Skye unzipped her jacket and sat across from me with her elbows on her knees and talked. She had been photographed by March for his “private collection” a few times, she said. He didn’t pay her in money, only in drugs. She made it sound like a fair swap, or rather she was convincing herself that it was.
“Isn’t he friends with Maureen?” I asked.
She snorted. “Friends. Yeah.”
I asked about Fred.
“He loves Derek. He loves all that free-spirit, hippie artistic bullshit,” she said. “He just sees what he wants to see. Like everyone.” Skye checked the sail, lifted a snaking end of coiled rope, dropped it again. “So, do you have anything on you?” she asked, standing with one hand on her hip.
“You keep asking me that,” I said.
“Yeah, I do.” She shrugged her hoodie off, leaving her shoulders bare in a thin camisole, flirting. She stepped closer so that we were almost touching.
“Skye, come on,” I said, shifting. “Don’t.”
Her expression clouded. “I hope you got a good look yesterday. Enjoy yourself?”
I drank my water, shook my painful head. This whole sailing thing was a mistake.
She collected her hoodie from the floor. “Julian wasn’t as pure and good as you,” she said. “He loved to come out for a sail.” She played with the zipper, which seemed to have stuck, and tossed the thing onto the bench across from me. “He used to make me a drink, a ‘Julian Special.’” She bit her thumb, chewing the worn-down nail, worrying the skin with her teeth.
The bottled water started to taste stale and metallic. It took a moment to understand what she was telling me, and then another moment for the instinctive disbelief to fall sickeningly away.
“Dad thinks he was such a saint,” she went on. “I said I’d tell him. I’d tell Virginia. He said I wouldn’t, and that even if I did, he’d just say it was bullshit and I was a jealous little bitch, jealous little sister. And he said everyone knew about March’s photos, everyone knew I was a slut.”
The boat floated in the water, going nowhere, stilled against the breeze. She talked quickly, with anxious animation. “I switched the drinks. He didn’t notice, he was stoned anyway. He was right there, where you’re sitting. Passed out.” She paused, staring at the bench, and shook her head. “I was so sick of it, you know? And I just thought, I know what it will be like, he just won’t tell me next time he mixes the drinks, and that would be worse.”
“You didn’t think they’d believe you? If you told them?”
Her face lost its hardness, threatened to crumple. “Maybe, yeah. But I didn’t want them to know.” She was ashamed, she was trying to paper it over, and I felt the bitter tide of my anger rising again, that impulse to shred the photos, to wreck the studio. To leave the man dead and alone. “I think Virginia kind of knew, for a while,” she said. “I don’t know.” The idea was unthinkable: I pushed it away, but it pulsed with cruel possibility.
“So where is he?”
She looked back toward the house. The boat seemed to be traveling so slowly, but we were farther out into the harbor than I had realized. The bridge cast a perfect shadow of itself onto the water. In the distance Luna Park showed its ghastly open mouth, its Ferris wheel an oversized toy. “We should head back,” she said. “Virginia’s probably home.”
I wanted to know, although part of me wanted not to. “Skye, where is he?”
She gazed at the little waves slapping the hull. “Stop looking for him,” she said, her voice tired and flat. “He’s not coming back.” The boat felt suddenly like a flimsy thing, suspended over cold depth. She adjusted the tiller, her body again filled with focus, tuned to the machine, the water, the weather. We picked up speed. “I could have said it was an accident and he fell, he was drunk, whatever.” The breeze carried her words away as she spoke. “But maybe it wouldn’t have looked exactly like that, his body. I don’t know.”
He was in the water then: this was what she had been telling me. Not telling me. I didn’t know how long bodies stayed underwater. A long time, probably, if weighted correctly. Every object around me now seemed full of sinister possibility: the new-looking anchor, the coiling rope, the heavy wooden boom of the sail.
“What about Virginia? Does she know?”
Skye shrugged. “Maybe she guessed.” Her confession was over, such as it was; she would not look at me, or the water, only toward the house. The breeze lifted her hair, blowing it across her mouth and her eyes. She was a girl again for a second, lanky and unself-conscious, inhabiting the child I remembered, and then the impression slipped. “You don’t have to tell her,” she said.
If not me, then who would? I tried to remember if we had been like this at fourteen, with this kind of remove from moral structures. I could imagine it in Virginia, but I didn’t trust anything I remembered of my own past self.
I tried to see something of Virginia in her, as though finding likeness between them would somehow provide a clue to the whole tragedy. I found only superficial resemblances. The tilt of her jaw in profile, the shape of her brow. Skye’s tawny blond hair was nothing like Virginia’s sleek dark mane. Maybe Virginia had once been this brittle, but surely never this damaged. To me she had always been imbued with a terrible power, all due to my adolescent desire.
Had Virginia returned to the house, shadowing her sister, to learn the truth? Or to protect her in case the truth leaked out? I reached inside for the familiar longing for her, and was surprised to find it flattened, somehow two-dimensional, a dead echo of itself. The glare was just starting to leach out of the sunshine as the afternoon turned toward evening. The shadow of a tall gum tree fell across the dock as we approached, and for a moment I saw March’s photograph there, Virginia framed by darkened greenery, waiting.