Emily rolled over and over like a kid circling down a hill. John Berry might be on the ferry tomorrow. His face was unclear. She remembered now just a vague beefiness around his upper thighs and the coarse quality of his hair.
Emily held to the side and kicked small tight scissor cuts. As though it was boiling, the water bubbled around her. Birdflower opened the door of the room and stood by the small outside light in his underwear, his long braid over one shoulder like a girl's. He climbed down the stairs, cleared the metal fence, and squatted by the pool's edge. She saw his body pinprickle as he lowered himself in and with one hand loosened the band of his braid.
“Let's not go back,” he said.
Emily laughed and splashed water at him. She swam to the darkest edge of the pool.
In a quick head-thrown-freestyle he trailed her, cornering her, and pressed his body against hers. Emily's back rubbed tiles.
“No way,” she said.
“Come on,” he said.
“Everybody lives on an island.” Their wet heads bobbed above water. Emily said, “Some just aren't out in the ocean.”
“You're so profound,” Birdflower said, his hands resting on each side of her rear.
Open-mouthed and falling, Emily kissed him. She saw at eye's edge a light flicker on in the first-floor row of rooms and a man at the window, looking up to the unanimous night sky and then holding a drink high as if in a toast to her.
ELEVEN. MERIDIAN
Wind moved the small Cape Hatteras office. John Berry flipped photos like cards into the circle of light in the middle of the room. He shuffled to one of himself and Emily on the beach, beers in hand and a bonfire in the background. Her face was flushed and her hair fell into a center part and blew slightly forward. That night, everyone had been so drunk around the fire, singing songs and one guy telling about times he went out on a late-night shrimper with his father, and how the trollers would gather around the boat with the best storyteller, and how that man's voice would whisper into the scene of lantern lights nodding from boat to boat. Near sunrise, John Berry had awoken with Emily's full weight on top of him and he'd carried her to the truck as the sun inched up. He folded the photograph. The next was of him and his father, both in Bermuda shorts, standing in Wanchese Harbor. That was the last time his father had been off the island before he died. For a minute John Berry looked into the tiny eyes of his dad and was oddly lonely for him. But his father had not minded dying. Earlier in his life he'd said right out that he'd seen more change on the island, and in the world, than his father had and probably more than John Berry ever would. At the graveyard, on a bright June morning, one which seemed to take away all the gloomy corners and uncertainties of death, John Berry had stood near his father's grave, and as the first shovel of dirt was pitched down, he threw in a handful of white sand. It sprayed up like the points of a wave, dazzled, then landed — pelting the coffin hundreds of times.
His thumb pressed on the gloss of a large one — Emily red-eyed from the flash, in a green halter dress, her glass held up for New Year's Eve. Around her waist were four creeping fingers. He held the photo near his hand to see if they matched. There was a hint of stray knuckle hairs — but how could he really tell? He threw the photo. It flipped backwards and flapped down. Pulleys rang against the flagpole and the aluminum office hissed.
John Berry checked the windows, no cars yet on his side. The green and red channel markers blinked out in the water and beyond he saw the dim winking lights of the island. A van's high beams threw light on John Berry's face and showed his finger pulling down a venetian blind. The lights flipped off and the van's engine rattled.
He looked into the shoe box; shiny bits of color were mixed and jumbled in the rectangle as if his whole life was the turning end of a kaleidoscope. Looking out at the two people in the van, he saw that they were kissing, and before long, he realized it was them.
The tick of the clock beat out pairs of seconds as Emily snuggled her head onto Birdflower's shoulder. A camper pulled in behind the van and a sleepy-looking woman tipped ashes from her cigarette out the window.
He'd get the pellet gun from the truck, shove it into his pocket, and force Birdflower to swim out and grab the last dock pole. Then he'd get into the van and drive Emily over the water to the white house, to their life as it had been.
He gathered the pictures off the carpet. The ferry was maneuvering its mass into the dock. John Berry slipped out of the back, gently resting the door behind him. The deep ferry whistle sounded. He got in his truck and inched the door closed, ignited the engine, and flipped the gear shift into reverse. In snapshots, John Berry envisioned the next scenes, one after another, blurred and hectic. The wheels of the truck straightened and he headed for the curving line of cars.
John Berry stood above the deck, his beige windbreaker making an empty rustle. He watched them talk. In the solitude of swishing wind and water he rehearsed his speech to her. Lines he'd written on scraps of paper for a month formed themselves on his lips.
A light in the van went on and the hippie got out and walked starboard like a drunken Indian against the wind. John Berry bolted to the deck, passed a line of orange preservers on the white wall, and paused at the van's door.
She saw not what she expected — Birdflower back to draw her into the big pink sky — but John Berry, and her hands went up to cover her face from the memory of the bottle and the glass spindrift. He got in and she pressed her body against the door. Through her fingers she saw him in long fractures.
‘'I'm sorry,” he said.
She lowered her hand. Seeing the cuts, he reached to her temple and brushed the tiny speckled ones shaped like seeds. She flinched, and he took his hands back and rested his forehead — rough hair everywhere — on the wheel. “I want to come home,” he whispered. Wind sputtered through the windows.
“Well, you can't.” She heard her voice reverberate off the front window, the floor, and the bucket seats.
“Please,” he said.
She shook her head. “Too much has happened.”
“Bullshit,” he said.
“Get out,” she said in a tired voice.
He placed a hand on her face. With his fingertips he stroked the curve of her neck, and made her ease and press against his hand. “Let me come back,” John Berry said.
Emily didn't answer. His hand firmed around her neck, and he said it again slowly. She rolled her head.
“I might kill you,” he said and opened the door, all the time thinking, What is this? what now? "Those scars,” he said. “One for every man.”
Birdflower watched John Berry run from the van into the metal archway and down into the bowels of the boat. He saw Emily's startled face through the glass and knew he should give her a moment. John Berry's rounded shoulders had looked like his own. It was as though he had watched himself scurry away. Her past lives moved and changed, spit out stories, made her wild some days and quiet some nights. The curtains which somehow delineated past and present would part and from the backstage of her life a player would come to add some scattered scene.