Page 88 of Salt Kiss
“You’ll get to tell him yourself in two weeks,” I say.
A low breath, gusted out quick. She looks away. “Right.”
I wonder if she’s thinking of the wedding, of going home to Manhattan.
But then she surprises me again, asking not at all what I was expecting. “You said you were Mark’s nephew-in-law,” she says. “How are you related?”
“Mr. Trevena’s older sister, Blanche, married my father.” Her hands twitch once on the railing, like she’s pushing herself to say something, so I add, “My mother died when I was in high school,” so she doesn’t have to be the one to ask.
“I’m so sorry,” she murmurs. She looks at me again. “It was awful when my mother died.”
“I’m sorry too.”
Isolde’s eyes go back to the water, back to the torn-up pieces of moon. “Do you still miss your mother?”
“Sometimes,” I say. “Do you?”
“Yes. She was—” A breath tears out of Isolde’s throat. It could almost be a laugh. “She was good. Not everyone in my family is. But she was.”
“My mother was good too. But that’s why, sometimes, I don’t miss her. Because—”
I can’t finish. I can’t find the words.
But Isolde finishes for me. “Because if she were alive, she’d see you now.” Her eyes are on the water. Sea spray has dampened her face—it’s caught in her eyelashes and is gleaming along her cheekbones. And at the fullest curve of her lower lip, it’s gathered into a single drop. When she speaks again, the drop falls. “She’d know the person you’ve become. And you can’t be sure if that would be a good thing or not.”
I am suspended in the air like the spray, weightless and flashing in the night.
No one,no one, has ever guessed this about me. And the shock of it, the relief of it, is annihilating. Someone knows. Someone cansee.
Someone understands that sometimes I’d rather my mother still be dead than be alive to see what I’ve done.
And then I wonder how Isolde could have guessed that, that horribly specific kind of grief that makes grief itself a lie. “How did you know?” I whisper.
She turns to face me, and water is beading on her lower lip again. I have the absurd fantasy of leaning forward and licking it off.
“I know,” she says, “because I feel the same way.”
I want to know why. I want to know if it has anything to do with why she can’t sleep without nightmares, why she needs someone else to help her breathe in her own bed. But I don’t get a chance to ask. Before I can even part my lips, she’s pushing away from the railing and disappearing into the glowing belly of the ship.
Thirty
There isno phone call from Mark this morning. I knew there wouldn’t be, but it still feels strange to start the day without hearing his cool voice. Unsettling, and it’s like the world knows and the world agrees because the rough weather has continued and the yacht is pitching under my feet as I stand at my balcony door.
But there is something beyond missing Mark’s voice, and as I watch the drizzle-washed sea outside, I return to memories of last night. Of Isolde at the prow of the ship, salt water glistening on her mouth.
I feel the same way.
It is nice to be seen. Understood. Especially about as ugly a thing as killing.
About being glad your dead mother can’t see what you’ve become as an adult.
I still don’t know whyIsoldefeels that way though. Maybe it is the nun thing. Maybe her mother wanted her to join the Church more than anything and would have been horrified at her marrying Mark.
Curiosity burns bright in my mind as I finish getting ready for the day and eat a quick, efficient breakfast while rain patters on the deck. I’d like to ask Isolde about it directly, but something makes me think that it wouldn’t work, that the inner workings of her are like a masterfully cut gem and the facets will only flash in precisely the right light—and only then with a patient hand.
I wonder if Mark was drawn to her because he saw a puzzle, something only cleverness and perseverance could work open. A challenge.
Not like me, who was begging to be fucked into the carpet at the first opportunity.
