The Season of Open Water by Dawn Tripp Read Free Book Online Page B

that trembling, fractured image of her face. She does not listen hard enough to make out the words. She does not want to. But she can sense the seesaw of the exchange, the back and forth, the tug and push and pull. She can tell her father doesn’t like them. His voice seizes up once, just once, then relents, softens down again. There are chinks in her father now that weren’t there before. He is awkward with anger. He does not have the knack for it he used to have. For years, she dreamed his rage. She dreamed it damp and lovely, something tangible, a blanket or the wind she could wrap herself into.
    The harsh smell of lye sticks in her nose.
    Her son, Luce, is still asleep upstairs—she remembers this suddenly. She has not heard a sound, not a step or a creak of the bed-springs, and she says a quick prayer to the water,
Let him sleep, Let
him be late for work, Let him not wake up until those men outside are
gone.
She does not want his path to cross with theirs. She does not want any dark little part of him to be tempted. Cora knows him well, so well it is a splinter in her heart.
    When she thinks of her children, they are close to her, they are almost in her skin or she is in theirs—she can feel them wince and kick and breathe—but when she thinks of herself, it is always from a distance, as if she were observing some separate creature passing beyond the reach of her own will. It happens most often when the white clothes are soaking in their bluing water, and her hands stir through the surface—pale and thin, the webs between the fingers nearly translucent in the water with a queer and greenish cast, like the hands of a sea-maid from out of the myths.
    She thinks of it this way: she was a woman once free—she was exiled by grief to some lost pocket of herself, and she waits there in that dark corner, crouched and listening, waiting for the sky to open up again and take her.

Noel
    Bridge comes back from Shorrock’s at quarter past ten. The day has warmed. Noel shows her the fox.
    â€œFound it in the road,” he says.
    â€œWhat a beauty.” She turns the pelt in her hands. “Don’t let Luce get hold of it. Did he ever get off this morning?”
    â€œLeft half an hour ago,” he answers. She nods and lays the fox on the porch.
    â€œWhat about those men Honey Lyons brought around?”
    He looks at her squarely, his eyes cool. “They came and went.”
    She smiles at him and, for the moment, lets it go.
    Together they unload the sea muck off the wagon bed and shovel it into low banks around the foundation of the house. Then they go into the shop to start work on the overturned hull of Duff Barton’s skiff.
    As they are stripping the gooseclams and the barnacles off the bottom of the boat with a wire brush and a putty knife, Bridge asks again about the men— Honey Lyons and the three strangers. She asks what they came looking for.
    â€œWanted some work done.”
    â€œRum work?”
    â€œBoat work.”
    She laughs. “I know who they are.”
    Noel shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. I didn’t take it.”
    â€œHow much did they offer?”
    â€œA bit.”
    â€œWhat’s a bit?”
    â€œA bit more than you’d expect.”
    â€œYou’re an old crow.”
    â€œIt’s a no-good job. No-good men.”
    She shrugs and sets back to work on her side of the hull.
    Noel doesn’t tell her that although he didn’t take the job, he didn’t refuse it either. He told Honey Lyons he would need a night or so to think it through. Everyone knew that Honey Lyons was in tight with the Syndicate, and had no allegiance to any of the local rum-running gangs. He’d work shoulder to shoulder with each of them, any of them, if there was a season for it, but he was a double-bladed knife. They all knew it.
    â€œThis one here’s rotted out,” Bridge says, prying up one of the planks. “This one