Twelve Mile Limit df-9 Read online

  But my friend Janet had experienced the bottomless void. She’d been swept away by a mindless thing that we all dread. Which is possibly why human nature won’t allow an individual-or three-to vanish without explanation. Blame and reason are contrivances to which we cling for comfort, a way of imposing order. When one is dealing with deep ocean, however, all acts are expeditionary, and even the most mundane untethering-such as pointing a small boat offshore-carries risk.

  How can you blame the sea? At night, alone, waves are as indifferent as wind, or the void that is the backdrop for a flashing light at sea.

  I’d learned enough, and what I’d learned was not comforting. I could never share that knowledge. I would never share it. As Janet’s friend, I would do what she would have wanted me to do: Protect her friends from the truth.

  I climbed back aboard, found a towel, and stripped naked, drying myself. Then I stood in the wind, hands on hips, feet set wide for balance, looking at the star streaks and comet swirls of two unfathomable spheres: sea and space. The constellations Orion and Cassiopeia were bright in the autumn sky; the Pleiades, a hazy, crooked A-shape. At home, from my stilted house, those star-shapes were familiar guideposts. Out here, sixty miles at sea, they seemed gaseous and foreign, insensible with their vacuum chill.

  I continued to stare into space, drying myself, and then I stopped, as I was drying my hair, surprised to hear a polite clearing of the throat behind me. I turned, still scrubbing away, to see JoAnn standing in the companionway. There wasn’t enough light to decipher her expression, but there was a weary, weary smile in her voice, as she said, “Leave it to you to find a way to get my mind on something else. Out for a late-night swim, were we?”

  I wrapped the towel around my waist as I told her, “I had to know. I had to find out for myself what it was like for Janet and the other two.” In the moment of my speaking, it seemed irreverent to leave Janet’s companions nameless, bodiless, so I added, “Michael Sanford and the other woman, Grace Walker. All three. So I got in the water.”

  JoAnn stepped over to me and laced the fingers of her right hand into mine, palm up, and gave me a shake of mild reproach. “Don’t do that, Doc. Don’t try anything like that ever again, not at night, not unless you tell us! I couldn’t bear it if you disappeared out here, too. Christ, I always thought I loved the Gulf, but I’m coming to despise it. It scares the hell out of me like it never did before.”

  JoAnn has a flexible, expressive voice, and it stumbled a little as she then asked a question that she wasn’t certain she wanted answered. “So how was it once you got away from the boat? In the water at night, I mean. God, I can’t imagine.”

  I told her, “It’s colder than I thought. That surprised me, but it’s a good thing for us all to know, so I’m glad I used myself as a guinea pig. After getting in there, I’m convinced that in the first hours after their boat sank, they were probably still in pretty good spirits-you know, confident they were going to be rescued at dawn. Then sometime the next day, they just drifted off to sleep, one by one. It was so gradual, they probably didn’t even realize what was happening.”

  I was wrong, so very, very wrong-but it was an unintentional lie, an attempted kindness.

  I felt JoAnn squeeze my hand. “Thanks. No wonder you’ve never married. You’re such a terrible liar, no woman could depend on you to lie when she needed a little ego boost.”

  Then, as she pulled herself closer, she added, “Rhonda sent me to ask you. We talked about it. After what happened to Janet, after being in this freaking wind for six days, all the polite little rules and laws; all the social-moral crap about how we’re supposed to behave, and what we’re supposed to do and not supposed to do, it… everything just seems like a bunch of bullshit. I mean, this makes all our silly little worries seemed stupid. We’re alive! And we’re alive for such a short time, why not have fun? Why not be with the people you care about and make them feel great?”

  She was bouncing around, not tracking clearly. I said, “Well… sure, very short lives. Yeah, I guess.”

  Her voice took on a small, rueful quality. “Does what I’m saying make any sense? Or am I just making an ass of myself because of what I’m asking?” She was stammering now. Standing there in her thin white T-shirt in the chill wind, brown hair tinted amber in the moonlight, oddly embarrassed.

  I said, “No, I have no idea what you’re getting at. Rhonda sent you to ask me what?”

  She tapped fingers to her forehead. “You mean I didn’t say it? Jeez, my brain really is scrambled. Turns out she gave Jeth two Valiums, and he’s out like a light, the poor babe. So Rhonda and I want you to come down… to, well, basically to hang out with us.”

  I chuckled, pulled her to me, and kissed her on the top of the head. “Know what? Our little hugging session actually did make me feel better so, yeah, I’ll come down to say good night. Give me a minute to get some dry shorts on and a T-shirt.”

  She touched her fingers to my shoulder, stopping me as I turned away. She stood there looking up at me in the moonlight-a friend I’d known so long and so intimately that I no longer saw the features of her face, only the warmth of her expression. “Don’t make this hard on me, Doc. What I’m telling you is, you don’t need your shorts or your shirt. Come just the way you are.”

  I said, “JoAnn? Are you asking… wait a minute, do you mean-?”

  She said, “Yeah, ol’ buddy. That’s exactly what we mean.”

  I stood there, mouth agape, until she took my elbow and tugged.

  “We’ve got wine,” she said.

  4

  Florida has the population of a fair-sized nation, and the disappearance of three people grabbed some quick headlines. But, very soon, it was business as usual on what Tomlinson once described as the “Disney Peninsula-a multitonomous fantasy that features every brilliance of the racial rainbow, along with every human fakery and illusion.”

  The media wave peaked with interest momentarily but then flooded away just as fast, once again indifferent to the fact that three people had lived and died.

  Physically and metaphorically, Janet and her companions had been swept out of sight, and the news gatherers went on to more current matters: On Thanksgiving Day in Miami’s Liberty City, members of a ghetto gang called the Spliffs stopped four Canadians in a rental car and shot them to death because the Canadians had made the outrageous mistake of taking the wrong exit off Interstate 95, and then onto the gang’s neighborhood street.

  In the gorgeous country town of Arcadia, a Brahma bull busted out of its loading ramp and gored three rodeo fans as they walked to their cars, but the fans refused the entreaties of clamoring personal injury attorneys to sue. As one fan told a reporter from the St. Petersburg Times, “Rodeo’n’s risky business whether you’re in the ring or in the stands. That’s the way we like it.”

  And on the main sawgrass plain of the Everglades, immigration police arrested forty-seven illegal aliens of various nationalities who’d been jettisoned off the uninhabited Ten Thousand Islands and left to wade ashore by flesh merchants who’d smuggled them into U.S. waters from Colombia. The illegals were dehydrated, cut all to hell by the coral rock that lies at the base of the sawgrass, and starving. In the November heat, many days without good water, it became a death march of sorts. Three of the weakest fell and were left to the vultures. Another died shortly after being hospitalized. One of the survivors, though, was quoted as saying, “Why did I risk my life to come to America? Because here I can live as a person, as an individual with dignity, not as a beast of burden. I am a woman, not a thing!”

  It was the sort of story that gave one hope.

  The effects of the Seminole Wind tragedy did not fade nearly so quickly on the islands of Sanibel and Captiva nor on the islands and water places that comprise a back bay community that is separate from the rest of Florida’s Gulf Coast communities. Talk of the three missing divers continued to be the main topic of conversation on Cedar Key, Siesta Key, and Venice Beach, on Don Pedro, Pa
lm Island, and Gasparilla, on Cabbage Key, Useppa, and Estero Island, on Vanderbilt Beach, Bonita Beach, and among the boating community of Naples, too.

  The refrain was familiar: How was it possible that three adults in wet suits and inflated vests were not found? It just didn’t make sense.

  At Dinkin’s Bay Marina and Jensen’s Marina, the pain was palpable, so much so that our communal Thanksgiving dinner was more like a wake. Which is why, two weeks later at Dinkin’s Bay Marina’s traditional Friday party-the Pig Roast and Beer Cotillion, as it is called-Dieter Rasmussen, the German psychopharmacologist, herded us over to the big sea grape tree near the boat ramp and gave us an unrehearsed lecture on what might have been titled, “Dah Five Stages of Mourning When Vee Haf Lost a Loved Vun, Yah!”

  Dieter is a wealthy German who loves the lazy, kicked-back lifestyle of Dinkin’s Bay, but he is also an internationally respected physician who’s an expert on human behavior and the chemistry of the brain. There were about fifteen of us, beers in hand, platters of steamed shrimp and fried conch on the picnic tables nearby, and at the center of our little group was Jeth. Jeth with the Cherokee black hair and Beverly Hillbillies accent, wearing filthy khaki fishing shorts and shirt, a plastic cup in his hand that we all knew was filled with vodka plus a little fresh grapefruit juice from the grapefruit tree behind the shell shop. Jeth, who’d once had a mild stutter, but who had not stuttered once since Janet’s disappearance. Not that he’d said much at all after our little fleet returned from Marco Island. He was sleeping too late, not bathing, and drinking way, way too much. Lots of red flags.

  Standing while the rest of us sat, Dieter spoke in a guttural, booming Teutonic accent and used sweeping arm gestures. He outlined the list-numbness, yearning, and disbelief, then disorganization and denial, before anger kicked in. Then came the final stage, which was the beginning of the healing process.

  Jeth, I was not surprised to realize, was displaying all the symptomatic stages except for the last.

  He was not healing, nor did he seem to have much interest in allowing himself to heal. Janet was dead because he’d insisted that they date other people. She’d been with Michael Sanford on that Friday dive trip because Jeth had refused Janet’s pleas that the two of them go away for the weekend and attempt to sort out their problems.

  That was the way he saw it, anyway, and why he was clearly punishing himself.

  I listened to Dieter say, “Emotional numbness, if unresolved, can impair a person’s ability to be deeply intimate or to interact with people and situations in a spontaneous manner. In other words, my friends, you will not haf fun anymore! In fact, you will be the pain in my ass, and we have enough pains in my ass on this island!”

  We all laughed. Everyone except Jeth, who yawned, took a gulp of his vodka, and watched a pelican collapse its wings in mid-flight and crash like a crate into the bay.

  As Dieter talked about the second and third stages of mourning-deep yearning, disbelief, and then denial-I noticed a green Jeep Cherokee pull into the shell parking lot and a lean, leggy redhead get out. It was Amelia Gardner. I recognized her from photos I’d seen in the newspaper and from television, too. For the brief period in which the disappearances got a lot of press, she, as the lone survivor, was the center of attention-Gardner and the families of the three people who’d vanished. As a group, they’d held press conferences and commented jointly on what they believe happened to the pleasure boat Seminole Wind and had issued occasional opinions on the job the Coast Guard had done.

  Their comments about the Coast Guard’s efforts were always positive, and deservedly so, yet their group hadn’t wanted the search to end when Dalton Dorsey and his superiors pulled the plug. I didn’t blame the families. Even if the three were dead-and there seemed no other possibility-their loved ones wanted the remains found because they desperately wanted and deserved closure.

  As Dalton told me on the phone, “I don’t blame them one tiny little bit. But we’re in the business of saving lives, not recovering bodies. People don’t realize, you get out there in international waters, beyond the twelve-mile limit, there’s only so much help you can expect.”

  Janet’s representative family consisted of a younger sister, Claudia Kohlerberg, who was a stockier, more athletic version of Janet. She’d traveled down from an Ohio farm town called Bryan, returned home two days after the search was ended, and now was back again to see to Janet’s personal effects. She’d been staying on the little blue houseboat at Jensen’s Marina: a nice woman with a strong smile and a jock-like informality, but who clearly showed the pain of her sister’s disappearance. There was a familial similarity both in appearance and depth of sensitivity, but Claudia did not give the impression of shyness, as Janet had. I had the feeling that, under happier circumstances, Claudia would have been the rowdy partier and the sisterly confidant of a long list of guy friends.

  Claudia seemed to like Dinkin’s Bay, and we all liked her.

  I wasn’t the only who recognized Amelia Gardner. Tomlinson and Ransom-who’d apparently hammered out a separate peace during their six days at sea-stood and walked toward the parking lot to intercept her. Dieter was saying, “When we lose someone we love, there is a deep yearning for what was lost followed by a desperate search for a way to replace that person.

  “This can be a very dangerous time! We blame ourselves. We say, ‘If only I’d done something different. ’ We have many regrets. Then we do a very human but stupid thing. We rush into bad rebound relationships. We try to replace the person with alcohol or drugs. During this period, we feel we have a hole inside ourselves that cannot be filled, a thirst that cannot be quenched.”

  I watched Tomlinson and Ransom introduce themselves to Amelia Gardner. Watched her nod as Ransom gestured to our little group, then as she leaned into her car and retrieved a small backpack, then walked with an easy-hipped grace across the white shell.

  She was a wearing a red tank top, khaki shorts with starched pleats, and thin sandals. A woman as tall as Ransom, but flat-chested, with pale Irish skin, freckles, and curly red hair clipped boyishly short. The bright red of her tank top made her hair the color of old copper. Take one look at her and you assumed certain things from her appearance, the muscle tone, and the way she carried herself: She probably had green eyes, didn’t tan, was a high school athlete, maybe competed in college, too. Good at endurance sports, almost anything outdoors, and had inherited a family passion for St. Patrick’s Day through her father, whom she probably adored. Not unusual among women athletes.

  There was something else I knew about her, even though we’d never met: Amelia Gardner was a survivor. On a black and windy night, out of four desperate people, she was the only one who’d made it to the light tower.

  Dieter finished by talking about “free-floating” anger that seeks physical relief and how, if we dealt honestly with our emotions and recognized them for what they were-symptoms of loss-it would enable us to pull wisdom and meaning from pain. “It will deepen and strengthen our relationship with ourselves and increase our resilience in living. That is Janet’s gift to us, but we must choose to accept her gift.”

  Jeth, at least, seemed to hear that. I saw him sit a little straighter, listening.

  Then it was Tomlinson’s turn, just as we planned. He stood and tugged at his ratty, gold paisley surfer’s shorts, his sun-bleached hair hanging long, and stood scratching at his goatee until he had everyone’s attention. Then he held up his hands for quiet and said, “The party’s gonna be a little different tonight. The rules are the same-you put ten bucks in the bucket, then eat and drink all you want. But one thing everyone needs to know. This party’s going to be in Janet’s honor. We are going to celebrate the life of our sister, that good, good woman, and it is going to be one hell of a party!”

  A couple of people hooted and there was gradual applause, then louder applause.

  Tomlinson raised his voice a little. “I already talked to Claudia about it. It’s time to stop feeling bad abou
t Janet being gone and start talking about what a great life she had. About what she contributed to the lives of us all. Man, I miss her! Damn right I do! Janet Mueller was a spiritual horse. There was no load so heavy that it took the light out of her eyes. She had energy, my children, a great karma, and here’s what I can tell you: Energy can’t be destroyed. That’s a fact of physics. Janet may have taken a different form, but her energy’s still here.”

  I’d heard Tomlinson make this point before. In fact, after trailering my skiff when we’d returned to Marco Island, I’d stopped at the island’s tiny cemetery where, a while back, he’d once spoken very similar words at the funeral of a young girl. The child’s second funeral. Exhausted from my days at sea, I’d sat for nearly an hour alone, next to the girl’s headstone, before starting the long trip back to Sanibel.

  Now Tomlinson said, “Janet’s still with us and loving us and looking over us. Which is why we are gonna party our asses off tonight. Just to get things warmed up, I here and now challenge Doc’s sister, Ransom Gatrells, to a limbo contest. And, ladies? I’ll be wearing a brand new sarong, a hand-painted Cartier from New Orleans, so get your seats early. Zamboni and the Hat Trick Twins are back in fighting shape and ready to rumble.”

  My friend continued, “I want to send out a special invitation to all the waitresses at Mucky Duck, Green Flash, Chadwick’s, and Sanibel Grill. As always, there will be a topless division. For the last seven years, that very popular division has been won by the Davis sisters from Mason City, Iowa, Andrea and Kristin, and God bless their family genetics. But one of the sisters has gotten married, so Andrea is at half strength. Ladies, the time to strike is now.”