it’s a frowzy beach town of whitewashed cinderblock triplexes built in the 1950s. It seems a perfect place for kids. But live here a while and you begin to have second thoughts about that too. Stan and Doug can’t wander away or get kidnapped, it’s true, but they could easily drown like their father. Or get stung by a lion fish. Or pick up a rusted piece of metal that turns out to be an undetonated mortar shell from World War II.
No place is safe. That’s one bit of wisdom Alison’s thirties have taught her.
When she gazes at the lagoon, she finds herself shaking her head in disbelief. It makes no sense. Erik is still down there, caught in the bowels of the Admiral Tokiwa, a 7-ton Japanese destroyer that sunk during World War II. The Colonel, the island’s governor, has sent divers down twice to search the wreck, but so far they have found nothing. A sunken ship, she has learned, is a treacherous place, cave-black inside. The silt inside a wreck, once stirred up, obscures light like a sandstorm. That’s why all wrecks are off-limits. So why did Erik leave his diving buddy to enter the Tokiwa?
Some days she can hardly contain her anger at him for this. It makes her tremble until she wishes her heart would burst, anything to silence the screaming in her head. She tries not to think of the several, miserable visits she’s made to the Colonel, who is always polite but firm in his refusal to “put at risk” his divers. When the Hono divers visit for their 6-month inspection of the Meck installation, he’ll send them down again, he has promised. Only the Hono divers are trained for this kind of task. Lately Alison has asked herself what she would do if one of the divers died while trying to recover her husband’s body. And now, nearly a year and a half after his disappearance, she toys with the possibility that she should stop insisting that he be found.
She has become a cliché—a widowed youngish mother, her life torn with tragedy. She’s drinking too much. She’s forgetting dates and meetings. She’s late with her class reports. And she’s started an affair with the island’s senior GP, Emil Timmerman, who is notorious for his affairs. Nobody knows what to do with her. But she can’t stop herself.
“You can leave,” her therapist told her. “Go back to Milwaukee.”
“Without my husband?”
“They’ll send him back,” she said. “After they find him.”
Alison shook her head no, no, no. The therapist’s office, one of three tiny rooms partitioned in a long, narrow trailer, was as cold as a meat locker. Behind her tiny metal desk, she had hung a print of Van Gogh’s “Old Man in Sorrow,” depicting abject grief, the subject hunched over in a chair, his face buried in both hands. Did the therapist know that its subtitle is, “On the Threshold of Eternity”? Why would she display something like that?
Alison said, “They’ll never find him if I don’t stay to make sure they do.”
The therapist seemed surprised to hear this. She said, “Oh, that’s it, isn’t it!”
“Is this a revelation to you, that I feel trapped? As trapped as my husband in that sunken ship?”
“No, it’s no surprise, Alison.”
Then why the fuck are you acting surprised? Alison stared sourly at the therapist, Eva, a woman who seemed younger than she and untouched by trouble. Eva was, she decided, no better than a tourist, a sightseer in the land of tragedy.
“May I be frank?” Eva said.
“Are you saying you haven’t been frank so far?”
Eva smiled a patient smile. “You know what I mean.”
Alison nodded okay, okay, sure, she knew what Eva meant.
“You’ve got to slow down,” she said. “You want everything settled. But nothing will be settled for a long time.”
“I just want him back,” said Alison. “His body. I need him back!”
“You’ll get him back,” said Eva. “But it’s going to take time.”
“I don’t have time!” Her teaching contract runs for another year.
“Greek widows are expected to mourn for five years. Five years, Alison.”
“Fuck the fucking Greek widows!”
“Is that what you told her?” Emil asks later. He is on his knees, on the floor of his office, waiting for her to begin. His office—on the hospital’s third floor—overlooks the moonscape of the lowtide reef. Waves pound at the reef’s edge a quarter mile away.
“Yeah, I told her fuck it, I’m done,” Alison says. “I’m an jerk, aren’t I?”
“No,” Emil corrects. He turns to smile up at her slyly. “I’m the jerk! Don’t for get that.”
Emil is 45, surprisingly pale, but tall and trim. He speed-walks to stay in shape, wearing a sunhat with baggy shorts and a tight-fitting T and gobs of sunscreen. He has a bright, birdlike face, narrow with a beakish nose. He’s nothing like Erik. But that’s the point.
“Say it,” Emil commands.
Alison complies: “Jerk.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“You’re such a jerk, Emil.”
Then she remembers she’s not supposed to use his name. Still, he nods his satisfaction. “I shouldn’t be giving you orders,” he reminds her.
“Then shut up, fuckhead, and take off your clothes.”
He grins this time and starts undressing. That’s more like it.
“Faster,” she says.
He has been training her, bringing her along slowly, as if she were a virgin. At first, she didn’t care. She told herself she’d do anything. This isn’t love. This is something else. Their scenarios have gotten more bizarre and only recently has she put a name to it. The realization that she could do this, that she could be one of these people, shook her. It’s sick shit. But it makes her feel. And now she’s so deep in, why would she, how could she, get out?
Naked, prostrate—bent forward in the yoga “pose of the child”—Emil is whimpering in anticipation. Hoarsely he says, “Be merciful, mistress!”
When she smacks his pale back with his broad leather belt, she feels a sickening thrill, like taking a sudden plunge in a roller coaster. Her head spins, she salivates, she flails again and hates herself. God, she hates every single cell of her body! Emil knows this. He says, “I’m such shit, aren’t I? I’m such stinking shit, I don’t know how you can stand the sight of me.” It’s a taunt. It sounds like the voice in her own head.
“Fuck you,” she says.
“Yes!” he says.
She flails again. A sudden stripe of blood appears on his back. It startles her. She swallows a gasp and a sudden urge to weep. The belt edge must have caught him. If she asked, All you all right? he would mock and scold her. She’s got to be stronger. Hasn’t Emil told her this every day? I’ll help you get the strength you need, Alison.
“Mercy please,” he moans. It’s a lie—there is no mercy.
She flails again.
“You know I deserve it,” he says. “What am I?”
“You’re shit, you’re an asshole, I hate you—you know how I hate you!”
Then he’s sobbing and her moment’s hesitation makes him implore, “Show me what shit I am!”
Trembling, nearly retching, she drops the belt. Her hand hurts. She gulps for air, as if drowning. “Turn around,” she commands. This voice isn’t her voice, it’s a stronger woman’s voice, a woman who knows what she’s doing.
Blubbering, Emil is on his knees, facing her, eager to do her bidding. “Anything,” he begs.