“Thanks for the advice,” he said neutrally. She held his eye for a long time, waiting, it seemed, for something that did not occur, and then closed her eyes.
“You’re welcome.” She stood up and yawned. “Look, Paz. I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours in over four days. I’m going to sleep until Luz wakes me up tomorrow. We’ll talk then. Good night.”
With that she walked into her bedroom and shut the door.
Paz drove slowly through the city, to his apartment, showered, and got into bed. For a while he listened to grel thoughts: crazy bitch, white girl, couldn’t possibly understand, never going to do that shit, need to find some other women, need to move out of this place, quit the restaurant, what am I supposed to do, go see Yoiyo, what crap, he’d spit in my face … and then fell into an unprofitably dreamless sleep.
In the morning, there were TV crews outside his house, wanting interviews and film. He brushed past them and drove to the Grove, to the garage on Hibiscus Street, thinking about not going anywhere, about becoming the turtle-faced cop, sixty and all alone, getting blow jobs from teen whores under the crime lights and never a woman to love him like Jane Doe had loved her demon husband. He thought about what Jane had said the night before. For a moment a different path opened up in his mind, a path that led to being a different kind of person. It didn’t last long. He thought he might try to open it again, though.
He found Jane’s apartment empty, stripped of everything but a few trash bags with Goodwill written on a note pinned to one of them. Paz felt a vast relief, mixed with … no, he was not going to go there today. What he’d do now, he thought, was take a week or so of leave, avoid the newsies, maybe fly over to Bimini for a couple of days, meet someone, maybe a girl in a string bikini, a regular person with no cosmic powers who didn’t know him at all and didn’t care …
“Hey, Paz.”
He went out on the landing. She was there, with Luz, saying good-bye to her neighbors, a large, hippie- looking woman with two mulatto kids and the pregnant woman, Dawn, with her toddler in tow. They seemed genuinely sad to see her go, actual tears. She walked halfway up the stairs.
“Well, Paz, how’s reality?” she asked cheerfully. “Thought any about what I said?”
“Reality is holding,” he said, ignoring the rest. “I came to see you off.” He handed her a bottle of champagne.
“Thank you. Must I break it over the hull?”
“Whatever.”
“Then I think I’ll drink it tonight. Will you do me a favor?”
“Anything.” A hint of suspicion in his tone.
“Drive us down to the dock and help me get loaded, and then take the Buick and give it to some deserving poor.”
“No problem,” he said happily.
They drove to Dinner Key then, and Paz got one of the little marina carts and unloaded their small baggage and helped them wheel it down to where the yacht was anchored. He waited on the dock with Luz while Jane stowed their gear and did various mysterious things around the vessel. Jane came back on deck from the cabin. Paz handed the child over to her. Jane had donned an orange life jacket, and now she strapped a miniature version onto Luz.
Under the jacket Jane was wearing a blue T-shirt and khaki Bermudas. She had Top-Sider boat shoes and a pair of fancy sunglasses on, they looked like Vuarnets, Paz thought, extremely cool, and she looked terrific. Bye-bye, Jane. Sad, but also a little relieved.
She said, “I can’t really handle this rig under sail myself so I’ll stop up the Waterway and pick up an itinerant sailing freak for crew, or else I’m going to have to putt along inland up to New York. What I really want to do is run out Government Cut from here and head for blue water and feel a live deck under my toes again.” She stepped up onto the dock and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then she dropped onto the boat again, down below this time, and he heard the heavy cranking of a diesel and then the sough-sough of a sweetly tuned engine idling, and smelled the acrid smoke of the exhaust. She untied the stern line and brought it aboard, coiling it neatly with an obviously practiced motion.
“Paz, if you would be so kind,” she said from the wheel, gesturing at the line forward. He untied it, coiled it roughly, tossed it on deck. The boat drifted slowly away from the dock. He saw green water, darkly shadowed. A few inches, a foot, widening. He looked at her, at her wheel, the light shining in her hair. Two feet; she was drifting away. He felt suddenly an enormous urge to leap the gap, to abandon his life, to spend the rest of it with her. She tipped her glasses up onto her head, so he could see her eyes, green as the water. She knew what he was thinking, he thought. The feeling passed, leaving a hollow sadness.
Three feet, then ten. She turned the wheel. The bow swung away from the dock. Last look; he couldn’t quite read the expression on her face, whether it was joy or something else. In any case, she blew him a kiss, and he watched Jane Doe escape by water.
