smiling as he fell out of the boat, twenty yards from shore, and started swimming. His stroke was graceful and his kick getting stronger. She had removed the stitches two months before. Ryan had turned a deep shade of brown, except for the angry red line that marked Dr. Jazz's stitching and cut a diagonal stripe across his leg.
She watched him as he pulled himself out of the water, tan and muscular, his blond hair long and almost white from the sun. She beached the boat and he helped her pull it up. Then she took the towel and ran to the end of the beach.
'Where you going?'
'You can have me if you can get me,' she teased.
He chased after her on his bad leg, having difficulty in the sand. She moved backward, laughing. Finally, she threw the towel at him and he caught it and lunged at her, going down hard in the sand. She thought he might be hurt so she ran to him, naked and brown from a month in the sun. He grabbed her leg and pulled her down beside him and they hugged each other.
'God, I love you,' she whispered in his ear.
'I don't know why,' he said honestly.
She kissed him on the mouth, and then he was kissing her body, her nipples erect with the heat of passion. Both found release once he was inside her. They longed to have more of each other. The penetration of mind and body couldn't seem to fill the ache of love. She pledged herself to him and was prepared to give up her life for him. He vowed no harm would ever come to her and would die before losing her. They marveled at the intensity of their feelings.
'I wish this would never end,' she said.
'The memory never will.'
That night, they unwrapped the last two steaks from the boat freezer and cooked them over the metal barbecue on the beach. Because there was no town in which to buy groceries, from now on they would live off of the dwindling supply of canned goods aboard, and the lobster and fish that they caught by hand.
After dinner, Ryan and Lucinda lay in the sand holding hands and thought back to the first time they had met, when Ryan had been invited to the Alos' house for Thanksgiving.
'You came through the door and I fell in love with you. How can that be?' she said. 'I was only seven years old. It's as if God said to me, this is the one.'
Ryan talked about Matt.
'The worst part is all the things that I wanted to do with him.' Ryan was looking up at the stars and wondering if Matt could hear him. 'Things that will never happen. They're losses that I can't get over because they live in my imagination and change as I do.'
Ryan thanked her for making the shadow dreams go away. . Thanked her for explaining Terrance's drowning to him. . For taking that darkness out of his life.
'If we survive this, will you marry me?' he finally said.
She propped herself up on one elbow and looked at him, the moonlight catching the blue in his eyes. 'You better believe it, buddy.'
He took Matt's elementary school class ring off his little finger. . It was his most prized possession and it had only cost twenty dollars-a powerful example of how meaningless his climb to wealth and power had really been. He slipped it on her finger and they looked at each other for a long time, celebrating their engagement without words.
One evening at the end of August, Cole got the call that changed everything. He was just coming through the door of his Georgetown rooming house when the phone rang and a thin-voiced man from the Phoenix Medical Group spoke to him.
It had been Kaz's idea to check out old-age medical plans in warm-weather states, like Hawaii, Florida, Arizona, and New Mexico. Older people, Kaz said, tended to migrate to warm climates because their skin had gotten thinner and their circulation slower. Something that Cole of course knew, but it was a worthwhile thought when you were down to a few hundred dollars and contemplating the problem of contacting medical insurance plans in fifty states. They were looking for a man who seemed to be out of the system and could very possibly be dead. They had to narrow the search somehow.
'Is this Mr. Harris with Medicare?' the voice said, with a distant twang.
'Yes it is.'
'I got your letter and I'm responding about David Robb.'
Kaz had dummied up a letterhead for. Medicare, using the letter canceling his own federal policy as the prototype. They tapped Carson Harris for the two hundred dollars it cost to get letters and envelopes printed. 'This is it, Cole. I can't keep loaning you money,' his frustrated brother said. So Cole and Kaz hocked their rings and watches.
Kaz had written a short letter saying that David Robb's account was being reviewed by Medicare, and asking the medical plan to contact them at the enclosed number. They had five hundred copies of the bogus letter printed and sent it off, hoping nobody would notice that the envelope was mailed with a stamp instead of a government franking mark. They'd sent the letter to medical plans in warm-weather states and had received no responses until the call from Phoenix.
'Is this your home?' the voice inquired.
'Private extension,' Cole said, trying to move the man along.
'I'm a little confused about your letter. You're doing some kind of check on David Robb. .?'
'Who's calling, please?'
'This is Dale Dennison, Southwest Age Benefit Program. We're connected to Medicare and we hold the current policy on Mr. Robb.'
Cole had a pen in his hand and was fumbling in the drawer for a piece of paper. 'Just to make sure we're talking about the same Mr. Robb, would you mind giving me his current address?'
'Our information lists him at the Wild Oaks Retirement Home in Phoenix.'
'Could you give me his age, his underlying carrier and his social security number?' Cole said, figuring it was a possibility this was another David Robb.
'What is this about?'
'We're doing a demographic realignment so that the actuarial shift in benefits won't affect the baseline average for sixty-plus men on Medicare drawdowns,' Cole said, hoping some elaborate gobbledygook would sufficiently mystify Mr. Dennison so he'd stop asking questions Cole couldn't answer.
'Oh, I see,' the confused voice said on the other end of the line.
'You were going to give me his age and underlying carrier and his SS number.'
'Uh, right. Well, he's a federal employee on the Blue Cross Plan. . He's eighty-six and his Social Security number is 568-52-2713.'
Kaz got home at eight. He'd been trying to find David Robb through the War Department and had been shut out. He was in a foul mood when he walked in, but when he heard that Cole had succeeded, his mood changed abruptly.
The retirement home was a low, one-story building on Route 357, the highway that ran through Phoenix.
Kaz and Cole paid the cab from the airport and went inside. What they found depressed them.
Wild Oaks was a vegetable garden where old people did a Thorazine shuffle under the prison-guard stares of attendants. Kaz introduced himself to a stout Navajo nurse named Arleen Cloud, who looked at them with open suspicion.
'I'm Joseph Robb; this is my brother Don. We're David's cousins from Altoona,' Kaz said to the woman, who wasn't buying it.
'Who do you two guys think you're kidding? I've got David Robb's file; he doesn't have any relatives. He's outlived the whole clan.'
' 'Cept for his uncle,' Kaz said.
'Which uncle?'
'Uncle Sam.' Kaz pulled his old federal badge and flashed it. 'So keep the attitude coming, Nurse Cloud, and I'll drop an obstructing justice charge in your mailbox.'
David Robb had tubes sticking out of every conceivable orifice and one or two that had been created for him-
