“Yeah, great.”
“What? You’re not happy for them?”
“Sure, I’m happy. If that’s what they want-and they know what they’re getting into with all the time and attention and dedication involved in raising a kid-which I’m sure they do. Then it’s great.”
Quiet. The spaced lights along I-95 set up an almost metronome quality as they strobed through the truck at sixty-five m.h., whisking over the hood, onto the dashboard, the quick glow on both our faces, and then gone until the next one.
“It’s not always just about the commitment and the dedication and the responsibility, Max,” Sherry said.
I nodded.
“It’s also about the love.”
Sherry unbuckled her seat belt, rolled on one hip, and rested her head on my shoulder.
“You know that’s illegal, Detective?” I said, moving the back of my fingers to her cheek.
“So arrest me.”
When we got to her house, the street was once again staid, neat, dark, and quiet. Wind ruffled the trees. The scent of night-blooming jasmine tickled the air. Sherry didn’t wait for me to unload the wheel chair. On occasion, she acquiesced to using her aluminum forearm crutches for short distances.
“Meet me out back,” she said over her shoulder, and went inside.
I took out the wheelchair and went through the side gate and pulled the contraption backward up onto the deck. The pool lights were on. We’d had an electrician come to repair and recheck all the lines. There was something about that blue-green glow that I’d missed when it wasn’t there, and I’d actually wondered why complete darkness never bothered me out at the shack, but I avoided it here.
I went inside to the kitchen and took a couple of beers out of the fridge. Sherry was still in the back somewhere, so I opened the Rolling Rocks and returned to the deck. Sitting at the patio table, I watched the lights dance off the oak leaves and the tile around the pool, and then- almost unconsciously-off the chrome of the wheelchair.
Without examining my thought process, I got up and moved the chair, rolling it back behind Sherry’s hammock in the corner, where it was out of sight. I had just settled back into my chair when the pool lights went out.
“It’s OK, Max,” Sherry said from the French doors of her bedroom, before I had a chance to jump. The still, burning light behind her showed her in silhouette. She was moving across the patio with the forearm crutches, and when she passed me, I felt the bare skin of her hip touch my shoulder. The scent of jasmine was replaced by a perfume I had not smelled for more than a year.
I heard the ruffle of water as Sherry lowered herself into the pool, and I hesitated for only a second. My heart was thumping when I stepped naked into the water and found her in the dark.
There is something about water, its movement, its cocoon of film over skin, its ability to mimic weightlessness: Some call it limbic; some call it internal; some call it healing. We used no words at all.
Later, when I carried Sherry to her bedroom and lay her down on the bed, I noticed that the mirror she had depended on for so long was gone. She had moved it from its regular space, stored it away perhaps for good.
We lay in each other’s arms for hours that night, neither sleeping, nor dreaming.
“Thank you, Max,” Sherry finally said.
“For?” I whispered.
“For saving me.”
I used my fingertips to move a strand of her hair behind her ear and watched her profile against the glow from the pool.
“Then I thank you, for the same reason, babe,” I said.
She turned to meet my eyes and whispered a phrase for the ages before meeting my lips with hers:
“Saving each other, Max-isn’t that what people are supposed to do?”
