Below The Surface. Karen Harper

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СКАЧАТЬ yet too soon when he heard a siren screaming along Gordon Drive. He did not let go of Briana until the medics appeared between two houses and came down on the sand carrying a stretcher. They bent over her to take her vitals and put a needle for a drip in her arm. Cole moved back, then off the sloop to give them room.

      Several people with houses along the stretch of beach came out into the diminishing rain. A short, elderly man swung a too-small windbreaker around Cole’s shoulders. It was only then he realized he was shaking.

      “If I go to the hospital with her, could you watch my boat?” Cole asked him. His teeth were chattering from the chill, and nerves.

      “Sure, sure. What happened to her? She your wife?”

      “A friend.”

      “Sure. Beautiful old boat. Don’t worry about a thing. I mean, I’m sure she’ll be fine—the girl and the boat.”

      Manuel Salazar, whom everyone called Manny, slammed the door to his old Ford truck, darted through the last raindrops and unlocked the front door to the Two Mermaids Marine Search and Salvage Shop. His fourteen-year-old daughter, Lucinda, trailed him in, yakking all the way. Lately she talked to her parents only in English. Everyone else in the family was proud to speak in Español, but not Lucinda. He’d laid down the law to her that she was having the traditional quinceañera celebration for her fifteenth birthday, a huge party which announced to friends and family that she was entering adulthood. Most chicas couldn’t wait for that celebration, which was better than any American birthday or sweet-sixteen party, but not his daughter. Lucinda had suddenly gone from being his angelic, younger daughter to someone he didn’t even know.

      He walked to his desk to see if there were any phone messages. Nada. With this storm, he wondered where the shop’s dive boat, Mermaids II, had ended up. His stomach knotted.

      “But it’s so expensive, Papa. Think of all you and Mama could do with the money.” Lucinda tried another tack to win her argument. “I overheard you say to her you couldn’t afford it, that you’d have to find a way, but why should you?” Dark eyes flashing in her pert, round face, she stood with hands on her hips, glaring at him. She looked so much like his sainted mother sometimes, though his mother would never have been caught dead in torn jeans and skinny-strap top that showed too much skin. “My friends—my American friends—” she plunged on, “think it’s really old-fashioned.”

      “So, they not your friends then, sí? Caramba, don’t you look down on your Latina friends. I never know a chica crazy enough pass up a quinceañera! Your Latina friends all happy ’bout their parties, dance with boys, make parents, godparents and padrinas happy, sí? And you just ask your Americana friends, what ’bout ethnic diversity and all that?”

      “Man, you go from sounding like a shrink to priest to politician, Papa. I’m an American teenager, and they have some say in their lives. Sure, most chicas want a quinceañera party, but not me! You want to spend some money for me you don’t have, how ’bout a new car I could use to get a job in town when I’m sixteen—that’s the age Americans look forward to.”

      “No car! Tell your American friends don’t come if they don’t want a good time with Mexican dancing and food and—”

      “I can’t even talk to you and Mama anymore!” she exploded, smacking her hands on her thighs. “Carianna didn’t have to have one!”

      “Have to have one? Your older sister give anything, if we could have pay for party for her, invite all our friends and family. But now I got this job with Briana and Daria. They even be padrinas, help us pay for things—”

      “So it’s a party for them? No, this whole thing’s for you and Mama, even Carianna and Grandmama Rosa, not for me!”

      “Me, me, me!” he mocked, throwing up his hands. “Now that what an American teenager all about! When your mama and I was your age—”

      “I’m not you and Mama, and I don’t still have one foot in the great country of Mexico where we were all starving! Why can’t you just listen?”

      “You shut your mouth, American girl! You gonna have quinceañera, honor your mama and grandmama. You make your family proud or you gonna find a new family. Now sit there till I find that video camera.”

      She turned her back and flopped into the padded chair at Bree’s desk. Muttering under his breath, Manny walked out of the small office space into the large, concrete-floored back room where dive and rescue gear was stored. A sign over the doorway read The Water is Our Office, and on the far wall hung a blown-up poster of the twins in their mermaid wet suits with scuba tanks at their feet and the words Love That Bottled Air! Another large picture at the back of the room showed only the twins’ mermaid tails as they dove below the surface and read, Bottoms Up!

      Wall Peg-Boards displayed depth charts, diagrams of the various artificial wrecks in this area of the gulf, and handmade drawings of the precious turtle sea grass the twins tended out by the Trade Wreck. On the floor, separated by aisles to walk between, were gears, winches, capstans, marker buoys, metal detectors, lift bags, underwater lights, pelican floats, wreck reels, cutting tools and cameras.

      His area was toward the back of the shop, where the heaviest equipment—especially anything to do with motors—was stored. Manny also handled in-water ship repairs and serviced dive equipment. He had a deal with the twins that he didn’t dive with tanks, only shallow stuff with a snorkel. Too far under water and he went nuts—“claustro-hydrophobic,” Daria had labeled it. Still, he loved the look of this place, the very smell of it. His greatest goal in life was to own the business someday and run it his way. He’d take on the rival salvage company across the bay and, once and for all, shut up its big brute of an owner, Sam Travers. You’d think that since Travers also did industrial dredging, demolition and pile driving, he’d leave the lighter stuff to Two Mermaids, but Sam resented the twins, especially Bree.

      This big back room always looked like organized confusion, much, Manny thought, like his employers’ busy lives. How he envied them for building this business, though he’d helped too and thought he was worth more than they paid him. But he’d recently found out that he would inherit half of the shop if anything happened to either of them, and since then, he’d made some big, hard decisions.

      Caramba, he might even have to force himself to dive to get what he wanted, instead of just operating on the surface. He grunted as his eyes searched for the camera to film the inside of the big, fancy Garcia Party House he had rented for the quinceañera. He wanted to show his madre how good things were going before cancer took her. She’d given up so much for him. He had to make her proud of him before she died, whatever it cost.

      He found the camera and took it out of its plastic underwater casing and rejoined Lucinda, who was twirling herself dizzy in Bree’s chair. Finally, his chica had shut her mouth. But in a way, the silence got to him, because he had to be doing something to keep himself from going loco waiting to hear about Bree and Daria.

      For once, Amelia Westcott was glad to see her own driveway. She hated driving in the rain, hated these months of weather so hot and humid you had to run from AC to AC. At least her sons would not be home from Cub Scouts yet and she could take a cool shower and calm down before they showed up. Her meeting with Daria had been disastrous; later, the docent’s tea at the art gallery had gone on much longer than she’d expected, partly because the lights had gone out from that boomer of a storm. Ah, sometime this month or next, the weather would clear and she could breathe again.

      If she hadn’t married Ben, who was now the prominent and very busy prosecuting attorney of Collier County, she probably СКАЧАТЬ