Points of Departure by Pat Murphy Page B

Now, he just laid back the skin and muscle to expose the intricate structure of the gills.
    Morris did not move. Nick looked at the teenager’s face and realized suddenly that Morriswas not asleep. He was dead. For a moment, Nick felt a tremendous sense of loss; but he pushed the feeling away. He felt hollow, but he fingered the feathery tissue of the gills and planned the rest of the dissection.
    He woke to the palm fronds rattling outside his window and the warm morning breeze drying the sweat on his face. The light of dawn—already bright and strong—shone in the window.
    Morris was not on the porch. His baseball cap hung from a nail beside the hammock.
    Nick made breakfast from the provisions that Morris had left him: fried eggs, bread, milk. In midmorning, he strolled to town.
    Morris’s mother, Margarite, ran a small shop in the living room of her home, selling black-coral jewelry to tourists. The black coral came from deep waters; Morris brought it to her.
    Two women off one of the sailing yachts anchored in the harbor were bargaining with Margarite for black coral earrings. Nick waited for them to settle on a price and leave. They paid for the jewelry and stepped back out into the street, glancing curiously at Nick.
    “Where’s Morris?” he said to Margarite. He leaned on the counter and looked into her dark eyes. She was a stocky woman with skin thecolor of coffee with a little cream. She wore a flowered dress, hemmed modestly just below her knees.
    He had wondered at times what this dark-eyed woman thought of her son. She did not speak much, and he had sometimes suspected that she was slow-witted. He wondered how it had happened that this stocky woman had found an alien lover on a beach, had made love with such a stranger, had given birthto a son who fit nowhere at all.
    “Morris—he has gone to sea,” she said. “He goes to sea these days.” She began rearranging the jewelry that had been jumbled by the tourists.
    “When will he be back?” Nick asked.
    She shrugged. “Maybe never.”
    “Why do you say that?” His voice was sharp, sharper than he intended. She did not look up from the tray. He reached across the counter and took her handin a savage grip. “Look at me. Why do you say that?”
    “He will be going to sea,” she said softly. “He must. He belongs there.”
    “He will come to say good-bye,” Nick said.
    She twisted her hand in his grip, but he held her tightly. “His dad never said good-bye,” she said softly.
    Nick let her hand go. He rarely lost his temper and he knew he was not really angry with this woman, but with himself.He turned away.
    He strolled down the dirt lane that served as East Harbor’s main street. He nodded to an old man who sat on his front porch, greeted a woman who was hanging clothes on a line. The day was hot and still.
    He was a stranger here; he would always be a stranger here. He did not know what the Islanders thought of him, what they thought of Morris and Margarite. Morris had told himthat they knew of the water dwellers and kept their secret. “They live by the sea,” Morris had said.
    “If they talk too much, their nets will rip and their boats sink. They don’t tell.”
    Nick stopped by the grocery store on the far edge of town. A ramshackle pier jutted into the sea right beside the store.
    Ten years before, the pier had been in better repair.
    Nick had been in town to pick upsupplies. For a month, he was renting a skiff and a house on Middle Cay and studying the reef.
    The sun had reached the horizon, and its light made a silver path on the water. Somewhere far off, he could hear the laughter and shouting of small boys. At the far end of the pier, a kid in a red baseball cap was staring out to sea.
    Nick bought two Cokes from the grocery, cold from the icebox behindthe counter. He carried them out to the pier. The old boards creaked beneath his feet, but the boy did not look up.
    “Have a Coke,” Nick said.
    The boy’s face was dirty. His