“Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Help him up.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  “He’s really bleeding.”

  “Are you staying at the hotel, sir?”

  “No.”

  “Look at his pants.”

  He scrambled to his feet as quickly as he could and began to walk away, knowing he could not stand the attention of strangers under these circumstances. His hands were bloody, and he wondered if he had sprained his wrist, because it seemed to hurt more than it should.

  “He dropped his sunglasses.”

  “Where?”

  “There—in the grass.”

  The blood from his scraped knees began to soak through his linen pants, and he wondered if he would have to remove them before getting into his car. He knew he should roll them up and look at his knees but something inside him was reluctant to do so. He felt like a boy again and had a brief, horrific vision of himself bursting into tears on the spot, humiliated and upset by the pain and the sudden loss of dignity. Someone handed him his sunglasses and he put them on. He tried to walk normally, knowing he was being watched, but he stumbled on, determined to keep moving.

  It was not a great distance to the tennis club where Stafford and his wife had left their car that morning, but by the time he arrived, his wrist was beginning to swell and the blood on his pants felt sticky and warm. He knew the club would have a first-aid kit and clean towels and friendly people all anxious to help one of their own, and he would never entirely understand why, when he arrived at the main entrance, he did not go inside. Instead, driven only by some vague feeling of necessity, he continued past the tennis club to the final rise of sand dunes that encircled the beach. He stood there for a long time, uncertain and afraid. Then he sat down and removed his shoes. He rolled up his pants and he undid the buttons on the front of his shirt, letting it fall open. He took off his sunglasses and removed his belt, and then he got up and walked across the beach toward the salt water that somehow, he knew, would wash away the blood and stop the pain.

  CHAPTER 9

  Goodness

  Surely goodness and mercy will follow me.

  —Psalms 23:6

  SHE CAME FLYING DOWN the path like a crazy thing.

  No, he was not at the club. No, they had not seen him. No, his car was still there. Would she care for a glass of water? No? She should have a nice day then. Have a great day, Mrs. Hopkins! An awesome day. A spectacular day.

  He had done this before, disappearing unexpectedly and without warning, and she had pleaded with him to carry a cell phone like other normal human beings, but he refused. It was the right of every man, he said, to withdraw from the world without explanation.

  “Oh, just wear a bloody pager, then,” she said. “You can turn it on and off when you want but at least you’ll know when people are looking for you.”

  “People are always looking for me,” he replied. “And ninety-five percent of the time I’m willing to be found. The rest of the time is my own.”

  “You’re a pompous ass, Stafford. You really are.”

  “Right.”

  He was too hard to love, she thought, and too helpless to leave, but she was sick and tired of protecting him. Tired of the worry and the shame that accompanied every good thing that had ever happened to them. Tired of the games and the houses and the carefully orchestrated pretenses, and she was, she decided, most of all sick and truly tired of caring about him. He was an impossible man. An arrogant, inconsiderate, self-centered man—an idiot, really—and when she found him, if he was up to it, she would skin him alive.

  During the winter months on Maui, the northern swells that approach the beaches along the northwest coast can create a powerful shorebreak that some call a killer break. There is no protection from the big swells as they surge toward this part of the island, and inexperienced swimmers are warned that powerful currents can appear quickly, especially when the wave action is heavy and the angle of the undertow creates the sandbars and trenches that can become funnels for riptides. Red flags are posted when conditions become dangerous, but visitors are urged to exercise caution at all times. There are stronger currents farther out, and swimmers caught in them do not always return. Knowing their own limitations, she and Stafford rarely swam in the ocean and never on rough days. But on the few occasions they had, they always went to the beach west of the Ritz-Carlton, where the gentle and protected waters of Kapalua Bay promised some degree of safety. Even there, though, and even on quiet days, Stafford was always wary.

  Agnes was shocked, then, to see him standing in the water up to his knees at the DT Fleming Beach—a beach known for its pounding surf and steep drop-off—facing the remnants of a storm that had taken place two days earlier some four hundred miles away. He had walked along the shoreline to the north end of the beach where the sand ended and the rocky terrain that led to Slaughterhouse Beach began. There were few swimmers in the water and none so far away as Stafford. The great waves were breaking hard on the shoreline, and the wind was gathering strength. She began to walk across the sand dunes that separated her from the water, but the dry sand filled her sandals and she kicked them off one at a time, leaving them behind. Barefoot, she ventured as close to the water as she dared, where the sand was hard-packed and walking was easier. She held her purse firmly, tucking it under her left arm for safekeeping as if expecting the waves to leap forward and snatch it from her. The united forces of water and wind frightened her, but Stafford was only fifty yards away at the very most and she would soon be close enough to call to him.

  Stafford, she would say calmly, and he would come away from the water.

  But as she approached, Agnes saw the dark stream of dirty water a few feet away from him, snaking its way from the beach to the water beyond the breaking waves like a little river with a mind of its own. It was, she knew, a riptide, and he was too close to see it, standing as he was in a place where the waves came in at odd angles, colliding with one another and creating unexpected patterns beneath the surface of the water. She saw him take another step forward and then back again as a larger wave approached. He turned then and saw her. He was laughing, and she could see that his eyes were bright. He held up his hands, spreading his arms out wide toward her as if to embrace her, the water, and the day. She could see that his lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear his words above the sound of the waves and the wind. He gave her an exaggerated shrug, like a boy caught in the act of doing something he was not allowed to do, and then he dropped his arms to his sides and slowly turned his back on the ocean. It seemed he would come back after all.

  “Stafford!” she screamed, and she heard her voice breaking across the wind. “Stafford, watch out!”

  The first great wave hit him from behind, and when he fell forward, slammed into the shallow water, he remembered only that he must not breathe or try to breathe. He tried to stand, but the undertow took hold of him and dragged him out into deeper water. He felt one hand touch the sandy bottom of the ocean floor and his fingers spread out instinctively, trying to grab hold of something, but there was nothing to anchor his grip. He kicked his way to the surface, where a second wave broke over him. His mouth and nose filled with water, and he began to choke. He knew he would take a sudden breath soon and when he did, he would force the water into his airways and then into his lungs, but instead, a third wave caught him on its swell and carried him forward. There was a momentary lull, the pulling back of the waves in all directions, and he found himself for the second time that day down on all fours. He staggered to his feet, reeling and gagging, only to step sideways into a deep trench of dirty water. He heard Agnes screaming, shrieking really, and he saw her running toward him, but when he tried to get up, he found he could not, feeling instead the force of a stronger current that swept him away from his wife and the beach and the waves that broke upon it.

  “Save me,” he thought he said, “save me.” But he could not have spoken these words aloud, because in his panic, he took in another mouthful of water and began to choke, unable to breathe, unable to fill his lungs with air.

  This had happened before, but it had happened many years ago and at the moment of his birth, and the woman who saved him then was an apple-cheeked Dutch midwife named Hester van Bosch. Stafford was the second and unexpected son of Michael and Mary-Jean Hopkins and he was born at home, which was also unexpected. But Stafford’s mother, anxious for a hospital birth after such a lengthy gap between pregnancies, had gone to unusual lengths to guarantee a safe delivery under controlled circumstances. She would move to Kingston for the final month and live with relatives until the baby was due. She would see the Kingston specialist recommended to her by the local doctor until she went into labor, at which point she would deliver her baby by cesarean section in an operating room at the Hôtel Dieu Hospital under a general anesthetic. She would remain in the hospital for a full three weeks following the delivery, and when she and the baby were well enough to come home, a hired girl would be brought in to help with the housework and the cooking until the school year ended and Emmett would be around full-time to help. That, at least, was the plan.

  Instead, Mary-Jean went into labor suddenly on January 31, a full six weeks ahead of schedule in the middle of a blizzard so fierce that even the snowplows slid off the roads and into the ditches. Michael had been forced to send Emmett by horse and sleigh to fetch old Dr. Milne from Napanee, but the snowdrifts were huge, and the wind blew so hard across the highway that Emmett never made it to Napanee. He took refuge at a neighboring farm where Irene Bailey ordered her husband to back his brand-new John Deere tractor out of the barn and across the snow-covered fields to Billy Splinter’s farm to fetch Billy’s cousin Hester, a local midwife who had successfully delivered hundreds of babies.

  Stafford was a footling breech, a stargazer, as Hester said later, trapped inside his mother’s body with his head tipped back as if looking up at the sky on a star-filled night. The left leg had come down and the tiny foot was just visible when Hester arrived, but Mary-Jean Hopkins was the kind of woman who always expected the worst and gave up early. She was forty-four years old, her hair already gray and her hands stiff from years of milking. A healthy baby born to a woman her age was too much to hope for and a baby set to come so early seemed to settle the matter. But when snow-dusted Hester came in through the door, smiling and calm, with the Baileys and Billy Splinter and Emmett following in her wake, it seemed like the cavalry had arrived and Mary-Jean would long remember the way Michael broke down and wept, squeezing her hand.

  “It’ll be all right now,” he said. “It’s going to be all right.”

  Hester knew from experience that a breech birth could not be hurried. The problems were significant, but aside from low fetal weight, hyperextension of the baby’s head, the age and physical strength of the mother, and the likelihood of umbilical cord prolapse, she knew that waiting was the key.

  “Wait,” she said again and again. “This is the hour of patience.”

  A breech baby born too quickly ran the risk of getting caught by a cervical spasm—its body released, its head trapped by a cervix not fully dilated as if held back at the last moment by a womb unwilling to surrender its charge into unknown hands. But if the umbilical cord became compressed and entangled about the baby’s feet, there would be other problems, because a baby’s need for oxygen did not change at birth—merely its means of securing it. The oxygen that flowed through the umbilical cord from mother to baby was designed to stop only at the moment of birth when the baby’s lungs would inflate like two tiny parachutes and the cord, no longer needed, could be clamped and cut. And at this time, in one last and unseen moment, the baby’s blood flow would reverse directions and pass from the right side of the heart to the left, bypassing the lungs entirely and forever after.

  It was shortly after six then, on a cold February morning, when Hester finally got busy. It was time at last, she said, time to get that baby out, but she couldn’t manage with Mary-Jean bouncing all over the bed. Michael would have to hold her still and administer the ether Hester had brought with her, but not too much and not too quickly. Hester knew the baby’s arms were locked in place on either side of the head and she would have to get them down, because the time for patience was over and every second mattered now. Michael, who had delivered many a Holstein calf, was impressed with the skill and physical strength Hester called on to complete these final maneuvers and grateful that Mary-Jean was no longer conscious.

  “Don’t fight with me,” Hester whispered. “Be a good boy.”

  Stafford came into the world quickly at the end, tiny and frail, and he lay in the hands of Hester van Bosch, who wiped out the inside of his mouth and throat before holding him upside down and delivering such a slap to his backside that his father cried out. There was, however, no response from Stafford, nothing but the alarming retraction of his tiny chest wall, indicating clearly to Hester where the problem lay.

  “There’s a bit of fluid,” Hester said.

  “What fluid? Why doesn’t he breathe right?” Michael asked. “Do something.”

  “Shhh,” she answered. “He will.”

  She had saved him then, suctioning out his airways and breathing the life back into him from the air in her own lungs. She wrapped him in towels that had been warmed in the oven, and when Mary-Jean said she was too weak to nurse the baby, it was Emmett, a few days shy of his fifteenth birthday, who prepared the first bottle.

  “We’ve got a nice little Jersey in the barn,” Michael said, and he sent Emmett hurrying to milk the cow and bring the fresh milk back to the kitchen where it would be boiled, diluted with water, and sweetened with corn syrup.

  The baby, Hester thought, was in pretty good shape all things considered. She did not know how much harm had been done, but she did know the lungs were struggling and the baby would soon need more help than she could provide. She kept him alive, though, those first hours and into the afternoon of the following day, until the roads were finally cleared and the ambulance arrived. And for three weeks afterward, Stafford Curran Hopkins lay in an incubator at the Catholic hospital in Kingston, where he surprised medical experts by showing no signs of permanent damage.

  “Keep that one away from water,” Hester advised his parents later, but Mary-Jean was dismissive. Dutch people, she decided, were too bossy for her taste.

  “They’re real experts, aren’t they?” she said, but that was only because the fear of losing Stafford would never leave her and any reminder of how close she had come to losing him would bring out the worst in her.

  People said he was good in a crisis, very good in fact. When, for example, important television shows spun out of control, as they often did, Stafford Hopkins remained calm. Ruthlessly calm, some said, and sometimes vindictive, but the truth was, Stafford was quick to make decisions that dealt effectively with escalating budgets and poor ratings. He was not a loud man or even a rude one. He was a man who embraced power naturally and wielded it without complaint. Caught then, in a riptide that pulled him away from the beach and into the deep waters off the coast of Maui, he was shocked to realize that the blackness of an awful terror lay upon him. He tried to roll over onto his back, knowing he must relax and float with the current, saving what little strength he had in him for the return. But the current would not let him go and he could not stand the vision of his body caught in its grip like a morsel of food.

  And he would have given up all his strength in this fight for release had Agnes not come for him when she did. He would have begun to lose hope and strength and then, taking in too many mouthfuls of seawater, he would have begun to vomit and choke and then he would have begun to sink, and he would have disappeared from the surface of the water and not been seen again. Fear would be overcome at the end by the silence of deep water and his eyes would close or not close, but he would not know the difference anymore.

  Jesus Christ! She would not put up with this. The remnants of a beach toy lay in her path. A pink thing. A noodle, they called it. A few feet of hard-packed pink foam that floated but would not bear the weight of two adults. Just a piece of one. Not even whole. But there it was, and she snatched it up from the sand as she ran into the water. Three steps into the sea, she realized she had not let go of her purse and shook it off her arm. From above, there seemed little to see. A man swept offshore, a poor swimmer whose grasp of the basics was clearly inadequate. A woman pursuing him, throwing herself into the same riptide but swimming with it, clutching a child’s beach toy.

  She had learned to swim at a rapidly decaying public pool in a poor section of Madison, Wisconsin. Her mother had wanted her to do well at things, and she had wanted to please her mother by trying. They still lived together then, and if things were not good, they were certainly not as bad as they became later. There was still some possibility that her mother might recover or, as the chain-smoking aide from Family Service said, Get her shit together. It was not easy, though, for a child to live with the pieces of a broken person, however bravely held together. But that’s how it was, and for a while it was better than nothing. Later, when things became worse and visits were limited to weekend afternoons, it became clear to everyone familiar with the tedious case history that the mother was unfit long before she killed herself.

  It was a girl named Arlene who taught her to swim, a brawny red-haired teenager whose self-assurance and confidence were, to some, inspiring. Arlene had an ear-piercing silver whistle that she blew at intervals, punctuating her verbal commands with quick blasts of sound. She seemed born to wear a bathing suit and she stalked the edges of the swimming pool like a staff sergeant looking for trouble in the ranks. Occasionally, and to great effect, she would leap into the pool herself and take hold of a shivering little girl whose strokes had become weak or sloppy.