The Shallow End

The parakeets woke before anybody did.

They had built a nest the size of a suitcase in the eave above the porch of the Landrys' main house — monk parakeets, green and shrill, a feral colony that had been in Louisiana longer than most of the families on the island. Somebody's grandmother had once tried to have them removed. They were still there. They screamed at first light every morning of July without variation, and by the third day Marin had stopped hearing them, which was the closest she had come in years to not hearing anything at all.

Curtis heard them. He was sitting on the porch steps with his phone, reading grain futures, and he turned the volume up on nothing at all and said, "I'd shoot them if it weren't a crime."

"You'd have to get up first."

He looked at her over his glasses. He was forty-two, sunburned only on the tops of his feet, a man who had been described at a dinner party once as solid and had taken it as a compliment ever since. "I get up. I get up earlier than you do."

It was true. He was often awake and gone — out on the water with Trent, or driving to the marina bar in Grand Isle proper to watch a game with the sound on. She had learned the schedule of his absence better than she had ever learned the schedule of his work, which involved, as far as she could tell, buying and selling things that did not exist yet and then being right about them.

The boys were still asleep. Yvette came on Tuesdays; here there was a girl named Marisol from the island who watched them for cash and took them down to the water in the mornings, and the house filled with the particular noise of children being safe.

Marin sat on the step and drank her coffee and looked at the gulf through the gap in the water oaks. You could not see it directly from the porch — only a stripe of it, and above that a stripe of sky, and the two were the same color today and useless for telling the weather.

Curtis said, "You're going in again?"

"I'm going to try."

"You don't try. You stand in it."

Wyatt came around the corner of the cottage then, in a wet T-shirt, carrying two fins, and something in Marin's chest performed the small, stupid rearrangement it had been performing for two weeks — not a leap, not anything as cinematic as a leap. A shift. Like a picture hung a quarter-inch off level that nobody else in the room would ever notice.

"Mrs. Trahan," he said, which was a joke, because he had been calling her Marin since the third day. "The water's flat. Today's the day you go past the sandbar."

"I've told you," Curtis said, without looking up, "she doesn't go past the sandbar. She goes to the sandbar and she stands on it and she thinks about going past it."

Wyatt leaned on the rail. He was twenty-seven and brown to the elbows and had the kind of face that made people want to tell him things. He worked the summer as a snorkel guide out of the marina and the rest of the year he did not exactly work, which was a thing everybody on the island knew and nobody on the island said. "That's not nothing," he said. "Standing on it is most of it."

"It's none of it," said Curtis, and went back to his phone.

She took the rings off before they left. This was a thing she had started doing in the first week — her wedding band and her mother's thin gold band, because salt water found everything — and she held them out and Curtis, without standing, took them and put them in the pocket of his shorts. He did it the way he took a receipt. Then she unstrapped her watch and gave him that too.

"Sun is up," Wyatt said.

They went down the shell path and across the road. Beach morning: the pelicans in a line, a man dragging a net, a woman in a black one-piece walking fast with her arms crossed as if she were cold, which she was not. Camille Hebert was already out with her three, stationed under an umbrella in a beach chair with a book she had read forty pages of since June. She waved. She looked, Marin thought, like an advertisement for something wholesome that she would never buy, and then hated herself for the thought, because Camille had done nothing in her life except be kind to her.

In the water, Wyatt was patient in a way she had not expected from a man that age. He did not put his hands on her. He stood three feet away and said now and no, wait and let it come, and she did the thing she had been doing since she was a girl in a bluegrass yard in Kentucky, which was to go out until the sand dropped and then stop, with her shoulders hunched and her chin at the surface, furious and ashamed.

"The bottom goes," she said.

"The bottom goes for one step. Then it comes back."

"What if it doesn't."

"Then I'm right here."

That was the whole problem, or the whole of it that she could have put into words at the time: everyone had always been right there. Her father. Her sister Margot. Curtis. Two boys who would be men soon and would need to be told things. There had not been a single hour of her adult life in which being right there was not the arrangement, and it had never once occurred to her to want it otherwise, and now, in July, at thirty-two, standing in water up to her ribs with a man she had known for two weeks, she wanted it otherwise with a clarity that frightened her more than the sandbar did.

She didn't go past it. She said she was tired, and she was, and they walked back up and sat on the steps of the Landrys' porch and drank the bad cold coffee from the pot in the kitchen, and Wyatt told her about a dive boat that had gone down off the Chandeleurs in '09 and about his brother's bar and about the girl in New Orleans he had almost married and hadn't, and she listened and thought: this is nothing, this is a boy talking, and I am a married woman on a porch, and this is nothing.

"Send him off when he bores you," Curtis said, passing them on his way to the truck with his phone in his hand. He said it kindly. He meant it kindly. It was one of the kindest things he had said all summer.

"Coming back for dinner?" she called.

He shrugged — the shrug meant he didn't know and might not, depending on who was at the marina — and she laughed and nodded as if this were a joke they shared, and it was, and it wasn't.

That night she lay awake in the cottage with the window unit going and the sound of the gulf coming through the screen like a machine that had been left running in another room. The voice of the sea, she thought, and then, annoyed at herself for the phrase: it's water. It's water on sand.

She got up. She went out onto the porch in her T-shirt and stood in the dark and listened to it, and it did not sound like water on sand. It sounded like something that had been talking for a very long time and had no intention of stopping, and she stood there until the parakeets started again, and then she went in and slept.