Stiltsville: A Novel by Susanna Daniel

she’d made so much noise coming in that I couldn’t reasonably pretend to sleep through it, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that she had dropped a large canvas bag filled with green and blue glass bottles. I helped her collect them—none broke—and the next day when I glanced into her bedroom from the kitchenette, I saw those bottles lined up on the windowsill, refracting the sunlight.
    From time to time I kept Bette company while she did her chores at the Barnacle. This is how I ended up lying on the Barnacle’s pier one Tuesday afternoon during that last long visit, after losing my job in Atlanta. I’d been in Miami for almost four weeks straight. It was January, but still we wore swimsuits without covering up, and the heat on the wooden pier spread through my skin like a warm blanket. Dennis was at class. That morning, he’d stopped by the apartment after Bette went to work, and we’d necked on the couch until the cushions stuck to our skin. This is what I returned to, all day: the rushing, splitting-open feeling of touching Dennis, of being touched by him. My mother was right: it was not easy, staying out of his bedroom.
    Bette wore a scarf over her hair and a neon orange bikini top and cutoffs with a red velvet patch on the thigh. She squinted while she polished the brass fittings of the Egret ’s teak railing. I mistook the squinting for concentration—later I would learn that this was a side effect of her nearsightedness, which, in an uncharacteristic fit of vanity, she had not corrected with eyeglasses. “Those bottles,” she said. “I’ve been dying to tell you.”
    I put aside the law journal I’d been reading, an article Dennis had published earlier that year. “Tell me,” I said.
    She squatted on the gunwale of the boat. I shaded my eyes to look up at her. She said, “I found them on a wreck. A shipwreck.”
    “Where?”
    She pointed south across the bay. “Out there.”
    My first thought was that surely it was not legal to remove items from a shipwreck. “Can you get in trouble for that?” I said.
    She laughed. “I don’t imagine they’re worth much. But they’re beautiful. I found them in the forward cabin the other night. It took me two trips to get them all up.”
    “You dove at night?” It seemed impossible that on those nights when she’d been out until dawn, she’d been scuba diving. I’d seen Bette’s boat—it was a seventeen-foot sailfish, a toddler of a boat. Surely it wasn’t fitted with dive lights. This meant she’d been diving with someone else, from that person’s boat.
    “Don’t worry,” she said. “I go with a friend. It’s safe.”
    I thought of Benjamin, a ruddy-faced bear of a man who spoke softly and had the habit, I’d witnessed, of lifting Bette over his shoulder until she battered him into letting her down. I stood up and stepped over the railing of the Egret , and maneuvered until I was straddling the gunwale, facing her. “OK, tell me,” I said. It was a little awkward, I admit. She hadn’t ever invited this kind of gabfest, and I wasn’t sure we were suited to it.
    For whatever reason, though—she was excited, bursting—this was not a secret she wanted to keep. “I met this woman,” she said, throwing me for a loop. “Her name is Jane. She’s a professional salvor. You know what that is?” I shook my head. “She has an engineering degree or something, and she works with dive teams to raise shipwrecks. They have to do it without hurting anything, inside the wreck or outside it. It’s very complicated work. Anyway, I met her at the club.” The club was the Coconut Grove Sailing Club, where Bette taught sailing lessons on the weekends in exchange for a discount on her boat slip. “I’m teaching her to sail.”
    “And she’s teaching you to—salve?”
    “Salvage,” she said. She looked off, as if remembering. “No, we just dive together. She knows the best spots. There’s a wreck she’s bringing up soon, and sometimes we just