A Time for Us - By Amy Knupp Page 0,21
Never had been. Rachel took the shirt and tried not to show any reluctance whatsoever to go in the tiny restroom Buck had installed in the boathouse corner years ago. It was no bigger than the bathroom on an airplane, with barely enough room to turn around, let alone lift her elbows to change her shirt. And the cleanliness factor, or lack thereof... Rachel closed her eyes, breathed through her mouth and put the tank on as fast as humanly possible. She burst out of the tiny space and struck what she thought, in her fashion-moron way, might be a modeling pose before Buck could tell she was gasping for fresh air.
“That’s some damn good advertising,” he said. “Be better with some of them puny little shorts to show off your legs, but we can work with the doctor pants.”
“Nobody will be seeing me in ‘puny little shorts’ anytime soon.” Rachel bent over to roll up her scrubs.
While she’d been in the restroom, Buck had retrieved her two-sided paddle—she was impressed he could put his hands on it so quickly since she’d been away so long—and was holding it up like an oversize walking cane.
“You ready yet?” Buck said good-naturedly.
She straightened and eyed her beloved boat. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Need help?”
“I’ve got this,” Rachel said as she picked up her kayak and headed for the dock.
She set the boat into the water and climbed in, scoring no points for grace, but she didn’t care. The second she was floating, she felt some of her tension leave her body as if a pressure-release button had been pushed. Buck handed her the familiar, orange-tipped paddle and she pushed off the dock with a wave.
With every dip of the paddle, Rachel relaxed more. The bay was shallow here and clear enough to see to the sandy bottom. She watched for fish, just as she always had, as she began a calming, rhythmic pace with the paddle, from one side to the other. A gull screeched from the shore behind her. In the distance, she could hear the captain’s voice over the intercom on a tourist boat as it set out on one of its daily fishing excursions. The gentle splash of her paddle hitting the water with each stroke mesmerized her. Took her further from her cares and worries. By the time she made it to the middle of the bay, the professional fishermen had left shore hours before and the dolphin tours were not yet under way. She was gloriously alone in her favorite place in the world.
With her back to the bridge that spanned the bay, Rachel stilled. Breathed in. Closed her eyes briefly in gratitude for the peacefulness around her as it seeped into her bones.
Noelle had never gotten it. She’d kayaked with Rachel plenty of times but swore it was dull on the bay. White-water kayaking would have been much more her style, though Rachel was pretty sure her sister had never gotten the opportunity to try it. Rachel had tried countless times to explain how being alone in a single-person boat out in the middle of the bay was soothing and restorative to her.
“There’s nothing to do but think out there,” Noelle had said more than once. “It’s like the water magnifies your problems and that’s all that exists. There’s nothing to distract you from whatever’s eating away at you. It could drive a girl to drink.”
Noelle had never understood Rachel’s explanations. For Rachel, the solitude and the closeness of the water had the opposite effect—they took her away. They allowed her to set all her other thoughts aside, to be drawn out of her own problems into the quiet drama of nature. She could sit for hours watching for fish, looking for bubbles in the water, stirring the water with her paddle without a care as to where she drifted. The gentle sounds the water made against the boat soothed her, cleared her mind. Noelle had loved the wildness of the gulf side of the island, the turmoil and the nonstop commotion of the waves smashing continually on the beach. Her favorite place to be whenever she’d been upset was in the middle of the crashing waves. Rachel grew agitated if she watched the never-ending waves for too long.
She dipped her fingers into the tepid water, closed her eyes and raised her chin so the sun could beat down on her and color her skin. Several feet away, a fish splashed, forming ripples on the otherwise placid