“Should I try again?” I asked Calder.
“Yes. The next message is peace.”
“I thought you said no ‘We come in peace’ messages.”
“That’s not the kind of peace I mean.”
“You mean like world peace?”
He lowered the binoculars and let them hang around his neck. “Remember what you’re doing. You’re trying to entice them with the most positive human emotions. Like that movie Jaws. I’m picking the emotional equivalent of blood in the water. Emotional peace is what we’re going for. Serenity. That’s what Maris wants.”
“Geez, Calder. Can’t we go with plain old happy?”
“Too generic. We need something more satisfying.”
“Okay, so maybe something peaceful like lying in a hammock?”
“That’s good, but you need to add heat to it.”
“Lying in a hammock on a beach in the Bahamas?”
“Come in, Lily!” Jules yelled. “What are you two waiting for?” She waved at me and I waved back.
“The Bahamas are good, but I was thinking of you in that bubble bath.” He smirked.
“Whose happiness are we thinking of?”
“Yours. Think about a bathtub. You’ve got the water as hot as you can stand it. There’s a mountain of white froth. Step in. Slide under. Let the water heat you to the core. Let all the tension of the day slide away.”
“That last part will be tougher.”
He pulled me closer as if he was going to kiss me, but his lips stopped a fraction of an inch from mine. We were nose to nose, his eyes burning into mine, until I could feel nothing but a slow, yearning heat in my stomach. He pushed the image of my bubble bath so smoothly into my mind that I silently stepped off the swim deck and let the water slide over my skin like silk. I sank below the boat, feeling the warmth in my cells slowly building into a sleepy heat. Peace. Lying in a hammock. Lying in a bathtub. Under the bubbles. With Calder’s hands slipping up … Ach! Damn it. What was it again? Oh, right, weightlessness. Heaviness. Relax, relax, relax. I was doing a pretty good job. A few minutes more, and I might actually fall asleep. I had just enough energy for one last projection: Serenity.
I don’t know how long I was down there, but it must have been too long because there was a jolt from above. Calder’s arm plunged into the water and yanked me into the boat.
“Very good,” he said, laughing, “but your friends are going to freak out if you stay under too long. God, that’s impressive. Weird. But impressive.”
I gasped at the air. “They’re all okay? Everyone’s still with us?”
“Of course they are. I told you to trust me.”
I nodded. “So are we done?”
“One more. This should do it. But it’s the hardest one.”
“Great.”
“Laughter.”
“I have to laugh underwater?”
“No. It’s not the sound you’re going for. It’s the feel. That’s why it’s hard. The thought of laughter is associated with the sound of it. You need to dig deeper. It’s the pain in the belly I want you to go for.”
“Pain? That doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s a good kind of pain. You need to conjure that laugh-till-you-cry feeling.”
“I know what you mean, but there’s nothing funny about this situation.”
Calder looked up to the sky. “I’m not going to be any help with this one, Lily. I haven’t done much roll-on-the-floor laughing in my life, so you’ll—Oh, man, here they come.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me down low in the boat. We peered over the starboard rail toward Bear Island. Two heads emerged from the water. Two pairs of eyes were focused on my friends.
“What are they waiting for?” I asked. Jules and Colleen squealed and splashed water at Scott and Rob.
“I don’t know, but they won’t be waiting for long. You did an amazing job, Lily. They’ve got to be salivating.”
“Then we should get out to them now.”
“We need them to get a little bit closer still.”
“No! That’s far enough!”
“We need to maximize our time away from the boat without being gone so long your friends get worried. We can’t waste time traveling. We need it for talking.”
I counted in my head: One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. The heads disappeared and then came up again, four seconds later. “How close are they?” I asked.
“About a hundred and fifty yards,” Calder said. “Let’s go, but don’t dive. I don’t want your friends to notice us leaving.”
“Is it time for a more specific message?”
“Nope. We’re back to the clean slate. Blank canvas, Lily. Got it? You need to hear them, without