spring spat us out. We shot through the rough tunnel to the undulant blue surface. Then we burst through into air, into sound.
We dropped our mouthpieces, pushed back our masks, and whooped. Adam slapped the water’s surface and howled like a dog. I gulped deep breaths.
“Amazing!” He laughed. “Did you hear it? Did you feel it?” He held my shoulders as we tread the water.
I shook my head.
He beamed, undaunted. “I’ve felt it before here—in Florida—but never this strong. Maybe the water makes it stronger.” He held his hand out, sweeping it up and down again in a slow rhythm. “It’s like a breath, a vibration. I felt it on the farm, too, Evelyn, if I was very, very still. And in the mountains, always in the mountains. But here!” He pivoted in the water, his head back and his arms spread. “In Florida! It’s music! This place is a different note. It is to the farm like a B is to a G. That’s the difference. That’s it. That’s what I’ve been feeling.” His eyes widened as we paddled toward the bank. His hair stuck up in spikes around the mask pushed up to his forehead.
I laughed in spite of my disappointment at not being able to hear what he heard. I flattened my palm on his chest and then let my hand trail down to his waist. “I don’t know about that, but I felt you.” I licked the smiling scar on his sternum.
“You did feel me, didn’t you?” He gathered me in, hugging me close against his chest. “Hurry! Let’s get out.”
We stripped off our gear and clambered out of the water. Adam ran to the truck with the tanks. I gathered the rest of our stuff and followed. He met me, grabbed everything out of my hands, threw it in the truck, and snatched a blanket. The lone family of picnickers had left.
He cupped my face in his hands, kissed me quickly, deeply, and took my hand. We ran out of the clearing, laughing, like kids. His tented shorts wagged in front of him. In the woods, we slowed to a breathless walk.
Several dozen feet into the woods, we found a few square feet free of cypress knees and threw the blanket down. We peeled our wet swimsuits off in a frenzy and made love under the green canopy and blue sky. The sheer sweetness almost broke me, waves washing over me in a rhythmic baptism over and over until I was undone. Adam’s sweet voice rising through and above us like a prayer.
He fell down against my chest. Turning my head to kiss his neck, I saw high in the boughs of cypress a single snowy egret break through and spread herself against the blue sky. I was humbled, grateful for the language of underground rivers, for lovemaking, for the single white uplift of a bird. Grief, for that moment, was only a watcher, a mute child who asks nothing from us and takes nothing, not even pleasure or joy. A presence among us, rather than our essence.
Later, as we drove home under the mid-afternoon sun, we were quiet, soft and liquid in our joints. Adam grinned into the air that rushed through the truck windows.
“I feel different here,” he said.
“I know. I see it.”
As we pulled into the driveway, the sky shifted into the darker shades of an approaching thunderstorm.
Adam did not open his door when he shut the truck off. He swept his gaze across the pastures of the Warren ranch, our house, and the small fresh patch beside the house, which I had turned over recently for a fall garden.
“Both places have their own music, but Florida seems less dramatic. No hills. No fall colors. But it has its ways. If the farm and the mountains laughed, Florida’s land grins a long, sly grin.”
Then he laughed and grinned, long and sly.
So I came to live in Florida, to begin to call it home. For the first time since Jennie died, I felt a true hope. He was right to take me there, to baptize me into the new with the familiarity of his touch and his voice.
I hope he felt the same gratitude and knew that when, in his grief, I took his hand and forced my body on him I was trying to do the same thing, to keep him with me—with us—to keep him from floating away.
I never went back inside the caves. I snorkeled a lot, scuba-dived in shallow