“Nothing’s there,” said Booger, “you might as well give up looking.” I made splash sounds with the small bones of my wrist. A map sat in my lap. It had led us here, out into the water where X certainly did not mark the spot. Maybe there was something worthwhile at the bottom of this sea, but this far from the shore the water was too deep to make out the ocean’s floor.

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s go home. It’s late.”

He rowed the boat back to shore and slogged behind me through the swamp, over mangroves and hoptrees.

“Where are we? I’m hungry,” Booger groaned.

I really didn’t know which way we’d come from or which way to go, or if helicopters could see us through the cypress and tupelo trees. Swampwater had muddied my ankles, and every time I lifted a foot the sludge released it with a smacking sound, like when Booger puckers his lips and opens them really quick. It was almost dark, and in a few more minutes alligators would begin to feed. The map had led us here, but was I, an eighteen year old girl, so besot with the quixotic romance of a treasure hunt that I had forgotten common sense and gotten us irrevocably lost?

“A briefcase!” yelled Booger, having wandered behind a pair of kudzu-covered oaks. He continued to shout, in the squeaky wheel of an adolescent boy’s changing voice, “I think there’s someone else in the woods.”

“Lemme see!” I slid beneath the kudzu chandeliers, my feet suck-suck sounding the entire way. Booger held aloft a shiny leather attaché, which he couldn’t help but smear with swamp goop. He began to empty its contents; looking for what? I don’t know. But I smacked him in his pug nose. Sometimes he deserved his nickname so much that I wanted to bite him.

Shhhh. I put my index finger over my lips and then I mouthed the word listen.

You know, it wasn’t a good idea to trudge through an alligator-infested swamp. A year ago this would have seemed impossible, being out here. But my mom left me and dad alone in our little vinyl-sided house in Tampa. Dad couldn’t bare it, so he left the car on in the garage one night and he died, like a parakeet in a mineshaft. My Aunt Millie and Uncle Henry were given custody of me, which thrilled them, because I was old enough to baby-sit.

They’d given me charge of their household—their trailer—while they went away, all week, to a swap meet. Henry would sell gator jerky from the back of his Ford while Aunt Millie would mill about. And they trusted me with their only son, who I took deep into the swamp, in the small hours before dusk, in search of my unclaimed inheritance. My father grew up in this area, and so he must have left something—or found something—in the off shore waters. When he died, he left me a treasure map drawn in crayon.

There it was, the sucking sound of footsteps, but Booger and I were planted where we were. Those were someone else’s feet. I looked at my watch—7:03. The oncoming dark seemed like a petition for our death, slipped over the transom by a cowardly court clerk. I—a parentless girl in charge of her twelve year-old cousin, both of us Blair-Witched in the bayou—was scared.

From my point of view, the barrel of the rifle had a declivity to it, as if the weapon itself bent back, shrinking from the act of hurting a kid. But that’s just how I remember it. After lowering the gun the man apologized like a puffy bird shrugging off water, shaking his head over and over again in impulsive shame. He wore a beige vest—tight around his considerable plumpness—with at least eight pockets, a ripstop boonie hat, black rubber waders, and full mosquito netting. He extended his right, gloved hand to me, licked his thin, bright lips, and said, “I’m sorry I pointed my gun at you guys. My name is Rudy Parker.”

He had apparently been surveying the swamp; he wanted to buy it. He owned a resort about a hundred miles north, he said, and they were thinking about expanding to another location. What, I thought, was worth building on in this location?

Just a quarter mile hike and Rudy Parker led us out of the swamp and to an odd sort of trail—an abandoned train track that snaked its way among swamp hummocks. He told us that the tracks were left behind by the Atlas Railroad Company in the 1930’s, because all of their workers were dying of malaria. I looked at my forearms, and they were riddled with red bumps.

Rudy Parker Latined us on the entire history of central Florida while driving us in his Volvo back to the old fifth wheel trailer—a Holiday Rambler. I thought that if I were to ever go on holiday, and if I had the time, money and chutzpah to ramble, I wouldn’t do it in this junky thing. But that’s just me.

I started a pot of coffee, but the sky steeped with scarlet. We popped the TV on. Pretty early in the season to get a hurricane. But it looked bad. It was coming for us. It was coming for the Holiday Rambler.

After we met up with Mrs. Parker, who was staying at a place called the Miracle Hotel, I called my aunt and uncle. They were distracted, in the middle of something. Fine they said. My suggestion was that I go with the Parkers—who needed an extra hand at the resort—and that we drop Booger off with them in Tampa. I’d return after everything blew over. This, they cottoned to.

“You’ll love her.”

“Who?” I asked Mrs. Parker.

“Bea Arthur,” she said. “She’s our resident celebrity at Honey Bell.” Mrs. Parker had a face of hard lines, and lips like an opened peach. She’d evidently attended considerably to her make-up, even though we were fleeing a typhoon. I thought of my mother, off with a lawyer somewhere in Atlanta. A lawyer who could pay for all the plastic surgery her face could twitch beneath.

The Honey Bell Tangerine Resort. Named after the region’s most delicious fruit, according to Mrs. Parker.

“Mrs. Arthur was a major investor in Honey Bell. She knows everyone in the complex, and everyone in the complex knows her. Mrs. Arthur also has a nephew here—Edward.”

“Why does Bea Arthur live here? Why doesn’t she live in New York, or London or somewhere?”

“Well she does, of course, have multiple homes. But she winters where it’s hot.”

“And I’m fairly certain you’ll like Sid, my brother,” said Rudy. “He’ll be here in a week or two, home from college. I’m hiring him on to help finish up some of the work around Honey Bell, but most of the time he’ll be teaching scuba classes.”

Rudy twisted his neck and looked right at me, even though he was driving. “Do you like dashing young men?” he asked with a grin.

I nodded. “Well, I—“

“Then maybe you’ll get along with Sid.”

We arrived at Honey Bell Tangerine, and all that color…tangerine, yes, and orange—those colors are not the same. The manufactured, landscaped greens; the stone-grey of brick walkways; the pink flamingo peignoirs of retirees. The entire ‘complex,’ as Mrs. Parker had called it, must have been many miles square. Taking it all in was like trying to eat a bowl of sky.

My room. I got a whole room in the main house of Honey Bell—the Casa La De Da. My window overlooked the tennis courts. Casa Le De Da was, I’d been told, still in need of some construction. My room wasn’t quite finished and so I found little post-its everywhere. Where the towel rack was supposed to go, a little yellow one, penned with the words “towel rack.” Others included “hair dryer,” “book shelf,” “mirror.”

I was glad that when I went to the vanity all I saw was this note. I didn’t need to see the real me at that point. In short, I didn’t see my reflection—I read it. A few books were on a white, built-in shelf at the foot of my king-sized bed. I hadn’t thought to bring anything of my own to read, so I studied the few books that were there, against all odds, considering the room had yet to be let out. Dean Koontz. James Patterson. Some poetry, which I avoided. And a book with a blank, blue spine. Its cloth may once have been lettered, but that had been long ago. The yellowish pages seemed brittle, and the words were set in some old font. What book was this? It had no title pages, and no author was indicated. It began, “A gentleman and lady traveling from Tonbridge towards that part of the Sussex coast…” To the coast. I’m reading this book even if I’m not, I thought. After the first fifty pages the book was blank.

Next morning I was to help in the kitchen, maybe meet the Golden Girl. I lay down wearing my over-sized jeans and a Nick Cave t-shirt. Inside the Casa La De Da, the ocean sounded faint like a music box playing TV static. But I’m the one in the box, I thought.

We failed to vouchsafe the continental breakfast from Mr. Parker, who rose early and scarfed eight Danish before I’d come downstairs. Mrs. Parker asked me to help Delia, the Honey Bell cook. She tied a salmon colored apron around my waist. “Just go fill ‘em up on coffee,” she said.

I picked up a white plastic carafe and stepped into the dining room, which was all sun, polyester curtains and gecko-patterned wallpaper.

Mrs. Arthur’s face shined with the silver of counterfeit youth, and her eyes seemed to suspend me like a marionette doll from strings in the focus of her tough mind. But the continental breakfast had been picked over, and maybe she was only looking at me for answers to questions like where’s my muffin? It thrilled me to ask her—Bea Arthur—the following question: “Can I warm you up?”

She nodded. I poured.

The Parkers sat reading; she the New York Times and he email on his laptop computer. Rudy clucked at something, and so Claire, (Mrs. Parker), asked him what was the matter. “Nothing from Sid, and it’s been a month.”

Since Mr. Parker had phoned him and asked for his itinerary, explained Mrs. Parker.

“But,” said Rudy, “there’s a message from Diana. She says that we should look at getting a colonic therapist down here. Coffee enemas, preferably with shark cartilage powder. She says that they open the bile duct of the liver, and that the liver then sends its excess waste build-up to the colon for … evacuation.” Claire raised her eyebrows at this, taking up notepad and pen.

“She also gives her regrets. She, Susan and Arthur are taking a few weeks in Mustique—there’s a new reflexologist there, named Roxanne. And, Arthur is flying them out on his Cessna! She says that if they grow bored, perhaps they can return directly to Honey Bell!”

I sat with a cup of coffee, hot and fresh since I made a whole new carafe for myself. I smiled at the Parkers, and Bea Arthur, who sat in the corner, crosswording. This morning was far preferable to the one’s I’d had with Uncle Henry, Aunt Millie and Booger. I was eighteen years old, no one was around to prod me to go to college or get a job, and I had my own room in a resort. The sadness of my father’s death fell out of my face like a shadow falls out of a house.

That afternoon, Bea Arthur and I played shuffleboard with great vigor. All the while, her personal assistant, Clara, looked on, helping when she could. Clara was from Pennsylvania, but she had studied theatre at NYU. She wore tight jeans, boots, and dangly earrings. Her brunette hair seemed to be made of a silk water fall, which occasionally covered her sapphire eyes. Mrs. Arthur was stout, extremely tall, and nimble. She wore a flowing linen outfit that moved like a sail in a lazy breeze whenever she sent the disc down the deck.

“Bertolt Brecht,” she said, eyeing up another ten points. “Not just a playwrite—a poet, a thinker, a visionary! Ten points for me. Your disc.”

I sent the disc and scored negative ten, because it went into the base of the triangle, the area that is the worst to land on when playing this game. Mrs. Arthur sang to herself…

There’s a ship
The Black Freighter
with a skull on its masthead
will be coming in

The song made me feel like my bones were made of ice, like my legs were peninsulas of frozen water. Her voice was big-breasted, deep, capable of turning even darkness into ash.

“Angela Lansbury has a mouth like a sailor,” she said, descending into a bitter rant in which actresses are foxes, directors tramps and actors clowns… she called people names, but I don’t know, exactly, what she meant by those names.

“Rudy is my partner in Honey Bell Tangerine, my coadjutor. But he has much less invested in this place than I do. I’ve even brought my nephew here! Charlotte, have you met Edward?”

“No, I haven’t seen any young men around here at all,” I replied.

Clara’s eyes lit up.

That evening at dinner, Edward—or Eddie, as he preferred—sat right next to Clara. I waited on them all—the Parkers, Mrs. Arthur, Eddie and Clara—hustling to the kitchen and back when Mrs. Arthur wanted more wine. But after dinner was served, I took a place at the table, and Eddie began to speak with me, and not with Clara at all. His fine countenance, his gentle voice—all this pleased me. I hadn’t been flirted with since high school, and my interest in the opposite sex had deflated when I had to share my cousin Booger’s fetid room. But Eddie didn’t seem to care that my bangs were overgrown, that my chest was small and pale, or that I was wearing a Honey Bell Tangerine Resort apron. He looked at me with the keen eyes of a cat, and wore non-brand clothing, which he claimed was all Vegan.

“Vegan clothing?”

“Synthetics,” he said. “My shoes are made from hemp and recycled tires.” He’d lived in New York for a while, played in an indie rock band or two, and knew all the music I loved. He could quote entire albums of the Sex Pistols, knew what and where Joey Ramone’s tattoos were, and he could sketch really well. He made a drawing of me on a dinner napkin. He made me look like Daria.

After dinner we went to the pool—heated, lit. Not a cup of tea I cared to swim, at least not in front of Eddie or Clara. The Parkers and Mrs. Arthur had gone away to bed. I sat by, watching as Eddie leapt into the deep end, wearing black board shorts. Clara came out a bit later in a safari green bikini, side-tied at the hips. She was a sex-shaped container filled with sex, a nightingale, a skinny latte. They began to splash at each other, and for a while all I saw of them, from my rattan chaise, was a blur of flying water. They swam to the other end of the pool, far away from me, completely out of sight. I went to my room, hopped into bed, and began to read my book.

In the morning, Arthur, Diana and Susan Parker arrived by an airplane that could land on water. I had been watching from my window as the plane circled around the resort, apparently inspecting and admiring Honey Bell’s amenities. I thought about what the place might look like from up above. Did it all come together to form a face? The Casa La De Da the nose, the tennis courts the teeth, a few clusters of palm trees the eyes, the beach the forehead, and the water its blue hair?

The newly arrived Parkers immediately commenced a juice fast. Arthur, Susan, Diana—prune juice lovers, all three of them. I, being the kitchen help, administered more than five gallons of juice in a day. Arthur, in particular, was thirsty, though he swore off papaya juice, claiming that his first sip of it had made his whole right side numb.

The next morning Aunt Millie phoned me. “Your Uncle and I were just wondering,” she said, her voice worming its way into some request, “if you wouldn’t mind staying at the resort for the summer. If it’s ok with the folks there, that is.” Susan Parker sat over a personal steam inhaler, which nearly eclipsed her small face with mist. Arthur was still in bed, nursing his numb shoulder. Diana, the only one of them up to the simple task of living, sat vigil over her convalescent siblings. None of them would argue against my staying. Who else would juice them and fill their nose steamers with menthol?

Free to stay the summer, as long as I helped out in the kitchen with Delia. Days passed, and the Parkers seemed to find new cures for new diseases everyday. Susan, convinced she’d come down with the rickets, lay, on the front deck, in a kiddie pool full of grape juice, cucumbers on her eyes. Arthur motored around on a Segueway, sure that any walk of length would re-numb his right side. Diana, though, assisted Rudy and Claire with the late-summer booking. Delia and I rolled filo dough hors d’oeuvres in the kitchen.

There’s a ship
The Black Freighter…
with a skull on its masthead
will be coming in

Delia sang. I told her that Bea Arthur had sang the same song. Delia laughed. She wore a white baker’s outfit, the sleeves of which wrinkled at her elbows. The wrinkles looked like weeping faces as she pulled out a soufflé from the stainless steel oven.

“Last year,” she said, “Bea sang that song at the Honey Bell Tangerine talent show.”

“Oh.” This sort of disappointed me. I wanted the song to mean something more, something secret—like maybe the Black Freighter was really real, and maybe it would be coming in soon.

“Of course, it’s got special meaning at Honey Bell. Famous ship wreck happened near about here. One of Ponce de Leon’s ships.”

Ponce de Leon came to Florida before it was Florida. Used to be, people thought he was looking for some fountain of youth, but even my fifth grade textbook said that that wasn’t true. But a sunken ship? That had me curious.

“No one’s ever found the ship,” Delia sighed. “Sometimes people come to Honey Bell just to scuba dive offshore, looking for that ship, and maybe for that magic water that some say’s on board.”

While en route to Bea Arthur’s suite it is important to observe one’s steps. Mrs. Arthur’s private cottage was a ten minute hike from the Casa La De Da. But the way was sandy, through the bluffs of the beach, where one’s footholds can not be sure, and the wind at noon was stiff and loud.

The coffee hit the sand before I did, pouring out in front of me like a filmstrip would (if it were made of water). I lost her lunch, not to mention I turned my ankle something bad. I sulked on the sand, until I heard the callithump of a runner’s strides, coming from the Casa.

His calves danced around as he jogged in place. His lips said something, and the curls of his auburn hair blew about in the stiff breeze. His running shorts were tight, and his legs were tan and muscled. Against the blue nylon of his shirt his chest rose and fell, again and again, for breath. He reached his hand to me, and his head eclipsed the sun.

“Call me Sid,” he said, my arm in the crook of his. He’d arrived that morning, very early, before even Rudy awoke to eat Danish. We cleaned up the mess of lunch and sand and returned to the Casa, where I repacked Mrs. Arthur’s meal. Sid walked with me back to the cottage, where Bea Arthur sat, eyes closed, on her porch. A gramophone, replete with a wooden horn, spun a record on the table next to her. It played piano music, something half mute; a box of cooing birds.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Arthur. We placed the tray on her glass-topped coffee table. “Please sit with me and listen.” she said, her face clear of trouble. Sounds—the lap of waves, the piano slower than a heartbeat, the occasional gull’s call, and Mrs. Arthur’s slow but audible breathing.

The lunch sat cold on the table for some time. The piano stopped and the gramophone’s arm spun its needle at the center of the record. This made a dissonant sound.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Arthur, stopping the record. “Charlotte,” she said to me with tender eyes, “The Parkers told me that you recently lost your father.”

I nodded, ashamed to admit this delicate fact in front of Sid, whom I only just met. But part of me knew that handsome boys love a troubled girl.

“He committed suicide in March,” I managed to say. The creak of Mrs. Arthur’s rocking chair as she tilted farther forward. The terrific grandeur of the ocean… its glass surface in a calm… the deep fathoms of its abysses. As Mrs. Arthur’s blue eyes dewed up for me, I thought of these words, though I couldn’t remember from where they came.

“I’m so sorry, Charlotte,” said Mrs. Arthur. At this, I felt the urge to leave, but instead began to speak—and speak. I told Mrs. Arthur how my mother left, the way my dad looked asleep in the car when I knew he wasn’t, the way I thought about him going about his death by himself. And I told her about the funny treasure map he drew me. The map was the final message my father gave me, before our lives forked. I had been keeping it in my pocket ever since his funeral. When I was bored or sad I worked it between my index finger and thumb. It had become frail, like Kleenex. Mrs. Arthur asked to see it. She looked it over, smiled, and gave it back. I returned it to my pocket, where I couldn’t feel its weight (though the weight was reassuring).

The terrific grandeur of the ocean in a storm, its glass surface in a calm, its gulls and its samphire and the deep fathoms of its abysses, its quick vicissitudes, its direful deceptions, its mariners tempting it in sunshine and overwhelmed by the sudden tempest—

I closed the blue book at that line. This was what came to me earlier that day—these lines. I must have read them the night before, and dreamt them over and over. There still were no mirrors in the room, which seriously peeved me, as I wanted to look good for Sid. I needed to be at dinner in two minutes. All I had was this book, which could not show me me.

I arrived a bit late, but the dinner party was teeming with chatter. Rudy and Claire were beaming; Diana had procured a guitar from somewhere. Arthur held to his wrist what looked like an ice pack, and Susan was massaging her own neck. Mrs. Arthur sat at the far end of the rather long table. Clara, who held a clipboard in her angular hands, stood behind Mrs. Arthur.

“Charlotte,” said the actress, “we are going to have a talent show. I, of course, will star.”

After dinner, Sid walked me up to my room, both of us a little drunk. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Umm, where?” I asked.

“To find whatever it is your father left you” he said. “I’m a certified scuba instructor. Water that close to the shore won’t be deep. We’ll both dive. With just a little practice, you’ll be ready.” We agreed that, after he’d shown me a thing or two about diving, we’d make the trip back down to my aunt and uncle’s place to find what my father left. He politely kissed my cheek goodnight. It took me hours to sleep. I felt… agitated.

Bea Arthur insisted on coming with us. “I can’t dive,” she said, “but I make a great look out. And you’ll need someone to row the boat.”

We left Sid’s Subaru near the Holiday Rambler, where Uncle Henry and Aunt Millie gave us warm welcome. After asking Mrs. Arthur about twenty questions about the Golden Girls, my aunt and uncle came with us out to the edge of the swamp. We followed the same train track trail that Rudy Parker had been following. In the daylight it was much easier to get to the shore, the dock, and the canoe.

Sid rowed us out, and Mrs. Arthur held the map. “Stop,” she said, “I think it’s here.” Sid pulled the oars inside the boat. He slid his goggles over his nose and eyes, and went down first. His flippers disappeared into the dark that waited below. What did my dad think was so important to draw for me a map? I donned my goggles in order to find out.

Things get pretty radical underwater. I’d learned this as Sid and I trained over the last couple weeks. Underwater time isn’t measured by a clock or watch, but by the way that seaweed sways, and most importantly, by the oxygen level on your dive tank.

I followed his fins to the ocean floor. We both carried dive torches, the lights of which flitted about like specters. We played a short and nervous game of flashlight tag, until his torch struck upon it first—a small row boat with a gaping hole in its hull. The boat was old, moss-covered and water-rotten where it was wood; verdigris, vermeil and dark where it was bronze. It looked Spanish, but I don’t know these things. I still don’t know.

We couldn’t turn the boat over, for moss and mud had made it immoveable. We peered through the hole in it only to find more moss. Nothing. A sunken boat—yes. Very interesting. But this was not what my dad left me a map to find. The metal box that my right foot accidentally kicked, in anger, was.

It was no magic potion, no elixir of immortality left by dead Spanish explorers. It was much more bizarre. Sid, Bea and I sat on the canoe, staring at the opened box, which contained a rusted, 1950’s era orthodontic appliance. Its wires shined, as they were made of gold.

“Huh,” said Sid.

“Weird,” said Mrs. Arthur.

“Fuck,” I said.

Weeks passed. Sid and I had worked everyday on our talent show act—an interpretation of the final scene from The Taming of the Shrew. We’re in Honey Bell’s rather large atrium—where the show is to take place—and I’m delivering Kate’s final speech when Rudy Parker walks in with the phone. “For you,” he says. “It’s your mom.”

We argue. I call her names—tramp, fox, whore. She cries. I end the conversation by being rudely cryptic—“dart not scornful glances from these eyes,” I say, hanging up the phone. But, before that, she told me she’s coming to get me on Saturday. The day of the talent show.

It went well. At the end of scene, Sid said “Kiss me, Kate,” and I did. It probably made some of the Parkers uncomfortable, this blatant exchange of potentially harmful pathogens, but I didn’t care. The scene ended, and I go outside for a breath of fresh air. Bea Arthur took the stage inside, with Susan Parker at the piano. She began that song, again, the one about the Black Freighter with the skull-topped mast.

My mother arrives, driven in a BMW by the handsome lawyer. I want to stomp on his square jaw, but he’s just sitting in the driver’s seat as the car idles.

“Charlotte do you have your things ready? It’s time to go,” she said.

I put my index finger to my lips, making a shhh sign to her. I pointed back to the atrium, where Bea Arthur still sang. I mouthed the word “listen,” and Bea finished, soft and slow, the song…

And the ship
The Black Freighter
disappears out to sea
And
on
it
is
me