Don, I Left as You Wished novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: One Length

I drove over the bridge at eleven with my suit on under my clothes, out of habit.

Nobody followed me.

There was no black car in my mirror and no tracker under my bumper.

Just the Narrows under me, black and quiet, and the lights of the ships.

I looked at the water the whole way across.

It was only water.

The house was lit up at the top of the hill.

Every light by the pool was on. The underwater ones too, so the whole thing glowed blue from the inside.

Nobody was hiding anything anymore.

Santo was waiting at the gate in his black trunks with a towel over his shoulder.

"No sharks?" I said.

"They're retired. They're framed in my office."

"They are not."

"Ask the capo. He made the label."

Up on the second floor my mother's curtain was wide open. Her light was on.

She was sitting at the window in her robe with her glass of milk, looking straight down at us.

She lifted the glass.

I lifted my hand back.

"She asked if she could watch," Santo said. "I said yes."

"Watch what?"

He didn't answer. He walked me to the edge of the shallow end and stopped.

"You stay on the deck tonight," he said.

"That's not how it works."

"Tonight it is. Just once." He looked at me. "Please."

He'd never said please to me. Not once in fifteen years.

I sat down on the warm stone with my feet in the water.

He went down the steps without stopping and pushed off.

It wasn't pretty.

It still wasn't pretty.

His head came up too high and his legs dropped.

His breathing was loud enough to hear from the house.

But he didn't stop.

He went under the rope where the bottom fell away, and kept going.

Over the deep end.

Over the drain.

I watched him pass over the place where his mother had been found, his shadow sliding across the bright tile eleven feet down.

He didn't look down. He didn't slow down.

He swam the whole length of his mother's pool, alone, and slapped the far wall with his hand.

He hung there with his arm over the gutter, breathing.

Up at the window, my mother put down her milk and clapped.

I didn't clap. I couldn't.

Santo turned around at the wall and looked at me down the whole length of the water.

Then he took one huge breath and went under.

Straight down.

I was on my feet before I knew it.

"Santo."

He was kicking down, clumsy, fighting to stay under, his arms reaching toward the bottom.

Down past where he could ever touch.

Down to the drain.

His hand closed on something.

Then he pushed off the bottom with both feet and came up in a burst of water, choking and gasping and laughing.

He swam the width to my side, ugly and fast, and grabbed the edge at my feet.

He opened his hand on the stone.

My ring.

The two-carat oval Dino had chosen. Like a drop of water.

It had lain on that drain since June.

Santo pushed it across the stone toward my toes and left it there.

He didn't pick it up again. He didn't try to put it on me.

"That one," he said, still out of breath, "somebody picked for you."

"Yes."

"And somebody pushed you in this pool and picked your name for you. And somebody decided you were leaving New York." He wiped the water out of his eyes. "Everybody's been picking for you since you were ten."

"Santo."

"So I'm not going to pick one. I'm asking you for a different one. Whatever you want. A ring from a gumball machine. No ring."

He held on to the edge of the pool with both hands, looking up at me.

"Marry me," he said. "If you want to. Say no, and I'll still be in the adult class on Tuesday."

I looked down at him.

I saw the wet black hair, the dark eyes, the scar through the eyebrow.

His face from above, in bright water.

Just his face.

I sat back down on the edge and put my feet in the water on either side of him.

"I forgive you," I said.

He went very still.

"Not tonight," I said. "Not for the ring. I forgave you on the pier at South Beach, when you went off the end of it. I just wanted to be sure it wasn't the salt water talking."

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