sea below. Margo heard the splash when it landed.
‘I guess I should introduce myself since I drank most of your champagne. Jack. Jack McCarthy.’
‘Margo,’ she replied. ‘But I’m not telling you my last name until I find out if you’re some sort of a pirate.’
‘Just a scientist, I’m afraid, a dull man with a dull job. I overslept and missed the sailing, so some friends gave me a lift.’
Margo studied him, wondering how much of what he was saying was true.
‘Now, if you’ll allow it, I’d like to buy you a real drink at a proper temperature. How do you feel about Scotch?’
Margo decided she didn’t care if he was telling the truth about himself or not. ‘Crazy about it,’ she said. ‘Single malt, neat.’
‘Done,’ he said.
He removed his raincoat and stuffed it into a lifeboat suspended nearby. Under the coat he was perfectly dressed for an evening in the Caribbean.
He offered his arm. Margo took it with a grin and they headed across the deck toward the lounge.
Jack McCarthy appeared to be another passenger out for a moonlit stroll, not a mysterious stranger who had just scaled the side of a moving ship in the middle of the night.
The airplane was in turbulence but to Margo it felt like the gentle rocking of a ship at sea. The sound of the purser’s voice warning the passengers to check their seatbelts awakened her from her dream. Half-awake, she checked her phone again, hoping that she might find an explanation from Jack waiting for her. She tried to hang onto sleep, loath to leave behind that first magical night with him. Their meeting had happened a little over a year ago, exactly the way she had just dreamed it.
She smiled, remembering. The two had been inseparable since the night of his unorthodox arrival on the ship. There was a logical explanation for it, of course. Jack had been in Colombia on an assignment for his company, the Worldwide Water Project. When he missed the ship, one of his friends who owned a cigarette boat had given him a lift. He’d done plenty of rock climbing in the course of his work, he said, so when they caught up with the big lumbering ship, he simply threw a line over the leeward side, shimmied up a rope and met the woman of his dreams.
That’s what Jack had told her, and that’s what Margo decided to believe.
Days later, when the ship docked in Puerto Vallarta, they got off. This time they’d used a gangway to disembark. While the ship departed without them, they sat in a café drinking Carta Blancas and deciding to get married.
Margo pushed the memories away. She sat straight up in her seat and checked her watch. It was less than an hour until the plane was scheduled to land. She refused the food and wine the flight attendant offered; she knew she would need all of her wits about her in the next few hours.
Margo pulled out the photograph she had brought along to surprise Jack. Billy had taken it in Puerto Vallarta on their wedding day, one year ago tomorrow. They had been married by the mayor with only Billy in attendance.
No force on earth could have kept her lifelong friend and champion away from Margo’s wedding, even if it involved chartering a plane, which it did.
Billy and Margo had grown up living next door to one another in two big apartments on Lake Shore Drive. After reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe they had even bribed one of the building’s handymen to open a wall between the two apartments. The passageway was masked by large cupboards on either side. That way, when they were under house arrest, which was a good deal of the time, they were able to move back and forth without even going into the hall.
Except for mostly absent parents and a gaggle of nannies, they were the only family each of them had.
Until Jack. When she called to tell Billy about Jack, he cautioned her that a shipboard romance should be confined to a ship. But when he realized how happy Margo was, he made a decision. While he never quite overcame his scepticism, he kept quiet about it. For Billy, who had an opinion on everything and a burning desire to share it, this was a supreme act of love.
He had appointed himself major domo, attendant, and father of the bride. The couple had planned to wear bathing suits but Billy wasn’t having it. From the plane he had managed to procure a vintage, hand-embroidered Mexican wedding dress that fitted Margo perfectly. For Jack, there were white linen slacks and an impossibly soft linen guayabera, the tropical shirt made popular by Ernest Hemingway.
Billy, of course, wore one of his exquisitely tailored suits, this one made of white linen. He ignored the Sydney Greenstreet jokes and proved to be much too elegant to perspire.
Margo couldn’t help but smile as she studied the photo that Billy had taken. Both she and Jack had a look of total joy on their faces. And that is how they’d been from that day until this.
The sadness in Jack, or whatever it was she had sensed that first night, was still there. But she knew the cause of it now. His childhood friend, Marcus, his ‘brother’, he called him, had died recently. The two had been as close as she and Billy. Margo certainly understood how devastating a loss like that could be. He gave no details and she didn’t ask. She was content to wait until he felt ready to tell her about it.
Jack had moved back to Chicago with her and opened a non-profit organization that searched the world for untapped water supplies.
‘Oil isn’t the real global problem,’ he had explained to her. ‘There’s plenty of oil. What humanity is going to need in the future is water.’
The PR firm Margo opened was thriving, too. She had a waiting list of people whose reputations needed serious polishing; she worked only for those few she felt were worth salvaging.
They had settled down next door to Billy in the apartment Margo had inherited from her father. She and Jack were even planning to start a family. Life was good. Until this morning.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are on final approach for Gustavo Diaz Ordaz International.’ The purser’s announcement startled Margo out of her reverie. ‘We’ll be on the ground in five minutes.’
Margo got out her passport, tightened her seatbelt and watched as the flight attendant passed out coats, stopping first at the man in 1B. The raincoat was in his lap.
Five minutes more and Margo would have a conversation with that man about the raincoat and what had happened to her husband.
Margo was crouched in her seat like a track star awaiting the starter’s pistol. She had her carry-on in her lap, her handbag on her shoulder, and her winter coat over her arm.
She hadn’t taken her eyes off the man in 1B since the flight attendant handed him the trench coat. She watched as he stuffed it into his carry-on.
She made a move to get up before the plane had come to a complete stop, but the ever-watchful flight attendant motioned to her to sit down.
