Open Water Read Online Free PDF

His face was losing color, chalk tones drifted higher. He looked pale as a china Madonna.
    “ ‘Another Melancholy Midnight’ with WPLM,” Willis said. His heart wasn’t in it exactly and she could tell. Shewasn’t smart enough to have known it all along. She watched him, but her anger was diminished. She arranged her tangled hair, pulling it free from her jacket hood. This girl had wanted to fight and she handed it right back. Now she was finished for the night. She closed her icy fists and pulled them inside the cuffs of her jacket. “Are you through?” she said.
    Two neighborhood women were walking back from the beach cleanup. He would have opened it up to conversation, invited dialogue, but the women ignored him.
    Willis called after them, “Hey, do-gooders. Ecology babes—”
    The Salve Regina student saw her chance. She trotted off and tagged up with the other women. Together they walked away from Willis.
    “Come on, Debbie. Debbie Cole—” he called after the nursing student. The fact that he said the girl’s true name forgave something in his behavior, but the Salve Regina student didn’t turn around.
    “Hey,
girls
,” Willis called after them. “
Girls
, wait up. Just a minute—
GIRLS
.”
    He watched the women until they became blotty in the circles of the halogen streetlamps. The surf at First Beach scrolled across the pebble sheet in rich, percussive phrasings. Willis weaved on his feet, as if the audile suction of the waves was, and had been for years, a great source of fatigue. The blood swam away from his face. Tiny silver smelts thrashed behind his eyes. The pain in his arm had migrated into his balance nerves and he lost his legs.

Chapter Three

    F ritz Federico accompanied Willis to the emergency room at Newport Hospital. Fritz was second-generation Portuguese-Italian, but his mother chose Germanic nicknames for her kids. Giovanni Federico became “Fritz.”
    The physician on duty took one look at the fresh X-rays of Willis’s wrist and told a nurse to telephone the hospital’s resident orthopedic surgeon. They had to get the specialist out of the swimming pool at the Viking Health Club. Willis had a compound fracture; the earlier break had opened up again and there was a new sawtoothed break two inches higher. The edges of the shattered bones looked feathery against the lighted screen. The nurse injected Willis’s arm with Xylocaine. When the arm was numb, the physician touched Willis’s wrist with his fingertips and then he used his thumbs, applying pressure, massaging the splintered bones into place. “Feel that?” he asked Willis.
    Willis said he couldn’t feel it.
    “You will later. No question about it.”
    Willis could have told the doctor that he wasn’t interested in these rhetorical questions.
    The surgeon spent a long time with Willis. The feathered bones were difficult to realign. A few resistant circlesof ink marked Willis’s shoulder although the insect bites had faded. The doctor kept quiet. When the arm was set, a nurse in dreadlocks pulled a new white gauze sock up to his elbow. She layered sheets of polyester fluff over his wrist, snipping the roll with a big scissors. She said, “I wondered you didn’t have 3M fiberglass. Why you have plaster?”
    Willis shrugged.
    “Three-M fiberglass much lighter. Three-M comes in all kinds of colors. What’s your favorite color?”
    “White,” Willis said.
    She stared carefully at Willis. “Don’t play with me,” she said. “I’m got these shears. You just feeling mean.”
    Willis smiled at the nurse.
    “Ted Bundy had a nice smile like that. He use his cast to attract girls. I seen his story on
Unsolved Mysteries.
”
    “I thought that case was closed.”
    The nurse stood back and crossed her arms. “I’m just saying. It’s a mystery what men do.”
    Willis was grinning. A firm, unflinching crescent. Even a forced smile tugged a muscle in his right cheek, creating an irregular fissure like the hips of an