Page 142 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

island, reported that the young woman had reminded him of Rio de Janeiro’s Sugarloaf

Jesus. She shone, he kept repeating to the coast guard men. Another passenger,

recently returned from her first trip to Havana, remarked on the music floating in the air,

a cushion of sound that seemed to surround the boat like a light fog, a swaying deep in

the hips of the keel.

After that moment of suspension on the rail, Miranda dove down to the intra-coastal

waters.

None of the fellow passengers could quite agree on what had happened, and the

interviewing Coast Guard officers sat over a beer that night, redacting their reports for

the official record. Had the dolphins really approached the young woman, lifted her hair

with their beaks? Had they twirled around her, offering fins to her groping hands? And

had they truly towed her away from the boat, out toward the far islands beyond the

horizon? They didn’t believe a word of it, and knew that a long day of search lay ahead

of them, poles and bright lights lancing into the coves where the manatee rest in the

warm waters.

Privately, the officers dreaded that amid the searchers would be the one remaining

member of this stricken family, Hector, Miranda’s dad, Cassandra’s husband, dark-

eyed, army fatigues hitched over belly, the strength of a luchador still tingling beneath

dark tattoos.

The coast guard veterans remembered the weird story of how they had found Hector in

the swamp. Oh yes, that was, to the day, exactly four years before his daughter’s jump

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