Pearl tried to get word to Covey about what had happened with Short Shirt, but her connections in Britain hadn’t heard from Covey for some time. Please try and get in contact with her, Pearl asked. Eventually, Pearl received word from them of Covey’s fate. There had been a terrible accident. Why had this happened to a child who had been through so much, a child who surely had merited a little bit of happiness? Pearl raised her arms in the air and railed at the God in which she had been taught to trust.
Bunny
Until word arrived that Coventina Lyncook, traveling under the name of Coventina Brown, had been killed in a train accident in England, most people in her hometown hadn’t realized that she’d been alive to begin with. Those who had grieved Covey’s loss since her wedding-day disappearance into the sea were now doubly heartbroken, including Covey’s father and Gibbs Grant. Gibbs had been studying in England at the time of the rail crash and realized, only then, how close he had been to Covey all that time.
When Pearl told her about the rail accident, Bunny ran down to the beach, looking up and down the cove, wishing for magic, thinking that she might find Covey lying there, now, barely conscious but still alive, just as she’d found her on the night of Covey’s wedding ceremony. She should have gone with Covey to Britain, Bunny thought, or followed her soon after. Or maybe, it had all been a mistake, helping her to escape in the first place.
Bunny walked into the sea, still in her street clothes, and swam straight for the horizon, pull, pull, pull. She imagined Covey just ahead of her, told herself that nothing had changed, but after two hours, she was forced to come back to shore and face the truth. She ran all the way home, weeping, her wet clothes clinging to her like long strands of seaweed, and climbed into bed.
The following year, Bunny was sitting on a bench at the swim club, wrapped in a terry-cloth robe, scrunching and stretching her toes in her rubber sandals and waiting for the coach. She moved her head to a rocksteady hit by Johnny Nash that was coming out of a radio on the coach’s table. After a year of grieving for Covey, Bunny had come to understand that she needed to go on without her friend, and if she truly wished to honor her memory, she had to walk through the door that Covey had pried open for her. Bunny had a gift for swimming in the sea, her coach told her. One day, she could be famous, he said.
Another woman, a few years older than Bunny, walked into the pool area. It was that police girl the newspaper had been talking about, the first in their town. Patsy something. She’d been down at the beach with Covey’s father on the day that Covey disappeared. Bunny’s brother, who was also on the police force, said this Patsy girl was all right. The police girl looked at Bunny and nodded. Bunny nodded in return and the warmth spreading up the back of her neck made her think of Covey.
Bunny would continue to think of Covey every time she pulled her goggles over her face and set out on a swim. Bunny belonged in the sea, where Covey had first led her. In the sea, despite her fears. Her swim coach had found her a second instructor for the distance swimming and it had been a revelation. Bunny understood, now, what she might be able to accomplish.
In the worst hours, she would draw courage from imagining her friend just ahead of her in the water and in time, it would no longer bother her so much that Covey had looked happiest not when she was with Bunny but when she was with Gibbs Grant. In time, it would comfort her, simply, to remember that Covey had once been happy.
Bunny herself had struggled after Covey’s departure. Only the swimming had helped. The swimming and Jimmy, who had been fixing local boats alongside his father since his primary school days.
Later, it would be awkward to explain to Patsy how she could let a man kiss her and make love to her. Hers was not a case, as with so many women, of being coerced into her first time. No, Jimmy had been a cheerful, joking kind of man, a good worker, and a good friend. He had always encouraged Bunny’s swimming. He had never suggested, as some people had, that a woman who took to the open seas the way Bunny did was an abomination to the Lord.
“That boy has a crush on yooouuu,” Covey teased Bunny once, when Jimmy agreed to use his motorized canoe as a safety boat for one of their swims. Bunny had cut her eyes at Covey but she’d known it was true.
Jimmy had never questioned Bunny’s dreams, and since it was the normal thing to do, Bunny didn’t resist when Jimmy wanted to court her, wanted to hold her in that way. The heat of adolescence made it easier for Bunny to behave like other women, and Bunny felt comforted with Jimmy’s arms around her. She assumed that it was only the absence of Covey, the loss of Covey, that made all sentiment, all desire, pale in comparison. It was only when she met Patsy that she realized she’d been wrong. And Jimmy realized it, too.