Four Minutes of Fire

Daniel Reyes goes out every evening at the same hour, the one when the sun drops low enough that the water forgets it's water and starts looking like fire. The men at the marina call him the grouper hunter, though nobody has ever seen him bring one home. Two rods stand upright in their holders behind his seat, lines slack, hooks bare. Between his knees sits a dry bag, and in the dry bag sits a flask, and by the time he clears the buoys it's usually half gone.

Two years ago his daughter sat in the seat behind him, seven years old, kicking her heels against the hull and asking why the ocean turned to lava at dusk. He told her it was the sun saying goodnight to the fish. She believed him the way kids believe anything said with a straight face and a steady paddle stroke. Her name was Yvette, and she had a laugh that came out sideways, like it surprised even her.

He'd had a few that evening before they launched. Three fingers, maybe four, poured at the kitchen counter while Yvette tugged at his shirt asking if they could go before the light went. He remembers telling himself he was fine. He remembers the paddle steady in his hands right up until the wind found them, and then not steady at all.

The storm arrived the way storms do now, without much warning, the kind the weather service calls isolated because it only ever seems to isolate one family at a time. He remembers the paddle torn out of his hands. He remembers the sound Yvette made, which wasn't a scream, more like a held breath breaking. He remembers diving until his lungs had nothing left to burn and the water gave nothing back.

He never found her. The Coast Guard called off the search on the fourth day, and a man from the county came to the house with paperwork Daniel couldn't sign for another six months. He didn't drink for the first eleven weeks. He remembers counting them the way other people count sober days, except backward, punishing himself with each one.

By week twelve the flask had found its way back into his hand, quietly, the way old habits do, wearing a new face and calling itself something else. Not the same as before, he told himself. He wasn't driving anyone home now. He wasn't responsible for anyone but himself, and himself didn't much matter anymore.

Coral runs the marina office and has watched him launch every clear evening since. She used to wave. Now she just marks the time in a little notebook she keeps by the register, and some nights, when he stumbles a little climbing into the kayak, she comes down to the dock and stands there with her arms crossed until he looks her in the eye.

"You could take the boat out sober," she told him once. "Better balance. Better everything."

"I'm not fishing for anything that swims," he said, and pushed off before she could ask what he meant, or tell him what she already knew about the smell on his breath.

He knows exactly what he meant. He's chasing the hour. Not the water, not the fish, not even Yvette exactly, because he's learned better than to think a person can be chased down like a lost dog. He's chasing the specific slant of light that existed for maybe four minutes on that one evening, the color the sky turned right before the wind picked up, the last ordinary minute before everything broke. If he can find that light again, exactly, down to the shade of orange bleeding into the clouds, some small unreasonable part of him believes he'll find the minute that came after it too. The one where she was still laughing.

And escaping the house. The house at six in the evening, when the light used to come through her window and land on the wall in a shape she called the dragon. The house where her shoes still sit by the door because he can't make his hands pick them up and put them somewhere else. The bottle in the kitchen cabinet that fills the same hour the light used to fill, except it never runs out the way the light does, never leaves him standing in the dark wondering what he's supposed to do with the rest of the night.

Tonight the light comes close. Closer than it has in weeks. The clouds stack up along the horizon in long orange columns, and the water goes the color of a struck match, and Daniel stops paddling and lets the kayak drift because his hands have started shaking in a way that isn't only the cold and isn't only grief either.

He reaches for the dry bag. Unscrews the flask. Brings it halfway to his mouth and stops there, arm hanging in the space between the boat and the burning water, and for a moment he can hear her voice so clearly it doesn't feel like memory anymore. Why does the ocean turn to lava, Dad.

He doesn't drink. He caps the flask instead and sets it back in the bag, and it isn't relief he feels and it isn't strength either, just a held breath, the same kind she made right before the water took her, except this one doesn't break.

The last of the orange slides under the horizon. Daniel sits in the gray that follows, rods still bare, flask still full behind his knee, one evening out of however many there will be. Somewhere behind him, small against the darkening shoreline, Coral switches on the porch light at the marina office, the way she does every night around this time, so he has something to paddle toward on his way back in.