Lemon Reef Read online

  Synopsis

  What would you risk for the memory of your first love?

  When Jenna Ross learns her high school love Del Soto died on Lemon Reef, she refuses to accept the official Miami medical examiner’s report of death from natural causes.

  Lemon Reef is a realm of glimmering beauty, where marine life triumphs over industrial waste. Del and Jenna dove on it every day during the summer before their tenth grade year, their love for the reef deepening as their passion for each other grew. It is a site of tenacity and wonder that mirrored their own, until they were outed and forced to separate. Even fifteen years later, Jenna knows that Del’s heart could not have given out there.

  Heartsick over Del’s death and fearing that Del’s young daughter may be in danger, Jenna risks all she has worked so hard for to return to Miami where she must dive into an excruciating past so that the truth of the present may surface.

  Lemon Reef

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  Lemon Reef

  © 2012 By Robin Silverman. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-717-2

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: July 2012

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Ruth Sternglantz

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Mera Granberg, Thaai Walker, David Lenoe, Brian Crawford, Kat Meltzer, Jim Wood, Linda Lucero, and Cheryl Ossola for patiently reading and commenting on many chapter revisions. Wendy Brown, Crosby McCloy, Hillary Read, and Carol Hirth read full drafts and provided generous and thoughtful suggestions. I can’t thank my editor Ruth Sternglantz enough for her dedication to this story, as well as her editorial guidance. Thanks to Radclyffe for finding a chapter of Lemon Reef among a pile of contest submissions and encouraging me to send the manuscript to Bold Strokes Books. My parents, Stan and Marilyn Silverman, are supportive and loving and bear no resemblance to the parents in this story. My friends Todd Jailer, Sarah Shannon, and Celia Jailer-Shannon have been a second home for us and an extended family. The same is true of Wendy Brown, Judy Butler, and Isaac Butler-Brown. I’m not sure what I or my family would have done without them these past years. Lemon Reef would not have been written without the support of Karen Bjorneby, the facilitator of our dynamic San Francisco writer’s group and a Bay Area treasure. Noah Silverman-St. John, my sixteen-year-old son, truly is, in the words of Zora Neale Hurston, “Drenched in light.” He is the most loving and courageous soul I’ve ever known, and I thank him with all of my heart for his unwavering encouragement while I wrote Lemon Reef and for his beautiful presence in my life every day. Finally, I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to Maria St. John, who was my life partner and dearest friend for twenty-one years. Maria, your fingerprints are on every page. Thank you for helping me tell this story.

  For Maria and Noah, toward moonlight.

  Chapter One

  Monday

  As Del was dying, I was going about my morning. As the ocean’s surface closed in over her, erasing any remains of a last stand, I buttoned my blouse and tamed errant curls, mindful to be quiet so as not to wake Madison. As Del began feeling air starved and disoriented, I drove north on South Van Ness Avenue toward the San Francisco courthouse, noticing bright fissures in an otherwise gray sky and thinking about the cases I would hear that day and what directions they would take. As Del grappled with the invisible monster standing between her and her last breath, I sat in traffic, trying to breathe through fumes emitting from the SUV in front of me. And as I entered the secured underground parking lot reserved for judicial officers, Del left her body thirty feet under the sea, tethered to a metal chain pulled taut against a fitful and unforgiving gravitational tide.

  *

  The call about Del came that afternoon from our mutual friend, Gail Samuels, who still lived in Miami. I was in chambers during a fifteen-minute recess, recovering from the last family-court case I had heard. The mother alleged the father had submitted someone else’s urine to show a negative result on a drug test so he could see his kids unsupervised. The father insisted the urine was his, despite my exhaustive attempts to explain to him that the depositor—as the test incidentally revealed—was pregnant.

  I sat at my desk and stared at my bookshelves, still empty but for the few books I had brought with me on my first day: A read and reread Gender Trouble stood shoulder to shoulder with an equally worn hardcover copy of Kafka’s short stories, which Del had given me in high school. Beside them, The Interpretation of Dreams, Men in Dark Times, and Bastard Out of Carolina lay horizontal in a pile.

  On the shelf below was a recent photo of Madison and me at a party for the seventh anniversary of our commitment ceremony. Madison was looking at me and grinning. I was looking down and away, my impish smile suggesting the intensity of her blue-lit gaze made me feel happy but shy. The rest of my office was bare except for boxes yet to be opened, a stack of framed pictures waiting to be hung, and a couple of chairs. I was considering where the couch would go when the phone rang.

  Gail, my oldest childhood friend, had visited Madison and me in San Francisco two weekends before. On the plane coming, she’d noticed a mole on the back of her leg. Convinced it was getting larger by the minute, Gail could think of little else for the rest of the trip. So when I heard her voice now, I fully expected to get the results of the biopsy she had raced back to Miami to have done. But what I heard her say instead was that my high school love Del Soto—her real name was Adeline—was dead. Her death had occurred while she was scuba diving with her husband Talon on a dive site sardonically referred to by Miami locals as Lemon Reef. Unofficial word from the medical examiner’s office was Del had died of a heart attack.

  I was stunned speechless by the news, numbness drawing down like molasses.

  “Thirty-one seems young for a heart attack,” Gail said, the phone now taking on the effects of a wind tunnel, Gail’s voice having to fight to be heard. Then, in response to my silence, Gail did what many people do when delivering news like this—rushed to provide more detail. “Del’s husband Talon told the police they were diving and the next thing he knew, Del was trying to get to the surface and then went unconscious.”

  *

  Talon. Del had shown up at my parents’ house after she’d started dating him. She’d walked casually past my mother, who’d hyperventilated at the sight of her, and into what had been my childhood bedroom. We were nineteen, and this was the first time she’d set foot in this room since we were outed in the tenth grade, the first time she’d initiated contact in almost as long.

  “I see Norma hasn’t mellowed.” Del was referring to my mother, who was still sucking air in the living room.

  “Uh, Del”—my back pressed against the just-closed bedroom door—“what are you doing here?” She was standing closer to me than a friend usually would, wearing jeans that displayed her jutting hipbones. Her copper hair hung long and loose. Her button-down blouse pulled tight at her breasts.

 
; Del’s gold eyes fluttered and then fixed on me. She’d wanted to tell me about him.

  “Talon?” I laughed, until I realized she was serious.

  He’d decided on the name himself when he’d turned eighteen. Del shrugged to say it made no sense to her either, explained further it was the finishing touch in a larger effort to reinvent himself with steroids, Sun-In, and a tattoo of a falcon’s claw over his left eye. She allowed herself to look around in fleeting glances as she spoke, as if titrating how much she absorbed of this room we’d made love in as teenagers and from which my parents had banished her overnight.

  Del had been with a lot of guys since we’d been together, and she’d never felt the need to tell me about any of them. I soon realized why this time was different. “Please tell me you’re not pregnant.” No response. “Del,” I pleaded, “what about school?”

  That was enough to make her vanish again.

  *

  The receiver grew heavy in my hand, my throat tightened, sadness and confusion welled. I began to grasp what Gail was saying: Del had died on Lemon Reef. I remembered the summer before our tenth grade year. We dove on Lemon Reef every day. Then at night we hung our suits to dry in the window above her bed like flags from our own private country. And with the rest of the house asleep, Del and I, two fifteen-year-old girls, popped the elastic corners of the fitted sheet up over the edges of her mattress one by one, our naked bodies folding into breaths and winces and whispers and giggles that stifled on the edge of being caught.

  “Jenna?” Gail’s tone was reaching.

  “Yeah.”

  “If you decide to come for the funeral, I’ll take a few days off.”

  A brief silence followed. Gail had never been very close to Del, so I was curious about how affected she seemed. Then she said, “They have a daughter. She’s ten. Del wanted to leave Talon, but he threatened to take the kid away from her if she did.”

  Gail’s tone went from informative to entreating, and I knew this was the real reason for the call.

  “Now Talon’s moving to Texas and he’s taking Khila with him. That’s her name,” Gail said.

  I’d met Khila once. The night before I was leaving for San Francisco I ran into Del at a gas station on Miami Beach. Khila was two months old. She was sleeping in the backseat of Del’s car, snuggled tightly in a soft blanket, secured in her car seat. She had light, wispy hair, long eyelashes, flushed cheeks, and pale naturally puckered lips. Her head rested against the car seat, and she had her tiny hand tucked under her soft chin like a little Thinker.

  “I just think it can’t be good for her,” Gail said, “to be raised by that man. Well, and”—she paused, took a breath—“Del’s family is wilder than ever. There’s no way they can fight for Khila on their own.”

  I hung up and leaned forward in my chair, resting my face in my hands. Phones rang in the distance, officious voices crowded and dispersed, and a clock ticked a rhythmic blur. My afternoon calendar was only half over, and I was telling myself not to focus on this news now. I had to finish my day. At the same time, I found myself crying, the tears strangely disconnected from any thoughts or feelings I’d had about Del in recent years, as though a remote pipe, long thought to be inoperative, had suddenly sprung a leak.

  Bea McVee, the presiding judge of the family court, appeared in my doorway. She filled the frame, standing her full five feet eleven, with gray dreads falling around her soft brown face and past her narrow shoulders.

  “Jenna.” She was already laughing about something, had apparently dropped in to tell me what it was. “Jenna?”

  I lifted my face from my hands, watched her smile shrink and her dark-brown eyes narrow with bewilderment. “My friend died.” Swatting at the tears as one would an intrusive fly, I added, “My first love. She was my…” My throat closed.

  Bea entered farther and took a seat across from me at my desk. I noticed the freckles that spotted her cheeks, a youthful detail on this near seventy-year-old face.

  “Died how?”

  “They think she had a heart attack. She was scuba diving.”

  “I see.” Then Bea said, “Well, how old was she?”

  “Thirty-one.” I shrugged, as if to say I had no idea how to explain it. “I’m thinking about going to the funeral.”

  It wasn’t easy asking for time off without any notice and being brand new, but Bea nodded expectantly, indicating that my newness wasn’t a factor, emergencies happen. She was the reason I was in this position. I had clerked for Bea when I was in law school. I was twenty-two, queer, rageful, irrepressible. I fought with anyone who disagreed with me; dismissed out of hand people far more important than I; argued relentlessly for everyone to act as though things worked the way they ought to.

  After the first week, Bea sat me down. “Jenna, you have considerable legal talent, but your demeanor leaves much to be desired. You have all the strengths of a young person who’s done it on her own.” As Bea knew I had. “And,” she added, “all the blind spots.” In the end, my strengths won out. After I graduated, Bea lobbied to get me hired half-time as the staff attorney for the family court. “Wait until you see the salary before you thank me,” she had said. She wasn’t kidding.

  But there was nobody I would have rather worked for and nothing I would have rather done. I filled the other half of my time working as an attorney representing indigent families at a nonprofit in Oakland. When, seven years after I was first hired, the commissioner position came open, Bea McVee, along with several other judicial officers, encouraged me to apply. I was hesitant at first because I was young and inexperienced as commissioners go. A main concern of the hiring committee, which I shared, was whether I would be able to manage the attorneys over whose cases I presided. Now, three weeks into the position, we waited to see.

  Bea said, “Just let me know if you decide to go to the funeral, so I can arrange for coverage for you.” I may have been staring off, or perhaps she was responding to something else about me, but she pressed her lips together, sat quietly, and watched me. When I finally met her gaze, she said, “Why do I get the feeling there’s more to this?”

  “More? No, I don’t think so. It’s just a funeral.”

  “Mm, hmm.” She waited.

  “Well, there’s a little more to it.” I thought for a moment about how much to say. I was already late for my afternoon calendar. “She has a kid.” The thick glass and sinuate light mired my view of the Federal Building across the street. “A daughter.” As I said it, I noticed an ache, as if anesthesia was beginning to wear off, and I could feel the edges of a pain I knew to be much greater.

  “How old?”

  “Ten. She’s ten now.”

  “She’s with her father?”

  I pushed my lips out in a pucker and nodded. “He may not be the best person to raise her,” was what I said. He’s a fucking creep, was what I thought.

  Her quietness told me she was connecting the dots and drawing her own conclusions. “So, you’re going to Miami to attend the funeral, right?” The question caught me by surprise. “What I mean is, do I need to worry about you?” When I didn’t respond, she said, “Nobody makes commissioner by thirty, Jenna. You’ll be a judge for sure, someday, if you keep your head about you.”

  My clerk was at my door urging me to get started. I stood up, flattened my robe, and wiped my face.

  “I should go. I’m keeping Alex Sanders waiting,” I said, referring to an attorney I often clashed with.

  Bea scrunched her face in a way that was both curious and challenging.

  “I’m too new to get a complaint.”

  “By him? It would be a feather in your cap, as far as I’m concerned.”

  As I was passing her to leave, Bea grabbed my hand, and I turned back to face her. “I’m serious, Jenna. Before you go taking on anyone in Florida, remember, you have a lot to lose.” Her eyes went to the photo of Madison and me.

  Chapter Two

  “Remain seated,” the clerk announced. “The Sup
erior Court of San Francisco, Department Ten, is called to order, August 9, 1999. Commissioner Jenna Ross presiding.”

  I deliberately put the news of Del’s death on hold and groped for the present. The tangible feeling of my chair as I trusted my weight to it grounded me, providing a softer landing than I expected. I looked out at the rows of faces watching me, waiting for me, my every movement feeling stilted and amplified, my every thought tilting me further and further into the present moment until I had it fully in focus.

  I glanced at my computer screen for the next case. “Flint and Baxter,” I said in the direction of those in attendance.

  “Alex Sanders representing the petitioner, Your Honor.”

  From the other end of the courtroom, a woman, busy with two things at once, called out from her distractedness, “Margaret Todd for the respondent.”

  *

  Her too-large black suit showed her recent weight loss. A magenta blouse and black pumps finished off the classic attorney uniform. But her clothing was where Margaret Todd and anything like convention began and ended. She was in her mid-fifties now and had been an advocate against domestic violence for close to twenty-five years. I had read articles by her in law school and did briefly join her on the domestic-violence-death autopsy team, when I interned at the family court in my third year of law school. Our purpose then was to review the cases in which someone had died from domestic violence and to try to understand the psychological and social factors contributing to the death. The cases were so horrific; I barely stood it for the one year I’d signed up for. Margaret was a founding member of the team and in her tenth year as a participant.