Breathless

with Zena and assured Mike that they could settle the issue quickly and to everyone’s satisfaction.
    The spacious main cabin included a galley with teak cabinets and a matching teak floor, a dining area, and a salon. There, Jake and Zena stabbed Mike Rivers to death.
    In the aft stateroom, beyond a closed door, five-year-old Cammy heard the brutal assault. She didn’t see the murder—except in her imagination.
    Her father took a while to die. But he did not beg for his life. She never forgot that he refused to beg.
    Jake and Zena wrapped the body in a tarp, then in chains. Laterthat day, more than two miles offshore, they added a spare anchor to the package and dropped it overboard.
    Cammy was on deck when the bundled body went over the side. Near twilight, the green and purple sea opened as if it were a great dark maw, hungrily swallowed her father in an instant, and licked the hull of the boat, wanting more.
    At the marina again, Jake found Mike’s car, drove it elsewhere, and abandoned it. That night, he was in high spirits.
    In the morning, they cruised south toward Mexico. As if nothing had changed, nothing at all, the sea rolled vast and bright, the air smelled fresh, the sky was blue, and white gulls soared with a grace they did not possess when on the land.
    Jake Horner loved books. He read fiction and nonfiction, but he especially liked volumes about therapeutic psychologies. He called himself a “journeyer,” as if it were a vocation, an avocation, and a faith. He said life was about one thing and one thing only: the next possibility.
    Because Cammy never went to school, Jake taught her to read. After that, being a dedicated autodidact, she taught herself what else she needed to know.
    Zena appreciated the mood-altering power of drugs, particularly ecstasy, and Jake liked to torment children. And burn them. Their arrangement was beneficial for them; it was a living hell for Cammy.
    Her patient reading tutor, who cheered her on when she caught fish and who personally baked her birthday cake each year, was also her torturer.
    For ten years they plied the sea, and Jake himself was a sea of contradictions. When Cammy sustained a cut or an abrasion, Jakedressed it tenderly and monitored her healing with concern. In less compassionate moods, he burned her with cigarettes, with objects like spoons and cast-metal religious medallions that he first heated with a butane lighter, and with melted candle wax.
    Her mother, having dissolved moral conscience with the chemical bliss of ecstasy, told her to be grateful for the generosity with which Jake shared his wealth and for his restraint. He hurt Cammy like that only twice a month, after all, always on the first and third Sundays, so she did not, Zena counseled, have to be afraid every day. Besides, he didn’t mar her face or body, restricting his attention to her hands, her feet. And although the threat of sexual assault was present, he never touched her that way. Her obsequious obedience, her abject capitulation even to torture, gave him a sense of power that he needed. Her pain was his ecstasy.
    “The poor thing’s had a hard life,” Zena told young Cammy. “His father was a psychiatrist. His mother was his father’s patient. She suffered spells of ennui and psychosomatic rashes. Neither could heal the other. They conceived Jake as their cause, but he fulfilled them no more than did fund-raising for the symphony and donating to the opera. At night, he sometimes cries in my arms, he’s so sweet.”
    Cammy never knew the significance of first and third Sundays or why burning mattered to him. He treated every burn with ointment, and when the wound healed, he kissed the scar and wept.
    When she was eleven and a half, she learned that he had a gun. He kept it always loaded in a locked metal box, in a locked cabinet, in the galley. The day after her twelfth birthday, she discovered where he kept the keys to the cabinet and the box.
    Cammy didn’t act for three years. Later, she was shamed by thisfailure to free herself when the means to do so existed. She could not reason her way to an explanation or intuit one that satisfied and exculpated her.
    After seven years of slavery, after being abused and humiliated and terrorized for so long, she had known no other way to live. All memories of her father had been washed away by time and by the tides of chaos on which
Therapy
cruised.
    Despair was an emotion too intense to sustain for long. Somehow, she had allowed