The Circle

She lived in the trailer next door, after all. Maybe Mae
     could catch herwalking within the compound, and be able to persuade her to rent her one.
    Mae parked and peered through the chain-link fence, seeing no one, only the shuttered
     rental kiosk, the rows of kayaks and paddle-boards. She stood, hoping to see a silhouette
     within the trailer, but there was none. The light within was dim, rose-colored, the
     trailer empty.
    She walked to the tiny beach and stood, watching the moonlight play on the still surface
     of the bay. She sat. She didn’t want to go home, though there was no point in staying.
     Her head was full of Mercer, and his giant infant’s face, and all the bullshit things
     he said that night and said every night. That would be, she was certain, the last
     time she tried to help him in any way. He was in her past, in
the
past, he was an antique, a dull, inanimate object she could leave in an attic.
    She stood up, thinking she should go back to work on her PartiRank, when she saw something
     odd. Against the far side of the fence, outside the enclosure, she saw a large object,
     leaning precariously. It was either a kayak or paddleboard, and she quickly made her
     way to it. It was a kayak, she realized, and it was resting on the free side of the
     fence, a paddle next to it. The positioning of the kayak made little sense; she’d
     never seen one standing nearly upright before, and was sure that Marion wouldn’t have
     approved. Mae could only think that someone had brought a rental back after closing,
     and tried to get it as close to the enclosure as possible.
    Mae thought at the very least she should bring the kayak to the ground, to reduce
     the chances that it would fall overnight. She did so, carefully lowering it to the
     sand, surprised by how light it was.
    Then she had a thought. The water was just thirty yards away, and she knew that she
     could easily drag it to shore. Would it be theft to borrow a kayak that had already
     been borrowed? She wasn’t lifting it over the fence, after all; she was only extending
     the borrowing that someone else had extended. She would return it in an hour or two,
     and no one would know the difference.
    Mae put the paddle inside and dragged the kayak across the sand for a few feet, testing
     the feeling of this act.
Was
it theft? Certainly Marion would understand if she knew. Marion was a free spirit,
     not a rule-bound shrew, and seemed like the type of person who, in Mae’s shoes, would
     do the same thing. She would not like the liability implications, but then again,
were
there such implications? How could Marion be held accountable if the kayak was taken
     without her knowledge?
    Now Mae was at the shore, and the bow of the kayak was wet. And then, feeling the
     water under the vessel, the way the current seemed to pull the kayak out from her
     and into the fuller volume of the bay, Mae knew that she would do this. The one complication
     was that she wouldn’t have a life preserver. It was the one thing the borrower managed
     to heave over the fence. But the water was so calm that Mae saw no possibility of
     real danger if she stayed close to the shore.
    Once she was out on the water, though, feeling the heavy glass under her, the quick
     progress she was making, she thought she might not stay in the shallows. That this
     would be the night to make it to Blue Island. Angel Island was easy, people went there
     all the time, but Blue Island was strange, jagged, never visited. Mae smiled, picturing
     herself there, and smiled wider, thinking of Mercer, his smugface, surprised, upended. Mercer would be too fat to fit into a kayak, she thought,
     and too lazy to make it out of the marina. A man, fast approaching thirty, making
     antler chandeliers and lecturing her—who worked at the Circle!—about life paths. This
     was a joke. But Mae, who was in the T2K and who was moving quickly up through the
     ranks, was also brave, capable of taking a kayak in the night into the blackwater
     bay, to explore an island Mercer would only view through a telescope, sitting on his
     potato-sack ass, painting animal parts with silver paint.
    Hers was not an itinerary rooted in any logic. She had no idea of the currents deeper
     in the bay, or of the wisdom in getting so close to the tankers that used the nearby
     shipping lane, especially given she would be in the dark, invisible to them. And by
     the time she reached, or got close to, the island, the conditions