Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea (22 page)

Rachel removed the bag from her shoulders, holding it from the strap like a severed head by the hair.

“Have a seat,” Stone said. He nodded to a folding chair leaning against the table
—
a guest too tired to stand on its feet.

The chair squealed as Rachel opened it. The table was scarred with random box-knife cuts and fragments of packing tape. The room, and everything in it, felt disposable
—
to be used, then thrown away. “This is yours too, this place?”

“It's all his,” the girl said, her face obscured by her hair. Stone nudged her shoulder with the knuckles of his drink hand. “Ours,” she said.

“This is my daughter, Diana,” said Stone. “Diana, this is Rachel Leary. She works for me at the Playground. Someday she might work for you.”

“Not likely,” Rachel said. “I got other plans.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Stone said. “My staff is filled with people who thought they would move on to bigger things.”

Rachel wondered how long he'd been pulling at the bottle. Kid stuff: sweet and heavy. A smell like burnt pancake syrup hung in the air. She wanted to blow it all away: the smell, the dark, the tension. “What I don't get,” she said, “what I can't figure out, is how you moved Jason.”

For the first time, Diana looked up. The gray light didn't do her any favors. Hints of smeared mascara
—
from tears?
—
hid in the creases along her nose. It may have been the makeup, but something about her looked shriveled. Rachel wondered what Jason had seen in her. But then, Rachel hadn't been part of that special moment
—
the threatening drunks, the retrieved soda cup
—
that changed everything. She marveled that one moment, like the push of a button, could reset the world. Was that the power of fear or courage?

“You don't know what you're talking about,” Diana said.

“I read the journal,” Rachel said. “From Happy World to the beach. I figure he must have been, what, at least a hundred sixty, a hundred seventy pounds? And carried over the boardwalk too.”

“Must be a magic journal,” Stone said, “if the dead can write in it.”

Rachel struggled not to smile. “So Jason was at the park that night?”

“Dad,” Diana said, trying to pry the drink from her father's hand. He pushed her back into her chair.

“She's bluffing,” he said. “Watch. Watch and learn. That's what you're here for.”

“I figure,” Rachel said, tracing stars on the table with her finger, “what would I do? I'm Diana. I'm in a place I shouldn't be with a boy I shouldn't be with. Now he's on the ground, and he isn't moving. I check his breathing, his pulse. Nothing. What do I do? Call an ambulance? Call the police? No, I go straight to the top. I call Daddy.”

“Ask her if she brought the journal,” Stone said to Diana. “Go ahead.”

Her head down again, Diana's hair fell like a curtain across her face.

“Something went wrong with the Magic Carpet,” Rachel continued. “It had worked before
—
in the summer. But it was winter. Jason was smart, very smart, but he hadn't accounted for the weather.” She looked straight at Diana. “The freezing cold.”

“Ask for the damn journal,” Stone hissed.

“You ask,” Diana said.

“I don't care which of you asks,” Rachel said. “I'll make a deal with either one of you.”

Stone took another sip. “A deal? You think there's going to be a deal?”

“That's what I'm here for.”

The fan
chop-chopped
in the silence. Rachel wondered if a little green ribbon was attached to its grill.

“You're going to give the journal to us,” Stone said softly. “And I mean, give. You know why?”

Rachel shook her head.

“Because we're friends, Rachel. We're all friends here.” He frowned into his cup. “I'd offer you a drink, but you're underage. And this is a dry town, after all.”

“Some friend,” Rachel said. “I've got my own people to look after.”

“Let's be real. One way or another, I'm going to get that journal. You know that, right?”

“Maybe.”

“There's no ‘maybe' about it. You know that. Why do this?” He spread out his arms, encompassing what, Rachel wondered: the cruddy room, the cruddy table? His daughter? This night? This world?

“Why fight?” he asked, dropping his arms.

“Because I owe it to my brother. And to Jason. And Ethan. Leonard.”

Stone waved his hand dismissively, swishing drink out of his cup. “You owe them nothing,” he said. He wiped his fingers on his shirt. “Leonard? The kid was stoned. Did he tell you that?”

“In his way.”

“And Jason, he was reckless.”

“Maybe. He slipped up. But not from the jetty. Was there water in his lungs?”

Stone brushed that aside too. “It wasn't drowning. It was a contusion or a concussion or some such thing. A blow to the head.” He punctuated his recollection by slapping his thigh. “That's what it was. From the rocks.”

“Stop it,” Diana said. “Let's get this over with.”

“That's what we're here for, sweetheart,” Stone said.

“Rocks, my ass,” Rachel said. “A magic carpet ride that went wrong.”

The room was too dark to detect any change of color in Stone's face. He filled the pause before he spoke, not with a sip, but with a long, cold look into his cup. “Bullshit,” he said. “There's no evidence of that.”

“If there wasn't,” Rachel said, “you wouldn't have asked me to come here.”

“It was an accident, for Christ's sake.” He caught himself, waving his free hand as if erasing a chalkboard. “If such a thing had happened, which it did not.”

“He didn't accidentally drop his own body in the ocean, did he?”

“That's just what I was trying to say,” Stone said, sliding into a chair beside his daughter. “That's responsibility. You, of all people, should appreciate that.”

Rachel gripped her backpack. “What does that mean?”

“Judgment,” Stone said with some heat. “Look at you.” He pushed the Frangelico bottle to one side, opening his hands to encourage confidences. “You're hurt. You're in pain. You're looking for someone to blame. But come on. Tell me something. Your brother should never have gone on that ride alone, right? Don't tell me that's never crossed your mind.”

“All the time,” Rachel said. “But it doesn't matter. He was old enough. He was tall enough.”

“He was
retarded
.” Stone dropped his hands on the table. “You were the responsible one. You were the one supposed to exercise judgment. If only you had.”

“If only the ride hadn't malfunctioned.”

“You're doing it again
—
making stuff up. That's grief talking, not brains.” He tapped his temple. “But I'm not here to judge. No, I'm not.” Again, a sip from his cup. “Look. There are two kinds of people in this world. Most of them are weak, needy, always waiting for someone else to tell them what to do. To set things right. To make things work. You know that. I mean, look at Chuck Waters. Decent guy, but come on. A hopeless case.”

“And you give them hope?”

“I give them work,” Stone said. He looked quizzically at his cup, saw that it was empty, and reached for the bottle. “Tell me, where are your friends? Where's Ethan?”

“I don't know.”

“I do. He's at home. Safe.” Stone looked Rachel in the eye. “Forgive me for getting personal, but … where's your mother in all this? How long are you going to carry her? Who's the adult? Who's the child?”

He's really drunk,
Rachel thought. “What's this have to do with you?”

“We're the other kind, Rachel. Don't you see? The kind who take responsibility. Who make decisions. Who think things through
—
who think and take action. We clean up the messes other people leave behind.” He draped his arm around Diana. She squirmed free, lifting the weight of his arm over and away from her.

Stone laughed. “I wonder if you two were switched at birth. You,” he said, pointing an unsteady finger at Rachel, “you I can see running this place. You”
—
this time nodding to Diana
—
“you I worry about. But you're what I've got to work with.”

“I wouldn't trade places for all the money in the world,” Rachel said. “I just want to get the hell out of here.”

Diana lifted her head. Streaked mascara made her look like a jungle cat. “So what's stopping you?” she asked.

Rachel couldn't think of anything to say. She stared into the table as if the scars would speak for her.

“That thing with Jason,” Stone said. “If he had been found in the park, you know what that would mean?”

“Your park would close,” Rachel said. “You would lose money.”

“People would lose
jobs
. The town would lose taxes. The shore would lose tourists. It might be years before we recovered. If we ever recovered.”

“You don't know that.”

“Really? Think, Rachel. Use the gifts God gave you. Why should the many suffer for the one? And for what? He was dead. There was no bringing him back.”

“What about the truth?”

“Truth is what we make of it,” Stone said, finishing his drink. “Sometimes we make tough calls, hard choices. But who has the right to judge us?”

“I don't know.”

“No one, Rachel.” Stone rose from his seat, taking up a stance behind his daughter. She seemed to shrink under him. “You don't even have to hand the journal to us,” Stone said. “Just put it on the table and walk away. You never have to see me pick it up. And you can tell your friends anything you want. I forced it from you. I threatened your mother. I promised not to press charges against that Washington kid. Or you can make it simple. In all the confusion, you dropped it on the boardwalk by accident and don't know what happened to it. You have no idea.”

She could run, Rachel thought. She could race out the door, off the boardwalk, away from Sea Town. She could jump into a car with Leonard, and together, they could hit the road with whatever cash they could scrape together, making the great getaway Leonard said he wanted. She could almost feel the air whistling around them, racing.

And then? Where would they go? There was always that long black wall at the end of every daydream of escape. Rachel hadn't the will to paint a picture on it she could believe in.

“I hope you read it,” Rachel said, reaching into her backpack. “Both of you.” She looked at Diana, whose eyes followed the journal from the pack to the table. “Jason loved you, you know.”

“He was so young,” Stone said.

“And me, I loved Curtis.”

“Only natural.”

“I wish it were,” said Rachel.

Stone had said she could just walk away, and now that she had produced the journal, it was as if she had already left. Impatient to see what was inside, Stone cracked the notebook open, squinting into pages he turned in the dark.

“Shit,” he said. “I should've brought a flashlight.”

Rachel grinned: he was no smarter than she was. She crossed her arms and watched.

But then Diana reached under her chair. “I have something,” she said, dropping a purse on the table. Rushing, she withdrew objects by the careless handful: loose change and wadded bills, sticks of lipstick and mascara, a bronze ring of keys
—
and, just before the triumphant rise of a miniature flashlight she proudly clicked into life, a small, heart-shaped locket on a silver chain. It skittered onto the table with a snare drum splash.

The Stones couldn't wait to read the journal, their heads side-by-side, would-be Siamese twins joined at the shoulder. Diana held the small flashlight like a spear, and their faces glowed, ghostly and intense, in the light reflected from the book. Curiosity, anxiety, satisfaction
—
all these burned in their expressions, but Rachel understood the moment for what it was: a distraction.

Her fingers sucked the locket into her palm without a sound, then slipped it into her pocket. The Stones continued to read, oblivious. Their greedy absorption of the journal annoyed her. “I'm not leaving empty-handed,” Rachel said.

Father and daughter looked up at her, startled, as if they had forgotten she was still there.

“I'm taking this bottle.”

Returning his attention to the journal, Bobby Stone waved his hand magnanimously. “Help yourself,” he said, “to whatever's left of it. Just, you know, be discreet.”

Rachel left the way she had come, passing the oxygen counter where, she guessed, Diana would drag her father before they left for home. As Rachel had once spoon-fed baby Curtis, Diana would fuss over her father, attending to his needs. She pictured Diana, a slight girl, navigating her father's bearlike bulk toward the counter. She would settle him onto a stool and, with one hand steadying his chin, struggle to put an oxygen mask over his face. Rachel anticipated the hiss of gas from the tank, the sighs from Diana, and the way the two sounds would mix, indistinguishable.

Through the narrow bite of the entrance gate, Rachel crawled out of the mall, then pulled herself to her feet. Nothing had changed. The streetlamps along the boardwalk bowed their heads in martial order, marching north and south into the distance. The gulls, without much to fight over, swirled quietly above the storefronts. On the beach, the surf crashed, withdrew, and crashed again as it always had.

Rachel withdrew the locket from her pants and opened it.
JW
+
DS
.
Jason Waters plus Diana Stone. What did it equal? An incomplete equation. But at least there was no inscription promising undying love. That would have been awful. With a small but satisfying click between thumb and finger, she closed the locket.