Find Me (30 page)

The wind lifts my hair off my shoulders. I lean against the railing and feel the spray on my face. I taste the salt. I listen to the churn of the engine. When I look back toward the marina, the wake is a wide white tail behind us.

A green cooler stands against the helm. Back when the
Booze Cruise
was a real party boat, I imagine the cooler was filled with ice and beer. When we look inside, it's empty and dry. Lit up tiki torches have been staked in the deck corners. Sweet smoke curls into the sky. The fire flickers in the wind, but finds a way to keep burning. A song about margaritas plays over a speaker. It is not a song that does justice to the gravity of our moment. I touch the slight roundness under my sweatshirt and think about the months that lie ahead, the ways my body will become alien to me.

I imagine me and Marcus stepping onto my mother's houseboat, my hands cupping my stomach, and offering her another path. I imagine all of us grabbing this new life and living it and living it and living it.

We wander to the upper level. We sit down. The blue vinyl on the seats is peeling. I pull back a gummy strip and try to see what's underneath. I feel the vibrations of the engine against my thighs. The margarita music is louder up here and I think about the Pathologist's voice crackling over the Hospital speakers, dripping into the rooms and hallways, all the lies he told us.

“I can't stay up here,” I say to Marcus. He touches my forehead like he's checking for a fever. I want to kiss him. I go back down to the deck, stern side.

A mist rolls across the water. The sky is marble. The clouds look like mountains. Birds hover above. Birds with orange feet and black wings. Birds with white feathers and slim elegant beaks. I feel a pang in my chest, like a muscle is cramping up, and want to believe that one of the birds is Louis, that the end is not really the end but a chance to become something new. The birds make big swooping circles. I watch until I get dizzy.

We enter a pocket of fog and it is like navigating through one of those mountainous clouds. My hair is damp. A cold creeps up my belly. The fog turns thick as smoke. I breathe it in and my heart surges and the world grows empty.

 

40.

I remember everything I do not want to remember and everything I do.

*   *   *

I remember the boy I loved and never saw again.

*   *   *

What is a baby but a ghost turning real inside you?

*   *   *

I remember the flyer of the missing girl in the T station. I see the masking tape on the post. I see the frayed edges of the paper. I see her face and I see her face turn into my own. I imagine myself picking up a phone and dialing the number. A woman answers. I imagine her voice is familiar.

*   *   *

This girl you're looking for? I hear myself say. Yes. Yes. I've just seen her.

*   *   *

I remember my theory of the sickness: for the immune the flaws in our memory protected us. Take me. Already my mind had washed away what it could not stand to remember. The sickness circled me and took a whiff and decided that my own memory was already doing the work it wanted to do, the work of forgetting. That I was already too far gone.

*   *   *

When the fog lifts, I raise my hand from the railing and point at the thin line of coast ahead. “Land,” I say to no one.

*   *   *

There is a rumble that sounds like an underwater earthquake. A freezing wind. A sudden purple sky. Lightning that looks like a creature thrashing behind the clouds. An ocean that is blue electric against the darkening horizon.

A curtain of water surrounds the boat. The distant coast disappears. The tiki torches go out with a hiss. The music stops. My body is filled with the drumming of the storm. I turn around and look for the
Booze Cruise
captain inside the helm. I see a silver spinning wheel and the pale blur of his hands moving over it.

The nose of the boat dips down. My clothes are heavy and dripping. I slip to my knees. I spit water. Ocean gushes from my sneakers. The cooler slides across the deck and crashes into the railing.

A tiki torch leaps from its holster and does a suicide jump into the water.

The roar of the engine mixes with the thunder of the storm, a big hurtling ball of noise. The boat rocks back and forth. Water spreads across the deck, slick as oil. I see myself swimming out in Revere, the waves rising over my head. I see those same waves growing larger and rising over this railing and swallowing us up. I am sure the boat is going under.

*   *   *

What if the boat disappears inside the storm? What if my mother is the one sent looking? What if the boat sinks to the bottom, never to be seen again? What if we turn into mystery, myth?

*   *   *

Maybe I wouldn't mind becoming a myth.

*   *   *

The storm is a squall, quick and brutal. It leaves me drenched and gasping. I grab the stomach of my sweatshirt and squeeze out the water. The ocean is murky and churning. I imagine sand and seaweed and fragments of shipwrecks being dredged up from the bottom and scattered.

My mother says water is neutral, that it doesn't have wants, but what about these storms that want you and everything you have? That want your life? I add this to my list of questions to ask her.

We drift closer to the island. I see a faraway line of boats. One of them is my mother's houseboat. She is tucked inside, dry and warm, unable to shake the feeling that something is closing in. She stands up and goes outside. She begins to wait. She feels my energy traveling toward her. This is what I imagine.

Again the sky rumbles. The captain keeps turning the silver wheel.

“Land,” I say to the child.

I see a silhouette on a boat deck, a slight still point in the distance. This I am not imagining. I will the figure to be a woman.

A ship horn bellows. The dark clouds slide over the party boat, satisfied with what they've done here, in search of new destruction. The water clears and I see a darting school of fish, a tangerine flicker.

I keep expecting the figure to turn, to vanish, to reveal itself as a figment of the mind, but she stays.

I feel a rage that could sink this boat faster than any storm.

I make the choice and feel the small thing inside go free.

“My name is Joy,” I say, practicing.

The woman is a dark speck at first, an idea of a person, but slowly she takes shape. I can make out the straight line of her legs, the curves of her shoulders. Whoever she turns out to be, I will ask her my questions and see how she answers.

Where will I even start? Here is where I will start.

I will ask her who she is and what she remembers. I will ask her if I seem familiar and how long has she been waiting and did she ever give me a name. I will ask her what she knows about consequences and when she tells me what she thinks she knows I will tell her she has no idea and then I will say, Fuck the guilt, it's no way to live. Do you know the secrets of your unconscious mind and the parts of yourself you want to kill and bury deep and can I help you with that shovel? Did you really think you could ever bury me? Do you think it is possible to love someone you don't know and do you think it is possible to love a ghost and are you really missing if there is no one there to look?

I'm here, I will tell her.

Look.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you:

To Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Studios of Key West, and Spiro Arts for the time and support.

I've worked on this book in a number of different places—North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, Utah, Virginia, Illinois, New York City, Boston, Key West—and each landscape made its mark. I'm especially grateful to Key West for the ghosts and the stories.

In the early stages, I consulted
Killer Germs
by Barry E. Zimmerman and David J. Zimmerman and
Flu
by Gina Kolata, later turning to sources that shined a light on our current American dystopia—especially Andrea Elliott's “Invisible Child” series for
The New York Times
and Matt Taibbi's “Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch from America's Most Desperate Town” for
Rolling Stone.

To Mike Y., for letting me crib from his Twitter feed.

To the Writers' Room of Boston, for the space and the view.

To Courtney and her excellent apartment, where this book was finished.

To the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the extraordinary show of faith.

To Don, Jess, Robin, Tarfia, Karen, Lauren, Ted, Shannon, Porochista, and Jane for the company on the path, which would have been so much darker without you.

To my early readers, Josh, Matt, and James, for helping me find my way through the woods.

To Mike S., Nina, and Meghan for the support and guidance when it was urgently needed.

To Elliott, for writing alongside me.

To Sarah Scire. To Sean McDonald. To Nayon Cho and Abby Kagan. To Delia Casa and Nina Frieman. To everyone else at FSG who helped this book come into being. Thank you.

To Emily Bell, for keeping the path alight with her fierce vision and impeccable editorial eye. For her trust and her friendship. I owe you the world.

To Katherine Fausset, for the exceptional privilege of being able to call you my agent and my friend. You are simply the best. Thank you as well to Stuart Waterman and everyone else at Curtis Brown.

To my family, for believing.

To my grandmother, whom I miss.

To Paul, for everything, always.

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Laura van den Berg
was raised in Florida. Her first collection of stories,
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her second collection of stories,
The Isle of Youth
, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was named a Best Book of 2013 by NPR and
The Boston Globe
.
Find Me
is her first novel. She lives in the Boston area. Or sign up for email updates
here
.

 

ALSO BY
LAURA VAN DEN BERG

What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

The Isle of Youth

 

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CONTENTS