Harrison Squared (11 page)

The long-haired man paused. Then he said to the man in the boat, “Just a second, Gus.” He climbed back onto the pier, put his hands on his hips. He towered over me.

“You her boy?” he asked.

“That's right.”

Something changed in his face. He glanced at the entrance of the shack, as if checking for eavesdroppers. “I'm sorry, kid.” His voice was quieter. “It's tough to lose a parent.”

“I haven't
lost
her,” I said. “
I'm
not wearing a black band.”

He glanced at his arm as if he'd forgotten he was wearing it. “No. Right. This is for the man who went down.”

“Hal Jonsson. He was in the
Huninn
, right?”

“That's right.”

“Well. At least he kept his word.”

He squinted at me.

“I was in the room when you called my mom,” I said. “I want to know why you took her out one day, then canceled the next.”

“It's business, kid.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“It
means
I had pots to haul. I couldn't afford to take her out again.”

“Then you shouldn't have agreed to take her out in the first place.”

“You're right about that, kid.” He turned back toward the ladder.

“Hey!” I grabbed his arm. I'd been looking for someone to punch since my mother went missing, and he seemed like he could take one pretty well.

Then he looked back at me, one eyebrow raised. I realized that the bicep under my hand had, evidently, been carved out of marble. It made my hand cold.

I dropped my hand.

“I wouldn't hang out on the docks,” he said. “A kid could get hurt out here.” He didn't say it like a threat. Then he said, “I'm sorry about your mom. I hope they find her.”

*   *   *

I drove the truck back to the rental. When I went inside, I was surprised to find Aunt Sel awake, staring at various pieces of the coffeemaker that were laid out on the counter like organs in an autopsy. “I thought you'd gone to school,” she said.

“I found the truck. It was down by the dock.”

“Could you do something with this? I have a terrible headache.”

While I made the coffee she sat in the armchair and rubbed her eyes. “You know, it's fine with me if you never go back. High school is a complete waste of time. The girls have no sense of style, and the boys—don't get me started on the boys.”

“I don't care how I dress,” I said.

“Clearly. You're like Tom Wolfe, possessed by a single fashion idea. But while he chose an ice cream suit, you've settled on … the hoodie.”

“I like being comfortable.”

“You sound like your father. He went through school looking like an indigent. You can get away with that if you're a genius. Not me, though. My only gifts were clear skin and a dirty mind.”

“You're oversharing,” I said.

“Your father loved school. Believed in it. Just like your mother. She's so
relentlessly
serious about it. ‘My boy never misses a day of school,' blah etcetera blah. She has high hopes for you, you know. Ivy League, top-of-the-class hopes.”

“I know what you're doing,” I said.

She opened her eyes. “What? You think I
want
you to go to school? Then who would entertain
me
? This place is
stultifying
. True, if there's any news, they can tell you in school just as easily as here, but how much better to spend your time with your most beloved relative? I can teach you how to make a decent Bloody Mary.”

“You're not a very good aunt.”

“Pardon me, but I'm
fantastic
. The best aunts aren't substitute parents, they're coconspirators.”

I poured her a cup and brought it to her. “I was thinking of going back to school anyway,” I said.

“Re-a-lly,” she said. She'd loaded the word with half a dozen extra vowels.

“Really.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You seem different. Did something happen this morning?”

She's still alive,
I thought.

“I'm going to take a shower,” I said. “I don't want to be late.”

*   *   *

I arrived at school just as the students were being let out of Voluntary. I could feel eyes on me as we climbed the stairs. Of course no one was whispering. But fingers were moving.

I took my seat in Cryptobiology. Flora, the Goth girl in the red lipstick, and Garfield the bat-eared boy said nothing as we wired up our dead toad. But halfway through class I noticed that Flora was giving me a pitying look, and I realized I'd been staring into space.

“Sorry to hear about your mother,” Flora said quietly.

“Yeah,” Garfield said.

Lydia, sitting a row ahead, glanced back; then she turned away without speaking.

Someone behind us squealed. Everyone in the class turned. On one of the tables, a frog had started to smoke, and the limbs were twitching spasmodically. Dr. Herbert rushed over, clapping his hands. “It's alive!” he cried.

Just as he reached the table, the frog's rear legs jerked in unison, and it leaped off the table. The wire leads snapped free, and the thing fell to the floor with a
fwap
! We gathered around it. The animal was still smoking, but it was inert again.

I was thinking of poor Michigan J. Frog, from the cartoon.

Hello ma baby,

Hello ma honey,

Hello ma ragtime gal.

Send me a kiss by wire,

Baby my heart's on fire.

“Everyone set your transformers to this voltage!” Dr. Herbert said. “We're doing science!”

After class I walked a few paces behind Lydia and followed her into the stone basement that held the pool. Just as we reached the locker rooms she turned and said, “You're looking at me.”

“I'm looking at your hands.”

The other students passed by us and went inside.

“We're not talking about you,” she said.

“Liar.”

“Not all the time.”

“That's more like it,” I said. “What are they saying?”

“We're surprised you're here at all. We all thought you'd have left town by now.”

“My mom's missing, not dead. I'm not leaving without her.”

“Oh, Harrison,” she said. “People around here go missing all the time. There's no use waiting for them to come back.”

“All the time? What do you mean, all the time?”

She looked exhausted. “Never mind.”

“Wait,” I said. “I'm looking for something. An albatross.”

She'd been turning away from me, and now she froze. “What are you talking about?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I was just…” I didn't want to tell her about the note. Or try to explain the Fish Boy. “Someone said something about that bird.”

“Go to class, Harrison,” she said. “And then go back to where you came from.”

*   *   *

Coach Shug came out of the water, shook his head as if clearing his ears, and then lifted his goggles to his forehead. He spotted me in the stone bleachers and lumbered forward. His skin was so white I wondered if he ever left this cave.

“You're back,” he said. “And still not dressed.”

Or undressed, I thought. “I told you, I can't because—”

“Note,” Coach said.

Oh no. All I had was the useless love note from Nurse Mandi. “She wasn't feeling well,” I said. “What she gave me I can't really—”

“Note.”

I took a breath, then reached into the pouch of my hoodie. I handed him the piece of paper. “She didn't really address my, uh, medical issue.”

He unfolded the paper and blinked at it. His wet fingers spotted it gray.

“I can try again if … Coach?”

His face had turned bright red. He was flushed from neck to ears.

“Coach?”

He looked down at me, his eyes shining with something other than pool water. “She gave this to you?”

I nodded.

He folded the note, then walked along the pool and entered one of dark archways cut into the bleachers.

The students began to filter out of the locker rooms and took their place by the side of the pool. No one asked me where the coach was. When he didn't appear after several minutes, they silently lined up and began to take their laps.

I sat there, my butt getting colder and colder on the stone bench, and still the coach didn't return. No one was looking at me. Enough of this. There was someone I needed to talk to.

I walked back up to the ground floor. My first day at the school, after I'd fled the cafeteria, I'd found the library by accident. The corridors still all looked the same to me, but after wandering more or less at random, I found the library doors again. They were shut this time, and at first I thought they were locked, but a hard pull got one to open.

Once again the place seemed to be empty of people. There was no one at the front desk, but I couldn't just call out for help—library rules were baked into my DNA. I walked up and down the stacks, past the ancient books, the faint lettering on their spines calling weakly like the voices of elderly hospital patients.

At the end of one of the rows, the room opened up to a space with several wide oak tables. It was very dim, and Professor Freytag leaned over one of the tables, gazing down at a map unrolled to cover most of the table. One hand was tucked behind his back, and the other gripped the side of his head, pulling at his white hair.

“Hello?” I said, keeping my voice low.

He didn't seem to hear me. I walked closer and said, “Professor?”

He whirled to face me. “Look what they've done!” he cried. His eyes were wild.

I held up my hands. “I don't know if you remember me—”

“I've never seen you before in my life. Hah!” He shook his head as if clearing it. “My apologies for shouting. I'm not used to … visitors. You frightened me.”

“Sorry about that.”

“‘Startled' is perhaps the better word. There's no reason for
me
to be frightened, is there? Forget I ever said the word.” He turned back to the map. “I get so frustrated sometimes. People come to the library and leave things lying about. Not even refiling them correctly. Just look at this.”

It was a nautical map, showing a jagged coastline, and swirls of blue lines to indicate the sea depths. “Is this Dunnsmouth?” I asked.

“Right over here,” the librarian said, and waved his hand at the coast. On paper Dunnsmouth bay looked even more like a crocodile mouth.

“My mother left the Dunnsmouth dock in a charter boat,” I said. “The police said it went down about fifteen miles out.”

“Fifteen miles, eh?” Professor Freytag's finger hovered over the map. His finger drifted slowly from Dunnsmouth, like a boat heading out to sea, and then pointed at a blank spot in the middle of the map. “Perhaps about there, if they went due east.”

“I don't see any islands out there,” I said.

“No, not a one.”

“Are there, I don't know, coral reefs or something?” I thought of the story problem from geometry class. “Big granite rocks? Sand bars?”

“Close in to the bay we have sharp rocks indeed. But not out there, my boy. At least according to this map.” He raised his eyebrows. “Why? Is there a mystery afoot?”

“That's why I came here,” I said. “You like riddles, right?”

“You've come to the right man!”

I showed him the note I found on the porch last night. The librarian refused to take it. “Open it, please.”

I unfolded it. He leaned back, squinting through those grimy glasses.

“‘She's still alive,'” he read. “Ah! And you want to know who this ‘she' is.”

“I know that. It's my mother. It's the second part. Where do I find an albatross?”

He straightened his glasses. “Why, around the neck of the old sailor, I suppose.” He turned and strode down one of the rows of shelves.

“What sailor?” I asked, and hurried after him.

The professor suddenly stopped, turned back, then reversed himself again. He pointed at a shelf at waist height. “Grab that one, my boy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'”

The book was very thin, almost a pamphlet. I opened it and saw a narrow column of text. “It's a poem.”

“A beautiful poem of death and rebirth,” the librarian said. He sounded elated.

“I don't think the note is about a poem.”

“Don't be silly,” he said. “A note can be about anything. A poem, even more so. They're practically equivalent.”

“Okay, but—”

“You'll thank me later,” Professor Freytag said. “Now, if you'll kindly shut the door on your way out? I have important work to do, and I don't want to be disturbed.”

This seemed like a strange attitude for a librarian to take. Then again, it was no stranger than anything else in this school. I did as the professor asked and closed the door behind me, then made my way back to the pool. I'd just reached the staircase when a deep voice stopped me.

“Mr. Harrison. What are you doing here?”

I froze, and turned. Principal Montooth stepped out of the shadow of a doorway.

“Just going back to class,” I said.

Montooth said nothing.

“Physical Education,” I said. “Swimming. With Coach Shug?”

“I know your course schedule,” he said. “I meant, why are you here at all? You know that you're excused from classes during your … family emergency.”

“I guess I needed to do something,” I said. “Just sitting there … I was going crazy.”

He looked at the book in my hand, and his eyes narrowed. I suddenly realized that I hadn't checked the book out. Professor Freytag had just let me take it.