The She (16 page)

I stumbled to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. The room was small, but every bedroom in this monster house had its own bathroom, and I stood by the sink, splashing, swallowing, spitting. It wasn't such a bad memory. It shocked me a little to realize how much my ambitions had changed, but it wasn't like I'd seen an armed robbery. I calmed myself enough to turn on the light and look at myself in the mirror. I had dark circles under my eyes. If you're blond with light skin, those circles look like bruises. I looked like shit.

I climbed back into the bed, wondering which I needed more—the air or the silence. You can't have both on the Hooks. I chose air.

I lay there breathing it in, and suddenly I was seeing the inside of the Burger King at the rest stop on the expressway down to the shore. I had been in there with my dad many times when I was little, when we were driving back from Opa's shipyard in Philly. With slightly less paranoia, I let the memory roll. It showed my dad standing at an ATM machine, some familiar guy behind him,
and I don't like this Connor Riley man as much today as I sometimes do because Dad lets me sit in the front of the truck usually, but a man in the truck means I have to squish into the backseat. I come up beside Dad at the ATM, and I can see his eyes growing ... his mouth spreading out ... his neck doing this little snapping thing to the time of the ATM machine spitting out bills.

Connor is looking over Dad's shoulder now. "Jesus, Barrett, how much does lunch cost? How much did you ask for?
"

"
I asked for twenty bucks.
"

They're both laughing. My dad is counting bills in disbelief.

"
You hit too many zeros. You're going to be in trouble with the old lady if you don't put it back—
"

My dad's shaking his head, pointing to the screen, smiling at Connor, who says, "Holy shit. What're you going to do with it?
"

Dad's eyes close, and he's still laughing. He says, "Evan, uh, which is the bigger sin? Cursing or stealing?
"

"
Stealing," I decide.

"
Yeah." He nudges Connor. "Do I raise my boys right or what?" Then he goes, "Shit. Goddamn. Fuckin'-A.
"

He walks over to the rest stop manager's office and he's cursing more of the same, until he sticks his head in. He says to the lady in there, "Uh, there's a problem.
"

Then Connor starts in, to the back of his neck. "Fuckin'-A yourself, Barrett. There haven't been any saints named in
about five hundred years. You're past your time. She's just going to keep it! And spend it getting her toenails painted for Mr. Gas-Pump-Trailer-Park. Why do you have to be so noble? Send it my way. I ain't proud—
"

Connor turns, realizes I'm still down there, and gives me a dirty look. My dad gets done with the manager. Then they're going through the Burger King line ahead of me, laughing at each other. But I hear Connor say, "You would never have done that if your kid hadn't been here. Christ, couldn't you just have pretended he wasn't here for about five seconds, faggot head?
"

My dad gets jollier over that. "Ask Mary Ellen if I'm a faggot head. And why would I do that for my kid? He's not even old enough to count!
"

I stuck my face into the pillow, trying to bring the black back. I thought of Emmett looking at me so concerned before he drank himself into a stupor last night, and now my memory was sending me all the wrong thoughts. I was supposed to be remembering the times my parents weren't trying for sainthood. Like the time my mom hit me with a two-by-four for lighting matches, laid a huge splinter into my ass, and begged me not to tell the teacher the whole time she was picking it out. I knew it had happened, but it was something I
knew,
not something I could picture. The picture was behind some gray door, I tried to imagine my dad smoking a joint. I could get the image for a second, and then it would leave me again. I lost it to the memory of myself smoking a few now and again.
Yeah, I guess that makes me next in line to smuggle a load, compliments of the Colombian mafia, and pass some off to Miguel.

Stop it! You're using your thoughts to defend them!

I lay there feeling completely pissed at myself, and my anger blew up into this nasty ball behind my eyes, which broke and ran out my eyeballs. But when I took in my first big gulp of air my stomach quit biting so much. I looked over at the darkened door just to make sure it was shut, to make sure Emmett couldn't hear me from the other guest room. He was so used to all this information. He was so cool and so together so, ah yes, the suave professor minus only the final part of a dissertation.
Fucking Marxist fuckhead.

I didn't know who to kill. I tried to force my mind through the pages of that black book—search warrants, tapes, maps—just so I could be mad at my parents, who were dead, instead of at my brother who was alive and my closest remaining family member. But I got distracted too easily. I kept hearing little phrases of Emmett's that irritated me to no end. Like "leap of faith." His one leap of faith had been to assume that our parents had to be dead or they would have contacted us.
Assume our parents are dead.
Calling that his leap of faith sounded somehow kind of cold.

I flopped over fuming about how Emmett always had this way of making me feel stupid ... mentally ill-equipped. I couldn't fume for too long, because my brother was also a nice person, with a conscience ten miles wide. And yet he always tried to understand those who did wrong. He rarely got mad, always tried to understand my side before he got in my face about something. It was hard to find fault with much that he said.

Go
out to Sassafras. See Edwin Church again.

I blinked at the thought and almost got sick. I got mad at my intuition for even showing its ugly face around me, especially to bring up Mr. Church. Then I sat straight up in the bed again.

Grey is going out there. Today.

Seconds later I was shoving my legs into my jeans and reaching for my watch: 6:35. She wouldn't get there for a few hours. I kept getting dressed at a slower pace, because sleep was impossible. I couldn't help thinking of some fourteen-year-old wondering what the hell she was supposed to do in the backseat of a limo with some fat, ancient sweat bag. And then I could hear her telling me, as plain as if she were here and talking to my face. "What, you want me to sit here and blame it on my parents or something? You want me to say they were like that first? Okay. I guess they were. But ... I made my choices. I'm not blaming anyone."

I couldn't even focus too much on my guilt, because it was huge. I'd had to pick this molested, courageous girl to try to force apologies out of. I let a groan fall out of my mouth, because punching my stupid self in the face wouldn't have helped anything. I needed to meet her at the docks, before she got to Edwin Church, and before he set her up to think "some ... fantastic ... motion picture ... fiction phenomenon—"

Emmett had such a way with words—that much I had to hand to him. Even when he was drunk.

"
The opposite of a correct statement is a false
statement. But the opposite of a profound truth
may well be another profound truth.
"
—
N
IELS
B
OHR

The sun was rising to a clear blue sky, the first one in days. I walked across the drawbridge to West Hook, feeling in my pocket for my gloves and pulling them on. My breath blew in streams into the icy air. I had to stop and look down the harbor at that sun coming up, making the surface of the water look like a million diamonds dancing. This diamond dance went out to meet the light of the sun, a giant diamond just above the sea.

I stood there and looked straight down over the rail of the drawbridge. The water wasn't splotched with diamonds straight underneath me. It was dark and bobbed around between the pilings, dancing and carrying on, giving me the feeling it was alive, had a personality of its own.

I heard myself speaking to it. "I don't know if you've got any she-devil hole under you, but I'd say you are a well of secrets."

Of course, I didn't get any reply.

"You really don't want anybody to know you, do you? You're like some bitchy girl. The kind I'm always drawn to and then can't tolerate." It mocked me, lapping and laughing, and I should have felt all sorts of vile hatred wafting off me for this water. But before I knew it, I was sending my spit downward, remembering my dad always spitting off the stern before he hit a storm, "to mix my body with hers, in case we have to reach an agreement."

I didn't know why I did it. I sure as hell didn't plan on having to reach any agreement with the sea. I watched as the spit hit the water and it gelled immediately, like any other foam cap, and for whatever reason my eyes were filling up again. Things got blurry. I banged on the railing once, and walked on.

The Island Diner was still there, just past the West Hook lighthouse, but I didn't think the waitress, Mrs. Chowder would be. Honest: Mrs. Chowder. I suddenly remembered Dad busting on Mrs. Chowder when he'd take us in there for the special on the nights Mom worked.

"
I met a dentist offshore named Dr. Molar! And there's a minister in English Creek named Reverend Goode!
"

"
Poor guys, they were doomed. I'd have never thought to work on this godforsaken island if it weren't for my name, Wade, I swear to God. What'll it be?
"

She's running through the specials, but he's looking at her and not listening. He's not done teasing yet. He loves to tease. That's why people love him.

"
So long as your middle name isn't seafood. Or clam.
"

"
It's worse. It's Flossie. Flossie Chowder? As in, you have to floss the clams out of your teeth afterward?" She blows a puff of smoke over Dad's head as he says no chowder for him, thank you.

Emmett doesn't care that Dad is distracted from us by Flossie Chowder. Ever since he turned twelve, he likes when Dad looks the other way at a table, because he thinks it's funny to be sitting right beside Dad at the table while flipping me the bird.

The memory surprised me a little. There was a lot about Emmett's behavior that had changed so much. Memories of his teasing, fun side came floating back with the inside of this authentic chrome diner It hadn't changed, except I didn't see Flossie Chowder or any of the other leathery-faced old waitresses, and I didn't see any of these young waitresses smoking. It was one change I could appreciate. I flopped down in a booth and studied some of the guys at the counter who looked like seamen and were packing away huge breakfasts. I guess some things never change.

I ordered a doughnut and a hot chocolate, remembering the hot chocolate in the Island Diner kicking butt. Then I sat there looking at Emmett's black notebook, which I'd brought with me. I had some time to kill, and there was stuff in there he hadn't showed me. I took a deep breath, swallowed, and opened the book, passing the search warrant before I had a chance to get sick again.

There were a bunch of typed pages with dates on them. They looked like Emmett had been keeping a journal or something. I read over his first entry a number of times, because I had written about the same exact period of time when I had Grey's acid running through me. The facts were almost identical. His interpretation was very different.

While drinking his coffee after dinner, Dad went through his usual rigmarole about the crew being a little superstitious over husbands and wives traveling on the same vessel. As usual, I had sided with Mom, who went on about it being a sexist excuse to keep women off the sea.

Retrospectively, I would have to say this particular conversation must have been rehearsed.

Emmett mentioned that Mom and Dad had been alone most of the day because he was in school, and they would have had time to plot out how to keep their kids completely innocent of an attempt to escape drug-trafficking charges. He said he had trouble believing that they would talk so normally about delivering steel girders when their hull had just been searched. They should have still been stunned about the DEA and been talking of nothing else, if they were so innocent.

I had remembered the conversation, too.
Rehearsed?
My parents had no training as actors. I did remember my mom seeming uptight over the superstitions and my dad seeming nervous about how the crew would respond to Mom. Had they other reasons to be uptight and nervous? Would I have been able to tell at that age? I just didn't know.

I tried to do homework after they left, which wasn't hard, considering I was clueless at the time. Evan was playing on the floor. He was giving me the creeps because he thinks be hears The She sometimes. He thinks about her a lot, and when we're alone together on a stormy night, he gets me so creeped out I want to smack him.

When they called, Mom described the sea as looking like soup being stirred. Dad mentioned that he could not feel any wind off the stern, and considering how it was blowing....

When the DEA questioned me later, I mentioned my parents' comments about the wind and water. I thought at the time the agents were very callous to have smiled the way they did. But Aunt Mel and I have to agree: Their comments sounded very much like the local paperbacks from cheesy publishers that Dad used to read and enjoy.

I just wanted to punch Emmett—not because I disagreed with him completely, but because I didn't know what to think. It would have been hard to detect an act, with all that wind and radio static, I had to admit that. Yet nothing at the time left me feeling like it was an art. But I felt stupid, very stupid, now.

I went up to the widow's walk, and the next thing I knew, Evan was up there, telling me Mom and Dad were sending a Mayday. He was pretty hysterical.

I couldn't help staring at that part each time I read it. It was the first detail we would have disagreed on. I had passed out or fallen backward or something. I had never made it up to the widow's walk. Emmett was remembering this wrong.