The She (19 page)

"I don't know."

I don't bother to look at Mr. Church reciting his famous last words. "I mean, it's not that he's not fun sometimes now..." I thought of him laughing at one of Mrs. Ashaad's jokes. He smiled a lot. He laughed once in a while. "Maybe
fun
isn't the right word. Maybe he never really is fun anymore. He's just ... pleasant. So he fools you."

"What does he do for fun?" Mr. Church asked.

It took me a minute to think of anything. "He watches
SpongeBob SquarePants
." I could feel my eyes locking in the sockets from the exhaustion of seeing memories. I just ' stared into the table. "He's obsessed with the fact that when SpongeBob gets full of water and blows up ten times his size, his teeth get bigger too."

I started to laugh a little but my smile only crawled up halfway when—

—I drop the shoe box so I can put my fingers to my ears, but I'm stepping all over navy men and I'm heavy and my heavy arms won't reach my head. I know The She—

The closer I get to Dad's office, the louder her shrieking gets.

"
...we have a list ... We are being ... sucked—Mayday, Mayday!
"

I jumped out of the chair, heard the mug spill over, but I was pressing the palms of my hands to my eyes, to keep everything black. "What is
wrong
with me, with my brain?"

"What are you thinking?" His voice came quietly right in my face.

"I keep having these memories, today and yesterday! They come out of nowhere! I don't want to go there, I—"

"I'd say that's normal, after you hear news that shocks you."

"I don't want to see my parents like Emmett sees them! I don't want to remember them that way! What if I remember them that way?"

"What if you don't?"

The shrieking mixes with her voice while she's talking to me, to Dad, it's all mixed together. "Oh, shit, we got the baby, Wade! Evan! Tell Emmett to ... Wade! What the hell is that? Over the port stern! Look with your eyes! Mother of God!
"

"She said, 'Mother of God.'"

I could feel his hands on my arms—normal hands, nothing cold or magical. But I wouldn't stop digging at my eyeballs with my palms.

"So?" Church said.

"So, that is one hell of a damn thing for someone to say who's trying to lie their way out of trouble! She's got to bring the Mother of God into it?" I yelled.

It proved nothing, which left me more frustrated, more harshly pushing on my eyeballs, but this time, it was for wanting to see something, not wanting to black it out. I was just too curious.

"
Emmeeeeeeeettt!" I'm a whale, trying to climb stairs on a tail fin. I'm stuck in slow motion. Screaming in whale. "Emmeeeeeeeettt!

"
Come down here!" I'm falling backward, blacking out, stumbling backward one-two-four stairs ... gripping the railing. I'm all but lying on it, hearing my dad's words..."He's not a big baby, Mary Ellen! He's just got a big imagination! He'll be better than Emmett in a crisis, I'm telling you—
"

And I'm crying like a two-year-old baby, but I'm gripping that railing. The shrieking has stopped. The wind still whips up there, but I'm back to myself, out of the whale's body, or whatever makes me so heavy when the shrieking comes. I'm going up and up till I see the door....

"Aw, shit ... I don't think I actually did black out!" It's still gray, though I see traces of Mr. Church's head in deep gray with a light gray halo around it. "I don't think I did!"

He asked, "Why is that so upsetting?"

"Because! It's in Emmett's journal that way! He said I came to the widow's walk and got him! I was thinking he remembered it wrong. Why is he always right? Why am I always wrong?"

"I don't think that's always true."

I let the damn thing roll as—
the wind is dying a little, but it's turning me to ice so I can't scream, can't distract Emmett, who is watching the sea and speaking in a low voice, and I think he's got Opa on the cordless.

"
Emmett!" He won't listen to me, won't look. I shake
him. "She's shrieking. She's taking the
Goliath/
Listen to me!
"

He's turning. I can see the whites of his eyes. His mouth is still moving a little.

There's no cordless. There's only a piece of paper in his hand, the one that he'd taken out of Dad's desk. It blows from his hand, flies through the sleet, and disappears over the bayberry trees toward the roaring surf. He darts past me and takes the stairs down two at a time.

My laughter peeled out, sounding strangely out of place and irreverent alongside this terrible memory. I didn't know why I was laughing, except that I could jump into my brother's skin sometimes, and I could feel his future embarrassment over this moment, and somehow it struck me funny. "Dad taught him to recite the captain's prayer three times, then spit off the widow's walk ... try to hit the sea. That's what he was doing. He wasn't in the shower."

I was all but squawking like a chicken, and Mr. Church ignored it.

"And then what?"

I shut up, got serious, because he was
punching the phone buttons. I'm hearing water crashing, a deluge, and loud bangs and growling and snarling and crunching, and my mom screaming a Mayday. Coordinates. I'm grabbing a pencil, writing them while Mom screams for my dad to shut up and do something. Emmett backs into me, pressing buttons on the cordless.

He screams, "Shit!" at the top of his lungs. His fingers are shaking too hard. He keeps dialing the number wrong.

My dad's voice wails from far off as Emmett dials again. " Yea ... walk ... shadow of death...
"

"
Goddamn it!" Emmett hurls the phone into the corner and runs from the room. I pick up the corded phone on the wall in the kitchen. I call the operator. Get the Coast Guard. They hear a little kid's trembling voice talking about The She. They hang up. I run to Dad's office, get the cordless Emmett just threw. I get the operator back as I'm climbing the stairs, get the Coast Guard again.

Emmett's screaming on the widow's walk again. I'm trying to shut him up so he'll speak to the Coast Guard, but he won't stop yelling.

"
Give them back, you fucking bitch! You fucking whore, I'll kill you myself! I'm going to kill you, you cocksucking whore!
"

The story was banging all over the cabin, and after seeing the stunned looks on Grey's and Mr. Church's faces, I flopped in the chair and shoved my own stunned face into my hands.

Nobody said anything for the longest time. Then Grey muttered something about, "You're going to drown yourself in bodily fluids," and she had gotten a tissue and was actually wiping up my chin—spit, or maybe it was snot even. I guess they were waiting for me to say something, but I didn't want to cut up on Emmett. I could feel my brother's terror pulsing through my veins, and I remembered as a kid that he had had moments when he could believe in The She—even more than I had.

"
Emmett, next time you hit your brother, your father's going to hold you down and I'm going to hit
you.
You understand?
"

"
I didn't hurt him, Mom! He just skeeves me out, always looking out that window at night, listening for spooks. He gets me so jumpy! It's disgusting!
"

I wouldn't have gotten him jumpy over something he didn't believe in himself—at least at very tense moments.

"He did say not everything was in that book," I finally said, though it was hard to defend him for leaving out parts that would be personally embarrassing.

"I wouldn't call that omission a terrible thing, necessarily," Mr. Church said, quietly. "Maybe he felt guilty and ... stupid afterward. Those are hard emotions to write about, especially in light of his probable thought that he had lost valuable time, which might have saved them, when he panicked."

"Stupid..." My cackle sounded way crazed.
Guess he never made that mistake again!

Church said nothing, but I could read some sort of victory sparkle in his eyes.

"He couldn't have saved them," I added quickly. "The Coast Guard can't beam up like on
Star Trek.
"

"Is
he
convinced he couldn't save them?"

"Well,
he's
convinced they died off the Florida shoals after—" I stopped. Then I laughed more, taking the Lord's name in vain a few times.
That kind of lets him off the hook, doesn't it?

But I was already shaking my head, already trying to disagree with myself. I couldn't get myself to believe my brother would ever fall victim to bad thinking. Especially not with Aunt Mel there looking after him.

"You know, you get me so turned around," I said to Mr. Church. "And I don't understand how you can sound so confident. You admitted a while ago that you sit out here and dream up these savvy little speeches you give."

He shrugged, and I wondered if it was even possible to make him feel insulted.

"But you've got nothing.
Nothing.
No mountain of facts, no evidence," I said.

"I'm sorry if I sound so sure, because I really don't know." Church faced out the window. "Except that I knew your mother and father I knew Connor Riley, too. They were apples and an orange. You put two sea captains together on the beach in a downtime game of Frisbee; sometimes they look so much alike. They're both laughing, playing jock, cursing like the seamen they are. But you know what I'm talking about. Some people, you see into them, you know they have a soul. Others ... you're not so sure. Do you have to be able to
prove
those insights before they become valuable to you?"

I didn't plan on answering, but out of my mouth came, "No."

Enough thinking. I was not a thinker. Church was standing there waiting, too nice, too, too nice. I figured he should have stayed a shrink. The world was missing out on a decent shrink. And he was reminding me of Santa Claus somehow, or of someone actually better You couldn't insult Santa Claus and expect him to be all, "Oh, well." I felt I could sit by him and give him a wish list, like a kid in need. He was old, and long past Emmett's and Aunt Mel's age of hungriness to become something other than who he was. He had nothing better to do, it seemed, than just be, and get absorbed in whatever problems fell through his door.

"I would like to take a boat ride out to the canyon," I told him. "I want to see the place where they died."

Two-thirty in the afternoon—we were heading out of the harbor between East Hook and West Hook toward the open sea in Mr. Church's thirty-one-foot Tiara, the
Hope Wainwright.
It was named after his mother he said, one of the two women he'd ever loved. He was better than Santa Claus. He had just waved me off when I promised reimbursement for his fuel, which would probably cost around two hundred dollars, and he had more gadgets and computerized screens on his dash than I had ever remembered seeing on the
Goliath,
which had been more than three hundred feet long. The gadgets gave me a mild feeling of safety. Though I did have my moments of paranoia passing through the harbor they had nothing to do with the things I felt sure I would have feared most—going four hours past the horizon, getting seasick, or memorializing the dead.

My paranoia had to do, first, with passing my grandfather's house, with so many windows, and I was sure Emmett was looking out of one. Mc Church had called Opa and told him he was taking me to the canyon, at which point he put me on the phone. I was surprised that Opa didn't object, considering what month this was. He said there was a "warm-water eddy over the shelf" that day, a term I had forgotten, but supposedly it meant we would have smooth sailing. I thought I detected some sort of gladness in his voice as he said, "Wish I had the health, I might join you." I told him not to tell Emmett, and he had said he wasn't that inconsiderate.

My other paranoia had to do with Grey, who had insisted on coming, and I didn't have the heart to stop her considering I had taken up her whole time with Mr. Church. I had nudged him when she'd gone into the hoagie store to pick up lunch and told him she'd been at Saint Elizabeth's with some kind of panic disorder and I wasn't sure this trip was a great idea. I had totally forgotten that he had an MSW. He had just shrugged it off, saying something like, "Well, if she's on an antidepressant, she probably shouldn't take Dramamine. Make sure she has a cast-iron stomach." I had seen Grey drink us all under the table, and I thought her stomach could probably hold its own.

Mr. Church paused at the drawbridge, and it opened up for us, sending the roadway straight into the air. We got a little wave from the drawbridge operator whose name came floating back out of nowhere—Mt Tommy Downs. I also remembered that my dad used to honk his thanks when we came through the passage in his own fishing boat, so I moved up beside Mr. Church to push the horn button. He must have thought I wanted to take the helm, because he stepped back, gestured at the dash, and before I knew it I had the wheel, and he was honking.

It felt weird gripping the wheel, and something made me turn and look back. Mt Downs was out of the gatehouse with his hands on the railing, just staring. Then I watched him do this thing that sent my heart into my sneakers. I knew why I had looked back. He put two fingers to his forehead and made a wide circle with his right hand.

"
You see that salute, Evan? That's for Barretts only. That's for you, little man. Me and you and twelve generations. Give 'im a high one.
"

I kind of raised four fingers, and dropped them, taking in a glance of Grey with her feet on the stern, hands in her pockets, ski hat on her head, staring into the afternoon sun. She had a bouquet of flowers beside her that she'd picked up at the flower store beside Mac's, the hoagie place. She hadn't said why she bought them. I turned and stared out over the wheel, hoping she wasn't planning on giving them to me for some reason. This drawbridge thing with all the pomp from Mr. Downs was freaky enough.

What amazed me most was how much I remembered, just from my dad letting me drive the
Goliath
and the
MaryEl,
his smaller boat used for fishing. We had a following sea getting out of the harbor with good-size swells, maybe eight-foot, charging up on us, and I somehow remembered to speed up and ride one's back so the next wouldn't catch us. When we hit the sea, the swells came at us, and I remembered to tack them. Basically the water was calm when we hit open water and my eyes fell to a compass. The canyon was to the southeast, eighty-five miles, and I watched Mr. Church set the path on the loran receiver He pointed out a few things I didn't remember and then I just tried to feel under the boat for currents that would need a little fight and watch for swell patterns. I guess you could say it was like getting back on a bike.