The She (22 page)

I felt free to shed all the shit off my skin, the invisible chains, the things I realized I'd been so subtly taught never to forget—like how to be skeptical. I could even shed my love of Emmett out here, or at least shed those parts that had always made me feel a little bit ashamed of myself, like I didn't measure up intellectually.

"Where are we going?" I said above the engines, but since Church was right behind me, I knew he could hear it.

"You tell me."

"No, you tell me. Come on. Do it, please."

He backed up so I almost fell backward when the
Hope
hit a swell I couldn't see or didn't care about. But then I heard a crack and his hot palms swallowed my temples, seemed to meet in the center of my head. It was keeping me standing. I didn't get that chill through me this time. Maybe I was chilled through to the max anyway. It felt like nothing—like normal, like my whole brain relaxed just a little bit more, like nature taking its course out here in the ultimate core of nature, and the right memories could just drop down off the dusty part of my brain with maybe a little extra clarity. I didn't even care whether it was mystical or right out of some standard psychology textbook.

I only cared that—
I'm writing shit on the wall of Dad's office and my pencil breaks but there's a purple crayon. My hand is shaking, and I can hardly hear Mom because she's screaming, because Emmett is throwing phones and cursing. Then I'm cursing and crying because the whole thing is impossible. I copy the stupid numbers again on a piece of paper, because I'm thinking he broke the cell phone, and the kitchen phone has a cord.

"East of two-six-six-eight-zero, north of four-two-two-eight-zero. Why did I try to talk to the Coast Guard about the fucking She? Why didn't I keep my mouth shut? They hung up on me! God! Both of us wasted time!"

I had screamed it straight up, and Mr. Church grabbed the wheel on either side of me so I was steadied between his arms.

He said right in my ear "If two grown adults could pick up the wrong handset, you were certainly entitled! Stop whipping yourself. You were a child!"

He drove like that for another mile, me between his huge arms. I watched the loran TDs on the dash match up with what had just come out of my mouth and still rang in my ears. He pulled the throttle into neutral, cut one of the two engines entirely, and I could hear the waves lapping on the side of the boat.

They drew me over and I stared into the black, feeling for the
Goliath,
for something spiritual, the voice of my father, I didn't know what I expected to feel, but the old saying of my dad's flashed through my head—"The line between complete joy and complete terror is often thin." I felt absolutely terrified, overwhelmed by something firing at my heart like a blowtorch.

I fell, to my knees, heard myself more than felt the words rip loose, "Daddy, tell me you're down there. Tell me you're down there."

Grey was beside me, and her voice was amazingly calm as she thrust a flower into my hand. "Just throw it. Say anything you want. You can talk to them if you want..."

"Scary!" My voice went off again. I might sense they were not down there if I let myself feel anything, and so I pushed at the tears and snot freezing on my face, watching my whole arm shake.

Grey shook my arm and a flower dropped out of my hand and hit the water She handed me another and said, "Do you have a favorite memorial saying? Memorial prayer? Family saying? You could say that."

"Yeah." I hadn't said a prayer in years, except with a whole group of kids in Mass. So it surprised me when I started in. It was easier to spit out than the captain's prayer because even as a semi-lapsed Catholic, I had a better idea of where the Mother of God was than where my parents were at the moment. I could hear us all, together separately, in twos, threes, different bedrooms, different cathedrals in different ports—

"
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee ... blessed art thou ... Mommy?" She had one of those bloody car accident flights today, and then she paid bills, and now she's tired. I'm shaking her awake. "...Blessed art thou among women, blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus..." It's my voice, and I don't care that she's falling asleep because the real great thing about saying the Hail Mary across the bed with Mommy is that I get to hold hands with her. She's not a kissy, huggy mom like my friends have, so I lure her to me with...

"
Holy Mary, Mother of God ... getting a whipping from me when we get home, Emmett," Dad mutters, and I'm laughing into my sleeve because Emmett got caught torturing me in Mass again. He can't be still, the usual. He smiles up at the rafters, fifteen, too old to get a whipping from Dad, but he's caught and I'm thrilled out of my tree.

"
Pray for us, sinners, now and at the hour of our death," he says pretty loudly, just in case Dad won't find him so old.

"Amen."

I crossed myself with the flower, then tossed it. I was calm again, tossing flower after flower that Grey stuck in my hand, watching my breath come out in steady, icy streams.

"I
know
where my parents are." I knelt there, tossing flowers, kind of amazed at myself, that I thought I would hear my parents' voices coming out of the deep, as if they were stuck down there. If you're brought up religious, I bet you can go for a time and barely think about it, but when you really need it, it punches a hole in the blackness and seems to find you. I didn't understand how my brother came to lose something like that, because it seemed almost to come
at
me, rather than come
from
me. He would say it was my imagination. Well, he was back there, and I was here.

"I don't have to believe Emmett. It's a free country." I could sense the height of illogic in my argument, but I loved it anyway.

Grey was up close to me, wiping my face with a tissue again, thinking I was talking about the
Goliath,
I guess. "Do you think this is where they went down?"

I didn't know what I expected to feel, some sort of knowing that came in some extraordinary way. All I felt was a supreme peace, as immovable as the iceberg that ruptured the
Titanic.

"Yeah, this is it. They went down near here."

She stood up, and I heard her exchanging a few words with Mr. Church, but I wasn't listening too well. I reached over the side, put my hands in the icy water splashed it up on my face, then sunk my hands in up to my wrists, not fighting strongly enough against some urge to stick my whole face into it.

"Jesus Christ, Evan!"

"
Damn
it, boy!"

They were screaming. I was upside down, being pulled at the back of my coat, my legs, until I splattered onto the deck. My face was soaked. I didn't know whether to apologize or not. I wasn't trying to commit suicide, just meet up either with my ancestors or with the water itself, which felt strangely like my possession, my girlfriend, my reflection in the looking glass.

"You crazy Barretts! You've all got a thing about the water!" Mr. Church did not sound contented for once. "If you're going to pull any strange Barrett rituals, don't you do it off my boat! Come here!"

He was pulling me toward the stern, which I crawled to on my knees, then looked over.

"Spit," he told me, and I spit over the stern. "That's what you do when you get an urge like that."

Urge like what
? I didn't exactly know what I had done or what I had wanted, but it seemed like something familiar to him. I stared over the stern for the longest time, and finally asked him to cut the engines entirely, just for a couple of minutes, so I could hear nothing but the sea. It was pretty calm, with only gusts of wind rising, so he obliged and I was better able to feel around in my gut.

I stared and stared down there. I can't explain what intuition really is, but at that moment I was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were sitting square on top of a grave.

"I'm going to talk Opa into hiring a diving team," I told Grey. She stood behind me, and I heard her let go of something, an excited laugh, maybe.

"Tell him I want to go in the bubble drum. I've always wanted to do that. Tell him they
have
to take me."

She got down on her knees beside me, free again of the poisonous tongue that seemed to grab hold of her. And I put an arm around her then both arms. I shook her a little. "I know I can get him to do it, if I just handle it right. He's in the right mind-set. I can feel it in my bones."

She smiled up at me, her pretty pink cheeks puffing out and her eyes lighting like soft candles, so free of any thoughts except those that filled my own core. It was like she passed through me, came out the other side, then whizzed back through again. I could sense she had crossed some threshold—moved out of her own set of problems and into somebody else's. For the moment, there was no Saint Elizabeth's, no need for it. There was only the sea, the wreck, and a chance to get in a bubble drum, to set people's lives back in order.

I think I would have kissed her if Church hadn't been standing there behind us. Given that she looked happier and sweeter than I'd ever seen, I think she probably would have let me.

That was my thought when suddenly everything went out of my head except an excruciating pain that cut through my eardrums like a knife. The worst of it lasted about three seconds, and I came out of it seeing Grey holding her ears and cursing, but not looking as nearly mortally wounded as I had felt. I thought my brain would bleed out my ears, but somehow I could still hear.

Grey's voice wailing out in pain. "Oh,
shit!
"

With my head still throbbing, I looked up at Church, who was staring down at us too calmly, with a completely baffled look on his face.

The pain moved out of my teeth enough for me to mutter "Start the engines."

I could hardly hear myself, so I screamed, staring into the blackness off the port stern, where I was sure the noise had come from. "Start the goddamn engines! Get us out of here!"

Mr. Church was fooling with the choke, but before the engines went on, he said, "Evan, it's a perfectly calm night."

"I heard heE We both did!" I could feel my neck pulling forward—trying to see into the blackness—as I wrapped my arms around Grey's head protectively. "She's out there, I can feel it—"

Grey finally quit cursing and pushed herself from under my arms like she had no interest in being protected. She said, "Don't go anywhere yet. I want to hear it again. Maybe we can tell what it is—"

"It's alive." I stared into black upon black. "It's alive."

It had a personality. I just felt sure. Maybe it had something that would love to remind me that certain wrecks could not be found—because they'd been sucked down the hole, below the canyon floor. My nerves of steel felt weak out here, and getting my friends out of trouble at school seemed so paltry. But I saw Grey crawling slowly on her knees to stare into the black abyss off the stern. Grey, who wasn't even taking her panic pills.

I crawled up beside her; saw she was shaking from head to toe, and her jaw shook as she stumbled, "I don't ... think so. Not a thousand cats. It sounds more like a thousand teakettles."

I forced my head to go there, to try to rehear it, to match her nerve. "An air pocket ... scraping against a head of wind."

"It sounded almost metallic. A jet scraping against an air pocket? At six hundred miles an hour?"

"I wish we had a tape deck," I forced myself to say, but my voice cracked halfway through.

She and I looked at each other; feeding off each other's nerve, maybe feeding off a common thought. If a creature lived out here who could screech at you, take people you knew, eat them off the face of the earth, hide from you, torment you, then life wasn't really worth living. Let her come and eat you, too, and fuck the whole thing.

"I don't think what we need is a tape deck." Grey pushed her voice forward, her attempt to sound casual coming out heroic. "There's got to be some sort of a pitch detector that records sounds that even human ears can't register: Did you hear that, Mr. Church?"

He was standing almost over top of us. "I'm afraid I did not."

I shut my eyes for a moment, letting my breath out. "What do you think it is?"

He didn't answer.

"Do you ... think it's alive?" I asked, turning slowly to him.

He was drinking a soda, clutching it in his hand, and it went up to his mouth and he swallowed. "I'd say you're in a bit of a quagmire if it is. According to the tales told, there would be no wreck of the
Goliath
down below, because The She removes all traces of them and sucks them into a hole underneath the canyon floor: Five minutes ago you felt very strongly we were floating over the top of a wreck. So, which is it?"

"I don't know. Well, how would anybody know for sure what happens to whatever The She eats, after she's eaten it?" I asked warily.

"I don't know."

I looked out over the stern, trying to decide if something was watching us, aware of us. I went to wrap my hand around Grey's and she shook me off again, this time more aware of what she was doing.

"I really don't feel like it was alive, but, um, maybe we shouldn't tempt fate until we're sure."

She meant we shouldn't act like lovers on a vessel, which could make The She jealous.

"I think maybe we should just be respectful and be on our way," Mr. Church said. He started the engines. Grey and I stayed on our knees, staring into the abyss, even after he'd put the boat in full throttle. Little lights revealed a following sea out of the canyon, which could make you totally paranoid. I watched the humps chasing us, wondering if they were getting bigger or if it was my imagination. Finally, I felt the boat bumping over the little whitecaps, which meant we were on the shelf and out of the deep.

I felt slightly better but not too safe, remembering the picture in Grey's book of a tentacle reaching all the way to the edge of the harbor and Chandra's tale about Bloody Mary saying a similar thing. But eventually my hands were numb from gripping the metal rail on the stern. I stood up, pulled Grey up, and we went into the cabin and shut the door.