by Lydia Millet
The yacht kids had left us their bag of marshmallows. Pastel colors but full-sized, a rare combo. Jack was delighted. He roasted six at a time, his fingers getting so gooey I had to wash them for him in the lapping tidewater when he was done eating. We sat between our fire and the tall tower from Low’s vision—me, Jack, Shel, Val, and Low. Low and I drank warm cans of beer.
Across the water we heard the beat of dance music, and then we saw fireworks. They blossomed in the sky over the yacht, red, blue, and white flowers. Like it was Independence Day.
And it was, we realized. It was the Fourth.
We played our own music from a boombox, but all we had was a CD of Low’s: folk songs. True to his tie-dyes and sandals, Low liked sixties music. “And still somehow, it’s cloud illusions I recall. I really don’t know clouds . . . at all.”
The batteries ran down.
After the music ended, someone suggested ghost stories. We told the one about the one-handed murderer stalking the teen couple who were making out in their parked pickup. They heard some scratching sounds but ignored them. And when they got out of the truck, they found a hook-hand hanging from the door handle.
Jack squealed.
Then there was a clever one about pale eyes at the bottom of a little girl’s bed. Suspense, suspense, reveal: they were her own big toenails, shining in the moonlight.
Meanwhile, Low was edging closer to me. One of his legs touched one of mine. Acting like it was a regular movement, I shifted mine away.
And decided to speak. Maybe the time had come. Not for Shel, necessarily—he couldn’t lip-read in the dark—but for my brother.
“Hey, Jack? I have to tell you a new story now. But a real one. A story of the future, Jack.”
Jack gazed at me sleepily.
“Evie. Is it about the polar bears? And penguins?”
“Yes, Jack,” I said. “The polar bears and the penguins. And us.”
LATER HE WIPED his eyes and squared his thin little shoulders. My Jack was a brave boy.
I SLEPT LATE the next morning because I’d woken up every time Jack tossed or turned, worried I’d given him nightmares. When I got up, the Cobra had weighed anchor. As far as I could see, there was the flatness of the ocean.
Around me the partygoers slept on, silent lumps in their sleeping bags. Except for Rafe, sprawled on the sand beside the embers of our fire in what appeared to be a toga.
And Jack, who showed me the book he was reading. A mother had given it to him, he repeated.
“Which mother?” I asked.
Because it was called A Child’s Bible: Stories from the Old and New Testaments.
“It was the lady who . . . she wears the flowery dresses?”
The peasant mother. Who fell onto plants.
“That lady gave you a Bible?”
For our parents religious education wasn’t a priority. Driving out of the city for the summer—taking a break from Minecraft on his tablet—Jack had gazed out the car window, pointed at the top of Bethany Baptist Church, and asked my mother what the long plus sign meant.
“It’s a bunch of stories with pictures. There are people and animals, but not as nice as George and Martha,” he said.
“Well,” I said. “I mean. Who is?”
The first story, Jack told me, had a talking snake in it and a lady who really liked fruit. She had my name!
“I don’t like how the snake’s a bad guy in it, though. That’s mean. Did you know snakes smell with their tongues?”
“What’s the story about?” I asked.
“It’s like, if you have a nice garden to live in, then you should never leave it.”
AROUND NOON, WHEN the others were stirring and rising, David yawned for way too long. I could practically see his tonsils. Then he asked: “Hey. Where’s Alycia?”
“Um, she stayed on the boat,” said Dee. “Sailed with them to Rhode Island.”
“What? Oh. Oh, no,” said David.
“Her dad’s going to be seriously ticked off,” said Terry. “And by the way, Rafe ID’d him. Slam dunk. They drove up to the house in the vintage Beamer? Then she jumped out and he followed her. He’s the one with the weak chin, covered by a goatee.”
“Still don’t know which mother it is, though,” said Low.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” said Terry.
“They’ll be the ones getting divorced,” said Rafe.
He’d taken off his toga—underneath he wore swim trunks I recognized as James’s—and was flicking the sand off. It was a sheet. “I wonder what the thread count is on this thing.”
“I scored three parent IDs last night,” said Jen, yawning. “Anyone want to hear ’em?”
“Three?” I asked, incredulous.
“I did better than that. I scored James,” said Sukey.
“Seriously?” said Rafe. He stopped flicking the sheet, shaking his head. “Me too.”
They stared at each other.
Juicy laughed loudly.
The toga sheet had come off James’s own berth, said Rafe (like it was proof).
Sukey said she and James had done it in the cockpit. Was that what you called it, on a ship?
Then Dee claimed she and James had fooled around in the yacht’s rec room, on top of a pool table. Mostly just kissing. He wanted to do more, but she wouldn’t let him.
The three of them tested each other’s accounts by referring to a birthmark, then went on to further details of James’s buff physique.
“Hey! There are little guys around,” I said. “Dial it back, sluts.”
Inside a fort of blankets, Jack was reading George and Martha One Fine Day.
Jen changed the subject, clearly miffed she’d been left out of the James sex club. Especially since—if you believed Dee, and I wasn’t sure I did, for she had been known to lie—even an uptight mouth virgin had made the cut.
Terry looked smug.
“So the game’s practically over,” said Jen. “And why? Because there are ass-kissers in our midst.”
One of us, cozying up to the model, had bragged his father was a director. Just said his name outright. Rhymed off some titles of movies he’d done. All to impress.
It was Juicy. We should have known.
“For shame,” said Rafe. “Shame, double shame.”
Juice hung his head and spat. Kicked at some glowing embers.
Another, trying to get into James’s good graces via a conversation about chaos compounds, had claimed an architect for a mother. Which Jen connected with some talk she’d heard from said mother of renovating a penthouse on Fifth Avenue for a Saudi prince. This was Dee.
And then—the worst, because the most surprising—Terry had been heard making graphic remarks to Tess about the location of female G-spots. How did he know so much? Tess had asked, according to Jen. Said Terry: Because he had a gynecologist in his family.
We all knew who the doctor was. She’d tried to lecture us collectively, over a not-good dinner of tofu dogs, about the risks of human papillomavirus.
Terry groaned and reached for a beer. “It was the Oracle, man!”
“You’re blaming it on weed?” said Sukey. “Pathetic.”
I felt deflated.
“You don’t win till you’re the last kid standing,” pointed out Low. “A lot of us still have a chance.”
“There’s still what, four of you left?” said Jen. “If Evie and Jack count as one?”
“Yeah, I’m still in,” said Sukey.
“And me,” said Rafe.
“And me,” said Low.
Still, the wind was out of our sails. The currency of the game had been devalued.
“But listen, guys,” said Low, “for reals. Up at the great house, when we got food, they said some weather’s on the way.”
“What kind of weather?” asked Dee, startled. She startled easily.
“What kind of weather is there?” said Low. “A big storm. They said if we weren’t back by this morning, they’d come down and get us.�
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We argued about compliance a bit, whether the parents were making up the weather as a pretext for our return—it was hurricane season, sure, but the storms didn’t usually get bad till late August or September.
Our resistance was halfhearted, though. In the distance, over the water, we saw a low bank of clouds. A chill wind was blowing, and the surface of the ocean was flat gray.
Grudgingly we packed up, tore down the peeling tarps and ski poles, and bundled it all into our vessels.
Jen, next to me in the rowboat, was still sulking over James. David was preoccupied, jiggling a leg anxiously, and Jack was melancholy, drawing macaroni penguins in his notebook.
I pushed off and began to row, since the others didn’t offer.
Glancing back, I saw no obvious signs of our stay except some pockmarks and footsteps, charred wood and ashes. A few sticks out of place, maybe. And the tall tower, collapsing as the tide came in. We knew the drill: leave no trace.
Of course, there would always be traces. The trick was to hide them.
We’d left some molecules behind for sure, I thought as I pulled and pushed. But nothing that said who we were. Just skin and nails and hair, cast far and wide into the sea.
3
WE WERE TIRED and dirty, rowing upriver. Everyone wanted showers, and the partyers wanted hangover cures. I was yearning for a few minutes alone.
So when the great house hove into view across the lake I felt like it was home. I could imagine my whole life had been lived there, instead of a drab building in Greenpoint.
I saw myself swimming in the lake every summer, lying on my back in a grassy field naming the constellations. Running full tilt down the dirt road, where the two rows of trees joined in a long arch overhead, my arms flung wide.
Roaming wild in the tumbling woods.
BUT THE PARENTS were in panic mode.
A few cars were still parked in the crescent drive, but most had been driven inland on a supply run. Some fathers were headed outside to nail plywood onto the windows. They stopped us in the foyer and asked Rafe and Terry to help them with the nailing.
Sexist pigs, muttered Sukey. She followed them outside, demanding a hammer.
Jack and Shel took off into the woods.
In the bathrooms mothers were filling buckets from the tubs. In the kitchen they were sorting and counting batteries, lining up flashlights and headlamps on counters. The coolers we’d taken to the beach were commandeered.
Someone was messing with a radio, and phones were charging in every spare outlet.
There was a prickle in the air.
I helped them scoop ice cubes from the freezers into deli bags. My fingers went numb. A TV on the wall showed swirling formations. Forecasters were talking about categories and wind speeds, paths and cones and bands. We’d heard the terms before. There were mandatory evacuations and stubborn folks “riding it out.” Some who would die of sheer stupidity.
Some who would die because they loved their homes. Some who were frail and old. Some others trying to rescue them.
A couple of us took advantage of the newly relaxed rules: carrying an ice bucket for a mother, I passed an open bedroom door. Saw Low fully relaxing on a parental bed. Flipping channels with a remote, trolling for entertainment.
“Shirker!” I said, pointing my finger.
Someone came up beside me. A short father. With a paunch.
He stood there, hands on his hips in a womanish fashion, glaring in.
It was a self-righteous glare. Low took in the situation instantly. His face fell.
“Lorenzo, get up off that bed,” said the father.
Low complied. Lethargically. Defeated.
“You are so busted,” I said.
I left him to his humiliation. Saw Jen checking her makeup in a hallway mirror and told her about the Low ID. “One down, three more to go,” she said.
In the parlor I caught sight of my mother kneeling in front of a liquor cabinet, as though before an altar. “We could also use bourbon, sherry, vodka, and vermouth,” she told her cell. I waved at her, since we hadn’t seen each other in days. She saw me but ignored me completely. “Make it at least four Bulleits,” she said to the phone. “Wait. Do they have the jumbo size?”
EVENTUALLY I GOT to worrying about Jack, so I went outside looking. Jogged past the tennis courts, heading into the treehouse grove.
No Jack there, but I spotted the twin girls playing tug-of-war with a doll. They didn’t hear me approach, I guess, because before I had a chance to call out—planning to ask if they knew where my little brother was—the one named Kay abruptly let go of the doll. Her sister fell onto the ground, flat on her back.
Then Kay picked up a rock, leaned over and bashed her sister on the head with it. Hard.
“What the fuck!” I yelled.
I ran over to Amy—Kay grabbing the doll and scurrying away, grimacing—and fell to my knees in the grass.
“Amy! Amy!”
Blood on the forehead. A visible dent. The kid was pale. No movement.
“Shit, shit, oh shit,” I said.
I hadn’t been trained for this. My Skills for Survival camp in the Poconos had focused on three-legged races and Capture the Flag.
But she was small and light, so despite a voice in my head that asked, Should she even be moved? Oh well, I picked her up and stumbled back to the house carrying her limp body.
DAVID’S MOTHER WENT into hysterics, while someone else called 911. The only doctor among the parents—Terry’s mother, as we knew now—was miles away, filling a shopping cart.
Amy might be concussed, someone said. She’d been knocked out. Despite the fact that no one thanked me, I felt mildly heroic.
By the time the ambulance pulled up and a team of paramedics dismounted, the storm prep had been put on hold. David’s mother leaned over Amy on a sofa, my own mother leaned over her, and some fathers clustered around.
“Is she in a persistent vegetative state?” quavered David’s mother. “Does she have brain damage?”
My mother patted her shoulder robotically with a flat, board-like hand. “Unlikely,” she said. “From a statistical perspective.”
A natural nurturer, my mother.
The paramedics came in and did their thing—I wasn’t close enough to see, but soon it was clear that Amy would survive, non-comatose. Her legs, clad in red-striped ankle socks and pink Hello Kitty Mary Janes, scissored back and forth on a couch cushion, kicking. I heard a telltale whine. “Mommy! Kay’s so mean! She hit me! She took Lacy!”
I still needed to find Jack. Maybe Kay had hit him with a rock, too. Run away with his most prized possession (a two-foot-tall plush penguin called Pinguino). Maybe the budding psycho was doing some stockpiling of her own: other kids’ toys.
A few minutes in, I flicked on a light in the pantry looking for food and saw David, who’d been notably absent from the crowd around his injured sister. He was sitting on the floor in the corner. With a bottle beside him.
“You didn’t get enough to drink last night?” I said.
“I drank Cokes on the yacht,” he said. “Stayed sober. Thought I had to monkey-wrench.”
“Say what?”
“I didn’t know Alycia’d stay there,” he said. “She didn’t say anything. Too busy flirting with some pig of a father. It’s on her. Right? Sleeping with the enemy. And I didn’t know a storm was coming, either. I had no idea.”
“What do you mean, monkey-wrench?”
“Those yacht parents are the worst. Those are the people that ate the planet.”
“David. What did you do?”
“I was thinking of a puncture in the fuel tank first. But you know. Gas in the ocean, killing fish. I didn’t want to sink to their level. So I just coded a little virus into the nav system,” said David.
I stared at him. I’d had no idea he was so hardcore.
“You should have seen those parents. Heard them. They were like rotten meat.”
“But. That vir
us. You mean . . .”
“The yacht won’t make it to Newport,” he said. And raised the bottle, took a swig.
It was champagne. It foamed around his mouth. Dripped down his neck and soaked his shirt.
“Listen,” I said. “They motored off with no problem. Their crew can fix it. Probably have already.”
David shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
He looked so dejected that I sat down beside him, nudged him with my shoulder.
“They’re all about backup systems. Right? And they’re filthy rich. They’ll land on their feet. I’d bet on it.”
By and by I heard a noise of hammering, and then a mother asking for help finding dog food.
Storm prep was on again, and I left David to his guilt. I had to find my brother.
IN THE ATTIC Jack had set Pinguino and his book collection on his bottom bunk, but he was nowhere to be seen.
In the greenhouse Jen and Terry were making out. They pulled apart when I stuck my head in.
“Really?” I said.
“Hey, they told us to harvest the produce,” said Jen.
“And we couldn’t resist,” said Terry, full of himself. “I mean this is our place. We have history here.”
“Our place? Gross. Please shut up,” said Jen.
They went back to picking cherry tomatoes off a vine. The greenhouse was four walls of broken glass and splintered struts, but a few vegetables still grew in its mess of weeds.
In the toolshed there was no one.
In the boathouse there was no one.
In the treehouses there were only initials.
But after a while, in a muddy cove of the lake that was hidden from view of the house by a screen of scrub and bulrushes, I found the small boys.
They had a shoebox and two nets—butterfly nets from the toy closet. They were squatting beside the box, putting the lid on, when I approached.
“Jack, I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” I said.
“Sorry, Evie,” he said.
“What are you doing down here?”
“We’re collecting.”
He liked to make nature collections—moss, flowers, rocks—and build miniature dioramas in trays or baking pans. He’d nestle water features among the plants, sometimes containing minnows or tadpoles he’d scoop up in cups and jars and place into his scenes. Pretty soon he’d get concerned for their well-being and carry them back to the lake.