Fatal Journeys

by Lucy Taylor

  “Don’t listen to her,” said Roberta. “Her imagination’s too vivid for her own good. She saw her own reflection in the water and scared herself.”

  Her dismissive tone and obvious desire that the matter be immediately dropped was all it took to spur Harb into manly action. Within minutes, he’d recruited Uncle Frank to assist him in a search while, despite Sonya’s protests, Roberta dispatched Julian back to the construction of the arch. The three of them, Frank, Harb and Sonya, then motored out to the reef in Harb’s thirty-eight foot cruiser, The Midnight Oil, where Frank snorkeled on the surface and Harb made steady inroads into a cooler full of Kalik Gold. Sonya, meanwhile, gnawed her nails, feeling more unsure of herself by the moment and parched as well, since Harb had neglected to stock up on an exotic beverage like water.

  By noon, they’d moved the Midnight Oil a half-dozen times, following the edge of the reef. Sonya had begun drinking beer, trying to get her courage up to enter the water. She knew she should help Uncle Frank—this mission was at her behest, after all—but the mere idea of going underwater made her lightheaded with fear. She could barely bring herself to gaze over the side. As though what was down there, whatever she’d thought was down there, was some sort of evil omen aimed at her. She could not forget the way the dead girl’s fingers had seemed to coax: Come join me, for we both know the truth, you’re looking at yourself.

  Or the memory—vivid now after being so long suppressed—of Vonnie calling to her from behind the boathouse, telling her about the peculiar, frightening dream.

  Harb interrupted her reflection. “There’s a lot of coral down here. You think this is where it was?” He clearly wanted her agreement, but Sonya wasn’t sure. Had they gone out far enough? Too far? If only Julian had come along. He was methodical and tireless and, best of all, he had the lungs of a seal.

  Uncle Frank, meanwhile, was finding only the detritus of passing boats—empty rum bottles and a man’s white deck shoe, a plastic cooler tilted on its side which he reported housed a moray eel that came thrusting out, teeth aglitter like a set of steak knives. It was after this, Frank’s up close and person encounter with the eel, that the two men declared the expedition at an end.

  Uncle Frank must have seen her look of confusion and defeat. He draped a sun-fried forearm across her shoulder and said, “Whatever you think you saw, it’s gone now, hon. Forget it. This is a happy time—your mom’s wedding day tomorrow!” He handed her a Kalik Gold and raised one of his own. “To Olendskis now and to Olendskis of the future!”

  Sonya accepted the icy can, holding it against her throbbing forehead as the yacht motored toward land, the sunlight glancing off the waves like quartz crystals, stinging her eyes. Vonnie, she thought. I saw you. I know I saw you.

  ««—»»

  Back on land, the party had moved outside, people bogeying to a reggae band by the pool, fruity drinks and snacks of grouper fingers, johnnycakes and guava duff being served by red-jacketed waiters.

  Sonya couldn’t bear the thought of chitchat with a horde of tipsy, inquisitive relatives. She grabbed another beer from the cooler and headed up the beach, disconsolate, too embarrassed to face Julian, wondering if she was going crazy.

  Beyond the grounds of the P. I. Hilton and the thatched bungalows of the Sivananda Yoga Ashram, she cut across a field of coconut palms, past a group of fleshy, dark-skinned gussy-maes in bright, ankle-length dresses, toting baskets full of handmade necklaces and trinkets carved from coconut shells. The women called out to her, offering their wares—straw handbags and turtles made of tiny cowries, polished conchs shell with knobby spires and gleaming pink interiors.

  “Morning Missy!”

  “I guh see you on duh beach today?”

  “That be Miss Vonnie from Summerland,” she heard one say and whirled around, mouth open, mute, shocked to be mistaken for her sister. Didn’t these women remember Vonnie’s disappearance, covered at the time in local news? How could they not know?

  Then again, how could she not know whether or not her sister was dead? If Vonnie were still alive, wouldn’t she feel it? For Vonnie had been her other half, as near to her as her own skin, as familiar as her heartbeat.

  As young girls, they’d been inseparable, and although Sonya was shy and bookish and Vonnie a Tom-boy who’d rather hike alone into the forest around their Michigan home than go to dances or muddle over books, they loved each other with the singular devotion of two people who, when looking into each other’s eyes, perceived their own reflections.

  Holidays then were spent at Houghton Lake, in a lofty A-frame set deep in the thick woods, a house mysterious and foreboding as a witch’s fairy tale cottage, constructed of spun sugar and candy canes and secrets.

  Vonnie and Sonya shared the loft at the top of the A-frame, where they could hear the wind rattle and stomp about the roof and imagined that gremlins were using the shake shingled slopes to go tobogganing. They pretended they were in a secret attic, hiding from ogres, or stowed away in the belly of a sailing ship, having barely escaped capture by pirates. They searched the Atlas for exotic-sounding names—Goreme and Peshwar and Cap d’Antibes—and speculated how it would be to live in these exotic places, the new names they’d take, the people they’d pretend to be, the daring exploits they’d undertake together.

  Life was all about pretending, Sonya had thought. The only difference was that most people didn’t seem to know that they were doing it.

  On cold nights, with autumn settling in, they’d snuggle in bed and whisper together about a world that seemed so wondrous and strange or, sneaking outside in the dark, they’d marvel at the silent, star-bright sky, an awe-inspiring spectacle that their parents and even older brother Julian, so shy and so reserved, seemed oddly unaware of.

  One such night, out of the blue, Vonnie had said, “As soon as I’m old enough, I’m going to run away and hide someplace far away. And when I do, Mom and Dad will never find me! Do you know why?”

  Sonya shook her head. She didn’t like to hear Vonnie talk this way, didn’t understand why she would want to leave. Things weren’t that bad in the Olendski household. Dad yelled sometimes and Mom drank a lot and Julian seemed a cipher at times, barely a ghost in his own home, but she knew from school and from TV that other families were unhappy too, and some much worse than theirs.

  Vonnie said, “Mom and Dad will look for me at first, to keep up appearances, but they won’t look for very long. You know why? Because the truth is they’ll be relieved.”

  “That’s silly,” Sonya said. “They love you, Vonnie. Mom and Dad would look for you like crazy. Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Because I see them as they really are, and they can’t stand that,” Vonnie said. A tiny fleck of iridescent blue, a chip of topaz, marred the brown of her left eye, the only obvious, discernible difference between her face and Sonya’s. “It makes them uncomfortable. That’s why when I run away, I know they’ll let me go.”

  “You don’t mean that,” said Sonya airily, parroting her mother.

  Her sister looked at her with disappointment and regret. “I do too mean it! It’s not good for me here and not good for you, either. Can’t you feel it?” In response to Sonya’s blank expression, she went on,”It’s like when you’re just on the verge of coming down with the flu, not sick yet, but your body tingles in a weird, yechy kind of way and the inside of your skin prickles and you know you’ve picked up a nasty bug. Sure enough, the next day you wake up ill. That’s what it feels like to me living here. All the time!”

  “Is this another of your visions?” Sonya scoffed. She knew her sister ‘saw’ or ‘felt’ things sometimes and it scared her. Like the time Vonnie had told her to be extra nice to their math tutor Mrs. Elms, because this was the last time they would see her, and two nights later Mrs. Elms was killed when a drunk driver slammed into her Camry. Or the time that Mr. Beaumont from next door, who was sad because his wife had left him, invited them to see his new puppy, and Vonnie refused to go and told Sonya she mus
tn’t go either. How angry Sonya had been with her sister! And years later, seeing the police cars come, and hearing about Mr. Beaumont’s ‘special room’, where two other little girls from the neighborhood said dreadful things had happened.

  “I don’t have visions,” said Vonnie, “I just get glimpses, like peeking through a curtain. You could do it too, if you’d let yourself. You’ve got the same gift I do, Sonya, maybe more, but you’ve got a wall up around the part of you that sees.”

  What if Vonnie had been right, thought Sonya, and this morning, looking through the clear water, she had actually been given a glimpse beyond the curtain? What if Vonnie had actually drowned three years ago, and she was only now able to ‘see’ it?

  The idea that her sister was truly dead rocked her like a punch. All these years, she had been the only one who held out hope. The rest of the family agreed with Roberta, that Vonnie had been killed by the same man who murdered Havana Brockton, undoubtedly a local man, for everyone know that Bahamian men boozed and brawled and beat their women. In hushed tones, they would add that Vonnie must have gotten involved in something tawdry and awful, for she’d made no secret of her sexual indulgences, had flaunted them, in fact. She’d been with men and women both that last summer on P.I., acted like a hooch-addled sailor on leave, fucking everything that surfed or limbo-danced or slammed Bacardi, the lean ebony dock boys with their bright white smiles and singsong dialects, the drunken, muscled frat boys on summer break, the pasty marrieds looking to be rescued from monogamy and boredom, she’d done them all and laughed about her exploits, she was a whore, a slut, a strumpet, she’d even hinted that…but Sonya wouldn’t, couldn’t, go there.

  She climbed a low ridge, hardly more than a bump of sand and grass, and stared out at the water, trying to triangulate in her mind exactly where she’d dropped the dinghy’s anchor. What she’d seen this morning hadn’t looked like any vision, but a dead body in all its swollen, mottled horror. If a killer was about, maybe even the same person who’d murdered the Brockton girl and her sister, wasn’t it her responsibility to do something?

  Go the police?

  Sonya decided she didn’t want to risk looking even more foolish. The officers of the Royal Bahamian Police Force were no fans of the Olendskis—there’d been too many lawsuits and scandals over the years, disputes over Summerland’s property boundaries, a drunken spat Mother got into at the casino of the Atlantis that made the front page of the Nassau Guardian, Daddy’s swept-under-the-rug fling with a local politician’s wife and whispers of a bastard child—then Vonnie’s disappearance. The police would laugh at her.

  She finished her beer and chucked the can, wishing for another.

  Lovely, I’m turning into a lush like Mother.

  The path she was following curved round again, leading her back toward the beach and an ancient stretch of grey seawall, erected she supposed at the same time as an old fort that had once stood here and decades earlier been torn down. The stones were chipped and cracked like bad teeth, their sides festooned with barnacles and encrusted with kelp.

  Along the dilapidated seawall, she saw a man stretched out on his side, the bottoms of his bare, dirty feet turned toward her.

  Oh drat, she thought, for this spot was special to her, one of the few places she could generally be alone. Then she did a double-take and realized, to her relief and chagrin, that the man was Julian. Rather than call out, though, she stood looking at him with fondness and a pleasant dash of jitters, the way she would always stop a foot or so away from a high balcony, craving the view but fearful of getting too close, afraid the secret urge to leap might prove overwhelming. The truth was she relished watching her brother when he didn’t know she was doing it. Tracing the clean hard lines of his body gave her pleasure. They were angular and cleanly geometric, bronze and sleek and sculpted, like the metal of a copper-colored Lamborghini their father had once owned. The only part of him that moved were a few wisps of hair tossed by the breeze and the lazy rise and dip of his ribcage.

  She said softly, “Hey Julie Boy,” and the way he turned and sat up, languidly, like a lazing cat, made her realize his surprise was only feigned, that he’d been pretending not to know that she was watching. That Julian, in one way or another, was always pretending. Julian, so beautiful and yet so shy, he’d spent his life pretending he didn’t realize others were always watching him, admiring, envying, coveting.

  “Hey Sister Girl, I wondered if you’d come along. I know this is your hideaway. How was the boat ride?”

  “Aside from the fact that Uncle Frank almost capsized the dinghy going into the water and Harb tried to feel me up? It was fucking dandy.”

  He looked stricken. “I’m so sorry.”

  She felt a surge of anger. “I wanted you to come with us. They’d have taken it seriously if you’d been there.”

  “I know, but Mother latched onto me, looked fit to be tied. You know how crazy she can get when she feels things slipping out of her control.”

  “Things like you, me, Harb?”

  “World peace and nuclear disarmament. Not to mention the impending nuptials.”

  “Speaking of which, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you working on the arch?”

  “We finished it, so I took off. Too much drama. You know Mom’s friend Lexy Dalton, the one who married the Hong Kong real estate exec? She got caught going down on one of the waiters behind the boathouse.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “Ha, I’m the one who caught her! I was looking for a place to smoke a blunt and what do I hear but sounds of high-velocity suction? A regular little Hoover, our Lexy.”

  The image made Sonya smile. “Good for her.”

  “And Aunt Willis has taken to her bed with stomach cramps, says the conch fritters were off, so Mother called a doctor over in Nassau to come see to her. Mother’s howling pissed at you, you know. Thinks the whole episode this morning was you getting back at her for marrying Harb.”

  “Oh, I’m mad jealous, for sure” said Sonya, rolling her eyes.

  Julian swung his feet over the wall on the land side and stepped into his sandals, which waited like obedient dogs alongside the wall. He performed a magnificent stretch, like someone waking from profound sleep or a shape shifter climbing back into his skin. Then abruptly, “Do you think Harb is marrying Mother for her money?”

  “Of course he is! Rampling, Elliot, and Chung Construction’s going bankrupt, everyone knows that. Mother’s his recovery plan. Why else would he marry her?”

  “Well, she drinks as much as he does. And she appears to like to fuck.”

  “Which makes a good match in some circles, I suppose.” They were silent a moment, the air whispering back and forth between them like children carrying secrets. Sonya sat down next to her brother. Like him, she sat facing the land but looked back once, quickly, at the water nibbling and lapping at the decaying wall. She was surprised how gentle the waves looked. Bathtub wavelets made by rubber duckies, small and inconsequential, barely there. Looking at them you’d never guess the same water had wrought this much damage to the stones.

  Julian sighed like a man laying down a burden. “Sister Girl, can I ask you something? Don’t get angry. But did you really see a body that looked like Vonnie? You didn’t just imagine it?”

  “Of course I didn’t! You’re as bad as Mother if you think that”

  “I know, but—look, I see things all the time when I’m out snorkeling. Then I dive down for a closer look and surprise! The shark I thought I saw turns out be kelp moving with the current or what looked like a skeleton reaching up from the sand to grab me turns into a half-buried anchor. I get spooked a lot. The light plays tricks. My mind plays tricks. And if you and Uncle Frank and Harb couldn’t find anything…?”

  “I don’t think we were ever in the right place. Uncle Frank and Harb were both three sheets to the wind. And Uncle Frank splashing around like a hooked pelican, it’s a wonder he didn’t draw sharks.”

  “Well, wha
tever you saw, it wasn’t Vonnie. You know that, right?”

  “But it seemed so real, Julian. If you had seen her yourself—look, let’s get the dinghy and go out again. Just for a bit, while we’ve still got lots of daylight. If we don’t find anything, I’ll let it go. I promise.”

  “You’re letting your imagination get the better of you.”

  “You know, it’s funny. That’s the same thing I told Vonnie right before she disappeared, when she told me about this awful dream she’d had.”

  “Really? What was it about?”

  “It was about you, Julian.”

  “Go on.”

  She gave a dismissive little wave, the kind favored by Roberta. “I’d forgotten all about it until this morning when I saw the body, but—it’s silly, Julian, really, Vonnie’s imagination, I’m sure. Forget I brought it up.”

  She expected him to argue with her, was surprised when he only stretched again and yawned profoundly.

  “Let’s walk, Sister Girl.” He held out his hand to her.

  “Now? In this heat?”

  “Hey, we Olendskis are like tropical plants. We thrive in a hothouse environment.”

  She hesitated another moment, then took his hand.

  They stepped down off the wall and started back into the grove of palms, headed inland. There were stones here too, chunks of seawall visible amid the foliage. Sonya realized that the water must have overturned them during a storm and pushed them along, pounding them into the moist soil like fists smashing teeth.

  Julian stopped suddenly, laughing softly as he pulled her to him. He slipped a thumb under the sides of her bikini top and peeled it down. Her back arched like a drawn bow and she pressed her hips against his and they sank together, heavy as the stones around them, into the soft earth, Julian’s mouth and hands frantic as he kept murmuring, “Sister Girl, my Sister Girl,” and Sonya clutched his hair and sighed, “My wicked little boy” and laughed with a delight that was mocking and skittish at the same time and threw herself into him like he was crystalline pure water and she near dead of thirst.