Water Memory

by Daniel Pyne

  He could have been an Oxford man, but for the immigrants and the quotas.

  “I know. I told him.”

  Robbens half listens to a boilerplate lecture that the rep should know better than to give. Ah, but then Drew’s just doing his job, isn’t he?

  “I’ll be emailing you the ship registry documentation and hostage list so the families of passengers and crew can be contacted. I can scan the passports if that at all matters. Whatever else will you be needing on your end? The holding party is anxious to close.”

  Overlooking another bay, the Chesapeake, a few hours later, from the Carey Business School library (which classmate Farhid has dubbed the Toxic Asset Incubator, because three recent graduates just escaped doing federal time for bundling bad loans), Jeremy Troon has commandeered a coveted cubicle with a view and downed two Red Bulls to get his thinking razor sharp. The seminar presentation feedback was excellent, and he was looking forward to Marketing and Statistics because numbers come easily to him, concrete and predictable. But a phone call from some thick-accented travel agency representative has him up and pacing, agitated, trying to keep his voice modulated because a few of his annoyed classmates are already looking up from their notes and textbooks with incurious expressions.

  “Slow down; say again?” But he doesn’t wait for the rep to repeat anything. “Well, she didn’t specify a container ship, but yeah, my mother is taking a cruise. Aubrey Sentro. Correct. What’s up?” The answer he gets is droll, dry, and matter of fact, but it stops Jeremy short; he shakes his head, struggling to process what he’s hearing. “What? Pirates. No. No. That can’t be right.”

  For a moment he just listens, the rep’s words jangling, random vowels and consonants, as if Jeremy needs to translate them from a foreign language. Ship seizure? His mother unaccounted for?

  “This is nuts. When was this? Where?” He starts to move again, just to be doing something. “Well, if she’s on the passenger list, why isn’t she on the hostage list?”

  Jeremy wanders through the stacks, looking for privacy, unable to find it. “Who did you say you worked for?” The caller repeats a generic name that slips out of Jeremy’s head again as soon as he hears it. He can’t stop walking. Some corporate ass covering ensues, so Jeremy cuts the man off. “Look, I couldn’t give a shit about insurance—what are you, what are you—?” He’s never been good at this, crises. Or surprises. What the hell is his mom doing on a freighter? He thinks: I gotta call her. I’ll just call her, and she’ll be at home, and this is all some kind of crazy mistake.

  “Wait. Who died? What are you—is my mother dead?” His mind goes blank, his stark panic spiking, fueled by caffeine. “How do you know that? How do you know she’s not?”

  An undergraduate seeking an empty carrel squeezes past him, smelling of sweet-scented vape and giving Jeremy a worried side-eye. “That one’s taken,” Jeremy covers the phone to hiss when the student heads for his vacant window-side carrel.

  “Oh Jesus, what does that mean, she’s not part of the package?” He knows he’s on the verge of shutting down. He needs to get outside; he can’t concentrate. “What are you telling me? My mother’s on her own?” The caller tries to explain again in the irritating accent: no need to panic, fluid situation, so much they don’t know yet.

  Fuck.

  Fresh air. Privacy. Clear his head, and yes, deal with this—Jeremy can deal with this. He steps from the stacks into a cavernous central atrium, its long maple tables filled with students, and he beelines for the exit. His free hand slaps a rhythm against his thigh. He’s trying to keep his voice low, measured. “What? Can you just—can you just tell me—what the hell do you know?!”

  His voice breaks. Everybody in the library is looking up at him.

  He shouts, “Fuck.”

  And keeps walking.

  The internet café—ByteMe—is dim, cooled, crowded with mostly young men wearing headphones and playing online games or poker or streaming porn, except for Castor Zeme, who’s been running a Google search for Aubrey Sentro and all variations of it on a filthy Dell computer and getting no results.

  Or nothing for Aubrey, anyway. There’re other Sentros on social and business sites: Facebook, Instagram, Ancestry.com, and one confusing listing for a Jeremy Troon at the Carey School of Business in Maryland, USA. At first Castor thinks it’s some kind of search engine glitch. He’s on Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn—Castor clicks through to Jeremy’s online résumé. No mention of Aubrey Sentro, but clearly there must be a connection. There’s one smiling photo of a young man with the eyes of the woman who killed Pauly.

  Castor double-checks Sentro’s passport photo. Not really a resemblance, but for the eyes.

  He digs in his pocket for a cell phone, the woman named Sentro’s Android, which he’s had hacked open by a one-eyed computer repairman in a shop off Central Avenue.

  It takes a while for the phone to turn on. He thinks about his brother, already buried and cold in the hard potter’s field clay of Saint Ignatius Cemetery on the rocky hills to the south of town. There has to be a reckoning. This woman is more than just part of the cargo.

  The home screen glows with a picture of two young children; Castor flips through the menus, finds Aubrey Sentro’s address book, a “friends and family” sublisting, and there it is: Jeremy.

  “Hi, yes. Yeah. They connected me to you, said you might be able to—yeah.”

  Sentro’s son has found his secluded space outside the library to make another fraught call, and he’s weathered a few layers of federal bureaucracy to get this far.

  “Well, I’m not sure how this works. My name is Jeremy Troon; I need to talk to someone about a missing American citizen.” The functionary on the other end of the call proceeds to recite some bureaucratic boilerplate, but Jeremy is growing pretty frustrated with all the runaround and keeps going. “She’s a passenger on a cargo ship that’s been hijacked, and—” He’s interrupted again, something about jurisdiction, so Jeremy just keeps talking over her. “Sentro. Aubrey Sentro, S-E-N-T-R-O. I just learned about it from—” The female voice on the other end tries to cut him short, some kind of accent—is it possible an American law enforcement agency would use a call center in another country? “What, no, no, please, don’t put me on hold again. NO, wait, can you just . . . wait.” She puts him on hold, lo-fi hip-hop on a loop. Jeremy’s cell phone is humming with an incoming call; his juddered brain is redlining; the screen caller ID says Mom.

  Thank God.

  The voice returns, offering to connect him with someone else, probably a low-level drone in the State Department.

  “No, can you just. Wait. I said WAIT. Shit. No, no, I’m getting a call coming in from her; can you please just”—the hold music bumps again—“fuck.”

  He toggles and accepts the incoming. “Mom?”

  “No.”

  No.

  “Who is this?” The voice of this Troon sounds agitated and strained. Castor Zeme crafts a faint mournful grin: All for the better, yeah? What he’d be saying to his brother, if not for the bitch.

  “Izzit Jeremy I’m speaking to now?” Finger in his ear, Castor tries to block out the gamer din of the ByteMe main room.

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Jeremy, how are you, mate? I’m calling about—”

  “Where’s my mother?”

  “Ah, that’s it, innit?”

  “Is she alive?”

  “C’mon. We’re civilized men here.”

  “Are we?”

  “Yah.”

  “But you have her.”

  Castor tries to imagine the American on the other end of the call: callow, rich, in a cold sweat over his missing ma. “We have her.” Troon comes across a lot older than Castor expected. That’s helpful. Be his own man, make decisions. “We have her, my friend.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What? Where is she?”

  “Ah, I’mma say no to that, just yet.”

  “What?”

/>   Gotcha. “You want to take a sec to catch your breath?” Castor tips back on his café stool. The kid sounds thoroughly gutted. It’s all good.

  “Where is she? What do you want?”

  “Wind down. I’ll be getting to that directly.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “He wanted a hundred and fifty thousand dollars; I got him down to eighty.”

  “You haggled with them? For Mom?”

  An agitated Jeremy talks across the barista station to his sister, who he sometimes forgets just turned twenty-five, all grown up, small boned and pretty, with breasts and so forth, hips, long legs, raccoon mascara and ashy lipstick, bright tattoos on pale biceps peeking out under her sleeves, and several examples of what Jeremy believes to be unfortunate piercings.

  When was the last time she cared what he thought?

  “I wasn’t sure he’d respect me if I didn’t—”

  Jenny bites this thought off before he can finish it. “Pay it! Get Mom back, Jemmy!”

  “Wait.”

  “Use my fucking half of Dad’s trust, if that’s what you’re acting so squirrelly about.” Jenny turns her back on him and guns a Frappuccino blender.

  “Will you wait and let me explain?”

  “Just do what you have to do.”

  Jeremy resents that he needs to justify to her his reservations. “Look. We gotta be smart about this. It could be, I dunno, a Nigerian scam or something. Old people are susceptible to all kinds of online nonsense. They had a whole series on NPR. What if they don’t even have her?”

  “What does Nigeria have to do with anything? You said it was South America.”

  “Figure of speech. Nigerian scam, it’s like . . .” He decides not to elaborate. “Trust me on this; it’s an internet thing, Jen. Where you make wild demands and get people to send you money. An online grift. Focus for me?” The cute cashier pushes three more empty venti cups down the line for Jennifer to attend to.

  “They have her phone. And her passport.”

  “So they say.”

  “Do the people she works for know?”

  Chagrined at having completely forgotten about calling Solomon Systems in his consternation and embarrassed that his sister thought of it first, Jeremy tries deflecting by wondering aloud if the kidnap insurance they carry, if they carry it, would even cover employees on vacation.

  Jenny presses. “Did you talk to them?”

  “I put in a call to them, yes,” he lies, feeling trapped. “Getting back to me. First they’d heard of it,” Jeremy insists with as much sincerity as he can, hoping to get the conversation back on track.

  “Capitalist fuckers.”

  Jeremy frowns. “I thought Mom hates boats.”

  “That time Dad took us all waterskiing.”

  “Exactly. She stayed on the dock and fed Beer Nuts to the seagulls.”

  “Mom.” Suddenly emotional, fighting tears that slick her eyes, his sister lets steam blast from the milk foamer and swipes it truculently with a towel. “She did hate boats. Still does. I talked to her.”

  “When?”

  Jenny packs espresso in the portafilter, cranks it into the machine. “She phoned me, from a port in Savannah, I think. That’s Georgia, right? Or down there, anyway. Called to tell me she was taking a cruise, Sorry I didn’t connect before I left, last-minute thing—you know, her usual yak-yak—and Oh, don’t worry about me, Jenny. I don’t know what to think.

  “And I was like, You fucking leave without talking to me? And then we got in an argument and . . . anyway.” Visibly rattled, Jenny fumbles the handles and knobs of her espresso machine like the stops on a pipe organ she’s never played before.

  “She tell you about the cargo ship?”

  “I can’t remember. Shit. Anyway.”

  For a moment, Jeremy watches her try to work, spilling ice, fumbling for cups, and he broods about his sister’s complicated relationship with their mom. He may look like his mother, but Jenny shares every shred of her singular, fervid, and resolute spirit, despite both their endless denials. Sometimes, when they clash, it’s like they’re fighting with themselves.

  Jennifer almost spills the next order as she sets it too hard on the counter. “Grande half-caf skinny latte, no foam, for Ginger, on the bar!” Her voice sounds strained.

  “Typical Mom, huh?” Jeremy thinks out loud.

  “Not really. Normally we don’t know what the hell she’s up to.” Jennifer wipes her eyes with her shoulders. “I’m sure she didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.”

  “Look at you.”

  “Shut up.” She says it without enmity and smiles at him sadly.

  “Says the daughter who keeps insisting she’s disowning her mother for not being around enough growing up.”

  “Shut, Jemmy.”

  “Dropped out of school? Shacked up with a pangender videographer.”

  “They were just a friend.” Another frantic spin around the espresso dials; he can see she’s distracted, and over the squawk of a double shot squeezing out without a cup to catch it, Jennifer says, “Shit,” then looks up at him. “We have to go get her.”

  “We? What?”

  “She’s out there by herself.” She looks past him into the shop. “Ginger! Grande half-caf skinny latte, no foam!”

  Jeremy says, “I’m meeting at six with this federal agent I talked to.”

  “FBI?”

  “He says he can’t officially open an investigation—”

  “Why not?”

  “No jurisdiction. Plus the US doesn’t negotiate with kidnappers or terrorists.”

  “He fucking said it?”

  “In those exact words, yes. But maybe—”

  Waving her hands like a traffic cop, Jennifer cuts her brother off. “No no no. Jeremy, the kidnappers are going to kill her. Isn’t that what the guy said? If we don’t bring them the money?”

  “Dude said he wants it wired.”

  “Fuck that. Into the void? No. Straight swap. Money for Mom. And we gotta have eyeballs on it, make sure they let her go.”

  “Listen to you.”

  “I know. This is insane.”

  “Face-to-face is not what they said.”

  “Are they going to turn it down if you bring it? Cash? I don’t think so.”

  “Me? What happened to ‘we’?”

  “Fine. I’ll go. I’ll just quit here, but you’ll have to put the ticket on your—”

  “No, it’s just, goddamn it”—he rambles over her—“so unbelievable. What a fuckup. You know, yours wasn’t the only life she ruined.” It just blurts out, and Jeremy is shamed by this childish accusation. He gropes for justification. “What if this is just another one of her lame-brained escapades, you know? Like that penny stock thing I had to bail her out of when Dad was dying? Fifty thousand dollars—she thought she’d make some extra money right during the whole depressing ordeal with his chemo and blood stuff, which you were too young to even—”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “And the time she totally missed your graduation. And I had to go to the fucking parents’ buffet.”

  “She had that emergency, with work.”

  Jeremy stares at his sister, all wound up, incredulous. “You’re defending her?” He feels his face flush; his hands are trembling. “What the fuck, Jenny? How does a goddamn paper pusher for some reinsurance company get kidnapped?”

  “I don’t know.” Jenny looks broken. “I don’t know.”

  Jeremy tumbles back from his tantrum, chastened. “Okay. Sorry. Okay.”

  “Excuse me?” a third voice interjects.

  But he’s still griping: “Who takes a cruise on a goddamn cargo ship, anyway? Fail. Fail. She’s always doing this, Jenny; she’s always . . .”

  Jenny asks, “Always what?”

  “You know.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Jennifer says it so softly her brother barely h
ears her. “We have to get her. She’s nobody, the person who slips through the cracks. And nobody else cares.”

  “Miss. Excuse me.” A short, burly customer in a coat and tie shoulders up, having evidently overheard enough to know this can’t be as important as his order. “Miss?”

  Jennifer ignores the man. “One of us goes; one of us stays here. In case,” she says, leaving the obvious apprehension hanging, eyes shiny with anxious tears. Jeremy stares at his sister. Small and fierce and hopelessly delicate. They were forced to rely on each other growing up. But oddly, she was often his protector.

  It scares him to say it: “I will. Go, I mean.” He needs to do this, for her, for his mom, for himself.

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Miss, but do you plan on making me my cold brew sometime this year, or should I talk to the manager?”

  Jeremy spins on the man, spits out, “If you don’t back the fuck off, Jeeves, I’m gonna rip you a new piehole and feed you a Cleveland steamer. With extra foam.”

  You could hear a pin drop, suddenly, in the city-center coffee emporium. All eyes on the barista station. The suit-and-tie man’s face has stewed to an unholy shade of red.

  “Jeeves?” Jenny cracks a brittle smile for her brother. “Save some for the bad guys, Vin Diesel. Damn.” And to the customer, as if this were all in the course of normal business, she says sweetly, “I’m so sorry. Coming right up, sir. On the house. My bad.”

  “Fucking Mom.” Jeremy slaps the bar hard and walks out, pissed at the world.

  Ice tumbles into a big translucent cup, iced coffee from a temperature-controlled carafe, plastic straw that will wind up with all the other trash in the North Atlantic Gyre. Her hands won’t stop shaking.

  Maybe she should go.

  She’s the one who gave him the hated nickname, but he let it stick; they were best friends growing up, despite his four-year head start on her. He irritates her; he annoys her; Jenny worries about him, even if he is sometimes an insufferable asshole. Maybe she should go, to wherever, and get her mother, instead of him. The day their father died, Jeremy’s junior year at Hopkins, he was a chocolate mess—blew off two finals, flunked the classes, got put on academic probation. He said he didn’t want to make excuses, never told their mom. After she simmered on it for a couple of weeks, Jenny biked to campus, tracked down both professors, and, aided by copious and only slightly inauthentic tears, got them to agree to let her brother take the tests late.