She went down the stairs as silently as possible. Some of the doors along the hall were open, but the only one with any noise coming from it was solidly closed. She went up to the door and pressed her ear as hard against it as she could.
“We haven’t started,” Aidan said. He sounded defensive. “I haven’t even put the tow fish in. He’s going on some numbers alone, which aren’t that reliable.”
“Just let him,” Julia said. “Let him do what he wants.”
“I’m just trying to—”
“Enough,” she said.
Clio backed away from the door quickly as she heard steps approaching it. Julia walked out.
“I just came down for breakfast orders!” Clio said chirpily. “It sounded like you guys were awake.”
Julia seemed surprised to find her there, smiling, wearing a paper hat.
“Just coffee,” she said. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” Clio said. “I’ll take Aidan’s order too.”
It was completely obvious that Julia didn’t want Clio going into that room, but she wasn’t about to tackle her and throw her to the ground to stop her either.
“I’m just going to check on them,” Julia muttered, heading down the hall.
“Okay!” Clio said brightly.
It was probably good to have your possible future stepmother think you were a little nuts. It would keep her on her toes and dissuade her from trying to sit her down and have touchy-feely talks. Not that she expected that from Julia. Julia looked like she might head-butt people in meetings.
Aidan sat at his computer in the corner of the tight little room, rotating slowly back and forth, his arms wrapped tightly across his chest. He wore a thinning, torn T-shirt, and his hair was still wet and shaken up.
“You want my order?” Aidan said, the annoyance still in his voice. “Okay. I’d like burned bacon, soft scrambled eggs, and toast, as long as the bread isn’t whole grain.”
“We need to talk,” she said.
“Do we?”
“Yes. We do. You can get online. You came into the kitchen last night to make sure I knew this.”
“No,” he said. “I came to tell you the wonderful meaning of your name and to enrich your life.”
“Here’s the thing,” she said, leaning over. “I need to send a note to someone. You can help me send that note.”
The skin on his cheekbones got very taut for a moment.
“Could,” he said. “But can’t. Again, your dad’s rules.”
“Why?”
“If I told you,” he said. “I’d be telling you. So I can’t tell you.”
“Listen, haircut…”
“Did you just call me haircut?” he asked.
“Yes. You know there’s no reason we can’t go online. It’s crazy.”
“Why’d you call me haircut?” he asked, touching his hair. “Is it because I have a great haircut?”
“You figure it out,” she answered.
“I don’t make up the rules,” he said.
“Well, you can’t stop me from sitting in here,” she said. “I need somewhere to practice my Mongolian throat-singing. You know us rich kids. We take lots of weird lessons.”
She started to warble a deep gargling noise.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re not going to sit in here doing that.”
“You’d be amazed at what I’d do,” she said.
“No. I really wouldn’t.”
“I won’t tell on you. And you should remember this. I make your food.”
She pointed to her hat. He got up and shut the door.
“Whether you like it or not,” he said, “I work for Julia. Which means I now work for your dad. And I actually need my job. If I break the rules, I could lose my job. And I can’t let that happen. Do you understand? Please don’t mess this up for me.”
The sudden seriousness stopped her. Whatever her dad was doing, maybe Aidan was as trapped as she was. Her father had tied up Aidan’s job in this scheme, whatever it was.
“Are you joking?” she asked.
“Do I sound like I’m joking? Your dad figured out that we were drinking the other night too. I got a lecture from Julia for about an hour. I really don’t want another one.”
He pursed his lips and stared at the wall. Clio could tell that it had bothered him to say that. He wasn’t as powerful as he would have liked to make out. He was being ordered around by everyone too.
“Fine, haircut,” she said, getting up. “I won’t make trouble for you. But you’ll eat what I make. That’s my job.”
The dive lasted about forty-five minutes, after which Clio’s dad and Martin emerged dripping from the water. All of the preparation and general hoopla didn’t come to much. They peeled off their gear and wet suits and quietly went back to what they had been doing before.
Clio watched this from the glass doors, shook her head in misery, got her sketchbooks, and sat down on the plush living room carpet. Today she had a nice, complacent subject: Elsa, sleeping again. She stuck her earphones in and flipped to a new page. Without realizing it, she passed an entire hour doing the sketch. Time slid past so easily when she was absorbed in her drawing. She only stirred when Aidan passed in front of her carrying what looked like a massive toolbox. He certainly kept a lot of toys down there.
“Hello, haircut,” she said. “Going fishing?”
There was a little stiffness in his demeanor now. And he was clearly working. She set the book down on the floor and followed him out onto the deck. He set down the box and removed a small cylinder.
“I guess that’s some piece of equipment,” she said. “Is it a camera?”
He said nothing.
“Come on,” she said. “You’re not really giving anything away by telling me that. I’m just curious what you put in the water. I’m not trying to get you fired.”
A pause. The eyes flashed. He was still in serious mode.
“It’s a tow fish,” he said. “It’s a reader that drags in the water and sends out the signal for our side-scan sonar. The sonar creates a picture of the ocean floor. Depending on conditions, we can usually get a fairly clear look. It doesn’t take a photograph—more like a sonogram.”
Clio eyed the long tube and the way Aidan carefully handled it.
“My dad didn’t listen to you this morning,” she said. “You should get used to that.”
Aidan tugged on the cable connected to the device to check the connection but didn’t reply. He stood up and lowered it off the side and carefully secured it.
“No one likes the tech guy,” he finally said.
He cleared his throat and adjusted his massive watch. It was one of those silver-and-gold things with six dials on the face.
“That’s a serious watch,” she said. “Looks like an astronaut’s watch or something.”
“Do you really have to say something about everything?” he asked. He self-consciously stopped touching the watch and stuck his hand into his pocket. It was a deep cargo pocket; he got his whole wrist in there.
“You’re one to talk,” she said. She turned on her heel and went back inside, sitting back down with her sketchbooks. Her heart was beating a little faster. It was like she was allergic to him. She should just stay away.
He came in after a moment, quietly shutting the glass doors.
“I’d like pasta tonight,” he said. “Lasagna.”
Obviously, her remark had caught up with him and he didn’t want to lose out on his game. She didn’t look up. Instead, she fingered through her pencils intently.
“If by lasagna,” she said, “you mean fish, you’re in luck.”
Aidan bent down and picked up her sketchbook, flipping through its pages.
“This must be your boyfriend, huh?” he said, dangling the book down, the page open to one of the drawings of Ollie. “Nice tie. Very ironic. I love people who dress all ironic. It’s so deep, you know?”
“Don’t be bitter, haircut,” she said, taking the book back. “It
makes your eyebrows come together.”
Rules and Transgressions
Being trapped had paid off for Clio in the past. For example, being trapped in the rain. That was how Dive! had been made.
During the summer that Clio was eleven, the family went to the beach for a week. It rained every single day, turning the little yard in front of their rented beach house into a mud pool and forming dangerous swells on the ocean. They tried to go to the boardwalk a few times, but it was frankly pretty depressing to run from one waterlogged booth to the next or to drink frozen lemonades while soaking wet and freezing in the air-conditioning.
Clio’s mother was studying restoration techniques on artifacts taken from the sea and spent most of that week curled up on the couch under a blanket, occasionally reading passages out loud. Clio started to trace the path of a boat on her sketch pad. Her dad watched her doing this. He suggested that since they couldn’t go anywhere, they make something. A game. Something based on what Clio had drawn. They were like that then, she and her dad. It was like they had one mind.
It was Clio who drew the board design, carefully working at it with a ruler and a set of drawing pencils. Her dad crafted the initial rules. They worked back and forth, taking each other’s ideas. What started as a pastime for one afternoon became an all-consuming obsession for the remainder of the trip, and their return home, and the next three months. They started trying it out on family and friends. Everyone commented on how good it was. How playable it was. How amazing Clio and her father were.
This encouragement gave her dad an idea. He decided to package it up and shop it around. Clio could still remember the day that they got the phone call that it had been purchased by Botzoo, a major New York game company. The video game version was what really brought in the money. People were playing it on their cell phones and their computers. It was everywhere.
The fact that a popular game was made by a handsome man and his eleven-year-old daughter (and that they were even depicted on the packaging) made for a good story. For almost a year, Clio and her father were the subjects of newspaper stories, early-morning news programs, and endless online chatter. That was when her father decided regular school wasn’t good enough for Clio, not when they had a sudden swell of income and opportunity. They would learn about the art and culture of the world directly. So, at twelve, Clio said good-bye to her friends at school. From then on, it was tutors and travel, drawing lessons and trips.
And in her memory, it had all been pretty great, right up until the end.
Sitting in the Sea Butterfly, Clio tried to reconcile this in her head. She remembered liking those trips then. Everything seemed perfect, like a fairy tale. Her life was charmed. The fall had come so fast, and since then, nothing had ever been quite right. This trip was just the most extreme expression of this “not rightness” so far.
When six people share a fairly small, confined space, two things become important. The first is personal space. Everyone had a few cubic feet to call their own, a place to retreat to. Even Clio and Elsa, who had no true personal space, came to an understanding. Everything on the right side of the room was Elsa’s, everything on the left was Clio’s. An invisible line divided the center of the bed, marked by the edges of their folded comforters. Sometimes Clio could take a long bath, just for the excuse of having a little room completely to herself for a while. Julia and her father kept up the ruse of separate bedrooms, and since they slept downstairs, Clio never had to watch them going into her father’s room each night.
The second element of survival was routine. The routine got her from day to day, and if she could get from day to day, weeks would go by. And if weeks went by, she would get to land. And land meant contact with Ollie.
There was breakfast in the morning. Dishes. Elsa’s morning nap. Lunch. Clio drew for longer and longer stretches in the afternoons, filling her notebooks. Preparing and clearing dinner took at least two or three hours in the evening, after which there would be some seriously awkward conversations. There were attempts at card games and one disastrous night in which her dad suggested charades, and then people would scatter to their little corners. Night always came early.
Clio watched the routines of others. For those involved with the mission, the days were full. Generally, Aidan and Julia worked downstairs, though Julia could also be found reading or writing in the living room. Martin and her father spent most of their time in the wheelhouse, controlling the boat, or diving. There was a dive almost every single day. Nothing ever seemed to come of these dives, not that Clio knew what they were looking for. They would stop the boat, send up the diving flag, and Martin and her dad would go in. Then they’d come up, and more meetings would take place.
When not sleeping or talking about Alex, Elsa spent her time “revising for A levels,” which Clio eventually figured out meant that she was preparing for some extremely serious tests that would determine her future. The floor of the Champagne Suite was often littered with notes in French and Italian. Elsa also had the habit of sucking on lemon wedges all day and leaving the remains on her bedside stand. Put her in the sun with a textbook, a lemon, and some suntan lotion, and Elsa was a happy girl. She didn’t seem to care at all what the others were doing—the only thing she didn’t like was that Aidan was elusive, frequently locked away with her mother.
The door-locking was something Clio paid very special attention to. The downstairs door to the workroom was constantly shut. When her father and Martin dove, she would sometimes go down and stand in front of it, and she would hear Julia snapping at Aidan about something. That room was definitely Aidan’s territory and was definitely the source of all Internet access. He sometimes stayed in there in the evenings, maybe working, maybe communicating with the outside world.
And so the week went on.
On the tenth afternoon, Clio realized that everything she had been planning to use for lunch wasn’t really edible. The bread had gone moldy, and there was only a tiny bit of meat and cheese and no more canned tuna. No soup or lettuce or pasta. No more lemons for Elsa to suck on. This was a clear, definite sign that they would have to return to land—but this fact had to be presented carefully. If she came out and told her father that there was no food, he would insist that there was. The trick was to put out really bad food, the dregs, and let him figure it out for himself.
“Oh yes,” Clio thought, pinning on her name tag. “This is the sign.”
There were so many dregs to choose from. Mushy olives. A handful of crackers. A single cup of the by-now-ancient curry. Some plain rice. A single slice of ham. Clio arranged it all very carefully, maximizing its misery factor. When it was all ready, she decided to go and get Aidan personally. She could take a little additional pleasure in walking him to his lunch of doom.
The door of the workroom was unlocked, so she pushed it open. To her surprise, no one was there. There was no noise anywhere on the downstairs level. She walked along and tried the doors, knocking on each one and trying the handles. No one was in any of the rooms. Only Julia kept her bedroom locked, but she clearly wasn’t there.
Clio returned to the workroom. The only things on the main table were two large charts that showed water depths and obstructions. There was a notepad on the side with a few numbers and letters scrawled in a jangled, masculine hand. This was probably Aidan’s writing and clearly the writing of someone who ordinarily used a keyboard. The strokes were rough and jerky.
Aidan’s laptop sat in the far corner, at his makeshift desk. There were crushed soda cans next to it. The screen was pushed halfway down.
Looking at someone’s laptop was a clear breach of privacy under any circumstances. But in this environment, the crime was ten times worse. Then again, these were not normal circumstances. This could be it—the opportunity, right here in front of her. She could just quickly check her e-mail and send a message to Ollie. Maybe one to Jackson, too, asking for advice. Maybe Jackson would agree to keep an eye on what Ollie was up to at the store. Why hadn’t Clio th
ought of this sooner?
She pushed the screen up carefully. The screen saver was on. She tapped the space bar gently, and it woke up. Aidan was running some program she’d never seen before—something obviously scientific. There was a graph on the screen, a little mountain range of a line spiking up and down. It probably had something to do with the sonar that he had dropped into the water. There was a key near the bottom that said Bell Star and a list of what looked like measurements. She briefly wondered what kinds of bells and stars Aidan would be studying. At the very bottom of the screen, though, were two little folded-up windows, one of which was Google, the other, a Yale e-mail system.
“Oh my God,” Clio said to herself.
It was sad how exciting this was. She stood there, unsure of what to do. This was clearly her shot—but then again, that meant invading Aidan’s privacy. It was possible that if she touched the computer, something would go wrong with the graph on the screen.
The temptation was painful. Truly, physically painful. She sat down and stared at the screen, trying to figure out what to do.
“What are you doing?”
Clio turned with a little yelp to find Julia in the doorway.
“No one was in here,” Clio said.
“Please don’t touch that,” Julia said, nodding at the computer.
“I wasn’t…” Clio said. And she hadn’t been. “I didn’t.”
Julia wasn’t buying that for a minute.
“I came down to tell you about lunch,” Clio said. “There’s lunch.”
Aidan came up behind Julia but stopped when he saw Clio sitting at his chair.
“I wasn’t,” Clio said again.
“There’s lunch,” Julia said to Aidan. “Maybe we should all go up.”
The sad buffet that Clio had laid out didn’t go down so well under these circumstances. Her father was standing over it, looking deeply unimpressed.
“We need to talk,” he said. “Upstairs.”
Nothing in the world is more humiliating than being ordered around by your parents in front of other people. The only thing that would make it worse would be putting up a fight, so Clio shrugged and followed him to the wheelhouse.
Girl at Sea Page 11