The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  JOSH

  I can’t believe my brother hasn’t fucking noticed she’s not with him. I can’t believe she puts up with a man who doesn’t notice that much. Is there any polite way to tell your brother’s girlfriend she can do so much better? To ask what the hell she’s thinking?

  “My dad had a Jeep,” she says. Her eyes are closed. “It was such a piece of shit, and so old, but I loved it.”

  She’s never, not once, mentioned her father. I feel like she’s finally letting me peer behind the curtain and I don’t want her to pull it closed again.

  “Yeah?” I ask. I take a left when I should turn right. I don’t want to get back to the hotel too soon.

  “We’d go for a drive, and he’d sing these stupid songs and I’d hold the six pack. My job was to open a new one for him just as he emptied the one he had in his hand, and then we’d split the last one.”

  My stomach sinks. I thought I’d get some cute childhood anecdote. A tiny pigtailed Drew being driven to soccer practice or going to McDonald’s. “You’d split it? How old were you?”

  She shrugs. “Nine? Ten?”

  I glance at her and take an extra turn. “Drew, that’s…kind of terrible.”

  She shakes her head, her eyes still closed. “It isn’t though. You’re just seeing it as, like, a responsible adult. Drinking bad. Spinach good. Like that. But as a little kid it was just fun. He liked having me around and I felt…I don’t know. Special. He was the only member of the family who liked me just as I was.”

  “You’re talking about him in past tense.”

  “He’s dead,” she says with no emotion whatsoever. She could be reporting his year of birth, his eye color. “Drunk driving accident.”

  “I’m—”

  She starts to laugh. “Oh my God, your face! I’m kidding! I mean, not about the dead part. He’s extremely dead. But he wasn’t drunk driving.”

  I wait another minute just to make sure this isn’t a joke too. “Drew, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  She hitches a shoulder, leaning back to close her eyes again. “It was a long time ago.”

  I turn toward the Halekulani at last, feeling slightly ill and thinking about Sloane’s quiet warning the other day—She’s messy—and knowing there was some merit to it. Reaching beneath the surface with Drew is like reaching blindly into broken glass. But the way she’s so cavalier at times, the way she acts as if nothing matters, it also seems like resilience, like the thing you’d do if you thought caring would destroy you. It worries me but I admire it at the same time.

  I pull up to the valet and open her door. If it was up to me, I’d just carry her upstairs, but just because I didn’t recognize her earlier today doesn’t mean other people won’t. I place a hand on her shoulder to wake her, leaning over to unbuckle her seatbelt.

  Her long lashes slowly flutter open, and suddenly our faces are inches apart and we’re way too close. My gaze dips to her mouth before I can stop myself. I imagine leaning closer, pressing my lips to hers, and for a moment there’s something in her eyes saying she’d let me.

  Fuck. I’m imagining taking advantage of my brother’s drunk girlfriend. It’s got to be a new low.

  I take a step backward. “Can you walk? I can carry you, but I’m worried someone will take a picture.”

  “I’m invisible now,” she says in a stage whisper. I think they probably heard her one town over.

  I laugh to myself. “Yes, super invisible.” I help her out of the Jeep and wrap my arm around her. She can’t walk a straight line even with my help, so we cut through to the pool area, where it’s dark and vacant, rather than go through the lobby.

  “Are we going to swim?” she asks, giggling.

  I scoop her up like a child. “No, I’m just trying to get you to the room without witnesses. Do you have your key?”

  She shakes her head no, resting her head against my shoulder and then she sniffs my shirt. And sniffs again. “You always smell so fucking good,” she says. There’s a hint of a groan to her voice and my body reacts before I can stop it.

  “I need to be bathed in boiling water,” she adds.

  “Man, you get weird when you’re drunk,” I say, but I’m smiling. “I didn’t expect that about you.”

  “You just thought I’d be all sleazy, didn’t you?” she asks. “You thought I’d be like the Naked video. Dancing around with only the naughty bits blurred out.”

  I wish she hadn’t reminded me of the video. Yeah, I hate the song, but no straight male hates the video, and I don’t need to be thinking about what wasn’t blurred out when she’s in my arms and my hand is inches away from her breast and she’s groaning You smell so fucking good against my neck.

  When we reach my door, I set her down gently. “I need you to be really quiet, okay? Sloane’s in the bed, so I’m gonna put you on the couch.”

  She nods but all my caution was unnecessary—there’s a light on in the bedroom. Sloane must be up and she probably knows I left, which will go over about as well as everything else I’ve done this week.

  Drew falls onto the couch without appearing to notice the blanket and pillow already there. She curls up and kicks off her shoes and just like that, she’s out cold. I get a second blanket from the closet and am pulling it over her when Sloane walks in, fully dressed.

  “She smells like a distillery,” she says, arms folded across her chest.

  “I thought you’d be asleep.”

  She walks into the bedroom and I follow, feeling too tired for a fight but knowing we have to discuss it.

  She’s got her suitcase out and it’s already packed.

  “Sloane,” I say, running a hand over my face. “What are you doing?”

  She swallows. “I’m going home.”

  “It’s the middle of the night,” I argue. “Look, go to sleep and we’ll discuss it in the morning.”

  “I need to get out of here,” she says. “I hate what it’s turning me into and I should never have come in the first place. I know that now." Her shoulders sag as if defeated and I hate that.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m so sorry this wasn’t what you wanted.”

  She shakes her head. “Don’t apologize,” she says, and she forces a small smile. “I knew the deal from the beginning of the trip. You told me how you felt but I chose to ignore it.”

  I sink onto the edge of the bed. “You seemed so ambivalent in Somalia. I had no idea it meant anything to you.”

  “I know,” she says. “I’m not sure I thought it meant anything myself until I got back to Atlanta. I turned it into a competition with Drew, rather than admitting to myself that coming here in the first place was a terrible idea. And competing with Drew was my second terrible idea, because that’s a competition I was never going to win.”

  “Drew had nothing to do with this,” I argue. “Obviously. She’s here with my brother.”

  She takes her toiletry kit and shoves it in her carry-on. “Is she, though? I was hoping once your brother got here it would change, but it hasn’t,” she says. “She’s at the center of every room for you. She’s the center of every conversation. She’s all you can see.”

  "Sloane…" I begin, running my hands through my hair. What she’s saying is ridiculous. "I don't know what you think is going on between me and Drew, but you're wrong. There is absolutely nothing there."

  She puts her bag on the floor and pulls it over to where I sit. And then she stops and wraps her arms around me, pressing her cool lips to my cheek. "I know you think that's true. I just hope you work it all out before a bad situation gets worse.”

  There’s no arguing with her, clearly, and I’m not sure I would anyway. Because the truth is that I like having Drew here, all to myself. I wish my fucking brother had never shown up at all.

  19

  DREW

  January 27th

  I wake up half on and half off the couch with the sunlight blazing through the window.

  For a moment, I wonder if I’m on to
ur, because it’s very much like the morning after a show. My mouth feels like I shoved it full of sand, and my brain is howling like a wounded animal that deserves to be put out of its misery.

  Not on tour.

  Hawaii.

  Fuck my life.

  What the hell happened yesterday? I see flashes of things—eating tacos at some total dive with a bunch of surfers, getting beers with our Uber driver, and a pig roast with some random Hawaiian family. I’m pretty sure I offered to let one of them get married at Tali’s beach house. I seem to recall even showing photos of her wedding.

  I bury my head in my hands and groan.

  “There’s Advil on the table beside you,” says a voice. I squeeze open a single eye and see Josh sitting at the desk, tapping away on his trusty laptop.

  “Why are you here?” I ask. My voice is rough, like I smoked a carton of cigarettes.

  “Why am I in my room?” he asks. “Great question.”

  “Shit,” I whisper. I struggle to push off the heavy blanket on top of me and sit up, burying my head in my hands again. I’m sweaty and filthy and I want to be placed in a medically induced coma until the alcohol is out of my system. “Shit.”

  More snippets of the evening are coming back to me now. We were in the rental car. And I was remembering my dad singing me those stupid Russian songs from his childhood in his piece-of-shit Jeep and drinking the whole time, and I think I might have told Josh about it.

  I reach for the water he’s set out for me on the coffee table. “Whatever I said to you…can we just pretend I didn’t say it?”

  He closes his laptop and turns in his chair to look at me. “Why?”

  I close my eyes. “I don’t…discuss my father, okay? With anyone. And that’s all just…it’s shit I don’t want out in the world.”

  “Hold on. Let me see if I can stop that telegram I just sent The New York Times,” he says.

  If I wasn’t in quite so much agony, I might laugh. But I’m in no mood. “Don’t tell Six,” I whisper. “And please, please don’t tell Sloane. She’s already got it out for me.”

  “You didn’t say anything worth repeating, Drew,” he says. “Don’t worry about it. And she’s gone, anyway.”

  My head whips up to look at him. “Gone?”

  There’s a quick flash of worry in his eyes before he glances away. “She headed back to Atlanta. It’s for the best. You might have noticed there was some tension.”

  “No,” I say with a half smile. “You two hid it really well.”

  He doesn’t smile back. “My mother is devastated. I told her earlier and she burst into tears.”

  My stomach drops, and not simply because I hate the idea of Beth being upset. Between the bar last night and waking up now I had decided to leave. But if Sloane’s already gone and Beth’s upset, how can I possibly leave too? “Doesn’t she see that everyone’s better off this way? Like, why waste all that time on something that isn’t going to work?”

  He shakes his head and for a moment there’s something grim in his face, something he doesn’t plan to share. “She wants to see us all married,” he says quietly. “I think she blames herself for the fact neither of us are inclined to settle down. Thank God you’re staying, at least.”

  I swallow, unable to meet his eye.

  He looks at me, then. A long look, like he knows exactly what I’m thinking. “Drew, promise me you’re going to stay. I can’t get into it but…this trip is really important to my mom. If you leave, too, I’m not sure she’ll be able to rebound from it.” My stomach drops farther. I don’t think any reasonable person would argue that it’s better not to know the truth. But I imagine Beth struggling to stay chipper through the rest of this trip and feeling like a failure because neither of her grown sons can keep a girlfriend, and that seems worse. “Please,” he adds.

  “Okay,” I whisper. “And I’m sorry…about Sloane.”

  His tongue darts out to wet his lip and then his teeth sink into it. God, I hate when he does that. I hate it so fucking much. “I’m not. I just wish my mom wasn’t upset.”

  “You’re probably a little sad. I mean, come on, you dated the girl for a while. As unfeeling as you are, there must be something there.”

  His mouth moves into an almost smile. “Unfeeling, huh? That’s how you see me?”

  I rise shakily to my feet. No, I think. I don’t see you that way at all anymore.

  Once housekeeping arrives to let me into my room, I enter to find Six’s clothes spread over the floor like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs, straight to the bed where he’s in nothing but boxers.

  There was a time when the sight of him like that might have appealed to me.

  At this exact moment, he just looks a little unclean and a whole lot selfish. I check my phone: he didn’t reply to last night’s text for two hours. It took him two hours to wonder where I was and check his phone, for fuck’s sake.

  And that’s exactly what I wanted: someone who was never going to depend on me, and someone I’d know better than to depend on. But I think back to last night, to that moment when Josh appeared in front of me in the Jeep. The way I felt found, and safe. And it felt a lot better than this does.

  Six is dead to the world, so I close the bedroom door and sit on the couch with one of his guitars. Frustratingly, it’s not well-tuned but I leave it alone and start trying things out, this song that’s been in my head for the past few mornings. The words aren’t quite there, but the chorus gives me chills, and I’d sort of forgotten what that felt like—the quiet thrill of creation, the moment of realizing I did something, and loving it enough that it almost doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.

  An hour before we’re due downstairs, I put his guitar away and wake him.

  “Hey,” he croaks. “What happened to you last night? Where’d you sleep?” His worry is coming about twelve hours too late.

  I could tell him his role in the whole thing but I’m still tired, and it hardly matters at this point. “Josh picked me up. You had our room key so I slept on their couch.”

  He sits up, suddenly stiff-spined and tense. “You called Josh? Jesus Christ, Drew, all you had to do was—”

  “I didn’t,” I reply, unduly irritated. I cross the room and get my suitcase from the closet. “He called me, looking for you. You told me you were going to text your mom. She was worried.”

  “Right,” Six says, rolling his eyes. “And I forgot. Thank God Saint Fucking Joshua was there to step in and save the day.”

  I’ve been in his shoes so many times—when I’ve screwed up and someone has fixed it for me, and made sure to let me know they had to fix it for me. It sucks to be the screw-up. It sucks to be the one people roll their eyes over, about whom everyone’s saying Well, what did you expect? to each other.

  But I’m not willing to sit here agreeing with him that his brother is a dick for coming to get me, for fixing problems he, in part, created. “Well,” I reply, “he really did kind of save the day.”

  I set the suitcase on the bed and walk onto the balcony to take in Diamond Head. I hate that I won’t really be able to hold onto this trip. Memories are like artwork left in the rain. They blur and smudge until all that’s left is your weak interpretation of it, your best guess as to what it was. One day I’ll merely say I watched the sunset here, but I probably won’t remember the way Josh made me laugh. I won’t remember him saying Tell me something real, as if what I said and what I felt and what I thought actually mattered.

  I’m going to miss this place, I think, taking it in for one last moment, and it won’t ever be the same without him.

  “There you are,” says Beth when we arrive in the lobby. “We were worried last night.”

  Six shrugs, unable to even pretend he cares about the inconvenience. “Sorry,” he says, sounding not at all sorry. “Time just got away from us.”

  “Time got away from you,” Josh corrects. “She wasn’t the one who was supposed to text Mom.”

  “Joel,
we had reservations and this is a family trip,” his father begins. “We expect you to—”

  Beth stops his lecture with a gentle hand to his forearm. “Jim, it’s fine. He made a mistake and he won’t do it again. Besides, we’ve probably overscheduled the kids. They deserve to have a few nights out without us old folks along.”

  She’s covering for Six. She’s forgiving him quickly so that no one else can hold him accountable. All this time, I’ve felt like Six and I were in the same boat, the unloved black sheep of the family whose every misstep is magnified and whose every good deed still manages to be cast in a poor light.

  But we aren’t the same at all. We are both black sheep, but Beth loves her son so much she won’t even let him suffer when he’s in the wrong. And my mother doesn’t love me enough to protect me, even when I’m in the right.

  He grins at me now like we’ve gotten away with something. “Maybe I need a wife to keep me on the straight and narrow,” he says, wrapping an arm around my waist. “What do you think, Mom? Should I keep her around?”

  I stiffen. Never, not once, in all the time I’ve known him, has Six even hinted at marriage. I can’t imagine why he suddenly is now. You don’t decide you want to marry a woman you forgot about mere hours before. Josh stands frozen, staring at his brother as if he’s even more stunned and unhappy about what was just said than I am.

  He opens the van door. Six tries to take the front and Josh snarls, “That’s her seat, she gets car sick,” and I start to wonder if I’ve made a grave error by remaining on this trip.

  PART II

  LANAI

  “The tiniest of all the islands, and the loveliest as well.”

  From Lanai: The Tiny Jewel

  20

  DREW

  “It’s only eighteen miles at its widest point,” says Beth, reading to us aloud from her trusty guide book. “And it has no traffic lights. Can you imagine? No traffic lights.”