It’s not like Meredith’s a regular girl who can go home to her own room and undress by herself. She has Juliann, waiting, curious, fully able to look at her twin sister and see through any deceptions. Oh God, this is over-the-top complicated.
“Hey, Daniel.” Meredith shivers a little where we stand together on the deck. “Were you going to give me a tour?”
I shake my head to clear it. My hair, still wet from the Yowells’ pool, feels like a bowl of ice wrapped around my head. Hers, long as it is, must be like a polar ice cap.
“Oh, sure. You’ve never been here before.”
“Ah…no.”
She smiles at me, at my ridiculous self for making such an inane comment. Like I don’t know she’s never been here before. Jeez.
“Welcome to our houseboat, Nirvana. This is the deck.”
She laughs again. Mom always says I can be charming when I want to be.
I unlatch the main cabin door and push it open. “The Landon living room. As it appears on a regular basis.”
There are newspapers on every surface. The sink is piled with dishes. Three bird feeders are on the table, little houses with their roofs raised, begging to be filled, the bag of bird food propped against one leg of the table. The middle of the bag pudges out like a glutton who slid from his chair without enough energy to move completely away from the scene of his excess.
“Wow.” She’s being really polite. “Your family reads a lot, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess.” I’d never thought much about what other families did.
I scrounge for two towels from the drawer under the bench seat while she’s taking it all in, spinning slowly to see the room in its entirety. When I drape a towel around her shoulders like a coat, she flips it onto her head and starts rubbing.
“But you gotta understand. This is standard operating procedure for the Landons. My parents are a little spacey. Their priorities are different from most parents. They define neat as ‘without interests.’”
“It’s kind of neat. In a way. I mean, you can see the things the driver would need are all here.” She points to the dials on the instrument panel.
“Oh, yeah. Compass. Depth finder. Wheel. They’re nailed down.”
She laughs. With a fair amount of interest she looks into the flat space beyond the wheel where Dad keeps his nautical maps. The wide windows don’t open, but form the windshield for the pilot at one end of the living space.
“There’s another wheel on the roof. For fair weather.”
She examines all the gadgets and the books on the shelves. Everyone always loves the compact efficiency of boats.
“The galley.” I point at a section of the shelves behind the wheel and before the bunk room.
“Cool,” she says as I open cupboards to show her the system of hooks and movable trays to keep things from sliding in rough weather.
She lets me lead her back to the deck. Her hand is cold and I pull it close and blow on her fingers.
“Foredeck, to port.” I motion, but walk backward and she follows without letting go of my hand. Her fingers are curled from the cold. When she bends to peer into the back of the cabin where Nick and I bunk, I tug her away.
“Tut-tut. In a minute. Aft cabin, first. For parents, currently elsewhere.” I don’t open the door. No point in scaring her with the state of their cabin. She already has the idea.
As we both step under the passageway that separates the two cabins, she stays with me. I wonder if she feels that little pocket of warmth out of the wind. When I start to step out on the other side, she tugs back.
“So there’s no one else here?” she asks.
“Nope.”
You would have to be stupid not to hear the invitation in her voice. I may be geeky and antisocial, but I’m not stupid. I spin on one foot and face her.
Her grin practically glows in the dark. I kiss her. More than once and it’s incredible how great it is. She puts her arms around my neck. It’s getting warmer by the second. Her lips graze my cheek, my ear. I can’t even think how to describe the way the feeling in your lips moves into your body and makes you warm all over. And how much better it is when you really like the person you’re kissing.
She whispers, “Say my name again, the way you did in the rowboat.”
“Meredith.” I try to hold the syllables longer and let them sink in around us.
“No, the nickname you used.”
“Oh…oh. Merry? I don’t know why I said that, it just slipped out.”
“I’ve never had a nickname before.”
“First time for everything.”
The kisses get a little crazy. I can’t hold her close enough. Joe would be disappointed I hadn’t planned this better, waited until we were in the cabin, near a bed.
“Lemme finish the tour.”
More kisses. She likes the place right in front of my ear.
“Meredith, Meredith.”
She walks close as we pass down the other side of the deck. When the boat rocks with the breeze, she pulls herself even closer. Her fingers are like little ice statues, bent and hard against my palm, the way toothpicks roll. I can feel her tremble, shiver.
“It’s too cold out here,” I say. “Let’s go in.”
Because Nick packed for camping before I left, I’m fairly confident our cabin is respectable enough. In the dark my fingers crawl along the wall until I find the light switch. A glow appears in four corners, low-wattage bulbs powered by the battery. Meredith looks around. There are not enough bookcases, so there are boxes of books in every corner. Maybe she’s thinking about the bunk beds being dorky. But there’s no other real solution on a houseboat.
Nick’s prize landfill find, an old television set that’s bigger than a chair, sits on the built-in dresser we share. He’s wedged it in with a blanket and a bungee cord to keep it from shifting with the boat. It still sticks out over the top of the dresser about six inches. That’s the way they made those early TVs. But Nick has to be able to watch the soccer matches and South Park when Mom and Dad are gone.
I turn off three of the wall lamps. Although the battery’s pretty strong, I don’t want to take a chance. Dad’s been fierce about it all summer and fall, drilling us on emergency procedures and the proper care of a boat. It’s not that sailors are cheapskates. They just always preserve their options, forever considering how to maneuver their way out of a storm. A working battery and motor are crucial.
Without curtains, the windows reveal the same black sky from earlier. The louvered windows rattle in their tracks, a reminder that hurricane season is not quite over. As the wind rises the boat’s shifts have become more like lurches, not quite predictable. Meredith grabs the rail of the bunk bed to keep her balance.
“But there are only two bunks and you have two brothers.”
“Joe—the one with me in the car the other weekend—is at college, so he uses a sleeping bag when he’s here. It’s been just Nick and me the last three years. You met Nick? He’s thirteen. The soccer king. What can I say?”
“Which bunk is yours?”
Pointing, I choke out the words, “Want to try it?”
“To get the whole experience of life on a boat, I have to, right?”
I nod, totally choked up now. She’s up the ladder and lying down before I can even think how to answer her question.
“Like it?”
“Maybe you should show me how you fit yourself up here. You’re taller than I am.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When the lightbulb blinks and dies, it feels like hours have passed and we’re asleep. At least I’m asleep, exhausted after the most incredible hour of my life. Meredith wakes me up.
“Daniel. Did you see that? The light just went off. Is someone here? Or is it on some kind of timer?”
As the wind slaps the siding, the boat snaps back and forth on the mooring. I know I should be paying attention to the boat, but the feel of Meredith’s hip next to my thigh and her bare breast on my arm is way too d
istracting. She lifts her head off my shoulder and peers into the dark space, her chin just above mine. I kiss it.
“Those little lights on the deck,” she says. “Did you turn those off when we came inside?”
“Oh, jeez, I forgot.” I sit up and bonk my head on the ceiling. I sink back on the pillow. “Dad’ll kill me if the battery’s dead.”
She’s watching me. Her eyes shift back and forth like a cat’s in the dark room. “Silly, the lights are already off. I just wondered if you did it.” She kisses me and there’s no way I’m getting out of this bed to worry about the lights. Who needs light anyway?
“Dan.”
My hands are stroking that dip in her back, working around the bones in her spine. I take her hips and try to lift her enough to work things out. Or in.
“Daniel.”
It’s an amazing feeling. How two people fit like that.
“Stop. Daniel. We can’t…we need another one of those…things.”
“Oh, God, Meredith.” Her skin is so warm.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You’re right. It’s just so hard to…you’re so beautiful and…so soft in the right places and…” I groan and wriggle out from under her. “I only had two.”
She starts to giggle. I have to laugh too. Great planner.
“First time for everything,” I say.
“Not anymore,” she says, laughing, and pushes me toward the edge of the bunk.
In the pitch black I grope around for my jeans. When I stumble on the plastic hook from my costume, I chuck it across the room. I’m laughing and telling her I’m going to check the battery, sorry about the condoms, is she okay, stay where she is, not to worry, I’ll be right back. I follow the bed rails with my hands until I feel her shoulder. With one foot on Nick’s bunk, I pull myself even with her face. I know what I want to say. The words are right there. The words. But all of a sudden, now that I know for sure it’s her first time too, it seems so self-centered to talk about how I feel, to just blurt it out like that. Without considering how she feels to have a dead guy in love with her. It’s not like she can look forward to going to the senior prom with me or that we can apply to the same colleges or put photos of each other on our yearbook pages.
“Merry,” I whisper instead, her lips so close I have to kiss them. “Thank you.”
The battery is fine. It’s just the bulb that’s burned out in the bedroom. Meredith thinks it’s the funniest thing ever.
“You were the one who panicked,” I say.
“Me? You were swearing and saying how your dad was going to go ape.”
“I did not say ‘ape.’”
“Did too.”
“Did not.” I have to silence that. I have to kiss her.
She’s trying to pull the black stretchy shirt on over her head while I’m trying to kiss her. It’s just that I’m not ready to let her go. If I get dragged off to Mexico, it could be months before there’s another chance for us to be alone.
“Dan. Daniel.” Her laugh is muffled in fabric. “Stop kissing me. I have to go home. Juliann and I agreed we’d both show up at one—that way, Mom could hardly be suspicious of either of us.”
“Does she know? About…us?”
“My mother?”
“God, no. Your sister.”
“Not yet.”
I’m being good. I smooth her shirt over her chest, slide my hands around her waist to help tuck it into her jeans. Just checking to be sure everything’s in place. God, she is so beautiful.
“What are you going to tell her?” I ask.
“My mother?”
“Funny. No, Juliann.”
“Maybe nothing.”
“This is not important enough to tell your twin sister?”
She looks away, reaches for her sandals, leans down to be sure she has the right one on the right foot. “I might just keep it to myself for a while. It’ll be different once she knows. Right now it’s just you and me. I like that.”
“I like it too.” I stammer a little when I realize she might think I’m trying to tell her what to do. “I mean, you can tell her if you want. Whenever.”
“Are you going to tell Mack?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Guys are different. If I tell him, he’ll think it’s no big deal, like we had a pizza or something. He might even say something to someone else. I don’t want him to blab it all over school.”
“It’s almost one o’clock.”
“You’re right. I’m gonna take you home now.” I kiss her again. “Seriously. I am. I’m gonna kiss you one more time, then I’ll row you in and walk you home.”
She waits like she knows I’m not finished. How can a girl know me like that? By osmosis maybe.
“And then…” I pull her out to the deck, wrap her in Dad’s peacoat, and bring the rowboat close for her to step in. “And then I’m going to walk out on that bridge and yell, ‘Life is glorious.’ And jump.”
She looks at me like it’s the most logical thing in the world to say. Or do.
Sunday morning I’m all alone on the houseboat. Outside the storm has arrived. Rain. Wind. When the boat rocks madly, my stomach rocks with it. I’m unbearably warm. The pillow smells like Meredith, a faraway memory, but I get warmer still. I peel back the blanket where I’m lying on the cushioned bench, green and miserable. Hours earlier when the pain in my gut was only a periodic clench, I checked the second anchor, and turned on the cell phone in case Mom or Dad call to check on the boat. I crash back on the couch, too exhausted all of a sudden to climb up to the bunk. No one calls and I doze. At every tenth pitching I halfway wake up, lean over to the window, and stare into the slanting sheets of rain to see if the Whaler is still tied to the D-funct marina. It feels like I’m in one of those werewolf movies where the wolf’s snarl will come shooting out of the dark, blood dripping from its jaws. I try not to think about Meredith and what we did, it’s worse than wet dreams.
When Dad and Nick finally arrive, they’re soaked. Sleeping bags, tent, everything. They don’t talk, not a word, and Dad’s face is all washed out. After they’ve lashed the camping gear under the small bimini on the back deck, they strip off their wet clothes and stand in the living room in their boxers. The space heater there glows red like the end of a thermometer. Outside every other wave sends the empty skiff, with its tiny nine-horsepower motor, bouncing up higher than the deck.
“Maybe we should bring it on board,” Nick suggests.
“We don’t need any extra weight in this kind of weather.” Dad stares at the skiff. “Has your mother called?” He’s looking at me as if I should be able to report exactly that. Positively that she’s called and all is well.
“No.”
“Is this a hurricane?” Nick asks me. Like I’m suddenly an expert. Or maybe he thinks I tuned in to the weather station. Way too logical.
Dad opens the door, slams it behind him, and disappears in his skivvies into the wind, though there’s not much danger of anyone being out there to see. He reappears a minute later with rain gear and dry clothes balled into one of his wheeled suitcases.
“Only way to keep things dry,” he explains as he turns his back on us, drops the wet boxers to the floor, and pats himself dry with the sweatshirt before he puts it on along with his khakis. Once he’s dressed, it’s like he’s official now and can do his job as a father. He moves his face close to mine. “Are you okay? You look wiped out.”
“I am wiped out.” My eyelids are so heavy, I feel like I may fall asleep while we’re talking.
The wind screams downriver. When Dad finally gets reception on the TV, the Richmond station is showing pictures of downtown Urbanna underwater. The power lines are down and the harbor has risen enough to spill into the street that connects downtown with the fancy sailing club under construction at the edge of the harbor. The TV flickers and dies.
“Think we ought to call Mom and tell her not to come home?” I’m making this up a
s I go. None of us have ever lived on a houseboat during hurricane season.
“Duh,” Nick says, grumpy and complaining about being deprived of the Cheers episode he’d been planning to watch.
“That show’s way too old for you,” I say from the couch, where I’m prone and slurring the words.
But Dad has other things on his mind. “I should have called you last night and had you take the boat up to June Parker’s Marina. This storm’s blowing from the wrong direction, coming right up the creek. We’re going to have to get the boat to shore.”
And with that I dump the entire contents of my stomach on the floor. Lucky for everyone I’ve been too busy to eat much in the past twenty-four hours. After Dad cleans up, he puts his hand on my forehead, turns to look at Nick as if realizing the very certain probability that three guys in one room means that the other two will be sick in short order. So it’s a bug or something, not just The Disease.
Dad’s indecision is making me nervous. He’s talking to himself. “We can’t go out on the river now.” Lost in thought, he slaps his arms against himself to keep warm. “This boat sits too high, I’m not sure it will respond in these waves. We may not even be able to get her in to the old dock in this wind.”
Nick and I exchange looks. The phone rings and keeps on ringing until Nick ends up finding it under me, between the cushions.
“Yeah, yeah. Yeah,” he says politely enough.
Without raising my head from the pillow, I gesture for a hint as to who’s calling. Nick hands me the phone.
“Boy, Meredith Rilke is sweet on you.” I’d like to know how he can tell that from a phone call. And what would she have to say to Nick that would take so long?
It shocks me when it’s Mack’s voice on the phone. “What were you saying to my brother about Meredith?” I ask.
If Mack’s blabbing about the double date and the fact that Meredith and I left the party together, I may have to disown him as a friend.
“Nothing,” Mack says. “She has the flu, that’s all.”
Catcher, Caught Page 15