The Romance Reader's Guide to Life

by Sharon Pywell

  “Maybe I would have bored him,” I said.

  “No. He didn’t want enough from you to be bored by you.”

  “In your own way,” Dead Lilly said to me, “you’re actually greedier about love than I ever was.’”

  “One more?” I had the knife in one hand and a piece of bread poised above the toaster coils. Maybe this would be enough, I thought: me and Dead Lilly and Boppit running the company days and toasting bread nights, Annie secure and happy with Janey and Todd, Snyder hamstering away with his fantasy art. I could live like this, couldn’t I?

  “It’s not like I’m alone. I have you two now,” I said. “I have Annie and Jane and sometimes in a pinch I can even count Snyder.”

  Bop stopped and fiddled with a strap on his platform Mary Janes. He was in a youthful mood, he’d said when I saw them and asked why he picked them up in the first place. He was being sentimental. “For now.”

  “What do you mean, ‘For now’? How long is ‘now’?”

  “Don’t you worry about it.”

  But from where I stood at the moment it looked worrisome. I’d become somebody who needed them. “Do you mean ‘Don’t worry because we aren’t leaving for decades,’ or ‘Don’t worry because worrying is a waste of time’?”

  Boppit said, “We mean ‘Don’t worry.’”

  I had an uncomfortably sharp view of myself sitting there in the middle of the night, talking to a uniformed dog in shiny Mary Janes and a figure that I accepted as my dead sister.

  “Shhh,” Boppit said suddenly. His ears popped up and his expression got focused, though not on anything in the room. He whined softly.

  Dead Lilly set a buttered crust down. Her expression was more serious than I’d seen it since she first arrived, her eyes black as the panes of glass behind her.

  “We have to leave you for a bit,” Boppit said soberly.

  “You’re not leaving me for good, are you?” The idea of their disappearing was so much more terrible than the fact of their having come to me in the first place. “Please don’t leave.”

  Boppit’s eyebrows had popped up in that worried, protective look he used to have when he lay by my bed and kept watch in our childhood room. “We’re not exactly in charge, Neavie.”

  I reached out to touch his uniformed arm, but when my hand got to it, the fabric had no substance. Only the day before I’d touched it and felt sturdy cotton. Now my hand floated through the arm and I jerked it away. He and Lilly got dim, then wispy.

  I tried to settle in without them. More tired than I’d known I was, I almost immediately fell into a state I wouldn’t so much call being asleep as being unconscious. And in this state I had what in other times in my life I would have called a dream: Max Luhrmann and I were on Mars, with the whole lightless universe as a background. Hunched behind us were Bop and Lilly. I could feel their feelings. There was a touch of ferocity about their mood: They were on guard; they were a little frightened. In the dream Dead Lilly put her arm around me and I could hear her thoughts. She was thinking “Goodbye,” and every part of me rang like an alarm had gone off in my chest.

  I swam up from the dream and looked frantically around for Lilly and Boppit, who were not there. I wanted to wake up like I had when I was twelve years old and be greeted with Boppit’s direct gaze and thumping tail. His eyes would catch whatever streetlight made its way into the room and I would lie down again, and sleep. But he was not here with me now.

  I searched around the side of the bunk for something to read. The usual pile lay by my side: a few magazines, my copy of The Pirate Lover, a spare copy of Jane Eyre I’d picked up at a used bookshop. The one I’d read with Mrs. Daniels lived on a shelf in my apartment. This backup edition was an old-fashioned blocky thing bound in Moroccan leather, designed more to take up a lot of space on a library shelf than to be read. It weighed upward of six pounds and had a spine as thick and horny as wood. Some deeply stupid editor had decided to illustrate it with sighing maidens and flower-choked weddings. When I’d first found it I’d hefted it up and flipped through hoping to find drawings of scenes I had imagined with Mrs. Daniels: the pacing, feral wife in Mr. Rochester’s attic, the lightning-shattered chestnut tree where Rochester had first kissed Jane, the flames spiraling up his bedroom curtains. Nope. I’d bought it anyhow. Now it lay open in front of me to a page with an insipid young woman playing a piano. She was smiling flirtatiously, tipping her head and batting her eyelashes in a way that Jane Eyre would find contemptible. This improbable ninny was looking up at a slender man, who smiled goofily back, just as Rochester would never smile. I sighed, flipped the page, and fell asleep for the second time that night.

  When I woke again my bunk was rocking. A low throb worked its way right through the wood and into my body. I reached for the light, flipped its switch. No power in the cabin, yet through its window I saw that a dim light shone on deck. Someone had disconnected the generator from the cabin. The Rubber Duck was moving, chugging almost silently along at no more than two or three knots, but moving.

  “Boppit?” I whispered hopefully. “Lilly?” No answer. I was alone, except for whoever or whatever had untied the Rubber Duck and pointed her out to sea. As my eyes adjusted I found that enough light came through the windows for me to navigate around the cabin. The Rubber Duck hit a wave head-on, dipped down, and rose up. I pushed the blankets back, noticing that my hands were shaking. I swung my legs over the side and went to the door. The latch was locked or jammed, immovable.

  “Hello!” I yelled. “What’s going on?” But my body had already told me what was going on. The inside of my chest was filled with something electric, churning.

  “Ricky?” I called. “What do you want?” Silence. Only the thrumming, low-level gears, the occasional slap of a wave on the hull. “Ricky!”

  I sat down on the bunk and worked on getting my breathing under control. When he opened the door, and it seemed pretty certain to me that he would eventually open the door, it would be easy for him to pin me in a corner in this tiny space. The cabin windows were too small for me to squeeze through. I had to break the door latch and get to the deck, where I’d have more freedom of movement, more of a chance. I scanned the room for some heavy object to bring down on the door’s jammed latch handle.

  Was that sound another engine? I climbed up to one of the windows and listened. Something was chugging toward us, bumping against the Rubber Duck’s hull, no one speaking but I heard a busy flurry of ropes tying another boat to our side. Just at the outside edge of my range of view I saw a shape heaving itself over the rail and onto the Rubber Duck’s deck. And there was Ricky Luhrmann’s bulky darkness beside the first silhouette, not helping it over, not stopping it, not moving at all but talking.

  “What a surprise,” Ricky’s voice said, not sounding at all surprised. “You hid your car, didn’t you? Clever boy, making me think that tonight there was nobody around. But look at you now, all hero rescuer. All you need is a cape.”

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “Very possibly.”

  “Ricky, let’s just take the boats back. If anybody notices they were gone, we’ll just say you took it out for a ride because you were drunk and you weren’t thinking straight. We’ll forget all about it.”

  Ricky’s creaking laugh cut through the door so clearly I stepped away from it. He must be standing within inches on the other side. He said, “No. I don’t think so, Max. I think we’re just going to play this out.”

  “I’ll turn us around.”

  Footsteps, scuffling, the bwuppp of a body against the bulkhead. Then I couldn’t hear anything for a few minutes. I climbed on the tiny refrigerator and tried to see them through an open ventilation hatch. The wind had thickened and it whipped a loose canvas on the lifeboat across my line of view, obstructing everything.

  “Ricky, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Yes I do. I’m going to teach the cunt little sister to mind her p’s and q’s, to leave me alone, to stay away from
me and my business. That includes talking to my brother, talking to the police, asking questions, calling my old boss, hunting me down like it’s her business, her right. It’s not. I’ve been thinking about things I could do that would make it clear to her. There are lots of things. The meddling little bitch needs to know I don’t sit back and do nothing if she messes with me.”

  “I think she knows that already.”

  “But it didn’t stop her, did it? She kept at it. A few minutes with me, here in the quiet, nobody around to hear a thing, and I’m sure she and I will come to an understanding. Get back in your boat and go home, Max. I’ll return her in the morning when I’m done with her. And she won’t say anything to anybody because I’ll tell her exactly what will happen to her if she does. And you won’t say anything to anybody because that’s what you do.”

  “It’s not what I’m going to do.”

  “People don’t change. You’ve always been a not-say-anything kind of guy. You did nothing then. You’ll do nothing now.”

  “What do you mean I did nothing?”

  “You left me alone with her. You came home and there she was, just a little floating thing in the bathtub. Oh, my. How did it happen, Max? Such a tragedy! And when the horrified parents got home we were all so mortified for you, the boy who was babysitting when it happened. Because it was your fault. And you know why? Because you left me alone with her. You went across the street to play basketball. Only be gone for ten minutes, you said. Who can drown in six inches of water? That’s what you said to yourself. We’d left her alone in the bath a dozen times and all was well. But not this time. You knew better. You left her even though you knew what I was. That’s why you’re to blame.”

  “Ricky, you loved Pansy. Why would I think that you would hurt her?”

  “I didn’t plan it. I just wanted to play, push her head under for a second. I didn’t expect it to feel like it did.” Ricky’s voice was unfolding, getting bigger. “Everyone blamed you. Even you blamed you.”

  “Neave!” Max shouted out, suddenly sounding panicked. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right!” I yelled. “The latch is jammed! The lights won’t go on in here!”

  “Let me take the helm, Ricky. This harbor’s clogged with islands.”

  “Oh, I studied the charts. We’ll be past Spectacle and out into the open water in a few minutes. There’s the green harbor light. Almost open ocean now. Nobody will hear a thing. Get in your little boat and go back, Max. There’s nothing you can do here. I’m a man of my word. I’ll bring little sister home when I’m done with her.”

  I tried, again, to force the cabin door latch. I scanned the dark cabin, looking for anything solid and heavy, but nautical rooms tend to be designed with things bolted down against the natural movement of a boat in water. There was my pile of candy wrappers, a glass and a fork, magazines, the books. And there was a wooden box that I knew held a brass compass. I opened it, plucked the gleaming thing from the gimbals and leveled it, brass-back first, at the latch. One hard blow and the handle rattled though it didn’t give way. Two more and I was rewarded with the sound of a screw or bolt dropping onto the deck on the other side of the door. I grabbed a pencil and pushed it into the old-fashioned iron casing, poking until I heard a satisfying clink. I pushed at the now broken latch again and felt it yield.

  Then the door was yanked open so abruptly that I fell forward, out of the cabin and into the firm grip of Ricky Luhrmann. “Got it open at last, sweetheart?” He wound my collar and the back of my pajamas around one hand like a fabric rope and dragged me to the railing, where he pulled the pajamas snugly around my throat. He turned me around so Max could see my face. We stood there like statues, Max and I disheveled and in pajamas, Ricky drunk enough for his balance to give way a bit when the boat hit larger waves. Even slightly drunk, though, he was shockingly strong, and his grip tightened if I so much as shifted my feet an inch.

  “Look,” he said with a laugh. “It’s a pajama party.” Max stood perfectly still. I could feel him being quiet so that Ricky would keep talking, be distracted into a drunken false moment and drop his guard. Max caught my eye. Wait, his look said. It’ll come. Ricky’s tone was conversational. He said, “You know, Max, I’ve been listening to you go on about currents and snarks and tracking the junk that goes overboard for years. If I were to slip, and accidentally knock little sister over the rail, I bet I could tell you where she’d end up.”

  “Really?”

  “Her head’d be the first thing to go. It’d wobble off in a week, faster if I snapped it before her tragic loss of balance. Then the ankle joints give way. That’s why you find so many feet on beaches. I expect a shark’ll snip off something. You told me once about a guy in Australia catching a fourteen-foot tiger shark that vomited up a bird, a rat, and a whole human arm, which still had identifiable fingerprints and a tattoo so the police were able to identify the guy. His murderers were found but released—an arm’s not a body. You taught me that. And you need a body to accuse somebody of murder. Cut up a body—no murder!”

  “That was in 1935.”

  “The law’s still the same now, though, isn’t it?” The engine kept softly chugging and the sea opened up around us. “I could put images in your head, Max. Things you don’t want there and you’ll never get them out. Just think.”

  “I have been thinking, Ricky.”

  “Remember your telling me about the poet Yasayori? You said that a thousand years ago he was banished to a remote island by his emperor. He wrote hundreds of poems on little wooden planks and threw them into the sea, hoping some would reach his parents. One washed up near the palace and a guy took it to the emperor, who loved it. He sprang that guy—sent a boat right out to fetch him back to civilization. I remember every single thing you’ve ever said to me. Can you imagine having your head refuse to let anything just go? It fills up. It’s like this enormous pressure, pushing, pushing, pushing.”

  I had gone utterly still, struggling not to telegraph any sensation at all to the man with the firm grip on my neck. He kept talking. “Let’s say a shark gets one arm, and the torso lands on a beach in Ireland. That would be almost a year from now, wouldn’t it? Do I have the times and currents right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “The way you’re looking at me right now, Max? It’s how Mommy used to look at me. She knew. She knew what I was.”

  “That must have felt terrible, Ricky.”

  “No. It’s a warm buzz. I’d stare at her until I could feel it, like I’m staring at you now. I can feel it starting. Feels great. Nothing in the world like it.”

  “Let her go.” Max took a step toward us and Ricky twisted me around, tightening the grip and reaching behind his belt. When he brought his hand in sight again it held a knife. Max stopped.

  “You understand that I have to discipline her. You can’t let them just do what they do. Then they think they can do whatever they want. You have to control that. Correct them.”

  Max’s eyes flicked to the left and I understood that to mean that a moment had come, that Ricky’s attention had lost its focus. I lifted my heel and drove it upward behind me as fast and hard as I could. I connected exactly where I’d aimed, and Ricky fell back. Max charged forward and into him, catching his shoulder and spinning him to the deck. Ricky rolled away. I saw the gleam of the blade but Max kept moving directly into him and when they came down together Ricky had laid open Max’s thigh from hip to kneecap.

  But I was free, and I knew the toolbox was only yards away. As Max crumpled onto the deck and Ricky scrambled to his feet, I flipped it open and pushed aside a caulking tool. A double-bladed bolt cutter lay beneath it. Also a bolt. Ricky straddled Max, breathing hard. He raised the hand holding the knife high, looking blind now with something that might have been rage but wasn’t. He was happy.

  Max swiveled his head, searching for me, and there I was, one hand gripping the five-pound metal tool, the other holding a bolt. I stood behind Ricky and to hi
s right. I flicked the bolt into the shadows behind Ricky, to his left. His head twisted around to follow the sound. I closed on him and brought the bolt cutter to bear in a hard, fast sweep.

  I caught him in the jaw. The blow whipped his head back and around, and the body followed the head. I’d heard bone crack. He hit the rail and I could see his eyes go wild when he understood what was about to happen to him. His arms flailed out in a panic and he managed to get a loose grip on the rail with his right hand. I brought the bolt cutter down again, heard cracking bone again. The broken hand flew up and away from the rail. He went over.

  Max struggled to get to his feet and grab the tumbling body but he slipped in his own blood and fell again. To my astonishment I saw him try to throw his good leg over the rail and follow Ricky into freezing water that would give him about two minutes before hypothermia killed him. I knocked him down, yanked his T-shirt over his head, and started ripping it into strips to tie up the thigh.

  “You can’t go after him,” I said grimly. “You can’t, and I won’t.”

  “He’ll drown!”

  “Hopefully. Maybe the propellers will catch him when he rolls under the hull.”

  I had to keep pushing Max back down on the deck while the Rubber Duck chugged along steadily at three or four knots and I gained enough pressure around the thigh to stop the bleeding. By then we were beyond the place where Ricky had gone in, and even with starlight the ocean surface was all glistening black skin broken by lacy chop. A human head bobbing above that great expanse would be almost impossible to find. Clouds had thickened and the wind had picked up. The freshening wind, the waves, the chugging engines swallowed any hope of hearing a man calling for help even if he were still alive and yelling, which was unlikely. He was lost. Still I did what Max insisted we do and turned the boat around. We flipped on searchlights and swept the water carefully, left to right, close to far, right to left. Nothing. What was left of Max’s pants leg was soaked through with blood, red where the wound seeped and then began to openly bleed again, purple and crusty farther from the cut. His hands whitened, and then his face.