The Loose Ends List

by Carrie Firestone

  “Yeah. It’s short for Madeline.”

  The bartender comes over.

  “What are you having?” He looks at me again.

  “I’ll have rum and Coke,” Janie says.

  “How about you, Maddie? Rum and Coke?” He eyes my ginger beer.

  “Um. Whatever you’re having is good,” I say.

  “Two Red Stripes.” He drops Jamaican money on the counter and leans toward me. Our hands are so close, if I move my finger the width of a straw tip, we’ll be touching.

  I take a sip of beer. It tastes like rotten bread crust.

  “I have to admit I’ve been calling you something else.” He smiles.

  “Oh, yeah? What?”

  “The Girl in the Purple Dress.” He remembers me from the elevator. I will not reveal I’ve been calling him Mystery Guy.

  A loud song comes on. He leans even closer, and I feel his warm breath on my cheek. “So, how’s the Wishwell?”

  “It’s growing on me,” I say. I shift in my seat. “I feel like somebody’s new cat. You know how they hide under the bed for a while, but then they’re good?” I don’t know why I just blurted that out. It was getting too intense, with his breath and his eyes.

  He laughs. “I know what you mean. We’ve had a lot of house cats. They all do the same thing.”

  Janie pulls her bee out of her bag and tosses it like a hot potato. She looks down. “Oh shit, Gram’s pissed. She wants us at the beach. They’re waiting for us.”

  I don’t want to leave.

  “That’s okay. I need to get to the beach to meet some university mates here on holiday.”

  Janie pulls me toward the door. “Bye, Jamaican buddies. You guys are super cool,” she yells.

  I shake my head, look back at Enzo, and go for the nonchalant wave.

  “Bye, Maddie,” he shouts over the music.

  “Oh my God. Janie. Why was I so nervous?”

  “Maybe because he’s painfully hot and has a British accent?” She stumbles over the curb and nearly runs into a man on a moped.

  “Janie! You have to sober up. Gram is not going to be happy. Come on. Think sober thoughts.”

  I grab Janie’s hand and pull her up the street. All I want is to turn around and grab Enzo’s perfectly tanned hands instead. I’d pull him away with me to the secret Jamaican caves, even if they are infested with bats.

  Gram’s standing with her hands on her hips as we approach the crowd of misfits gathered around a line of tables down the beach from Mama’s restaurant. Waiters rush back and forth with giant platters of food.

  “Where were you? Astrid’s furious,” Dad says.

  “We told you we were going exploring,” I say. I’m hoping Janie doesn’t open her mouth.

  “That was hours ago. Come on, girls. Tits and Mama went through all this trouble to make a nice evening. Get over there and be charming.” Dad pushes us toward the tables.

  “Glad you could make it.” Gram is not happy. “You missed the cocktail hour.”

  “We’re sorry. We got lost,” Janie says.

  “You got lost in a one-street town? Are you drunk, Jane Margaret? There are no words.” She walks away, leaving us feeling like terrible people. Gram does not like anyone missing her planned events.

  “Everyone, come eat,” Mama calls. “We have a feast set up for you.” Mama must have timed the dinner to start at the beginning of the long Jamaican sunset. Reds and purples fan out over the scarlet expanse of sun disappearing on the horizon.

  I don’t know where to sit. There’s a spot next to Holly, but I don’t think I can eat next to someone in a wheelchair. Holly is scary to look at. It’s as if she’s been blown by a warping mechanism that twisted her body into a distorted shape. She can’t eat, so liquid nutrition tubes feed into her stomach. I talk to her like she’s Abby’s mentally challenged dog and hate myself for it, but I can’t stop. I say stupid things like “Marshall tells me you were a dancer. Isn’t that nice?” I get tongue-tied.

  Mom and Jeb are taking turns holding a seashell to their ears. I guess she’s gotten over the alcoholic remark and he’s managed to smoke some grade-A Pineapple Skunk. Bob Johns waves me over.

  “Maddie, I want to introduce my old friend Delly and her son, Joseph.”

  A woman wearing a coral-colored headscarf and piles of beaded jewelry smiles up at me. Gram always talks about people’s energy. This lady’s energy calms me down right away.

  “Come pull up a chair here.” Delly makes room for me. I squeeze in between her and Joseph and end up directly across from Holly. Janie plops down next to her. Poor Holly is probably getting a massive dose of rum breath, and she can’t even move away.

  I’m suddenly ravenous. Mama was right. It is a feast. Bob’s friends give me a play-by-play of all the dishes: the fruity rice, the meat, the fried patties. It’s so good I want to lick the drippings out of the barbecue pit. Delly and Joseph are getting a kick out of the skinny girl throwing back a massive amount of food.

  “Wait, let me ask something else and see if I understand you.” Janie is talking to Holly like they’re old friends. Janie is asking questions, and Holly is blinking answers with her eyes.

  “Do you miss eating food?” Janie asks. Ridiculous question.

  Holly blinks twice. “Yes? That’s yes, right?” Janie cranes her neck around the rigid, twisted body of this poor crumpled woman with big brown eyes and hair cropped close to her head. It’s hard to figure out what she might have looked like once.

  Her husband laughs. “That’s yes. I’m thinking she would love some of this food right now.”

  “Do you want us to turn your chair around so you can see the sunset? It’s breathtaking.” Janie studies Holly’s eyes. “Yes. She blinked twice. Turn her around.”

  Marshall and Janie turn the wheelchair around just as the sunset is taking over the entire Jamaican sky. We all seem to pause to see what she’s seeing. Thank God she still has her eyes.

  I’ve never thought about how brief a sunset is. It’s so brief, it’s almost cruel.

  I tell Bob’s friends about New York and NYU, and we talk about education in Jamaica as we all suck the last of the barbecue off our fingers. I look down the long table to see Burt feeding Mark soft food with a spoon. Paige’s mom watches her laugh at Gram’s long-winded story, as if she’s trying to memorize her laughing daughter’s face. It feels like we’re gathering for a holiday, only the holiday is death.

  My stomach, full of meat and fried deliciousness, hangs over my shorts. Two guys play guitar and bongos near the bonfire. Bob steps up with his trumpet. Gram and Aunt Rose hold hands and wiggle their hips like groupies. We all dance with Tits and Mama and their friends, swaying to the music as tiki torches throw bursts of light on the faces of my grandmother, parents, brother, cousin, uncles, and great-aunt—all the people who mean the most to me.

  I pull out my bee and text Jeb. He feels around his pocket and looks down to read Snow globe moment . He gives me a thumbs-up and a goofy grin. It’s been a snow globe kind of day.

  NINE

  I CAN’T SLEEP. I try to wake up Janie, but she slaps me. I curl up with my blanket on the balcony. Everything’s black: the sea, the sky.

  My bee buzzes under my leg.

  Hey Maddie. Any chance you’re up? I’m by the pool if you want to talk. Enzo (from the Jamaican pub earlier)

  Oh my God. It’s him. It’s a photo on the bee of Enzo’s face with his adorable side grin looking up at me. I can’t believe he feels the need to remind me of where we met. I have to calm down. Janie would tell me to recite our favorite line, They’re just boys. He’s just a boy.

  Actually, I’m on my balcony reading Scientific American. Delete.

  We’re in the middle of a movie, but maybe tomorrow?? Delete.

  Sure! I’ll be there in a few minutes. Send.

  I throw on clothes and brush my hair and teeth, moving just slowly enough that he won’t think I’m too eager. I put on a little makeup so I don’t look like a
pasty vampire chick and walk calmly toward the elevator. For a second I worry again that he is a patient. Maybe he wants one last fling before he goes. I don’t know what to think.

  Wes and Uncle Billy’s TV is blaring through their door, but otherwise, everything is quiet. I take the elevator up to pool level. I walk toward the Grotto looking for Enzo and nearly trip over something hanging half off a lounge chair. My heart sinks. It’s Skinny Dave. He’s facedown, half on the chair with his legs sprawled on the floor. I can’t tell if he’s alive or dead. He reeks. I know Janie would probably shake him or check his pulse to see if he’s alive, but I cannot do this. I race around looking for someone to help me.

  Enzo is sitting on the Grotto steps with his baseball cap and his seashell necklace and his smile. For a second, I forget Skinny Dave.

  “Hi, uh, we have to help this guy. He’s passed out,” I say, flustered.

  “Where? Show me.” I lead him to Skinny Dave. He immediately kneels next to him and feels for a pulse. I stand awkwardly, not knowing if I should hit the red emergency button on my bee.

  “I think he’s just hammered, poor guy.” Enzo shakes him a little. “People tend to do that on the Wishwell.”

  “He’s actually an alcoholic. Like, that’s his disease.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s definitely drunk. Go and grab some towels. We’ll get him straightened out.” I grab a stack of towels from the bin and lay them out on a chair. Enzo hoists Dave up and gently lays his greasy head on a folded towel. I cover him so his head is the only thing peeking out. He’s a sad, smelly little boy, curled up and snoring.

  We leave him to sleep and go back to the Grotto steps.

  “That was awkward,” I say.

  “That was nothing. I’ve seen it all on this ship.”

  “What do you do here?”

  “Me? I’m visiting. Francesca’s my mum. I come every summer and sail around for a few weeks, visit friends in Jamaica or Brazil. Believe it or not, this is my holiday, so I try to avoid getting involved in the scene here.”

  “Wow. I guess I’m relieved to hear you’re not a patient.”

  “That wouldn’t be fun, would it?” He pulls his chair closer so we’re facing each other. “How about you? Your cousin said your gran is the patient?”

  “Yeah. Pancreatic cancer. She told us about the cancer and the trip all in the same night. Oh, and she also introduced us to her long-lost Jamaican boyfriend. It was a lot of news to process.”

  He laughs. “Well, that’s one way to get it over with.”

  “True. But I think it would have been better to know about the cancer first. Even now, I hear about all the treatments these people have been through before they got to this point, with years of chemo or experimental drugs or whatever.” I stop talking, afraid for a second I might break down. “I just—I’m wondering if it’s too soon. Like she had it in her mind to do this, and she’s not even willing to try to live.”

  He nods, and I get the feeling he’s heard this before. “It’s hard for people to know when to do the whole Wishwell thing. If it’s any help, I’ve seen the pancreatic people. It’s usually pretty quick.”

  “So you’ve been around this stuff a lot.”

  He nods again. “I’m sort of immune to it all. I mean, it’s sad, but the suffering is worse. I watched that part with my dad. We had heard about the Wishwell Research Facilities in the Pacific, where they experiment with revolutionary medical trials.”

  “I just found out about the research facilities. I had thought the Wishwell was just a ship.”

  “Oh, no. Just wait until Wishwell Island. You’ll see it soon enough.”

  It’s a little unsettling to be reminded that I have no idea what is on the itinerary.

  He takes a drink from a plastic cup and holds it out to me. “Thirsty?” I drink from the same side he just sipped. I can taste the Enzo germs in the root beer.

  “We went to the island when Dad was really sick, as kind of a last-ditch effort. But it was too late to save him. That’s when my mum had the ship idea. She wanted to create a place where people who were beyond repair could find relief.”

  “I’m sorry. About your dad.”

  “Thanks. It was a long time ago now.” He gets up and grabs a bunch of towels. He lays two down over me and covers himself. “So let’s talk about Maddie.”

  We talk for hours. I tell him about my friends and Connecticut and the lake club summer I was supposed to have. I talk about Gram and all the amazing things we’ve done over the years. I show him constellations, because there are millions of stars painting the sky above us. I tell him how I wish I could be close with my brother like we were before he got weird and angry.

  He tells me how he half grew up in Italy and that now he’s in university in London, where his dad was born and raised. He loves soccer and surfing and has had a lot of girlfriends but none of them stuck. He brushes my hair out of my face and looks into my eyes and smiles as he talks. He tells stories about his crazy drunken friends, and I tell him they would get along swimmingly with my E’s.

  “I have a million questions,” I say, sliding closer as the chill of early morning sets in.

  But my questions can’t compete with Enzo’s hands pulling me toward him or his warm lips or his arms wrapping us together in beach towels. Never have I ever had the best kiss of my life with a ridiculously hot guy on a secret ship beneath a dense band of stars. There aren’t enough jelly beans for this one.

  The screech of a deck chair wakes me up. We actually fell asleep making out. The pool maintenance guys are escorting Skinny Dave past the Grotto. He’s disoriented and having a hard time standing.

  Enzo sits up and rubs his eyes. He looks at me and smiles.

  “Welcome to the Wishwell,” he says. “It’s always an adventure.”

  He walks with me to the elevator and kisses me good-bye when the doors open on my floor. “Bye, Girl in the Purple Dress,” he calls. The doors shut before I can answer.

  We get Lane’s invite just as Janie is grilling me about Enzo. Friends, please join us in the ballroom at 8 pm sharp for a pajama party to celebrate Paige’s birthday with her two favorite things: a campfire sing-along and chocolate. Shh. It’s a surprise. Wear your PJs.

  “This is so cute,” Janie says. “Lane is adorable, the way he carries Grace around in that pouch thing.” She jumps on my bed. “So did you fool around? Like fool around, fool around?”

  “We made out.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I mean, like, for hours. I have chafe from his stubble.”

  Gram texts, Vito invited us to his cabin to see his Christmas village. Meet me in ten.

  “Gram is the bossiest cruise director,” Janie says. “I’m hungover. I’m really not in the mood to see Vito’s Christmas village.”

  We meet Gram and Wes in front of Vito’s wing.

  “Where’s everybody?” I say.

  “Who knows?” Gram says. “It’s like herding cats.”

  The hallway blinks with colored lights. We knock softly. Vito’s daughter Karen lets us into the cabin where Vito is in an oversized recliner (or maybe it appears to be oversized because he’s undersized), covered with a red-and-green blanket.

  A Christmas village, piled with fake snow, snakes around the cabin. I’m mesmerized by the lights, and tiny people ice-skating, and elves in moving sleds, and gumdrops, and candy cane trees, and miniature stacks of presents.

  Vito is an elf peeking in on Christmas.

  “Vito, your cabin is magical,” Wes says. “This is fantastic.”

  I sit on a chair next to a fully decked tree. The glowing angel tree topper’s skirts change color every few seconds. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” comes on, and suddenly I’m back in Gram’s apartment, drinking hot chocolate and playing with her Austrian advent calendar with the moving reindeer.

  “Welcome to my fantasy.” Vito lifts his arms and pulls at his tinsel-wrapped oxygen tank. “I’ve always thought, wouldn’t it be nice if it w
ere Christmas all year long? And now it is.”

  Janie and I sit on the floor, and Gram and Wes sit on either side of Vito as this old, withered man shows us decades of family Christmas photos. “…And this is Rockefeller Center—we always took a trip to see the tree. Oh, we got all the kids on Santa’s lap for this one,” Vito says in his Queens accent. He holds a picture to his chest. Karen and his other daughter, Roberta, come over with plates of Christmas cookies.

  “It’s our grandmother’s recipe,” Roberta says. “Would you believe Francesca has them deliver these wonderful cookies every morning?”

  We eat cookies, and Wes tells the story of the time when he was four and decided to yank off Santa’s boot while Santa was doing story time at the library. He ran down the street in the snow, his mother chasing behind, and threw Santa’s boot in the river.

  “That’s disturbing,” Gram says. “Crave attention much, Wessy?”

  “I probably thought it was funny.”

  “You would have gotten the belt if you were my kid,” Vito says.

  “That’s a festive thing to say, Father Christmas,” Wes says. Vito laughs until he starts hacking and can’t stop.

  Karen and Roberta walk us out. “Thank you for humoring Dad,” Roberta says. “He always loves a fresh audience.”

  It’s ninety degrees out, and I can’t stop humming “White Christmas.”

  Gram has the biggest balcony of all of us. I’m barely functional now that the exhaustion from my Enzo night has caught up with me. But I’m massaging Gram’s knotty, raptor-like feet while she lies on the lounge chair telling me about Gloria’s cabin.

  “She and the minister have been married sixty-two years. Their family gave them a bon voyage party, all excited that the minister and Gloria were treating themselves to a cruise. They never told their family what kind of cruise this is. To each his own.”

  I squeeze lotion on the top of Gram’s foot. “Wait, the family thinks they’re on a regular cruise?”

  “Yep. I can’t imagine getting on the ship without at least saying an honest good-bye. But people are funny that way.”