by Paul Griffin
“—but you never got around to it, I know, I know.”
“It’s next on my TBR pile,” I said. “Right after I finish Batman #368, A Revenge of Rainbows, Batman and Robin versus Crazy-Quilt.”
“Why do you like it?” she said.
“Who doesn’t like the Caped Crusader?”
“Don’t make me pinch that freckled cheek a little too hard. It will smart. Seriously, what draws you to the Lawrence movie?”
“Dude escapes to the desert. What’s not to like? My mom and dad have all these DVDs stockpiled from, like, twenty years of shopping the bargain bins. I’ve been putting them onto drives for them, to make space in the bookcases. I watch them sometimes, while I’m transferring them. Most of them were really good, but Lawrence of Arabia stopped me cold. I don’t know, you have to see it. Everything looks clean and quiet and wide open, like nobody’s going to mess with you out there.”
“Ever been to it?” she said. “The desert?”
“On the Internet.”
“Then how do you know you’d like it?”
“It’s a theory I suspect will prove true.”
“Boy wants to get away, huh? From what?” She knocked her knee against mine.
“You’ve been?” I said. “To the desert?”
“My father’s friend owns a preserve in the heart of the Great Basin.”
“Whose doesn’t? The Great Basin being in New Mexico, of course.”
“Utah, Lawrence. It overlaps Nevada too, and Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, California.”
“But not New Mexico, Drikipedia? Not even a little bit?”
“Not even for you.”
“Poor me.”
“Poor New Mexico,” she said. “We spent a Christmas week out there in Utah. It was beautiful. Beyond beautiful.” She double squeezed my hand. “But, you know, as stunning as it was out there, it was too lonely for me. Stef’s not going to make it, is she?”
“We’ll cross paths with somebody.”
“The way you say it, I want to believe you.” She touched my left side and rested her hand on my rib cage, midway down the line of the surgery scar. “Can I ask you again?” she said.
“You just did,” I said.
“It looks like it hurts.”
“It was a long time ago,” I said.
“But it still hurts.” She rested her hand on my heart.
Stef whispered in Portuguese. She was watching us.
“What was that, sweetheart?” Dri said. “You’re thirsty, I know.” She put her ear to Stef’s mouth. Stef gulped and cleared her throat and whispered again.
I checked the water distiller. “We have maybe a mouthful for her,” I said.
Dri shook her head no. “She doesn’t want any,” Dri said. “She said she saw them yesterday. Your scars. She said they’re bullet wounds.”
Hearing the words, I felt the dull heat that pulsed whenever somebody made me remember. The heat radiated outward from where the bullet went in just below my left shoulder blade. I shrugged. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I said. I saw she wanted me to tell her more, but I couldn’t, not with John in earshot. His eyes were dead set on the horizon. JoJo’s too, but I don’t think he was looking out into the ocean as much as looking away from what was happening to Stef. She was turning pale except for under her eyes where the skin was purple.
Dri was kneeling next to Stef but still an arm’s reach from me. She took my hand, and her fingers stitched the spaces between mine. She spoke quietly. “You can tell me about it, you know?”
I knew I could, even then, after knowing her for only a day. The way she held my hand, the way she looked at me so openly. She was the kind of person you could tell your secrets and know she would keep them, but I gave her what John always gave me whenever we dared to let it—that night—creep up on us. “It’s just what happened,” I said.
“I don’t mean to push you,” she said. She had more to say, but I cut her off.
“I appreciate that,” I said. I closed my eyes and rested the back of my head against the side of the boat. It felt like a betrayal to Mr. Costello, talking about the shooting with anybody except John or maybe my dad. He was there too.
I’m still trying to understand what happened that rainy night not long after I turned fourteen. I know this much: It didn’t end that night. Three years later, it had followed us onto the water, and now we were trapped with it. Payments were going to have to be made, favors returned, accounts reckoned, sacrifices honored, all the things John and I had managed to dodge until now.
Thursday, August 19, just after midnight, the beginning of the second day on the water …
We were too tired to keep two people on watch. We kept nodding off. The waves had gone from making us seasick to rocking us to sleep. Better to have one wide-awake person on lookout while the other three rested up. I took the midnight to three shift. I checked on Stef. Her arm was dead, black from the tourniquet down with a faint scent of rot, but she seemed the most peaceful yet. She’d stopped shivering and her breathing came easier as she slept. These were not good signs.
No boats passed during the three hours of my watch, or I didn’t see any lights on the water. I did see some in the sky. They came rhythmically, every couple of minutes. We’d drifted into a flight path. The jets flew too high for their engine noise to reach us. Toward the end of my shift, JoJo kept me company. I pointed out an even more useless light, a satellite. It moved slowly, a shooting star that didn’t want to die.
“You see Lyra behind it, of course,” he said.
“Of course.”
“You don’t like astronomy?”
“I think I’d love it, if I had the time.”
“I miss my telescope. When we get back, I must have you down to Rio. Matt, I’m so grateful you’re here. You and John. I believe God sent you both. You especially. You revived her. Why do you shake your head? Yes, Matt, you have to accept this truth. You brought Stef back from death.”
“She would have coughed up the water anyway, sooner or later.”
“I think not. She was drowning. I wouldn’t have known what to do. I would have frozen. I did freeze. I never thought I was this kind of person, that I would falter in an emergency situation. I always imagined myself as someone who would be capable in a crisis.”
“You were great,” I said. “If my girlfriend was in trouble, I would have lost it.”
“No. You have a talent for remaining calm. This is the way God made you.”
“Inside I was freaking out. I still am.”
“But the trick is not to show it, yes? Not in the moment anyway, or else we all would have panicked. Well, maybe not John. He is stonelike in his stillness at times. I mean this as a compliment. Perfectly steady, your friend. If the nuclear bombs fall, I want to be standing next to John. He will know exactly where to go and what to do, yes?”
“I think he would stay put and crack a Sprite,” I said.
“I could see him doing this. He would lie back and put his hands behind his head and say, ‘What’s next? I’m ready.’ Or is John not a believer?”
I didn’t know the answer to that. We never talked about stuff like whether or not there was a next life. I guess our minds were tapped out trying to figure out this one. Before I could say anything, JoJo said, “He’s a believer. He believes in himself. Matt, who shot you?”
The question woke me up. It always did, but especially now, coming the way it had, from nowhere, or at least not in any way I could connect it to what we’d been talking about, life after death, heaven, hell—there it was, the connection, hell.
“I never found out,” I said.
“He got away?”
I checked to see if John was sleeping, and he was. Dri too, and Stef.
“He got away,” I said.
“A random act of violence,” JoJo said. “I think this would be harder to bear than a deliberate act.”
He was so wrong. It was a deliberate act, and it was harder to bear because I was
the one who had provoked it. I tried not to see it happening all over again. The more I tried to push it away, the harder it pushed back at me, into my consciousness. I didn’t want to blink. In the tenth of a second that my eyes were closed, I would see it, the explosion of car-window glass.
I fiddled with the tiller handle, looking for a way to end the conversation. “What are the chances it’ll start when we need it to?” I said.
JoJo patted the boat’s engine like it was good dog. “We have a chance now,” he said. “We’re all going to be okay. I feel it, you know? The morning will come and we’ll see a boat. It will be close enough for us to chase it. God is watching out for us. Matt, how about you? Do you believe?”
“Only when I’m taking a test I didn’t study for,” I said.
“Then you believe.” He mussed my hair.
I tried to find a form in the constellation of stars JoJo had pointed out. “So what’s Lyra’s story?” I said.
“It’s an eagle. She’s carrying a lyre up to heaven. See?”
“Honestly? No.”
He smiled and squinted at the stars. “I don’t either. This is why the stars are awesome. You can draw whatever you need into them.”
“And why would the ancient Greeks or Romans or whoever need an eagle to fly a lyre up to heaven?”
“Why, so the angels can jam, of course. They knew they were headed that way too, and who doesn’t like a good party?”
John stepped toward us. I hadn’t noticed when he’d woken up. He took the binoculars from me and said, “Get some sleep.”
“You’re not on duty for another half hour, boss,” JoJo said.
“I’m awake. You guys rest up. I’ll wake you at six. And don’t call me boss.”
“Is that an order?” JoJo said. Now he mussed John’s hair. John looked at him like, Why are you touching my hair?
JoJo lay next to Stef. I lay next to Dri. There was no other place to go. Her head rolled slightly with the waves. She cuddled into me. The boat almost rocked me to sleep. When I closed my eyes I saw my parents. Mom paced. Dad kept telling her the same lie I kept telling Dri, that everything was going to be okay.
To: [email protected]
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From: [email protected]
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Subject: Update on Missing Persons Costello/Halloway
* * *
Date: August 19, 4:50 AM
* * *
The friend whose car they borrowed says Halloway is a stand-up guy but he wasn’t so sure about Costello. I ran background checks, and Halloway looks clean so far. Costello has a weapons possession charge. It was dismissed. I know a guy in Queens County Court who’s going to look into it for me. For now, I’m thinking this is just a joyride that got out of hand.
Also, Costello’s mother was hospitalized with alcohol poisoning. Apparently this wasn’t the first time.
August 19, dawn of the second day …
Another sailor joined us that morning. I met him in my nightmare. He lay in the front seat of the car with his skull smashed in. Mr. Costello opened his eyes and cried blood tears. The ghost had never spoken to me before, but that morning he said, Matt, it’s time to wake up.
I woke up to fog. Dri held my hand in her sleep. I thought someone had put a wood chip into my mouth, until I realized it was my tongue. Now I was the one wondering if I could have just a sip of seawater. Somehow I still had to pee. I slipped away from Driana.
The fog was thick and drizzly, and I couldn’t see much past the edge of the boat. John stood at the bow, his arms folded across his chest. He nodded Stef’s way.
She died with her eyes and mouth open. That beautiful young woman who was joking around less than a day and a half earlier was just nowhere. I’d seen bodies in caskets, but I’d seen a body like this—raw, ugly dead—only once before. I must have been staring at her, what had been her, for a minute before I realized the drizzle had turned to rain. It fell so hard the fiberglass rang. The ringing woke Dri and JoJo. Dri was midstretch when she noticed Stef. “Why are her eyes open? Why is her mouth open?”
Dri looked like she’d been in a car crash, just dazed, sitting there in the middle of the wreckage, but JoJo was flipping out. He shook Stef’s body. He broke the strips of towel that kept the body tied to the windsurf board. He ripped away the sail that mummified her. He grabbed Stef’s head in his gigantic hands and brought it to his face and screamed at her in Portuguese, as if yelling could wake her up, could make her face not be paler than the fog. Like shaking her could stop her body from being limp the way a body is when it has no muscle tone. He tried to revive her, mouth to mouth, the way I had two nights before. He was a quick study, because the air went into her lungs no problem. Her chest expanded unnaturally, too quickly, and collapsed just as unnaturally as JoJo hyperventilated her. I tried to make him stop. When Dri snapped out of her daze enough to help me, we were able to pull him off Stef. The last breath he’d gotten into her body made an awful sound as it came out, screeching train brakes.
John got in there and pulled the tarp off Stef.
“John, hey, wait,” Dri said. “Stop.”
“What are you doing, man?” I said. I had been trying to cover the body with the tarp when John yanked it away.
“Catching the water,” John said. “Matt, wake up. A little help here?”
I left Dri’s side and stretched out the tarp with John. We funneled the rain into the milk crate Dri had lined with the plastic tarp. It would hold maybe a cubic foot of water, which seemed like a lot at that moment. JoJo covered Stef’s face with his hands. “Help me, Driana,” he said. “The rain is getting into her eyes. Help me close her eyes. It’s getting into her mouth. She’s going to choke.”
“JoJo,” Dri said.
He cut her off. “Just help me, will you? Help me keep her eyelids down. Why won’t they stay closed?”
The rain smashed the tops of our heads. Before long the milk crate was full. John dunked the gallon jug into it. He pushed the jug into Dri’s hands. “Drink,” he said. “Drink all you can, both of you, before the rain stops.”
“She was a sister to me, John,” Dri said.
“That’s all the more reason for you to hurry up and drink.”
“Are you kidding? The last thing on my mind right now is water.”
“Do what you want,” John said. “Drink or end up like her.” He dunked the peanut can into the milk crate and drank. I cupped water in my hands and drank until my stomach stretched.
By noon the rain was long gone and the sun was the hottest I’d felt it all summer. The water was flat. No breeze, no birds, no fish.
JoJo cradled Stef’s body. He was almost as pale as the corpse. He whispered to it. I’d managed to close the eyes after holding them down for a few minutes, and I’d pulled up the Windsurfer sail over the face, but JoJo slipped it down. The eyes didn’t stay closed for long either. The heat was working its nasty magic, and the inside of the body was beginning to swell even as the skin was drying out and shrinking. The eyelids pulled back, and the eyes were starting to look like cheese mold. Dri looked away, out at the sea. Where else could she look?
I hadn’t needed much time at all to become emotionally distant about Stef’s death. Almost right away I’d stopped thinking of the corpse as her and started referring to it as, well, it in my mind anyway. How had I been able to make this switch so quickly? My coldness frightened me. My John-like practicality. Still, I didn’t dare to suggest that maybe we wanted to get the corpse out of the boat before the skin split. The sun was cruel enough that day to bloat the body quickly. Then a more horrific thought came to me: The sun wasn’t being cruel at all. It was just being what it was, a mindless, merciless star that would shine on whatever got in its way, beauty or horror, without prejudice, with equal heat. It was everywhere I looked, in the fabric of the water, the sky, the rare wind gust: no spirit, no feeling, emptiness.
We’d put the water in th
e bench cabinet to keep it as cool as we could. The gallon jug and milk crate were full. “We should limit ourselves to a gallon a day,” John said.
“That gets us through tomorrow,” I said, “and then we’re back to relying on the distiller Dri put together.”
“A gallon for all of us, a quart each,” John said. “That’ll see us through the next four days or so.”
“You really think we’ll be out here that long?” Dri said.
“Does it matter what I think?”
“We have to run into somebody at some point,” I said.
“Why?” John said. “Nobody owes us anything.”
“Save your strength, John,” Dri said. “Don’t let it burn you out. I’m talking about your anger.”
“I’m not angry,” John said. “I was stating a fact, that we got ourselves out here, and we’re the ones who have the biggest incentive to get ourselves back to land. Relying on magical thinking, like we’re blessed or whatever, isn’t going to save us. It’s going to kill us. We’re not special. All you have to do is look at your cousin’s body to know that. For all her money, she … Look, if anything, I’m a little scared.”
“Yeah, huh?” Dri said. “You don’t look the least bit scared, and maybe that’s the most frightening thing of all.”
“You’ll believe me or you won’t. I have no control over that, but there’s no anger here. Anger will get me killed faster than anything else, and I’m not ready to give up just yet.”
“Oh, you’re angry all right,” Dri said. “You just don’t realize it. And I agree with you on one thing at least. Anger can only get us killed, especially out here. Your best bet is to forgive Stef. Not for her. I know you don’t believe in ghosts or whatever.”
“Okay, if you say so,” John said.
“For you, I’m saying. Forgive her for your own peace of mind.”
“I’m sorry about Stef,” John said. “I feel bad for you, for him too.” He nodded at JoJo, but JoJo wasn’t listening. He was cradling the corpse. The body looked smaller in his giant arms. “Seriously,” John said, “the last thing I can afford right now is to waste time being mad at Stef.”