by Paul Griffin
As it turned out I happened to be sitting between them. Yes, the flies were chewing at me as much as they were John, and yes, I agreed with what he was thinking, but no, I wasn’t going to tell Dri we had to dump her cousin’s body. I’d told her too much already, spilling the grimy details of the Woodhull Road mess. I regretted it now, my need to share or whatever, to infect her with the sense of loss that took hold of me under the train tracks that night and never let me go, as if talking about it would halve the pain instead of double it.
I cupped my hand and swung harder than I had to at a fly chewing my shoulder through my shirt. I was shaky with a hunger pang. The cramp went almost as quickly as it came, and I didn’t feel any better, just weaker.
“JoJo,” Dri said. “Look at me, sweetie. It’s time.”
“Your uncle will die if he doesn’t get to say good-bye to her,” JoJo said. A fly landed on his lip now. He could have swatted it away, but instead he smacked himself.
“He can’t say good-bye, Jo,” Dri said. “She’s gone. Look at her. It’s killing me. We have to let her go.”
“How can you not see that I have to bring her home to Rio?” JoJo said. “She has to go into the crypt. This is her destiny. Did you know that your uncle had a crypt made for Stef’s mother?”
We all did. He’d told us about it twice already. “I know, Jo,” Dri said.
JoJo cut her off. “I used to go with Stef,” he said. “These huge pine trees shade the crypt. She’ll be happy there. She’ll be with her mom. You understand, don’t you? This way I can visit her. Please, I am begging you, Dri. Matt, you see where I am coming from, right?”
“I do, JoJo.” I had more to say, starting off with “but,” until JoJo cut me off.
“Thank you, Matt. She thanks you too.” He brought Stef’s face to his chest to shield it from the flies. “Yes, meu amor. I’m taking you home.”
John slung his arm over my shoulder. “Nice job, bud. Your pal Dri there was a breath away from getting crazy man to give up the corpse. You’re the smartest guy I know, but you don’t know when to speak up and when to shut up. When will you ever learn, man?” He grabbed at a fly on my arm and actually caught it. He crushed it, and another took its place.
For the next few hours, Dri begged JoJo to let go of Stef’s body. She hugged him; she hugged Stef’s corpse. She stroked his hair and hers. She cried, laughed, and remembered with him. All the while the flies gnawed on us. The biting got so bad I had to slip into the water and stay there for a bit, much as I hated being in the ocean in the dark. Finally, at sunrise, Dri convinced JoJo to give up Stef.
We took back the sail, the strips of towel, even the tourniquet crusty with blood. Stef wore a silver choker. A medal hung from it, the dove of peace. I unclipped the necklace and gave it to Dri.
“No, leave it on her,” Dri said.
“No, Dri, you take it,” JoJo said.
We put the body on the windsurf board. JoJo said some prayers in Portuguese and we laid the board in the water. The ocean was flat then, but when the waves came the body would wash off the board. We only needed it to stay above water until we paddled away.
John and I paddled while Dri and JoJo watched the body grow smaller. I kept my eyes steady ahead until we were a hundred yards off, and then I looked back. The body’s grisliness wasn’t obvious anymore. JoJo took out his phone. “Matt, can you turn the boat a little right? I want to line up a picture of my angel with the sun in the background. Yes, that’s it. This will be my last memory of her, forever part of the sunrise.” Click.
Stef took the flies with her. Not all of them, and not all at once, but in a few minutes only a few ragged stragglers remained. They were easy kills.
To: [email protected]
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From: [email protected]
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Subject: Costello/Halloway
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Date: Saturday, August 21, 12:50 PM—Day 4
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MISSING PERSONS SUFFOLK COUNTY 314-0818 COSTELLO/HALLOWAY ***EXPANDED***
Also presumed missing:
Gonzaga, Driana, 17, of Manhattan
Gonzaga, Estefania, 18, of Rio de Janeiro
Martins, João, 18, of Rio de Janeiro
Driana Gonzaga appears to be universally loved. The locals are starting up a search party for her. We checked her friends’ Instagrams and found a shot of her and Matt Halloway holding hands on the beach the night of the party. That’s where the search focus is for now, on the cliffs and dunes. Lots of places to hide bodies, neighbors say, but I don’t buy it. Everything I’m getting on Halloway from his coworkers and teachers is he’s the perfect kid, nice, quiet—very quiet. He doesn’t even have a Facebook page, no Instagram, no social media whatsoever. Costello doesn’t either, but I’m less sure about him. One of his coworkers referred to him as the Iceman.
Sunday, August 22, morning, day five …
Our water supply was starting to look scary, and what little we dared to drink we sweated right out. The dehydration cramped my legs so bad my hamstrings twitched. I tried to rub the knots out of the muscles but that only exhausted me. My circulatory system was getting messed up too, because even though it was a hundred-plus degrees in that boat my feet were cold. Meanwhile my head and shoulders were on fire. John had made a turban from his T-shirt and kept the turban wet. Blisters speckled his shoulders.
“Better put your shirt on,” I said.
“I’d rather keep my head cool,” he said.
Time slowed down sometimes and sped up others. The morning passed in a blink, and then the sun stalled at noon. “Move,” I said. “Get going. Go down.” My voice sounded strange to me, how I might sound as an old man, if I lived long enough. Most of the day before, my stomach felt punched in, but today I wasn’t hungry at all, like I was just getting over the flu. I was too tired to sleep but too drowsy to be awake, too sick to dream. I guess that was a good thing. I wasn’t coughing as much as I had been the first couple of days. That had been rough, getting used to breathing in the saltwater air. Still, my lungs itched deep down.
Now that Stef and the flies were gone, the sense of urgency had left the boat. We seemed to move in slow motion. My arms were heavy when I put the binoculars to my eyes. The binoculars probably weighed a pound but felt twenty times that. When I was alone on watch and Dri was asleep—that was the worst time. The real drag about being stuck on the water is the monotony. Even the constant feeling of terror becomes boring. And after the first few hours of being amazed by the sea’s wideness and the clouds that look like angels one minute and trolls the next, there’s nothing to look at, no place to go but inward, and who wants to go there, especially when a ghost is waiting for you?
The one thing we had plenty of was wind. We tried all kinds of ways to rig up the Windsurfer sail. It was stained with orangey reminders of Stef’s suffering. We tied the mast to the railings that ran along the front of the boat with a complicated web of towrope. The sail caught the wind until the mast creaked against the towrope and fell. We applied more rope. The sail held the wind and stayed up and almost flipped the boat. We lowered the sail, the flag of our incompetence. Even if we’d figured out a way to make it work, we wouldn’t have known which way to sail. We were able to figure out north, south, east, and west with John’s wristwatch, but we didn’t know which one of those would take us to land. We could have been twenty miles off the Brooklyn coast for all we knew, or twenty from Boston, or two hundred from nowhere. Everywhere I looked, looked exactly the same.
Then at about two in the afternoon we finally saw a bird, a gull. Not long after that we saw fish, very small and silver. They followed along in the boat’s shadow. We tried to catch them with our hands, but they were too fast or we were too slow.
JoJo spoke to me in Portuguese.
“My brain isn’t working well enough to try to translate that,” I said.
“Maybe big fish will come to eat the small ones,” he said.
His smile sagged, his face darkened. The light went out of his eyes, and they turned muddy indigo. He drew his phone and shot a video of himself. He spoke in Portuguese.
Dri hugged him. “Stop talking like that, Jo. Your mom already knows you’re grateful to her.” She turned to me. “He said he’s grateful to his mom for having him.” Back to JoJo: “You’re going to tell her that yourself, Jo, in person. You’ll see her again very soon, sweetheart. You just watch.”
Dri’s hug cheered him up. It cheered me up too. Our feelings were so transferable out there. Being together with nowhere to run, we were forced to absorb one another’s moods. Well, three of us were. Only John was immune to our fears and hopes. JoJo was John’s opposite. More than Dri and me, he picked up on any little shift in someone’s emotional state and magnified it. With Dri’s hand in his, the light was back in his eyes. “Here, come, Matt. Come, John. Today’s memory will be a video of the four of us. Lean in.”
“We need to save that battery,” John said.
“Just for a moment,” JoJo said. “When we get home I am going to post all the memories of her, for her family. The story of her last adventure. Humor me, John. Please?”
John was making a harpoon from the Windsurfer’s handrail. He scored an end of it with the flat-head screwdriver. “Then you’ll turn off the phone?” he said.
“We’ll be quick.” We huddled, and JoJo framed us. “Dri, tap record. Thank you. Okay, so we are four days on the water, and, well, we are here. We will not be defeated. We will carry Stef’s memory home. Dri?”
“We have each other.”
“That’s all?” JoJo said.
“That’s everything,” she said.
“Yes. Now you, Matt,” JoJo said.
Dri was leaning into me. The backs of our hands were touching. I slipped my fingers between hers, and she gripped my hand good. “I’m relieved,” I said. In the phone’s screen I saw Dri and JoJo smile in confusion. John just looked confused. “I was stuck for what to write about in my college essay,” I said.
“John?”
“Five, not four,” John said. “We’re five days on the water.”
At dusk John called me over to help him with the harpoon. “Sit on the bench and hold the pipe steady,” he said.
He lined up a hammer with the end of the pipe and swung down. The pipe cracked along the lines he scored into it. I touched the end of the harpoon, and it was sharper than the old kitchen knives we had back home in Queens—not that they were being used much. No way had my parents eaten a thing since I’d gone missing. I couldn’t think about it, about them. I had to save my energy, and I wasn’t going to burn away my calories on tears.
John wasn’t as interested in the harpoon as he was in the short end he’d snapped off.
He wrapped a handle onto it—Stef’s plasma-stained tourniquet. “It’s a knife,” he said.
“I picked up on that,” I said.
“To butcher the fish.”
“What fish?”
“The one I’m going to catch.”
“How?”
“I’m still working on that.” He wore the knife in his belt.
I was alone on lookout duty as the seconds ticked away toward midnight. I watched the date change from Aug 22 to Aug 23 on JoJo’s phone. Sun became Mon, and acid burned the lining of my stomach. This was the start of our sixth day on the water. I turned off the phone and stowed it in my pocket. I didn’t see anything out there worth a battery-draining SOS flash.
JoJo was supposed to relieve me but I let him sleep. The flies had chewed on all of us equally by now, but JoJo’s bites weren’t healing. He wouldn’t stop digging at them—or couldn’t stop, he said. He was as close to peaceful as he was going to get, snoring away in the back of the boat, and I wasn’t sleepy anyway. It wasn’t the stars that were keeping me awake. Even they couldn’t amaze me anymore. It was Dri, the idea that we might hang out together after we were saved, if we were saved. I pictured the two of us doing regular stuff, picking out that dog, the one she was going to rescue in September. Meeting up with her at the animal shelter and heading out for a slice or two after. Lying in the grass together at the North Meadow in Central Park, trying to find faces in the clouds. Cuddling up with her on the sofa while we watched corny old movies or great ones, Lawrence of Arabia maybe. Isn’t that what you do with your girlfriend? I didn’t know. I’d never gotten that close with anybody. I’d had crushes, and most of the people I hung out with at school were girls, but it wouldn’t be right to start up something serious with one of them. I was friendly with everybody but wouldn’t allow myself to have actual friends outside of John. When people tried to get close, I pulled back. I was a loner, and I felt better that way. It’s not fair to ask a girl to be with somebody who can’t really be with her. But Dri was different. I couldn’t see myself not being with her. I think it was the sand castle she built with that kid. The one that lasted forever when you remembered it. That was Dri. The world could wash away, and she would still be there with that lopsided smile, the one that made me smile just thinking about it.
Something chirped, John’s phone alarm. He woke himself up to turn it off. “What’s with the grin?” he said. “Matt, don’t start losing it on me.” Our self-appointed timekeeper, he nudged JoJo with his foot. “Hey, you’re up,” he said. “JoJo.”
“Uh?” JoJo rubbed his eyes and seemed not to know where he was.
“You’re late for your watch,” John said.
JoJo mumbled in Portuguese and then said sorry in English. The giant was woozy, and the boat rocked as he stumbled to his post.
“Matt, sleep,” John said.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You need to stick to the schedule. If you don’t sleep, you’ll fall asleep next time you’re on lookout.”
We’d stretched the tarp over the front half of the boat to make a sleeping tent. Two people fit under there. We’d made a smaller tent toward the back of the boat with the Windsurfer sail. It was big enough for two people, but we designated that one for Dri whenever she wasn’t on watch. It was the better tent. You could see the sky through the sail a little bit, in between Stef’s bloodstains anyway, even at night if the moon was high enough. It wasn’t so claustrophobic. The tarp the boys slept under was as dark during the day as it was at night, but because it was plastic-coated canvas, it was much warmer than the tent we’d made with the Windsurfer sail. I crawled under the tarp and was almost settled in when I felt Dri’s hand on my ankle. I sat up. “You okay?” I said.
“Freezing. Come here.”
John was back under the tarp in his sleeping vampire pose, hands folded over his chest, but JoJo was awake enough now to have heard Dri. He looked sad. “Matt, what are you waiting for?” he said. “She’s cold. Here, take this too.” He gave me his hoodie to give to Dri. She was already wearing one, but it was thin. When he pulled off his hoodie his shirt came up too, and his back was covered with sores. “JoJo,” I said, but he cut me off.
“I know. I won’t scratch. Now go to Driana.”
I crawled under the sail and cuddled Dri. She was shivering. “She’s been gone almost four days now,” she said, “but each time I wake up I look for her for a few seconds, until I remember this isn’t a dream. JoJo was dead-on when he was talking about my uncle Tomás. He’s going to lose it. Stef was his world. My dad’s too. He loved her like she was his. When we were little we’d get caught doing something stupid, and she would always skate free. I’d get punished for both of us. And—I’m not lying—it was always Stef who got us involved in the mischief in the first place. I guess I didn’t have to tell you that. This one time we were in the Ralph Lauren store. I was like eleven. Stef just had to have these sparkly princess hair bands. She stuck one into her pocket, another into mine, and of course she was out the door home free and I got caught. But Stef came back for me. Was she sorry? No. Right in front of the security guard she yelled at me for being such a rotten thief. They made us wait in the security office. I’m
a crying mess and Stef’s pouting. She made the security guard change the channel on his TV to Judge Judy. My dad came and picked us up and didn’t say a word until we got home. ‘Well, Driana,’ he said, ‘I’m so disappointed in you I could cry.’ Stef was like, ‘But, Tio, it was my fault. I was the one who stole them.’ And my dad goes, ‘No, no, it can’t be. Not my Estefania. She would never be so naughty.’ ”
“Which was his way of telling her he was so disappointed in her he could cry,” I said.
“Exactly. So maybe she didn’t skate. I swear, I know I should be crying, but when I think about her all I want to do is laugh.” She was doing a little of both. “My poor dad. This is going to change him. He won’t be as hopeful anymore. He struggles with that.”
“Hope?”
“I know, he’s rich, so the world should be rosy every which way he looks, right? But all the stuff he does with the foundation? He sees things. He tries to fix one of them, then he takes on two more disasters. Spoiling Stef was one of the great delights in his life.”
“How about your mom?” I said.
“What about her?”
“In all the time we’ve been out here, you haven’t mentioned her.”
“She moved out. Right after Christmas. I’m still so mad, Matthew. Not about the split. I mean, that part’s breaking my heart, but I get it. Things happen—things you couldn’t possibly have seen coming—and you change, and you aren’t the people you were when you met. It only makes sense at that point to take a break. No, I’m mad because she wanted me to go with her. I just don’t know how you ask somebody to do that. I mean, if you have to go, go, but don’t ask me to desert my father and leave him with nothing, right? If my dad had left, I would have stayed with my mom. He wouldn’t have asked me to go with him, though. He wouldn’t have wanted Mom to be alone. But then he never would have left her in the first place. God, I can see her back in her apartment. She’s past freaking out by now.”