by Paul Griffin
“They all are,” I said. “I’m sorry. About your folks.”
“They’re just separated still. Legally, I mean. She hasn’t filed for divorce yet. I’m not pushing them to stay together, just hoping, you know? It’s tricky because he has to travel all the time and she’s a homebody. Good luck trying to get her to leave New York. Even before they split we could barely get her to come out to East Hampton. She was thinking about coming out this weekend though, or she promised me she would think about it. She knew my dad was going to be back from London too. I wasn’t expecting them to fall into each other’s arms all over again, but I was thinking maybe it could be the beginning of a thaw. They’ll never get back together now. Not after this.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Tragedy brings people together, right?”
“Not this time. She’ll blame him for all of this, beginning with letting me have the party. She says he’s too lax with me, and he says she doesn’t trust me enough. Sorry, I’ll stop there. I could go on all night about the two of them, and thinking about where they are or aren’t on fixing themselves only makes me more upset because there’s nothing I can do about it out here. There’s probably nothing I can do about it back there either. God, I feel like I’m talking at half speed. Am I? It takes a lot longer to find the words. I know I’m starving, but then how come I’m not hungry anymore?”
“We’ll run into somebody soon,” I said.
“You keep saying that. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“What about you?” she said. “Your folks still together? They’re cool?”
“They’re cool. They’re together.”
“Nice. Maybe I don’t have to worry about you so much after all. Your folks are great, you’re at Hudson, you’re going to Yale.”
“I wish. Been meaning to ask you, can your dad buy them a building for me?”
“You’re going, okay? So where’s this whole desert thing coming from? And by the way, I don’t for a minute believe that’s going to make you happy. Being alone. Here’s my prescription: You and I start hanging out. We have an awesome year next year. I force myself to get over the fact I’m dating a dude who’s still in high school. You force yourself to date a girl who cleans animal cages. You with me so far?”
“My second favorite movie is Rocky. Ever see it?”
“Am I from Mars? And why are we talking movies all of a sudden?”
“I’m just saying, Rocky’s girlfriend, Adrian, she cleaned animal cages.”
“And as I recall, Rocky did just fine.”
“Well, he lost the fight,” I said.
“But he got the girl, so there you go.”
“I still can’t believe you haven’t seen Lawrence of Arabia.”
“When we get back, we’ll watch it and you’ll explain why it’s so awesome when the book was only meh. Okay, you finish up at Hudson, next stop Yale. You drop the forestry thing and major in something sensible and incredibly lucrative like film criticism, something that will keep you from running away to the canyons, where they don’t have any movie theaters, just so you know. You head on up to Cambridge on the weekends, where I’ll be waiting for you at the train station. You study your brains out on that train, okay?”
“Promise.”
“You get killer grades, you graduate top of your class, you have your pick of teaching positions.”
“Teaching, huh? I don’t think so.”
“You’ll see. Whatever you do, you stay with me in New York, we live happily ever after.” She hid her face in my shirt. JoJo turned to see what was up. Then he turned away.
“Why did you have to give me that ice cream?” she said. “Why did you have to get on the boat?”
“I was, I don’t know. I was worried about you.”
“Oh my God, you just keep making it worse. Why are you doing this to me?”
“What am I doing?”
“Matthew, look at me. What are you running away from?”
John was awake now—and after he’d told me to stick to the sleep schedule too. He’d slipped out from under the tarp and onto the nose of the boat. He was looking into the nearer water.
“We should probably quit while we’re ahead,” I said. “Or while I’m ahead at least. I had you at happily-ever-after a minute ago. I can only mess this up. We should rest.”
Dri kissed my cheek and lay back and rested her head on my chest. She slept, and I didn’t sleep a wink. Her hand was resting on my chest too. Her fingers found the gaps in my rib cage. Her fingertips crossed the scar line.
THE HAMPTONIAN TIMES
Gonzaga Cousins and João Martins Missing Six Days
BY M. J. SHAW, AUGUST 23, updated 6:32 PM
* * *
East Hampton—On Main Street, yellow ribbons are appearing everywhere, tied around trees and lampposts with pictures of Driana and Estefania Gonzaga and Mr. Martins. The teens went missing last Tuesday night after a party at Driana Gonzaga’s home on Dune Road.
Police won’t comment while the investigation is ongoing, but rumors are circulating that authorities aren’t ruling out the possibility of a kidnapping. No word has been given as to whether a ransom request has been made. An official close to the investigation reports that detectives are focusing on two young men from Queens, Matthew Halloway and John Costello, both 17.
Mr. Costello’s former boss, Michael Garcia of Elite Auto Repair, described Costello as a terrific worker, but “robotic. I always had a funny feeling about John,” Garcia said. “He was the kind where you want to put a little distance between yourself and him.”
Lifeguards at Heron Hills, where the young men were working this summer, said of Mr. Halloway, “he was too nice sometimes” and “too good to be true.”
Comments (34)
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Allison_Sunada
We love you, Dri. Please come home safe. : … ( 25
Coop_15moonwalk
I heard of Diana Gonazogo from a mutual friend, and she’s supposed to be a real good girl. When they catch these losers from Queens, they should string them up. Serious, no mercy. 3 9
Gabriela_Azevedo
Estefa, que o tempo que surfou nas Maldivas foi o melhor momento da minha vida. Eu te amo e JoJo, e eu sei que você vai ficar bem, por favor, Jesus Cristo. 1
Tuesday, August 24, afternoon, day seven …
“You have to stop scratching,” I said. I’d told him plenty of times, and I was getting close to yelling at him.
“Just a few more minutes,” JoJo said. “It’s the only thing that makes me feel good.”
“You’re tearing off your skin. Your nails are filthy. You’re infecting yourself.” I pushed his hand away from his shin. “I mean it, we’re going to have to tie your hands behind your back.”
“It’s not just the fly bites,” JoJo said. “My dermatitis flares up when I become stressed. Matt, my medications. I don’t do so well when I skip them.”
“Just keep washing the sores with salt water and then rinse with the fresh water.”
“We don’t have enough fresh water. I would rather drink my share. Anyway, it’s not just my skin. I take mood stabilizers, or I did until we rushed out here. So there, we are brothers now, if we weren’t already. I let you in on my secret. You’re not on medication?”
“I probably should be. Dri says I’m sad.”
“Yes, I know. And this tells me that Driana truly does not understand the meaning of the word sad.”
I didn’t like the way he was looking at her. He seemed to be annoyed with her. He had no reason to be. She was asleep under her tent—deeply asleep. Her arms were spread out a little from her sides, her hands palms up. Her head rolled with the waves, leaving her neck exposed. I kept thinking, Vulnerable. She’s so vulnerable.
It had started the day before, just after sunset. A bad feeling had come into the boat. It wasn’t exactly anger. A menace, maybe. I didn’t think JoJo was causing it, but he was picking up on it. He took a picture of a sore on
the inside of his shin. It looked like raw chicken. He’d lost the most weight. He had the most to lose, and now his jeans hung loose. Mine did too. John was lean to begin with, but his cheekbones were becoming sharper. Dri seemed to be in the best shape, at least up until that point.
I lifted the water jug from the sea. We kept it there with a towrope to cool it and slow the bacteria from turning it bad. We’d cut the rations to stretch the supply, but that rainstorm was five long days in the past, and now we were down to a third of a jug. Our ration for today was three sips each. I took one of mine. The water still tasted of gasoline but I had a hard time not chugging it. JoJo held out his hand for the jug. He took all three sips at once. And then he took a fourth.
“Hey,” John said.
“What?” JoJo said.
“Easy. You pulled one too many out of the jug.”
JoJo cursed. “Sorry. I forgot.”
“You’re done until we cook up some more,” John said, but more was not on the way. Dri’s improvised distiller filled two peanut cans a day, and the sky had to be cloudless.
JoJo handed John the jug and curled into himself under the tarp. John capped the jug and dropped it into the sea and got back to studying the strip of water in the boat’s shadow. He set up his post at the back of the boat, as far away from JoJo as he could put himself. He had his harpoon ready, but I didn’t see any fish except for those small silver ones. They weren’t big enough to stab, maybe two inches long. Anyway, all you had to do was think about trying to catch one and they flashed away before your hand hit the water.
“We should have saved a piece of her,” John said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Shh. For bait. Just something to keep in mind.”
“John? Don’t say stuff like that to me, okay?”
“I know it isn’t exactly pleasant to think about.”
“Gee, really?”
“If it happens, I’m saying. We can’t waste anything. If we get enough meat in the water we’ll have a good shot at drawing the bigger fish.”
“How do you know it won’t be you?” I said.
“I don’t. And if I’m the first to go, then I want you guys to dig in.”
“You’re losing it.”
“You’d be insane not to, if you could stomach it.”
“Now we’ve gone from bait to food. You could?” I said. “Stomach it?”
“I’d have to.”
“You’re scaring me, man.”
“If that’s what it takes to get you to wake up, then a little fear is good.”
“I’m awake enough. The panic I felt when the engine conked out—”
“You mean when the supersized zombie over there conked it out,” John said.
“Either way, when I looked around and all I saw was black, choppy water? That zing that made me want to puke? That didn’t go away, okay? It’s become my baseline, and I’m just used to it by now. I’m still plenty scared, so rest easy on that much. I know where we are, what our prospects are.”
“I don’t think so,” John said. “Things are going to have to change if we can’t figure out a way to get some food. It could happen before that even, maybe as soon as our water is gone.”
“Are you saying you’re going to enforce this change, whatever it is you have in mind?”
“I don’t have anything in mind. I don’t even know what it will look like. I know this, though: I’ll have no control over it. None of us will. It’ll just happen. And once it starts, there’s no going back. No food and the drive to survive can make a person do things he never thought he’d be able to do, especially when he’s losing his mind. I’m telling you, Matt, watch your back. Dri’s too. As big as he is, I think he might be stronger than he looks.”
“And I think you’re paranoid.”
“Proud to be too.”
“We can afford to cut him a little slack here,” I said. “The guy just lost the love of his life. He’s a wreck. Can you blame him for being a little off?”
“A little off? Okay.”
“Come on, John. At heart he’s a giant teddy bear.”
“I don’t think you believe that. And if you do, that’s the kind of thinking that’s going to get you into trouble. I don’t know what he is at heart, but it’s not a teddy bear. Or if it is, it’s one with teeth.”
“He cowered just before when you yelled at him about the water.”
“We have no choice but to stand up to him out here. You can’t show your fear around somebody like that. It triggers something in them. They don’t have control over it. They become … I don’t know. Slaves maybe.”
“Slaves to who?”
“Their instinct. Sure, he’s cowering—for now. Even he doesn’t know he’s about to explode. You’re not seeing the situation for what it is. You feel sorry for him.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“When it’s messing up your judgment it’s a huge problem. Look, we’ve been here before, and I’m getting tired of it. Why do you always have to put yourself in harm’s way? Go wake Dri. It’s her time to watch.”
“I think you need to take your own advice and get some sleep.”
“I’ll have to. I just hope you and Dri keep an eye out for me when I do.”
And John did sleep, right next to JoJo too, under the tarp. Part of that was the old idea of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer—at least I’m pretty sure that’s what John was thinking. Even if he wasn’t, he had to hunker under the tarp anyway. The sun was murderous this time of day, four o’clock. Dri had to do her watch duty from the shade of the tent we made from the Windsurfer sail. We’d propped it up on one side with the Windsurfer’s fiberglass crossbeam so we had a clear view of the water.
I kept her company and kept watch for her as she tried to rub a twitch out of my shoulder. The dehydration was knotting up the muscles in my back too. Dri dug into my shoulder. It helped, but I didn’t want her to burn so many calories on my account. As soon as she stopped the tightness would come back anyway. “Save your energy,” I said.
“Doesn’t feel good?”
“Awesome. Here, swing around. Your turn.”
“No, you can catch me next time,” she said. “Bet you’re regretting that one now, huh? Giving away those Klondike bars?”
“No. No way.”
“Your lips are trembling.”
“The rest of me too, I think. It comes in waves. I feel like I’ll pass out, and then the feeling passes.”
“Me too.”
I checked to see if John and JoJo were still asleep. It was so dark under the tarp I couldn’t tell. We were far enough toward the back of the boat that John wouldn’t have been able to hear me anyway. “It was my fault,” I said.
“What was?” Dri said.
“The attack on the car. Mr. Costello. The other night when you tried to make me feel better, when you said I had to understand that we weren’t marked, John and I, our dads? We were, and I marked us. It wasn’t random at all. I got Mr. Costello killed. Back home he’s everywhere, you know? I see him on my way to school, when I turn the corner to catch the train into Manhattan. He’s there under the tracks, right where it all went down, lingering in the trestle shadows. He follows me up the steps to the turnstiles. He looks so lost and sad. Like he wants to tell me something, but he can’t talk, because his neck is all blown out. His voice is gone.”
“And you think you could have stopped the shooting?”
“I could have.”
“How?”
“By not starting it. I provoked them, the idiots who were messing with the other team’s assistant coach. I practically dared them to fight. I was our catcher. John was pitching. He was our shortstop normally, but both our pitchers were knocked off the mound by then. John was the next best arm. John zips one in. Right when the ump calls ‘Strike,’ one of the idiots in the bleachers starts howling. His buddies are all coughing, they’re laughing so hard. The assistant coach is grabbing at the back of
his neck, and he’s got clumps of slimy spit between his fingers. I was sick of it. John calls out to me to throw him the ball, but I can’t stop staring at the guys who were messing with the assistant coach. The umpire asks me what’s up, and I’m just sort of frozen there. John calls me to the mound and I jog out. We come to the conclusion that we need to get rid of these idiots. Now the whole infield’s huddling on the mound, and then the outfield jogs in. John and I walk toward the bleachers. We let the idiots know we think it would be a good idea if they left now. I don’t have to tell you what they thought of our idea.”
“I hate these guys,” Dri said. “How can a person find something like that funny? Messing with some poor man who’s just trying to take care of his team? If you find that funny, you’re not human.”
“They’re everywhere, though. That’s the thing that bums me out the most. I read that one in twenty-five people is a sociopath.”
“And this is why you want to run away? You don’t think you’ll run into people like that in the desert?”
“Less of them.”
“Or more. The desert is the perfect hideout.”
“Well, these particular psychos, the ones in the bleachers, the last thing they want to do is hide. They want to be seen. They won’t leave. They want to be heard. The ringleader calls John and me everything you think he’d call us, and then he tells us to get back out there and play ball, or else. It just burns me, that this guy is going to make all of us stand by while he abuses the assistant coach. Maybe I’m madder because we let it go on so long. That’s when the word comes to my lips. I call the ringleader the same thing I’d call myself at this point, a coward.
“Here I’m this fourteen-year-old punk, and this dude’s in his thirties, and I’m challenging his manhood. I’m telling him he’s afraid to own up to the fact that he’s an idiot. If he had the courage to look at himself in the mirror that morning and see himself for the piece of garbage he is, he wouldn’t embarrass himself by leaving the house. Well, he’s up in my face fast and gives me a double arm shove, and I hit the ground. By now the rest of the team is with us, and there’s more shoving, and just when I’m about to get stomped, Mr. Costello gets in there and grabs the ringleader by the ponytail and kicks the back of the guy’s knees. Now the ringleader is pinned facedown in the dugout dirt. Mr. Costello helps him up. He drags him to the ball-field exit and throws him into the parking lot. As the ringleader and his buddies walk away, I can see him doing it. He’s looking back over his shoulder at me and John and most of all Mr. Costello, and he’s mumbling to one of his crew. You know the rest.”