“They fucking hurt me this time.”
I need to do something. I wonder where I put that peroxide. Fuck. “I know.”
He shivers, hard and fast, like a spasm. Then he gags.
I say, “You’re going to do that cool thing that I just did, now.”
He laughs a little, but he doesn’t throw up. He presses his slimy palms into his eyes. “They kept bringing in these loads of fish and dumping them right next to me. I think they caught more fish this week than they usually do in a month, without me free and being a whatever.”
“Vigilante.” It occurs to me that I could feed him a fish and he might be good as new, but somehow I don’t think he’d go for that. He’s not an idiot. He knew the fish would fix hypothermia, he knows if they could fix this. There’s no way it’s worth it to him. He’d kill one to save me, but not to save himself. Just like I’d risk Dylan’s life for him but not for me. It makes us a little horrible.
“Fucking assholes,” he says. “Going to fish them all away. Then what?” He exhales. “Then what do I do? What am I even supposed to do here, no fishermen and no fish?” He looks at me in a way that might mean something.
But my throat just dropped down to my chest.
Teeth watches me. “What’s wrong?”
“Holy shit.”
Dylan.
Fishermen.
Dead.
Dead.
“Dylan,” I manage to say.
“Your brother?” He lights up, just like every time, then I see him go through exactly the same process I just did, and his eyes go out and his cheeks drop and he bites his lip. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
Holy fucking fucking fucking shit.
What have I done?
I’m staring at Teeth like I don’t know who he is.
“There will be more fishermen,” he says. “There are always more fishermen.”
“In the next week?” No one knows the fucking bait. Fuck. Fuck.
He doesn’t say anything.
Fuck. I can’t believe what I did. I went in recklessly and didn’t even think about how my family would get fish after I threatened the fishermen at gunpoint. And I didn’t think, for a second, what we were going to do if things went so incredibly wrong.
I say, “What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did you do?”
“I can try to catch fish for you—”
“You can’t swim!”
“I have to swim!” His voice breaks. “I’m a fish!”
“What were you thinking? You killed two people!”
“I don’t give a shit! Stop yelling at me!” He folds up and puts his head in his lap. “Stop yelling at me!” he says again, breathing so hard. “I hate them and I hate humans and I hate you and I don’t fucking care, and if you say one more word about your fucking brother, I’m going to scream so loud that my throat falls out and I’m going to tell everyone I exist and that you killed the fishermen!”
I stare at him. This bruised and bloody fish I don’t recognize.
“I don’t care,” he says. “I don’t care about the fishermen and I don’t care about my stupid human sister and I don’t care about you and I don’t care about your brother.” He looks at me. “I’m a fish. I’m a heartless mean king of the fish and I don’t care about you and I don’t care about anything! I’m strong!” He’s shaking like it’s the only thing he knows how to do. “I’m so strong! Nobody hurts me. Nobody can hurt me. This is my game and I didn’t do anything wrong and I’m just trying to help and it’s not my fault, I didn’t do anything, they hurt me, and I hate this.”
And then for a minute, just a minute, my brother fades from me, for one more minute I can’t spare, but I can’t help it. I know what I need to think about, and I’m not thinking about it. I’m thinking about Teeth. All I see is him.
This bruised, bloody boy I know too well.
And he’s staring at me like he knows everything in my entire head.
Maybe he does.
And maybe he has a right to be angry about it. Because he has been raw and I have been guarded, and all this time I thought he was manipulating me. Now look at us.
“I don’t feel anything,” he insists, his voice so weak.
So I’m crashing into him, and my arms are all the way around him, and he’s so small and shivering and I’m holding him as hard as I can, and just when I think he’s about to crack and say the three words I don’t know how to deal with, he whispers, “I hate humans,” and he’s crying as hard as I’ve ever seen.
And I feel everything.
In the morning I wake up not to screams, but to shouting from the marina. But most of the town, I find out, is gathered in the marketplace, swearing and crying and putting up posters calling for a midnight hunt of the sea monster who killed the fishermen.
Fuck.
She told.
twenty-two
MY MOTHER HAS RUSTED COMPLETELY OVER.
Dad is throwing things and screaming about what kind of world do we live in where there are sea monsters; why can’t we rely on anything—medicine, reality, morality, my brother—to be real, and what the fuck are we going to do, how the fuck are we going to go on?
Dylan is still totally healthy, hidden in his room, and we’re already planning his funeral. I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my eyes closed, thinking about colors of flowers.
And Mom doesn’t talk to anyone.
Dad eventually decides that the sea monster story has to be bullshit, that someone else killed them and is using the sea monster as an excuse. All we have is Ms. Delaney’s gun, the one she said she threw in the ocean years ago, next to the fishermen on the marina.
All we have is gooey residue on the gun’s handle.
I go down to the marketplace to try to barter whatever I can, to get out of the house, but nobody has any fish they’ll give me. And after ten minutes around the town square, I’m convinced Dad’s the only one who isn’t sure the sea monster is a murderer. I buy milk. Most of the shops are closed, and everyone is leaning against the booths and the doors of the nearby houses plotting rigs with the fishing nets and shooting sprees with hunting rifles. One man rests against the door of the rundown firehouse, sharpening a knife twelve inches long.
“You’re losing the ghost,” Fiona tells me. “Finally.”
“The ghost is with me,” I tell her, and she shakes her head. “He is,” I insist.
“The ghost is finished,” she says. And I get so freaked out by that that I run to the dock. But he isn’t dead. I see him floating on his back asleep under the dock, and I hang my head over the edge and watch his chest rising and falling. He isn’t gone, not even a little. I don’t wake him up, because I know he’ll want me to hang around, and I can’t stand to tell him right now that the whole island’s against him. I don’t know what I’m going to tell him.
And I need to be getting home.
We have three days of fish stored up, and then God knows what we’re going to do. Recovering Teeth to the point that he can catch fish isn’t even a semivalid choice anymore, since I honestly can’t picture him surviving much longer with everyone looking for him. Shit, I can’t think about this.
The truth is that we’re fucked. I drank all the milk on the way home, but no one even notices.
“What’s wrong with Mom?” Dylan asks me.
“She’s just sad.”
“I have candy.” Dylan uncurls his fist. “I can give it to her.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re such a kid, Dyl.” I remember when I offered Teeth candy.
I’m watching Dylan and counting. I estimate he has about eight days, since he has a low fever and we have no fucking meds.
I estimate Dad can last about four.
Mom probably five.
Me probably six.
Which means that, by the time he dies, he will have been functionally alone for two days already.
“I’m hungry,” Dylan says.
/>
My stomach twists. “I need to go,” I tell him.
He sticks his lip out. “Where are you going?”
“Don’t pout.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
I figure out how to smile at him. “You’re such a brat.”
He smiles back.
“I’ll be back soon,” I say. “Gotta run an errand.”
“Earring?”
“Errand.”
“Oh.”
I kiss his forehead. “Take care of Mom and Dad.”
“I’m a kid.”
“I know, I know.”
I stop and throw up again on the way to the mansion. It hurts a lot this time, and I have to stay doubled over around my stomach for a minute. I can’t go up there now. I need to collect myself. I turn around and go back to the dock. I don’t know why I think this will help me at all.
I don’t see my fishboy. He’s probably under the dock again, out of the sun and out of sight. I don’t think he could swim very far away right now.
Then I start panicking that someone’s found him and killed him, and I have to peek under the dock to make sure he’s there. He is. Asleep. Breathing.
Even if he could somehow catch a fish, he couldn’t kill it. He has no teeth.
I wade into the freezing water. It cramps my calves. I have to stand still for a long time, but eventually a minnow acclimates to me. I try to channel Teeth when I grab it out of the water. It works.
The thing flops in my hand so hard I almost drop it. I don’t have any good way to slit its throat, so I hit it against the dock until its neck breaks. My father told me once that it’s the most humane way to kill them, but right now it feels anything but.
It stops moving instantly. I didn’t expect that. I don’t know.
I wonder how they’ll kill him.
I leave it on Fishboy’s chest and start to climb out of the water, but he stirs and goes, “Rudy?”
“You better hope so,” I say, with a little laugh, and he laughs too.
“Eat that,” I say.
“Okay.” He brings the fish to his mouth to rip it open, but it doesn’t work. His face doesn’t change when he starts ripping at it with his fingernails instead. I think he’ll get through eventually. “I’m feeling better,” he says.
“Good.”
“You leaving?”
“Yeah, I have to.”
“See you later?”
“Definitely. You stay here, okay?”
He nods. He got into the fish’s belly good. He starts sucking it clean. There’s a flyer floating in the water, drifting out to him. I’m glad he can’t read.
The posters are everywhere. The Delaneys’ front door is plastered. They used pictures of the Loch Ness Monster.
There’s a time and a date for a hunt, and it’s eight hours away, fucking Christ.
I bang on the door. “Diana, open the fuck up! Open the fucking door!”
She has to open the door. She has to fix this because I think she’s the only one who can. I don’t know how, but there has to be a way; she has to tell them she killed them or tell me I killed them because holy mother of fuck I need those motherfuckers because I cannot lose both of my boys and even if Dylan isn’t really mine Teeth really is and I know that now and I cannot lose both of them when everyone has been telling me for five months that I have to stay here, that I don’t have a choice, that I’m trapped on a fucking island by the fucking water and I can’t leave, and I have to stay here, I have to save Teeth a million times and I have to hug Dylan, I have to love Dylan even though he’s fucked and always has been and I don’t know him, and I’m never going to know him, and I’m never going to know me because everyone in the world who even sees me is fucking dying, and I will never know me until I’m done knowing people who know me, and I will never ever be free.
“Answer the fucking door!”
The door swings open and there’s Ms. Delaney.
I wipe my cheeks off as fast as I can.
And I have no idea what to say. With the possible exception of the fishermen, I’ve never been in front of an adult I respect less, and this time, I can’t be polite. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be polite again.
“You’re going to kill him,” I say. “You and Diana, you’re killing him.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“He’s your son,” I say. “He’s your fucking son. He’s family.”
“You had no right coming into our lives,” she said. “God knows if my daughter is ever going to be all right.”
“He’s your son!”
Her hand grips the doorway. “You do not know nearly enough to barge into our bus—”
“I know him!”
“So do I.” And then, holy shit, she has me by the collar. “So do I. I know that boy. My little boy who could barely move. My boy who grew scales and cried in his sleep every night to go home.”
I stare at her. I’m breathing so hard that my chest keeps nearly touching hers.
“He was a fish,” she says. “Where would you have put a fish?” She lets go of me. “And you have a lot to learn about family, Rudy.”
“He can’t breathe in there. How can you pretend he belongs there?”
She looks away.
I’m getting my voice back. “He has lungs and a heart and he . . . he is just telling himself over and over again that he is all fish because that’s what you wanted him to be.”
“I don’t regret what I did. A teenager in my doorway is not going to change that.”
Then why does she cry every week on the day he was born? But she knows that. I don’t need to say it.
“He’s my best friend,” I say.
“Considering the state of my daughter, I’d say it’s better for everyone if your friends are removed from you.” She glowers at me. “And you will now kindly remove yourself from my doorway.”
I take a few deep breaths and back up without turning around. My head feels like it might fall off.
“By the way,” she says as I’m going. “Give your brother my best.” And she shuts the door.
My parents’ room is dark and silent, but I can see the heap of my mother underneath the sheets. I’m still shaking and I can hear Dylan chattering on his rocking horse. I close the door. And then everything drains out of me and this quiet takes its place, heavy and hot. I don’t know how my parents’ room is always so warm, though I don’t think I’ve been in here more than once or twice.
“Mom,” I say.
She doesn’t move, but she isn’t asleep. I can tell by the way she breathes.
A loud wave hits a rock, and the house creaks. How did we get stuck in such a shitty house? The whole place feels closer to falling apart with every single day.
But I guess we’ll probably move back home soon. Which doesn’t make me feel anything in the whole world.
I sit down on the bed, next to her stomach. She turns her head on the pillow to look at me. She has the same color eyes as Dylan, but hers are a lot thinner.
“Hey,” she whispers. Her eyelashes are matted together.
“Hey.”
She exhales for a long time.
“It’s going to be okay,” I tell her, because it seems like the only thing to say, and I need to say something that will make her sit up. But as soon as the words are out of my mouth, they feel mean, like I’m saying it just to hurt her. I’ve never been able to lie to my mother, and I don’t like the squeezing in my stomach that tells me I’m doing it now.
But she doesn’t laugh at me or start crying, both of which I was afraid might happen. She takes my hand and says, “I love you, baby.” She runs her thumb over my knuckles.
Her fingers are smaller than mine, thin and soft. I touch her engagement ring. I’ve always liked it. I used to try it on, which I guess is weird. Even when I was a kid, it only fit on my pinky. The diamond is shaped like a tear. She always says that when I propose to someone, I shouldn’t use a round diamond. Round diamonds are bad luck, s
he says.
She has spots on the back of her hands from when she was younger and she didn’t wear sunscreen.
I say, “He’s going to be okay.”
She looks away. “I wish there were . . . God, I can’t believe I’m saying this.” She clears her throat for a minute. “I wish there were an easier way. A way that wouldn’t be as horrible for him.”
“I know.” I remember learning about euthanasia in school. I thought they were talking about youth in Asia for so long. I don’t know why I’m thinking about this right now. Probably because this room is so quiet. I had no idea how hard it was to hear the ocean from in here. It’s much louder in my room. I wish this were my room.
I picture slamming my brother against the dock.
“Where’s your father?” she asks.
“On the deck. I brought him a peanut butter sandwich.” He wasn’t up for much more than crying. I don’t think he ate the sandwich.
He’s really upset because he went out to try to catch fish today, but all he got were minnows. He can’t figure out the bait for the Enkis. He tried waving a net around, and nothing. The fishermen knew something we don’t.
“And your brother?”
“TV. This cartoon about a time machine. His eyes were humongous. Kid’s a dork. He asked me if people can time travel in real life.”
She chuckles, just a little. “I wish.”
“Yeah, me too.”
I don’t even know where I’d go. Some time when I wasn’t alive.
Because if I went back to things that I’ve really done, I don’t know what I would do differently, which is probably such a stupid thought since everything is so fucked up. But I can’t pinpoint where I went wrong. I probably didn’t have to save Teeth when I found him with the fisherman that first time, but what difference did that make? He would have escaped eventually like he always did, and he would have felt like the battered war hero he wants to be. Or thought he wanted to be.
I had to save him that time he was drowning. That wasn’t optional. I can’t imagine standing there, watching him drown. Maybe I shouldn’t have been there on the beach to see him. Maybe I should have left the house at a different time and let him just go under the water, but I can’t even think about that without feeling like I can’t breathe, either.