If I could go back to when Dylan was born and know how sick he was going to get, maybe I would have done something. But I don’t know what I could have done. He was still just a baby. I don’t know how to be a different brother. I don’t know how to love him more than I do now, and that’s not the heartwarming sentiment it pretends to be.
And I had to save Teeth last night. I need to accept that and let it stay, so heavy and hard I can feel it in my mouth. Because it’s true; I couldn’t have let him drown in those fishermen. I didn’t have a choice.
Or I did. I could have let my best friend die.
Though that would have been better. I would have lost him but saved the whole fucking island. My family would be fine. No one but me and Fiona would have noticed if the fishboy were gone. They would notice more fish and less worry.
I saved his life. I can’t let that be the wrong choice.
So I make a new one; except, really, it’s the same choice I’ve made four times since we’ve moved. It’s that same one.
I have to save him.
I have to save both of them.
There has to be a way. I didn’t die in that cave, and Dylan didn’t die when he was two, and Teeth didn’t die in the shrimp boat, because there is always a way. And I’m going to find it.
I’m going to be a good brother and a good friend, and maybe that means I can’t be a fully good person, and I’m going to have to lie, but I’m going in. Because this time there really isn’t any other choice.
“I’m going to fix this,” I tell Mom.
“Just be with us, honey.”
I say, “I’m going to make this okay.”
She’s looking at me. She doesn’t want to ask.
But she whispers, “How?”
I’m about to cry, so I laugh instead, like she did. “I don’t know.”
She sits up and hugs me tight. My head is against her collarbone. When did she get so thin? I feel like I should be holding her and comforting her, but I just want her to hold me. I want to fold my arms into my chest so she can get her arms all the way around me, and not a bit of me will be in the open air. I don’t want to be exposed to anything right now. And she lets me. She shields me with all of her. Maybe I understand more right now than I ever did.
She kisses my cheek. “Rudy. When did you get so big, huh?”
“I think recently.”
“My sweet boy.”
I can’t focus on her. I have my plan.
The ghost is finished.
Someone can always get out, but I didn’t really notice until now. Because the person isn’t me.
twenty-three
HE’S UNDERNEATH THE DOCK, STILL. HE GOT A MINNOW HIMSELF, and he managed to break the neck, but this time he can’t get through the skin. He’s gnawing at it uselessly. I take the pocketknife I brought and slit open its belly. It doesn’t bother me now.
Teeth snatches it back. “I would have shared,” he says, with a bit of a grin. “You didn’t have to just steal it from me.”
“This is for you.” I hand him the knife.
He examines it and nods. “Until my teeth grow back.”
“Sure.”
“Thanks, Rudy. I don’t know where I’m going to put this, though . . . ” He leaves it on the dock. “There.”
“Not really safe there.”
“When I can swim, I’ll put it in my cave.”
“The big cave?”
“No, too far away. I need to find a new cave. For now.”
The water is up to my chest, and I’m shivering.
“You should get on the dock,” he says. “It’s cold under here. Even I’m cold. And I’m a fish.”
I shake my head. “I’m only here for a second. I have to get back to my brother. Listen. You have to get out of here.”
“Yeah, but I can’t get to my cave right now. Plus it doesn’t feel the same. Unless you come too?”
“No. Out of here. Away from the island.”
He stares at me.
“Listen to me.” I rock as a wave passes. “They know what you did. They’re out for blood.”
He touches his cheek.
“Yeah. Your blood. Except all of it this time.”
He brings his eyes down and sucks halfheartedly at his fish. “I hate humans,” he mumbles, the same way he did earlier, like he’s saying something completely different.
So I say, “Me too, you know?”
He looks up.
I clear my throat. “Look. They’re coming after you tonight.”
“What are they gonna do?”
“Whatever they have to. They have guns, and knives, and . . . and you won’t be able to get away this time. You need to get the fuck out of here.”
He’s still not giving me much of anything. “And go where?”
“I don’t know. Far away. Different water. Somewhere. Anywhere. And stay the fuck out of sight this time, okay, wherever you end up? No getting on the rocks to flirt with human boys, idiot.”
He rolls his eyes. I want to smile.
“But I’m serious about getting away,” I say. “You have to, or they’re going to kill you. I mean it. They’ll find you and you’re not getting away this time. And I can’t save you. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s a lot of them. A whole lot. And I’m not magic.”
“You should be a fish.”
“Yeah.”
“Killing me isn’t going to save your brother.” He shakes his head. “It’s not going to save any of them. They don’t get that?”
“They think you’re dangerous.”
“I’m not going to hurt anybody!”
“I know. Teeth. I know.”
He’s breathing really hard and fast now. “I can’t get away,” he says. “Because I can’t bite and I can’t swim.” He holds up his tail. “I can barely even kick. I can do a lap around the island, maybe. Maybe.”
He couldn’t. “I know.”
He’s figuring this out as he goes. “And if I swim as far as I can, that will get me out of sight, but stuck in the deep water. I’ll drown. They’ll kill me, or I’m going to drown.”
“You’re not going to drown. I’m not going to let you drown. Listen to me.”
He looks at me. I’ve never seen his eyes this big. “I’m really smart, Rudy, and I can’t figure out a way out of it.”
“Then I must be fucking smarter, because I have this figured out. I didn’t come here just to scare you to death, okay?”
“Okay.” He covers his face with his hands. “Okay okay okay.”
“Shh, listen to me.”
“Listening.” He reaches out and grabs my shoulder like he’ll fall back into the water if he doesn’t. I cover his hand with mine.
I say, “You’re going to steal a boat. You only need to swim as far as the marina. Quietly. And haul yourself on board. You can do that. That’s barely a swim. And you’re out of here.”
He takes a minute, drawing his bottom lip into his mouth. I’m holding my breath while I watch him. Come on. Come on. I figured this out. I didn’t miss anything. This will work. It has to work. This is part one, and part two isn’t going to work if I can’t get him out of here and safe.
“Come on,” I whisper to him. I grip his hand on my shoulder. The webs between his fingers are cool and smooth between mine. “You steal the boat. You sail it. Fuck, I can teach you how to sail it if I need to.”
“I know how to sail.” He sounds offended. “I’ve watched them do it a zillion times. What the fuck do you think the fishermen talk about all the time?”
“So get on that boat and get the hell out of here. Go as far as you want. Go to England. Learn the funny accent. Say ‘Teeth’ like it has an f at the end.” He can’t really pronounce his th’s anymore anyway.
“Like Madeleine?”
“No, that’s France. But okay. Go to France.”
He tilts his head like he’s imagining this. For a second I think I have him convinced.
/>
I hear a seagull above my head, and I smell smoke now that it’s getting dark. They talked about making torches. I think they’re trying to scare Teeth to death so they don’t actually have to do anything. They still don’t want to confront the fact that he might not be just a legend.
I don’t even know why I was willing to believe I wasn’t imagining him, looking back. I guess I was just as lonely as he was.
He breaks me out of my thoughts. “It’ll never work.”
No. It has to work. It has to work because I have to fix something, and if I have to see his body bruised and writhing and not breathing ever again, I . . .
I need to never see him again. The ghost is leaving me.
I swallow and say, “Why not? I can fix it. Whatever the reason is, I’ll fix it.”
He shakes his head hard, his hands creeping toward his ears. “Rudy, I can’t. No no no. I can’t leave the fish. I can’t.”
I was ready for this. “Yes, you can.”
He keeps shaking his head, harder and harder. He’s whimpering like he’s in pain.
I have to fix it. “You have to leave the fish. You can leave the fish.”
He’s still shaking his head.
“No. Listen to what I’m saying.” I take his hand off my shoulder and squeeze it as hard as I can. “Look at me. Listen to my words.”
He stops moving. Completely. It’s like every muscle in him is listening.
I touch his cheek because, for a minute, I absolutely have to. It’s automatic.
I look right into his ugly eyes. I need to choose every word really carefully, or this isn’t going to work. This is like casting a spell, but if I really knew how to do it, I would have whispered it to myself years ago.
God, I need to get this right. Today, for him.
I say, “You can leave the fish. I am standing here, telling you you can leave the fish.”
He swallows. He wants to say something but he doesn’t know what. “But—”
“No. You may leave the fish. You can. No one will blame you. The fish will not blame you. You have to do this. I will not look at you and think you’re a bad brother. Nobody will. You have to leave because this time you have to save yourself. The fish and me, we’re kicking you out.”
“But—”
I hold my finger up to his lips. He flicks his eyes down to look at it.
“You’re absolved,” I tell him.
He brings his eyes back up to mine. There’s no fucking way he knows what that word means. That’s a word I dream someone will say to me.
So I put it in his language. “You’re free.”
There’s this long minute where all I hear are the waves.
He wants to argue and say he doesn’t want this. He wants to pretend this isn’t exactly the opportunity he would have died for. That the real reason he needed a friend outside his family wasn’t so he could hear these words.
You are no longer responsible. You are no longer allowed to give a shit. Nobody can need you ever again. Go.
All he can say is, “You’ll take care of them?” His lips are chapped against my finger.
I was ready for that too. “I will.”
“Promise?”
My poor fucking fishboy. “Promise.”
Then he shakes his head a little, shaking my finger off. “It still won’t work.”
Fuck. He’s used up all my reasons. “Why not?”
“’Cause boats are for humans.”
I’m about to smack him across the face, I swear to God, but then he grins at me. He’s kidding.
“I hate you sometimes,” I say, “you know that?”
The grin slips off. “What about you?”
“Oh, I’ll be fine here. They have no idea I was with you.” I hadn’t really realized this. “Diana didn’t tell. I was in the marketplace today, and nobody knew. They’re not coming after me. She didn’t tell . . . ”
“Saint Diana.”
“Yeah.”
“But I mean what about . . . you and me.”
Oh.
There are a million things to say. And now I’m willing to talk about it. Maybe I always was, or maybe I can only do it because he’s going away and I know I won’t have to face it. But here I am wishing we’d talked about it when we had time.
Because Teeth, okay? Just . . . Teeth.
“I don’t want to be alone,” he says.
“Maybe . . . maybe there are more of you out there.”
We both know that’s bullshit. The rest of the world doesn’t have magical fish. Or any miracles, really.
“Look.” I take a deep breath and say the only thing that will make us both sleep tonight. “I think this is the part where we stop pretending we’re not going to see each other again.”
He grins even bigger. He believes me. I close my eyes and let myself believe it too, even if it’s just for this second.
His voice makes me open my eyes. “I can’t believe you’re saving me again,” he says. “I am so fucking pathetic.”
“Pathetic, huh?” He learned that word from me.
“Yeah. It’s like the opposite of a fish, right?”
“You got it.”
He says, “But it is really whatever, you know? You’ve saved me way more times. And we call ourselves friends.”
It doesn’t matter what we call ourselves, really. “You already saved me,” I say.
“That was nothing.”
“I’m not talking about the cave.”
He wrinkles his nose.
“That first day,” I say. “When you got up on the rocks to flirt with a human boy.”
He smiles big, with all his ground-down teeth shining.
I wonder if he’ll do it again, with some other boy, even though I told him not to. I don’t know what I want. I worry that he’ll get caught again, but I can’t protect him from that. I don’t know if he should replace me. I know how I feel, but that’s not really the point.
Once he promises, absolutely promises, that he’ll be gone by nightfall, I go. I’m even colder once I leave the water. I hear him splashing around as I make my way back to the beach. He’s singing quietly, this dumb fucking fishboy. Really deep inside I know I’m never going to see him again.
I come out from tucking in Dylan to find Diana standing at the shore, the handgun stretched out toward the sea. The ocean is whispering at her feet, and it must feel like nothing she’s ever known, but she doesn’t move. She doesn’t look at all afraid.
It’s been a long time since I noticed how pretty her hair is. The moonlight makes it obvious.
I stand beside her. She doesn’t react.
“How did you get the gun?” I ask.
“The sheriff gave it back to my mom.”
“That seems stupid.”
“We know who killed the fishermen.” Her voice sounds squeezed to the top of her mouth. “We don’t need evidence.”
“I’m surprised everyone believes you.”
“People believe you when you tell the truth,” she says.
“You learned that from books, huh?” My voice is so soft. Not even quiet, just soft. I’m not thinking about the words before I say them, because I can’t think of anything I could say that will matter.
Her eyes narrow. “No.”
I clear my throat. I should look away from her, but I don’t. I don’t know. It just feels like there’s nothing else to watch right now but the angry crease in her cheek. I don’t feel like watching the water. It’s been a long time since I looked at it without squinting for a hint of a tail.
“Thanks for not ratting me out,” I say.
She doesn’t say anything, just cocks her gun toward the water, swallowing.
“He’s not here,” I say. “He’s gone.”
“You helped him.”
“Yeah. Why do you want to kill him?” I say.
“He killed the fishermen.”
“They nearly killed him. They . . . worse than killed him.”
“I know all abo
ut what they did,” she says.
“I know.”
“And he’s not dead. He’s alive.”
“Bits of him.” The ghost is leaving me.
“I don’t want to talk about this,” she says.
“You also don’t want to kill your brother.”
She drops the gun and looks at me, finally. She’s crying. “What he did was wrong.”
“I know.”
“How the fuck do I make sense of that?”
“I don’t know.”
My words thrum at my ears. I felt like this that time Teeth held my head underwater, trying to make me less afraid.
“This doesn’t happen in books,” she says. Her chin shakes. “There’s supposed to be a right answer.”
“I know.”
“Can you say something helpful?”
I nod.
She waits.
“I’m sorry.”
She laughs a little. It sounds so angry. “For what?”
“Being a shitty friend.”
All I hear is the ocean. Then she sniffles and cocks the gun again.
If this were a fairy tale, this would be the part where the fishboy appears and Diana shoots him through the heart. Because he is a tragic hero, he’s our fucking Gatsby, and he lived for his fish and he has to die for his fish. He would never let my fake authority, condoning his abandonment, making up rules about what’s okay just to save his life, convince him to give up his family. He would never leave.
He would know that without him, none of us will be as good. Me, without a friend; and the fish, without a brother; and the island, without a story; and Diana, without her something real, we will all be a little bit less than we were before we knew him.
So he wouldn’t leave. Not until I could come with him. And I have never been less able to leave than I am now.
But this isn’t a fairy tale, and he doesn’t appear. We stand here for a long time.
He really left.
Because it was all that we could do.
And I don’t know if it was the right answer. But I can picture him sailing away, lonely and scared and safe. And even though this isn’t the ending I want, I feel like singing when I take Diana’s hand and we stare out at the empty ocean.
twenty-four
IT ONLY TAKES ME A DAY TO FIGURE OUT THE BEST FISHING spots and a couple weeks to get my technique down pat. Most everyone is still on the hunt for the fish who took the boat right out from under their noses, but every day more people give up and come here and try their hand at catching something real instead.