The She

  I flopped back, staring at the ceiling, trying to decide where to land a thought.

  "What does Opa say? Does he really think his own daughter..." I trailed off.

  "Right about the time this happened, he was completely unglued about Aunt Mel. She was still in grad school, twenty-six years old, running around shoving The Communist Manifesto under everyone's noses. It took a while for her to balance out, grow up, decide she was a socialist and not a radical communist. Opa told me back then he would never have believed it about Mom, but what with Aunt Mel doing that, he said he wasn't exactly sure who his daughters were. I think his exact words were, 'I am through the looking glass, and I don't trust my own judgment.'

  "Aunt Mel calmed down quite a bit, but I'm not sure he ever really formed an opinion on Mom. He had open-heart surgery and vein replacements in his legs because of diabetes—all in one year. He can talk about it. But I wouldn't carry it too fat, considering his health. His dinner table story about the Riley boat led me to think he was going to tell you this weekend, and I wanted to do it. So I took a nice long walk over to West Hook and got this out of my old room."

  He drummed his fingers on the map, and I kept staring at the circled X under the hurricane. Something about this felt wrong, entirely wrong.

  I fought back my disgust and took the book into my lap. "So ... this is everything. If I read all of this, it'll somehow convince me that my parents were drug runners."

  I shut my eyes, felt his hand go on my arm. "It's far from complete. Actually, there's more that I learned after I got so sick of the journal that I didn't even want it around me. It's just important things that kept me from swinging into accepting something for emotional reasons, rather than accepting the truth and learning from it. But if you have any questions, whatever it is you want to know, feel free to ask me."

  He was so confident about all of this. And despite all this evidence, it felt inconceivable to me. "You know, I've smoked a few joints in my day. Did a lot of that before last November in fact. But no one's accusing me of taking it over to the grade school and shoving it under the noses of little kids like Miguel!"

  I thought he might jump on me over my little confession, but maybe he'd been more perceptive all along than I'd realized. He just said, "And I would never think that of you. Unless, of course, the DEA started showing up, wanting to search your room, and you suddenly disappeared thirty-six hours later to the wailing sounds of an island superstition."

  I shut my eyes again but didn't miss the look of pity on his face first.

  "If it helps any, I would miss you very much, and I would always love you," he said.

  But it didn't help. All I could see on the backs of my eyelids was that wave, so clear so picture-perfect ... as if it had been done on film. A white avalanche falling on a cabin in the dark. I had never known my intuition, which had told me to go see Edwin Church, to fuck me over so badly.

  "I could see it so clearly," I said again, so softly I didn't think he could hear me. But somehow he did.

  "Evan, there are no huge waves on the Atlantic. There's nothing big enough to founder the Goliath without a major massive storm to go along with it. They were riding through a piddling, freezing rain downpour; There weren't even gale warnings."

  "So what was that shrieking I heard?" I asked it more for myself than for him, because he had never known what to do with that phenomenon. When he was a kid he would beat my ass over it. Once he grew up, he chose to ignore it.

  "I don't know, Evan. But I do know that your choices are clean Mom and Dad were escaping from the law. Or there's an enormous She out there that eats people."

  EIGHT

  Emmett stared at the television with that book in his lap until he passed out on the couch. I had to take the empty wineglass off his chest and put it back on the bar. I'd spent the time staring out the picture window into the blackness—just staring and wiping my eyes, and staring more. I don't know why I was so suddenly interested in looking at the water. Like I wasn't sick enough. But I could see whitecaps that turned neon in the dark, and at one point, I tried to look away but my eyes found their way back again.

  Finally, I heard Opa getting up from his nap. I could hear him padding around in the kitchen; and beyond it, a cell phone rang from far off. I went diving down the stairs two at a time. I got to my phone on the fifth ring.

  "Hello?"

  "You sound like you just swim the channel. Did you have to run through that five miles of house to get to your phone?" It was Bear.

  "Something like that." I actually grinned in relief, hearing a normal voice. I could also hear a bunch of voices going off around him and a humming sound.

  "Guess where we are, my man?"

  "In a car" I tried.

  "And guess where we're coming? Don't think I didn't hear you bitching loud and clear on Wednesday about being stuck in the Hooks by yourself—just because Harley was bitching louder about not having her Thanksgiving Day party. I solved everything."

  Bear's family didn't have a summerhouse, and Harley's was on a different barrier island.

  "So who'd you rope into giving you a change of scene?"

  "Uh, you won't believe it."

  He didn't say the name, which meant he was stalling—which meant I might not love this idea as much as Harley had. Lots of kids from school had summerhouses in the Hooks.

  "Here, I'll let her talk to you."

  A girl's voice came through the receiver: "Bear mentioned you were lonely, and I was bored." She giggled in an unmistakable way. Chandra Clemmens, Grey's best friend.

  "What'd you do, steal the key?" I managed to shrug it off. Chandra was nicer than Grey, and I figured with Grey not around, I would be okay with her.

  "I have a key. I told them I was sleeping at Harley's. At any rate, we'll be there in about half an hour, Bear told me you were down there, and I was like, 'Miracles. Evan Barrett at the shore.' What got into you?"

  "My grandfather's health. It wasn't exactly my choice."

  "Does his house still make you seasick?"

  "Very. Emmett's drunk." I wasn't about to give the whole reason.

  "Well, you know my house only has one picture window. In the family room. We'll party in the kitchen, okay? Shall we pick you up along the way?"

  I started putting on my shoes as soon as she hung up, even though she said it would be half an hour. Then I looked at my watch. Twenty-seven minutes. I forced myself to head for the dining room, where I found Opa padding through from the kitchen with a glass of milk in his hand. I figured I might find him here. He'd drunk a glass of milk at the dining room table every night when I was a little kid. I guess some things never change. He put a lamp on instead of the chandelier so the room kind of glowed. He sat down at the head of the table, watching me.

  "Judging from the sight of you, I'd wager your brother had a word with you."

  I could feel that my eyes were swollen and red, and I wondered if I should go wash my face before my friends picked me up. I leaned against the door frame, watching his eyebrows shoot up.

  "What do you think, Opa? You really think your own daughter could do that?"

  "Who am I to say?" He had that merry twinkle in his eye, which didn't seem to fit the subject matter. But I realized he'd had years to get used to the idea.

  "You're her father; who loved her more than anyone."

  "Precisely. According to Melanie and Emmett, that nullifies my opinion." He said it quietly. I thought I detected some anger behind that merry twinkle, but I couldn't tell whether it was at Mom, her sister; Emmett, or himself.

  I watched him study the glass, turning it in circles on the table. He pushed out the chair next to him, and I went over and sat down. This time I was sitting where Aunt Mel had eaten dinner; and the black hole of the window stared back at me. I studied the whitecaps again. Opa cleared his throat, but I didn't look away.

  "Unfortunately, it happened at a time when other family problems had caught me off guard. I was so unprepared for what Mel
anie had become in college. It annoyed me no end that I could spend a fortune educating my girl, and her education would dictate that Daddy's life was all wrong." He laughed a little but didn't look happy, until he started up again. "But she's settled down to an extent that I could make peace with her ... I hope she can live with me. And it's helped me to look back on Mary Ellen a little differently—in spite of your brother's supremely hard line on the thing."

  "He agrees with the DEA."

  "Don't I know it. Let's not knock it down so easily. Supposedly, unless you believe in the wiles of The She, it's the only theory that works. That's his and Melanie's position, and he certainly can defend it. By the end of his freshman year in college, he was such the logician, he could stump even me. I've been working for forty-five years, manufacturing vessels, employing thousands of people, and here comes an eighteen-year-old to give me something to think about. I had hired a detective right after the disappearance. I thought the detective had done well. Your brother said he had not."

  "What did the detective find out?"

  "He talked to at least twenty-five of your parents' friends, including the Lowenberg couple, and Claude Lowenberg had been a longtime crewman on the Goliath. None had ever heard Mary Ellen or your father discuss becoming tempted in any way to do the drug-running thing."

  "Really?" I leaned up to him.

  "Yes. That was enough to settle it for me. Your brother said ... I forget the exact words he used ... something about a logical fallacy." He was chuckling to himself again. "Using a lack of evidence as evidence. I believe the term is post hoc, some sort of illogic he said I was using. In other words, my findings didn't eliminate the possibility that they may just have been very secretive."

  "He said you talked to the DEA."

  "For two days. The agents told me about the search warrant. The kids hadn't told me." He raised his eyebrows, kind of embarrassed. "That didn't look good to the DEA. I tried to describe your mother's pride to them, to which they responded that pride or no, it looks like guilt if you keep it to yourself. Their reasoning for the search was sealed in the courts. The DEA agents said if their grounds and their sources leaked out, it might prevent others from being caught. After a while I quit trying to pry at them."

  "Why?"

  "Because of my health. And because enough of the locals were supportive that I took my solace in loyal friends. I stopped trying to take it in evidence, which was expensive, time-consuming, and nerve-racking, especially when you're engaged in two major surgeries at once. Nothing would bring Mary Ellen back."

  "So..." I rubbed my chin, not knowing quite how to word this. "You never gave much thought to them still being alive somewhere?"

  "No." He shook his head hard. "Not after three or four days. I'm a seafaring man myself, and though I can't always say what the sea will do, I am bright enough to know what it can't do. If your brother is correct and they went down between Florida and Cuba, or I'm correct and they went down up here, they are dead in either case."

  He went into the science of survival, even in a life raft, which I really didn't need to hear. I had to agree with Emmett on that one—if they were alive, they would have contacted us somehow.

  He glanced at me, looking sad. "As for your brother I'm a workingman. I don't have the kind of education that can think its way into every last crevice. The only thing I could poke holes in is your brother. If I wanted to."

  "What do you mean?"

  Opa leaned to the side to shift his leg, and I could see a combination of love and sadness in his eyes as he went on. "He's the one who's always saying to me that people believe what they need to believe. He said it so often that when I would get to thinking of my Mary Ellen as innocent, his words would be the first thing that came to my head." He chuckled, looking a little sidetracked. "I would feel guilty just for having thought it! But Emmett's got some needs himself. He needs to distance himself emotionally from the whole thing. He does that by using his head, which helps him turn off his heart."

  "Hmmm." I thought that was an unusual take on Emmett. I'd always thought of my brother's head as holding the secrets to the universe. "But you have to be able to turn off your heart, in order to see the facts clearly."

  "That's what he would say. But I don't know if that's possible, completely turning off the heart. I think the heart is always working. Whether you want it to or not."

  He shifted around, making a pained face over his leg, which he reached down and massaged. I asked if there was anything I could get for him, and he shook his head and went on.

  "He's turned out to be an awful lot like your mother and she was a very, very calculating type."

  He turned his glass around some more. "It kills me to say it, but your father was actually the better seaman. At least in my opinion. He had intuition. Mary Ellen's brain ran on six pistons, but my honest opinion is, at least on the sea, that's an inferior quality to what your father had."

  "Emmett always told me she was the better captain."

  "One thing I'll say of her; she had more working head knowledge, more knowledge of fancy equipment. She knew every last thing about the gadgets I put in the vessels I manufactured. But I would never have found much use for many of them back when I was young, driving my own ship." He shook his head, still smiling. "And she was a bigger risk taken Your father he had some sort of built-in warning signal—something Mary Ellen never understood. All the gadgets in the world won't replace that on the sea. I think there's probably a dozen times she might have gotten herself in trouble, maybe even foundered, driving through too big a weather problem, taking shortcuts through the shoals around Florida. He was not as fast as she, nor as ambitious. But the goods were always delivered, and the men always came home safe, so..."

  Except for the last time. I almost said it. But my mother had been on board, too. I wondered who was calling the shots on that trip. If Emmett's theory was correct about driving straight into a hurricane, it was probably Mom. After the memory surges last year I remembered her saying over the radio they weren't over the deepest part of the canyon because the depth finder said they weren't. Then Dad got on, saying the equipment was faulty, and he knew exactly where they were.

  According to Emmett, that whole conversation was an act or something. I shook my brains out, trying not to lay a thought on that one. I guess I was afraid of the memory becoming any clearer and me realizing it actually might have been faked. Maybe I would remember something in their tone, something false, something I wasn't ready to deal with yet. A person could explode if he had to think too much.

  "Here's one big difference between your mom and dad," Opa went on again, smiling as he shifted himself in the chair. "Tell me where you remember this from."

  He recited what sounded like a familiar poem—creepy, but familiar. "Spin thy safety net thus here; guide me through this deepest drear; guard my crew from early grave, from wailing winds, from witch, from wave. Upon thee I do hence depend, to bring my vessel home again."

  He waited, watching me. Emmett had been on the Goliath a lot more than I had, and I'm sure Opa wouldn't have had to sit there for so long if he'd asked Emmett. "It was in Dad's quarters on the Goliath. Framed on the wall. His captain's prayer."

  "Almost every captain has his own version of either a captain's prayer or a good-luck chant hung somewhere in prominence. In many cases, as in the case of your father it was passed down through generations. Your father's was written by Elijah Barrett, nine generations before him. Your ancestors on that side used to go out on the deck and say that in a dangerous spot, and then they would spit over the stern. I guess the earlier ones felt it brought them luck. Maybe at the end, it was more of a tradition. But your father still confessed to reciting it in a rough patch." He took a sip of milk and set the glass down again. "Now, do you remember your mother's captain's prayer? The one that was posted there when she still drove the Goliath?"

  That would have been before I was born. But I felt a smile coming over my face. I'd heard this one enough a
t the house. "Lord, give me a stiff upper lip."

  NINE

  "I thought we were supposed to be having this party in the kitchen." An arm went around my neck and a joint sprang in my face. I turned my gaze from the blackened picture window in Chandra's family room to this joint, then to her eyes.

  "You look seriously weighted down, mister." Her blue eyes, which were starting to look a little glassy, still sparked with fun. "What can I do to get you to stop thinking about whatever it is you're thinking about?"

  Instead of answering, I said something obvious. "It's colder than hell in this house."

  "So warm up." She took the joint out of my face and a bottle of brandy popped up. She was double-fisting it. "It'll take at least two hours for the place to heat up. Come on in the kitchen. I've got the oven turned on and the door open for you. And you can have yourself a nice little dance with the spirits of warmth and humor in the meantime. Come on. It's just plain ol' brandy, plain ol' Mexican marijuana. Nothing perilous, I promise."

  She'd given me the speech about my lack of imbibement at least four times in the past year, She knew what had happened to me a year ago, but I was never sure she knew Grey was behind it. It wouldn't be like Grey to blather something that could ruin her socially, and Chandra had always acted like she had no clue. She weaved both hands in front of my eyes, and I looked from one to the other thinking, Screw it. I took the joint and sent hot smoke down my throat and headed back for the kitchen, where Bear and Harley were playing some board game on the floor in front of the oven, drinking brandy out of water glasses.

  "That's not really a board game, it's a b-o-r-e-d game." Chandra followed me in. She put a glass of brandy in my hand. "Take it easy on that stuff. You'll get sick all over your grandpa's superexpensive tiles."

  I sat down on the kitchen carpet between Harley and Bear swallowing brandy, which was as biting hot as the joint. The warmth from the oven felt good. I forced my mind to what was going on.