The She

  I just sat there in silence.

  "Must be pretty serious," she slurred. "Your grandfather okay?"

  "Yeah. I just..." I was trying to think how to put it so that I wasn't lying and would have to remember how to cover my tracks later "I just heard some family dirt tonight that I didn't know, and it's pretty awful, and I really can't talk about it, okay?"

  She sat up, pulled her feet up cross-legged, watching me. "Okay. Don't tell. I know about awful family problems. It really sucks no matter how you look at it. Because most of the time? You did nothing to cause it. I mean, it's bad enough when you do something and you have to be embarrassed by it. But get this. My dad filed a false insurance claim last year. Fifteen thousand big ones. Well, guess what? In October he got caught."

  I turned to stare, and she was nodding at me, swaying just a little, but very sympathetic looking. I almost kissed her. It's like she read my mind.

  "Sure makes you feel closer to someone when you tell them some of your dirt, doesn't it?"

  "Yeah."

  "Good, so can I jump on you now? I've always wanted to."

  I put my hands up before I could even think about it, which made her look ready to die, which I didn't really want, either. I stammered, "Let's wait until you're soben We're on two different planets right now. It just wouldn't mean anything."

  She groaned and threw her head down toward her lap. "You think I'm an idiot! That's one of your famous send-off lines that I'm always hearing about in school. The corridors are littered with injured females who've heard all kinds of garbage from you, like, 'You're too important to me! I want to go out with you in a couple of years, when I'm more serious about things!'"

  At least she was laughing and not crying. I started to deny it, but first I wanted to think on whether I was serious about what I'd said to her. It had just come flying out. Maybe that meant I wasn't serious. But it didn't matter because there was an issue here that was serious.

  "Chandra, this is not a very good night for me, okay? Besides, you never flirt with me when you're soben That is true."

  She shook her head, picking at her feet and sighing. "Can we just roll the tape back? Forget I said any of that stuff? Especially if you're feeling bad about your family."

  I kept quiet, but her face came right up to mine, all sympathetic. "Because you shouldn't, you know. You didn't have anything to do with it, am I right?"

  I heard my own laugh hit the air which surprised me, being that I wasn't even smiling.

  "I just told my dad, 'Listen, why ever you did it, I don't care. However you pay it back, I don't care. Just don't think you can put me in public school and use my tuition money to pay your stupid fines and reimbursements. I had nothing to do with it!'"

  I nodded pretty hard, feeling resentment build up in my gut—toward Emmett for telling me, toward my parents for whatever the hell they actually did. I tried to tell myself Emmett was right, and I would just have to get used to all this. It was where all the evidence pointed. Bloody Mary had been doing good, proving the existence of some dark force, until she asked for sixty-five bucks. My stomach bottomed out, and I tossed an arm over it.

  "And whatever it was, just be glad you don't have Grey's family. They are in a class all their own, believe me."

  "She says her mother's a drunk and her father cheats on her."

  "He cheats? That would be nice, if he was just a cheat. He's a total cokehead."

  I swung my neck to stare. I'd been upset by my dad's little sandwich bag of Colombian gold.

  She must have gotten some steam power from my concerned gaze, because she went on a real tear. "A cokehead, and he's a decent lawyer but I'm telling you, half their money was not made the legal way, okay? Are you with me? And at least when our parents do wrong, they don't try to mix us up in it. That's the goods I had on her back when we started being friends—what her dad did to her freshman year. Not that I would ever ever tell anyone but..."

  She stopped long enough to take a huge sip of soda, but I could see it all coming like a train, and I felt like asking, "What am I? No one?" I didn't really want to hear any stories about Grey being used as a cocaine delivery girl. It would make me feel sorry for her and I didn't want to.

  It wasn't exacdy drugs.

  "When she was a freshman, her dad lent her to a prospective client. At least once, maybe more times. He sent her out to dinner with some fat, aging bald guy in a limo. Is that the most disgusting thing you've ever heard in your entire life?"

  I watched her face to see if her meaning of the word lent was the same as mine. She kept nodding, and my stomach flipped almost completely upside down. I hadn't drunk that much, but I hadn't drunk for a year before that. And it was on top of Thanksgiving turkey and lobster butter and whatever else. Maybe it was just that I'd never heard so many puke-inspiring tales all in one day.

  "Excuse me." I got up, started walking to the bathroom slowly, but by the time I got halfway there, I was running.

  TEN

  My dreams that night were all twisted, the kind that keep waking you up because people turn into snakes or eels and then say, "What's up?" like nothing's wrong. This bitch of a stomachache I'd brought home from Chandra's shortly after I tossed didn't help things. I was lying on my side in bed, because lying on your side kills stomach pains, according to Aunt Mel. Maybe that's why my brain tossed up an image of my dad from the side. I was seeing his profile, though I was very close up to him, about nine inches from his ear. His jaw was moving a little, sending his reddish beard a little up and down.

  "Spin thy safety net thus here; guide me through this deepest drear; guard my crew from early grave..." His voice is clear; even his breathy pauses ring clear, "...from wailing winds, from witch, from wave. Upon thee I do hence depend, to bring my vessel home again."

  His eyeball turns until his eye catches mine. Then his whole head turns. He's looking at me dead-on. I can see every freckle on his nose, and his eyes, so ... deep.

  "When do you say that poem at sea, Daddy?"

  I shot up in the bed, staring through the darkness and gulping air like I was going to get sick all over again. I remembered I was at Opa's, in the twin bed in the smallest of the guest rooms, where soft sheets are supposed to make up for a hard mattress and a hard pillow. I couldn't move to find my watch and look at it. This one wasn't a dream; it was a memory.

  The more I breathed, the less it felt like I was catching my breath. I could feel gray doors blowing open, and it was petrifying, worth trying to fight off. One of those doors might bring me an image of my parents shooting heroin or cheating on each other or lying to the cops or...

  Or, or, or...

  "I'm saying it now because I'm going up to Nova Scotia tonight. There's weather. We Barretts, we always say that in weather, and I'm not ashamed to tell my own son so, to tell him we spit over the stern when we say it."

  "Why would you be ashamed to say that, Daddy?"

  "I'm not. I'm not ashamed of being respectful of the weather. I'm not ashamed of thinking that certain sayings bring you luck, hope, deliverance. That little chant has been with our family a long, long time. I want you to say it someday, when the weather tosses your ship mightily."

  I grabbed for the crank to open a window, feeling heat barreling up from the radiator vent below the bed. I liked the cold air hitting my face, but with the window open I could hear the roar of the sea. It rumbled and thundered from miles out, and the closer part smacked against the pilings under the drawbridge. But, somehow, it sounded better than the artificial heat felt.

  "I'll say it, Dad. I want to be you someday."

  He's chuckling, rolling his eyes. "Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it—"

  I stumbled to the bathroom and splashed water on my face. The room was small, but every bedroom in this monster house had its own bathroom, and I stood by the sink, splashing, swallowing, spitting. It wasn't such a bad memory. It shocked me a little to realize how much my ambitions had changed, but it wasn't like I'd seen an
armed robbery. I calmed myself enough to turn on the light and look at myself in the mirror. I had dark circles under my eyes. If you're blond with light skin, those circles look like bruises. I looked like shit.

  I climbed back into the bed, wondering which I needed more—the air or the silence. You can't have both on the Hooks. I chose air.

  I lay there breathing it in, and suddenly I was seeing the inside of the Burger King at the rest stop on the expressway down to the shore. I had been in there with my dad many times when I was little, when we were driving back from Opa's shipyard in Philly. With slightly less paranoia, I let the memory roll. It showed my dad standing at an ATM machine, some familiar guy behind him, and I don't like this Connor Riley man as much today as I sometimes do because Dad lets me sit in the front of the truck usually, but a man in the truck means I have to squish into the backseat. I come up beside Dad at the ATM, and I can see his eyes growing ... his mouth spreading out ... his neck doing this little snapping thing to the time of the ATM machine spitting out bills.

  Connor is looking over Dad's shoulder now. "Jesus, Barrett, how much does lunch cost? How much did you ask for?"

  "I asked for twenty bucks."

  They're both laughing. My dad is counting bills in disbelief.

  "You hit too many zeros. You're going to be in trouble with the old lady if you don't put it back—"

  My dad's shaking his head, pointing to the screen, smiling at Connor, who says, "Holy shit. What're you going to do with it?"

  Dad's eyes close, and he's still laughing. He says, "Evan, uh, which is the bigger sin? Cursing or stealing?"

  "Stealing," I decide.

  "Yeah." He nudges Connor. "Do I raise my boys right or what?" Then he goes, "Shit. Goddamn. Fuckin'-A."

  He walks over to the rest stop manager's office and he's cursing more of the same, until he sticks his head in. He says to the lady in there, "Uh, there's a problem."

  Then Connor starts in, to the back of his neck. "Fuckin'-A yourself, Barrett. There haven't been any saints named in about five hundred years. You're past your time. She's just going to keep it! And spend it getting her toenails painted for Mr. Gas-Pump-Trailer-Park. Why do you have to be so noble? Send it my way. I ain't proud—"

  Connor turns, realizes I'm still down there, and gives me a dirty look. My dad gets done with the manager. Then they're going through the Burger King line ahead of me, laughing at each other. But I hear Connor say, "You would never have done that if your kid hadn't been here. Christ, couldn't you just have pretended he wasn't here for about five seconds, faggot head?"

  My dad gets jollier over that. "Ask Mary Ellen if I'm a faggot head. And why would I do that for my kid? He's not even old enough to count!"

  I stuck my face into the pillow, trying to bring the black back. I thought of Emmett looking at me so concerned before he drank himself into a stupor last night, and now my memory was sending me all the wrong thoughts. I was supposed to be remembering the times my parents weren't trying for sainthood. Like the time my mom hit me with a two-by-four for lighting matches, laid a huge splinter into my ass, and begged me not to tell the teacher the whole time she was picking it out. I knew it had happened, but it was something I knew, not something I could picture. The picture was behind some gray door, I tried to imagine my dad smoking a joint. I could get the image for a second, and then it would leave me again. I lost it to the memory of myself smoking a few now and again. Yeah, I guess that makes me next in line to smuggle a load, compliments of the Colombian mafia, and pass some off to Miguel.

  Stop it! You're using your thoughts to defend them!

  I lay there feeling completely pissed at myself, and my anger blew up into this nasty ball behind my eyes, which broke and ran out my eyeballs. But when I took in my first big gulp of air my stomach quit biting so much. I looked over at the darkened door just to make sure it was shut, to make sure Emmett couldn't hear me from the other guest room. He was so used to all this information. He was so cool and so together so, ah yes, the suave professor minus only the final part of a dissertation. Fucking Marxist fuckhead.

  I didn't know who to kill. I tried to force my mind through the pages of that black book—search warrants, tapes, maps—just so I could be mad at my parents, who were dead, instead of at my brother who was alive and my closest remaining family member. But I got distracted too easily. I kept hearing little phrases of Emmett's that irritated me to no end. Like "leap of faith." His one leap of faith had been to assume that our parents had to be dead or they would have contacted us. Assume our parents are dead. Calling that his leap of faith sounded somehow kind of cold.

  I flopped over fuming about how Emmett always had this way of making me feel stupid ... mentally ill-equipped. I couldn't fume for too long, because my brother was also a nice person, with a conscience ten miles wide. And yet he always tried to understand those who did wrong. He rarely got mad, always tried to understand my side before he got in my face about something. It was hard to find fault with much that he said.

  Go out to Sassafras. See Edwin Church again.

  I blinked at the thought and almost got sick. I got mad at my intuition for even showing its ugly face around me, especially to bring up Mr. Church. Then I sat straight up in the bed again.

  Grey is going out there. Today.

  Seconds later I was shoving my legs into my jeans and reaching for my watch: 6:35. She wouldn't get there for a few hours. I kept getting dressed at a slower pace, because sleep was impossible. I couldn't help thinking of some fourteen-year-old wondering what the hell she was supposed to do in the backseat of a limo with some fat, ancient sweat bag. And then I could hear her telling me, as plain as if she were here and talking to my face. "What, you want me to sit here and blame it on my parents or something? You want me to say they were like that first? Okay. I guess they were. But ... I made my choices. I'm not blaming anyone."

  I couldn't even focus too much on my guilt, because it was huge. I'd had to pick this molested, courageous girl to try to force apologies out of. I let a groan fall out of my mouth, because punching my stupid self in the face wouldn't have helped anything. I needed to meet her at the docks, before she got to Edwin Church, and before he set her up to think "some ... fantastic ... motion picture ... fiction phenomenon—"

  Emmett had such a way with words—that much I had to hand to him. Even when he was drunk.

  II

  "The opposite of a correct statement is a false

  statement. But the opposite of a profound truth

  may well be another profound truth."

  —NIELS BOHR

  ELEVEN

  The sun was rising to a clear blue sky, the first one in days. I walked across the drawbridge to West Hook, feeling in my pocket for my gloves and pulling them on. My breath blew in streams into the icy air. I had to stop and look down the harbor at that sun coming up, making the surface of the water look like a million diamonds dancing. This diamond dance went out to meet the light of the sun, a giant diamond just above the sea.

  I stood there and looked straight down over the rail of the drawbridge. The water wasn't splotched with diamonds straight underneath me. It was dark and bobbed around between the pilings, dancing and carrying on, giving me the feeling it was alive, had a personality of its own.

  I heard myself speaking to it. "I don't know if you've got any she-devil hole under you, but I'd say you are a well of secrets."

  Of course, I didn't get any reply.

  "You really don't want anybody to know you, do you? You're like some bitchy girl. The kind I'm always drawn to and then can't tolerate." It mocked me, lapping and laughing, and I should have felt all sorts of vile hatred wafting off me for this water. But before I knew it, I was sending my spit downward, remembering my dad always spitting off the stern before he hit a storm, "to mix my body with hers, in case we have to reach an agreement."

  I didn't know why I did it. I sure as hell didn't plan on having to reach any agreement with the sea. I watched as the sp
it hit the water and it gelled immediately, like any other foam cap, and for whatever reason my eyes were filling up again. Things got blurry. I banged on the railing once, and walked on.

  The Island Diner was still there, just past the West Hook lighthouse, but I didn't think the waitress, Mrs. Chowder would be. Honest: Mrs. Chowder. I suddenly remembered Dad busting on Mrs. Chowder when he'd take us in there for the special on the nights Mom worked.

  "I met a dentist offshore named Dr. Molar! And there's a minister in English Creek named Reverend Goode!"

  "Poor guys, they were doomed. I'd have never thought to work on this godforsaken island if it weren't for my name, Wade, I swear to God. What'll it be?"

  She's running through the specials, but he's looking at her and not listening. He's not done teasing yet. He loves to tease. That's why people love him.

  "So long as your middle name isn't seafood. Or clam."

  "It's worse. It's Flossie. Flossie Chowder? As in, you have to floss the clams out of your teeth afterward?" She blows a puff of smoke over Dad's head as he says no chowder for him, thank you.

  Emmett doesn't care that Dad is distracted from us by Flossie Chowder. Ever since he turned twelve, he likes when Dad looks the other way at a table, because he thinks it's funny to be sitting right beside Dad at the table while flipping me the bird.

  The memory surprised me a little. There was a lot about Emmett's behavior that had changed so much. Memories of his teasing, fun side came floating back with the inside of this authentic chrome diner It hadn't changed, except I didn't see Flossie Chowder or any of the other leathery-faced old waitresses, and I didn't see any of these young waitresses smoking. It was one change I could appreciate. I flopped down in a booth and studied some of the guys at the counter who looked like seamen and were packing away huge breakfasts. I guess some things never change.

  I ordered a doughnut and a hot chocolate, remembering the hot chocolate in the Island Diner kicking butt. Then I sat there looking at Emmett's black notebook, which I'd brought with me. I had some time to kill, and there was stuff in there he hadn't showed me. I took a deep breath, swallowed, and opened the book, passing the search warrant before I had a chance to get sick again.