The She

  Grey climbed up onto the bridge, looking all around. She hadn't heard my whole conversation with Emmett, I don't think, because she was indiscreet enough to say, "Definitely. It feels like we're falling."

  "Well, that's goddamn impossible," Emmett snapped.

  "Then why are you so nervous?" I snapped back. My own nerves were snapping.

  "I don't know," he said. "I think it's the two of you giving me the creeps."

  "Can you hear that?" Grey jumped down from the bridge, and her feet hit the deck with a bang. "Shh... listen."

  Against the downward sway that was dominant in our rocking, I started to hear a little gurgling on the side of the boat. Rock, down, gurgle ... Rock, down, gurgle, gurgle.

  "We're being sucked," she told us.

  "Let's go," Emmett said, and reached for the throttle. But Grey jumped in front of him.

  "No! Don't you want to see?"

  "Not particularly!"

  "How are you going to feel tomorrow if you say you ran tonight? From something you don't even believe in?"

  Their stare-off was lost on me. I moved back to the stern, listening to Emmett finally agree, persuaded by her combination of logic and dashboard readings, that we had somehow lost about three hundred yards of water. Any great intellectual would want to figure that out, she told him. Three hundred yards of depth. Where in the hell does it go? The Hole?

  And I felt every hair on my body standing straight up as I gazed off the stern, though I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing yet. I only got the idea the water could rise. And just keep rising.

  The sucking and gurgling was unmistakable now, and water smacked as if the stern were unhappy and fighting it. Grey punched me in the arm and I looked at her. She was pointing off the port stern—not straight out and not straight up.

  If she were a clock, her body and her arm would have made about 10:30. I know, because I've seen it in my head five hundred times since, her halfway point between the horizon and straight up in the sky. When she found her voice, it was too loud.

  "Guys, why are the stars disappearing?"

  She was absolutely telling the truth. Emmett came back and gripped both of our shoulders, saying, "It's in the sky. It's a cloud!"

  I thought the line was too thick, crawling slowly upward, without showing any stars behind it. "It's water" I breathed.

  "It's a cloud!"

  "It's her" Grey said. "Oh, my God, what have I done?"

  I had about two seconds to realize I had no idea how far away this black thing was rising, because there was nothing to help me gauge distance. It could have been twenty yards off the stern or ten miles away.

  I screamed. "It's a wave! I just know it!"

  Emmett's eyes grew immense, and I had a flash of a second to enjoy the fact that he finally believed me. He all but threw himself at the throttle, but before the engines filled my ears, I heard one short line screaming out of him.

  It was the first line of my dad's captain's prayer.

  The engines cut in at the same time as the shrieking, which dropped me to the deck in a moment of sheer pain and utter heaviness. We were flying west, away from the impending black at top speed, but it was too late.

  Almost right over our heads, but way up, I saw a telltale white line rip across the black, a line any petrified sailor might have taken as a couple of long eyebrows. They got thicker and I shut my eyes, knowing I would be seeing a wall of white behind me any second.

  "Emmett, drive! It's a fucking wave!"

  He was still shaking his head in denial, though his mouth was moving. I didn't need to hear: I couldn't hear anything except that shrieking, and then Grey shrieking just as loud. It was as if the water quit shrieking long enough to inhale. Then a rumbling, crashing boom split my head, like the sound barrier was breaking.

  "Drive, Emmett, drive! It's a fucking tower man—"

  I lurched to my feet, jerked my back to the thing. The throttle was all the way forward, but this boat wasn't moving fast enough. We were heavy, paralyzed mice trying to crawl away from an angry Hon. I couldn't look anywhere but straight ahead, but I felt a huge breath blowing my hair forward, and the picture drilled through my head of a huge avalanche devouring a small cabin in the dark. Spray followed the hurricane breath, pouring onto us, forcing my eyes shut.

  A blast of water shot me in the back, and I smashed into the cabin door. I grabbed the helm from Emmett, slamming the wheel all the way to the right.

  "You'll kill us all, goddamn it! We're gonna die, we're gonna die!" He kept screeching. But I'd just had time to cast one glance over my shoulder which showed me nothing but white as high up as I could see. Call it intuition, or just an eye for detail, but my sight caught one black streak off to the far right, and I drove sideways into it, falling, falling. It was a spot where the wave hadn't broken yet, and I was flying into some spot between a giant thumb and a giant finger that could squash us like a fly.

  Grey threw herself down and grabbed the bridge ladder waiting for the boat to roll in this little piece I caught near the far end of the wave. We were falling sideways, bouncing, managing on the last little thread of my driving power to keep from spinning over and rolling. The flood in the stern forced the boat to list into the wave, into starboard, and I knew we needed to straighten before it washed back the other way. Mercifully, we were straightening. The boat trembled in seizures, in violent attempts to obey me, finally pulling up, up, sideways into the black.

  I could not conceive of the height we were reaching in this endless climb, up over a hunched, black shoulder and the white, shapeless face screaming in outrage.

  Emmett had fallen and just laid at my feet, so I screamed, "Grab something!"

  Finally hitting the crest was no consolation prize, because this mountain had a backside that made the headlights of the boat seem like we were looking straight down to the canyon floor; to the hole. I tried to slide us down it sideways, but that screeching started in again, and I could barely hear Emmett screeching back as we spun downward. There were twenty times we could have rolled; we were like a little peanut rolling down the front of an unconcerned, heaving chest. I could finally feel the force with which the Goliath would have struck the surface as it fell. It would not have made it this far; could never have hit the backside of this wave, or it would have crashed into the deep and split into four or five pieces. The water was a solid wall to port, and I hugged it, half driving and half bumping, down, down, until I couldn't resist the urge. The only way to keep sanity enough to stay at the helm was to screech back.

  "Get away from us! What in hell did we ever do to you?" I stopped short of name-calling, some idea in my gut cutting off my air; as if to remind me to show some respect.

  The wave moved out faster as I yelled, with the shrieking turning to a deep OoooOOOOooooooooooo that got less and less overpowering until it finally bottomed into little more than an echo. We were rocking finally, moving, but not dropping anymore. Somehow I had lowered the speed to nothing to look at the white line disappearing toward the shore. Almost at the horizon, it evaporated to nothingness. I knew what had been out in front of that white line could easily have toppled Opa's house.

  Emmett was sitting in water up to his waist while Grey clamored to her feet beside him. My own screeching having stopped and the wave having been silenced, I realized he was still yelling.

  I dropped to my knees and shook him, as he screamed in my face without seeing me, "You fucking whore! I'm gonna kill you!"

  "Emmett! It was a wave, buddy. Calm down ... It was a wave." I looked through the black and added, "I think..."

  TWENTY-THREE

  I couldn't stop Emmett from freaking out, even after I got him to his feet. We were up to our knees in water; but he just swayed there, pointing where the thing had disappeared close to the horizon

  "It's going to hit Opa's house! It'll level Opa's house!"

  "Emmett, they never make it to shore."

  "You don't know that!"

  "Yeah, I do."
/>
  "Evan!" He hugged on me. "It was just a wave, right? It didn't ... come after us. Right?"

  Grey was behind me sending a Mayday, saying we'd flooded one of the engines and had been hit by a rogue wave, and she was spitting out lorans. I could feel Emmett trembling violently and couldn't decide how much was from being half soaked in the cold wind, and how much was from being out of his tree. Grey was turning up the ballast pumps, and I decided the best thing to do was get Emmett moving. A bait bucket floated past, and I grabbed it, stuck it in his hands.

  "Bail, my man! I'll get us moving on one engine, but you've got to get some weight off the top or we're going in the water! Do you understand?"

  He started bailing, but like a zombie. I turned to Grey.

  "The Coast Guard has a cutter about twenty minutes from here," she said. "They're ripping this way. They'll give us a tow. We ought to be okay. Unless you think she's coming back."

  She ... she ... she. All the theories were mixed and mashed together making my brain split into quarters.

  "I don't think she's coming back that fast." My voice came out like metal on metal. "It was a wave, Grey! Right?"

  "Uh, yeah." She looked at me like I was nuts. "It was a wave. What a killer bitch! It put me in my place ... I'm going to have to be nice now, just from knowing I'll never match the competition—"

  "Um..." I took her by the shoulders and moved her in front of the helm. "Just drive toward that cutter: And don't talk about that thing in front of Emmett as if it were alive. Okay?"

  I found a hand pump in the galley, and under the anemic sound of one engine, I figured I'd better try to calm him as we bailed. He was muttering under his breath, like a crazy person. It was part reality about we could have been killed, part captain's prayer part seizure breathing because he was cold and wet.

  "Okay, bro. Let's figure this out while we bail, okay?"

  He threw a bucket of water over the side, and I started in. "There's a fault in the canyon floor right?"

  "I don't know..."

  "And the fault trembles every so often and throws up a reaction, right?"

  "I don't know..."

  "And it never hits shore because it just keeps refilling the canyon. Maybe?"

  "I don't know, except that it is fucking cold out here now."

  "Keep bailing, keep your blood moving. They're coming. Okay? Talk to me." I watched him toss another bucket of water over the side. "And since there aren't enough witnesses who live to tell about it, nobody takes it seriously enough to investigate."

  I thought it would have to help him to think of the thing in his own terms, so I blathered on about funny eardrums and heaviness in your limbs. He kept bailing, and I couldn't tell for sure whether he was really hearing me, just because his head kept nodding up and down. He hadn't heard the screeching, but he seemed to want to agree with me about everything. "It's got to be suction, something about the force of gravity pulling on sensitive bodies, right?" I said.

  "I would guess."

  "Well, you're going to have lots of fun up at school after this, my man! I want you to promise me you'll call all your cronies over in the science department, and we'll work on something together for once, all right?"

  "We're not sinking, right?"

  I figured he ought to know that much and fought to keep from yelling at him. "No. The ballast pumps are working good, and so am I. Just keeping bailing and get a hold of yourself."

  He bailed until the cutter lights came over the horizon and finally drew near.

  A Coast Guard officer offered us a bigger motorized pump, and another jumped on board with a clipboard. The guy was writing down basic info—our names, name of the boat, size of the boat.

  "We got hit by a rogue wave," I told him.

  "What, you tried to ride it straight up?" he asked.

  "No, I zagged it. The water load is from where it hit us in the stern. Believe me, if we hadn't been on the edge of it, we would be dead and gone. I zagged up a piece of the swell that hadn't broken, came down behind it."

  He didn't look too impressed. "How big?"

  I realized he thought I was talking about a twelve-foot rogue wave. My mental alarm bell went off. He would never believe me. Should I lie? Make the thing sound smaller? Just so I wouldn't have the Coast Guard thinking I was nuts? I wondered how many people might have caved in with that thought, especially if their last name happened to be Barrett.

  Grey put a hand on my back and put herself up close to the officer: "It was halfway up to the sky, mister."

  I cleared my throat as a flood of Mom memories struck, "...another pitfall of me being a captain ... the Coast Guard doesn't hear women very well. Unless they always remember to keep it in really, really manly terms, it's downright dangerous—"

  "It was sixty-five foot," I put in quickly.

  The guy looked away from me quick, back down at the clipboard, and his pen made a few random circles above the page. I sensed he felt we were trying to blame the weather rather than my bad driving.

  Emmett waded over and I nudged him. "How big was it, Emmett?"

  "It ate my parents," he muttered, and I rolled my eyes heavenward, realizing I had won something, but wondering how quickly Aunt Mel and I could get him some therapy.

  "You lost passengers?" The officer grabbed for his handset.

  "Not tonight," Emmett said. "Our parents were out here eight years ago, and it took them off a three-hundred-foot freighter; It is big enough to roll a freighter—"

  "Which one of you is the captain of this voyage?" He sounded confused.

  "I am." Grey raised her hand.

  I felt my mother's bones roll as his eyes looked right through her like maybe he ought to talk to a guy, and they swam back to me. "It's just that there's no weather tonight, Mr...."

  "Barrett. I'm Evan Barrett. This is my brother Emmett. This is the owner, Grey—"

  "Barrett." The guy looked me up and down. "You guys are related to those people who sent a Mayday and disappeared a few years back?"

  "They were our parents," Emmett croaked.

  "Oh."

  I watched in amazement as he circled his pen over the place where he was about to put the size of the wave, and skipped it again. His complete thought came to me in a flash: We either fucked up our driving or created a hoax to prove something about our parents. Mr. Church's words clattered through my head: The Coast Guard rewrites these reports to fit a belief system they can tolerate. He didn't leave the height blank on purpose. I just think his fingers couldn't write what his brain refused to acknowledge.

  The Coast Guard was good enough to give us a tow to shore. I forced Emmett to go on the cutter but Grey and I stayed on board, watched the ballast pumps, manned the Coast Guard pump, and kept ourselves busy. We were almost back into port when I went into the galley and found Grey loosening a couple of floorboards with the help of a wrench.

  "The engines are pretty well drained by now," I said, thinking she shouldn't waste her time.

  "They are. Just ... there's something down here I need." She pulled up the floorboards, then reached her hand almost under the pumps. It came up dripping with a very large, sealed bubble envelope in it. She handed it to me.

  "Hiding place number one," she said. I opened the envelope. It was full of cash, six fat bricks of hundred dollar bills. I stared at her and she laughed, tired. She shoved it down her coveralls and hooked her jacket again.

  I helped her screw down the floorboards, trying to convince her that she would not run away so long as I was living. She kept insisting she was not running off, but I couldn't imagine what she needed this wad of cash for if that wasn't the case. It looked to be about twenty-five thousand dollars, maybe more.

  My tongue was thick, and my arms were still weighted down, like they sometimes had felt when I'd heard The She. I could only sit there on the floor soaking wet and cold, trying to decide what The She really was.

  I had driven her. I was supposed to be convinced it was a wave more than anybody in
the world. But there were those elements that squeaked through my head that made the wave seem alive ... those things I could never explain and maybe wouldn't want to. Like the fact that she started to rise up in some jealous seizure while I was kissing the love of my life. Like the fact that, afterward, I remembered feeling that I was fighting something alive, and that we'd all talked about her as if she were alive.

  That wave had a pulse, a heart throb, an anger a sense of humor. She was a thing that laughed at me ... something that maybe didn't want to hurt us as much as show off her fury and then spare us ... maybe so that someone else might go back to shore and brag on her. And like maybe there was some small maternal instinct in her. She had rolled the Goliath, taken my parents, yet wanted me to know that maybe she was no ugly hag, that she was offended by some of the horror stories that echoed back on shore. She takes whom she will, but she doesn't eat. Her passions are more sensual, having more to do with her heart and spirit than her mouth and belly. She's a graveyard, not a kitchen. She's a woman, not a witch. When the church bells ring in memoriam in East Hook, she takes a graceful bow. She's never wiped her mouth.

  I knew I could never prove to another human being that my description of The She was valid in any way. But I also kept hearing Church reminding me that no one could take her from me again. Because even if the next terrified soul had the presence of mind to get pictures and send them to publications all over the world, it's easy to photograph nature but difficult to photograph soul and character. And if somebody found the fault in the canyon floor and validated that great mystery, nobody could ever photograph a massive idea, a will, or a decision to place a fault where it lies.

  You can't photograph the hugest mysteries of the universe that really have nothing to do with what shows up before your eyes, under a microscope, through a telescope, in the pages of books. I can't prove much, but I decided, as we pulled into the Basin, that when the next person tries to pull that argument on me—that great spirits aren't real because they never show up in our faces—I'll see that vengeful, hateful, graceful, merciful killer wave—which I knew in my heart was sent for our eyes only, for a once-in-a-lifetime answer to some deep needs of three orphaned souls—and I'll say, "Well, maybe divinity just isn't that artless."