The She

  "You're saying this waitress was Captain Riley's girlfriend? And it's impossible that Mrs. Riley is a widow?"

  "The wife is always the last to know about an affair. Dad used to laugh in disgust and Mom sometimes threatened to tell Mrs. Riley. After the girl's name showed up on the Basin dock log as crew, Mrs. Riley had her chance to reckon with the truth. But Mrs. Riley believes what Mrs. Riley needs to believe. A person is entitled to her sanity, especially when she's an innócent party. I'm saying her actual widowhood is so improbable that when I call her by that name, I have to smile into my fingers."

  "What does this have to do with Mom and Dad?" I could feel myself taking an educated guess by this point, though I didn't think I could ever believe it.

  "Here comes one of the lies I've always told you, which I want to clear up. Two more years pass. I never heard another word about Mr. Riley from Mom and Dad. No matter what he did, they were just not the types to get off on gossiping about it. But remember how I've said now and again that I was on the boat with Mom and Dad the day before they disappeared? That Dad pulled me out of school to help him work on a faulty hatch?"

  "Yeah...," I breathed. Emmett had mentioned it a number of times over the years.

  "Well, there wasn't any faulty hatch, okay? That's not why I was there. Dad came and got me at school, didn't say anything except that there was trouble on the Goliath and they needed me to help. We got to the dock. Nobody was around except Mom by that point. They took me on board. The hold was full of steel girders that needed to be delivered to Jamaica quickly, but the place was a wreck. In the galley, plates and food and cleaning supplies were all over the tables. In the captain's quarters, every last paper was out of the files. Everything left was in these huge, makeshift piles. In the crew bunks, all the mattresses had been slashed and the foam was coming out. A hundred other things were out of order though all they had in the hold was steel. Thank God the cargo wasn't somebody moving their corporation with all papers in boxes. That would have been a mess.

  "At any rate, Mom looked really glum, and all she said was, 'Start cleaning up.' So I did. Dad cleaned up the office, I cleaned the galley, Mom cleaned the barracks. Because they'd never mentioned Captain Riley's stupid proposal after he made it to Lowenberg, I didn't really get what was going on. I thought it was some sort of robbery ... until I found the search warrant. One of them had laid it on the counter in the galley."

  I interrupted him at that point. "So what did they say? Did they say they had been running drugs?"

  "Of course not. I was their son. You don't share things like that with your son. But I think what had happened to Captain Riley's income had started happening to them. They were short on funds, and maybe they couldn't make their payment to Opa that month."

  For that he had a page of line graphs from a Quick-Books program. They showed Dad's income had dipped sixty thousand dollars a year for two years, leaving the final income at only thirty thousand dollars.

  "Mom was so stinking proud, you know. She insisted on buying that boat from Opa at the same price anybody else paid. If she didn't, she said, her crew wouldn't respect her. Not that it really helped all that much. I think they finally caved in, ran an illegal load or two ... It probably happened anywhere between once to occasionally. There's no actual way of knowing now."

  My head was shaking slowly back and forth, back and forth. I shut my eyes again, to keep from seeing Emmett's neat and orderly little research. But I didn't want to see that wave—An avalanche of white bearing down on the little cabin in the dark, only it wasn't snow. It was water. For a year now, that vision had given me so much peace.

  I wanted it to stay. But it was fading.... Even with my eyes shut, this black book was overtaking it, making me feel like an imbecile. Then the book dissolved, too.

  I heard voices instead, first far-off, then my room came clear, from back in West Hook. I was kneeling on one side of the bed; Mom was kneeling on the other. We were talking like that. We must have been praying first—doing the Hail Mary before bed—but now we were just talking. Mom was smiling. Her hair's falling out of her ponytail on one side. Her hands are red and cracked because she hates to wear gloves in winter. They're folded in the middle of the mattress so our knuckles are touching.

  "Mommy, what's rape?"

  I'm asking her because Dad always says things like, "You're six years old. Go play baseball for about five years." But Mom never glazes on me. And I can see her smile growing bigger, more ornery, before her eyes wander over to mine, way slow. I know I'm saying a bad word, and I know this word has to do with something evil, but she's laughing, like evil has no power over her.

  "It's where a man gets his way and a woman doesn't, because his muscles are bigger."

  "Emmett told Daddy you got a rape once. Emmett said you told him that."

  She's laughing more. I watch her send her body in a circle above her knees when she laughs, and it looks very full of confidence, and I decide I want to laugh like that from now on.

  "Daddy knew, or I wouldn't have told Emmett."

  "So a bad man was strong over you. It's true?"

  "You ever known me to lie?" She drums her fingers on top of my hands.

  I'm looking her over. I'm thinking she's the prettiest lady I've ever seen, though she doesn't look like my friends' moms. She's got muscles in her neck that go down under her blouse, come out her fingers, and go everywhere in the room.

  "He must have had a lot of muscles."

  "Yeah, well. He was a very small person." She laughs again, like she just made some kind of joke that I don't get. She's laughing into the mattress now.

  "Mommy, did you put the man in jail?"

  "Yeah. For a while."

  "Is he out of jail now?"

  "He works on the docks, in fact." She watches me for only a second before my thought grabs hold of her, and she wraps her hands around mine. "But don't you worry about him, baby. He would have no interest in you. He'll never do anything to hurt you. You believe met"

  There's no way not to believe my mom. "Do you run away when you see him ?"

  Her smile dims down for a minute, more like she's confused than like she's afraid. "No ... No! In fact, I make sure, every time I'm down there, to say something. I march right up and look him in the eye. Maybe I say, 'Couldn't you move that mop a little faster?' Or, 'Not going out today, Fitz?' He's grounded for life. He'll never see the other side of the horizon again. That's about the lowest thing that can happen to a person of the sea. That's all I do, remind him of that, when I'm looking him in the eye."

  She looks peaceful, saying that. I say, "So he didn't hurt you very bad, then?"

  Her smile looks different now. Like it's taking some muscle to hold it up.

  "Because if he really hurt you bad, you would want to kill him."

  She looks past my head at something behind me, with that smile held up like it's working against fifty fishing weights pulling her face down. She'd had folded prayer hands again, but now she turns them over, cracks her knuckles. She stands up, lets her face relax. She's not looking so happy now.

  "I'll never lay my hand on Michael Fitz."

  "How come? You're strong."

  "Yes, I guess I am. In certain ways. I'm strong enough to know that no matter what ... two wrongs don't make a right."

  Another gray door in my blurred memory had blown open, I realized, only there was no storm above it. It blew open silently, and there was peace up there. Peace and strength. I knew my face was all wet, and I plopped down a foot further from Emmett, because it was bothering me, him seeing me like this.

  But I said anyway, "I always thought, even after last year ... I didn't like thinking about Mom and Dad because I didn't want to think about how they might have died. It may have had more to do with what I would remember about them when they were living. If I thought about that too much, I would miss them even more."

  "They were good people, Evan."

  "The thing I remember most about them was how they were
so strong."

  "They were that."

  "So then, what's making you think this? They said they didn't want anything to do with Captain Riley's drug running. The search warrant on the Goliath turned up nothing, right? Or they wouldn't have been going out to sea the next night. They'd have been under arrest."

  I didn't even like saying that last sentence. Arrest and parents are terms that sound ludicrous when put together: Emmett got up and poured himself more wine.

  "Evan, the DEA is a very busy organization. They wouldn't have done this on a hunch. They had reasons. They had evidence."

  "What evidence?"

  "I don't know. The grounds for a search warrant are always sealed until charges are brought. In that case, they are unsealed and a copy goes to the defendants' lawyers. If no charges are brought, the grounds remain a secret. The boat disappeared too quickly after the search for any charges to be formulated. And it's expensive to execute a search of a ship that size. They wouldn't have spent the money if—"

  "How can you accept it without even knowing what their suspicions were? Some creepy idea that your parents are buying and selling illegal stuff that will go down to lowlifes, like those guys who hung around in their old bomb cars out in front of West Hook Junior High School?"

  "Just that the government was so well organized. I think one thing Mom and Dad didn't count on was the DEA coming to haunt Opa and me the way they did. This was after they hadn't been able to prosecute Riley, and they were extremely pissed when Mom and Dad quote-unquote foundered. They questioned me for four hours the next morning. They talked to Opa for days. They even tried to talk to you, do you remember that? Two men and a woman in suits? They came to the house?"

  I had no recollection of that whatsoever and told him as much.

  "Well, you had no memory of the disappearance to help them with. You kept saying Opa and I told you in the morning. They gave up on you after about five minutes. They tried to come back to me days later but that's when Opa started hiring lawyers like crazy to protect us. It spared me further questioning, but the only other thing it seemed to accomplish was to slowly bust a couple of Opa's heart valves. And I'll never forget the looks on the agents' faces when I was so adamant about Mom and Dad describing the sea to me. 'Black-bean soup, coming to a boil,' according to Mom, and Dad describing a wind you couldn't feel. I felt pretty humiliated by those mannerly smiles. Especially since they had brought six bound volumes of notes they had taken on the Riley disappearance, probably to intimidate us. Aunt Mel and I looked through them when they were questioning Opa. They knew every crew member's mother's shoe size."

  He dropped his head back and rubbed his eyes with one hand. "Evan, I went through my hell back then. I was die age you are now. Believe me, I felt the same way you do. Only, I didn't go to Edwin Church, my God ... I wish you had told me! Now he's stirred you up to think some ... fantastic ... motion picture ... fiction phenomenon—"

  I put my head in my hands, thinking of something like a chilly heat shooting through me when the man had touched me, and the vision that came so crystal cleat I could still see it. White avalanche descending on a cabin in the dark.

  "It seemed so real!"

  Emmett rubbed my back as I wiped my eyes on the balls of my hands. "I'm sure it did. Evan, the desire to believe what you need to believe is ever so powerful. I think desire is the most powerful force in the universe. There's only one thing I know that's stronger: Evidence."

  He turned the page again. My neck creaked when I looked this time, like it was rusty. I stared at an old-fashioned sandwich bag. It looked kind of dingy. He had stapled it to a blank sheet in his anal-retentive research way.

  "I emptied it when I found it. Smell. I bet it still smells."

  I bent my head down as he opened the baggy and I sniffed hard. Marijuana. Unmistakably.

  "When I got home after cleaning up the Goliath, I took this out of Dad's desk drawer and emptied it. I figured it would be only hours before the DEA came to the house, so I threw the contents into the ocean."

  "Great. Are you saying Mom and Dad were loadies?"

  "I'm saying they must have smoked it occasionally. I never saw them do it. I think it was probably just Dad. Mom didn't even drink. After the disappearance, Aunt Mel and Opa and I were cleaning up the house, and I remembered I had never put the trash out on the road. I dug the little bag out and saved it."

  "Why?"

  "Why? Fortunately, Aunt Mel was with me most of the time early on. She made me go and get it, and we talked about it when Opa wasn't around. She was educated—knew the difference between saying, 'This is the truth because that's where the evidence points,' and saying, 'This is the truth because I happen to love the people involved.' Love and truth have no correlation. Love helps create little theories that make you feel better, Sometimes the truth does not feel good. Does that mean we shouldn't seek it out? Does that mean we should believe a lie?"

  "If the truth is something awful, why not just leave it the hell alone?" I breathed.

  "Because we can't. Obviously, you couldn't either, You remembered something, that thing you used to call shrieking. And you had to go to Edwin Church. For what? You wanted truth. Human beings are always searching for the truth. Aunt Mel and I have committed our lives to it. If you're going to figure out what's at the core of the universe, if you're going to spend your life telling people truths, then it's a package deal. Even if you're not a philosopher you're still a human being. Life is all we have, and if we can't look at it honestly, are we really living?"

  "Just stop for a minute."

  He did, but it didn't really help me grip on to where this might be going. Gray doors. Now there were a hundred of them floating around in my head. I couldn't think.

  "Just cut with the Philosophy 101 and tell me what it is you think Mom and Dad did, besides run drugs. We didn't get to the part where they're dead yet."

  I could hear him swallowing a huge gulp of wine, and I wanted to shout, "Hey, that's really dealing in reality!" But it wouldn't have done any good.

  "Plainly, I'm saying they were trying to fake a disappearance. They were trying, though they ran into some insurmountable problems that got them anyway—"

  "Jesus Christ." I said it to shut him up again, feeling my eyes dredge up so much sop that everything was swimming. But his voice rang clean.

  "Listen to me, Evan. They would never desert us. Not for long. Here's my one leap of faith, all right? I try never to take those leaps, but I do have common sense, and I'm allowed to apply it. I might not have thought my parents could succumb to greed or pride or Mom's stubbornness or whatever: But I am still certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that they loved us. They were planning to get us to them. As soon as they were safe from scandal, a possible prison sentence, everything that would ruin our family, and ruin your life and my life."

  I wiped my soppy eyes and turned to look at him. He was tucking one lip under the other, up and down, so his beard was sticking out. I felt that the pain in his eyes was almost entirely for me. He'd gotten used to his over the years. It amazed me that I'd lived with him all this time and he'd managed to keep it from me. He was trying to think of me. I tried to keep from attacking him.

  "So then, what happened?"

  "Here's where they actually died." He pointed to the new page, a satellite picture showing a huge swirly hurricane floating ominously beneath the dip of Florida and down southwest of Cuba. "This is a hurricane we didn't hear much about on the news because it never hit land. Hurricane Marco. November eighteenth to November twenty-sixth. On the nineteenth, winds hit approximately a hundred and ten miles an hour out over this little piece of the Atlantic below Florida." Above where he pointed, I could see he had mapped out a pencil line from New Jersey with a few angles in it, cutting over a little toward Bermuda.

  He followed it down with his fingers. "This is the passage Dad used to call 'whistle free.' He would take it when freight wasn't moving fast. Very few boats cut that far west. He used to do it b
ecause if certain unscrupulous captains saw you, or caught you on the radio, or caught wind of where you were going, then they could contact your client ... if not steal your run with a lower bid, then get a piece of the next one. If Mom and Dad went this way trying to get to the Caribbean, they would have been here on the sixteenth." He pointed to the spot where the hurricane looked most thick. "They would have had to brave it out, take a risk, which Mom was great for. They couldn't send any Maydays because that would blow their cover, I think they foundered right about here. That's where they are."

  This spot on the map looked alien enough. He might as well have been pointing at Mars.

  "Well, what about the crew? I don't think it's likely that five guys would be in on a scheme like that!"

  "There were only four: Lowenberg was off with his wife, saying she was having a baby, though the actual birth record for their child wasn't for another week and a half. In other words, he called out for what happened to be false labor. That's possible. But I think big money was calling everyone's name, and Lowenberg resisted. His wife was his way out. That doesn't mean he'd blow the whistle. Seamen have an honor code of loyalty. Lowenberg probably stretched it to blow the whistle on Riley. He would never; ever do it to Mom and Dad."

  "Emmett, this all sounds so incredibly ... sleazy," I mumbled, rubbing my eyes hard with my fingers. "I just ... I can't picture it in my mind."

  "It takes a while. And it wasn't without certain noble intentions. Wade Barrett and Mary Ellen Starn didn't desert their kids. Believe me, bro. If they were alive, they would have contacted us."