Teeth (20 page)

Diana doesn’t take her eyes off the fishermen when she says, “Can you get him on your own?” It takes me a minute to realize she’s talking to me.

“I think so.” I crawl back into the cabin. “Hey, you.”

“Hey.” He’s shaking. I should have stayed in here with him and let Diana handle them. She’s on top of this.

“Ready to go?” I say.

“They don’t
need
me?”

“Don’t worry about that. Come on. We’re going.”

“Never coming back.” He raises his arms and helps me pick him up. When I get him outside, the fishermen leer and the fat one smacks his lips, but they don’t make any moves toward him. Teeth shivers nonetheless and puts his face into my shoulder.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say. I touch Diana’s arm. Teeth looks up to watch my hands. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but his grip on me suddenly tightens, and he’s tugging that arm back over to wrap around himself.

Oh.

He brings his eyes up for just a second to look at Diana. He yanks my sleeve. “I want her to look at me.”

“Later, okay?”

“Now.”

I guess this isn’t the time to argue with him. Diana hands
me the gun. I’m a lot more awkward with it than she was, but I keep it stretched out in front of me and I keep my face fierce. I’ll let them have their moment.

“Hey,” I hear Diana say.

And he says, “How’s Mom?” They both laugh weakly. I guess that was a joke.

Diana says, “Rudy, let’s go. He probably needs medical attention.” She’s talking like a textbook like she sometimes does. I kind of love that.

I let my hand brush against hers when I give the gun back. Teeth stares. I say, “Yeah, the mermaid hospital. We’ll clean him up as best we—”

Then Teeth grabs the gun.

He studies it for a minute, with his finger on the trigger, and mumbles, “Just like in
Bambi
.”

He straightens his arm toward the fishermen and methodically shoots each of them in the head.

I hear running footsteps as they hit the ground. I’m confused, and I think one of them has somehow survived and fled, or that Teeth has grown the legs he needs and started to run, thank God, far, far, so far away, but then I realize the fishboy is still in my arms and it’s Diana running as hard and as fast as she can toward her house, not looking back, and the blood is pooling at my naked toes.

I guess this was too real for her.

Because God fucking knows it’s too real for me.

I MANAGE TO LOWER TEETH TO THE DOCK BEFORE I START
throwing up.

“Whoa, what are you doing?” Fishboy leans forward and watches me. “That’s so cool. Do it again!”

I do.

“Man, that’s awesome. I wish I could do that. Can I do that?”

I grab him by his shoulders.
“You fucking killed them!”

He’s grinning like I just told him I’m buying him ice cream. “They went down so
fast
. They didn’t even get to say anything. I wonder what they would have said. Killed by a fish!”

I let go of him. “Christ, Fishboy!”

The smile’s gone. He stares at me. He’s the world’s most battered child. “My name is Teeth.”

I think I’m going to puke again, but I don’t.

“You’re mad at me?” he says.

I back away from the dock and pace on the sand. My chest feels like it’s breaking into pieces.

And the fucking ocean, the ocean is so quiet, because I guess the fucking ocean just doesn’t know how to act appropriately for anything, goddamn it, the fucking ocean, I am so sick of the fucking ocean and I don’t know what to do and I want to dive in and get clean and never have to come back out. I want to stay underwater forever and plug my ears and . . .

And I guess I just wish the storm way out at sea would come closer, just so I would have something to think about besides the two fucking fishermen wrecked into pieces in the marina.

“I can’t believe you did that,” I say. “That you even could do that.”

“They hurt me.”

I can’t look at him.

“They hurt me!” Fishboy says again, louder, and fine, fine, I look up, and he’s raised himself off the dock as much as he can, resting on the bottom of his tail. “Look at me!”

I look.

Christ, half of his scales are gone. I don’t know how he’s balanced as well as he is when the bottom of his tail is that ripped. I don’t know if he’s ever going to swim well again. One of his eyes is swollen all the way shut. Half of his hair is matted down with blood. I need to wash him clean.

The fact that my brain is saying, right now, that I need to wash him clean, tells me that those men got exactly what they deserved.

I breathe out.

“I know.” I get back on the dock. “I know.” I want to touch him, but it’s like I can’t figure out how. My fingers keep twitching away. I eventually touch the swollen eye, really carefully, and he leans a little in to my hand. And it’s okay.

I take a handful of seawater and carefully rinse out the cuts on his face. He winces and looks down. “You got a scrape,” he says. “On your knee.”

“Yeah? I don’t know how.” Probably getting down on the ground too quickly when I first saw him. Or crashing onto the dock to let him go.

He leans down and cups his hands for water and rinses my scrape. It hurts more than it helps, but I let him do it anyway. Then I figure I should probably leave his cuts alone until I have something besides saltwater.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

He says, “You didn’t do anything,” in this voice that knows that I did. He exhales and looks out to sea for a minute.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” I say, but really I’m just not sure if I can stand to listen.

“They fucking hurt me this time.”

I need to do something. I wonder where I put that peroxide. Fuck. “I know.”

He shivers, hard and fast, like a spasm. Then he gags.

I say, “You’re going to do that cool thing that I just did, now.”

He laughs a little, but he doesn’t throw up. He presses his slimy palms into his eyes. “They kept bringing in these loads of fish and dumping them right next to me. I think they caught more fish this week than they usually do in a month, without me free and being a whatever.”

“Vigilante.” It occurs to me that I could feed him a fish and he might be good as new, but somehow I don’t think he’d go for that. He’s not an idiot. He knew the fish would fix hypothermia, he knows if they could fix this. There’s no way it’s worth it to him. He’d kill one to save me, but not to save himself. Just like I’d risk Dylan’s life for him but not for me. It makes us a little horrible.

“Fucking assholes,” he says. “Going to fish them all away. Then what?” He exhales. “Then what do I do? What am I even supposed to do here, no fishermen and no fish?” He looks at me in a way that might mean something.

But my throat just dropped down to my chest.

Teeth watches me. “What’s wrong?”

“Holy shit.”

Dylan.

Fishermen.

Dead.

Dead.

“Dylan,” I manage to say.

“Your brother?” He lights up, just like every time, then I see him go through exactly the same process I just did, and his eyes go out and his cheeks drop and he bites his lip. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

Holy fucking fucking fucking shit.

What have I done?

I’m staring at Teeth like I don’t know who he is.

“There will be more fishermen,” he says. “There are always more fishermen.”

“In the next week?” No one knows the fucking bait. Fuck. Fuck.

He doesn’t say anything.

Fuck. I can’t believe what I did. I went in recklessly and didn’t even think about how my family would get fish after I threatened the fishermen at gunpoint. And I didn’t think, for a second, what we were going to do if things went so incredibly wrong.

I say, “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did you
do
?”

“I can try to catch fish for you—”

“You can’t swim!”

“I have to swim!” His voice breaks. “I’m a
fish
!”

“What were you thinking? You killed two people!”

“I don’t give a shit! Stop yelling at me!” He folds up and puts his head in his lap. “Stop yelling at me!” he says again, breathing so hard. “I hate them and I hate humans and I hate you and I don’t fucking care, and if you say one more word about your fucking brother, I’m going to scream so loud that my throat falls out and I’m going to tell everyone I exist and that you killed the fishermen!”

I stare at him. This bruised and bloody fish I don’t recognize.

“I don’t care,” he says. “I don’t care about the fishermen and I don’t care about my stupid human sister and I don’t care about you and I don’t care about your brother.” He looks at me. “I’m a
fish
. I’m a heartless mean king of the fish and I don’t care about you and I don’t care about anything! I’m
strong
!” He’s shaking like it’s the only thing he knows how to do. “I’m so
strong
! Nobody hurts me. Nobody can hurt me. This is my game and I didn’t do anything wrong and I’m just trying to help and it’s not my fault, I didn’t do anything, they hurt me, and
I hate this
.”

And then for a minute, just a minute, my brother fades from me, for one more minute I can’t spare, but I can’t
help it. I know what I need to think about, and I’m not thinking about it. I’m thinking about Teeth. All I see is him.

This bruised, bloody boy I know too well.

And he’s staring at me like he knows everything in my entire head.

Maybe he does.

And maybe he has a right to be angry about it. Because he has been raw and I have been guarded, and all this time I thought he was manipulating me. Now look at us.

“I don’t feel anything,” he insists, his voice so weak.

So I’m crashing into him, and my arms are all the way around him, and he’s so small and shivering and I’m holding him as hard as I can, and just when I think he’s about to crack and say the three words I don’t know how to deal with, he whispers, “I hate humans,” and he’s crying as hard as I’ve ever seen.

And I feel everything.

In the morning I wake up not to screams, but to shouting from the marina. But most of the town, I find out, is gathered in the marketplace, swearing and crying and putting up posters calling for a midnight hunt of the sea monster who killed the fishermen.

Fuck.

She told.

MY MOTHER HAS RUSTED COMPLETELY OVER.

Dad is throwing things and screaming about what kind of world do we live in where there are sea monsters; why can’t we rely on anything—medicine, reality, morality, my brother—to be real, and what the fuck are we going to do, how the fuck are we going to go on?

Dylan is still totally healthy, hidden in his room, and we’re already planning his funeral. I’m sitting at the kitchen table with my eyes closed, thinking about colors of flowers.

And Mom doesn’t talk to anyone.

Dad eventually decides that the sea monster story has to be bullshit, that someone else killed them and is using the
sea monster as an excuse. All we have is Ms. Delaney’s gun, the one she said she threw in the ocean years ago, next to the fishermen on the marina.

All we have is gooey residue on the gun’s handle.

I go down to the marketplace to try to barter whatever I can, to get out of the house, but nobody has any fish they’ll give me. And after ten minutes around the town square, I’m convinced Dad’s the only one who isn’t sure the sea monster is a murderer. I buy milk. Most of the shops are closed, and everyone is leaning against the booths and the doors of the nearby houses plotting rigs with the fishing nets and shooting sprees with hunting rifles. One man rests against the door of the rundown firehouse, sharpening a knife twelve inches long.

“You’re losing the ghost,” Fiona tells me. “Finally.”

“The ghost is with me,” I tell her, and she shakes her head. “He is,” I insist.

“The ghost is finished,” she says. And I get so freaked out by that that I run to the dock. But he isn’t dead. I see him floating on his back asleep under the dock, and I hang my head over the edge and watch his chest rising and falling. He isn’t gone, not even a little. I don’t wake him up, because I know he’ll want me to hang around, and I can’t stand to tell him right now that the whole island’s against him. I don’t know what I’m going to tell him.

And I need to be getting home.

We have three days of fish stored up, and then God knows what we’re going to do. Recovering Teeth to the point that he can catch fish isn’t even a semivalid choice anymore, since I honestly can’t picture him surviving much longer with everyone looking for him. Shit, I can’t think about this.

The truth is that we’re fucked. I drank all the milk on the way home, but no one even notices.

“What’s wrong with Mom?” Dylan asks me.

“She’s just sad.”

“I have candy.” Dylan uncurls his fist. “I can give it to her.”

I roll my eyes. “You’re such a kid, Dyl.” I remember when I offered Teeth candy.

I’m watching Dylan and counting. I estimate he has about eight days, since he has a low fever and we have no fucking meds.