The She (29 page)

"I'm taking care of some business that's highly therapeutic," she said, and as they exchanged a couple of argumentative lines, it gave me time to think a little.

"You can call the Coast Guard," I said. "Grey has a seaman's license. On what grounds are they going to tell us to not take this boat out?"

"How about that it's the last day of November the most dangerous month on the water?"

I pulled out the weather fax, showed him the clear skies and the warm-water eddy over the canyon. I really loved showing him paper proof of stuff. It made him angry because he had no real replies.

"You're not going, Evan," he said. "The Coast Guard could stop you on ... the issue of truancy ... and I'm not sure if it's even legal for two seventeen-year-olds to take a boat this size out alone. I will call them and find out."

I wasn't so sure the Coast Guard would get involved in an issue like truancy, and I decided to meet him on his own turf.

"What are you afraid of, Emmett? Outside of me getting suspended? That's an issue I will handle, I assure you. What's out there? Nothing?" I shoved the weather fax at him again. "According to everything you believe, there is nothing out there. No waves, no whirlpools, certainly no life force that could bring any harm to us. Right?"

His jaw bobbed for a moment. Struggle was written all over his face. "Okay. I'm not worried about the weather on this trip. I'm worried about your lack of good judgment. You're supposed to be in school. She's not well. This is ludicrous."

Grey said, "Someday soon, I'll be better than I am now. But you've got to know, I'm better
now
than I ever was. I'm much more equipped to do this than last summer when I looked to be on top of the world." She looked so sincere, I think it stumped him for a minute. He changed direction.

"Would it be a terrible imposition if I asked the nature of this trip? Or is this just another 'I feel things' expenditure of what could feed a dozen children of Zimbabwe for a year?"

I just grabbed his arm, figuring the only way to win this argument was through the back door "Bloody Mary heard The She this morning."

"Evan, there is no She."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure!"

"Then why don't you come with us?" I really didn't want my brother on this boat giving us heartburn the whole way out and back. But I didn't feel we'd get out of the harbor any other way. "There's no She, no gigantic waves, no nothing but a warm-water eddy, clear skies, and maybe a couple of drug runners looking to cook up an excuse for a disappearance. Right? And for whatever reason, you've been renewing your seaman's license every year You know the dash of a big fishing boat, Emmett. The way you were talking in the diner Friday night, about learning how to use Mom's instruments, you couldn't forget all that stuff, not the way you baked it into your brain. Why not come? Help us out? What are you afraid of?"

He sighed. "I'm not afraid of anything."

"Are you afraid you might be proved wrong?"

It took him a minute to finally say, "No."

"Maybe you're afraid you'd have to throw out your whole dissertation and start from scratch."

"That was a cheap shot!" He pushed me in the chest with his finger "Don't you ever imply my integrity isn't intact!"

"Well, maybe it's really not!" I got back in his face, fighting my conscience for a moment. "You've got a perfect opportunity to prove something. In fact, the burden of proof is on us! All you have to do is come along, see nothing, then you can laugh at us all the way back to shore. Why won't you do that?"

He threw his arms up and down and said, "Am I allowed to simply say that I have a bad feeling about this? Would that be a crime?"

I let my head bob downward so he wouldn't see me smile. A
bad feeling,
huh? Lord knows I'd given him enough unsound arguments over the years. I rubbed his arm. "Of course you can say it. But you have to come. Say you'll come, Emmett. This is about our parents. I have to do this. If you're right, then nothing will happen. If you're wrong ... you need to know, too."

He'd been rubbing my right arm as I'd been rubbing his left. He pulled me by the back of the neck up to him so we were forehead to forehead. "I know this is a hard time for you, Evan, and I want to do anything I can for you. I'll go. But I want you to promise me, when we get back and nothing has happened—
if
nothing has happened—you will start to accept the things I've been trying to tell you."

The
if
part was a real stretch for him. I knew that. I promised.

And he was an extremely good sport, I'd have to say. He got at the helm of this huge boat and went happily nuts over the dash, like I hadn't scared the hell out of him for the past two hours. Grey had to take ten minutes, explain every monitor, radar both handsets.

"You must let me drive some." His eyes lit up like torches as he clutched the throttle. It sent these fireworks through my insides, which went off a second time when Grey handed him a yellow weather suit that looked exactly like his old one. He'd gotten heavier and softer in the body since he was seventeen, but the weather gear covered that. A person's eyes are always their own. Except for the beard, he looked like the guy who used to flip me the bird across the table, sit on my head and fart, and tease me until I was laughing and crying at the same time.

He brought us out of the harbor with little problem, remembering like I did about the following sea. We hit the surf coming in off the Atlantic City beaches, and the size of this boat being what it was, he barely had to zag. I got goose bumps watching him stick a finger in his lips, then set out against this monitor some ultramodern, ultracomplicated loran receiver: After a couple of tries he plugged in the loran TDs for the Baltimore Canyon and looked not the least bit impressed with himself.

Grey had picked up hoagies again, and I looked at mine a little warily as we sat in chairs on the stern. It was right around noon, and I turned mine over and over in my lap, watching her grin. She unwrapped hers, handed me the papers, and took a huge bite, laughing at me. I laughed right back, until she started this ungodly game of "see food." I swear she chewed one mouthful for over a minute.

I decided her games of gross-out, whichever ones they were, had a purpose. They were more of her endearing defense mechanisms to keep men and boys at bay. I just didn't respond to it with anything more than a grin and a thumbs up.

I watched the Atlantic City horizon disappear, then did little else for two hours, save go into the cabin a couple of times to get warm. But we didn't leave Emmett alone on deck for too long. He confessed to being "squeaky," though I couldn't feel more than a couple of jolts when he caught a six-foot swell head-on. There were a lot of four-footers. I noticed, on my watch, that it took me a half hour longer to start feeling seasick. I didn't say anything to Grey, who had eventually devoured half my hoagie, too. Emmett gave her the helm finally, sat down in the other fishing throne, and stared off the stern.

He was smiling. "That was great. Very refreshing."

He watched Grey for about ten minutes, then, convinced she could do the same job as him, he turned to me. His grin looked a little lopsided.

"How you feeling?"

"Green," I confessed.

"Me, too."

We stood up as discreetly as possible, leaned over opposite corners of the stern, and heaved our guts into the water. I could hear him laughing along with me.

Finally we both turned. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve, and watched him take a more gentlemanly approach. He put his fist up to his mouth, then put a hand on his chest.

"You lost it
first,
" I told him, in case there was any question.

He took his hand off his chest very slowly, formed the bird, and flipped it straight up at me. I hooted as he shook his hand out and took his seat again. I flopped down, too, and he leaned close so I could hear. "Dad said it takes six trips out to get a seaman's stomach if you're not born with one."

"Guess we weren't born with it. We'll get it back, bro." I punched his arm.

He was staring down at his thumbs, picking one with the other: "
You'll
get it back."

I watched him and finally nudged him. "All this really sucks. We should have bought a boat together Emmett."

He shook his head. "I'm where I'm supposed to be. I'm very happy. You, on the other hand, will probably come back. It was written all over you last weekend. It's cold. Let's go inside."

We walked past Grey to get into the galley. She just shook her head, handing me a pack of spearmint gum.

We fell into either side of the booth, and Emmett said, "The house is in both our names. I could just sign it over to you, Evan. I don't have any problem doing that."

He was talking about our old house in West Hook, which was a beauty in my eyes. It was old but not falling down, and Opa had mentioned it was worth close to a million dollars, just because of the location. One thing I could definitely say about my socialist brother—he was no hypocrite.

"You're not parting with half a million dollars with no more than a shrug. Over my dead body." I punched a fist lightly on his hand. "Besides, we're moving a little fast here."

"Maybe," he said. "But I just have a feeling."

"Oh! You have a
feeling,
do you?"

"I suppose it's all right. I mean, you have an actual
thought
every once in a while." He pulled the gum pack out of my hand with a glint in his eye I hadn't seen in a while. "You rancid little wet fart."

I was driving when we got to the canyon. I cruised over a few white waves, watching the lorans for where the shelf would drop. Emmett pointed to a monitor on the computerized dash that actually read depth numerically and on a graph. I saw a black line tumbling downward on the neon green screen.

"You just hit thirteen hundred yards depth. See that?" He pointed to the numbers. He was chewing a fresh piece of Grey's Wrigley's spearmint, which means he'd just gotten sick again—in the cabin bathroom, I figured, because Grey was sitting with her feet up on the stern railing.

I gave him the helm and went to stare over the stern, deciding I liked to look at the water this way rather than on that little green monitor with its lines tumbling downward.

It was almost a mile down, here.
A mile down.
I tried to think of it. It was less than a mile from our town house in Rittenhouse Square to the art museum. I thought of turning half of center-city Philadelphia onto its side and shoving it downward off this stern. It was a fucking city deep. And yet, the top was smooth in the late afternoon sun, giving no hint of what lay beneath. Little ripples turned to dancing diamonds in patches, and there weren't any swells big enough to rock this boat enough to feel it, all of a sudden.

I knew Emmett was now heading toward the loran IDs of where we were the other day, and it gave me time to think this thing through again. I had said I felt my parents down there. I had actually been thinking of souls and loved ones and not the
Goliath
at that time. Mr. Church had been right when he said that to Emmett. Maybe, just maybe, my intuition worked okay, if I didn't try to get too specific about it. Maybe they
were
down there. The hair on my arms stood up as we passed one remaining yellow flower floating and waterlogged, that hadn't managed to drift away in the Atlantic. A short time later the engine was cut down to neutral, and Emmett came back to the stern.

I pointed downward. "This is about where we were when I thought we were over Mom and Dad. You feel anything?"

He put his hand on my back with a shaky laugh. "I'm afraid I don't."

But he rubbed my back sympathetically, looking all around. "I've rarely seen the water this calm. Beautiful, isn't it? Diamonds dancing. It's probably calm enough to cut the engines. If you want."

I shrugged, looking into the gray water. "Let's drift around."

I gave Grey the thumbs down, and she cut the twin engines again, so we were left in silence. It's considered a somewhat daring thing to cut all your engines in the canyon, because a stray swell could get out of hand, and then you had no way to maneuver yourself against it. But there was nothing but little flat ripples to the horizon in every direction today. The surface looked almost like it was covered in bobbing Saran Wrap.

"Could you just live out here?" I asked.

Grey had taken a folding deck chair plopped it between us, and slouched there, just staring off the stern into the late afternoon sun. "Absolutely."

Emmett didn't reply. I turned my eyes to Grey, got a sneaky feeling in my gut, and said, "You're not thinking of..."

"I would never." She put a hand up, like,
Stop with that thought.
"The boat would be the first place my dad would look for me."

I got the feeling Emmett absorbed more of that comment than most people would have. In fact, he put a hand on her knee, patted it, and said, "No matter how big your problems get, you must promise not to run away. There are too many organizations available to help minors in trouble. It's not necessary, if you know where to go."

She turned her head slowly to look at him. When she saw he was looking, she turned frontward again and laughed. "I'll be all right."

It didn't sound convincing—at all. I figured no matter what she tried, I was bigger and stronger and if I had to tie her up to keep her from running, I probably could. The problem would be what to do with her where to take her after I had to tie her up.

Emmett went on. "I'm friends with Myra Ashaad. In fact, I talked to her this morning after she discovered Evan had left school. She doesn't know you left Saint Elizabeth's. But she did say she was working on something for you."

Grey just got this little sad grin and said, "She's a nice lady. I owe her my sanity at this point. What there is of it." A stray laugh rose up. "But I wish she wouldn't get in the middle. It's probably dangerous."

"Your dad?"

"Yeah, he's a real sweetheart."

"All she implied was that you were abused." He slumped a little further and I could see that in his good-hearted way, he was trying to dig information out of her. "But people who abuse have boundary problems all across the board."