Antsy Floats (12 page)

“Thanks for your help today,” she finally said.

I shrugged. “I didn't do anything. That's what I'm telling
you
, and that's what I'm telling the police.”

“Are you going to turn me in, then?” she asked. She didn't say it pleadingly or like she was worried. She asked it calmly.

“I'll make you a deal,” I told her. “If you leave me alone for the rest of the cruise, I won't say a thing.” I could have left it right there, but my big mouth had other ideas. “But first you have to tell me what those passports are for. I have a right to know.”

“You probably already guessed what they're for.”

“I want to hear you say it.”

“Why? Are you recording it?”

“Are you really that paranoid?”

She sighed. “I've been smuggling people into the United States.”

“So, you're a coyote? That's what they call people like you, right?”

She looked at me like I had punched her in the stomach. “Coyotes do it for money—a lot of money. They take every penny they can from desperate people, and they don't even care what happens to them. But I don't charge people anything. I'm not making any money from this.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“Because I can,” she said.

“So who do you take? Criminals? Escaped prisoners?”

“No,” she said calmly, and without any of the judgment my voice held. “I pick people who need to go.”

She told me how she would make arrangements each week when the ship stopped in Cozumel, Mexico. She would smuggle one person on board and hide that person in her lifeboat.

“But it was only barely working—because I could get them on the ship, but I couldn't get them off. US Customs has the cruise port very secure . . . so they all had to leave the ship before it was docked.”

“You mean . . .”

She nodded before I could finish the thought.

“They'd have to jump before we pulled into port. They would leap into the water just off the Miami shore, and I would never see them again. I would never know if they lived or if they drowned because of me.”

And then something occurred to me, something I had pushed out of my mind since the beginning of the cruise. Someone jumping from the ship . . .

“This last time was the worst,” Tilde said. “This man—he was too scared to jump until long after we were in port. Finally he got up the courage and jumped from the lifeboat. I couldn't bear to watch. He landed on the concrete, fifteen decks below. He died. Because of me.”

I reached out and touched her hand, forcing her to look me in the eye.

“No, he didn't. I saw him fall, and he didn't hit the concrete. He fell between the ship and the dock.”

She looked at me as if I'd just given her a new lease on life.

“You saw him?”

I nodded.

She took a deep breath and then let it out. It was filled both with relief and with a little bit of fear. “If you saw him, I'm sure you were not the only one. I'm sure he was caught by port security.”

“No,” I said. “Here's the thing: I went down to tell security what I saw, but no one believed me. I never saw him floating facedown in the water, so he must have gotten away.”

Tilde closed her eyes and breathed slowly, still holding my hand. The Caribbean breeze tossed her hair this way and that. I wanted to reach out and brush her hair away from her face just so I could feel her hair in my fingers, but I didn't let myself do it.

“We won't have to worry about that again,” she said. “Now we have authentic-looking passports, complete with a real microchip. Now we can slip people right past security, as long as they don't give themselves away.”

It occurred to me that she was saying “we,” and I didn't like that at all. It made me think again about Crawley's philosophy of self.
Me
, not
we
. Especially when “we” means being part of a criminal conspiracy.

“I think,” Tilde said, “that you and I are bound together. I think there is meaning to these things. Do you believe in fate?”

“No.”

“Do you believe in destiny?”

“No.”

“You're lying.”

“So what?” I told her, getting angry at all the conflicting feelings inside of me. “All you do is lie. Lie, and cheat, and steal. Why should I be a part of that?”

She grimaced, an expression I wasn't expecting. “Seven days,” she said.

“What about it?”

“These cruises last for one week. Which means I have no friendships that last more than seven days. People get on the ship, and they get off. I never see them again.”

And then something occurred to me. Something that made me feel . . . well . . . cheap.

“You have an accomplice on every cruise, don't you? You suck some poor bozo in and use them to help you.”

She didn't deny it, yet still she held my hand. I pulled it back.

“Just to help me get money,” she said. “I needed help breaking into cabins and getting enough money to buy those fake passports. But those other boys—they never knew what the money was for. They just thought I was a stowaway stealing money. They never knew about the secret people I brought on board. You're the first one to know the whole story.”

“But those others boys—you took them to your secret lifeboat, didn't you? And you let them kiss you and hold you and whatever else you let them do. You let them do it just so they'll steal for you!” I was beginning to feel sick all over again.

“Yes,” she said gently. “But it's different with you,” she insisted. I could see tears in her eyes now. Maybe not like big Lexie tears, but tears all the same. But at this moment, I had absolutely no sympathy.

“You didn't want what the other boys did, but still you helped me . . . and it made me want you even more. I think I'm in love with you, Enzo. I know it can never be, you being who you are, but I think I'm in love with you. Isn't that crazy?”

I heard her words, but still I felt betrayed. “You'll say anything to get me to help you.”

“Yes, I probably would,” she admitted, “but now I'm telling the truth.” And I believed her. She didn't have to lie, because the truth was so much more compelling, screaming so much louder than any lie could. The fact that she was so honest about her ability to lie just confused me even more. As for my feelings, I couldn't even tell what they were now. They were all jumbled together and the only feeling I could pull out of that mess was a kind of dull anger that had no focus or direction. It shone its sorry light evenly on her, me, on the deck around us, on the whole stinking ship. Is this what Crawley feels? I wondered. A low-grade fever against the entire world? Is that how you protect yourself from feeling anything else?

I asked her something then. It was both a test and maybe even an accusation. Whatever it was, I felt I had the absolute right to ask it of her.

“If you love me,” I said, very slowly, “then say . . . my . . . name.”

She couldn't look at me. She just pursed her lips and scrunched her eyes closed like a little kid playing hide-and-seek. I knew there was pain behind it that I couldn't understand, and the fact that I didn't understand it made me more insistent that she pass my test. She knew my true name. She knew it from the beginning. I waited, but still she wouldn't say it, and I didn't know why. All I knew was that she had failed the test.

I stood up, leaving her there.

“Until you can say my name,” I told her, “I don't want anything to do with you.”

Because I knew it wasn't me that she loved; it was Enzo. And I was not Enzo.

•  •  •

My head swam that night as I tried to go to sleep. I still had no luggage, none of my familiar stuff; I had one friend who wanted to surrender to the not-so-neutral nation of Switzerland and a wild stowaway girl who was paving my personal path to hell with her good but fairly insane intentions. All I wanted to do at that moment was escape. I mean, isn't that the whole point of a cruise, trying to move fast enough to leave all your troubles behind? I never expected an “all-inclusive” vacation to also include its own troubles.

“I love you, Enzo,”
Tilde had said, and hearing that should have made me feel good, but instead it just made me angry, because the boy she thought she loved didn't exist.

Finally, the rocking of the ship put me to sleep, and the last thought I had before dozing off was that in the morning, I'd somehow make my escape from Tilde real.

ESCAPE MEANS A
LOT OF THINGS TO A LOT OF PEOPLE.

I heard about this guy who was so caught up in a dead-end life, he was ready to off himself. A bitter marriage, debt up to his eyeballs, hateful relatives, and a job he couldn't stand. So he leaves for work one morning, but he doesn't go to work. Instead he goes to a coffee shop to write a suicide note. Only he never finishes it, because the day just happens to be September 11, 2001—and I'll give you one guess where he worked. So what was, for everyone else, the most horrific tragedy in the nation's history became the answer to all his prayers.

With everyone thinking he was dead, he ran off to South America and started a whole new life and even had a new family. No one stateside knew he was alive for ten years, and it could have stayed that way if he hadn't tried to contact one of his old friends, who freaked when he got a phone call from the dead.

On the one hand, it was a horrible, selfish thing to do. But on the other, if he was gonna kill himself otherwise, can you blame him? So now he's in prison on like fourteen thousand counts of fraud—but in spite of it, he still seemed kinda happy and content in his
Sixty Minutes
interview.

That is not the extreme kind of escape I was talking about, but I did find myself busting into survival mode. There comes a point at which we all kick into survival mode. It's a natural fact of evolution—and evolution is all about dealing with extreme stress. Like when a comet comes and blows the hell out of the planet, who do you think survives? It's the various species that figure out how to adapt to a worst-case scenario. Those are the animals that get to serve their genetic soup to the next generation. And other species? It's like, “No soup for you!” and they go extinct.

So here I am, looking at a comet named Tilde who's barreling toward my world, about to kill off all my dinosaurs, and I decide it's time to embrace my inner Crawley and totally cut her off. Selfish? Maybe. But I think there's a difference between selfishness and self-preservation.

•  •  •

The next morning we awoke already docked in Grand Cayman—another Caribbean paradise—and I was determined to blast everything out of my mind and survive. More than survive, I was going to enjoy myself, and I knew exactly how to do it. It was time for Crawley's birthday kidnapping!

See, Crawley expected me and Lexie to abduct him on a regular basis and force him to do some thrilling activity that would make him scream and curse and threaten to have us arrested. This was his way of getting around his agoraphobia. Lexie and I had masterminded some great excursions for him, and I took great pleasure in watching him scream his way through them. There was the zip line through Prospect Park at sixty miles an hour and the ride aboard NASA's nose-diving cargo jet that simulates weightlessness; there was the death-defying drive through the south Bronx in a convertible.

This time I felt like I owed him something special for what he did for me last night, so I signed him up for the Parasailing Adventure. Parasailing is when they hook you up to a parachute, then pull you behind a speedboat like a human kite and hope you don't die. I figured with so many old people on cruise ships, a cruise line's gotta deal with enough expiring people already, so they're pretty good at not losing the ones that planned to live. In other words, survival odds on these adventure excursions were much better than they looked.

Lexie showed no interest in planning this particular abduction, so I got her a ticket to the dolphin encounter with Christina—my treat, with Crawley's money. Lexie, however, flatly refused to have anything to do with dolphins.

“I have no interest in touching something big and rubbery,” she said.

“Really?” I replied. “Don't tell Gustav.” (I swear, I could have flown a 747 through that setup.)

She ignored me and said, in a catty tone of voice, “As it so happens, I'm going with Gustav and his friends on the Island ATV Adventure.”

“You can't drive an ATV,” I reminded her.

“Of course not. I'm riding with Gustav.”

“What a great idea,” I said, clearly meaning the opposite. “And you won't even need to hold on; you can just Velcro yourself to his back hair.”

What I didn't tell her was that my parents had also signed up for the ATV adventure. So whether she liked it or not, they'd be keeping an eye on her.

It was still early, so we had a couple of hours before our shore excursions. Howie dragged me into another search for the ghost of Jorgen Ericsson—this time on the pony trail. “Lance says someone saw him riding a dark, ghostly horse in the early morning light.”

“Musta been a jackass,” I said, but Howie didn't get it. I hadn't told him about the Viking ship, or anything else having to do with Tilde, and didn't plan to.

The pony trail wound through the higher decks of the ship and doubled as a hiking trail, so we weren't the only ones there. Considering that my head had been feeling so full of horse crap lately, it was the perfect place for me to be.

Howie's enthusiasm for the ghost hunt was tainted by other stuff going on in his head—only some of which I knew about at the time. I chalked his mood up to his unexpected financial crisis. He had been calling everyone in the world from his cell phone while on the ship because he thought it was so cool that his phone worked in the middle of the ocean.

“Howie,” I told him, “your cell phone would probably work on Mars—it's all about roaming charges.”

He looked at me like I just told him his grandma died. Then, when he checked his account, he had run up $643 in roaming charges. Now he was just kind of dazed, his head wobbling like a slow-motion bobble-head doll in short-shorts. “There's so much stuff that ain't fair, Antsy. And the phone companies just rub it in.” I thought he'd go into one of his rants about global communication conspiracies and how Verizon is working on ways to control our minds through text messaging—but he didn't—he just got quiet, which is totally unlike Howie.

Then when we came around a bend, who did I see coming toward us down the path?

Tilde.

Survival mode
, I think.
Save my dinosaurs.
I didn't want to talk to her or even devote a single brain cell to what happened last night. Suddenly I got this flash of stupidity disguised as inspiration.

“Quick,” I say to Howie. “Hold my hand!”

“Huh?”

“Just do it. Don't ask questions, just do it!” And when he hesitates, I quickly remind him that he owes me more favors than he can ever pay back, but I'll wipe the slate clean if he holds my hand for ten seconds, fifteen, tops.

His head bobbles a little bit more. “Well, okay, I guess.”

He takes my hand and our fingers intertwine.

I gotta tell you, it felt profoundly weird—like putting on someone else's shoes and those shoes just happen to be full of oatmeal—and not the instant kind. We're talking the cooked-for-an-hour-by-some-Quaker-dude-with-funny-hair oatmeal.

Tilde passes, making brief eye contact, sees our hands, then continues on with a look on her face that I can't read, but that's okay because whatever the look is, I need to get away from it. In a moment, she's around the bend and out of sight.

In that moment, I realized that I had just broken my own promise to myself. Rather than refusing to act the part of Enzo, I played right into it. It was the one and only time I did, but it was done, and I couldn't take it back. I'm not proud of it, I'm not defending it, but I did it.

“You can let go now,” I told Howie.

“Oh yeah, right.” He pulled his hand away and looked at it like maybe his hand got splattered with some of the oatmeal in my shoe. Then he stopped walking and looked at me. I mean really looked at me, in a way that Howie never looks at people.

“You know, I'm not stupid,” he said.

I took a deep breath, figuring I gotta give him the whole explanation about Tilde from day one—until he said, “There's no way you can get cell service on Mars.”