Brett McCarthy (17 page)

pre•car•i•ous

Here’s the thing about driving in Maine: Kids do it.

Especially in the rural areas and unorganized territories. In The County, kids helping with the potato harvest learn to handle tractors. Fishermen’s kids and island kids drive powerboats. In the North Woods, where you can’t get groceries in the winter unless you can operate a snowmobile, I’ll bet more than half the kids can drive them.

Of course, cars are a completely different story. I’d never heard of an eighth grader cruising in an automobile on the highway. Or being nuts enough to try.

Nevertheless, Sockrgurl found herself safety-belted into the passenger seat of a Subaru wagon in the wee hours of an April night, as MensaMan drove her along Route One. I kept looking in the side-view mirror for flashing blue police lights. I kept checking the speedometer, making sure he didn’t exceed the limit. I kept pinching myself, hoping this was a bad dream.

“What’s our story if you get pulled over?” I asked.

“We’re not going to get pulled over,” he replied patiently.

“Maybe you can tell them you’re temporarily insane,” I suggested. “Or permanently. You can act really surprised when they accuse you of being an underage driver.”

“It won’t matter, because I don’t have a license,” he said. “The penalties for operating without a license are identical for the sane or the insane. I’ve checked.”

“I wonder if they’ll make you take a Breathalyzer,” I continued. “I mean, they’ll figure you’ve got to be drunk. Or worse.”

“Or maybe it’s all three, you know?” he said. “I’m mentally deranged, drunk, and drugged. And if they ask me my name, I’ll tell them it’s…Hotchkiss! Michael Hotchkiss. And that my dad taught me everything I know about drugs and alcohol.” We both laughed.

“You know, speaking of our favorite teacher…there’s something I’ve been wondering about,” I said. “How did you know all that stuff about marijuana?”

Michael shrugged. “It’s no secret. It’s on the Internet.”

“Yeah, but why were you even reading about it?”

“Just Googling one day. I don’t really remember.”

“You Googled ‘pot’?”

“No, I Googled ‘cancer,’” he said.

I was quiet for a while, thinking.

“That surprises you?” he asked.

I shrugged. “No. It’s just that sometimes I forget I’m not the only one who cares.”

“I think sometimes you forget that not everyone in the world is a lousy friend.”

“That too,” I agreed. “Remind me, if you don’t wrap us around a tree tonight, to thank you for being an incredible friend.”

“I’m involved now,” he said in a familiar yet non-Michael voice. “You let go and I’m going to have to jump in there after you.”

“Oh, don’t tell me, don’t tell me…yes! I know! Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, in
Titanic
!” I exclaimed triumphantly.

“Very good,” he said, sounding surprised.

“I have to ask you something else,” I said. “Truth?” He nodded.

“Is Nonna smoking pot?”

Michael sighed.

“The truth?” he asked. “I have no clue. I told her and Mr. Beady about the medical marijuana stuff. Your grandmother thought it was funny, like wouldn’t it be a riot if she became an old-lady pothead. But Mr. Beady asked for the Web sites. I don’t know if he ever did anything about it. Has it gotten that bad?”

“Yeah, it has,” I answered softly, gazing out the window. We’d exited Route One and now snaked along the windy roads that led to the ocean. Inky black outside. No street-lights, not a sign of life from all the dark houses. Then I saw something flash in the side-view mirror. Distant, moving in the same direction as us.

“Headlights,” I said, my heart sinking. Since turning onto the rural road, we’d traveled alone. We were close to the Landing, and I’d begun to think we were actually going to make it.

“Drive steady,” I said. “It’s probably someone who lives out here, going home.”

“Or not,” he said. “I’m pulling over.”

“That’ll just attract attention!” I exclaimed. “They’ll think you broke down.”

“Brett, it’s almost two in the morning, and people around here are all sleeping because they have to get up in a couple of hours to take their fishing boats out. Chances are that’s a cop. Even if he’s not looking for
us,
he’s looking.” Just then a wide dirt parking lot opened to our left. It surrounded a clapboard, barnlike building bearing a large sign,
JOHNSON MARINE, BUILDING AND REPAIRS
. Without hitting the turn signal and without slowing down, Michael swerved into the lot and cut the lights. For a moment, before our eyes adjusted to the darkness, it was like floating through space. We could see nothing but felt ourselves propelled forward in the moving car.

“Michael!” I screamed. It was terrifying, flying blind like this. I braced myself for the impact. Michael switched on the parking lights, and two small beams illuminated the space a few feet in front of the car. It was enough to allow him to guide us alongside the building, right up to the edge of the woods bordering the lot. When we stopped, he cut the engine and turned off the lights again.

Way in the distance bright headlights flickered as they passed behind trees and drew closer. They weren’t going particularly fast, but they were definitely headed in our direction, along the marina road. Neither of us spoke; just waited.

Within a few minutes a pickup drove past, its radio playing so loudly I could feel the bass throb right through the floorboards of our car. It sped by without pause, into the night, eventually no more than two red taillights in the distance. We both sighed.

“The fishermen are awake now,” I commented.

“Right,” said Michael. “Let’s get out of here before the cops who might be chasing
them
find us instead.”

Morin’s Landing is a small family-owned marina run by part-time lobsterman, part-time outboard motor mechanic, Dwayne Morin. He’s old, like Mr. Beady and Nonna, and unlike Mr. Beady, he’s a real Mainer. Whenever we load bags into the
Dolly Llama,
or carry heavy coolers packed with ice down the long dock, and he says, “Let me help you with that,
deah,
” it’s the real thing. We’d docked our boat at the landing for as long as I could remember. Still, it looked completely different in the dark.

Hulking shadows of sailboats yet to be put in for the season crowded one end of the parking lot like beached whales. Over the front door of the small frame building Mr. Morin used as a workshop and office, a blue neon security light buzzed. Steel lobster traps, stacked seven to eight high, stood sentry near the ramp leading to the water. At low tide that ramp sloped steeply downward, a precarious descent.

Precarious:
dependent on chance circumstances, unknown conditions, or uncertain developments.
Dangerous.

As Michael steered the car into a parking space alongside the traps, I could see the ramp, floating almost horizontal to the land. High tide. That helped. Took us down a few notches on the Precarious Meter.

I grabbed flashlights and raincoats from the backseat. Michael reached into the glove compartment, pulling out a plastic rectangular box about the size of an iPod.

“Tunes?” I said. “Are you kidding?”

“Global positioning system. Handheld with navigation capabilities. No genius travels without one,” he said matter-of-factly.

“I really hope you know what you’re doing,” I breathed as we stepped out. An icy, wet wind gusted into my face.

I waited for Michael on the ramp while he went to fetch the key to the power dory we planned to “borrow.” About a half dozen boats, tied to iron rings along the dock, bobbed in the water. I swept the line of them with my flashlight. At the end of the line I saw the
Dolly Llama.
My heart sank.

They weren’t here. Mr. Beady didn’t own a boat, and despite his long list of annoying qualities, stealing boats wasn’t among them. If the
Dolly
was here, then Nonna wasn’t.

I saw Michael dart across the lot.

“Got it!” he panted, holding up a key attached to a silver chain.

“How did you know where it was?” I marveled.

“I’m Superman, Lois,” he said. Christopher Reeve, from the movie
Superman
.

“Michael, seriously. You didn’t bust into the office—”

“Chill,” he said, laughing quietly. “The owner parks his boat trailer here and leaves the spare key on top of one of the tires. C’mon, let’s go.” He nudged me toward the ramp.

“They’re not here,” I said dully. “Look.” I aimed my flashlight at the
Dolly
.

But Michael just shrugged.

“They wouldn’t have taken the
Dolly,
” he said. “She doesn’t handle well in this sort of weather. Not like this baby!”

Michael directed the beam of his flashlight toward a long white boat tied to the dock. Even in the dark I could tell she was new.

“It’s a pretty big dory,” I said skeptically. “Are you sure you can—”

“Trust me, Rose. Do you trust me?” He was back to
Titanic
dialogue, Leonardo DiCaprio playing Jack Dawson.

Trust him? I wasn’t even sure I trusted myself.

dis•as•ter

I hadn’t counted on the cold.

Scary cold. Forget bone-chilling; this was marrow-freezing. The ocean off the coast of Maine is part of the same North Atlantic where the
Titanic
sank. Minus the icebergs, but just as dead cold as that April when the big ship went down.

Michael managed to point this out as the salty black chop of the water sprayed against the sides of the power dory and into our faces. The boat wasn’t going fast, but the wind kept stirring things up.

“It hurts,” I said, willing my teeth not to chatter. “The water actually hurts.”

“Water that cold?” said Michael in his Jack Dawson imitation. “It hits you like a thousand knives, stabbing you all over your body. You can’t breathe, you can’t think…at least not about anything but the pain.”

I groaned. At that moment I failed to see the humor in replaying scenes from
Titanic
.

“Actually, a body can survive only fifteen minutes in water this cold,” said Michael, back to his Michael voice. “I looked it up.”

Great, I thought. I’m going to freeze to death at two a.m. in a stolen boat driven by the captain of the Mescataqua Junior High School Math Team. I imagined the headlines: “Suspended Soccer Star and School Brainiac Perish in Icy Boating Accident.” The papers would carry photos of the wrecked dory. Interviews with our puzzled friends. The pissed-off dory owner. They would wonder: What were those kids doing out there? Good question.

“Brett! Hold the flashlight steady!” Michael said, a little sharply, pulling me from my morbid thoughts. I directed the beam onto the floor of the boat, where he’d placed the GPS. Last summer, with my dad, he’d programmed the starting location (Morin’s) and destination (Spruce Island) into the GPS. Now, as long as we followed the directions it gave, we could navigate in the dark, past the rocks and right up to the island’s dock. Miles overhead the eyes of some giant satellite bore down on us, tracking our movements.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I repeated.

“Trust me, Rose. Do you trust me?” he replied, back to
Titanic
dialogue.

“If you don’t stop imitating Leonardo, I’m going to push you overboard,” I said. “And you’ll have only fifteen minutes left in your incredibly annoying life.”

We rode in silence after that, listening to the monotonous, low drone of the engine. The smaller islands glided past, darker shadows against the dark sky. The moon hid behind filmy clouds that covered the stars as well. It was a bitter, unfriendly night, and it made me sad. Sadder than I had been even in the past months, and I felt suddenly overwhelmed by the stupidity of it all.

This was a mistake. Once again I had let my emotions rule my common sense. But unlike all the previous disasters, the consequences here could be deadly. This water was freakin’ cold, and we couldn’t see a thing.

Disaster:
a calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction.

I had opened my mouth to tell Michael to turn the boat around and take us back to shore when we saw it. The glow.

From a modern lighthouse the beam knocks you flat. The twenty-first-century fog-piercing ray penetrates gray ocean mist like a laser. People who value their eyesight avoid looking straight into it at close range. This glow, however, was something else entirely. Instead of laser white, it burned gold. Instead of a sharp arrow, it was a soft halo. From the top of Spruce Island lighthouse, which had been dark for a hundred years, it welcomed us now.

“It works. It works!” Michael exclaimed, raising his fist in the air. “Yes!”

My eyes filled with tears. I was too exhausted and cold to pump the air like Michael, but that glow was my victory too. I was right. She was here. And I had been so close to turning back.

As we approached the Spruce Island dock, Michael cut the engine way back and steered the dory carefully alongside. I jumped out, rope in hand, and tied us up. Michael jumped out behind me.

“Okay, let’s go,” he breathed into my ear. We took off at a run, our flashlights strafing the path with beams that bounced at every step.

Ages ago, way before Nonna and my grandfather bought the island, or were even born, for that matter, Spruce Island had been a farm. Not much of a farm. “Subsistence farm,” according to my father, which meant a family lived there, probably fished, and ate what they planted. There are open meadowy spaces in the middle with bent fruit trees that still produce an occasional apple or pear. Little footpaths crisscross the entire island, from a small sandy beach through the balsam “fairy woods” to the old lighthouse on the point. Michael and I followed the path to the middle of the island.

“Let’s start with the cottages,” I panted.

“Why not the lighthouse?” he said.

“Because I smell smoke,” I replied. “Someone’s lit a fire.”

No light shone when we entered the clearing. The deserted look of the place creeped me out. The four cottages, arranged in a semicircle with a big open space in the front for bonfires, gaped at us with dark, blind eyes. The pine trees thrashed overhead in the wind, and the bonfire place was dead cold.

“Do you think they’re inside one of the little houses, sleeping?” Michael whispered.

“Nonna! Mr. Beady!” I yelled. “Where are you guys?”

Nothing. I aimed my flashlight at the rooftops. From one protruded a metal cylinder, thin tendrils of gray smoke oozing from its top. Michael and I looked at each other, nodded, and dashed toward it.

The door swung inward at our push. Right off I noticed two things. First, the heat. The inside of the cottage was way warmer than the outdoors. In the little sitting room to our left I could hear dry wood pop and see orange glowing behind the grill of a small iron stove. The second thing: clutter. I saw a duffel bag, open, with half its contents strewn on the floor; a big cooler, cover half off, filled with groceries.

No question about it: Mr. Beady had been here.

Michael had tiptoed ahead of me into the bedroom. He emerged, shaking his head.

“Empty,” he said. “But it looks like someone’s been lying in the bed. Covers are all rumpled.”

“Let’s try the lighthouse,” I said, exasperated.

The path from the cottages to the lighthouse is the deepest, most heavily wooded on Spruce Island. On the hottest and brightest of summer days this path remains cold and shadowy. Year round it smells like Christmas trees in there, and tiny mammals, like red squirrels and chipmunks, rule. It’s the sort of place Monique Rose would love, and where I’d already promised to build fairy houses with her come summer.

But on a raw April night at three a.m. it’s one scary place. We had to walk slowly, since the combination of ankle-turning roots and pitch dark didn’t lend itself to running. The trees, swaying in the wind, moaned. I don’t know what made me do it, but I reached out and grabbed Michael’s hand.

It was amazingly warm. I remember feeling incredibly grateful to have that hand to hang on to, and as we made our way through the woods, I gripped it with bone-crushing intensity. Michael never complained—which is saying something, because I have pretty powerful paws. As we approached the end of the path, the sound of waves washing up on the rocks grew louder.

And suddenly we were there. The woods opened, and Spruce Island lighthouse blazed before us. Well, maybe “blazed” isn’t exactly accurate. Compared to the dark path and view of the lighthouse from the water, it seemed blazing, close up. It was definitely bright, and on a clear night could probably have been seen for miles. The lanterns, glowing from atop the stone tower, flickered when the wind gusted hard against the windows. They illuminated the air, heavy with moisture, so everything around us seemed bathed in gold.

Michael released my hand, taking a few steps to his right in order to get a better look. He crashed into something and swore.

“What the…,” he said, then gasped. In the dim light I could make out two shapes. Not standing, not lying on the ground, but seated. Reclining, actually. In aluminum beach chairs. They did not look human. The only thing I can compare them to is larvae. That disgusting, maggot-like stage of insect development: white, cocoon-like, and bloated. Only these larvae were giant, man-sized mutants.

“Oh my god!” Michael screamed, his voice high-pitched with fear. “Mummies!”