Sharks & Boys (20 page)

If
I die at sixteen, I won’t grow up. No going to college. No getting married. No becoming a vascular surgeon or a mother. I’m still a virgin. Dying now would be an enormous disappointment. I press my face against the side of the raft and gently bite at it. I know I can’t eat it, but it gives me something to do. I have this feeling that if I allow myself to become motionless, I’ll die.

There is a hand on my leg. It’s Wick. Have I forgiven him? Not with words. But I don’t hate him. I don’t want him to die. Maybe there will be something else between us after this. After this?

I wonder if there is life after death. Would I go to college? Get married? Become a mother? I doubt it. I’ve never heard a word about sex in the afterlife. Maybe I’ll get reincarnated. Do you get to choose what your soul inhabits? Could I come back as a goat? Or worse, some sort of edible vegetation? I don’t think I want to be so stuck on death. My mind leaps. Machu Picchu. Wristwatches. My mother. A horse. Cake. Skate. My father. Grace. Burr.

I stare at my hand, entwined with Wick’s. I move my fingers one at a time. I can’t move my injured thumb at all. I can’t believe a piece of glass can do this. Even when I touch it with my other fingers, I can’t feel my thumb.

“Who do you think will get the money?” Dale asks.

“What money?” Landon asks.

“Skate and Burr’s money. Who do you think will get it now? When their parents died, they got over a million bucks.”

How can Dale be thinking about this? Why does it matter? Besides, the answer seems obvious.

“It’ll go to his relatives,” I say.

“Except for their uncle, they don’t have any relatives. They’re all gone,” Dale says.

“Right,” I say. It seems impossible, but the entire Riggs family has been extinguished in less than a year.

“So his uncle Bennett will get it,” Munny says.

“That sucks,” Dale says. “I didn’t like that guy. Not looking out for them at all. I don’t want him to get anything.”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Wick says.

“So you met him?” I ask. I’m still trying to piece together the events.

“Briefly,” Landon says.

“He was headed to Miami,” Sov says.

“What a dick!” Dale says. “He should have stayed with them. That’s what a good uncle would have done. And why did he even leave the keys for the boat?” Dale says. “He should have known they’d want to take it out.”

“Maybe he didn’t know,” Sov says.

“None of this makes sense,” Dale says. He sounds frustrated as he strings his sentences together. “It’s like Burr and Skate had a death wish. We’re out drinking on the night of a huge storm on a boat, and only two us know anything about sailing. Son of a bitch. Rewrite. Do over. We did it wrong. And Uncle Bennett becomes rich. Maybe he set it all up.”

“No,” Wick says. “It’s a freak accident.”

“I don’t know,” Dale says. “That guy shouldn’t get anything.”

“Stop,” I say quietly. “Something else. I need to hear something else.”

There is silence. I can hear myself moan. Landon moves toward me. “Enid?”

The raft feels unstable.

“Switch spaces with me,” he tells Wick.

Wick agrees and moves to Landon’s spot. We’re not being as careful about weight distribution as we used to be. I guess we think it matters less and less.

“Landon?” I say.

I turn to face him, and I lace my fingers together like I’m going to pray. I can’t keep my secret any longer. Landon has lowered his head right to my mouth. It’s almost as if he can tell I’m going to make a confession.

“Tell me,” he says.

“I called Grace.”

He puts his hand on my knee. Landon has met Grace. Six months ago, he had an ice-cream sundae with her and my father at a Friendly’s restaurant. I had refused to go. First, I’m not really a huge fan of Friendly’s. Second, I didn’t want to meet the product of my father’s first affair. My father had another meeting scheduled with the two of us. Next week, Grace and my father and I were going to eat bagel sandwiches for lunch at a shop near Lake Champlain. Afterward, we were going to buy expensive chocolates. My father had told me that I had to go. But I would not, I’d told myself. I would not.

“When? What did you say?” Landon finally prompts.

“A week ago.”

I don’t say anything else. My head is pounding. Confessing doesn’t make it feel any better.

“She’s just a kid,” Landon says. “It’s not her fault.”

I know he’s right. But I don’t know how to process it.

I nod. “I told her that I didn’t want to meet her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘But you’re my sister, Enid. I bet we’ll like each other. I can count to fifty in Spanish.’”

I sniffle, but my nose is absolutely dry.

“What did you say?” Landon asks.

“I told her not to call me her sister. I told her I’d never like her. I said that my life would be better if she hadn’t been born.”

I search the cut on my hand. It’s red and puffy and so swollen that it’s breaking open. Landon doesn’t say anything. I know he’s ashamed of what I did. I feel his thumb on my chin. He presses on it, guiding my face to look at his.

“When we get out of here, you need to call her up and apologize. That was a shitty thing to do.”

I nod. And I nod. And I nod.

“I feel awful.”

“Enid, I know you’re not ready to get past this yet, but one day you’ve got to get to a better place.” I bite my bottom lip. “I know,” I say. “When we get out of here, you should probably talk to somebody.” He means a counselor. He takes hold of my chin again and makes me look in his eyes. His thumb feels weak. “Okay,” I say. He closes his worried eyes. Beneath the thin skin of his eyelids, I think I can see his eyes darting from left to right. He must be in a place of dreams too. I wonder if President Nixon has come to him. Maybe he’s like the patron saint of people adrift.

“Do you really think we’ll get out of here?” I ask.

His eyes clap open.

“I do,” he says.

His eyes aren’t cloudy. They’re clear. He seems certain.

“Do you think we’ll all get out of here?” I ask.

He looks around the raft.

“I hope so,” he whispers. “I hope so.”

There’s
at least two hours of strong sunlight left. Then our fourth night will close in on us. We’re talking less and less. It’s as if the dinghy has grown rooms, and we’ve each taken our twin and found our own place to dwell.

We’re so tired. I can hear it in the way we breathe. Frustrated sounds escape from our mouths when we exhale. Being this thirsty and worn down makes living laborious. None of us wants to talk. At the moment, it’s easier not to. It’s easier just to sit in one spot beneath the hot sun and be silent. And for me, this means that it’s easier not to forgive.

I’m thinking about forgiveness. Not Grace. Wick. I haven’t fully forgiven him. It’s like I’m teetering on the lip of reversing course and unforgiving him altogether. I understand where President Nixon was coming from in his forgiveness lecture, but if your boyfriend lies to you, leading you to steal your mother’s car and board a ship that eventually sinks, placing you on a dinghy adrift in shark-infested waters, I think it’s okay to take some time to process the events. It could take me a few more weeks. Maybe months. Actually, I might be a retired grandmother living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, trying to adjust to my newly replaced hip by the time I totally get over this.

It hurts. I don’t hate Wick. I think I understand what happened. He was confused. We broke up. He got more confused. Enter Simone. And the end of my life. I get mad all over thinking about this. I haven’t been this mad since those sharks nearly flipped our raft on day two. Actually, they’ve been trying to tip our raft relentlessly. I don’t know why I’m stuck on the events of day two. I had no idea sharks were such focused fish. They have the determination of Olympians. I hate them. I listen to my breathing, then to the water. Its rhythmic splash begins to sound like the national anthem. I think back to the most recent Olympics. The Winter Games. I like watching figure skating and bobsledding. I don’t really skate or sled. Skating hurts my ankles. I’ve never tried to bobsled.

Who among us would be the best at it? Maybe I would be. When I get back to my life, I should try it. I like that phrase: when I get back to my life. It runs through my mind on a loop.

“I’m going to try bobsledding.” I hear myself say it out loud. “When I get back to my life.”

“Really?” Landon asks. He sounds so groggy.

Now I remember that Landon is next to me. I like talking to Landon. I ask another question. “Besides humans, what animal do you think would be good at bobsledding?”

He doesn’t answer. I look at him. He’s fallen asleep. I poke him with my elbow and repeat my question. He pauses. I think he thinks I’m crazy. But then he answers me. I close my eyes.

“Penguins. They slide real well on their bellies. And they can use their flippers to steer.”

“You’re right,” I say. “They’d be great. Better than me.”

I open my eyes and look into the ocean. Suddenly, in the white curling foam of the cresting waves, I think I see penguins. They’re not bobsledding. They’re walking upright across the water. Their clawed feet anchor their tuxedoed bodies as they waddle across the small waves. They have impeccable posture. They plod along with a sense of urgency. They act as if they’ve got somewhere they need to be. All of them.

“Look in the water. Do you see them?”

“What? Penguins?” he asks.

“Oh God, you do see them. They’re really there?” My mind spins with worry. How far have we drifted?

“No, but I just mentioned them. It seemed like a likely hallucination.”

“They’re gone,” I say.

“I’ve been seeing things too. Classic cars. They drive on the water like boats. They veer so close. Sometimes I feel like I could open up a door and climb inside.”

“They’re not real,” I say. “Don’t leave the raft.”

“I know,” he says.

Our mouths are spitless. Talking is tough. And my mind feels dull. I keep searching to find the right words. I’m amazed that I’m still able to stumble upon them. But I can. Landon and I are leaning into each other. We’re nearly collapsed on top of each other, forming one person. Sov and Munny are similarly positioned. So are Wick and Dale. It’s almost as if we’re Siamese twins, attached to our respective twins somewhere around our hip regions. Also, I’ve experienced an emotional shift. Maybe it’s related to the fact that we’re approaching our last survivable day, but I’ve entered a new psychological space; it’s a place of apathy. I don’t know who or what to care about. There’s one last question I want to ask. So I do.

“After you got back, would you have told me about Simone?”

“I don’t know,” Landon says.

“Oh, you would have, right?”

“Maybe, but it would’ve taken me a while. I might have just planted seeds of doubt. Dropped hints. Stuff like that.”

It’s almost like we’re alone on the raft. I don’t care if Wick hears me.

“Hey, I didn’t know you read Noah’s ark.”

“What?” he asks.

“Day two. When you were chiming in about Noah’s ark.”

“I thought that was day one,” he says.

“Maybe it was day one,” I say. “You’ve read the Bible?”

“No, when I dated Lorna, sometimes I went to church with her. One Sunday there was a sermon on Noah’s faith.”

“You’ve been to church? What religion was she? Baptist?”

“No. Lutheran,” he says.

Lorna had been Landon’s first serious girlfriend. I had no idea she was religious. The only thing that stood out about her was that she had very big lips.

“Will you two get back together?” I ask. After dating for two years, they broke up right after Valentine’s Day. He really hadn’t started dating other girls yet.

“No, it’s over,” he says.

“Is it because she wants to date another Lutheran?”
I ask.

“No. She ended up dating Skate for a while,” he says.

“I forgot about that.”

I think of Skate, not drifting away facedown in the ocean, but fully alive, jumping off the diving board into the pool, his knees hugged to his body, yelling, “Cannonball!”

“I don’t want to think about Skate,” Landon says.

I don’t say anything right away.

“Did you love Lorna?” I ask.

“I don’t want to talk about her,” he says. “It’s over.”

“I was just surprised that you went to church with her,” I say.

“It was only a few times,” he says. “I went for her. Not for the sermons.”

“I was surprised to hear you talking about the ark.”

“Why? We went to Bible classes with Grandma Calhoun and learned about it. You had a needlepoint picture of it up in your room until you remodeled it last year.”

“Oh yeah.”

And suddenly, it’s as if the picture is right in front of me. My grandmother, the only religious person in my life, passed away nearly a month after she finished it. The animals are gathered around the ark in twos. Their gender is distinguished by either the absence or presence of long, curling eyelashes. A pair of alligators kiss in front of the ark, while orange-beaked chickens perch on their backs. For the first time, I can see the humor in that—prey nestled atop predator. But my favorite part of the picture is the two happy giraffes, poking their heads out of two small windows. They crane their heads to look at each other. Their necks are long. It’s clear that my grandma wanted me to know that they loved each other.

And behind the ark, and the united animal couples, there is the smiling sun. Literally: it has a smile line that connects the two apples of its exaggerated pink cheeks. It’s nestled in a patch of blue clouds. But as I think about it now, I can’t figure out whether the ark in the needlepoint is preparing for the flood or has already returned. Are the elephants stomping their way up the loading ramp, or parading their way back down? They’re happy; the elephant in the rear position has its trunk entwined in the front elephant’s small tail. But are they coming or going? Are they getting ready to abandon land, or are they rediscovering it? It seems so important. I can’t believe that I never wondered about it until now. And where’s Noah?

Something about approaching death allows a person to live in total clarity with whatever she can conjure in her head. That’s where I am. Living in my head with this almost-forgotten picture. I watch it and then I let it fade. I still have a body. I can’t completely retreat into my head just yet. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of me. I rub my neck against Landon’s side. I never imagined dying this way. Until now, I’d contemplated two scenarios. A car accident. Or breaking one of the many thermometers in my house and releasing a stream of poisonous mercury, then somehow ingesting it. But never sharks. Never the open sea. Landon holds my good hand. He squeezes and I squeeze back.

“Enid, if I tell you something, will you promise not to think I’m a jerk?”

“Okay,” I say. I have no idea where this confession is headed. I suspect it has something to do with a series of leg amputations that befell my Barbie collection in second grade.

“I can feel your pain,” he says.

This seems like a very obvious comment.

“I know,” I say. “We’re all hurting.”

“No, when the test administrators poke your toes, I can feel it. When they make you watch sad movies and you start to bawl, I can tell you’re crying.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask. This doesn’t make any sense. “You mean sometimes you weren’t honest during the twin tests?”

“No,” he says. “Worse. I was never honest. I didn’t want to be that connected to you. I wanted to be my own person. So I lied. I could always tell when you were eating Bing cherries. I could tell when you put your left foot in cold water. And I could tell when you were driving down here that you were really upset about something too.”

“You knew I was driving down here?”

“No, but I could sense you were real frustrated. I could tell something was really wrong.”

I don’t even try to look at him. I remove my hand from his grip and slap him on the head with it.

“That was very selfish of you,” I say. “And psychologically speaking, it totally could have messed me up.”

“It was wrong. I’m sorry.”

“So how connected are we?” I ask.

“You always knew when I was looking at a circle. Every time. It was unreal.”

“Are we as connected as Burr and Skate?” I ask

“I think so. I mean, I don’t know now that they’re gone. I don’t know what heaven is like.”

“Do you think they went to heaven? How does the afterlife even work? Mormons aren’t supposed to drink,” I say.

“If heaven keeps out beer drinkers, the line into Hell is going to be astronomically long.”

He leans in and kisses my head.

“Where did you get this barrette?” he asks.

“Dad gave it to Mom,” I say. “I found it in the glove box. I think it was a guilt gift over affair number three.”

“He’s not perfect.”

“I can’t be with a guy who cheats on me.”

“You don’t have to be.”

Landon leans his head against me, and the steady pressure hurts my neck. I turn my head up to look at him. He’s sleeping.

“Landon?” I say.

He doesn’t wake.

“Landon?” I whisper.

And I join him in sleep.

I hear the sound of a storm. The waves begin to quicken and heave against the raft. I know it’s the end. I can’t believe that I hung on this long only to die in a second storm. I start thinking about my funeral. Who will come? What will my parents dress me in? Maybe they’ll put me in last year’s prom dress. It’s an icy blue color and falls just below my knees. It would be a shame to wear that dress only once. Wait. If I die this way they’ll never find my body.

“My God!” Wick yells.

I turn to look at him. His finger trembles. He points to the sky. I look up. It’s a bird. It’s a big metal bird with glass eyes. Is this what takes us all to heaven? Do we all get to go there at the same time? I thought death would take us one by one, but the bird looks big enough for everyone. How am I supposed to get on this thing? Does it beam me up? Do girls go first? Sometimes, I feel like I don’t know anything.