The She (30 page)

"You a shrink? I thought you were a philosopher" she joked.

"Most of the truly dedicated academics try to be a bit interdisciplinary these days. If you're feeling that you can't report your family, that's a very normal feeling, especially if it's dangerous."

I figured he would throw out a solution, but he didn't, and I wondered if that wasn't smart. See if she wouldn't talk first.

"I'm ... pretty certain it's dangerous." She sighed. "I got to thinking last week that he'd talked so much business in front of me because he was stupid. Now I'm wondering if he wasn't very, very smart. It kind of puts me in check ... though I'm not ready to scream checkmate."

Emmett kept nodding, and she shifted around. "He's got a money-laundering operation that's gotten pretty substantial. Loose mob ties, though I wouldn't call him a mobster: Let's call him a friend. Ha-ha."

"Which mob?" Emmett asked, and I just gazed over the stern like this was of no interest to me at all, but I was, figuring what I could tell the FBI if I had the chance.

"Irish. He takes a lot of trips up to Boston. I really think his heart was in the right place when he came out of law school. That was a long time ago. He had something to do with the IRA. Then ... I don't know what happened, except he did some coke, and then did too much coke. Got greedy, full of himself, full of his own sense of power, He thinks he can do
anything
," she said.

I took her hand in my lap and held it, sensing her feeling of aloneness. She just let it lay limp there, but she didn't snatch it away. She finally said to Emmett, "Your brother suspects I'm suicidal. I might be, except that I feel like I have a divine purpose in my life that I haven't completed yet. My divine purpose is to show a lot of people that guys like him can't do just
anything.
"

I flinched, thinking of the men in the limos for the hundredth time.

"Well, do you have a plan?" Emmett said.

"Yeah, I've got a plan."

He waited, but she stayed quiet. Too quiet. The lowering sun had turned the sky, and the water all sorts of orange and red and white and yellow. It was like being inside a crystal ball. I think, no matter what we were discussing, we would have had to stop and pause and consider. For me, part of pausing and considering was thanking heaven and everyone who lived up there for an amazing sight like this. It made me feel closer to heaven, and I wondered if Emmett didn't feel some void, not feeling like he could thank God for things.

Maybe he managed by keeping his mind on the needs of others. He was far better at it than I was. He spoke first.

"Grey, I cannot encourage you strongly enough to find some adults who can help you. Up at Drexel, there's a list of charities as long as your arm and people who would know about things like this."

She reached over took his hand, pulled both our hands into her lap. It was beyond a cool gesture—it was a miraculous gesture. She was out on a boat, isolated from the world, with two full-blooded guys. If she trusted no one else in the world, she trusted both of us.

"I don't know which of you has the biggest heart." She shook my hand a little. "I'd be tempted to say this one, because he puts up with my endless abuse. But I don't know. You both have hearts of gold, I'll say that much."

And we sat like that, holding hands in her lap, watching the sunset change from yellow to orange to red to purple—over the shine of Saran Wrap—and, finally, to black.

Emmett stayed quiet after night fell—diplomatically quiet, I should say. He read the dash on the helm a few times, went into the cabin a couple of times, and I started to get antsy about him.

"I don't know what I want more," I mumbled to Grey. "To see The She or not to see The She."

"What's your gut telling you? Some gusts blew up after sunset. Feel that?"

"My gut is telling me I'm seasick." I put a hand on my stomach and didn't mind confessing. It seemed like we'd heard enough about each other over the past few days to say just about anything. "I guess my ultimate wish list would be to see The She and then find some way to escape her. I suppose people have escaped her wrath, or there wouldn't be any of those accounts in the cheesy little books I've seen."

"I'd just like to ask her if she's got a taste for Girl Scouts, and then kill her with my own bare hands. Is there any way to kill a sea hag? Like ... a silver bullet or anything? Maybe we should have thought of that before we came out here."

I stared into the black abyss, and the gusts made me edgy. Wind dies down at sunset more often than it rises up. I could see little whitecaps dotting off the stern. In the black, they looked like neon dots lighting and disappearing. I listened past them, but there was no sound beyond the slight wind kicking in. I shook Grey's fingers around, thinking of my mother's description: "black-bean soup, coming to a boil." I swallowed, realizing that was a way creative statement for my mother who didn't have a drop of imagination in her and remembering how Emmett had later said the line was rehearsed.

It
was
a far reach for Mom. But the more I looked at these neon dots lighting and, disappearing, the more it seemed like a perfectly natural thing to say. I was looking at them so closely that when they changed, I flew out of the deck chair grabbed the rail on the stern, and stared harder.

"What is it?" Grey asked.

"Something..." I didn't know how to describe it. I felt like I was on LSD again. "You didn't see that?"

"See what?"

She had a hand on my back, and at this point, I knew she wouldn't think I was losing it. "All those dots out there. They just dropped about thirty feet and came right back up again."

She looked and looked, up, down, up. "Well, maybe you're seeing a reflection of the sky or something."

She looked up agaih and I forced my eyes off the water. The stars were bright like flashlights, all the way to the horizon, leaving a pretty clean line where the sea met the sky on all sides. The half moon overhead was full yellow, giving these whitecaps their neon.

"Maybe." I sat down again slowly.

"I feel very selfish having you guys out here," she said. "Though I guess if I really and truly believed I was going to die by coming out here, I would not have come. I'm not ready for serving myself up as a hot lunch."

I tore my eyes from the deep and laid them on her sad, determined face, glowing in the stern lights.

"I want you to tell me where you're going," I told her flatly.

Her eyebrows rose and fell. "I'll be safe. Believe me. Maybe someday I
will
tell you. Someday when I'm not so busy trying to become a different person."

"I like you the way you are."

With some stunned awe, she leaned sideways in her seat and completely cracked up. "You are nuts, Barrett. If The She is out there, you'd do better to go out with her than me."

"I don't think you've ever really been out with anybody," I finally said.

Her eyebrows did the up-and-down routine again, and she didn't deny it. "I've had my nights. I chew them up, spit them out, and have enough good sense not to put them through it again. Someday I'll be a different person, Evan. Then I'll come back."

I cramped her fingers totally, pulling them into my lap like I wouldn't let her go. She didn't respond to the loss of circulation. She just said, "By that point, you'll be married to some lucky girl and will have three kids as perfect as yourself, Prince William."

I hated when people called me that. I leaned away from her, then spun in annoyance as a hand came down on my shoulder. Emmett leaned over and I could see he had a hand on Grey's shoulder too.

"Evan, I don't need to remind you that you need to go to school tomorrow. You have an important meeting in the morning, and you can't be late."

In other words, outside of a slight breeze kicking in and my misguided eyes, nothing at all was stirring out here.

"I'm not ready to go back yet." I stood up, not knowing whether I wasn't ready because I hadn't seen any She, or whether I knew when we got back to Philly, Grey Shailey might walk out of my life and be stubborn enough to not show up again until years had passed.

Grey stood up, too, looking at me with eyes that didn't lie. She didn't want to go back to shore either hack away from this place of make-believe and magic and answers and mysteries. Emmett moved back to the helm without saying anything else, but I knew we couldn't stall him out here for more than twenty minutes or so.

I went into the galley, and Grey followed me.

"I don't want to go back," she whispered, and it was the first fear I'd heard break in her voice.

Her eyes looked afraid, but then they changed somehow, filled up with some sort of resolve again. She bit her lip and stepped up to me slowly and wrapped her arms around my neck. It was hard looking down into her eyes with her that close, leaning into my chest. Usually, when a girl gets that close, you shut your eyes. You just kiss her. Our noses bumped. But her eyes were wide open, looking purely curious for once, as if the hardness that usually possessed them was sound asleep. I realized I had wrapped my arms around her when the ski tags on her zipper fluttered sideways and my hands felt the back of her soft sweater. It was good she was still biting her lip. I couldn't do anything but speak up.

"Grey Shailey, I don't want to become part of your problems."

"I don't know that person," she whispered. "I'm not her. Maybe I left her back on the shore. Maybe I'm somebody else now. Maybe I don't ... have those problems anymore."

I knew the feeling of being in a different world when you were out here, past the horizon. And I knew her eyes looked more empty of pain and distrust than I had ever seen them. It was almost startling, seeing that big a change, her eyes with nothing in them but some innocent curiosity, some desire that was devoid of self-consciousness. It was still awkward, in a kind of endearing way. Her elbows were up on my shoulders, and she was tapping the back of my head with her fingertips. I realized she was pushing, not tapping, some sort of shyness breaking through.

"Okay." I wrapped her all the way into my arms and whispered, "Let's see if we can make The She jealous. Let's say ... we're tempting the devil."

She liked my reasoning, I think. Her little whispered laugh blew on my mouth. She liked being close to the edge, and so long as she wasn't killing her friendships, I had a feeling that love of danger would always live on in her She kissed me, those short kisses where you're not trying to take somebody's face off. I didn't want to take her nerve away.

Her sweater got rumpled up, and I let my hands rub across the smooth skin on her back. This little moan fell out of her and I just had the thought,
Yeah. That's what you've been missing. That's what it's supposed to feel like.
And then I was really kissing her and she was wrapped around my neck like she wanted to pass through me again. I don't know how long we stayed that way. An eternity and about three minutes beyond it. The boat even kicked in with a nice little rock back and forth that felt so peaceful, so comfortable.

"We'll get us our own boat, and we'll go to Marrakech," I whispered, kissing her more. "Then Madagascar. Then Australia. And New Zealand. And the ... whatever islands, where Amelia Earhart disappeared."

"Oh, lord," she whispered. I could feel her struggling inside. I kissed her down her neck and around to the other side. She sighed, and I could feel her starting to tighten up.

"Okay, just Madagascar" I looked at her hard. Her eyes were shiny, glazed, bright. I felt like I almost had her.

"The boat's rocking," she whispered.

"I know."

"Something's happening, Evan." I didn't really even care, considering what was going on inside my own skin. It was hard to apply her words to anything but the fireworks going off in my gut.

However Emmett stuck his head down, and I loosened my grip a little. Sometimes reality sucks, even out here. He shook his head, like he was a little annoyed but not angry.

"Grey, I suddenly seem to be having trouble with your dash. It's a great dash. But the depth finder is acting crazy."

She had put her elbows between us when he appeared. She drummed on my shoulders lightly in frustration, and I let go of her followed her out to the stern, thinking,
More later. She won't leave me now.

To my surprise, a wind really had kicked in.

"There's no weather" I reminded Emmett.

"It's not weather I'm worried about. The sky is great. It's that water seems to be disappearing out of the canyon. Look at this." He pointed to the little green monitor that drew the graphs of the depth. Everything looked okay to me. The line was definitely pointing downward.

"Look at the loran TDs," he said. "We're in the deepest part of the canyon. I can match them up with your map. But look at the depth. We've misplaced about nine hundred feet."

Grey glanced at the graph on the dash, but then, like I would have done, she looked over the stern, curiously.

"Well, we all know the canyon doesn't have a leak in it, right?" she said, but would not stop staring. "Unless The She has something to do with it."

I think Emmett was annoyed that he had found us kissing, and that comment made him very, very annoyed. He flopped his arm down on the wheel and scratched his beard impatiently. The map he'd been talking about was folded in fours, and he grabbed it off the dash.

"We've been drifting around for a few hours. It could be that we moved further and the receiver didn't pick it up. There's not much current. Look." He pointed a finger at a far northwest corner of the canyon. "The depth we're registering would put us about here, which would mean we've drifted twenty miles."

He looked at the loran receiver. "These numbers say we haven't moved more than a mile."

"Which I would say is accurate, given that there's hardly any current. Or hardly waves." Grey cast another glance over the stern, which sent me back there to stare into the night. I heard her say to him, "We couldn't drift twenty miles."

"Unless we got pushed in a rush from the Gulf Stream," he countered. "It's been awfully warm out here."