The She (32 page)

"I don't know..."

"And the fault trembles every so often and throws up a reaction, right?"

"I don't know..."

"And it never hits shore because it just keeps refilling the canyon. Maybe?"

"I don't know, except that it is fucking cold out here now."

"Keep bailing, keep your blood moving. They're coming. Okay? Talk to me." I watched him toss another bucket of water over the side. "And since there aren't enough witnesses who live to tell about it, nobody takes it seriously enough to investigate."

I thought it would have to help him to think of the thing in his own terms, so I blathered on about funny eardrums and heaviness in your limbs. He kept bailing, and I couldn't tell for sure whether he was really hearing me, just because his head kept nodding up and down. He hadn't heard the screeching, but he seemed to want to agree with me about everything. "It's got to be suction, something about the force of gravity pulling on sensitive bodies, right?" I said.

"I would guess."

"Well, you're going to have lots of fun up at school after this, my man! I want you to promise me you'll call all your cronies over in the science department, and we'll work on something together for once, all right?"

"We're not sinking, right?"

I figured he ought to know that much and fought to keep from yelling at him. "No. The ballast pumps are working good, and so am I. Just keeping bailing and get a hold of yourself."

He bailed until the cutter lights came over the horizon and finally drew near.

A Coast Guard officer offered us a bigger motorized pump, and another jumped on board with a clipboard. The guy was writing down basic info—our names, name of the boat, size of the boat.

"We got hit by a rogue wave," I told him.

"What, you tried to ride it straight up?" he asked.

"No, I zagged it. The water load is from where it hit us in the stern. Believe me, if we hadn't been on the edge of it, we would be dead and gone. I zagged up a piece of the swell that hadn't broken, came down behind it."

He didn't look too impressed. "How big?"

I realized he thought I was talking about a twelve-foot rogue wave. My mental alarm bell went off. He would never believe me. Should I lie? Make the thing sound smaller? Just so I wouldn't have the Coast Guard thinking I was nuts? I wondered how many people might have caved in with that thought, especially if their last name happened to be Barrett.

Grey put a hand on my back and put herself up close to the officer: "It was halfway up to the sky, mister."

I cleared my throat as a flood of Mom memories struck, "
...another pitfall of me being a captain ... the
Coast Guard doesn't hear women very well. Unless they always remember to keep it in really, really manly terms, it's downright dangerous—
"

"It was sixty-five foot," I put in quickly.

The guy looked away from me quick, back down at the clipboard, and his pen made a few random circles above the page. I sensed he felt we were trying to blame the weather rather than my bad driving.

Emmett waded over and I nudged him. "How big was it, Emmett?"

"It ate my parents," he muttered, and I rolled my eyes heavenward, realizing I had won something, but wondering how quickly Aunt Mel and I could get him some therapy.

"You lost passengers?" The officer grabbed for his handset.

"Not tonight," Emmett said. "Our parents were out here eight years ago, and it took them off a three-hundred-foot freighter; It is big enough to roll a freighter—"

"Which one of you is the captain of this voyage?" He sounded confused.

"I am." Grey raised her hand.

I felt my mother's bones roll as his eyes looked right through her like maybe he ought to talk to a guy, and they swam back to me. "It's just that there's no weather tonight, Mr...."

"Barrett. I'm Evan Barrett. This is my brother Emmett. This is the
owner,
Grey—"

"Barrett." The guy looked me up and down. "You guys are related to those people who sent a Mayday and disappeared a few years back?"

"They were our parents," Emmett croaked.

"Oh."

I watched in amazement as he circled his pen over the place where he was about to put the size of the wave, and skipped it again. His complete thought came to me in a flash: We either fucked up our driving or created a hoax to prove something about our parents. Mr. Church's words clattered through my head:
The Coast Guard rewrites these reports to fit a belief system they can tolerate.
He didn't leave the height blank on purpose. I just think his fingers couldn't write what his brain refused to acknowledge.

The Coast Guard was good enough to give us a tow to shore. I forced Emmett to go on the cutter but Grey and I stayed on board, watched the ballast pumps, manned the Coast Guard pump, and kept ourselves busy. We were almost back into port when I went into the galley and found Grey loosening a couple of floorboards with the help of a wrench.

"The engines are pretty well drained by now," I said, thinking she shouldn't waste her time.

"They are. Just ... there's something down here I need." She pulled up the floorboards, then reached her hand almost under the pumps. It came up dripping with a very large, sealed bubble envelope in it. She handed it to me.

"Hiding place number one," she said. I opened the envelope. It was full of cash, six fat bricks of hundred dollar bills. I stared at her and she laughed, tired. She shoved it down her coveralls and hooked her jacket again.

I helped her screw down the floorboards, trying to convince her that she would not run away so long as I was living. She kept insisting she was not running off, but I couldn't imagine what she needed this wad of cash for if that wasn't the case. It looked to be about twenty-five thousand dollars, maybe more.

My tongue was thick, and my arms were still weighted down, like they sometimes had felt when I'd heard The She. I could only sit there on the floor soaking wet and cold, trying to decide what The She really was.

I had driven her. I was supposed to be convinced it was a wave more than anybody in the world. But there were those elements that squeaked through my head that made the wave seem alive ... those things I could never explain and maybe wouldn't want to. Like the fact that she started to rise up in some jealous seizure while I was kissing the love of my life. Like the fact that, afterward, I remembered feeling that I was fighting something alive, and that we'd all talked about her as if she were alive.

That wave had a pulse, a heart throb, an anger a sense of humor. She was a thing that laughed at me ... something that maybe didn't want to hurt us as much as show off her fury and then spare us ... maybe so that someone else might go back to shore and brag on her. And like maybe there was some small maternal instinct in her. She had rolled the
Goliath,
taken my parents, yet wanted me to know that maybe she was no ugly hag, that she was offended by some of the horror stories that echoed back on shore. She takes whom she will, but she doesn't eat. Her passions are more sensual, having more to do with her heart and spirit than her mouth and belly. She's a graveyard, not a kitchen. She's a woman, not a witch. When the church bells ring in memoriam in East Hook, she takes a graceful bow. She's never wiped her mouth.

I knew I could never prove to another human being that my description of The She was valid in any way. But I also kept hearing Church reminding me that no one could take her from me again. Because even if the next terrified soul had the presence of mind to get pictures and send them to publications all over the world, it's easy to photograph nature but difficult to photograph soul and character. And if somebody found the fault in the canyon floor and validated that great mystery, nobody could ever photograph a massive idea, a will, or a decision to place a fault where it lies.

You can't photograph the hugest mysteries of the universe that really have nothing to do with what shows up before your eyes, under a microscope, through a telescope, in the pages of books. I can't prove much, but I decided, as we pulled into the Basin, that when the next person tries to pull that argument on me—that great spirits aren't real because they never show up in our faces—I'll see that vengeful, hateful, graceful, merciful killer wave—which I knew in my heart was sent for our eyes only, for a once-in-a-lifetime answer to some deep needs of three orphaned souls—and I'll say, "Well, maybe divinity just isn't that artless."

"
But who's to say what's true and what's not,
what's real and what's imagined, what's the way it is,
and what's what you want it to be?
"
—E
D
O
KONOWICZ
, author of
Terrifying Tales of the Beaches and Bays

I threw my mortarboard in the air with a hundred other fools out in Fairmount Park on a clear spring day. The sun was warm, and I should have been extremely happy, except I was still numb from having heard Grey's name announced among the graduates. I'd last seen her six and a half months ago. I made my way over to Mrs. Ashaad and saw my brother doing the same.

He caught me just before I reached her and gave me a bear hug, laughing a little. "I have to say, Evan, you gave me a few scares during the past four years. Congratulations, my man."

He stuck out his hand, and I skinned it, turning to Mrs. Ashaad.

"You gave
me
a few scares, too." She hugged me, and I caught her by the shoulders.

"You graduated Grey."

"Yes, I did. She completed the work."

"From
where
? If she did that, then you have to know where she is."

"No, I don't. Her last work came in late. What else is new? We were able to process it in time. Come to my car with me. There was something in the last bit of work addressed to you."

I followed along half thrilled, half angry, knowing that this was not possible if Mrs. Ashaad didn't have an address. While we were walking, my mind roared back to how she had slipped through my fingers—by throwing me a curveball I never would have expected.

I'd docked her dad's mangled boat when we reached the Basin, and I had actually cut a stern line and had it in my hand. I was playing cowboy or something I hadn't really thought through, except if she didn't tell me where she was going, I had some game plan to tie her up.

I looked up on the dock, and there were two men standing there in trench coats, with what looked like business suits on underneath. It was after midnight. One reached a hand down and pulled Grey up onto the dock. Neither said "hello," but the second one said, "We were listening to the Coast Guard radio and thought we might have had a fatality. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine." She turned, reached into her weather-suit pocket, and tossed me her car keys. I caught them. "Will you drive my car back to Philly?"

I looked back and forth between her and these two men I had never seen before, figuring she would introduce them. She asked them, "What should I do about the boat?"

"Leave it. We'll have it taken care of," the first one said.

"Evan, just leave it. Leave everything, okay?" She took two steps backward up the dock, and the two men fell in with her. She walked backward like that, staring and staring at me, until she finally blew me a kiss and turned. I didn't know if they were uncles or people from Saint E's. And I never saw her again.

I figured I would smooth talk Mrs. Ashaad out of her address somehow, some way, though she had denied having any knowledge of Grey's whereabouts up until a month ago, when I had finally stopped asking.

Mrs. Ashaad was parked in a VIP spot, so we didn't have to walk very fan She opened her back door, and sure enough this package she pulled out was merely a FedEx envelope. It was misshapen, as if it had once been full of papers, but now there was only a small envelope left in it. She handed the envelope to me, and I saw my name in pretty handwriting that sent chills down me.

"She said to give it to you on your graduation day," she muttered. "It's a present of some sort."

I tore it open, expecting a lengthy letter of explanation—where she was, why she'd never contacted me, and why she came to our town house and picked up the car without saying squat to me, without even ringing my doorbell. I still had the keys.

But it wasn't a letter. At least, not one from her. It was a report. A lot was blacked out with thick black marker like the name of the company, the names in the to and from lines, and any part of the address except the state, Florida.

The report said, "This is in response to the dive of the wreck of the
Sanskrit
, owner operator James Diaz, having foundered off the coast of southern Florida. Remains from eight victims were removed via photo arms of Bubble Drum II, and analysis of those remains took place on May 3 at the LabTech facility in east Miami.

"Be advised that based on the dental records and DNA samples provided, none of those remains belongs to Wade E. Barrett of West Hook, nor his wife, Mary Ellen Starn, also of West Hook.

"A transcript from LabTech is provided. We hope you found our bubble drum and diving facility as accommodating as you expected.

"Yours truly." And a blacked-out name.

I slid down the side of Mrs. Ashaad's cat, staring at this piece of paper until Emmett finally grabbed it from my hand. He dropped to his knees and let out a loud yell, half from shock, half a victory whoop. He's a much faster reader than I am. I didn't know where to land a thought. I wanted to think about taking that letter to the authorities, though I didn't really know which ones would change the status of my parents from "missing at sea" to "died at sea," or even if that letter would be enough evidence that they died up here in the canyons.

And I couldn't get rid of the image of Grey stuffing that money envelope down her coveralls. I had guessed it to be somewhere around twenty-five thousand dollars, and she'd most likely used every dime getting herself down in a bubble drum, finally. She should have used it to live on. She used it on us, and I had no way to thank her.