Off Plan

by May Archer

  “Why the hell would I tell Mason how I feel? God. How long’s he gonna be happy here, Rafe? How long ’til he realizes he can do more and be more? Until he decides he doesn’t wanna be tied to a half-assed, grumpy tour boat operator?”

  “How long until you do?”

  “What?”

  “Fenn, you’ve been mostly miserable here for years. And you know what? I understood that, more or less. You had a shit hand dealt you in Texas. That was like me and Aimee. You tried your best, and it ended anyway. Now, since you hooked up with Mason, you’ve come alive again. You smile. I mean, not at me, thank fuck, but at other people who actually like that stupid mug of yours.” He grabbed my chin, holding me immobile, and gave me two insolent cheek pats before laughing and twisting out of my reach. “You’ve got Dad ready to do literally anything you asked of him that he’s capable of doing. You have a guy who cares about you, and you’re pushing him away. I dunno, man. I think this—” He waved a hand from my head to my feet. “—is on you.”

  “Oh my God.” I widened my eyes. “What is life like in your reality?” I wrapped my arms around him tight. “Please, Rafe, take me back to Narnia with you when you go!”

  Rafe drove an elbow into my stomach, sending me back a pace. “I’m serious.”

  “You’re delirious. Your dad is willing to do anything for me? Ha!”

  “Did you ever notice you and my dad have these conversations that are in mirror writing? He writes the message left to right, you read it right to left? Every damn time.” He broke off with a shake of his head. “Anyway, trust me when I tell you, he wants you to be happy, and to stop living half a life.”

  “No. No, you’re—”

  “I know this because he told me so. In those words.” Rafe pursed his lips. “The man is an asshole, a liar, and a manipulator. Half the time, Fenn, I don’t even know if I love him or I hate him, because he never thinks and he never fucking listens. But… I don’t doubt that he cares. He’s just very, very wrong in the ways he shows that.”

  Rafe made zero sense. “Your dad calls me Mary’s nephew, Rafe. Not even his own nephew, mind you.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m…”

  Rafe’s entire face cracked into a wild grin, the kind I rarely saw on him anymore and realized I’d missed. “Fenn. What’s the name of this boat?”

  “What?”

  “The boat.” He shimmied side to side. “This piece of shit flotation device we’re standing on, which also happens to be the most expensive thing my dad owns, and the source of his livelihood. His life’s work, Fenn. What. Is. It. Called?”

  “The Mary Anna. So?”

  “So, Fenn, you utter, utter fool, if he named the most important thing in his world after my mom, didn’t you ever think that him calling you Mary’s nephew makes you more important, not less?”

  I gaped at him. No. No, that had literally never occurred to me, any more than believing in Beale’s portents had occurred to me, or believing the treasure was real had occurred to me, or thinking I could morph into a unicorn had occurred to me.

  “For fuck’s sake, cousin, stop psyching yourself out about what’ll happen if life goes wrong. Start thinking what might happen if it all goes right. I promise you from experience, if it goes to shit and you’re sad later, it won’t make you feel better knowing you wasted your chance to be happy.”

  “Is this a pep talk?” I demanded. “Because I’ve never had one of these, and I need to know if we’re supposed to hug it out after, or if that’s weird because we’re related or…”

  “Asshole,” Rafe said without heat. “And look, it causes me physical pain to say this, but you’re a good guy. A hard worker. A talented mechanic. Why don’t you let Dad invest in you? Take one of his small-business loans. Open a garage.”

  “Uh, because I don’t know how to—”

  “Then find out. Jesus. Kids today! Want every damn thing handed to them.”

  “But what if I fuck up—”

  “What if you don’t?”

  I frowned. What if I didn’t?

  “And while you’re at it, why not call the hot doctor? A man could do worse than spending his life with you, that’s all I’m saying.” He tilted his head from side to side lightly. “I mean, not a lot worse, but…”

  I snorted as a kind of wild hope started spreading inside me. “Hey! Who’s the asshole now?”

  “Still you.” Rafe grinned that full-on version of his smile just as a crack of purple lightning rent the sky, and then neither of us was smiling.

  “Well, that was rude,” Rafe yelled at the sky. He rolled his eyes. “Especially since I still need to go climb on the fucking roof of the office to secure the rest of the tarps.”

  I shook my head. “Can’t do that when your dad has the rest of the tarps, remember? Let’s just lock it down as best we can and figure out where he is.”

  We finished securing the boat and the Goodmen Outfitters office, then ran up the dock to Rafe’s Jeep. We climbed inside and shut the doors just as the sky opened and rain began to pour down.

  “Hot damn,” Rafe said. “Been a minute since we’ve had one like this. Makes all the other storms this season seem like a warmup.” His windshield wipers could barely handle the onslaught as he crept down the road toward the motel.

  Meanwhile, I grabbed my phone from my pocket and texted.

  Me: Mason, I…

  Fuck. This was harder than I’d thought. I felt like I’d been apologizing to him since almost the first minute we’d met. I’d gotten him wrong, I’d gotten his situation wrong, I’d gotten my responses wrong, over and over. And every damn time, I’d apologized and Mason had accepted it. Accepted that I was flawed and human and really fucking scared.

  In exchange, he’d made me feel… incredible. Happy. Important. Simultaneously relaxed and ready to take on the world. His faith in me, in us, hadn’t wavered once, despite all the times I’d pushed him away.

  So, yeah, a fucking apology text was not gonna cut it. I was gonna need to do something bigger. Something more. Something that might convince him to accept just one more apology from me and give me one more chance.

  But first I decided to start with the most pressing thing. I sent off a text:

  Me: Mason, stay at the clinic. Don’t try to get home in this. I’ll pick you up.

  “Well, shit.” Rafe pointed up ahead, at the pickup parked in the lot by the motel. “Found the tarps. No Dad, though.”

  “He got a flat.” I pointed at the passenger’s front tire. “Looks like he dented the rim.”

  “Bet I know how. While you were texting your honey bunch, I was navigating around a huge-ass pothole in the Pass ’bout a half a mile up from here.”

  Texting my honey bunch. I snorted. I resisted the urge to tell Rafe what I’d actually been thinking.

  “It’s the rain,” I said instead. “All these storms over the past month mean a ton of standing water eroding the rock under the asphalt.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Fix… erosion?” I blinked. “Uh, no, Rafe. How about I fix the tire on the truck instead?”

  “In this rain? No way. And I don’t have Dad’s keys, so it’d be a waste of time. I’m grabbing the tarps just in case. Text him for me, would you? Find out where the hell he is.”

  But when Rafe got back in the car a minute later, Big Rafe hadn’t answered.

  “Let’s stop by his office,” I suggested, hooking a thumb toward the house.

  So Rafe pulled the car in next door, and the two of us bolted up the porch stairs… only to find the front door locked.

  “You have your key?” I demanded.

  Rafe shook his head. “Took a little too much delight in handing it back to Dad a couple weeks ago when I moved into Grandma Goodman’s old house.”

  “Great. Well, I have a key, but it’s over in my…” I squinted through the tree break. “Fuck. Rafe borrowed my car!”

  “Let’s see if Gloria’s out back.”

  I followed Rafe around the side o
f the house, and both of us were drenched to the skin before we reached the bunker door… which happened to be firmly shut and locked.

  “Shit,” Rafe said, ducking under the small overhang to bang on the door anyway.

  “I’m checking the back door of the house.” I went back the way we came but detoured up the wooden stairs to the back entrance. That door was locked also. The storm windows were down, and everything looked secure.

  I took my phone from my pocket and hit Redial.

  “Hey! Dad’s phone’s ringing in there!” Rafe yelled from the bunker. “I hear it echoing!”

  He came running through the yard a second later and stood beside me on the porch, dripping.

  “Well, wherever Rafe and Gloria are, Rafe got shit sorted for the storm before he left.” I gestured to the storm windows. “But forgot his phone.”

  “I guess so,” Rafe muttered. He tapped a couple of buttons on his own device. “I’m calling Beale to see what the hell is going on. It’s starting to feel like an episode of that apocalyptic show where everyone goes missing and— Hey! Hey, Beale! Beale, you’re breaking up! Where are y—? Double fuck. Call dropped.” Rafe clicked his phone off and kicked at the porch railing. “Lightning must’ve hit the tower on the north side of the island. Again.”

  Which meant Mason probably hadn’t received my text either.

  Lightning speared the sky, and thunder boomed so hard the world shook. The rain was like a living curtain hanging over the edges of the porch, obscuring everything beyond it.

  “So what now?” Rafe demanded.

  “Now I’m running up to the motel to get a change of clothes and my rain gear. Then we get back in your car and head for town to find Mason and Rafe and Beale, because I’ll be damned if I’m spending the apocalypse with you.”

  “But Fenn!” Rafe called as he hurried down the stairs after me. “My favorite cousin! We could be apocalypse buddies!”

  I snorted and ran off the porch, through the tree break, and up the concrete stairs to my room at a pace that was probably not smart given the level of standing water on the ground. I purposely took the closer stairs, just to give me an excuse to go past Mason’s room and make sure all was well. His curtains were closed and it was dark inside, which meant he wasn’t there, because I couldn’t imagine him being inside without the lights on when the storm was this bad. My stomach twisted, wondering if he was scared, wherever he was.

  I took a second to call him while I was throwing on some dry clothes, but the phone clicked to voicemail immediately.

  “Mason, if you get this… call me or text me, okay? Let me know you’re alright? I’ll come to you, wherever you are.” And as I hit the red button to disconnect, I realized it was true. I’d go wherever he was, on the island or off… and not just today, but in the future. I could leave Whispering Key anytime I wanted, and I’d be willing to leave for him.

  This was way more of a revelation than it should have been.

  I remembered Big Rafe telling us a few weeks ago that the island wasn’t a prison or a tomb, and… okay, when Big Rafe started making sense, you had to wonder if maybe Beale was right about portents or if Young Rafe was right and the apocalypse was coming.

  By the time we got back to town, after white-knuckling the drive even at fifteen miles an hour, our humor had fled once more, because the apocalypse thing wasn’t as funny when the streets of town looked literally deserted. I reminded myself that—duh!—the rain was coming down in buckets and no one was going to be standing outside in this, but I was still more relieved than I wanted to admit when Rafe pulled the Jeep into the lot behind the Concha and found it full of cars. I didn’t see my Charger anywhere in the lot or on the street.

  I wrenched open the door to the little restaurant and immediately scanned the tables, even as everyone turned around to say, “Heya, Fenn! Heya, Rafe!”

  Kono Cuddins and her husband were sitting at one table. Marius Wynott sat alone at another. Lorenna McKetcham and her granddaughter were at a third. Pete Blumenthal and his girlfriend, Marlie Coblet, at a fourth. Dale Jennings and Omar Abadi at a fifth. Juju Irvine was sitting on a stool beside Gerry Twomey, leaning back against the bar, and her brother Bubba sat on her other side. Lety was behind the counter cooking something, as usual.

  No Big Rafe. No Beale…

  Most importantly (and disappointingly), no Mason.

  “Hey,” Rafe said. “Have any of you guys seen my dad or Beale?”

  “Or Dr. Bloom?” I added.

  “Saw Rafe this morning at the Bean!” Marlie said. “Said to let anyone know if they needed help with storm preparations. He could be helping out!”

  Right. That made sense.

  “And I saw Dr. Bloom earlier today!” Marius Wynott volunteered. “Came by my shop with your Beale.” Mr. Wynott looked vaguely disapproving. “Had a bit of a kerfuffle, alas.”

  “Beale and Mason? What happened?” I demanded.

  Mr. Wynott sniffed. “I’m not sure I should say.”

  I narrowed my eyes and leaned forward, but Rafe put a restraining hand on my arm.

  “Marius, you answer Fenn’s question,” Lety ordered, and Mr. Wynott pursed his lips and rolled his eyes, but complied.

  “Well. I was about to help Dr. Bloom select a new book to read when I got called away momentarily. When I came back, I heard him speaking quite heatedly with young Mr. Goodman. Dr. Bloom was on the phone and said he was going to ‘take the job.’ He told me he couldn’t stay. And then he told Beale he required a ride off the island.” He sighed. “I wonder if this means he won’t be able to take care of Topaz while I’m gone in July?”

  “Yeah, that’s really the most important concern here,” Maddie McKetcham muttered before her grandmother shot her a quelling look.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I informed Marius. “Mason’s not leaving yet. He’s still looking for a job.” And he wouldn’t be leaving at all, if I could convince him to stay.

  Juju exchanged a dubious glance with Maddie. “Last I heard, Big Rafe already found someone to replace Doc Bloom.”

  “What?” I scowled. “No. Not a chance—”

  “Yep. That’s what I heard, too,” Bubba said worriedly. “Told Mason about it the other day. And Gloria said Big Rafe said he had a million job offers. She’s shocked he hasn’t taken one. So it’s only a matter of time before he leaves, I’m afraid.”

  “Does this mean there’s trouble in paradise?” Gerry asked slyly. “If you need a friend in your hour of need, Fenn—”

  “Not now, Gerry,” Lorenna said.

  I ran a hand through my hair, remembering I hadn’t gone inside Mason’s room at all. I’d assumed he was at the clinic…

  “Maybe Mason’s at work!” I almost smacked my forehead at this obvious explanation. “I’ll go check—”

  “I doubt it,” Kono piped up. “Taffy called me half an hour ago and said Mason told her to close up at lunch ’cause they had no appointments. She ended up staying until Orry could pick her up, and Mason never came back from lunch. She figured he was caught in the rain and went home.”

  This got weirder and weirder. And I was really fucking annoyed that I couldn’t make a damn phone call.

  There was no chance that Mason had left this island for good. None. Not without saying goodbye to everyone. Worst-case scenario, he’d gone for an interview off island.

  No, I reminded myself, worst case, he’d actually taken a job off island.

  But I wasn’t going to give up. I’d done that too many times already.

  “I’m gonna miss him a lot,” Juju said with a sniff. “Mason, I mean.”

  Lorenna nodded sadly. “I was thisclose to getting him to join the Mahjong Society.”

  “He was a trustworthy guy,” Bubba said.

  “He was hot as fuck,” Gerry said mournfully.

  “Not now, Gerry!” Rafe, Kono, and Maddie said at once.

  “You guys are talking about him like he’s leaving,” I said angrily. “He’s not. He’s gonna
be back, you know. Tonight. And once he is, it’s up to us to convince him to stay.”

  “On Whispering Key?” Kono shook her head. “What would he wanna stay here for?”

  “Because this is where he’s needed,” I said, realizing the truth of my statement as I said it. All the eyes in the place shot to my face simultaneously.

  “But, Christmas Eve three years ago, didn’t you call Whispering Key a Universe-forsaken hunk of rock inhabited by a bunch of shit-for-brains dumbasses?” Dale wanted to know.

  And holy shit, if his ferrymones gave him a memory like that, he shouldn’t let Mason make him give them up.

  “I… I might have,” I allowed. “It’s all a blur. But the point is, maybe it is a forsaken hunk of rock, but it’s our forsaken hunk of rock! And we might be a bunch of shit-for-brains dumbasses, but we’re lovable shit-for-brains dumbasses—”

  “I certainly find you lovable,” Gerry began, and the entire room shouted, “Not now, Gerry.”

  “Big Rafe is right when he says this island is changing,” I told them. “It’s growing already. Waking up. Coming alive. Even I can feel it. It’s like that scene at the end of Beauty and the Beast, when all the talking clocks come back to life—”

  “Dibs on being the dancing teapot!” Maddie said.

  “Things are getting better here,” I concluded. “But honestly? Some things were already pretty fucking great, and I don’t think I saw them until Mason came here and made me see them. Like, the way we all look out for each other. The way when one of us has a problem, we all share that problem. The way we’ve made each other crazy, and kept each other safe, and stuck together through all the bad times like… like family.” Like my own crazy, ridiculous, lovable family. “So why wouldn’t Mason want to stay here, when we all want him to? You want him to stay, don’t you, Lorenna? Gerry? Maddie?”

  All of them nodded.

  “Then… maybe it’s time we stop just accepting the shit that happens to us around here.” I looked at each one of them in turn. “Maybe it’s time we decide what we want for ourselves. What we want this island to be. And then we go out and get it. Starting with Mason Bloom.”