by Jeff Soloway
“She’ll tell you the whole story,” said Erica. “The real one. But you got to promise to keep those shitheads off her. And give her job back after. She just needs a minute to get dressed. Meet us in the Resources room in fifteen.”
“No time. Chomp’s men are coming back. They’re pissed, Carmen. Tell me now. What did you see?”
Another silence.
“One moment,” Carmen said.
“No moments, Carmen. They’re coming. Now.”
I was helpless in my coffin. I was a ghost that could hear and feel and fear and puzzle over mysteries but could take no action. Death being eternal, my pain would forever increase, my obsessions grow wilder.
Carmen began speaking again. In her lurching English, so different from her light-footed Spanish, she clumsily but effectively replicated her description of my father—his age, his weird hair, his ugly sandals, his thin arms.
My heartbeat seemed loud enough to shake the closet around me. I reminded myself that the description was useless without the name. And only I had the name.
“Good,” Chuckles said. “But we’re not done. I need you to come with me. We have ID photos of all the passengers. You can look through them until you identify the man you saw.”
I had to get upstairs. I had to warn him.
“Now?” Carmen asked.
“Right now. Before they come back. But they’ll get to you anyway. I warn you, Carmen. I know how these guys work. They’re going to scream at you. Make threats. Kick shit around. They’ll want you to sign some paper. They’ll want you to lie. They’ll want you to say a crew member broke into that room, because they think they can blame us for the murder. Sue us for millions. But you just described to me a passenger, not a crew member. So I know the truth. If you try to fuck us over, we’ll make you sorry.”
Silence. My knees burned, my back wept, my scalp itched with sweat. Far worse was my fear for my father. I could do nothing but hang on.
“Why would I lie?” Carmen protested.
“You lied already,” Chuckles said. “You’re lying now.”
“What do you mean?” Erica asked.
He meant me.
“What’s under the bed?” he asked.
I heard a thump. He was kicking at the bed frame. He was rummaging around in my mind, tossing mental secrets aside and flipping emotions over.
I pushed open the door. Light scorched my eyeballs. I stepped forward, blinking, right into Chuckles. His pudgy body barely fit on that strip of floor.
“I followed them here,” I said. “I sneaked into their room, just like I sneaked into Chomp’s. Blame me, not them.”
Chuckles socked the upper bunk with a meaty elbow and howled at me and his pain. “I should tell them you’re the killer.”
Erica ducked and scooted onto the bottom bunk beside her sister.
“The killer was one of Chomp’s men.”
“How do you know that?” But Chuckles paused to let me go on. He wanted to be convinced.
“I was next to Chomp at dinner when the protester screamed at him. Chomp just laughed and stared him down. He was never afraid. He knew the guy was harmless. But he told Harvey to arrest him for murder. Did you question the guy?”
“They wouldn’t let me,” Chuckles admitted. “They wouldn’t even let me watch.”
“I think they were covering up a murder they committed. Have you heard Carmen’s description? It doesn’t match the protester.”
“Who does it match? One of Chomp’s men?”
I paused. “I don’t know.”
Erica stared at me but said nothing.
“We’ll show her the passenger photos,” Chuckles said. “Photos of Chomp’s guys too, if we have them. Get an ID. That’s evidence.”
“I’ll bring you something better,” I said. “Proof that it was Chomp. My mother’s been with him all evening.”
“What does she know?”
“Everything.” I hoped he believed it. I hoped he’d seen my mother stroking Chomp’s arm at dinner. “But if I bring you proof, will you stand up to Chomp? You’re the one who said Chomp owns the ship and everyone on it.”
Chuckles smiled condescendingly. He knew I was provoking him. “I just spoke to corporate. The murder’s already national news. Fox is coming to the island after all. Corporate’s terrified we’ll get the blame. They want us to push back. Captain Prosti’s sick of those guys on his bridge. He’s getting his Italian up.”
I went on provoking. “Chomp’s got two dozen armed guards, with passkeys and the full run of the ship. Your security guys have, what? Maybe one gun buried in a locker under two sets of old handcuffs.”
“If the captain tells us to, we can change the codes on all the locks. We can close off zones of the ship behind sea-proof doors. We can call the Coast Guard or half a dozen navies, not just the U.S. We can refuse to dock the ship on the island. We’ve got one thousand employees. Twenty-five hick pirates are nothing. But it all depends on the evidence. In the meantime”—he pointed at Carmen—“you and me have photos to look at. Get dressed.”
Carmen didn’t move. She was still clutching her phone.
“We’ll keep those men off you,” Chuckles said, a little more gently.
“And my job?”
“You tell the truth, you keep your job.”
Don’t trust him, I wanted to say, but then, she shouldn’t trust me either. Her sister definitely didn’t. Erica was scowling at me. But she remained silent.
Chapter 18
I returned to my room on my own. Passing from the suffocating chaos of Carmen and Erica’s room into the plush, carpeted passenger deck, with its indirect lighting, slate-gray walls, and smiling stewards bearing stacks of clean sheets, was like passing from a fever dream into the private hospital where you were dreaming it. The ship’s passage was completely smooth now, but as there had been no announcement, I assumed we had yet to dock.
Just as I opened my door, I saw, peeking out from around a hallway corner, a woman. For just an instant, her face softened, as if she thought she knew me. Her skin, smooth in the forehead but lined in the cheeks, was that of a good-looking woman transitioning peacefully to middle age, exactly as my mother refused to. She looked like the woman my mother had spotted at the Sailaway Party, the one my mother had claimed, preposterously, to be Clark’s new girlfriend. Somehow this phantom of my mother’s imagination had escaped and was now flitting about the ship in search of someone new to haunt. She darted out of sight. I entered my room and shut and bolted the door behind me.
Inside were more phantoms. Dresses, skirts, and blouses were stretched flat on both beds, draped tragically over chairs, or hung from the little cow-horn hooks in the wall, where they shivered in the air-conditioned breeze. It was like a meeting of spirits whose bodies had dissolved at sunrise. A whole row of long gowns hung from the curtain rod in the back, a solid wall of Lord & Taylor that obscured the balcony door entirely. Before major social events, my mom liked to choose her outfit by comparing as many as she could at once. Presumably Chomp appreciated women who took trouble. The bathroom door was open, the floor shag-carpeted with towels. She must have used every one we had. Her date with Chomp would have called for the shower of her life. I piled the towels up and tossed them on the floor of the shower for the cleaner to remove.
Propped on my pillow was a note she must have left earlier: “Jacob: Where are you? Going for drinks w/Pres. Buffoon then dinner. Party on the island after. Invite on desk. Meet me at dinner or on island at usual.”
Buffoon—a favorite term. Usually it meant a zombie boyfriend, one who might stagger on at her side for months more but never had a chance to reanimate in her affections. But in calling Chomp a buffoon, my mother meant something else: that she knew she could never love him, but also that she considered him no more ridiculous than anyone else she’d dated. On
ce you believe that all men are equals in buffoonery, their inner character crumbles away. What’s left are the ancillary attractions of wealth, looks, and glamour, Chomp’s greatest assets. Together they gave him a formidable power over her—the power to delight. A power he held over many Americans. That she acknowledged his appeal was doomed to fade was to me a small consolation.
I heard a knock on the door. Through the peephole, I saw my father. I hustled him in and bolted the door. His eyes crawled about the room, over each garment and into each corner. He was looking for her.
“Mom’s out,” I said. “But we have to talk.”
“Where the heck am I supposed to sit? I like that one. Matches her eyes.” He pointed at a sky-blue dress upholstering the desk chair. My mother’s style had evolved over the years, but she remained faithful to favorite colors. I imagined this room from his point of view, insubstantial reminders of his wife covering every surface, reaching up to pull him back to the past, perhaps back to their old bedroom as she inspected a dozen dresses before one of their rare nights out. His expression at those times would be all mock distress at the disorder; he preferred to hide the pleasure he took in watching her please herself. I wasn’t fooled. I liked to come in and watch them both.
He pulled the dress gently aside to expose half the desk chair, but he didn’t dare sit. His brown eyes seemed as sensitive as bruises. He was still wearing his boxy brown sandals. He had no idea they could be a fatal giveaway.
“What are you doing on this cruise, Dad?”
“Clark didn’t tell you?” he asked.
He looked sincerely oblivious, but then he always did.
“No.”
“I wanted to talk.”
“To Clark?”
“To you and your mother. We never talk anymore. I mean as a family.”
He picked up the dress, folded it lengthwise and then again the other way with almost naval neatness (and no idea of how to actually fold a dress), and placed it over its companions on the bed. For him, this was swaggering boldness. He sat down in the chair.
“Well, you can talk to me.”
“She should be here. That’s what I came for. Is it too much to ask? After ten years I want this one thing. Maybe after ten more I’ll want one other. Can’t you do me a solid once a decade? I bumped into Clark at the airport. I tried to ask about her, but he brushed me off. Can’t blame him. He’s stubborn, I’m stubborn.”
“How did you know who he was? You’ve never met him.”
“I’ve seen his picture on Facebook.”
“You’re on Facebook?”
“Sorry I haven’t friended you yet. You know me. High standards. Hey, Jacob.”
This was his traditional introduction to an unpleasant question, as in “Hey, Jacob. Want to tell me why I found rolling papers in the glove compartment?” Or “Hey, Jacob. Any idea when your mother’s coming home tonight?”
“What, Dad?”
“Do you ever—these days—get in love?”
Not the question I expected. Get in love? He hardly knew the phrase for it, and yet, like everyone else, he couldn’t elude the emotion. I glanced down to avoid his eyes and of course caught a full view of his toes twitching uncomfortably in his sandals. At least he’d skipped the black socks.
I looked back toward the balcony door, but of course the view outside was blocked. I couldn’t tell if we were near the island or not. All of life had passed my father by like the sea outside, calm, silent, and unnoticed. He had accomplished his daily tasks but never bothered to look through his porthole or step out onto his balcony to see what was drifting by. And yet one moment, many years ago, he had somehow summoned the courage not just to poke his head out and breathe the salt air but to leap into the sparkling ocean. And propose to my mother. What was he like back then?
“Not in love like you and Mom used to be,” I answered, “when I was a kid.”
“We were kids too. They say only kids take risks. Bullshit. Adults take bigger risks. Or they should. I am right now. So’s your mother. But believe me, I’ve thought through all the risks. Has she? Clark is one animal, but now I see her goofing around with Chomp. That guy’s trying to blow up our country—again—and she’s up there cutting his meat for him.”
“Were you at the dinner?”
“They stuck us by the kitchen. I know your mother. She gets dazzled. That’s how I worked my magic on her way back. Just kidding.”
“I know.”
“I need to talk to her. I won’t get all hangdog, promise. You can trust me now. I’m taking control of my life.”
How does a man seize the helm of life after fifty years of kvetching and doing crosswords on a deck chair? He acted like he’d picked up audacity like he’d picked up a new coding language, with a little practice and some online interactives. And maybe he had. But what had he done with his audacity?
“Dad, what were you doing at Clark’s room?”
“Huh?”
“Somebody saw you pounding on the door of Clark’s stateroom, right before the evacuation drill. What were you doing there? You should have been in your room.”
He unconsciously slipped his hands into the tufts of hair around his ear, two little rabbits hiding in a bush. “I was looking for her.”
“For Mom?”
“Yeah.”
“In Clark’s room?”
“Yeah. I’d just seen Clark at the buffet. He ran away from me. Again! They were trying to tell us to return to our rooms for the drill, but you know me. I take risks.”
“What did you do?”
“I followed him down. He’s not exactly Carl Lewis. He got to his room and slammed the door on me. Believe that? Wouldn’t let me in. Yelled at me. Told me they’d broken up. I thought he was handing me the baloney. I tried to tell him I didn’t care. She can putter around with whoever she wants, it’s her right. This was before dinner, before I saw her with Chomp. But I didn’t know then. I thought he was bullshitting me.”
“So what did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Dad.”
He dropped his hand to the arm of the chair and stroked it with one finger, as if it might hold some residue of her. “I guess I got a little…annoyed.”
That was the word he always used for enraged. “Annoyed” was how he got after a security guard caught me and my friend Nathaniel stealing turkeys in the Stop and Shop for a turkey-bowling competition on an icy cul-de-sac. And after I failed the one computer class he made me take because I skipped the final. He only achieved peak annoyance a few other times in my adolescence. His face would turn from pink to red to purple and his arms would tremble like a weightlifter’s. I would step carefully back, since he looked like he was about to explode or get violent, and I didn’t want to hurt him defending myself. But he never touched me. He’d just order me out of his sight, go to his room, and slam the door behind him like it was taunting him.
Maybe Chomp wasn’t the killer. I would never have believed that my father, at this age, could attack another man, but then I never believed that Chomp could win a general election. People, like nations, are not only more creative, resilient, and determined than we can imagine, they’re also stranger and darker. It never occurred to me that my father would have the patience and the enterprise to finagle tickets for the Chomp cruise and the tenacity to follow us to Florida and track down my mother’s lover in his stateroom. But those things he had undeniably done, and now anything seemed possible. I always knew he felt strange passions. Everyone felt them. I did too. But even when I was in their grip, even on those rare occasions when I was shouting with rage or weeping with grief or missing meals for love, even then I almost always remained self-aware enough to think, in one part of my brain, Here I am weeping (or raging, or starving), just like I’ve read about; how strange. Which is to say that, even as I knew those emotions wer
e weird and temporary, so was I absolutely controlled by them. As my father had been controlled by his fury. As I, at this moment, was controlled by love.
“Oh, Dad. Clark’s dead. What did you do to him?”
“What do you mean, dead? He was giving me guff two hours ago.”
“Someone killed him. I saw his body. Security’s looking for you.”
“Why me?”
“You were at his door. You were seen.”
Just as I once wondered whether I could ever defy him even to defend myself, now I wondered how far I’d have to go to hide his guilt. A few lies to Chuckles to put them off the case. A loan of a new pair of sandals. I was sure my dad had some reason for what he’d done. He always had a reason.
“It wasn’t me! He never opened up. I walked away. Might’ve been those other guys.”
“What other guys?”
“These two loudmouth security guys. They came running around the corner just after I was leaving. I ducked into some cross hallway. I don’t mess with security guys. But I heard them knocking at Clark’s door, so I stopped and peeked around the corner. To get a look. To see if—you know. If she was inside.”
“Did Clark open up?”
“Not at first. Probably thought they were me. So they started banging louder and screaming something about doing spot checks for the evac drill. They thought no one was looking. Jerks. I started to get pissed off. How much you think this guy paid to get screamed at on a cruise? It’s a vacation, not a police state. So what if Clark’s a twerp? Everyone deserves respect.”
“What did these guys look like, Dad? This is important.”
His eyebrows crowded each other above the nose. By now, he knew it was important. But did he know how important? Clueless was different from stupid. He was never stupid. He remembered every book he read, even if he’d read it in high school.
“Kind of like Ponch and Jon from CHiPs,” he said. “Jon, mostly. The white guy.”
“The guards were both white?”
