I tried to jerk my hand free, but he wasn’t letting go. So I swung my leg around and stomped on his arm. Hard.
He loosened his grip enough for me to pull away.
I wanted to run screaming for the shore, but there was more than just me involved now. If Grant were still somehow floating around the bay, or had sunk to the bottom, I couldn’t let the troll get him, couldn’t let those sharp barnacle teeth get those little-boy bones.
I hadn’t gone far when I encountered the fingers reaching for me again, insistent. Again I kicked them away.
Three times this happened.
The fourth, I found something new.
I had gotten hold of a jungle of bulb kelp and was sifting through it.
There was something there that was larger than a bulb. My fingers brushed against the thing. It wasn’t solid—it was soft, as though it had been in the water a while. There was no way of knowing for sure what it was, so I opened my eyes into the darkness.
I could barely make out cloudy shapes in the flotsam I was trying to untangle, but on the bay floor, something stared back at me.
It wasn’t the troll. Its eyes were gray and fathomless and set in a kind, feminine face. Not Grant, either.
Another body? Three corpses in one night? How could that be?
Then the eyes blinked. Not a corpse, but a living woman, her dark hair swirling with the ebb and flow of the tide.
I tried to grab an arm or a leg. I didn’t know who—or what—she was, but I wanted to keep her from drowning if I could.
I left the tangle of flotsam and reached below me to the sand. No matter where my fingers touched, what debris I combed through, the woman’s body eluded me.
My lungs felt as though they were about to explode. Surely she couldn’t stay under this long? I held my breath as long as I could, grabbing at an elusive arm or anything to help the woman to the surface. But it was dark and cold, and my stored-up oxygen was exhausted, so I had to break off and come up for air before diving under again.
Still no body. Her head and her hair were the only things that seemed solid. I didn’t want to pull her up by the hair, so I put one hand on either side of her face.
But when I went to pull it, it dissolved into sand and re-formed farther away from me.
I chased her. I stopped worrying about her drowning because each time that face slipped away from me and came up in a different eddy, she didn’t seem to need to breathe.
What was she? This woman, whoever she was, felt so real to me, both tender and serene. I couldn’t not look at her. It felt like she’d once been someone, someone I’d held dear but had forgotten.
Another wave buffeted me, and with it came a gob of flotsam. All right. Whoever this woman was, she could breathe underwater and seemed happy to stay there. But what if Grant was in this other jumble of seaweed?
I reached out for it, but before I could make contact, I felt a feathery caress on my face. The woman now had hands, and they gently stroked my cheek. Where before she had seemed serene, now she looked sad, as though she knew what was about to happen to me but was powerless to stop it. She shook her head gently from side to side. No.
She didn’t speak, but the message could not have been clearer. Don’t touch that, child. Let it go.
I found it hard to breathe, not because I was underwater but because I was about to sob. How could I disappoint such a beautiful, compassionate creature?
And yet I was about to.
When the flotsam came near me again, I grabbed a piece and held on tight. I didn’t know what I had. Maybe the troll. Maybe Grant. Maybe some other horrible surprise. But I grabbed anyway.
I realized now what I should’ve known the instant we found Lyudmila. I was wasting time. I was flutter-kicking around the shallow waters of the bay because I didn’t want to face what I’d done.
Earlier, when Grant had come to me so terrified it looked like he wanted to escape his own skin, I didn’t have to take him back to his house. I didn’t have to ferry him across the shipping lanes, either.
I could’ve just done the right thing and said, “Let’s go back to my place. It’s chili night. My brothers and I will keep you safe.”
But I didn’t. Because I was afraid of what Mr. Shepherd would think.
If any one of my brothers or I pissed him off, he could build a fence so high we’d never see our beloved bay again, let alone have access to it. I would never see the herons fishing in the muck or watch osprey drop their disgusting morsels on the beach. I’d never run the sand between my toes or dig for razor clams. How would we ground ourselves, living so close to the beach but not being part of it? Without Useless Bay, my brothers and I would shrivel to nothing.
Plus Mr. Shepherd had the power to deny me access to Henry. We were supposed to be friends, he and I. But recently something had started changing between us, so now it was the kind of feeling that couldn’t be fenced off. I told myself I’d never do anything to stop the way Henry looked at me now, the way his eyes lingered on the whole length of me that didn’t make me feel like a too-tall freak, as though being the Girl weren’t such a bad thing after all.
Then I did something stupid.
Which brings me to the second death in Useless Bay that night, or How I Royally Screwed Up.
At first, I thought it was just bulb kelp that I’d grabbed. And if it was a little slimy, a little elusive . . . well, so was everything else in the bay. I had no way of knowing I’d gotten myself a live Portuguese mano’-war, or purple jellyfish-o’-poison. The top you can brush up against with no ill effects. But the bottom? That was where the nematocysts were.
I grabbed that part of jelly and held it tight.
The second death of the night was my own.
eight
HENRY
There’s a difference between seeing a dead person and watching someone die.
Pixie whipped up out of the bay with a purple gelatinous disc on her arm. She threw her hair out of her face, examined the disc, and said, “Oh, shit.”
At first, I didn’t understand what was going on. Frank did.
He swore and tore off down the beach, carrying his med kit, which he dropped at the tide line.
Lawford wasn’t far behind. The two of them waded waist-deep into the bay and felt under the surface.
I’d never seen them in red-alert mode before. There were waves of panic rolling off them, and it was infectious.
“Have you got her?”
“Not yet.”
“Come on, man. Hurry!”
“Hold on— I’ve got her, I’ve got her, I’ve got her!”
Once on shore, Frank rolled Pixie onto her side and whacked her hard on the back.
She barfed seawater, got to her hands and knees, and barfed more. She wiped her mouth. “I fucked up, Frank,” she said.
Lawford said, “Easy there, girly man,” as Frank opened his med kit.
It all happened so fast, and I was so slow. I followed them from the patio behind the main house to the beach in the cold rain and stood over them, useless. I had no idea what was going on.
Pix definitely didn’t look right. Her face was as pale as a halibut, and her breathing was raspy and labored. Her whole chest drew up each time she inhaled.
I heard sirens. I told Lawford, “That’ll be the ambulance. Go. It’ll be faster if they know exactly where we are.”
“Right,” Lawford said, and he sprinted around the house to the security gate, the lights from the motion detectors illuminating his way.
God, she looked bad. Her right arm was swelling, and with each heartbeat the swelling spread. Her fingers were already the size of kielbasas, and her face was puffed up like a French pastry.
What would happen when the swelling reached her brain? Or her lungs?
“Do something!” I barked at Frank.
“Shut up, Henry! I’m already on it!”
He pulled a yellow syringe out of his medical kit. It had the logo of a bee on it.
“Bee stin
gs? You’re treating her for a bee sting?”
“Not a bee. A Portuguese man-o’-war. Pix is allergic.”
He jammed a needle into her thigh so hard that his sister recoiled from the force. He had to practically sit on her to keep the syringe in her flesh.
I counted to ten before he took it out, then tossed it carelessly aside. We’d worry about biohazard disposal later.
Pix shook uncontrollably. She fought for each breath.
“It’s not working.
It’s not working!”
“Give it time.”
“You’re just spreading the poison through her faster. Look at her hands. Look at her face. Everything’s puffing up.”
It was true. With each heartbeat (and there were a lot of them), the evidence of the poison seemed to be spreading.
“I told you to shut up, Henry!”
“Goddamn it, Frank. Look!”
Her eyelids were so swollen they were as large as moon snails.
“Where the hell is that ambulance?” Frank shouted in Lawford’s direction. Not that Lawford could hear. He was too far away.
“Frank!” I said. “It’s not working!”
“Maybe you’re right.” He opened his med kit and took out another identical syringe and whacked her just as hard in the same spot on her leg.
This time she arched so high I was afraid her spine might break.
But that wasn’t nearly as bad as what happened next.
Pix fell back onto the sand and stopped moving completely.
So did Frank.
Wait, what? Both of them? At the same time?
But there he lay, a heap of Frank, not doing anything.
I couldn’t deny what was in front of me, but I didn’t understand. Frank wouldn’t have given up on Pixie. None of them would have ever given up on anything that wasn’t yet dead.
Why the hell was he down now? Was it some kind of sympathetic quint thing? One gets hurt, the other feels the pain? Hell of a time to be too sensitive to do your job.
I shook him, but he still didn’t move. I felt his carotid artery.
There was no pulse. No pulse.
What the hell was going on?
All right. Here were the facts: There was one me and there were two Grays. I made a choice—the kind I hoped I’d never have to make again.
I kicked Frank aside and went to work on Pixie.
I found the spot on her rib cage and started pounding on her. Hundred beats per minute. That was how often you were supposed to press down. And I thumped. And I thumped.
I don’t know how long I had been keeping this up when Dad pulled me away. I screamed. “Jesus Christ, Dad! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He wore his business face, which pissed me off. This was the wrong place to be managing anything, least of all me.
“You’re in the way. You’re duplicating effort.”
“Yeah, well next time your girlfriend dies, I’ll tell you something just as comforting.”
Too late, I realized my mistake. His wife was lying dead twenty feet down the beach. The two of us sucked at interpersonal skills, and we definitely weren’t huggers.
But Dad was better than me on one point. He’d gotten me out of the way. A swarm of first responders was now working on Pixie, who was so swollen she was unrecognizable.
Joyce was three paces behind my father, talking in that clipped voice into her headset, tapping on her electronic tablet. Probably to legal. “That’s right. Nondisclosure statements all around. There are a lot of people involved. When the press gets ahold of this, they’ll have a field day.”
Meredith was there, too. “Who’s that on the ground next to her, Henry? Who else are they working on?” She sounded desperate.
“I think that’s Frank,” I said. “Where’s Sammy?”
“How should I know?” Meredith said. “We went out searching together but then split up.”
Dad’s face looked like putty, features that had been formed and re-formed over and over in the past hour. Finally, he said, “No sign of Grant?”
“Nothing at all. Pix has been out swimming in the bay. She should have been searching for him on land with the dog . . . ,” I said. Come to think of it, where was the dog? I hadn’t seen her since we were in the guard shack. “Maybe somebody should go inside and get a piece of Grant’s clothing. Maybe one of her brothers can run the dog. If they’re not all down.”
He paid no attention to the last part. Apparently I was the only one who wondered if all the Grays had dropped at once.
“Good thinking,” Dad said. “Joyce?”
Joyce pushed a button on her headset. “Mmm?” she asked Dad. “Clothing. Probably something dirty, correct?”
Dad looked to me, as though I were the search-and-rescue expert, having learned by osmosis.
“Yes,” I said, because it just made sense and gave me something easier to think about than Pixie dying in front of me and her brother Frank dying at the same time for no apparent reason. I picked at the scars on my hands until I drew blood.
“Hold on, Pix, hold on!” An EMT worker was shoving another one out of the way. The first had apparently been trying to run a line in her vein and had screwed up, because a spray of blood squirted from her elbow into the air.
Interesting, interesting, I thought. She has her own blowhole.
Dad saw what was happening, and just like that, he became the person I needed him to be. I could see it in the slump of his shoulders, hear it in his deepening breathing. Of all the things that could have flipped him, all the tragedy that had happened and was still happening, Pixie’s spurting blood was enough to make him remember I was his child.
“Don’t look, son,” he said, his voice full of compassion.
He pressed my face to his shoulder.
Dad wasn’t usually a hugger, but that night he was. He was as damp as I was and doughy around the middle, but it was a kindness, and he didn’t drip many of them on me. So I accepted.
At the same time, someone hovering over Frank shouted, “Clear!”
There was a whir and a kerpow.
Nothing happened.
“Look away. It’s okay to look away if it’s too hard. Marilyn would understand.”
I sometimes forgot that Pixie’s real name was Marilyn.
“I think I need to see this, Dad.” And I faced her. All I could do was watch.
I’d never made her any promises, so there was nothing to be broken, but still it felt like a breach of contract, all the things we’d never get to do together flooding into my brain.
We’d known each other for years, and I just assumed we’d have time for all that stupid crap, like sitting around a campfire, eating s’mores, and listening to some guy playing acoustic guitar. The things you do on a beach, the easy way you wrap your arms around someone and hold them tight in the firelight and know that even if you don’t have forever, you have this moment.
But that was always the problem with Pixie, wasn’t it? We were too close. A moment wouldn’t be enough.
And now it looked as though I wouldn’t even get that.
Dad had told me to look away. My bad eye was still killing me from my fracas with Todd Wishlow, who thought Pix was worth only a moment.
Pixie was worth much more than that, even though I hadn’t realized it until right then, when she was leaving me. She wasn’t just a weekend friend. I’d known her for six years, and when you’ve known someone for that long and you start to think about them romantically, it automatically gets serious. And no matter how many lectures Dad gave me about getting serious too young, that was what I wanted.
I wanted the beach bonfires and someone with a guitar playing “Kum Ba Yah” and to wrap myself around her in a blanket and have her lean against me in the firelight. Rides on the Seattle Great Wheel, walking down the street with my arm around her waist, all of that.
Too late.
Dad seemed to understand and dug my hand tight into his. The most he could do was stan
d with me as I watched Pixie’s senseless death, but he was there for me in this moment when there were all other kinds of things that needed his attention.
I loved him for it. “Clear!”
Whir-kerpow!
No change in Frank.
“I would roll this back for you if I could, Henry,” Dad said.
The man holding the paddles over Frank rocked back onto his heels, smeared the rain on his face, and looked at his stopwatch. After a few moments, he gently closed Frank’s eyes.
At the same time, whatever had worked its way through Pixie’s bloodstream had gotten to where it needed to go, and she jackknifed up, and with a wheeze and a gulp she screamed and didn’t stop.
Frank breathed, but he did not scream. He rolled over onto his side and started to shake. “Whoa,” he said. “What happened?”
Pixie wouldn’t stop screaming. Her scream was so awful it was as though she were being eaten alive. I shot away from Dad and crouched down on the beach next to her.
“Shh . . . easy, Pix. Easy. I’m here. You’re all right.”
“Oh my God,” she said, and she bawled, her face more inflated than mine. Her eyes were still swollen shut. Both of them. She reached out blindly for anything.
I grabbed her arm and dragged her to me. “I’m here.”
“I’m not ready,” she said. “Please tell her I’m not ready.”
“Shh . . .”
I rocked her.
She gulped air. “It’s too much,” she said, and gulped some more.
One of the first responders tried to pull me away. “It’s okay, sir. I’m going to ask you to let us do our job now.”
I told Pix once again that everything was going to be all right, but she kept crying, saying she “wasn’t ready,” until someone put something in her drip that calmed her down.
As they carried Pixie away on a backboard, Frank got unsteadily to his feet and said, “Whoa! That was freaky!” and the medics laughed. They didn’t try very hard to carry him away as well, even though he’d been just as dead as his sister was. He was a Gray, I guess. Since he was up and acting alert, they assumed he could take it.
But I wasn’t convinced that he was okay and that he didn’t need to be seen by a doctor.
Useless Bay Page 6
