The Opposite of Here

by Tara Altebrando

  I tap “About the owners.”

  Bill and Terri Straus are your proud hosts and will make sure your time in Key West is relaxing and enriching.

  I go back to my search and reread one of the main articles about the whole story.

  The doctor, William Straus, has moved out of the county. He agreed never to practice again and is rumored to be operating a B and B elsewhere in the state.

  Charlotte won’t want to come with me so I don’t even ask.

  I calmly say, “Let’s go back in.”

  We join our group and I pull Nora aside and say, “I need you to come somewhere with me.”

  “Where?” she says.

  “I think I know where Ray is going.”

  “This doesn’t seem like a good idea,” she says. “And there’s barely time. We have to be back on the boat in like an hour …”

  “I know but … please.”

  She gives me this look, and it seems to sum up everything that’s been between us—the deceptions, the jealousy, the lies, the hidden resentments—and I say, “I need to see this through. After tomorrow they’ll be gone forever and I’ll never know what it all meant.”

  “I don’t know, Nat,” she says.

  “You’re the only one who can do this with me.” I nod toward the others. “I mean, look.”

  She follows my gaze; Lexi and Charlotte are chanting, “We must. We must. We must increase our bust.”

  “Fine,” Nora says. “Let’s go.”

  My phone leads us away from the bars with crowds spilling out onto the street, and, soon, we’re on quiet residential streets. The houses are small and adorable, and I’m thinking who the hell lives here, which I think pretty much everywhere I go. I wonder if that feeling ever stops, if you’re ever in the world enough that you get it: People are not all like you. They live other places and have totally different lives than yours and they’re fine. Maybe even better than fine.

  Maybe half the reason I’m never happy where I am is that I’m living in the wrong place.

  Maybe I should go away to college.

  I should go to film school, wherever that is.

  Google says it’s a ten-minute walk to the B and B, but we can do it faster than that, I know it.

  I track us in the app, feeling somehow comforted by the moving arrow on the screen, showing us getting closer to … what, exactly?

  INT. AN INN -- DAY

  A man is gagged and tied to a chair in a guest room. He’s sweaty and bloody. He’s been here awhile.

  A younger man, RAY, comes into the room, carrying a selection of knives on a tray.

  RAY

  Now, where were we?

  Groans from the gagged man. He pulls at his restraints, tries to move the chair with body bounces.

  Ray turns around with a knife in his hand.

  RAY

  Oh, right, we were talking about my sister.

  The flowers lining the main path look like the heads of tropical birds. A set of sheer ivory drapes dances out an open door on a high veranda. A sign out front, predictably, shows a siren and a crocodile sharing a rocky perch.

  The front steps bend and squeak. I stand at the front door, a combination of wood and frosted glass. I put a hand on the heavy metal knob and turn.

  Our phones buzz.

  We quickly silence them and head in.

  Soft music plays—some kind of creole/zydeco—but there is no one at the front desk. Only a cup of coffee that looks abandoned, cold. There’s a bell to ring for service but that seems like a bad idea, then Nora does it anyway.

  It’s louder than it should be, or maybe just seems louder than it is. No one responds.

  Nora and I swap a look, and I step toward the open door opposite the entrance. I go through it and into a quiet courtyard garden. There’s a small neglected pool with a slightly green tint; multiple dead flies floating.

  A mermaid fountain trickles water into a small collecting pool. A few metal bistro tables and chairs sit on an uneven bluestone patio. The air smells of chlorine and gardenias.

  “Hello?” I call out.

  There’s no one there.

  “Natalie,” Nora whisper-screams. “Come here.”

  I go back to the lobby, where she stands at the threshold. She points up. A thump from overhead shakes the ceiling fan.

  “I’m calling the cops.” Nora reaches for her phone.

  “Wait,” I say. “Not yet.”

  I head for the stairs. It’s a wide curved wooden staircase that takes up half the lobby’s air space. I try a few doors on the first floor hall—locked—then see a door open a crack at the end of the hall. The floorboards squeal under my feet.

  “Ray?” I say softly. “Are you here? It’s me, Natalie.”

  I peek through the opening in the doorway—a cat or something darts across the room. I reach out and start to open the door and it shrieks the whole time.

  Grunts from the far side of a large four-poster bed.

  “Ray?”

  More grunts and another thump.

  “Michael?” I try.

  I take a deep breath and close my eyes and prepare myself for the worst.

  INT. AN INN -- DAY

  An empty lobby; no one at the front desk. In walks a teenage girl--this is NATALIE--and she clearly has something on her mind. She moves as if in slow motion, careful steps.

  She climbs a winding staircase and climbs some more, then reaches a top floor, an open door. Curtains blowing from an open veranda door. She steps out, the railing is broken. She crosses to it. Looks down. A body floating in the swimming pool below.

  A sound behind her. She turns. It’s RAY.

  NATALIE

  I’m sorry about your sister.

  RAY

  She was a very strong swimmer.

  I step into the room and walk toward the sound, and he says, “Who’s there?”

  Not Ray. Not Ray’s voice.

  Not Michael either.

  He pulls himself away from the bed and stands and says, “Can I help you?”

  “I was looking for my friend.” I can’t bear being in the same room as him but don’t have a choice.

  “Sorry.” He’s holding a wad of foul-smelling paper towels and goes to put them in a plastic bag. “Goddamn cat puked under the bed.”

  This is the guy.

  This is the guy?

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Someone young and charismatic, maybe. Someone handsome that patients would admire. But he’s a short, stout, balding man who, by the looks of it, sweats a lot. His thick gold wedding ring looks too tight on his hands, and his shorts can’t seem to find a waistline.

  Nora’s hanging back at the door to the room, just waiting.

  This is not what we’d been expecting, and I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or disappointed.

  “Was Ray just here?”

  “Let’s talk downstairs,” he says, “after I get rid of this.”

  He heads for the hall and we follow and he disappears into a bathroom and comes out, drying his hands with a paper towel, then he goes down the stairs and settles in at the front desk. “Now who are you looking for? Our guest list is private, so—”

  “Ray Haines,” I say. “His sister was one of the people you—”

  “I had one visitor stop in earlier—nice young man—didn’t say anything about a sister. Said he was looking for a place for his parents to stay for their anniversary next year.”

  Nora and I share our confusion with a look.

  “You seriously don’t know who he was?” I ask.

  “He famous?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “It’s nothing like that. His sister was one of the people who died. After you hypnotized them.”

  It’s like he’s been infected with malware. His voice is full of menace when he says, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”

  “Why did you do it?” I ask. Because if Ray didn’t, I have to.

  “I didn’t intentionally harm
anyone,” he says flatly. “Which is more than he can say.”

  “What does that mean?” I say.

  “I’m done talking,” he says.

  Nora is backing away toward the front door. “Nat, he’s not here,” she says. “We really have to go.”

  We run hard. The boat can’t leave without us. We can’t let that happen.

  Our phones light up.

  Texts from Lexi and Charlotte.

  Where are you guys?

  Why aren’t you answering?

  We’ll hold the boat if we have to.

  Please don’t make us have to!

  My body isn’t made for this. I’m winded and burning.

  When we finally arrive at the port, they’re waving their arms, as if we don’t know where to go, as if the ship isn’t right there.

  “Where were you guys?” Lexi asks.

  “Everything okay?” Charlotte says to me, more meaningfully.

  I’m too winded to talk.

  We sanitize and go through security, then stop on a lower deck to catch our breath. When I can, I explain where we were, who we saw.

  “I don’t understand,” Nora says, in conclusion.

  I say, “Me neither.”

  “Why did he go there if he wasn’t going to do anything to him?” Lexi asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe he thought he’d do something, then couldn’t go through with it?”

  Which is more than he can say. What did that mean?

  Back in the cabin, Charlotte wants to shower.

  Lexi needs to pee.

  That leaves me and Nora alone on the balcony.

  “I had this clarinet teacher when I was in middle school,” she says. “And he … he just was so gross. He’d say stuff like ‘stand up and let me see how much you’ve grown,’ and I just didn’t know until a lot later how not cool that was. At the time, I just knew it made me feel weird, you know? Anyway, that guy today. I don’t know what he did or whatever, but he reminded me of him. The clarinet teacher. My parents never got why I wanted to stop taking lessons because I never told them. I never told anybody.”

  I nod, wondering whether there was an exact point in time where life got complicated for all of us.

  “I’m sorry about what happened at my house,” she says. “You know it wasn’t your fault, right?”

  For a second I might cry but then the boat is making this crazy U-turn and the sun hits us hard and I slide my sunglasses onto my face and feel like I can do anything. I pull Nora into a hug.

  “You’re not going to like this,” I say when I release her.

  “I know,” she says, and I realize she’s crying. “You’re going to go talk to him,” she says. “The other one.”

  “Michael.” I nod.

  Nora sighs away her tears. She says, “I just want things to be normal again. And simple. Fun, even.” She half smiles. “I want us to go back and be dumb high school seniors and have a great year and not have any more weirdness between us and not have any insane things happen to us and that’s it really. Is that so much to ask?”

  “No,” I say, squeezing her arms. “It’s going to be like that, I promise. It’s going to be epic, the rest of this year, seriously. We’re going to grab life by the whatever-you-grab-life-by and live large. For real. We’re going to be royals. We’re going to be amazing and do things people will talk about for years and no one’s going to be able to touch us.”

  “So don’t go,” she says, but I can see in her eyes she knows I have to.

  I knock and he opens. His hair is wet, the bracelet on his wrist. His eye is swollen above a purple cheekbone, and he has a fresh cut on his lip.

  I say, “What happened?” right as he says, “What’s wrong?”

  He takes my hand, his eyes full of worry.

  “Your brother,” I say. “He found the doctor.”

  “What?” he says. “Come in, come in. How do you know this? Were you there? Are you hurt?” Looking around, he says, “The place is a mess, come out here.” He goes through the open balcony door.

  I follow. You can feel how fast the ship is moving already, the wind whipping through its channels.

  I say, “I’m fine. I figured it out. The doctor owns a B and B here now. Ray went there.”

  “And he brought you?” he says. “Sorry, I’m just confused about how—”

  “No, when I figured it out I went there.”

  “Why?”

  “To stop him, I guess?”

  “Stop him from what?”

  “I wasn’t sure! I’m still not. I mean he definitely went there, but he didn’t even tell the doctor who he was. He was gone by the time I got there.”

  He sits down, sighs. “After all this, you still needed to go after him. He’s still the one you …”

  “It’s not like that.” I step closer to him. “I thought you’d figured it out. I thought you got off the boat and lied to me to protect me. I thought you’d be there.”

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t,” he says. “I’ve been going crazy wondering what was happening. But my parents wouldn’t let me get off.”

  I kiss him, hard, and we grab at each other for a frantic minute and then the mood breaks and something feels off. His parents weren’t the ones stopping him from getting off … Were they? When I pull away I lean my forehead on his tall chest and look down, avoiding eye contact until I can figure out why I’m hearing alarm bells. On the small low table beside us, I see his key card.

  RAYMOND HAINES

  I reach down and pick it up for a closer look.

  “Ah, crap,” he says, then he leans out over the railing and shakes his head and smiles back at me. “Admit it. You’ve missed me.”

  You want to believe that people are good.

  You know that there are warlords and murderers and kidnappers and terrorists in the news and in the world. But in the day-to-day of your normal life, you want to believe that you don’t have to be on the lookout for evil or malice. You want to believe you’d smell it a mile away if it did exist. You’d be smarter. Wiser. You wouldn’t be duped.

  You want to believe that if you were in trouble, the stranger who stopped to help would call you a cab, send you home, not drag you behind a dumpster and cut you into pieces.

  You want to believe that you can go out and embrace the world with open arms and be okay.

  You want to believe that no means no.

  You want to believe that people will always do the right thing.

  Even you.

  But you don’t know for sure until you’re there.

  “Where is he?” My voice is gravel. I have to clear stones of anger away to make room for air. The ship vibrates urgently underfoot.

  “That’s what you want to know?” he says. “Don’t you want to know why I went all the way there and didn’t, like, kill the guy?”

  “Fine. Tell me.”

  “While it might appear that I didn’t do anything, I actually did do something,” he says.

  “What?” I say. “What did you do?”

  “Here’s what’s going to happen to Bill. Bill is going to go about his business thinking everything is just peachy. He’s going to think that whole messy chapter of his life is over and that he’s sitting pretty in his cozy little B and B. But then one day—and it might be tomorrow, or it might be a few years from now—he’s going to hear my sister’s favorite song on the radio. And when he does, he’s going to stand up in the middle of whatever he’s doing. It won’t matter if he’s cooking breakfast for some guests or taking a little dip in his pathetic green pool or getting a haircut or shopping at a mall. He’s going to stand up and walk out of wherever he is, right into traffic.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say.

  “We had a little chat, me and Bill. He won’t remember it. And he won’t understand either why that seemingly random and just plain silly song about a yellow submarine just compels him to walk right into harm’s way. He won’t have the time to figure out that it’s all beca
use I just gave him a little dose of his own medicine.”

  “You did that? Got those people on the ship to sing?”

  “People are ridiculously easy to manipulate,” he says.

  “Where’s Michael?” I ask, feeling the fuzzy edges of fear.

  “I honestly have no idea,” he says. “The last time I saw him, he did this to me.” He makes a circular kind of gesture around his face. His cheekbone has turned an even darker purple. I can taste his blood on my lips, and it makes me want to throw up. I can feel the start of a dry heave in my stomach; some kind of release that has to come one way or another. “I told him what I’d done with his passport and license, and he was not pleased.”

  He shakes his head at me and says, “I honestly don’t understand what you see in him.”

  And I hear his words like in slow motion along with Just relax, and Everything okay out here? and Stand up and let me see how much you’ve grown, and I’m so tired of being a girl and being judged and having to navigate this whole new world of desire and fear that I charge at him like I’m the walking dead, with nothing to lose.

  I push against his chest with every last bit of anger I have in me, and, on impact, his expression changes from some kind of arrogance to fear. I’ve caught him off guard and he’s so tall and his center of gravity is so high …

  Oh my god.

  He’s falling.

  Over the railing.

  I almost laugh.

  He reaches out for me and catches only my necklace, which breaks free but then falls from his grip. The silver bar catches the sun and glints and then seems to swim in the air between us.

  Paul’s up there, on his cloud-throne, and he covers his mouth and says, “Oh shit!”

  Maybe this is what it feels like, to see the floating glass no one else can see.

  Metal warms my palm as I snatch the necklace from the air.

  Of course, I bought it for myself. Because yes, it was the beach where I used to hang out with Paul, but before that, it was the place I used to go to alone, when I was feeling low or lost or just not wanting to be wherever else I’d been.