Miss Hazzard was a houseboat.
Under other circumstances, this would have been a luxury. A funny story to tell about an unusual accommodation. Instead, Rudy shifted nervously. Our brains played leapfrog, eyes darting ahead to the dock, measuring distances and dividing danger. Neither of us sure of getting him onto the boat or through the sliding glass.
I smelled Flynn’s sweat-soaked clothes—probably the result of waiting in an airless stand for us to appear—as he settled the truck into a spot, headlights pointed in the direction of the water. He dusted a hand over brown-blond curls at the nape of his neck. They were of near-mullet proportion. “Daddy said to tell you not to use the bedroom on the left. The one on the right isn’t bad, isn’t good. The couches fold down so you should have plenty of space. We were putting you in C Cabin, but mice pilfered the supplies, and trust me, Hazzard’s the better choice. I aired her out all day so it should smell nice for you.” Better than he smelled for sure.
“What’s in the bedroom on the left?” Chan asked.
“Guns, I’m sure.”
Caroline wheeled around. “Are they loaded?”
Flynn’s eyes pinched together, like he didn’t trust Caroline’s intelligence one bit. “They can be in a moment’s notice. Just the way God intended.”
57. A HEAP OF SHADOWS
$98,390.00
We were spending the night with loaded weapons. Some of them were guns.
Flynn trekked off up the hill, and I sent Becky and Chan on a walk-through of Hazzard. Chan came back and gave Rudy the lay of the land. “Bad news. The threshold between the dock and the boat is too wide. I’ll have to carry you. Good news. After that, the entryways are wide.”
There was a prickly moment wherein I was torn between being upset for Rudy, who clearly hated this news, and delighted by Chan. He might not like Rudy but he wouldn’t emasculate him; he had far too much empathy for that to be the way he wounded an enemy.
“I’ll sleep in the truck,” Rudy said.
“That’s crazy,” Chan said.
“Would you want me to carry you?” Rudy asked.
“Hell no, but we’re all doing things we don’t want to do on this trip.”
In the end, Chan carried Rudy over the gap and the guys retreated to their corners. A good idea since they probably had to share a bed later.
Chan commandeered the table, burying himself in his sketchbook. I sat nearby, watching the weightless way his pencil glided over the paper. Granddad’s barn appeared with the door skidded sideways and the cavernous bus in shadows. On the corner, he roughed in his own face. He flipped the page over quickly and started another sketch. Caroline’s eyes. He flipped again. His hand was heavy now, pressing lead to the page.
I watched for an hour, and that was my limit. I went out to the deck, passing Becky on her way in. Her head was bowed, her posture sagging. I caught her arm. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said, but she meant everything. Her eyes were on Caroline.
“I’m here,” I said, the words just popping out.
“I know you are.” She paused long enough for me to rest my forehead against hers. Becky Cable didn’t need me—she never had, but she appreciated my stilted attempt at comfort. There were many ways to be strong, and Becky was all of them, even as she was walking away from a situation she didn’t know how to solve. “See if you can help her.” Caroline was a heap of shadows perched on the edge of the boat. “I’ve tried all my tricks.”
That was the problem with tricks. Tricks could make a sad person laugh, but they couldn’t keep them laughing after everyone went home. I sat near Caroline and listened to the frogs and the stars and the water striders doing their breaststrokes. Liquid pooled around Caroline’s clothes, ran down her outstretched hand and returned to the lake, ran sideways on the aluminum deck and wet my shorts. She watched droplets fall like they were each a favorite television show. Her flesh was goose pimpled, and I heard the clatter of her teeth, but she didn’t complain. April in West Virginia was many things, but it wasn’t pleasant for swimming. A dip in this lake bordered on dangerous. No wonder Becky was upset.
It was a long time before I spoke. “What happened on the Gravitron?”
“Nothing. Everything. I flipped around upside down.”
I pictured this.
The Gravitron was an enclosed spinning ride that generated g-forces. At maximum speed, you looked like a shrink-wrapped human. Clothing tightened. Bodies pressed against the wall. The floor dropped three or four feet and you were suspended. You felt like you were dying when you turned your head to see the person next to you. If Caroline was inverted when the ride slowed . . . I saw why Chan had been furious. She might have broken her neck.
“Why would you do that?”
Her heels bounced against the hull of Miss Hazzard. “That’s what Becky asked.”
“It’s a decent question.”
“Come on. Tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
“Turning myself upside down on the Gravitron? Because no, I haven’t. I feel like we have wildly differently ideas of what makes a ride fun.”
“We have wildly different ideas.”
“I think that’s fine.”
“Jennings, I wasn’t asking for your permission.”
“You’re wet as a fish. You’re sitting on the back deck alone. You’re asking for something, honeypie.” I had to take the risk. To ask the real question I hadn’t stopped asking since Rudy brought it up in the bathroom. “Caroline, did you come on this trip to kill yourself?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Did you tell Chan?”
“I didn’t have to, but he knew. He’s not mad at me. He’s scared. Maybe you forgot the difference. Or maybe you don’t get scared anymore.”
I was scared right then. “Do you have a plan?”
“Yes.”
And we sat there weighted down with her admission, unsure of what came next. Could I say, I’m not going to let you, when a person was not a thing you could carry in your pocket like a wallet or a phone? There were so many words in the English language, and maybe doctors and psychologists had ones that fit this situation, but I didn’t. I felt small and afraid and inadequate.
I moved closer. Our thighs touched. I slung my arm around her back, not caring that my side was damp and then wet. Not caring about anything except keeping her connected to me. “I wish you wouldn’t.” I turned sideways to say this, and in my peripheral vision, I caught a glint of moonlight in her lap.
Metal.
She had a gun.
58. THE GENTLE ROCKING OF THE BOAT
$98,590.00
Boarding Miss Hazzard with a Walther PPQ in hand was not how I pictured our evening, but like it or not, that’s how the evening had decided to go. I disarmed Caroline and marched her inside on a diet of gentle words and calm suggestions. That wasn’t how we looked to the others.
“Golden Jennings, what the hell are you doing?” Becky didn’t sound scared of me, only alarmed at the situation. Things were spiraling and she was the first to spot the evidence.
“Chan,” I said calmly, still holding the gun and keeping contact with Caroline. I was mildly afraid she might bolt past me through the door and jump into the dark cavity of Echo Lake.
He didn’t budge from his sketchbook.
“CHAN!”
His head whipped up. He took in me, the gun, Caroline’s crumpled Gollum shape. “I need your help,” I said. “Please take care of this for us.” I held the gun out, barrel down, grip facing him. She had given it over when I’d asked, but she stared longingly at the pistol like a child who has given up a pacifier.
Chan was beside me. In a swift, comfortable move, he released the magazine and reversed the slide. A bullet sprung from the chamber, hit the wooden paneling, and rolled under the galley fridge. We all watched the gold cylinder disappear and then reappear again with the gentle rocking of the boat.
“Disarmed,” he said.
“Find
a way to lock the bedroom on the left.”
There was no lock. Chan asked Becky to kindly remove herself from the couch, which she did, but she was less Becky in those movements than I’d ever seen her be. She stood in the corner, arms folded over her chest, head bowed. This was the way Gran sometimes looked when she prayed, and if that was the case here, I supported the decision. The manufactured couch scraped the panel walls and scuffed the thin blue tiles as Chan dragged the beast through the hallway. He blockaded the bedroom door so efficiently he had to exit the boat at the stern. All eyes tilted toward the short ceilings as he crossed the top and returned through the door nearest the group. Removing the gun and barricading the door took three, maybe four minutes; each second felt like waiting on news from a doctor. I was full of thoughts, wishing I was full of wisdom instead.
“Thank you,” I said, still managing to be calm.
Rudy rolled closer to his cousin, and I nodded that he should move her to his lap. It was all hands on deck, quite literally. Neither cousin argued when his arms caged around her wispy body. He tucked her head under his chin like a child. She was sobbing, and every sniffle and sob was amplified by the small galley.
I wanted to scream, but you can’t scream at someone in that condition. I made a measured decision to be civil. “It’s time to talk,” I said. But I still didn’t know what to say.
Life had us all by the throat. It was easy to blame Caroline for the thick, swampy feelings, but she wasn’t the only carrier of the fear disease. We weren’t just scared for her. Deep down, we were scared of becoming her. Sure, I’d gotten rid of the gun today, but what if there was another gun tomorrow? What if I failed at boarding Bus #21? What if I couldn’t go to college? What if I woke one day and remembered I was supposed to die on June 15? That’s what I felt when I saw Caroline under the orange grove and the fear hadn’t changed a lick. Her trembling, weeping body reminded me I knew more about hurting than healing. Even when I tried to be the strong one.
Rudy spoke first. “I hope you guys know I’m sorry about earlier. I never meant to get drunk.” This was an odd entry point when we’d just removed a handgun from a suicidal girl.
“We know,” Becky said, slightly annoyed.
“I had to get that off my chest. Anyone else need to do the same?” Rudy asked.
Except for Becky scooting closer to Rudy’s wheelchair, the room had no response.
Finally, Chan pointed at Caroline. “This is what happened on the Gravitron.”
“Don’t make family meeting all about me. He’s just as tripped.” Caroline didn’t look up, but she was pointing at Chan. It was peculiar to hear such a substantial statement from such an unsubstantial life-form. Her body looked like clothes left in a laundry basket.
“I’m fine,” Chan said, also in a measured voice.
He had a point there, as he was the one removing bullets from chambers, not loading guns.
“Come get eyeball to eyeball, Clayton, and tell me you’re fine,” Caroline said.
“This family meeting is about you and your death wish, not mine.” That’s what Chan said, but Chan performed a tell I recognized. He leaned against the door, stretched lazily, focused on his fingers splayed on the ceiling. He often made his physical body bigger when he felt smaller.
“What’s she talking about, Chan?” I asked.
Caroline’s tone was sharper than Chan’s chain saws. “Hurt recognizes hurt, Jennings. Your boy here’s in a wringer. Guilt’s a real bitch, huh?” she said to Chan.
He frowned, tried to speak, and then couldn’t.
I didn’t know what was going on, but I moved closer. He definitely had something unsaid gathering in his chest. “Just talk, Chan. Maybe it’ll give Caroline courage.”
All of a sudden, Chan was eleven again. Huge eyes surrounded by a sagging jawline. So unsure. He twisted his arms into a pretzel shape, guarding his chest. “I’m not sabotaging your bus trip, if that’s what you think,” he said. I hadn’t thought that at all. “And I didn’t come along to hurt myself like she’s suggesting, or anyone else.”
“We stood in Granddad’s barn and I begged you to come. And you were adamant that you wouldn’t. Something must have changed your mind. What was it?”
Chan studied Rudy, and I anticipated for a split second what this was about.
“You.” Chan’s eyes darted between Rudy and me. “Him.”
I made a dismissive noise in my throat.
“I saw you giving him a tour of the farm. The way you fawned. You gave him your beanie on Bus Twenty-One.” Heavy sigh. “Something happened between you back then and this was my chance to see if you broke up with me for him. If all this fallout was his fault. It’s shallow, but it’s true.”
“Chan, you broke up with me.”
“Not last June I didn’t.”
“I didn’t break up with you last June.”
Caroline’s head snapped up. “Yeah, you did,” she said to me. She looked more awake than she had since the fair.
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
There was pity in her smile. “You two were in each other’s faces on the sidewalk outside the Green-Conwell. Chan told you if you got on the bus, you two were over. And you said, then consider us over. I’ll never forget it because I thought, Now, Caroline, that’s how people end relationships. But then Chan followed you on, fuming, still arguing, and I felt a teeny bit better. It’s not easy to get rid of someone who doesn’t want to leave.”
“That. Did. Not. Happen.”
But there was Chan’s face, Chan’s honest, earnest face. The face that planned for everything except me changing my mind. “It did,” he said.
I pressed my brain through the sieve of June 15. I didn’t even remember boarding the bus, much less arguing with Chan. I suspected I never would, but my lack of memory didn’t make the story untrue. There was no reason to lie. Not about this. So every time Chan acted like I ruined us, he hadn’t been acting. I had.
“But then you forgot,” Chan said. “You came out of the hospital with this memory erased. Gone. Which was a relief, in a way, because forgetting meant you still wanted to be with me. But every day felt like the day you’d remember. Like the day I’d lose you. We argued last week and strangely enough, that argument made me believe the memory was never coming back. You said I had an agenda, and that was the exact phrase you used in June. If you were ever going to remember . . . those words should have been the trigger. I decided we were safe. I wanted to strike while the iron was hot.”
Everything clicked at once. “You didn’t want to talk about New York because you were afraid I’d remember?”
“Would you risk the person you loved most in the world remembering that they didn’t want you anymore?”
“What if I was being flippant that day?” I said, but I didn’t believe that and neither did he. The truth sat uncomfortably in the center of the room. It was this: I’d spent several years keeping a promise that looked grand in framed photos. And our love story—the parts of us that kept growing and desiring each other—had expired when I started to long for a wider world and Chan hadn’t. Only loyalty was left. It was a beautiful, marvelous loyalty, but it wasn’t enough by itself. “Chan, I’m so incredibly sorry. For everything.”
“You’re telling me.”
Chan set his sketchbook on the table and then hesitantly pushed the book toward me. He swayed as if he intended to leave, but I blocked the route to the sliding door. “Please don’t leave. We still need you.”
He flipped through the sketchbook until he found a particular drawing. “This is me, eyeball to eyeball. You see this, and you’ll point the gun at me instead of you,” he said to Caroline.
Chan had opened to a drawing of Simon, not from the bus. The bomber stood slack-jawed and chinless, beside our bar table at Down Yonder, one hand splayed on a cardboard coaster, the other fisting a clump of dark hair. A spot-on likeness.
Rudy reached from his chair and traced Chan’s pencil line as if Simon might be
alive.
“Simon never came to our table,” I said.
“Wrong again, Golden,” Chan said.
Chan, who never cried, had tears cresting. His voice shook as he faced not me, but Caroline. “Simon came to our table while Go was at the jukebox. And I told him . . . I told him that you had sex with that guy Jim Conner in the bathroom. I told him I thought he should know.”
59. NOD IF YOU UNDERSTAND.
$98,800.00
Chandler Clayton was 220 pounds of man. His favorite tool was a chain saw. He could deadlift me like a child or toss me effortlessly when we swam at the blue hole. He’d been Hulk-size at fifteen. Strength is the mantra of the huge, and strength often comes with a tagline: Vulnerability is not allowed. I don’t know when adults started looking at Chan like he was already grown or when I came to believe Chan was the wall nothing penetrated, but I now knew we were all wrong. Last June, life pierced the wall of Chandler Clayton, and the blow had been devastating.
We all sat spellbound, thoughts buzzing like swarms of bees around our heads. No one was visibly angry; they were all shocked, same as me.
“Chan,” I said.
“There’s nothing you can say, Golden.”
“Chan,” I said again.
Chan cut me off, speaking specifically to Caroline. “This isn’t on you,” he said. “I did this. To all of us. To every person attending the memorial.” Chan did not scream or lash out. He didn’t curl into a ball like Rudy had in the bathroom. He rose to full height and said to me what he’d been unable to say for months. “I didn’t tell you sooner because I didn’t want you to hate me. Not when I hated me enough for both of us.” The words were long ghastly gasps, like he’d been underwater too long and had just crested the surface.
What did you say to a boy who believed he’d killed nineteen people?
“What did I promise when we were eleven?” I asked, trying to tell him in advance that I would not hurt him more than he was already hurting.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
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