by Paul Griffin
“I know, sweetie.”
“The water feels good.”
“I know. But put on the vest, okay?”
“No.”
“To save your strength, JoJo. Please.”
“No, I said.”
I knew how he felt. Our skin was burned and raw and the vests chafed. Dri spoke too softly to him for me to hear what she said. He pouted, but he was calming down. He put on the vest and swam away a little farther. Dri followed, and he started talking and crying, and she nodded and stroked his face.
John picked out the bigger chunks of fish from JoJo’s vomit. He washed them with seawater and trimmed out the salvageable meat. He watched Dri and JoJo as he worked. “So what do you think about him now?” John said. “It’s a one-way trip from here, Matt. He’s too far into crazy to make a comeback, and he’s becoming our biggest problem.”
“When you told me I didn’t know when to shut my mouth and when to speak up?” I said. “You were right. Now you need to do the same.”
“His wounds are bad. Gangrene. He’s dying anyway.”
“Not yet, he isn’t.”
“It can’t happen soon enough.”
“We better get him out of the water,” I said.
“Leave him alone.”
“His sores,” I said. “All that blood. He’ll attract a shark.”
“That’s what I’m praying for.” John studied the notch in his fiberglass harpoon.
DECK LOG, AUGUST 26, 16:21 HOURS EST
VESSEL: USCGC Erica James (WPC 1128), Sentinel-class Fast Response Cutter
FROM: Navigator, LTJG Nancy Alvarez
TO: Chief Navigator, Lieutenant David Mercado
If their departure point was East Hampton, they were within range of any number of refueling stations. After nine days, they could be in Florida or Nova Scotia. Lieutenant, quick question: where in Hades do you want to start?
Day ten …
JoJo needed a night to cool off before he was able to say he was sorry. Then he needed most of the next day to get himself to mean it. Dri gave him the meat John had salvaged from JoJo’s vomit. “He saved it for you, Jo,” Dri said.
“Why didn’t you eat it yourself?” he said to John.
John looked away. What Dri said wasn’t exactly true. Actually, it was exactly a lie. John had been using the meat for bait. He didn’t get any takers anyway.
“We need you, Jo,” Dri said. “We all have to watch out for each other now. We have to keep our lookout posts too. As many eyes on the sea as possible, right?”
JoJo ate the meat slowly this time. Still, he nearly coughed it up again. His sobbing shook the boat. He pressed in on his eyes with the heels of his hands. “The glare. I feel like someone rubbed broken glass into my eyes. I swear, if I knew it would stop the shimmering, I would blind myself.”
“Keep them closed, Jo. Rest. You can take a night watch. You too, Matthew. Your eyes are red. It’s my turn to keep lookout.”
I settled in near JoJo. I didn’t want to, but I was afraid that avoiding him might provoke him. I changed the dressing on his leg. All I could do was scrub out as much pus as I could with the ocean water and use the same filthy strips of towel to cover his wounds. He lifted the dressing and studied his leg.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I can’t anyway,” he said. “My fingernails are falling out. What do you think would happen if you made a tourniquet just above the wound, and then John sawed off just below it? I think he would like to do this, no?”
“No, I don’t think he’d like that at all, and I know for sure you would end up like Stef.”
“Ah, but, Matt, we’re all going to end up like Stef. Besides, then we could eat my leg. Only the fresh meat, of course. John will find it. He has shown himself to be quite skillful at trimming away the rot.”
“You can’t give up, Jo,” Dri said.
“But why not?” JoJo said. “Hope is so very draining. It’s a bore, actually.”
Dri dunked her shirt into the water and wrapped it around JoJo’s eyes. She sat by John in the back of the boat and took her turn with the binoculars.
“How you feeling, Jo?” I said.
“Are you serious?” he said.
I tapped his heart. “Here, I mean. What kind of meds were you taking?”
“You’re asking me the names of the pills? I can’t even remember anymore. One is pink, the other yellow, another light blue.”
“You been taking them long?”
“Since I’m fourteen,” he said. He laughed quietly. “Yes, finding the right potions, the right doses, took some time. Lots of trial and error. So fun, you know? Not knowing whether the next minute would see me wanting to leap for joy or leap from my balcony. All the while the doctors told me not to lose hope. They said it was the result of a chemical imbalance in my brain. That the way I was feeling wasn’t the real me. That I was supposed to feel good—that was the natural way of things. But I don’t think so, my friend. I think this, here, right now, the way I’m feeling: This is the true me. And I am so very angry. I don’t even have the courage to kill myself. Who would build such a world? Tell me. A world where tests like this are commonplace? A monster, no? A sociopath. Who would bring you and Dri together and then crush what might have been? Well, with any luck, you will be allowed to die together. I guess that’s something. We must be grateful for minor blessings.” He peeked out from under the wrap Dri had put over his eyes. He nibbled at his fingers and sucked at the crusted blood under what was left of his nails. “Good night,” he said to me. “Or perhaps it would be better simply to say night.” He chuckled and mumbled to himself in Portuguese as he crawled under the tarp.
Dri patted the spot next to her for me to come sit. I joined her and John at the back of the boat. John asked her for the binoculars.
“More plastic?” she said.
“Clouds,” he said. But he kept looking at them. “So when were you going to tell me JoJo was on meds, Matt? That he doesn’t do so great when he’s off them? You too, Dri. You had to be clued in. Didn’t it occur to you I might need to know this information?”
“Why?” Dri said. “How’s that your business?”
“You’re kidding, right?” John glared at her. “I’m sick of all these secrets. Hey, the story Matt told you? Three years ago, the night of the ball game, what happened after? Such a sad tale, I know. Poor Matt, poor John especially, right? I want you to know something about Matt, Dri. He flat-out lied to you.”
NAVIGATOR’S LOG, AUGUST 27, 12:21 HOURS EST
Helicopter searches will stop at sunset, 19:33 hours, per Captain Braswell’s orders, after last night’s near crash.
Tropical storm Carlotta has been upgraded to a Beaufort rating of 10 with sustained winds of 50 knots. NOAA predicts mounting intensity in coming days. It’s too early to start using the h-word, but one thing is for sure: This girl is headed our way, folks.
“It’s time to tell the truth,” John said. He, Dri, and I sat close together in the back of the boat. JoJo was snoring up in the front of the boat, under the heavier tent.
“John, you don’t have to do this,” I said.
“I do.”
“Why? After all these years, we’re going to talk about it now?”
“JoJo was right. One of you could die out here, both of you, all of us. It could happen any minute, the way things are going with big boy over there, with him about to lose what little grip he has on reality. I want to die clean, no lies hanging in the air. I don’t want you thinking of me the way Matt has you thinking of me.”
“What are you talking about?” Dri said. “I’m only thinking good things about you, at least when it comes to that night at the ballpark.”
“Exactly, and that’s my point. You’re wrong to see me that way.”
“You don’t think what you did was heroic?” Dri said.
“No, it wasn’t. I wasn’t. The whole thing was stupid. Look, it didn’t happen the way Matt said. What do you call it when you lie n
ot by what you say but by what you don’t, by leaving something out of the story, like the most crucial part? My mother used to drag me to church for it and make me confess to the statues.”
“A sin of omission,” Dri said.
“That’s how wrong this feels, letting Matt’s version of the story be the one that defines him, me. Sinful. Look, the idiots in the bleachers, the way Matt said they were with Mr. Carlo? That was his name, by the way, the assistant coach. All that stuff was true. The lie starts when Matt told you he ran out to the mound. He did, but I didn’t call him out there. That was wishful thinking on Matt’s part. He came out on his own. The part about how we decided we had to stop the game until the idiots left the ballpark? No. I didn’t want to stop the game. I wanted to finish it and get home, before the psychos messing with Mr. Carlo started to get even more psycho and mess with us.
“Matt kept saying that we couldn’t leave Mr. Carlo hanging like that. That we had to stick up for him. It was our duty. How could we let this stuff happen right in front of us? How will you sleep tonight? All that garbage. I told him these guys were going to be idiots wherever they were. Us stopping them from spitting on Mr. Carlo wasn’t going to stop them from spitting on somebody someplace else. We weren’t going to fix them or anything, right? I told Matt to get his butt back behind the plate before I kicked it in for him, that the discussion was over.
“Matt grabbed the ball from my mitt and jammed it in his, and now the game was stalled for sure. Yes, Matt marched over to the bleachers and I marched after him. But I followed him to get the ball back and get the game going again, not to have his back. I’m sure it looked like I was right in there with him though. Calling him out to the mound to huddle, like it was my idea in the first place to stand up for Mr. Carlo. Jogging to the bleachers together, standing shoulder to shoulder with my buddy as we faced down the bad guys. Sure, the two heroes. But by the time I was standing there with Matt, he was already mouthing off with the ringleader there. I didn’t say a word. Then everything was like he told you—until we stopped at the red light on the way home. Yes, the windows blew in. Yes, they shot my dad. Yes, the nose of the gun came in through the backseat window. But that’s where the truth ends.”
“John,” I said, but he cut me off.
“Shut up, man. Ever wonder why Matt was shot in the back, Dri? He covered me. The shooter was aiming at me, and Matt put himself between us. He took my bullet. You wondered how I survived the car crash that came after that without a scratch, right? All those tools flying around? It wasn’t any miracle. It’s because I wasn’t in the car. I kicked the door open and ran. I left my father and my best pal bleeding in my dad’s crummy old secondhand van, and I took off as fast as I could. And you know what? I was right to run. What else could I do? They had guns, I had nothing. I was right about Mr. Carlo too. It was none of our business. He was going to get picked on wherever he went. How is that my fault? I liked him a ton, and I admired him, but it wasn’t my job or duty or whatever to get myself killed for him.”
“Why are you doing this?” I said to John. “Why do you have to make yourself out to be the bad guy?”
“I’m not saying I was the bad guy,” John said. “I tried to stop you from getting yourself into a mess. If that makes me bad or a coward, I don’t care. The label means nothing to me. I was right to do what I did that night, to try to hold you back, to save myself when I got the chance, and I would do it again, just the same way. My eyes are shot. I need to sleep. Wake me when it gets dark. I’ll probably wake up anyway.” He gave me the binoculars and lay on his back under Dri’s tent, the one we made of the sailcloth.
Dri’s eyes looked less green and more violet, reflecting the change in the water’s color. The clouds were coming. She pointed to the darker tent.
JoJo was awake. He was sitting up at the edge of the tarp, looking at himself in his phone screen. He chuckled and stuck out his tongue. Pale brown gunk coated it. A crack was beginning to form down the middle. He took a selfie with his tongue out. Click. “I don’t know why we have sound effects on our phones,” he said. “There’s no real clicking here. Why do we need the lie? Right, John?” He checked the picture and nodded. “We should get it over with. We should die with what little dignity we have left. We should kill ourselves.”
Dri took the phone from him and put it into the cabinet.
Afternoon, day eleven …
The sky was more clouds than blue, and JoJo’s calf was red. It was hot to the touch and swollen. The skin was beginning to rip outward from the wound in a starburst pattern not too different from the one on my shoulder, except that his was shiny with pus. Looking at it made me wince, but JoJo was done being embarrassed by it. He called it my friend here. As in, “My friend here would like a sip of seawater. Won’t you fetch me some, Matt?”
That was all I could do, drizzle seawater over it, knowing this was doing nothing except cooling it temporarily. I double bagged the filthy dressings. I was going to throw them overboard to get rid of the stink.
“Wait,” John said. He threw the rotten fish carcass in with the rags and poked the bag full of small slits. He tied off the bag and hung it so it trailed us just below the water’s surface.
“We could use a hook right about now,” I said. “Can’t you cut one out of the fiberglass from the Windsurfer mast?”
“It’s too brittle. It’ll crack. The best I can do is a notch. That’ll be enough to keep the point in there. All we have to do is draw big boy near enough where we can spear him.” He filed the tip of the harpoon he’d made from the Windsurfer mast with the rusty wrench.
“I’m thinking of what your mom told us that time we went camping,” I said, “when we tried to help that bear cub after that moron’s Winnebago ran over its paw. ‘Be careful about what you chase. You just might catch it.’ ”
“The time you tried to help it,” John said. “I said let it be. I’m not afraid of dying, Matt. I’m afraid of not doing everything I can to stay alive. We need two lookouts now, round the clock. One watches for fish, another for ships, while the third rests.”
I didn’t bring up the fact that there were four of us. JoJo hadn’t pulled a watch in two days. He’d gone quiet, but not in any way that gave me the feeling he was less likely to explode. He seemed to be plotting something. He muttered in Portuguese.
“What was that, sweetie?” Dri said.
JoJo shrugged. “Nothing.” His eyes ticked to John and then back to his wound. His smile was creepy and sad at the same time, the kind you see on somebody who has nothing to lose.
John lifted the bait bag out of the water and put a few more slits into it. I smelled it in the wind, the iron in the blood.
“Where is a shark when you need one, eh?” JoJo said. “Now he would do it. He would be a good friend and chop off my leg for me.”
Dri stopped telling him to stop talking that way.
Dri and I always tried to be touching somehow, shoulder to shoulder, knee against knee, hand in hand. She drew soft circles into my palm with her fingertips. This wasn’t an attempt at romance. It was deeper than that. Her touch was the only thing that seemed real out there. The rest of it was a bizarre slow-motion thrill, which didn’t make it any less painful or confusing. I couldn’t have imagined that I, a kid whose closest contact with boating was the Staten Island Ferry when I visited my aunt once a year, would end up lost at sea. Now I was beginning to wonder if I could go back to the land with these eleven days adrift in my memory. The two worlds seemed too separate to bring one back into the other without some kind of trouble following, except I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to have to worry about that now.
The ships that had come close enough to us were too fast to chase. The ones that came at night, when they were lit up and easier to see, were out of our gas-supply range. We had maybe five minutes of drive time left in the tank. That would move us three miles or so—less if we were driving against wind and waves. The freighters didn’t see us or must have thought we
were fine. We had no way to advertise we were in trouble, no radio to call the Coast Guard, no flares. Our SOS flashes were lost either in the sun or moon glint apparently. Nobody had any idea where we were. How could they? Even if they figured out we’d borrowed the boat by now, why would we have stayed on the water?
Then again, how could we not be on the water? If we’d come back on land we would have gone home. Why would five kids who didn’t know one another simultaneously decide to run away for a week and a half, without leaving a single word with loved ones? The only logical conclusion was that we’d gotten into trouble and drowned.
Would we? Was that how it would end? Would we capsize in a storm? Drowning would have been preferable to dying of thirst. What would that look like? How would it feel? Would it be so painful that there would be a need for mercy killing? Would the dried-out dying beg for death? And what about the last survivor? Who would put him out of his misery, or her? No, it would be John, I was sure, as sure as I was that I wouldn’t be able to watch Dri die. I’d want to go first—but after JoJo. I couldn’t leave her with him, or what was left of him. Watching him sleep under the tarp, I had a good picture of how he would die. Acute systemic infection, the same thing that had killed Stef probably. That was if John didn’t get to him first.
John slept in Dri’s tent or pretended to sleep. His eyes were closed but he’d stopped sleeping in his vampire pose, with his hands folded over his chest. Now they were at his hips, where he kept his homemade knife.
Dri was on the lookout for ships, nodding off. She’d barely said a word after John gave her the true story about Woodhull Road. I let her sleep. She wasn’t missing anything anyway. The horizon and water leading out to it were empty. I was supposed to be on the lookout for fish. I was nodding off myself when I heard a splash on the side of the boat. At first I thought it was a wave that had slapped the fiberglass, but the sound had a squeaky click in it.
