by Paul Griffin
“I don’t think so,” John said. “None of us are.” He nodded JoJo’s way.
JoJo had curled up into a ball. He put his fists to his mouth and screamed.
Three hours until daylight, day thirteen …
Light rain woke me—more like nudged me out of my daze. I didn’t dare sleep now.
Dri and I helped John funnel the rainwater off the tarp into the gas jug. The rain didn’t wake JoJo. He was balled up on the floor by the engine, where he had conked out.
We’d grabbed a bunch of laundry detergent bottles from the garbage spill, but we didn’t need them. We collected half a jug before the rain stopped. Still, it was enough to fill our shrunken stomachs. We took turns drinking and keeping an eye on JoJo.
After he’d calmed down, he cried for what seemed an hour. He’d genuinely seemed not to remember shoving Dri or punching me. “I did that?” he’d said when Dri told him what happened. After that he crawled to the back of the boat and collapsed. We hadn’t heard from him since, except for his snoring, which must have been painful for him. It sounded like when boiling water rattles the pot cover.
Dri peeked into the jug. Maybe a third of what we’d collected was left. She looked to where JoJo was sleeping.
“Don’t,” John said. “Please don’t.”
“If he wakes up and finds out we have water and didn’t offer him any … I don’t know.”
“That’s why we should drink it all right now,” John said.
“That sound,” she said. “His throat must be so dry it’s cracking.”
“Leave him alone, I’m telling you,” John said.
She ignored him and brought the jug to JoJo. I went with her. I was ready to knock JoJo into the water if he so much as gave her a dirty look, and I wasn’t going to pull him back into the boat this time. I couldn’t see the shark with daylight still a few hours away, but I felt it there, gliding along just on the other side of the fiberglass, this starving presence.
We had a hard time waking JoJo up, but when he came to, he drained the jug, of course. He muttered thanks but sarcastically, as if he resented our help. Then he mumbled to himself as he went to work picking at his skin. He started in on a boil on his shoulder. His fingernails were gone, so he rubbed his shoulder against the side of the boat. He grunted as he scraped. “Matt, get the light?” he said. “I want to see.”
I was about to tell him he really didn’t want to see, that none of us did. I was afraid he’d flip out when he saw what I was pretty sure was going to be a rotting hole in his shoulder. I couldn’t risk making him mad, though, so I got the phone out of the cabinet and shined the light on his shoulder.
I was wrong. The wound wasn’t rotting. It was a fresh two-inch pit. I winced at the sight of the raw skin hanging from his shoulder. He twisted his neck to see what he had done to himself. He kicked down on the fiberglass with his heels. The boat vibrated.
I heard a splash off the left side of the boat, and then another on the right. I shined the light into the water. There were two sharks now.
JoJo went back to picking at his skin. Dri didn’t tell him to stop. He eyed John and growled and laughed quietly to himself.
John didn’t flinch. He didn’t provoke either. He looked away and put the binoculars to his eyes and scanned the horizon for lights, or pretended to.
“Look up,” JoJo said. He was talking to me. “Look.”
The sky was clearing strangely. The edge of a high-pressure band pushed the clouds away in a perfectly straight line. JoJo pointed to the stars. “The Hercules Cluster,” he said. “See?”
I didn’t see it, but I said, “Sure, right there. Cool.”
“He was a Roman invention, stolen from the Greeks and cleaned up, made more Hollywood, if you will. The original Greek version of the myth was much grimier, and so much closer to my heart. They called him Heracles. He is my kinsman. You have no idea what I am talking about, do you?”
He didn’t either, I thought, but he had enough mental power left to give me one last lesson in tragedy. “Heracles was made to wear a poison robe that ate away his flesh,” he said. “To end his suffering he begged to be thrown into the fire, but no one would do it. They were cowards. All of them.”
Dri tried to hold his hand, but he nudged it away, and then I nudged her away from him.
One by one they fell asleep—first JoJo, then John, then Dri. That was always the order when I was on watch. Dri couldn’t sleep until she was sure John wasn’t going to attack JoJo, and John couldn’t sleep until he was sure JoJo wasn’t going to attack him. Dri slept with the hammer.
I saw a freighter’s lights on the horizon. I didn’t bother to wake anyone. Why get their hopes up? Still, I reached into the cabinet for JoJo’s phone and flashed the ship. The light was weak, and the ship was far away. Ten minutes later the boat dropped back under the horizon, and the sky clouded over fast.
The waves were beginning to get bigger. They rocked me into a daze. My head weighed a hundred pounds. It dropped, and I slapped myself awake. I had another half hour before my watch was over. Dri was due to take the next shift, but I wished it were John’s turn. I half hoped John would kill JoJo while Dri and I were asleep. I wondered—if Dri stood up to John, would he take her out too? He knew he would have to kill me first. Would he? Could he kill me after what we went through together that night on Woodhull Road? The times after that, when my family had his back?
I was nodding off when Dri relieved me. She was groggy. I wanted to stay with her to help keep her awake. She insisted she was okay, that as bad as she looked, I looked worse and needed to get some sleep. I did, too. I was shivering. The air was coldest at this hour, a couple of hours before dawn.
I settled in under the tarp we’d restrung at the front of the boat. John snored quietly. My shivering exhausted me, and I fell asleep fast. I don’t know how long I was out when I felt the boat rock and then I heard a splash. I was groggy. I needed a few seconds to remember where I was and to realize that John wasn’t under the tarp anymore. Then I heard Dri scream.
August 30
Dear Senator Rice,
I understand that with the discovery of my niece Estefania Gonzaga’s partial remains, the Coast Guard is considering calling off the search for the remaining young people lost at sea the night of August 17. I implore you to ask Admiral Sutterjee to reconsider this decision. I will do everything I can to finance a continued search.
Please, Mark. I beg you, ask the admiral to give the kids one last shot.
Sincerely,
Rafael Gonzaga
Dawn …
JoJo was gone. Dri and John scanned the water. “What happened?” John said.
“You didn’t see?” Dri said.
“You were on watch,” John said.
Dri cursed herself. “I nodded off,” she said. “How could I do that? How could I desert him like that? He needed to be looked after.”
“The splash that woke me up,” John said. “I think it came from the left.”
Sure enough, JoJo rose to the surface not far from where John pointed. He groaned.
There were four sharks after all. JoJo was jerked down, but he didn’t go all the way under. Blood spread out from him. He looked confused. He stared at John as a shark bit his shoulder and shook him to tear away the skin. He didn’t have time to scream before another shark clamped its mouth over his head. Tail fins whipped the water into pink froth. I think the sharks started to attack one another too. I had to sit. My legs went weak and I plunked down on the bench seat. Dri sat next to me and dry heaved. John stood tall and kept looking into the water. He nodded for a while. Then he looked at Dri and me and nodded some more.
Maybe a few minutes passed before Dri’s stomach settled and I noticed a light was strobing weakly in the morning glare. JoJo’s phone was on the floor of the boat, in the corner. It blipped S-O-S.
“Happy now?” Dri said.
“Sure, Dri,” John said. “I’m having the time of my life.”
; Half an hour later we three were lying back against the boat walls. We needed that much time to paddle and drift away from the blood trail, to realize that for the first time in several days we could breathe a little more freely. The sense of relief was as huge as the sense of sadness I felt about the way JoJo died. I knew him for two intense weeks, long enough to know John was wrong about him. The JoJo of the last few days wasn’t the real João Martins. The JoJo I’d remember was that nice guy I met on the beach. The one who wanted to take us surfing.
The morning air felt more like the afternoon, when it was so hot you didn’t want to move. I was burning up. I didn’t see any sharks, but they couldn’t be too far away with all that blood around. I checked the sea on all sides before I dared reach down to scoop a little water onto my face. The clouds were black and moved fast, but where the sun broke in, the rays wriggled through my skull.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the look on JoJo’s face right before the sharks attacked. He was smiling, and he was looking at John.
Dri leaned into me and flashed through the pictures on JoJo’s phone. They started with the party at Dri’s. Stef stuck her tongue out at the lens. Then there was John, checking out Mr. Gonzaga’s new Porsche. There was one of Dri and me, holding hands by the pool.
“Save the battery,” John said. “Turn it off.” I did and stowed the phone in the cabinet under the bench seat. The waves were getting bigger, and JoJo’s phone was our last chance at getting out an SOS flash. John’s battery had died the day before. I looked around the boat for loose items that needed to be secured. I put the distiller in there, the peanut can, the empty water jugs. I forced myself to pretend I wasn’t scared when I asked, “Where’s the hammer?”
Dri pointed to where she slept, but it wasn’t there.
“I have it,” John said. He pulled it from his sleeping spot under the tarp. “What do you need it for?”
“I don’t,” I said.
“Quit looking at me that way, Matt. Until he did us the favor of killing himself, I wasn’t taking any chances.”
“I bet you weren’t,” I said.
“Here, you know what?” He tossed the hammer into the ocean.
“What’d you do that for?” Dri said.
“In case we turn on each other. Isn’t that what you guys are afraid of? That I might hit you while you’re sleeping?”
“Actually, John, no,” Dri said. “Not until you mentioned it.”
John pulled out three life vests and started to tie them down to the railings. He left them open in the front so we could buckle ourselves into them.
“What are you doing?” Dri said.
“They’re seat belts,” John said.
“Okay, and we need them because?”
“So we don’t get thrown from the boat. Look.” He pointed toward the horizon, except there wasn’t a horizon anymore. The water and sky were the same color, almost black, and all I could think about was JoJo, how lucky he was to miss what was coming.
Late afternoon, day thirteen …
The waves didn’t break, and the clouds didn’t either. The sun wasn’t supposed to set for another hour, but night came early that day. Overhead was a dark purple skin with gray veins. It slid over the sky with a definite edge, God’s eyelid closing. It stretched out to the horizon in every direction.
We’d strapped ourselves in at the back of the boat, John on one side, Dri and me on the other. John actually slept. He hadn’t in days, I think, afraid JoJo would wring his neck the minute he nodded off. It was so ridiculous I actually laughed. Here he was snoring away in a modified vampire pose—how a vampire would sleep sitting up—and we were about to get hit with a storm strong enough to sink the boat, it looked like. Dri laughed with me. Then in the space of a breath Dri’s laughing stopped, and she looked so sad. Her hair beads had chipped and faded from blue to white. Her eyes were dark, picking up the purple in the sky. “You think he did it,” she said. “You think John killed JoJo.” The way she said it, she definitely wasn’t asking.
John’s head swung loosely with the waves. For a second I thought he was dead, until I saw his chest rise and fall.
“You don’t?” I said.
“No way. It was suicide. John wouldn’t have the courage.”
“He would,” I said. “He does. You don’t know him. You don’t know what he’s capable of. He’s the most fearless guy I know.”
“You can’t be serious. He runs from every fight, and he admits to it. He’s proud of it.”
“Not the hardest fight,” I said. “The most important one. He’s been pretty much supporting his mom since he was fourteen. After Mr. Costello was killed, she drank to the point she couldn’t work. He goes with her to her rehab counselor. He makes sure she goes.”
“Matt, do you hear yourself?” she said. It was the first time she hadn’t called me Matthew. “Why didn’t you tell me this stuff before?”
“He’d be mad if he knew I told you.”
“Why?”
“He doesn’t want people knowing he’s a good guy.”
“That makes no sense.”
“He doesn’t want to ask anybody for anything, you know? Even if it’s just to feel good about him. John can tough out anything, and he’d kill somebody to keep himself going, to keep his mom going.”
“This is awful. The two of you. I don’t know what to do here. Please, you have to believe me. JoJo killed JoJo. He’d been battling depression for a long time. John is …”
“What?”
“He’s your brother.”
“That’s right, and I know him better than anybody. Brothers or not, if he thought I was a danger to him, he’d kill me too.”
“How do I get you not to think this way?” She kissed my eyes and then my lips. Her skin was sticky. Her lips were salty and chapped. We kissed and kissed, and all the while John Costello’s head swung loose, like the life had gone out of it, rocking back and forth with the waves that were starting to throw the boat.
NAVIGATOR’S LOG, AUGUST 31, 05:51 HOURS EST
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to meet Carlotta. At present, her waves are topping forty feet.
Sunless sunrise, day fourteen …
The waves beat us up all night, but the rain didn’t come until morning. It came warm and smoky at first, and then it turned cold and fell harder and didn’t let up. We popped out of our life-vest seat belts to catch the rainwater with the tarp. Even the storm waves and the threat of being thrown overboard couldn’t scare off our thirst. We didn’t need more than a few minutes to fill the jugs. We strapped back into our seat-belt vests and passed the jug around. I drank too fast; we all did. I felt weak and loose in my limbs, but Dri’s head was bobbing and then swinging as lifelessly as John’s had the night before.
“How does she pass out from drinking water?” John said.
“Too much water. I should have stopped her. Hyponatremia, it’s called. They told us about it in that first responder class. It’s what happens to distance swimmers and marathoners after they finish and they’re dehydrated, and then they guzzle water. It dilutes the salt in their blood and knocks everything out of whack.”
“How do we fix it?”
“We don’t, unless you happen to have a quart of Gatorade on you. Her blood will balance out on its own, I think. How soon, though, I don’t know.”
“Not soon enough. Hang tight to her. Matt, brace her.”
A wave two stories high rolled up on us and ripped the boat into its crest, and then the sea dropped. My stomach lifted and I was dizzy as we coasted down the back of the wave.
“You have to brace her better,” John said. “Her head’s whipping all over the place. She’ll break her neck.”
I held her close to keep her head from whiplashing. The waves came bigger. No lightning, no thunder, just the rain. It fell like poured gravel, and the fiberglass shook like it was coming apart. I tucked Dri’s head tighter into my chest. The next wave threw us. We landed side-on into another wave. The boat whi
pped up the wave’s face to the crest and hung there nose-down like a pendant before it dropped. We went underwater.
This crazy vision came to me down there. I was inside the mind of a fish looking up at the storm on the surface. My sky warped. My stars scattered, and my moon was ripped from its orbit. It rolled away, leaving the world with a new gravitational pull that made everything six times heavier. I didn’t think we’d ever rise to the surface.
We stayed underwater for what felt like a minute but was probably a few seconds before we were ripped upward again, this time inside the wave. A moan moved into me from my feet and buzzed up my body and rang my bones. The fiberglass hull was bending, splintering. We broke through the back of the wave.
Dri coughed water. “I can’t do that again,” she said. I think that’s what she said. The wind screamed like a Super Bowl crowd or a hundred thousand souls let loose from purgatory.
“I’m just glad you’re awake,” I yelled.
“I’m not! I don’t want to be.”
We had to do it again. A wave as tall and wide as a stadium rolled toward us. Even John was hyperventilating. We rode up the face of it so fast my organs shifted toward my spine and compressed my lungs. I couldn’t breathe. The wave sucked us up to its ridge and then rolled away, right underneath us. It left us hanging in midair. What came to me then? Dri’s sand castle. All you had to do was remember it. That was going to be the last image in my mind as I died, the one I would take with me into whatever came next, Dri and that kid on the shore that sunny day in front of Sully’s. And then I hoped there would be nothing. If there was something, I would have to face Mr. Costello.
We fell. The boat almost rolled over as it slid down the far side of the wave. Without giving us time to catch our breath another wave scooped us up. This one had jags and peaks, a mountain range of black water. “Matt?” Dri said.
“Yeah?”
The wave smothered the boat and sucked me down into darkness and backward in time to Woodhull Road, three years earlier, the car crash under the elevated train. The windows that hadn’t been shot out blew out. My eardrums felt blown in. The twisting crunch that totaled Mr. Costello’s van had only lasted a second. This—being crushed inside the wave—lasted much longer, and it wasn’t happening in slow motion either. I never would have been able to imagine a body could spin so quickly underwater. The boat rocked to the surface.
