by Paul Griffin
“John,” Dri said, “let it go. I’ll kill you. I don’t know how, but I will. You can’t eat raw bird anyway.”
“Sure you can.”
“It’s sick too. You’ll get sick. I’ll gouge out your eyes.”
John let the bird go, except it didn’t go anywhere. It stayed next to John and looked from John to me, to John.
I was too tired to laugh.
The bird looked up and flew off. John and Dri heard it before I did. Chuck-chuck-chuck.
John gripped my shoulder. I had to punch him to get his hand off me. The helicopter came close. No basket stretcher dangled down to us. No safety ropes. No Navy SEALs in high-tech wet suits. A guy in work clothes leaned out the shotgun window with an actual shotgun and fired a long-tailed streamer into one of the logs. The streamer pulsed fluorescent pink. Another guy leaned out with a bullhorn. He was laughing and waving, and John, Dri, and I looked at one another like, What do we do? John shrugged and waved back. The guy yelled down to us through the bullhorn, “We’re not here to rescue you.”
“Truly appreciate that!” I said.
“We’re spotters for the salvage crews. We’re here to tag the freight. We don’t have any ladders or anything to pull you up. We’re short on gas and have to get back. We’ll send somebody along shortly. You all right?”
“Perfect! Never better!” Big thumbs-up.
He thumbed us back. “Okay, help’s on the way then.”
“Take your time! We’ll just be right here. If we head out, it’ll only be for a bit, and we’ll leave a note.”
“Shut up, Matt. Save your voice.”
“For what?”
The helicopter swung away. We watched until it disappeared into the haze that blurred the horizon, and then we watched some more. We watched and watched and no one came back, not even that messed-up seagull.
The ship broke the horizon line an hour later. When it was a few minutes away, John said, “Okay, here’s the story. Stef died the way she did, JoJo committed suicide with the sharks. We leave out the part about the conversation you had with him.”
“No,” Dri said. “No way. We play this one for real.”
“Don’t do it, Dri,” John said. “Keep it simple. You’re not going to be helping anybody here with that kind of thinking. You’ll only be hurting yourself, your parents, JoJo’s mom, and Matt too—Matt especially. Hey, even I’ll feel bad if you do it.”
“Do what? Tell the truth? At the very least, I was an accomplice. If what I did deserves punishment, then that’s what I want. If the courts or whoever decide it doesn’t, I’ll just punish myself on my own. Sounds like a win-win for everybody. You two get another shot at life, and I get a shot to pay back the life I didn’t save. Don’t look at me that way, Matt.”
“What way?”
“Like you still … Look, you guys say what you want, but I’m telling them what happened. If our stories don’t match up, they’ll start looking at you guys too, like what are they hiding? It’s simple: Just tell them what I did, for God’s sake.”
I fell the first step I took on the freighter deck. It was too steady. They split us up right away and put us into cabins. I couldn’t lie down without wanting to throw up, so they put me in a rocking chair, and I felt really good. They hooked me up with two IVs: one sugar, one salt. “You want to see yourself?” the medic said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I figure you might not want to be alone the first time you see it.”
“See what?”
He brought me a mirror. I didn’t recognize myself. My face was fried and my lips and tongue were swollen.
He treated me for burns on my shoulder where my life vest tore into me. I’d need an operation on my left ear. I still hear the whoosh of the ocean even now.
Later the doctor came in and asked me to stand on the scale, and I was able to for a few seconds. He measured my height. “How tall were you when you went out on the boat?”
“A little over six feet, I guess.”
“Well, now you’re a little under.”
“How does that happen?”
“When you don’t eat, your bones shrink.”
“That fast?”
“Your slumping doesn’t help. Be proud of yourself.”
“Proud? I can’t see her, can I, Doc, just for a minute?”
“Let her rest, son.” He gave me a sleeping pill, and boy did it work fast. I fell asleep right in the rocking chair.
I woke up in my bunk, but how I got there I don’t know. I got myself into the shower and lay down and fell asleep there. They woke me and helped me get dressed and wheeled me into the captain’s kitchen. Dri and John were already at the table, in wheelchairs too. We all looked shell-shocked, and Dri looked away.
I went from one hundred and seventy pounds to a hundred and forty-six, and I set out to put back on every pound right then and there. They fed us Jell-O first. Then ice cream. Then I was into fried eggs, boxes of cornflakes, and frozen pizzas. The captain laughed. “Slow down,” he said. “There’s plenty more.”
Dri gagged and hurried away to the bathroom and never came back. John didn’t even look up from his plate. “Do you have any more rice pudding cups, the big ones?”
We watched a movie, John and I, I forget which one, a comedy. It was funny but we didn’t laugh. I fell asleep in my rocking chair. When I woke up, John was gone. The medic said, “He told me to tell you you’re boring. He’s playing cards with some of the guys. You want to go down there?”
“Can I see her?” I said.
“She’s sleeping.” He wheeled me to my bunk, hooked up my IV, and I passed out.
When I woke, the bunk was too quiet. The wind roared inside my head. I put on the TV loud and felt better. A guy came in and said a detective by the name of Kreizler wanted to talk with me.
The detective and I sat and I rocked and told him everything, or pretty much everything. He was a nice guy. “They say the odds are eighty percent that without GPS on that boat you should have died at sea,” he said. “I don’t know how you lasted that long. I mean, how did you not give up?”
“I gave up,” I said. “It’s just dumb luck I lasted.”
“João’s mother would love to speak with you, Matt. She’d like to meet you when we dock in Newark.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Not yet. I wouldn’t know what to say.”
Kreizler nodded. “You talk with her when you’re ready.” He patted my shoulder gently, more like he rested his hand there, but I winced anyway.
“Where did we wind up, by the way?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“In the ocean. Like near England or something?”
Kreizler smiled. “They found you about eighty miles away from where you left. Who knows if you were dragged out and back in with all the crazy winds, but you didn’t end up far from where you started. Life’s like that, take it from me, an old guy—and it’s a good thing, trust me. Hey, I’m really happy,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Driana’s account, John’s, yours—they all link up perfectly. Almost perfectly. You left one part out of your story.”
“I did?”
“John told us. Driana did too.”
“I didn’t see anything. I swear. He was in the water by the time I woke up.”
“Matt, nobody is going to file charges. Everybody understands.”
“Can I talk with her?”
“She’s gone. Her father took her home. His helicopter picked her up an hour ago.”
Kreizler took JoJo’s phone but said he’d send me the pictures.
They flew my dad out to the ship the next day. My mom was looking after John’s mom in the hospital. She was doing okay, my dad said. He pulled us into a hug. That was the first time he’d hugged me since before Woodhull Road. He cried and we didn’t. John and I didn’t want to be all bunched up like that either. We were burned and my arm was in a sling. I’d dislocated my shoulder. It was on fire. I had t
o break out of the hug.
My father extended his hand to John. He nodded and gulped. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for saving my son.”
“We saved each other,” John said.
“Thank you, John,” he said. “That was a beautiful thing you did, going out there with Matt.” He pulled John in for a hug, and John let himself be hugged this time, and then he hugged my dad back, pretty tight too.
An ambulance met us at the dock. A few photographers were there. These security guys blocked them and we ducked into the ambulance. They had my dad sit up front in the shotgun seat. He hesitated half a second before he got in. We took a slow ride from Newark into Manhattan, and then across town to the Hospital for Special Surgery, no lights, no sirens. We didn’t talk.
They put us in the same room. They thought we’d like that, the nurse said. They had the rocking chairs there for us. We rocked and watched some morning talk show or other. I couldn’t understand a word anybody was saying. They all talked too fast. And the makeup. Why? And why did it take two weeks lost at sea for me to notice these things?
John needed hand surgery. He’d be going home that night. My ear surgery was more complicated, and I’d be in for a few days. A nurse leaned into our room and said she’d be coming to get me in a few minutes.
“Nervous?” John said.
“No. I mean, what could happen at this point, right?”
“Well, you could always die on the table.”
“Why’d you do it?” I said. “Why couldn’t you let me go? To get her, I mean, during the storm. Without the rope. I wish you would have let us both go, and you stayed strapped into the boat. Then we all would have gotten what we wanted. You get to go home, Dri gets the sea, and I get to be with her. Because this? This here, right now? This is worse than dying with her. This is being dead while she’s gone.”
“You’re welcome,” John said.
“I hate you,” I said.
“I know you do.”
“We’re even now, right? Is that what you’re thinking? I took the bullet for you, so you came out onto the boat with me? Except we’ll never be even. You saved me from going out into the storm, you saved her for me, in my place, and oh, by the way, I got your dad killed.”
“It’s just what happened.”
“I’m so sick of you saying that. No, I owe you, and I’ll always owe you, and I’ll never be able to pay you back, and I hate you.”
“Bullet or not, Mr. Carlo, my father, Dri—none of that matters. I mean, I was mad at you for maybe a day after that night, Woodhull Road. Making me keep living when my dad was dead. Giving me the chance to run. The choice. And then I was grateful to you, that at least somebody was left to see my mom through the funeral, the years after that. But I would have come out on the boat with you anyway.”
“Why then? Why’d you come out there with me?”
“You were my brother.” He grabbed the remote control and clicked to ESPN.
The nurse came in. “Your dad’s just down the hall in the prep room, waiting for you. Mom too.”
“Thanks,” I said. I got into the wheelchair and she wheeled me out.
“Matt?” John said.
“Uh-huh?”
“Good luck.”
“You too,” I said, and those were the last words we ever said to each other.
I can’t watch movies anymore. Everything seems fake. For a while, right after we got back, it was the other way around. Everything in the here and now looked weird, too fragile, like it wasn’t supposed to be there. Like if you touched it, it would crumble or end up being a sham, hollow. I don’t know, everything looked like it was going to float away. Gradually, it all started coming back, the weight of things. The noises brought me back—car horns, shrieky laughter, crazy people screaming at each other over a parking spot. The crowd. I was back in the crowd, trapped.
Maybe a few days into senior year, after everybody stopped bothering me about the boat, I reached out to Dri on Facebook. They made me join first too, to leave her a message. That’s how crazy I was about her, getting myself out there on social media, putting up with those sidebar ads asking me if I wanted to date seventy-year-old women in my area, because I said that my age was eighty-eight, figuring that would be enough to scare off most friend wannabes. My profile picture was a screenshot of the Francis Ford Coppola version of Dracula, when the count appears as his real age, which is like five hundred or something. The day after I sent Dri the message, her page went offline. I left a message on her phone and didn’t hear anything, and then when I tried again, the number was dead. She was gone.
I found out she didn’t take the year off after all. She went up to Harvard right away, a few days after she got back. I tracked down her mom and she told me.
Her mom really wanted to take me out to lunch, but I couldn’t do it. I just wouldn’t know what to say except I didn’t want to talk about the boat, and all I wanted to do was be with Dri. One thing I did want to ask her was how she and Mr. Gonzaga were doing, but I didn’t. I left a message for Dri with her: Could she ask Dri to call me? She said she would and Dri didn’t. Her mom gave me Dri’s new mobile number, but I didn’t call it. She’d only cancel the number, and I didn’t want her to go through the hassle. Enough was enough. She needed to forget me, and I guess she did.
On a cold, clear day in early December I found myself downtown in some Wall Street guy’s conference room for my Yale interview. We were high up in an office tower. The harbor seemed small. The ocean behind it went on forever. Three of them, I faced. “So what was that like, talking to JoJo’s mom?” one of them said.
JoJo. Like they knew him. Like I knew him. It all felt so far away, farther than it should have for a near-death experience just three months in the past. I didn’t know how to answer. The whole interview was like that. I think I was blowing it on purpose. I just wasn’t up for trying so hard and then getting rejected. “Weird,” I said, and that’s all I said.
“She wrote us a letter.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Martins. Her father went to Yale. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“She said you were incredibly gracious. That you spent hours talking with her.”
I nodded. “Yup.”
“Uh-huh,” the guy said. He looked at the other two. One of them said, “Matt, you’re a hero.”
“Why?”
“You don’t think so?”
“I didn’t save anybody out there but myself. I didn’t even do that. My … John Costello did.”
“How did it change you, son?”
“Change me?”
“Your time on the water.”
I excused myself and left.
They let me know pretty much right away that I got in. I guess they needed a really crummy sailor from Queens to round out the class or something. Mom, Dad, and I went out to celebrate. This was a week before Christmas.
We went to a steak house in Manhattan. The woman at the table next to ours got fish, a whole snapper. I excused myself and went to the bathroom. I locked myself in the stall and thought I was going to pass out from the sadness. I can’t eat meat anymore either, I mean hamburgers and steak and all the stuff I used to love. I know I’m supposed to eat it. I’m a carnivore, from a long line of carnivores going back five hundred million years and who knows how long before that. But since I got back from the boat, I can’t eat anything with eyes, I have no idea why. Maybe I just feel bad for it, the poor sucker who got caught, I guess. Too bad I’m not a big salad guy either. I eat a lot of pizza these days, PBJ. I’m doomed, heart attack at fifty, so much to look forward to.
We ended up ditching the steak house and going to Patsy’s that night, and I picked at my slice. When we got home, I tapped up my iPad to finish a paper I had due the next day, the last day of school before Christmas break. My fake-creepy-old-man Facebook account popped up with a notification in my email. I had a message in my in-box, first time ever.
Yup.
I
met her two days before Christmas at a diner on the Upper East Side. I was a lot early, she was a little late. She stopped short when she saw me sitting there in the booth.
“Wow,” she said.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“You look different from who I remember.”
She did too. Older, sadder, impossibly beautiful. She’d changed her hair; it was simpler, pulled back. I realized I’d never seen her in anything but jeans and a bikini. She wore a dark gray skirt suit and heels, a lawyer or banker, the kind of person who ran things, not the kind who would hang out with a guy like me, jeans and sneakers. “I have to go visit one of my old teachers,” she said. “Catholic school. The nuns. Gotta look like a lady, you know?”
“Sure. I always wear skirts when I visit my old teachers. You look smoking hot though.”
“You’re totally adorbs.”
“How’s Harvard?”
“How’s Yale?”
“I guess I’ll find out.”
“No!”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“Oh my God!”
“Shh.”
“I’m totally psyched! I knew it!”
“I didn’t.”
“I did, for the record. I told you. I want that duly noted.”
“It’s in the books.”
“I’m so happy for you! And your dad didn’t even have to buy them a building.”
“We just got the projected expenses work sheet. By the time we pay them, they’ll be able to build one.”
She swung around the table and sat next to me and hugged me and rested her head on my shoulder. It was the last thing I expected and the only thing I wanted: that it would be the way it had been. We kind of collapsed right back to that first day on the beach, when she tucked her number into my hand and I knew I was totally messed up for life, because once she got to know me, why would she be with me? Yet here she was. Here we were, holding hands under the table, drawing little circles into each other’s palms. And then it all fell apart, tears from nowhere. “I see you and I can’t stop remembering,” she said.
