by Paul Griffin
“I know.”
“You too?”
“No. I see you and I want to be with you, and the last thing I think about is the boat. I think about making out with you in my parents’ junk-filled basement, discount DVD cases everywhere, while we’re pretending to watch a movie.”
“I think about you all the time. All the time. I think about them too, but you most of all. How’s John?”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought that was going to happen. That breaks my heart, but it makes sense, or about as much sense as me dreaming about you and knowing I can’t be with you.”
“Why though? I don’t get it.”
“You do though. I didn’t think we’d live, and I couldn’t watch you die. If he went after John or me, you wouldn’t have stood for that. He would have killed you too or maybe first.”
“But if you didn’t think we’d live, why’d you—”
“I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see you die violently. If it was going to happen, I wanted it to be in its own time, as peaceful as it could be, or with less horror in it anyway. I thought we might go quietly, together. I know now that I never really thought I would have to live with this. I guess I’m going to have to though, huh? I guess I’m just going to have to do it, to keep on going, knowing that the nightmare might sneak up on me in the day too, in the mirror when I brush my teeth and I see Jo.”
“We can help each other.”
“I don’t even know how to help myself. I’m a mess, and I’m not about to mess you up too.”
“I’m already messed up. We can be messed up together.”
“I have to figure out how to be with me before I can be with somebody else. Be with you. I can’t stop thinking that he might have made it.”
“No way.”
“We did, just two days later.”
“He wouldn’t have made it through the storm.”
“He stands there. He doesn’t look angry. He’s so lost.”
“He’s not. He’s with Stef, the only place he ever wanted to be. The JoJo you see is the one you’ve created.”
“And you?”
“Me?”
“How’s Mr. Costello? The one you created.”
“He’s there. Not as much, but he knows where I am. He still wants to tell me something, I have no idea what. I’ll never know. How are your folks?”
“Same. Working at it.”
“Good.”
“Is it? I don’t know. I wish it would be one way or the other, clean.”
“We all do.”
She nodded. “Do you hate me?”
“I love you, like crazy-crazy love you.”
“You’re horrible. How could you say that to me? God, you’re an idiot.”
“I know. So, as I think about this whole conversation we’re having here?”
“Yeah?” she said.
“You’re saying I still have a really good chance then, right? That’s what I’m getting from you anyway. Your vibe.”
“My vibe. God, you’re impossible.”
“You don’t have to tell me I’m wrong. You really, really don’t.”
She smiled. “I don’t know what to do with you.”
“I do. I mean, I have an idea about what you can do with me. I have several ideas.”
She hugged me—hard too, and for a good while. “Maybe, Matthew,” she said.
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe someday.” She kissed me fast and then pulled away, and then she leaned in for a longer, harder one and lingered, and then she pushed away really hard and left without looking back.
“Someday,” I said. “Okay, that’s not a no anyway.” I ordered a milk shake and two plates of fries and needed to ask for a second bottle of ketchup.
The day after graduation I went right back into school at the local community college. I took an intensive EMT course over the summer and now I’m working with a hospital ambulance. I’m telling myself I’m saving money for Yale, but we’ll see. I ended up deferring for a year. I have until next month, Thanksgiving Eve in fact, to let them know whether or not I’ll need a room in New Haven come the following fall. They check in with me once in a while. How am I feeling? Am I leaning toward coming or not? “I can’t say yet,” I say. I do know that I want to change my major. Instead of forestry I’m thinking I might want to go premed. Dri was right. I’m not cut out for the desert. I don’t even know where the Great Basin is. I’d like to check out Rio though.
I still live at the house just uphill from Woodhull Road. All the old triggers are there. The ballpark, the elevated train, every time I see some idiot shove some poor guy around. John was right though. Those triggers will be everywhere, anywhere, any time. My solution is this: If I see wrongs I can’t right I call the cops and roll on. I don’t look back either. I turn the corner, onto my street, and sometimes Mr. Costello is there. I don’t turn away from him. I go my way. Once in a while he follows me. He doesn’t mean me any harm, and he isn’t bleeding anymore. The wounds are gone. He can talk now, but he doesn’t.
The nights I’m not working on the ambulance are the hardest. I dream of the sea. The Atlantic. It burns cold in me, the temperature of the water after the storm tested and tasted me and decided in the end I wasn’t worth swallowing. I found out we were at the storm’s edge, never near its heart, where the Coast Guard was risking lives to save ours. Still, I’ll never be able to forget the thrashing. That nightmare drags me in its gritty wake and leaves me broken and thrown, pieces missing. And then I wake up, and the longer I’m on my feet and moving around the better I feel.
A few nights ago I was coming home from a double shift on the bus, which is what we call the ambulance. I stopped to fill up my brand-new very old car with cheap gas at the broken-down station a mile from the house. The station was full service only. While I waited I thumbed through the pictures Detective Kreizler Dropboxed me from JoJo’s phone. I do that a lot. I was watching that video the four of us made when we were a few days out on the water, when JoJo was trying to reassure us we were going to be okay. Dri was saying, We have each other. I paused the video. I touched my heart to be sure the medal still hung there. The dove of peace Dri slipped into my pocket while we were at the diner. That’s when I noticed him. John. He was inside the mini-mart, at the counter. I remembered too late the station was around the corner from John’s house. He used to work there. He was buying milk.
He looked exactly the same. He didn’t look happy, not sad either. He didn’t strike me as somebody who had a lot of worries or hopes. He seemed mildly content as he checked his phone and traded a few words with the old man ringing him up at the cash register. He paid for the milk and went.
I could have called out to him. Instead I waited for him to see me. He didn’t. He headed away, up the block toward his mom’s.
I hear through my mother he started at electrician school, nights. She’s constantly after me to give him a call. She says we owe it to each other to reconnect. She can’t understand why we wouldn’t want to reach out to each other. My dad doesn’t say anything about it. He puts his arm over my shoulder, the one that healed well. My hearing still isn’t great on the left side. The right one works fine though, and that’ll do.
I started hanging out with this girl from EMT school. I knew her from around the neighborhood, going way back. We were in a lot of the same classes at school, before I transferred to Hudson. We were pretty good friends in junior high, as much as I had friends back then. She just said it out of the blue one day: “We should go out.” So we did. I liked her a lot. I felt the click, a deep affection, a bond that formed there, but after a couple of months I started to drift away. Maybe I do have love for people, but I don’t know if I want to be in love more than once in a lifetime.
My bus is busy. On any given night I’ll meet ten, sometimes a dozen or more new people. Patients, loved ones, the ones who love. I’m with them for half an hour or so, an endless agony for them as they deal with the surprise of what’s unf
olding in their minds, the realization that they’re the ones this time. That they’re being dealt tragedy out of the blue, that nothing will be the same. I try to make that half hour a little less rotten for them, to calm them, to touch them gently on their shoulders and tell them without words that everything will be okay when most times it can’t be. Yes, I lie to them, to get them through. I speak softly and hope they’ll steal some of my quiet and walk underwater with me for the space of a few breaths, and then I never see them again. But I never forget them either. Not a single one. I remember their eyes. They’re all so different but so much the same. They glisten with awe. I figured it out, how to live in the city and get away at the same time. I lose myself in the crowd.
I feel Dri with me too, as I’m moving through the bustle. I hear her laugh, a little too loud, too true. I close my eyes and I see hers, the color of the ocean the day we met. The first word I whisper when I wake up every day is “Someday.” And then I think, maybe someday is today.
You know, now that I think about it, the way he came out of the gas station convenience store, the way he hesitated at the door for half a second, maybe John did see me, but he just kept going.
Thank you to Anna Orchard, for saying in her lovely British accent, “I’d like you to write me a story about children lost at sea.” David Levithan, for friendship and kindness that borders on ridiculous. Jodi Reamer and Alec Shane, lifeguards, for even more ridiculous generosity and for taking me in when I was a bit adrift myself! Bess Braswell, Lizette Serrano, Antonio Gonzalez, Jessica White, Rachael Hicks, Yaffa Jaskoll, Carol Ly, Megan Bender, and my dear friend (and favorite singer) Emily Heddleson. Penny Hueston and all my friends at Text, especially Michael Heyward, who is a brother to me. And my editor, teacher, and pal Nan Mercado, whose mind is as wondrous and beautiful as her heart. Risa Morimoto, I love you.
Paul Griffin loves being out on the water—in a boat with a working engine. Once, when he was a kid, his uncle’s leaky old boat stalled. He was adrift less than an afternoon and in the relative safety of Long Island Sound, but being stranded like that was scary enough to get him looking for higher ground. Now he lives two hundred and fifty feet above sea level in northern Manhattan, where he works as a volunteer EMT. He wrote the novels Ten Mile River, The Orange Houses, Stay with Me, and Burning Blue, all for young adults. Visit him at paulgriffinstories.com.
Copyright © 2015 by Paul Griffin
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
First edition, August 2015
Cover art © 2015 by Larry Rostant
Cover design by Yaffa Jaskoll and Carol Ly
e-ISBN 978-0-545-70941-5
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