My First Love and Other Disasters

by Francine Pascal

  “What do you mean they’re with their grandfather? Where? What’s going on here?”

  “He came to visit them . . . and . . .”

  “Their grandfather came out here and what—he’s with them here, or took them away? Tell me.” She looks like she’s going to explode.

  “Well, he didn’t actually take them.” That sounds like he stole them or something.

  “He’s got them, hasn’t he?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “You let him take my children! How dare you decide such a thing when I told you I didn’t even want him to talk to them on the phone!” She comes toward me like she’s going to attack me and I move back.

  “Where are you going?” she demands.

  “No place. I’m really sorry. . . .” I never in my whole life had anyone outside my family yell at me like this and be so angry. I know I’m going to cry any second.

  “How dare you disobey me with my own children! Who do you think you are?!” Now she’s practically screaming at me and I’m too scared to cry. Please, God, let her calm down.

  Just like on command she stops and says in a quiet, mean voice that practically spits at me, “Where are they now?”

  “Fishing.” I manage to get it out in a very small voice.

  “At six o’clock!” Again she’s screaming. “Are you telling me they’re out on the water at this hour?”

  “I don’t know. . . . They’re probably on their way back.”

  “They damn well better be.” She spins around and says, “Come with me.” And she pounds down the stairs.

  I don’t even stop for my shoes. I just race after her. That was rotten of Mr. Landry to keep them out so late. Why did he have to do that? I knew I didn’t like that man. Boy, he doesn’t care about anyone but himself. And after I was so nice to him. He really stinks. I can hardly see the stairs because now that she’s stopped yelling at me I’m crying.

  Cynthia doesn’t even stop at the door, she just pushes through and lets it slam in my face. I follow her but I manage to stay behind her. I’m afraid she’ll start screaming at me in the street. She is steaming mad. We get to the dock and I don’t see the kids or Mr. Landry anywhere around. We look for the woman who rents the fishing boats, but there’s nobody on the pier.

  “Well”—Cynthia turns to me—“now, where did they go?” As if I would know.

  “Maybe he took them for something to eat or something . . . ice cream! That’s it. He must have stopped in . . . with them.”

  It has to be because they never let anyone pass that store without buying them a cone. I run on ahead to the ice cream store but I can see they’re not there. Barry is alone behind the counter. My heart sinks.

  “Barry?” I pull open the screen door and poke my head in. “Did you see David and DeeDee?”

  He’s surprised to see me. “Who?”

  “You know, the kids I take care of.”

  “Oh, yeah. . . . No, I didn’t see them.”

  “They were with their grandfather. They must have come in here.”

  “I’ve been here since eleven this morning and they haven’t come in.”

  “Oh . . .,” and I can’t help myself. I start to cry again right in front of Barry.

  “Hey, what happened? Are they missing or something?”

  “They were with their grandfather. . . .”

  “Hey, come on, nothing to cry about. If they were with their grandfather”—and he comes out from behind the counter—“they’re fine. I bet he took them for something to eat.”

  By now Cynthia is here. “Well,” she says, “where are they?”

  “Barry says maybe Mr. Landry took them for something to eat,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Barry says, sticking up for me.

  “Have you seen them?” Cynthia asks Barry, and he says no, and then her whole expression changes and she looks scared instead of angry. Then she says, “Maybe they never got back. Maybe they’re still out there and something’s happened.” And without another word she shoves the screen door open and races out and toward the pier. Barry and I run after her.

  There’s still nobody on the pier. It looks as though all the sailing dinghies are in, but there are so many you really can’t tell. Still, the woman wouldn’t have gone home if one of her boats was still out.

  “They must be back because the woman wouldn’t have gone home with one of her boats still out, right?” I say to Barry more than to Cynthia. I’m sort of afraid to talk to her.

  “That’s right,” he agrees. “She wouldn’t leave until all the boats were in.” But Cynthia looks like she’s not about to trust either of us.

  “Who owns the boat rental?” Cynthia asks Barry.

  “Mrs. Randolph and her son Charlie,” he says. “They live across there over the grocery store.” He points to an old wooden two-storey house. Before he even finished showing her, Cynthia starts running across the street.

  “I’ll just the if anything happens to them,” I say to Barry. “It’s all my fault.” I’m feeling almost sick to my stomach.

  “What do you mean?” he says. “I thought they were with their grandfather.”

  “They were, but they weren’t supposed to be. It’s a long story, but Cynthia doesn’t want them to see their grandfather.”

  “Is he a bad guy or something?” Of course Barry is confused.

  “No, nothing like that. It has to do with her ex-husband. He owes her money so she said his father can’t see the kids—oh, it’s all a big mess.”

  “She sounds nuts not to let the kids see their own grandfather.”

  “I know, but that’s the way she wants it, so I guess I should have listened to her. After all, they’re her kids. Oh, I don’t know. I wish I’d never come out here. . . .”

  “Hey, come on, they’ll turn up.” He’s really a very nice guy, which makes me feel even worse because I was so awful to him.

  “Hey, look,” he says, pointing out on the water. “There’s a small sailboat coming in toward shore.” It has to be them. Please, let it be them. We both run to the end of the pier. As the boat comes closer, we can see that there’s only one person in it. Even close I can tell it’s only Mrs. Randolph alone. She pulls the boat up to the pier and Barry runs over to grab her line.

  “Mrs. Randolph,” Barry shouts to her, “did the man with the two little kids come in yet?”

  “They sure didn’t,” she answers, and my heart falls three feet. “That’s who I was looking for.” And she climbs up on the dock and ties up the second line. “They’re almost two hours late and I was getting worried. They got whitecaps out there now, you know.”

  This is becoming a nightmare. Cynthia comes running up to us out of breath, saying she can’t find the woman, and we tell her this is Mrs. Randolph, and then she finds out that the children and their grandfather are still out there. Mrs. Randolph leaves out the part about the choppy water, but Cynthia’s face turns white anyway, and she grabs my shoulder as if she’s going to faint. Mrs. Randolph says she thinks they’d better alert the police and the Coast Guard, and then she tries to calm Cynthia by saying they probably ran aground around the cove. Lots of people do, and there’s no danger because they can walk to shore from there. That helps Cynthia a little but she’s still frantic. Mrs. Randolph takes Cynthia back to her house to call the Coast Guard, and Barry tells me to wait here while he locks up the store and gets his speedboat, and he runs off.

  I wait alone at the end of the pier and start thinking how all this is my fault. Then I start thinking about David and DeeDee. If anything ever happened to them . . . but I can’t even finish the thought because it’s so horrendous. I’m glad I at least made them wear life jackets, and then I remember that Mr. Landry didn’t have one and I think, gee, he’s pretty old and if the water is rough . . .

  In the middle of all this I start thinking about how angry and disappointed my parents are going to be about the business of me staying alone with the kids. They may even make me come right home. It pro
bably won’t make any difference—coming home, I mean—because Cynthia’s certainly going to fire me anyway.

  I’m so involved in thinking about all this mess that I don’t even see Barry pull up in his speedboat.

  “Hey, Victoria! Over here,” Barry shouts from the boat, and when I turn around, my stomach does another drop, which brings it about to China. Jim is with him. Right now he’s the last person in the world I want to see.

  Barry puts out his hand and I grab it and jump in. I try to give Jim a casual “hi” but only half of it comes out words and the rest gulp. He’s busy throwing lines and pushing the boat away from the dock and the other boats, and Barry is steering and I kind of creep into a corner and hope nobody notices me.

  Mrs. Randolph is right, the water is awfully choppy and we’re bouncing up and down, banging hard every time we hit the water. Naturally I pick the worst seat, and every time we hit the water a cold spray smacks me in the face, taking my breath away. Barry turns around and waves me up with them. Hanging on to the rails for dear life, I creep up to where Barry and Jim are and squeeze between the two front seats. At least there’s a plastic shield that keeps off most of the spray. Barry shouts something to me, but the noise of the motor and the splashing is so loud I can’t make out what he’s saying.

  I finally understand that he wants me to let go of the wheel. I can always count on me to do the dumb thing. Barry is breaking his neck trying to steer the boat in all this mess, and I have the wheel in a dead man’s grip. I let the wheel go and grab on to Barry’s arm which also makes steering impossible except I have to hold something. Jim pokes me and points to a metal bar right in front of me that I can hang on to.

  It becomes even rougher as we get farther from shore, and all I can think of is those little kids and how scared they must be and poor Mr. Landry—how awful he must feel because he really loves them so much.

  Still hanging on to the metal bar, I let myself slide down to the floor with my back against the instrument panel. This way I end up facing Barry and Jim. They’re both standing there. Barry is steering and Jim is squinting into the wind, searching the water. The wind is whipping their hair back and they’re both wearing sweatshirts, the kind with the hood except the hood won’t stay up.

  Boy, Barry is a nice guy. I didn’t even have to ask him anything. As soon as he saw something was wrong he jumped in to help. I mean, he didn’t have to go out searching himself, but I guess that’s the way he is.

  I suppose it’s pretty nice of Jim, too. Except I don’t think of Jim as nice like Barry, which sounds peculiar. But I don’t mean it as a criticism of Jim, it’s just that now that I know them both a little better, I think Barry may be a nicer guy. I still dig Jim much more.

  “They didn’t say anything, just that they were going to try for flounder,” I tell Barry.

  “That means middle fishing,” he says to Jim, and he heads the boat out toward the center of the bay.

  It’s so rough now that it feels like we’re in the middle of a squall.

  “Hey, buddy,” Jim shouts to Barry, “this could be really dumb.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Going out in all this,” Jim says. “It’s getting too rough for this size boat. We should head back.”

  “We can’t!” I say first to Jim, then again to Barry, and I’m practically pleading. “We have to find them. Don’t you realize they’re just two little kids and Mr. Landry, and he must be at least—I don’t know—almost seventy. And I don’t even think he has a life jacket.”

  “Hey,” Jim shouts to me above the wind, “I know it’s serious, but I’m just saying we can’t handle it.”

  “We have to,” I say, mostly to Barry.

  “No, we don’t,” Jim tells me, “that’s what they’ve got the Coast Guard for. They know what they’re doing. They have the equipment, the power boats and helicopters and everything. We don’t belong in this thing. All we’re going to do is get ourselves in trouble.”

  Suddenly he got to be forty years old. I can’t believe he’s acting so awful.

  “You could be right,” Barry says, “but I’m willing to take the chance. I figure it’s safe enough to take a couple of fast swings around the area.”

  Hurray for Barry!

  “They’re probably holed up along the shore somewhere and we’re risking our lives for nothing.” Now Jim sounds almost nasty, but it’s two against one so there’s nothing he can do about it. For the first time since I’ve known Jim I feel angry at him. Even what he did last night didn’t make me feel this way.

  Barry steers the boat in big circles, trying to cover as much of the bay as he can. No luck. The sea keeps getting choppier and now it’s starting to rain. It really is a squall.

  “Look,” Jim says, “I told you you’re not going to find them. Come on, buddy, let’s head back. This is crazy.”

  “Please, Barry.” I practically beg him. “Just a little longer.”

  “It’s getting very hard to handle the wheel,” he says, and I can see it is because every time we hit a wave both of them have to hang on to the wheel for dear life.

  “Maybe we should head back.”

  “Smart boy,” Jim says, pleased that he won.

  Gross. How could he be pleased that he won such a horrible kind of argument!

  “How come,” I say to Jim, “if the Coast Guard is so great, we haven’t seen any of their boats, and no helicopters or anything else?”

  “Believe me, they’re out here,” he says, “looking in the right places. They do these kinds of searches twenty times a week.”

  “Maybe,” I say, “but if we haven’t seen them yet, they’re not looking around here, and if the kids are here they’re not going to find them. Barry?” I turn to him. “Can’t we just look around this part once more?”

  “Okay, we’ll head for that tower over there,” he says, pointing to a lighthouse on the mainland, “and then we’ll circle back around that cove. Okay, Jim?”

  “What am I supposed to say? It’s your boat,” he says, and he looks really annoyed.

  Barry heads the boat across the bay toward the tower, and we all keep looking around, trying to spot the kids and the old man. It’s getting harder and harder to see because the rain is coming down heavy now and the sky is black.

  I see a piece of wood in the water and my heart stops. Maybe it’s part of their boat, and I point it out to Barry (absolutely not to Jim) and he says, no, it’s only a log.

  “I told you we’re not going to find them,” Jim says to me. “We’re only one little boat on this whole great big bay. No way we can find them if they’re even out here. They’re probably back on shore and we’re risking our necks for nothing. God, what a dumb idea.”

  All the while he’s talking to him I’m busy searching the water. I don’t even look at him. I may not ever look at him again in my entire life.

  “Come on,” Barry tells him, “it was worth a try. The more people looking the better the chances of finding them.”

  “Baloney. They’re back at the dock,” Jim says, and I pray like crazy that this time he’s right.

  A bolt of lightning cuts through the rain and I jump six inches off the floor. I’m terrified of lightning on the water. I’m about to ask Barry what would ground the lightning on this boat, but I’m afraid he’ll say “us,” so I just swallow the question. I always knew I should have listened in that damn science class.

  Just as we’re making the last turn I think I spot something.

  “Wait! Wait!” I’m shouting and pointing over the side. “Over there!” But over there keeps changing because the boat is rolling so much. Whatever I saw is gone.

  Barry circles the area I was pointing to, but there’s nothing there. The rain is coming down in sheets now, and Barry turns the boat lights on—not that it helps us see, but at least other boats can see us.

  We search blindly for another ten or fifteen minutes and don’t see a thing. I’ve never felt so bad in my whole life.

&
nbsp; “Hey, look!” Barry suddenly shouts, pointing to something off the right side of the boat. “There is something there!”

  It takes all three of us to turn the boat and keep it heading into the wind. Whatever’s in front of us now isn’t very far away, but the going is so rough we can only inch along. A couple of times we lose sight of the thing, but Barry keeps the boat straight on fourty south on the compass. We’re practically on top of it before we see it again.

  It’s the boat with the kids and Mr. Landry!

  I don’t even bother saying, “I told you so,” to Jim. I’m so relieved to see them, even Mr. Landry, that tears well up in my eyes and I practically begin bawling out loud.

  The kids are huddled together in front of the mast in the cockpit, in water almost up to their waists. Mr. Landry is at the tiller trying to steer but doing nothing but spinning in circles. The sail is torn and flying in all directions. That must have been why they got lost. A sailboat’s useless without a sail.

  The kids go crazy when they see us. They start jumping up and down and waving, and we shout to them to sit down, but they can’t hear us over the motor and the storm. We motion wildly for them to sit. Mr. Landry gets the idea and with one hand still on the tiller leans way over and pulls them down.

  Barry motions for Jim to take the wheel and tells him to head off the bow of the other boat. He’s going to make a grab for their mast.

  Mr. Landry sees what we’re trying to do. He moves to the mast and wraps one arm around it and holds out the other to Barry.

  Jim swings the boat around twice, but both times it’s too wide and they miss each other. I hold on to Barry’s leg so he can lean out farther.

  Again Jim makes a pass at the little boat, and this time Barry grabs Mr. Landry’s hand. But a wave hits our boat and it breaks their grip. When the wave hits the dinghy it catches Mr. Landry off balance, and we all watch in horror as he slips off the narrow deck and into the water on the opposite side of their boat.

  I can hear the kids screaming and I start to scream myself. Barry grabs one of the lines and dives off after Mr. Landry. The kids are hysterical and hanging over the side. I know they’re going to fall in any second.