The Art of My Life

by Ann Lee Miller

  His left arm had fallen asleep. His teeth chattered. He scooted tighter against the cabin, blocked from the cold wind and Franco’s sight. His gaze fell on the dinghy trailing behind the Escape. He could go below for Aly, and they could make their escape in the row boat. The odds of his getting into the cabin undetected—much less, the two of them climbing back out without attracting Franco’s attention—were slim. And even if they could make it into the dinghy, he wouldn’t risk exposing Aly to the elements without food or water for God knew how long while they waited for rescue.

  Cal went up on one elbow and edged just high enough above the cabin to see Franco.

  Directly in Franco’s line of vision, Cal spotted Aly peering from under the propped-open fore hatch.

  Aly stood on the fore bunk, unlatched the overhead hatch, and raised it so slowly Vic wouldn’t notice even if he were looking at the hatch.

  Her free hand ran over the carpet indentations on her forehead where she’d begged God to keep Cal safe and rescue them both. She nudged the hatch another eighth of an inch open.

  Rifling through Franco’s backpack had produced their phones, but the Escape had traveled out of service range. She’d texted Fish anyway, just in case. No luck. It didn’t send.

  Finally, the hatch was open enough for her to see out.

  Vic sat facing her behind the wheel, the shotgun resting on the cockpit bench beside him. Cal had to be prone in the shadows on the aft deck.

  She felt the smooth skin of the grapefruit in her sweatshirt pouch for reassurance. It was a crazy idea that banked heavily on her belief that Franco was not a killer—at least not the kind who would shoot a person point blank. If this worked, her JV career as catcher would count for more than an ill-conceived attempt to convince her freshman boyfriend she was athletic.

  She cracked the hatch open another inch.

  Cal had to get to Franco before the guy saw Aly.

  “Hold it right there.” Franco’s voice rasped as he grabbed the shotgun off the bench and aimed it at Aly.

  Cal scrambled off the aft deck and made for Franco.

  Franco pivoted and trained the gun on him before he could make contact.

  Cal froze. In the background he could see Aly boosting herself out of the cabin. He couldn’t think what she was doing other than trying to get herself shot.

  With Franco distracted from the helm, the Escape veered into the wind, stopping the forward motion of the boat. The mainsail luffed frantically in the breeze.

  He had to keep Franco’s attention off Aly. “Look, you can’t get to Grand Bahama without my help. Let’s act like civilized people and—”

  Suddenly, shouting and bright light doused the cockpit.

  Cal reacted rather than thought and dove for Vic, knocking him into the companionway hatch.

  “Coast Guard. Put your hands in the air or we’ll shoot.”

  The gruff voice barking through the megaphone sounded oddly familiar.

  Fish.

  Cal jerked the gun out of Franco’s hand and flung it toward the wheel. He drove a punch into his gut.

  Franco slammed him against the steering column.

  Pain shot through Cal’s ribs and the back of his skull.

  Franco lunged for the gun.

  “Move and I’ll shoot.” Fish’s voice boomed from the aft deck.

  Fish had never fired anything more powerful than a BB gun and ten to one didn’t have a gun in his hands now.

  Cal heard a thump, and Franco’s head jerked to the side, his eyes wide with surprise.

  Cal made a split second decision to go for Franco instead of the gun and slammed him against the aft cabin.

  Franco’s head knocked against the mainsail winch, and he crumpled over the gun.

  A cracked grapefruit rolled off the seat and plopped onto the cockpit floor.

  Fish scuttled into the cockpit and rolled Franco off the gun.

  Cal cinched the sheet line around the inert Franco’s wrists.

  Aly stepped into the cockpit, grinning.

  Fish raised his voice. “Missy, radio the Coast Guard. Read them our location off the GPS. Tell them everything you know.”

  Cal jumped to his feet. “No! There’s a warrant out for my arrest.” His eyes shot to Aly. “Skipping probation meetings. I would have tested dirty. I’m sorry. I was going to tell you, but it never seemed like the right moment.”

  Fish grabbed his arm. “Take Zeke’s Ambition. Aly and I will handle things on the Escape and meet you back at the dock. The Coast Guard announced your coordinates on the emergency channel over an hour ago. Another call must have taken precedence. Get out of here. Fast.”

  Cal stood rooted to the spot. Fish jeopardized his career again for him, voluntarily this time. “Why are you doing this?”

  Fish shot him a half-smile. “Bubba Franks. Now, go!”

  Fish’s words propelled him to the deck, then a leap aboard Fish’s boat that Missy held in close by a painter.

  Fifth grade Bubba had stuffed scrawny fourth grade Fish into a Read-Pattillo Elementary dumpster every day for a week until Cal and Fish fought him together.

  Missy cast off, and jumped into the captain’s seat.

  The engine roared to life, and Cal watched Aly grow smaller and smaller as they hurtled into the night.

  Relief had barely eddied in his chest when Missy shouted. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.” She glanced over at him. “I love you. No matter what.”

  “I love you, too, Sissy-Missy. Thanks for helping Fish with the rescue.”

  “Hey, take over. I’ve never driven one of these things before.”

  He couldn’t help laughing in spite of everything. He nudged her out of the seat with his hip. Neither had he, but he was about to figure it out.

  Chapter 22

  January 28

  Have you ever had a painting or relationship that was snatched away before its time? What do you do with the agony left in its wake? I don’t want to waste my suffering. Or worse, distill it down to bitterness.

  Aly at www.The-Art-Of-My-Life.blogspot.com

  Cal had run out of Dr. Pepper this afternoon and now it was midnight. Aly’s two-day-old coffee sloshed in his stomach. He’d fought the Gulf Stream current for twenty-four hours and crashed somewhere around Jupiter, only to wake up panicked that the Coast Guard had found him.

  He’d slapped white paint over the Escape’s name on the transom, and started off again.

  He could have shot straight to the Bahamas from New Smyrna Beach, but thirty-four blue water hours one-manned was more than he’d wanted to handle. He’d made the right decision hugging the coast to West Palm Beach.

  Exhaustion draped him like a cast net weighed down with a hundred sinkers. He shifted into machine mode to knock out the last three hours to West Palm Beach.

  The baggie of stems and pieces he’d scavenged from Leaf’s food truck, duct-taped to the inside of the keel, taunted him like it had since he left New Smyrna Beach. His mind replayed Aly’s belief he could stay sober. She thought he gave in to despair too easily. Well, who wouldn’t give up—facing a life without Aly, without Fish and his family?

  He didn’t want to remember, but he’d nearly lost Aly by smoking while sailing. He’d made it this far without lighting up. He could make it the rest of the way.

  His eyes panned a three-sixty around the horizon and land surrounding the boat. Every light intensified, turning into a Coast Guard cutter. He was channeling Leaf’s paranoia along with his inability to make it in society. For the first time he resented his grandfather.

  Mom had beat the genetics she’d been dealt. He sat there, a hand on the wheel, his mind as blank as the night channel, asleep and awake at the same time.

  Then, thoughts sluggishly moved through his head. Mom had married Dad and normalcy. She’d started a business. Cared—too much—what people thought. But there was something else, something bedrock. God. She must have thrown her arms around God in a headlock at some point. That explai
ned why she crammed religion down him with his Flintstone vitamins.

  He had to have some of Dad’s laid back, relational genes, too. But he sure got Mom’s intensity, artistic bent. Life came hard for both of them.

  Mom had been different lately, almost like she was trying to accept him the way he was. In a searing moment of truth, he saw that his deeper connection was with his mother, not his father. In the next breath, he felt the loss of never seeing her again. Or Dad, Missy, Jesse and Kallie. Jillian and Chase’s small faces crawled through his mind. He’d never see the kids grow up. He’d miss the day Fish decided to forgive him.

  Wind whistled through him, whipping their faces, and a lifetime of memories away.

  He dashed below for a sketchpad and pencil. But when he pressed the pencil to the paper, pain paralyzed him. He fired the pad and pencil through the open hatch.

  He tied his sweatshirt hood tighter and tried to think about nothing for long stretches. After so many hours under sail the wind seemed to wear away his skin, snake into him through the pores on his face. The drone hummed in his ears till he wondered if it could drive him insane. Mental health wasn’t a strong suit in his family.

  Aly. He’d resisted thinking about her for twenty-nine and a half hours, but his mind and body were too tired to push her away one more time. He’d thought it was just the Gulf Stream fighting against him, but everything in him clawed to get back to Aly. If he turned around he wouldn’t be going back to Aly. He’d be going to jail.

  Razor-wire topped fences, cement block walls, metal bunks, every day the same as the last. For five years. No way.

  Then Aly was in his arms. He breathed her. Made love to her. Held on and never let go. His chest quaked. Again. The numbers on the GPS blurred. A knot formed in his chest. His shoulders shook.

  He wiped the wetness out of his eyes with the arm of his sweatshirt and stared at the GPS. West Palm.

  His body on autopilot, he dropped sail, anchored, and fell onto his bunk more tired than he’d been in his life.

  Tomorrow he’d sail the last ten hours to Grand Bahama—his future loomed colorless and empty as a rusted fifty-gallon drum. His last conscious thought—a plea, a prayer.

  Aly.

  Aly stared into her morning coffee, wondering if she had slept at all. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw Vic Franco and his shotgun or Cal saying there was a warrant out for his arrest.

  Somehow she and Fish had given the Coast Guard their statements without telling any outright lies. When they docked the Escape, her mother, Kallie—minus Jesse who had taken the kids home to bed—Cal’s folks, and Henna cheered. Every one of them hugged her and Fish. Even Starr, who actually said she wanted to be closer to Aly in the future.

  Missy had gone home to crash, and no one knew where Cal was, least of all her.

  And she still didn’t. She’d been glued to her phone for the thirty-six hours since she’d last seen him. She slept curled around it, hoping Cal would call—somehow erase the hurt that he hadn’t told her about the arrest warrant; tell her he’d worked things out with his probation officer—but he hadn’t.

  She’d been an idiot to think he wouldn’t ignore texts and disappear for days at a time now that he’d told her he loved her.

  She stared at the phone willing it to come to life. It vibrated and shimmied. She stared at the pink metal in shock, then lunged across the counter. Cal?

  Fish.

  Her heart sunk. “What’s up?”

  “Cal took off on the Escape the night of the boat-jacking. Left me a note saying he wanted to get his head together for a couple of days, not to call the Coast Guard. I didn’t think too much about it till the police showed up this morning looking for him.”

  Fear tasted like she’d run her tongue across a window screen. “Did you tell his family?” “Just you. I don’t know what to do. I’ve got a charter that leaves in ten minutes, and I won’t be back till four thirty.”

  “I’ll handle it. Thanks for calling.” She shut her phone and dropped her head onto her folded arms. “Oh, God.”

  If Cal had wanted her to know where he’d gone, he would have called, stopped by. He was in some kind of trouble. He’d run, that much was obvious. He’d told her he’d never go back to jail. His family would be frantic.

  She swallowed the metallic taste. Where would Cal run?

  There was only one place she could think of to look. She downed her coffee, grabbed her keys and purse, and jumped into her car. She had to try.

  Starr gripped the bar and stared unseeingly at Jackson’s silhouette. Behind him, morning sun burned through the glass wall.

  Cal, violating probation, gone. Aly didn’t know where.

  Starr sank to the floor and clenched her arms around her knees. He’d run. A shudder passed through her body. She’d thought Cal was staying away from weed. And Henna had gotten rid of his supply. He’d been out of jail six months. Starr had almost started to breathe regularly.

  How could Cal, who had always had family to back him up, live on the run? He would progress to harder drugs, die with a needle in his arm. Alone.

  She vaguely sensed Jackson lifting her, cajoling her to stand and come with him.

  How could they find Cal? Where would he go? Did he have friends she didn’t know about? He’d barely been out of New Smyrna Beach.

  Jackson walked her across the drive, into the house, and released her beside their bed. She lay back and stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d whimsically stuck to the ceiling, her version of camping out.

  Always before she could dull feeling with activity—prune the lemon tree, clean out the pantry, teach a class, dance. But now, she lay still on the bed, a hundred-pound ingot of fear and hurt planted on her chest. If you could divorce your child and cease loving him, she would.

  Jackson sat there for a long time stroking her hair absently and she didn’t have the will to bat his hand away. There was no comfort. His shoulders that had always been so powerful, slumped with helplessness. He, who had comforted so many, had no words for himself, for her.

  Their pain rose in the room like dirty water in a car that had gone over a bridge. Her body lay paralyzed. Not even an eyelid blinked. But her mind dragged her back to the first time she entered the jail to visit Cal. Would Cal be found and sent back?

  She’d walked across the thin, worn carpet of the visitor’s room, scanning the prisoners’ faces projected onto computer screens separated by study carrels. She’d passed visitors parked on mismatched chairs—a black woman balancing a toddler and an infant on her lap, an old man in grease-stained jeans. Dirty, poor, amoral by association. Now she was one of them.

  “I’ll give you something to cry about.” The words her father had used to stop her tears decades ago clamped down on her. They cinched the pain inflating and deflating her lungs until she could barely suck oxygen from the air.

  She sunk onto the visitor’s chair and curled her fingernails into the hard plastic seat. Her gaze welded to the video monitor, and through it, to her son’s hungry eyes, scanning her face as she consumed his.

  If she pressed her palm against the cement block wall and Cal did the same, she could almost touch him—if he wasn’t squirreled away in some distant part of the jail.

  Her parents had dug a saltwater spring of tears she should have cried. But in the past twenty-four hours Cal drilled even deeper and cracked a fault in her foundation. Ice water—fear, despair, loss—flowed in and chilled her core.

  Cal’s gaze, mahogany with anger, hurt, skittered from the webcam. Sea-bleached hair her fingers once clutched kinked against the shoulders of his orange jumpsuit as though waiting to spring back around her knuckles.

  She searched beneath the unnatural pallor of his tanned skin for the six-year-old who had taken Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes’ name. The irony of a preacher’s son called John Calvin Koomer caged in the Volusia County Correctional Facility fanned hysteria through her. But she stilled her body and concentrated on inhaling the smell of pencil
eraser scrubbed across a piece of paper. She glanced down, expecting to see rubber shavings, but only her purse sat on the shelf.

  The scratch of Cal rubbing the stubble on his chin came through the mic. He opened his mouth, then closed it, locking in whatever thoughts he might have voiced.

  She knew what she needed to say. I love you. Nothing you do will ever make me stop loving you. The words had come to her in the half-sleep spanning the hours she’d lain in bed spooned to Jackson, long after his shoulders had ceased to quake with grief. Words she was certain God wanted her to say.

  She cleared her throat, and Cal’s eyes darted to the monitor, pliable, needy. She hadn’t seen the soft Cal in such a long time, she hardly recognized him. A kernel of warmth burst open in her chest, and her arms ached to hold him.

  Behind her an oscillating fan creaked and started its journey in the opposite direction.

  She still loved him even though he’d just ruined a lifetime of salvaging her reputation—the one her parents started annihilating before her birth. It would take a miracle to keep this episode of Cal’s life out of the The Hometown News—one God was unlikely to give up.

  I love you stalled on her tongue.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  She wondered if he read the battle inside her. Of the three kids, Cal knew her the best.

  She and Jackson had been too lenient, too strict, too stupid, too blind. They must have done something to deserve public humiliation. Only minorities and white trash landed in jail.

  Cal hooded his eyes, shutting her out, and last night’s fear surged into her stomach. “Are you okay?”

  “Just great.”

  She flinched at his sarcasm.

  Cal sighed, relenting. “The holding cell in New Smyrna Beach was the worst. The metal door clanged shut. I had all night to stare at the leftover ink on my fingers and think. Not knowing how long I’ll be locked up—”