"So your parents had an accident the night after a DEA search was executed. Stranger things have happened," he said. "Perhaps the DEA was suspicious only because your father made too many trips to Jamaica. Maybe he accidentally brushed elbows with the wrong guys in port. You know what a friendly guy he was."
I spun in my chair to look at him. "Do you know this for a fact?"
"No. I don't know anything for a fact."
I groaned, flinging my arms at the book. "Look at all this paper!"
"Yes. The academics are very endeared to the stuff. The more paper the more respectable the project. That doesn't fly with me—"
I exhaled, and what sounded like half laugh, half yelp barreled out with it. I was thinking of Emmett's words in his journal when he'd become so impressed with the DEA. I have never, ever seen so much paperwork in all my life. I shook off the thought.
"He said he took only one leap of faith in all of that ... which is that they're dead!"
"He's taken a hundred leaps of faith!" Mr. Church countered. "He's taken no fewer than you did last year."
I started to deny it, but he looked so sure that finally my mouth stopped running. I just huffed, out of breath.
"For one thing, don't you think it is a major major leap of faith to accuse decent, normal people like your parents with actions of that nature?"
"Yes!" I banged on the table again, surprising myself, though I couldn't say which surprised me more, the quickness of my answer or how stupid I felt for not having asked Emmett that. I tried to remember why I hadn't.
"He was making it sound like everybody was doing it, or being tempted to do it—" I turned to see how Mr. Church would respond to that, and he was shaking his head, focusing out the window.
"Five vessels were either caught or suspected in the years surrounding your folks' disappearance, including Riley's. Let's say there were twice that many involved, just for the sake of argument. There are dozens of freighter ships pulling in and out of the Basin every week. The ratio would be about the same as the number of kids in your school who decide to become drug dealers to those who don't."
I wiped my eyes again, liking his answer maybe. I said more quietly, "He found drugs in my dad's desk."
I could hear him riffling pages in the book.
"What, this? Big, bad marijuana? I've smoked a few pipes with your father" he said, which snapped my head up. "And your mother too. Yes, Mommy, too! They were in college. Going to parties thrown by the oceanographers. I was forty-two, having a hard time growing up, I guess. Vietnam can do that to you." He chuckled, then tossed the book back on the couch. "Who knows, maybe it had been there for eight years. I'm surprised your brother didn't have it analyzed."
There was a ring of disgust in his cackle. "However I'm shocking you about the venial sins of your parents' youth, the truth is, it was a major leap of faith for your brother to go from a sandwich bag to 'importing with the intent to distribute.' The only place he's not taking a major leap is in noting the close proximity of a DEA search to their actual disappearance."
Well, that was a hard thing to call a coincidence. I tried to think of myself as somebody else—somebody not related to my mom and dad. It would have looked like a hell of a coincidence—enough to make me scoff quietly, the way Emmett did at the widow Riley's story.
"It's a leap of faith for him to dismiss your old friend The She," he said. "How about that?"
I dropped my forehead into my hand, taking one final big breath and letting it out. "Don't even go there. Don't freak me out like that."
"I believe I told you last time I absolutely believe in The She."
"No." I only smacked the table this time. "You said it's possible there's some 'dark force' over the water."
"Let's not get into a semantic argument. Whatever you want to call it. Perhaps the artists' renditions are a bit on the dramatic side."
"Well, I don't believe in The She!" I hopped in the chain "At least I'm trying not to! There's only so far that I can go and feel like a sane person! You can't live your life like you're in some sort of psycho altered state!"
Mr. Church scrunched his eyebrows like maybe he couldn't figure out my point. "Do you believe in God?"
"I suppose," I said.
"Do you believe in angels?"
I shrugged. "Probably not."
"Why not?"
I watched him for a minute, trying to decide why not. "Because they're too much like leprechauns or elves or fairy godmothers."
"And what does 'God' sound like? What's the difference? Why accept one bigger force of goodness without the smaller ones? On what grounds are you dismissing one and preserving the other?"
I dropped my head onto the table. "You sound like Emmett."
"Do I? At times there's a razor-thin line between truth and insanity. You have to hit it just right. Your brother would have to believe this: Opposites need each other. If you choose to believe in a force of good, you would also have to choose to believe in a force of evil. Because without the concept of evil to help define it, the concept of good would be all but valueless. Do you understand?"
I watched him retreat to the stove, shaking my head in awe and exhaustion. "What do you do, sit out here your whole life and ponder all sorts of weirdness?"
"Mmm ... I fish and crab, too." He shook around a pot filled with water that was steaming. "Sorry, I don't have any marshmallows."
He was trying to be funny, I guess, but my head was too busy trying to pull some sense out of his twisting train of thought. "You can't be saying that ... if I believe in God, I have to believe in The She?"
"No, I'm saying if you believe in a force of good, you can't be dismissive of a force of evil. I'm not saying it has to bear fangs and rise out of the deep and shriek. But I've heard enough about that shrieking, lord knows. If I'm going to believe in a dark force over the water why not believe it has a will, and a character, and can choose to expel an audible sound? On what grounds would I dismiss that?"
I looked at Grey, who looked blankly from me to Mr. Church, but her eyes rolled a little anxiously as they fell again.
"I think there's a scientific explanation for that noise, and someday they'll find it," I said, for her sake as much as anything.
"Scientific explanations. Philosophic explanations. Did you know we're not even sure the universe actually runs on a mathematical system of tens? Our own numbers, which are the basis of proof for most everything these days, are just a theory. The application of them is a leap of faith. Your brother's not so different from Bloody Mary."
I didn't feel like standing up for Emmett right now, though I didn't laugh at him, either. I watched Mr. Church dump boiling water into a cup, put powdered chocolate on top, and look around at the counter: I guess he was looking for a spoon he couldn't find, because he finally stirred the cocoa with a pen. His hands looked so incredibly normal. Just weathered hands that had pulled on a lot of rods and traps and nets. I watched one wrap around the cup as he brought it over to me.
"What's up with your hands, Mr. Church?" I was still thinking hazily of them as having some extreme power of suggestion on the human mind. He had been beating up on Emmett's arguments enough that I could almost be curious about them again, though I was very skeptical. I still had the memory of how they had turned my body kind of cold all the way through. It was interesting, if nothing else. "When did you first start using them that way?"
He put the cup down in front of me, and I wrapped my hand around it to get my fingers warmer, They weren't icy, just clammy. The place was a lot warmer than you would think. There was a woodstove inside the fireplace, and it was huffing and charging full force.
"When I was a prisoner of war three or four South Vietnamese prisoners were being held there along with the Americans, and I noticed them doing this thing—clapping their hands, rubbing them together and pressing them to one another's heads. I finally asked what it was all about, and they said it helped them see their families and what they were doing."
&n
bsp; "And you just believed them?"
He raised his eyebrows and let them fall again. "Not at first. But there was a Mrs. Church back then. I missed her; and I wanted to know what she was up to."
"So ... all the Americans started doing it?"
"They tried. After a time. It's amazing what you'll believe when your discharge date is three months behind you and yet you're still in Vietnam. I don't think it worked for too many of them. In fact, I may have been the only one."
I looked him up and down as he shrugged, like the explanation for that was beyond him.
"How do you know it worked?"
"I wouldn't say it worked in the sense that I got any gratification out of it. I discovered through those experiences that my wife had left me for a man I used to work with. If nothing else, it helped prepare me for coming home to no one."
"You saw your wife with somebody else? While you were a POW?" That kind of sucks, I figured, watching him nod, then I remembered what I was supposed to be arguing for. I found myself leaning to the side and saying, "Oh, bullshit."
I kind of flinched at the sound of it, but it had felt like such a natural thing to say.
He raised his eyebrows again, like he was used to responses like that. "You see, to know and to prove are two different things. You can see that, can't you?"
I shook my head after a minute, more focused on the idea that I was more insane this year than when I had come here last year. Then, I'd come across the bay to Sassafras, imagining that the water was going to suddenly part and some hag was going to thrust herself out of a whirlpool and shriek, "I've long been waiting for you!"
I hadn't heard Emmett's little theories on that trip. On this trip I'd spent a couple of moments hoping that The She would rise out of the back bays and start showering me with salt and garlic. Believing in The She was better than believing in the DEA, I figured. I was twice as psycho this year.
"Maybe your brother needs to remember things a certain way, too."
"My brother"—I flopped my head onto my hand, figuring I could crawl onto the floor and fall asleep in front of his fireplace—"is the most honest person I have ever known."
"He's a great kid," Mr. Church agreed softly, almost inaudibly, but I flipped my eyes up, out onto the meadows at the use of the word kid. Emmett was twenty-five. I hadn't heard anyone call him a kid in a long time. I wondered if Church had said it that way on purpose. It made me remember Emmett's face when he was a kid in a laughing, carefree house, where the people seemed so not entirely upright ... but just kind of—
"Emmett, if you do that again at my table, you're gonna wear my food instead of eat it."
"It was the dog, Mom!" He's laughing down at Otis, who's crashed out on the floor, banging his seventeen-year-old tail against the tile. Otis doesn't care what he gets blamed for.
Mom scoots her chair back and marches over to the counter, while we crack up. Dad calls it the joys of living with three men, but she just doesn't think we're funny. She gets mad. We wait till her back is turned, and thumbs fly to foreheads.
"You ate it," Dad says.
"No, you ate it."
"You ate it."
"Well, since you all ate it, I guess you're too stuffed for dessert. Otis, you want blueberry pie, my man?" She lets him eat some off her fork. That's one of their tricks.
"But, Mommy! I didn't eat it this time!"
Emmett and Dad look at me, and they both crack up. Dad's turning to look in stunned awe at Mom, who's down on her knees. She's holding a long piece of piecrust between her lips, and Otis sticks his graying snout over the whole thing. Their lips meet.
"Your mother is having a supreme moment of hypocrisy, men. I think this means we all get pie ... regardless of who ate what."
Mom pulls this ritual with Otis about every other night, but Dad is always stunned by it. He's looking at them, not us, so Emmett takes advantage. He leans across the table so his smile's right in my face.
"You always eat it, you rancid little wet fart."
"Emmett. He wasn't always like he is. He used to be fun. What ... made him like this?"
"I don't know."
I don't bother to look at Mr. Church reciting his famous last words. "I mean, it's not that he's not fun sometimes now..." I thought of him laughing at one of Mrs. Ashaad's jokes. He smiled a lot. He laughed once in a while. "Maybe fun isn't the right word. Maybe he never really is fun anymore. He's just ... pleasant. So he fools you."
"What does he do for fun?" Mr. Church asked.
It took me a minute to think of anything. "He watches SpongeBob SquarePants." I could feel my eyes locking in the sockets from the exhaustion of seeing memories. I just ' stared into the table. "He's obsessed with the fact that when SpongeBob gets full of water and blows up ten times his size, his teeth get bigger too."
I started to laugh a little but my smile only crawled up halfway when—
—I drop the shoe box so I can put my fingers to my ears, but I'm stepping all over navy men and I'm heavy and my heavy arms won't reach my head. I know The She—
The closer I get to Dad's office, the louder her shrieking gets.
"...we have a list ... We are being ... sucked—Mayday, Mayday!"
I jumped out of the chair, heard the mug spill over, but I was pressing the palms of my hands to my eyes, to keep everything black. "What is wrong with me, with my brain?"
"What are you thinking?" His voice came quietly right in my face.
"I keep having these memories, today and yesterday! They come out of nowhere! I don't want to go there, I—"
"I'd say that's normal, after you hear news that shocks you."
"I don't want to see my parents like Emmett sees them! I don't want to remember them that way! What if I remember them that way?"
"What if you don't?"
The shrieking mixes with her voice while she's talking to me, to Dad, it's all mixed together. "Oh, shit, we got the baby, Wade! Evan! Tell Emmett to ... Wade! What the hell is that? Over the port stern! Look with your eyes! Mother of God!"
"She said, 'Mother of God.'"
I could feel his hands on my arms—normal hands, nothing cold or magical. But I wouldn't stop digging at my eyeballs with my palms.
"So?" Church said.
"So, that is one hell of a damn thing for someone to say who's trying to lie their way out of trouble! She's got to bring the Mother of God into it?" I yelled.
It proved nothing, which left me more frustrated, more harshly pushing on my eyeballs, but this time, it was for wanting to see something, not wanting to black it out. I was just too curious.
"Emmeeeeeeeettt!" I'm a whale, trying to climb stairs on a tail fin. I'm stuck in slow motion. Screaming in whale. "Emmeeeeeeeettt!
"Come down here!" I'm falling backward, blacking out, stumbling backward one-two-four stairs ... gripping the railing. I'm all but lying on it, hearing my dad's words..."He's not a big baby, Mary Ellen! He's just got a big imagination! He'll be better than Emmett in a crisis, I'm telling you—"
And I'm crying like a two-year-old baby, but I'm gripping that railing. The shrieking has stopped. The wind still whips up there, but I'm back to myself, out of the whale's body, or whatever makes me so heavy when the shrieking comes. I'm going up and up till I see the door....
"Aw, shit ... I don't think I actually did black out!" It's still gray, though I see traces of Mr. Church's head in deep gray with a light gray halo around it. "I don't think I did!"
He asked, "Why is that so upsetting?"
"Because! It's in Emmett's journal that way! He said I came to the widow's walk and got him! I was thinking he remembered it wrong. Why is he always right? Why am I always wrong?"
"I don't think that's always true."
I let the damn thing roll as—the wind is dying a little, but it's turning me to ice so I can't scream, can't distract Emmett, who is watching the sea and speaking in a low voice, and I think he's got Opa on the cordless.
"Emmett!" He won't listen to me, won't look. I s
hake him. "She's shrieking. She's taking the Goliath/ Listen to me!"
He's turning. I can see the whites of his eyes. His mouth is still moving a little.
There's no cordless. There's only a piece of paper in his hand, the one that he'd taken out of Dad's desk. It blows from his hand, flies through the sleet, and disappears over the bayberry trees toward the roaring surf. He darts past me and takes the stairs down two at a time.
My laughter peeled out, sounding strangely out of place and irreverent alongside this terrible memory. I didn't know why I was laughing, except that I could jump into my brother's skin sometimes, and I could feel his future embarrassment over this moment, and somehow it struck me funny. "Dad taught him to recite the captain's prayer three times, then spit off the widow's walk ... try to hit the sea. That's what he was doing. He wasn't in the shower."
I was all but squawking like a chicken, and Mr. Church ignored it.
"And then what?"
I shut up, got serious, because he was punching the phone buttons. I'm hearing water crashing, a deluge, and loud bangs and growling and snarling and crunching, and my mom screaming a Mayday. Coordinates. I'm grabbing a pencil, writing them while Mom screams for my dad to shut up and do something. Emmett backs into me, pressing buttons on the cordless.
He screams, "Shit!" at the top of his lungs. His fingers are shaking too hard. He keeps dialing the number wrong.
My dad's voice wails from far off as Emmett dials again. " Yea ... walk ... shadow of death..."
"Goddamn it!" Emmett hurls the phone into the corner and runs from the room. I pick up the corded phone on the wall in the kitchen. I call the operator. Get the Coast Guard. They hear a little kid's trembling voice talking about The She. They hang up. I run to Dad's office, get the cordless Emmett just threw. I get the operator back as I'm climbing the stairs, get the Coast Guard again.
Emmett's screaming on the widow's walk again. I'm trying to shut him up so he'll speak to the Coast Guard, but he won't stop yelling.
"Give them back, you fucking bitch! You fucking whore, I'll kill you myself! I'm going to kill you, you cocksucking whore!"