IV
"But who's to say what's true and what's not,
what's real and what's imagined, what's the way it is,
and what's what you want it to be?"
—ED OKONOWICZ, author of
Terrifying Tales of the Beaches and Bays
* * *
EPILOGUE
I threw my mortarboard in the air with a hundred other fools out in Fairmount Park on a clear spring day. The sun was warm, and I should have been extremely happy, except I was still numb from having heard Grey's name announced among the graduates. I'd last seen her six and a half months ago. I made my way over to Mrs. Ashaad and saw my brother doing the same.
He caught me just before I reached her and gave me a bear hug, laughing a little. "I have to say, Evan, you gave me a few scares during the past four years. Congratulations, my man."
He stuck out his hand, and I skinned it, turning to Mrs. Ashaad.
"You gave me a few scares, too." She hugged me, and I caught her by the shoulders.
"You graduated Grey."
"Yes, I did. She completed the work."
"From where? If she did that, then you have to know where she is."
"No, I don't. Her last work came in late. What else is new? We were able to process it in time. Come to my car with me. There was something in the last bit of work addressed to you."
I followed along half thrilled, half angry, knowing that this was not possible if Mrs. Ashaad didn't have an address. While we were walking, my mind roared back to how she had slipped through my fingers—by throwing me a curveball I never would have expected.
I'd docked her dad's mangled boat when we reached the Basin, and I had actually cut a stern line and had it in my hand. I was playing cowboy or something I hadn't really thought through, except if she didn't tell me where she was going, I had some game plan to tie her up.
I looked up on the dock, and there were two men standing there in trench coats, with what looked like business suits on underneath. It was after midnight. One reached a hand down and pulled Grey up onto the dock. Neither said "hello," but the second one said, "We were listening to the Coast Guard radio and thought we might have had a fatality. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine." She turned, reached into her weather-suit pocket, and tossed me her car keys. I caught them. "Will you drive my car back to Philly?"
I looked back and forth between her and these two men I had never seen before, figuring she would introduce them. She asked them, "What should I do about the boat?"
"Leave it. We'll have it taken care of," the first one said.
"Evan, just leave it. Leave everything, okay?" She took two steps backward up the dock, and the two men fell in with her. She walked backward like that, staring and staring at me, until she finally blew me a kiss and turned. I didn't know if they were uncles or people from Saint E's. And I never saw her again.
I figured I would smooth talk Mrs. Ashaad out of her address somehow, some way, though she had denied having any knowledge of Grey's whereabouts up until a month ago, when I had finally stopped asking.
Mrs. Ashaad was parked in a VIP spot, so we didn't have to walk very fan She opened her back door, and sure enough this package she pulled out was merely a FedEx envelope. It was misshapen, as if it had once been full of papers, but now there was only a small envelope left in it. She handed the envelope to me, and I saw my name in pretty handwriting that sent chills down me.
"She said to give it to you on your graduation day," she muttered. "It's a present of some sort."
I tore it open, expecting a lengthy letter of explanation—where she was, why she'd never contacted me, and why she came to our town house and picked up the car without saying squat to me, without even ringing my doorbell. I still had the keys.
But it wasn't a letter. At least, not one from her. It was a report. A lot was blacked out with thick black marker like the name of the company, the names in the to and from lines, and any part of the address except the state, Florida.
The report said, "This is in response to the dive of the wreck of the Sanskrit, owner operator James Diaz, having foundered off the coast of southern Florida. Remains from eight victims were removed via photo arms of Bubble Drum II, and analysis of those remains took place on May 3 at the LabTech facility in east Miami.
"Be advised that based on the dental records and DNA samples provided, none of those remains belongs to Wade E. Barrett of West Hook, nor his wife, Mary Ellen Starn, also of West Hook.
"A transcript from LabTech is provided. We hope you found our bubble drum and diving facility as accommodating as you expected.
"Yours truly." And a blacked-out name.
I slid down the side of Mrs. Ashaad's cat, staring at this piece of paper until Emmett finally grabbed it from my hand. He dropped to his knees and let out a loud yell, half from shock, half a victory whoop. He's a much faster reader than I am. I didn't know where to land a thought. I wanted to think about taking that letter to the authorities, though I didn't really know which ones would change the status of my parents from "missing at sea" to "died at sea," or even if that letter would be enough evidence that they died up here in the canyons.
And I couldn't get rid of the image of Grey stuffing that money envelope down her coveralls. I had guessed it to be somewhere around twenty-five thousand dollars, and she'd most likely used every dime getting herself down in a bubble drum, finally. She should have used it to live on. She used it on us, and I had no way to thank her.
I reached around and grabbed the FedEx packet off Mrs. Ashaad's seat as Emmett passed the paper to her while giving more shocked victory yells.
The words WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM stared back at me. I dropped the envelope, dropped my chin to my chest as my heart fell. The two men in suits had been FBI, I realized, and Mrs. Ashaad's broken-record lecture made sense all of a sudden. "Evan, she's not coming back, or if she is, it will be in a long, long time. You have to remember her in the wonderful way that you do, and move on with your life." I could just never accept it. Now, I guess I had to.
There was a little note attached to the report, in her pretty handwriting, but all it said was, "Thought this might come in handy. Have a great life. I will think of you every day. Stay good, Grey."
During the summer I looked at the pages over and over and I would hold that report up to the light, trying to see something through the black lines. It would be her new name, new address. I could see only a couple of little indents, and I could have sworn, when I held the paper in just a certain way, that the last name she had chosen was Starn.
I knew this report didn't mean that she was actually living in Florida. She could be living in goddamn Wyoming and just went down there with a new ID, with whatever the government gives you. Her name did come up in the Philadelphia newspaper starting in June. I was staying with Opa that summer and might have missed the whole thing if Emmett hadn't been good enough to check every Philly paper's Web site daily. She had not been exaggerating about her father.
The FBI had arrested fifteen men in a sting that involved extortion, bribery, drugs, and money laundering. Her testimony implicated her father and two of the other men, and the stories read like the thing had snowballed. After she told what she knew, they all started to turn on one another: Some of the more gabby newspapers liked the idea that a daughter would turn on her father; they put out a bunch of articles, and one even ran her picture. I was made so sick by the whole thing, the only one I would read all the way through was the Inquirer. Even that was sickening. After the story blathered on through the counts of everything in the world that had been thrown at "Philadelphia Attorney Kevin Shailey," it listed child abuse, including incest and prostitution of a minor.
Another story told even more. If the people at Saint E's had convinced her she'd get some sort of heroic reception, they had miscalculated. Youth and family services had gotten her some kind of specialized lawyer because one set of defense lawyers actually planned to "use the sex charges to discre
dit her testimony," to try to show that she made up the extortion charges against the other two men because she was mad at her father: It just looked like an enormous mess and the ultimate test of a girl's sanity.
This trial started in August, and I knew she would be in Philly for three days. I was staying with Opa, working the docks and trying to start a fishing boat rental business, at least on paper with Opa's help. It took everything in my heart and soul not to get in my car and drive up there. I got as far as the mainland twice, and forced myself to turn around. I was just remembering her pride and how difficult the newspaper said the questions would be. I didn't want her looking into my face while she was telling it.
They kept her on the witness stand for three days, from eight-thirty in the morning until five-thirty at night. When I knew she had left Philly again, I went over to my house in West Hook and sat there and wept a few times. I' could feel her great will to do good for people, which made the horrors of her mouth seem so minuscule in comparison. Then I felt my mother's presence come around and tell me nicely to get a stiff upper lip.
On August 16, a year to the day after the Girl Scout's drowning, Grey's father was sentenced to fifty years in a federal prison with the possibility of parole after twenty years. That final newspaper article said that he and one of the two other guys went down based mostly on what Grey had to tell. One of those newspapers had joined forces with Saint Elizabeth's, apparently, and they started some sort of fund in her honor to help kids who had to turn in their parents for criminal activity. Grey wasn't around to receive anything from it, and the newspaper even said she might never know about it.
In August, I got the idea to call the LabTech place to find out what DNA evidence she had presented on my parents. They said two toothbrushes and two hairbrushes, which could mean only one thing. At some point, she had come to West Hook and had gotten into my parents' house. It wasn't hard. That window Emmett left open the night of the disappearance never shut well or locked.
When I figured that out, my intuition drew me back there, and I went around inhaling. In certain places I could smell that combination of fabric softener shampoo, soap, and that just Great Grey Shailey Smell that had stamped itself on my brain. One of the places I could smell it the best was on the pillow in my old bedroom. It was unmistakable. She had laid on my bed.
I moved into the house in September and I started sleeping in my own bed again, and I slept with that pillow beside me, afraid that if I lay on it too hard, the smell would disappear.
And I guess all that sounds a little crazy, especially since I don't remember feeling that horrible about my own parents' loss. I guess maybe I felt it horribly, but not in this way of having had my skin ripped from my body. It was a hard autumn, which had been preceded by a hard summer.
Though it was a good time in many ways, too.
When I came to stay with Opa for the summer I took a room that had a view of the harbor from three sides. I woke up every morning and looked out for about half an hour before I got up.
My first day at work on the docks, I showed up expeering just to pitch in, scrub floors, and fill bait buckets, which is about what happened. But when I first got out of the car with Opa, about a hundred people flew out of the marina building holding balloons, throwing confetti, and holding up photos of my parents. It was nuts. I had no clue while I was sitting up in Philly how much my parents had meant to the islanders, or how many of the islanders' opinions of them were like Mr. Church's.
One lady had painted seamen's portraits of Dad and Mom and reminded me that Dad had portraits of all the ancestors in the attic. I figured I'd get them all down someday soon and try to hang them.
Emmett was up in Philly that day, and I wished he had been in East Hook. I thought our experiences at sea might have changed his mind about his life's direction. But not even surviving a sixty-five-foot wave had managed to do that. The changes I saw in him were slow, painful, yet sometimes funny. He came down for the annual Maritime Memorial Service, and he blessed himself after the prayer, Afterward, we walked home on the beach and he threw something into the surf—a black book, though I'm not sure whether it was the DEA report or his dissertation.
I do know his dissertation had been rejected a few days earlier He had tried to stick with his basic premise, but he laid in some added things: "Quotes by weird guys like C. S. Lewis and Michael Polanyi," he told me, as if these names were new and intriguing to him. I'd never heard him mention either before. He said the department was right to reject it, because the quotes toppled other arguments, and he could see that now. He needed to start from scratch.
He spent the month of July with us in East Hook, thinking the change of scene would help his writer's block. And when it didn't, he turned into more of the Emmett I used to know. He would lose his temper then become extremely apologetic, as if I cared. I would try to bait him, like I did when I was a little kid and I knew I was within arm's reach of Mom. We were grown now, and I didn't need Mom or Dad holding him off, but we frequently ended up in a wrestling match on the floor of the family room, which sent Opa into peals of laughter It added some kind moments to a difficult period for us.
One day when he couldn't write, Emmett got to clicking around on the Internet, something I'd noticed him doing a lot of, and he started to laugh hysterically.
"Read this," he said. I wasn't surprised by the tide, "Danger on the Seas As Walls of Water Sink Tankers," because he was always surfing for something to "prove" my parents got taken by a wave. It was published in a newspaper called The Observer out of the United Kingdom, dated Sunday, November 10, 2002.
"They are the stuff of legend and maritime myth: giant waves, taller than tower blocks, that rise out of calm seas and destroy everything in their paths," it read. "For years scientists and marine experts have dismissed such stories as superstition. Walls of water do not rise out of the blue, they said. But now research has revealed that 'killer waves' do exist and regularly devastate ships around the world. They defy all scientific understanding and no craft is capable of withstanding their impact."
"They don't know about you, my man." Emmett held out his hand for me to skin, and I kept reading, though only one other line was understandable to me. "These mammoth events are not tidal waves or tsunamis, however. Nor are they caused by earthquakes or landslides. They are single, massive walls of water that rise up—for no known reason—and destroy dozens of ships and oil rigs every year."
"Looks like they don't know about The She, either" I said. "Are you going to send this to the DEA?"
Emmett sighed for a long time before shaking his head. "Maybe when I have about twenty-five things like this. Maybe when we can finally explain that shrieking, too. It's insidious, their mindset. I'm telling you. I would know."
He's found nothing yet to explain a shrieking that one person can hear and another can't, and nothing to really explain the heaviness that would come and go in my limbs, Grey's limbs. He's patient, but I think the most unsettling thing for him, beyond his struggle with his dissertation, is having to believe in something that he knows but can't prove. He says it's deeply humbling.
It's still difficult for us both sometimes. A year has passed since that Thanksgiving trip to East Hook, and everything has changed. But being that it's November again and the smell of that pillow is starting to leave, I spend time with a face that's wet and a gut that is bone-dry of any intuition as to where Grey Shailey is ... or if I will ever see her again. It's almost as if she were strong enough to will away my intuition, or as much of it as concerns her.
It's also difficult to live without having any evidence as to exacdy where my parents' resting place is, but that is a common problem for seafaring people, and I have enough friends around here to take the same comforts in them as Opa did when the ship rolled and sent the crew and his daughter to the bottom of the deep. I visit Edwin Church a lot. I call him Edwin at his request, and he treats me like a man. We sit outside his cabin on milk crates on nice days and drink brandy, and I
swat the shit out of my neck and hands to keep the green flies off me. He's immune or something. Maybe he laid hands on himself, who knows. We don't talk about his hands. We don't need to, and there's nothing really to say about it.
He says things that give me peace somehow, in some way I don't understand. I'll say to him, "Edwin, it's been a year. When are other girls going to start to look worthy to me? I'm supposed to be a young, horny guy."
He'll clamp down on my shoulders and say, "I don't know," and shake me a little, like he's trying to shake something positive into me, something from his glinting eyes, his ornery grin ... and it works. I get filled up With a peace. It doesn't always last long. But it does the trick for the moment.
* * *
READER CHAT PAGE
1. Do you think Emmett mixed up the sequence of events on the night of his parents' death subconsciously or intentionally? Why would he do so on purpose?
2. Do you think Emmett was right to keep the information about the DEA investigation a secret from Evan for so long? How might Evan's feelings about his parents and their disappearance have been different if he had known the information when he was younger?
3. Describe Evan's original feelings for Grey. When do his feelings for her change?
4. Why are Emmett and Aunt Mel opposed to religion?