Under the Influence (26 page)

T
hat night, I made Ollie the most comforting dinner I knew: macaroni and cheese. Afterward, I ran him a bath and, as was his preference now, let him be by himself in the tub, though I sat just outside the door, listening to make sure he was okay.

At first all I heard was the sound of water running, and then Ollie making sounds like a motor. Often, at bath time, he would take out his Matchbox cars and run them along the edge of the tub.

“Faster, faster!” he was yelling. “Yeehaw!”

Then his voice changed, so what I heard sounded like a man, or a child's imitation of a man, anyway. One of his plastic action figures must have entered into the drama now. “Slow down, buddy,” the voice said.

Then a different voice, also male, but deeper, tougher than the first. “You want to see how fast this baby can go?”

“I want to go home,” said a third voice. Higher, softer. Ollie's voice. “I don't like it here.”

No response from the deep male voice. “What are you, a pussy?” Followed by an eerily familiar laugh.

“I'm scared,” said the smaller voice. “I'm going to throw up.”

The laughter grew louder, like something in a fun house.

“Are you a baby?” the deep voice said. “I thought you were a big boy.”

Then came another sound. Vowels and consonants all mixed together.
The soap dish clattered against the side of the tub. The sound of metal hitting metal—the shower wand, maybe, hitting the faucet, then splashing, followed by a high voice. My son's rendition of a girl.

“Help, help! I'm drownding!”

More. A weak cry, followed by a raucous sound from the male voice.

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall.”

“I told you to rest.”

“I want my mom. I think we should call the police.”

“Shut up.”

“Are you okay in there, Ollie?” I called to him through the closed bathroom door.

“I'm fine,” he said, his voice back to normal again. Just my son again. My small, pale, anxious son.

After I dried Ollie off, I put on a DVD. I chose one Elliot had given us that Ollie had loved: Laurel and Hardy pushing a piano up a mountain and across a bridge. He'd watched this DVD a dozen times, but he laughed every time at the part where Hardy dangles off the side of the bridge. This time he was strangely silent.

When the movie was over and he'd brushed his teeth, I tucked him into bed.

“You don't have to talk about what happened up at the lake if you don't feel like it. But it might make you feel better.”

“If I told, you'd be mad.”

“I won't be mad. I promise.”

“I don't want Monkey Man to get into trouble,” he said. “He made me promise not to tell.”

“It's okay,” I said. “You get to tell me. A kid should always get to tell his mom.”

So he did. The whole story this time, including everything he'd left out in the car driving home from Lake Tahoe. And unlike his mother, my son never makes up stories. What he says has always been the pure and unsparing truth.

T
hey had gotten to the lake house just after ten on Saturday morning. Ollie knew this because he was wearing the watch Monkey Man had given him, that he never took off—his special diver's watch, good up to a hundred meters underwater.

The minute they pulled into the driveway, they realized that Cooper must be there. That bright yellow sports car.

“They call that baby a Viper,” Monkey Man told Ollie. “You got to promise me, bud, that you'll never be caught driving a boring car.”

He promised. When he grew up, he would drive a Viper, too, just like Cooper.

They thought he'd be in the house but he wasn't, though it was clear he had been. (“Sort of like with Goldilocks and the three bears,” Ollie said. “When they say ‘Someone's been sitting in my chair.'”)

Monkey Man offered to make Ollie breakfast—his Tahoe tradition—but Ollie said no. (“No
thanks,
” he told me.) They'd had a banana in the car already and anyway, he wanted to get out on that boat. He had been waiting a long time for this day.

So Ollie and Monkey Man went down to the boathouse. One of the Jet Skis was gone, which is how Monkey Man knew Cooper must be out on the water. But the Donzi was there.

“It was like a rocket ship,” Ollie told me. Even now, after everything that had happened, he spoke of the boat with awe. Awe mixed with horror.

Monkey Man said they'd take a quick ride first, find Cooper, then come back to the house and make a nice breakfast.

“We were going to have bacon and flapjacks,” Ollie said, “then go back out on the boat.”

Because it was late in the season, there were hardly any other boats on the water that morning. “That's good news,” Monkey Man told Ollie. “It means we can really crank this baby up to warp speed.”

“I should probably put on my life jacket,” Ollie told him. “I promised my mom.”

“Sounds like a plan, bud,” Monkey Man said. “Me, I was never one to do what my mom told me, but if you're that type, good for you.”

Ollie had brought his camera along. Monkey Man had brought a cooler on the boat. He popped open a beer. “You want a taste?” he said.

“I'm too young for beer,” Ollie told him.

Then Monkey Man started up the Donzi, and they were flying across the water—so fast, Ollie said, that he felt like his cheeks might blow off his face, so he put his hands on them. His Giants hat blew off, and Monkey Man told him not to worry, he'd get him another.

They tore around that way for a couple of minutes. Monkey Man was laughing and waving his hand in the air. Ollie wanted to yell something, too, but he was actually feeling sick. He was worried he might throw up on the boat.

Actually, Ollie hated being on that boat. He closed his eyes tight, holding onto the railing, wishing it was over.

“I didn't want Monkey Man to think I was a baby,” Ollie said.

“Monkey Man kept yelling stuff like ‘Banzai,' like we were cowboys or paratroopers or something, and I tried to yell, too, only I couldn't catch my breath,” he told me. “I was just wishing it was over.”

That's when they spotted the Jet Ski. Even from a distance, Monkey Man could tell this was his son, Cooper. Possibly because of the way he started zigzagging around when he spotted the Donzi.

He was headed toward them, coming up from behind, and there was someone on the back of the Jet Ski, though Monkey Man couldn't tell who it was. Ollie was just keeping his head down, trying hard not to throw up.

Just at the point where the Jet Ski got close to the Donzi, Cooper started doing this crazy thing, Ollie said. “He was making it go all wobbly, to get the Jet Ski to ride over the big waves the Donzi made. When he hit one, the Jet Ski seemed to lift right out of the water for a second, like he was flying. Then it crashed back down onto the water,
smack.
Then more zigzagging, to do it again. Cooper was shaking his head back and forth and he was laughing, the same way Monkey Man did, but even more than that.”

He took his hands off the handlebars of the Jet Ski. He was close enough now that Ollie could see it was a girl riding behind him. She was yelling at him to put his hands back on the handlebars.

Monkey Man started doing the zigzagging thing, too, Ollie said. Like the two of them—the boat and the Jet Ski—were dancing with each other or playing tag.

Then the Jet Ski veered toward them, and it was like Cooper had given it an extra shot of power, because it was coming faster than ever, right toward the Donzi. Too fast and too close for Monkey Man to get out of the way.

Then came a crashing sound. Ollie got knocked on the floor of the boat. The Jet Ski turned upside down, and its engine sputtered and stopped. Cooper fell in the water, but he came up a second later, not even looking like anything bad had happened, just rubbing his hand. He wasn't laughing anymore, but he was smiling.

The girl had fallen in, too, but she didn't come up. She yelled something one time, but then she was under the boat and they didn't see her anymore.

“I think she hit her head,” Cooper said. He was talking in a funny voice, like he had marbles in his mouth.

“She didn't have her life jacket on,” Ollie said. “I was waiting for her head to come back up, only it didn't.”

That's when Monkey Man turned off the Donzi's engine. He dove into the water. There was a lot of splashing, and a few seconds later Monkey Man came up, holding the girl, keeping her head above the water, which wasn't so easy because she was all floppy.

Cooper was still lying there against the side of the Jet Ski, like he was watching TV. He was singing this song about beer bottles on the shelf. The numbers were supposed to keep getting lower only he couldn't keep them straight.

“He didn't seem to get it, Mom,” Ollie said. “It was like he still thought it was funny. I'm just a kid and I knew it wasn't funny.”

Then Monkey Man hauled the girl out of the water and onto the boat. Cooper still wasn't doing anything besides watching.

The girl wasn't moving. She was just lying there, like a dead person. Then Monkey Man bent over and at first Ollie thought maybe he was giving her a kiss, but it turned out he just wanted to know if she was breathing.

“She's probably going to wake up in a minute,” Monkey Man said to Cooper. “Meanwhile, we need to get you sobered up, buddy. Looks like you started in a little early today.”

Then Cooper told his dad he'd had four bloody somethings. It didn't make any sense but he seemed to think this was funny. He thought everything was funny.

They tied up the Jet Ski alongside the boat. This was when Monkey Man started making Cooper drink all that water.

They sat around a long time then. Ollie said maybe they should call someone. Maybe his mom.

“My phone doesn't work out here,” Monkey Man told him.

By this point, Ollie was feeling hungry. He'd been too excited to eat breakfast earlier. They never did go back in for their flapjacks, and now
it was probably past lunchtime. But the girl still hadn't woken up. She wasn't like a normal person that's asleep, either. She was breathing, but not in the regular way, and she still wasn't moving.

“It's like that time I got hit with a lacrosse stick, junior year,” Cooper had said. “I was knocked out for a while. They say you see stars and it's true. Then I was okay.”

He wasn't laughing anymore. To Ollie, he sounded a little worried. But he was still talking funny, and Monkey Man was still telling him to drink more water. He had an old box of crackers in the boat. He told Cooper to eat those. Cooper said they were gross and soggy.

“I don't give a shit if you like them or you don't,” Monkey Man told his son. “I want you to eat them all.”

By this point, Ollie was so hungry he wished he could have one of the crackers, but Monkey Man didn't offer him one. It was really hot on the boat, and Ollie's hat had blown off, and since I had made such a big point of reminding him to keep his hat on, he was worried he'd get a sunburn and I'd be mad. They had covered up the girl with Monkey Man's jacket. Ollie was thirsty, so Monkey Man handed him the water.

“Don't take too much,” he said. “My boy here needs to drink as much as he can. If you're thirsty you can have some of this.” He handed Ollie a can of beer. Ollie knew kids weren't supposed to drink beer, but because he was so thirsty he took a sip.

They just floated there for a while then, the three of them. Four, actually, if you counted the girl. Ollie didn't know how long they stayed there, but it was long enough he had to pee so badly he thought he would burst.

“Pee over the side of the boat,” Monkey Man told him.

But there was a girl on the boat.

“She won't notice,” Monkey Man said.

Once again, Ollie told Monkey Man he wanted to call his mom. Monkey Man said, “Remember what I told you? We don't get cell phone
service on the lake. And anyway, why would you want to call your mom? You aren't a baby, are you?”

To make the time pass, Ollie pretended he was watching
Toy Story 2
inside his head. Starting with the beginning and trying hard not to race ahead to his favorite parts. Only it didn't work very well. Then he tried to remember Shel Silverstein poems we'd read.

Two boxes met upon the road,
he recited. Not out loud, just in his head. He forgot what came next, so he started in on a different one.
If you're a bird, be an early bird
.

“My brain was getting jumbled up,” he said. “I couldn't remember anything.”

Finally, he recited to himself the contents of
Goodnight Moon.
A baby book, but for some reason he still remembered all the words.
In the great green room, there was a telephone, and a red balloon . . .
It had made him feel better, he said, thinking about sitting on my lap, long ago, reading that book together.

It was getting late. He knew this because the sun was a lot lower in the sky than before—the time of day, he remembered, when I had told him photographers usually took their best pictures. Also, it wasn't so hot anymore. He had fallen asleep for a while, but then he woke up. Monkey Man and Cooper were still sitting on the back of the boat, talking.

“I think we can call someone now,” Monkey Man said. This was strange, because all day Monkey Man had told him the cell phone wouldn't work on the lake.

For most of that day—except when Ollie asked him a question—it was almost like Monkey Man forgot all about him, but now he remembered.

“We need to talk about something, buddy,” Monkey Man said to Ollie. “You and me. Man to man.”

There were going to be some men coming over on a boat pretty soon, to help the girl wake up. She probably needed to go see a doctor. They'd have some medicine at the hospital to make her better.

“They might ask you a few questions, after,” Monkey Man had told Ollie. “Like how she hit her head, and how the boat crashed into the Jet Ski.

Monkey Man had it backward. It was the Jet Ski that crashed into the boat. Ollie tried to remind Monkey Man about that.

“Some of the stuff from today . . . it wouldn't be a good idea to tell,” Monkey Man told him. “The police might get mad at Cooper, if they thought he was driving a little crazy.”

Cooper wasn't talking in that funny way anymore. He wasn't even smiling the way he had been before. He actually looked pretty serious, like a person who lost their money or their dog died.

“We aren't going to talk about Cooper driving funny on the Jet Ski,” Monkey Man said. “The men that come on the boats to help us might not understand that part. Then they might not let Cooper drive the Jet Ski anymore and you wouldn't get to ride on the back next time.”

Ollie didn't actually want to ride on the Jet Ski. Now all he wanted was to get back on dry land and never go to Lake Tahoe again.

“Another thing,” Monkey Man told him. “We probably aren't going to mention about how we took our little rest. We'll probably just say we were out for a little ride, and we had this accident, and now we need to get our friend here to the hospital.”

Ollie didn't understand what difference it made, whether they had the rest or not. Maybe his mom would be mad that Monkey Man let him stay out on the boat all this time without his hat on, getting a sunburn.

“Certain things,” Monkey Man told him, “are just for us guys to talk about. Like that beer you drank, for instance. I wouldn't want you to get into any trouble about that. If you had to go to jail, for instance. You wouldn't get to see your mom.”

Monkey Man took out his cell phone then and made a call, and the surprising thing was, the phone worked fine. A couple of minutes later another boat pulled up. It was some kind of water police. There were two men wearing uniforms, also a woman in a doctor suit.

The first thing they did when they jumped on the boat was check on the girl, who had been lying on the floor in the exact same position all this time. They put a cuff on her arm and listened to her heart. They pulled up her eyelids and looked at her eyes with a flashlight.

Pretty quick, they said they needed to get the girl to the hospital. They put her on a stretcher first, then moved her onto their boat and drove away.

One of the boat policemen stayed on the Donzi with Monkey Man and Cooper and Ollie. The boat policeman rode back to the dock with them, towing the Jet Ski.

Ollie was hoping that once they finally got back on land, he could have something to eat. He knew he probably wasn't going to get those flapjacks anymore. But even some chips would have been good, or a peanut butter sandwich. Except the police officer told them they had to go to the hospital, too. They needed to get checked out, plus he wanted to write down the story of what happened.

When the police officer said this, Monkey Man looked at Ollie. He didn't say anything, but Ollie understood. He wanted to remind Ollie about their secret. The part of the story the police wouldn't understand.