The Starboard Sea: A Novel (23 page)

“Looks cozy,” I said. “You have any siblings?”
“Three. Two brothers and a sister. I’m the firstborn.”
It made me depressed to think of an entire family living in that

small house.

Still, it was a strange comfort to drive around with no par ticu lar destination. Leo had invited me off campus, and because I was impossibly sad, I thought it would be a useful distraction. “Meet me at the Gas Mart,” Leo had said, and I’d walked the few blocks into town so that no teachers would see me get into Leo’s Chevy. If caught riding in a car, I might have received a few minor demerits, but Leo would have lost his job.

At the Gas Mart, Leo tossed me a can of Budweiser. He didn’t take one himself. His Malibu was in cherry condition, and I figured Leo was too responsible to drink and drive, too worried about screwing up his car. I snapped open the beer and took a long foamy chug.

We drove in silence until Leo pointed to a plastic case filled with tape cartridges and told me to pick out some music. I slipped Bon Jovi’s
Slippery When Wet
into the deck.

“I love these guys,” I said.

Leo looked at me suspiciously, like I was pandering to his taste. “I would have figured you for a Depeche Mode fan.”
Leo and I swapped opinions on Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard. We parted ways on U2 and the Smiths but agreed on the Beastie Boys. “It’s a kick-ass time for music.” Leo drummed his steering column. I riffled through his tapes and held up an incriminating Whitney Houston album. “What can I say?” Leo smiled. “My girlfriend, Cheryl, goes crazy for that shit.” I cut loose on “Living on a Prayer,” and Leo said, “Wow. You sound nothing like Jovi.” Leo told me he played guitar and for a moment we were just two guys enjoying the glory of being young and loving rock and roll.
My mother always warned that you couldn’t have too many friends. “People come in handy,” she would say. Leo made me feel connected to a former life. He reminded me of the locals Cal and I hung out with up in Maine. Cool guys who sold us homegrown weed, who took care of our summerhouses in the winter, and whose best hopes involved lobster pots and freezing weather. Leo explained that he planned on graduating from Bellingham’s kitchen to working at the Goodwyns’ marina.
We’d been driving along for several miles. It was dark and there were almost no streetlights, but I could sense the landscape changing. The barrack houses disappeared as tall hedges sprouted up on either side of the road. Even the air smelled sweeter, like sugary beach blossoms. Every five hundred feet or so we passed a steel gate with a no trespassing sign. We’d crossed over onto the South Side of the island. “Some of the South Siders want to put up a gatehouse with an actual guard,” Leo said. “They’d keep the whole world out if they didn’t need someone to clean up after them.”
I felt compelled to rock and disrupt this quiet neighborhood, so I opened my window, took another swig of beer, cranked up the stereo, and belted out, “You give love a bad name.”
Leo pulled up in front of a wrought-iron gate. He turned down the music and said, “It’s closed now, but on Saturday night, this gate was open.”
A large gold G swirled over the center of the iron entry.
“Who lives here?” I asked.
“You don’t recognize it? It’s the Goodwyn place. Biggest house on the island,” Leo said. “This is where I dropped her off. Your friend Aidan wanted to come out here to see you. I was the one who drove her.”
Now Leo cracked open a beer. He looked straight through the windshield and told me that on Saturday, Aidan had approached him just before the dining hall closed and asked for a ride.
“Did you know her?” I asked.
“Not really. In the dining hall, you come to know people based on what they eat, but that girl barely ate anything. I hardly ever saw her at dinner. She was a pretty girl. I was surprised she knew my name.”
I remembered telling Aidan the story of Leo catching me sneaking out of her room. That I’d asked his real name. “So what happened?”
Leo turned to me. He squinted his eyes. “What happened? That’s what you need to tell me.”

Leo had assumed I’d been at Race’s party. “Your friend told me she needed to find you. I had a sense she was worried. The storm was pretty bad by that point. Zero visibility. That girl kept bouncing her knees and tapping her fingers on the window. The only time I ever saw a girl ner vous like that was when Cheryl thought she was pregnant.”

Leo finished his beer. We sat together in the darkness. He said, “I don’t know what you guys did, but I need my conscience cleared. You’ve got to tell me what happened.”

“I wasn’t there,” I said. “I didn’t go to the party.”

I made Leo describe how he drove down Race’s driveway, how he parked near the house. “The power was still on at that point. The house lit up like it was Christmas. I offered to wait for her, but Aidan told me not to bother. I think she felt guilty. Worried she’d get me into trouble. She kept apologizing.”
It was hard for me to listen, to hear and make sense of Leo’s details.

To put his story into a sequence. “What are you telling me?” I asked. “What did you see?”

“I never left the car. I saw her open the door and go inside. I sat in the driveway until the lights went out. Then the storm got bad. I worried about the roads flooding.”

Leo cracked another beer, the foam spraying across the dashboard. He ran his hand over the leather, his fingers thick with calluses.
“Did anyone see you? Did you see who was there?”
He shook his head. “I should have gone in after her. Look, I don’t know what happened. I’d like to believe that you weren’t there. Cheryl told me I should confront you. She told me to drive you out here. Return you to the scene of the crime. This hasn’t gone the way I planned. I was going to accuse you of all sorts of things.”

It took my mentioning the police to convince Leo that I hadn’t gone to the party.

“I know this guy,” I said. “Officer Hardy. He’s a good guy. You need to tell him what you told me.”
Leo turned the Malibu around and began to drive back to Bellingham.
“If there’s a chance that something happened at Race’s, you need to come forward.”
Leo said nothing. He continued to drink as he drove, raising the silvery can to his lips, belching with impressive resolve. We’d managed to go from pals back to strangers. On the stereo, Bon Jovi sang about being wanted dead or alive. Leo skidded into a blind curve, one hand on the steering wheel, fishtailing across the lane. I could taste the beer acid rising up in the back of my throat. The lingering aroma of garlic and grease made me cough first and then heave. I asked Leo to pull over. “I’m going to be sick,” I said.
We were still on the South Side when I tumbled from the car. A security camera hovered overhead, taping me as I retched through the gates and onto someone’s shiny black driveway.
Leo put the hazards on and shot outside to check up on me. “Get back in the car,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” I spat and cleared my throat. A moment later, Leo held out a towel. I took it, wiped my mouth.
“Thanks for not throwing up in the Chevy,” he said.
We drove back to campus with the windows open, the cold air lashing my face. I knew I had to convince Leo to speak to Hardy, but I couldn’t even get him to talk to me. My entire body felt like a smoldering furnace being tripped from high to low. Palms sweaty, feet frozen. My imagination fueling my sickness. Aidan had drowned. This was certain. But how she’d slipped into the water was now unclear.
Leo pulled back into the Gas Mart and parked. We sat for a moment, then he said, “If I tell some cop that I was driving your friend around, I’m as good as cooked.”
“It won’t be like that,” I promised.
“I’d be incriminating myself. Making trouble where there is none.”
I said, “The truth is always dangerous.”
“Well, that’s just some slick thing to say.” Leo twisted the empty beer can in his hands, the metal making a sharp, painful sound. “What do you know about truth or danger? You’re just some dumb rich kid at a second-rate school.”
“Third-rate.”
Leo almost smiled. He scratched at his cheeks, bloodying one of his boils.
He was conflicted, but I figured I could sway him, convince him to come forward, so long as I didn’t push.
“There’s a right thing to do here,” I said.
“No,” Leo said, “there isn’t. I don’t know what happened to the girl after I dropped her off. When I drove you out to Race’s tonight, I thought I wanted to know. Thought there was something to be gained by knowing. Figured you’d confess and we’d go from there.”
If before I’d heard fear and compassion in Leo’s voice, suddenly I heard something else: money. I slipped out of the car, then leaned into the open window. “What exactly did you have to gain?”
Leo didn’t need to say a word. He’d taken a chance that I’d done something worth hiding and that I’d be willing to pay for my secret. He’d picked the wrong guy, but he’d also acted in opposition to his own character. He was shaking. “Forget this. Forget all of it,” he said. “It never happened. I made a lousy mistake.”

Walking back to campus, I unbuttoned my shirt, hoping the night air might chill the nausea out of me. My lungs filled with cold, my breath foggy. If what Leo had said was true, and I wasn’t entirely certain that I could trust him, I needed to consider a new series of possibilities. With some keen urgency Aidan had gone to Race’s home. She’d needed to see me. A gust of wind slammed against my body. My hand fell across my chest and though my skin should have been icy, my fingertips burned from my own radiant heat. I had a fever and needed to put myself to bed.

When I got back to my room, I saw the torn paper bag with Riegel’s present. My plan had been to open it with Aidan. To tell her the story of my day with Riegel and for the two of us to tear into his gift. Though I didn’t deserve any presents, I took out the box from the Whaling Museum. A black ribbon was tied loosely around a long narrow carton. Inside, a glass bottle rested on a wooden stand with a piece of cork stoppered inside the neck of the bottle. Where I expected to see a ship, instead the glass held a large ceramic whale. With a ship in a bottle, all a person had to do was rig the masts and then, once the ship was glued into place, raise the sails. I couldn’t understand how a person could put a whale inside a bottle. The bottle felt heavy in my hands as I rotated it, looking for seams in the glass. There was a boat after all. A tiny dinghy with small faceless sailors balanced in the whale’s shadow.

The sailors in the dinghy rowed with their backs to the whale, blind to their oncoming danger. During a whale hunt, there always must have been a moment when the hunt could have gone either way. When the harpooned whale might have plunged underwater and taken everyone in the dinghy down with her or when the harpooneer might have struck the perfect, life-ending hit. It was all I could do not to go to the headmaster’s house and wake him up to tell him that my friends had been among the last to see Aidan. I wondered if the weight of my accusations alone would be enough to sink them. On Monday, classes started again. I woke up sick and it took all my strength to climb out of bed and throw up in my garbage can. Lying on the floor, I noticed that there was something else in the bottom of Riegel’s gift bag. The tangerine Aidan had given me. It looked as fresh as the day Aidan dropped it in my lap. I put the tangerine on my bureau, coughed up more bile, and decided to sign myself into the infirmary. After dressing quickly in a sweater and jeans, I walked down the hall, leaving my garbage can filled with sick in front of Kriffo’s door.

In the hallway, I met Tazewell coming out of Yazid’s room. He reeked of cheap air fresher and expensive weed. I nearly clocked him when he asked how I was doing.

“Not well.”
“Yeah. You don’t look so good.”
“You look like shit,” I said, a little too harshly.
“Yeah, maybe.” He smiled. “But I never get sick. Nature’s medicine.”

Tazewell and his stoner routine. He leaned against the wall, obstructing my exit. “Man, it was so nice to have a week with no classes. Felt like we were in college. That reminds me, Kriffo’s pissed at you.”

“Why would he be mad at me?”
“You’re going to Princeton, right?”
“I applied.”
“Well, you and I are legacies, and they never take more than two

students from here. Until you came along, Kriffo thought he had a shot. With his grades, he’ll be lucky to get into Syracuse.” Tazewell checked his watch. “We should be roommates.”

Outside Whitehall, Nadia stood on the walkway, balancing her weight on one foot. She’d swept her brown hair off her face and back into a high ponytail. It looked funny, like a rooster’s cockscomb. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. She lightly touched my arm and said, “Her mom’s here.”

On her way to the bathroom that morning, Nadia had seen a woman, “prettier than any Astor girl,” carrying boxes from Aidan’s room. “I thought you’d want to know.” Nadia was wearing a loose T-shirt and a long gypsy skirt. She tripped over the fabric as she walked with me to Astor.

“You look different,” I said.
“Is that good? Or just different?”
“You look good without all that makeup.”
Nadia pointed out a black Lincoln Town Car parked in front of

Astor. We stood together for a moment, right by the fire escape, the one I’d managed to hoist Nadia up the night we’d sneaked into Aidan’s room. Nadia was rocking back and forth on her heels.

“Wanted you to know, I never saw her,” she said. “Never had a chance to give Aidan your message.”
I nodded. Aidan had died on the night of the storm. She’d come to shore with the yachts. I’d spent days looking for someone who was already gone.
“I can’t miss class.” Nadia took a few steps backward.
We said good-bye and I was surprised when Nadia sprung forward, clasping her arms loosely around my waist, tucking her head against my chest, hugging me. She was so tiny and awkward. Too young to be away from her family. It was clear that she needed someone to look after her, but here she was looking after me.
As Nadia walked away, I shouted, “Thank you.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” she said.
I called out, “You have no idea.”

I waited around outside until a man in a brown suit and black sunglasses left Astor pushing a dolly stacked with boxes. A woman followed him. I recognized Aidan’s mother from the photograph. She held a pair of Fred Astaire’s tap shoes in one hand and a brown cigarette in the other. She was tall, almost as tall as me. She didn’t look like any mother I’d ever seen. Her long hair was blond and copper like Aidan’s, but where her daughter’s was wild and natural, the mother’s was perfectly sectioned into costly spiral ringlets. She wore a purple-andgreen dress, and even though it had no formal waist, even though my mom would have called the outfit a muumuu, somehow Aidan’s mother managed to look even more slender and slight. Her body lost inside all that fabric.
I don’t know why, but I expected Aidan’s mother to recognize me.