Dark water slaps the boat’s sides. I use a paddle—taken from one of Stan’s countless kayaks—to push us away from the jetty.
The boat is small. It came with the house when we bought it. Now and then, Stan used it to motor to the Yacht Club. Mostly it sat by our dock, neglected.
I start to paddle.
It’s stopped drizzling. The wind’s dropped, and the ocean’s glassy. This is lucky: Jo gets seasick. And this boat’s too small to handle bad weather.
I’m crouched in the back, behind three built-in bench seats. Jo’s kneeling in the bow, also wielding a paddle. Stan’s mummy lies across all three seats. He’s taking up most of the space. As usual. I can’t bear to touch him.
When I yank on the paddle, the tarp crackles. My gut heaves. It’s like a message. Even dead, trust Stan to be obtrusive. He had a loud voice, a loud laugh. He snored. He sang in the shower. And he yelled a lot, especially lately. Tears flood my eyes. I can’t stop shaking.
“Dana?”
I look up. Jo’s twisted my way. She sounds irate: “We’re not moving!”
I look around. Shit. The coast lies far too close. We’ve hardly made any progress.
We decided to paddle out a ways because the motor would be noisy. While the Oaks looks deserted, plenty of people could be watching. The woman in the Dutch Colonial on the corner is a night owl. Teens often hang out on the public beach, just up the block. My own sons could be watching!
“Paddle harder!” I say. My arms are burning. I’m getting blisters. The motion takes me back to summer camp—in a canoe, on a lake. Jo couldn’t come. Her mom couldn’t afford it.
“I’m trying,” gasps Jo. “We’re getting nowhere.”
Again, I look over my shoulder. Winderlea and its grounds lie dark. Some of the neighboring mansions have outdoor lights on. Trees shine green-gold. Light ripples on the smooth water.
I inhale. It’s lovely. Why did Stan and I never come out here in the boat at night? All this beauty lay right outside our door. My paddle splashes. The tarp crackles.
I shake myself. What the fuck. Now’s no time for nostalgia. I could end up in jail! I need to focus. I slice my paddle into the water and pull.
“Dana?” Jo sounds strangled. She’s stopped paddling. We start to turn in a circle.
“Jo?” I say, alarmed.
Her head’s between her knees. She squints up at me. “I’m okay . . . Just out of shape.” She’s pale as putty and breathing like Darth Vader. “Hurry . . . up! Start . . . the . . . fucking . . . motor!”
I start it up and we head for the mouth of the bay. The wind’s cold against my face. It takes a while for Jo to stop wheezing.
The farther we get from shore, the bigger the waves. The boat’s bouncing. I slow us down.
I keep my eyes on the islands: four low black mounds, at least another ten minutes’ away. They’re uninhabited, home to dry grass and rocks, plus mounds of bird shit.
Some years back, a stray cat was found out there. It must have swum out. It made the paper—front page news in Glebes Bay. They printed its photo, a mangy old tabby. Someone adopted it, named it Molly Brown. Of course Jo later explained why.
We hit a big swell, and the boat bounces. Cold spray blasts my cheeks. My teeth clack. Jo turns, her face greenish gray. “Slow down,” she rasps. Poor her. She’s seasick.
I ease back on the throttle. “Where to?” I ask.
Jo turns again, one hand clamped to her mouth. “Port, twenty degrees.”
I’m surprised. So far as I know, she’s never been on a boat in her life. But I shouldn’t be. She’s a teacher and well read, after all. She’d know the right terms. I turn as directed.
Jo speaks through splayed fingers. “They’ll have divers in the bay. We need to go out a ways, past the islands.”
We motor on in silence.
As soon as we pass the first island, the sea gets rougher. Even I feel queasy. I slow further. I’m cold. We’ve been out a good thirty minutes. We bounce onward.
“Okay, here,” says Jo. Her voice sounds squishy.
I slow down, then stop. Jo leans out, over the side, and retches. Her short hair’s sticking up. Her back shudders. I catch a sour whiff of vomit.
When she’s done, I motor on a bit to evade the smell. We can’t drop Stan near Jo’s slick of vomit.
“Enough,” says Jo. “Here.”
I cut the engine. The sudden silence feels overwhelming. Jo’s hunched in the bow, head in hands. We slowly drift toward the biggest island. The boat sways gently.
Jo turns and removes her glasses. Her face looks naked without them. “Dana?” she rasps.
“Yeah?”
She rubs salt spray off the lenses. “You sure you want to do this?”
I look back to shore, starred with tiny cheery lights. We could turn around. Take him back. I could call the cops, admit everything.
“Yes,” I say. There’s no going back. I know exactly what would happen.
Jo opens her mouth as if to contradict me. I lay a hand on Stan’s body and close my eyes to shut her out. I bow my head, aware Jo’s watching. I try to breathe deeply.
When I raise my head, Jo looks away. Maybe she thinks I’ve been saying a prayer or goodbye to my husband—late husband. Why does late mean dead?
“This is the only way,” I say.
She nods. “Okay.”
Stan’s tarp crackles as she shifts. She pulls Stan’s iPhone out of her pocket. I’m lucky she remembered it. Stan never went anywhere without his cell.
There’s a plop when she drops it overboard. It disappears fast.
I reach for the broken vase lying in a plastic bag in the boat’s bottom. It’s heavy.
At the last minute, Jo remembered this too. I ran back to get it. She’s good with details.
I drop the bag overboard. There’s a heavy plop. We both watch it sink. It feels like a test run. God, Stan would hate this: more plastic pollution.
Up near Jo’s end lies a length of chain, each link almost as thick as my wrist. Jo found it in the shed, along with the tarp and the wheelbarrow. It’s hellishly heavy. Her idea is to wrap it around Stan.
She picks up the chain. “You’ll have to come forward.”
I crawl up by his chest. It’s lucky he’s off the ground, balanced on the benches.
Jo ties the first loop and passes the chain under him. I reach beneath him to grab it. We both pull, hand over hand, until the loop’s tight. We manage five loops, Stan trussed like a pot roast. Sweat coats my back. I unzip my dark jacket.
Jo secures the chain’s ends with an old bike lock, also found in the garden shed. She thought of everything. She swivels her wrists and sighs: “Now for the hard part.”
My stomach sinks. Moving him without the chain was hard enough. And that was on dry land, not in a small, tippy boat. How will we manage? Thank God he’s not heaped in the bottom. We don’t need to lift him, just roll.
Jo takes his head-end. I crawl down to his feet. “On the count of three,” she says. I nod. She counts slowly.
We both heave. Muscles I didn’t know I had are straining. It seems impossible, but he’s moving. When he’s poised on the rim, I’m scared he’ll roll backward. But no, there’s the tipping point.
“Push,” grunts Jo.
He flips and topples over.
There’s a sickening lurch. The boat tips beneath us. There’s a splash.
Dark water rushes up. We did it! He’s in the water! Fuck! The boat’s flipping. I shriek. Without thinking, I jump back to counterbalance us. Jo also lunges backward. The boat rocks madly. Cold spray hits us.
Sick and stunned, I lie curled in the boat’s flooded bottom. Water sloshes. The boat’s still rocking.
Overhead, the clouds have thinned to reveal a white hook of moon. I sit up and crawl to the side. My jeans and jacket are soaked. I don’t want to look but must. This is it.
Goodbye, Stan.
The sea’s darker than the sky. Ripples break its surface. In the depths, something blue flashes. I jolt back. What was that? We haven’t stopped rocking.
I grip the boat’s side and peer back into the black water. That blue spark! I look at the veiled moon and my ring. Was it the diamonds catching moonlight?
Even when Stan proposed, sailing on Lake Como, and I was thrilled, I disliked this ring. Not just one humongous diamond but three. So flashy and ostentatious.
I touch it. The stones are cold and hard. The last ripples hit the boat in accusatory slaps. I start to twist at the ring.
Jo hisses: “What are you doing?”
“I don’t want it,” I say. “I’m throwing it in. With Stan.”
I keep clawing at the ring. I know it’s an empty gesture. Am I ridding myself of this symbol of marriage or trying to show I don’t care about its worth, don’t need Stan’s fortune?
Jo grabs my arm. “Stop it!”
I blink at her vacantly, still wrenching at the jutting stones.
“The cops will be over you like a rash!” she says. “They’ll notice everything! Your ring disappears, they’ll ask where it went.”
I stare at my hand. The moon’s disappeared. Yet even in the dark, the stones emit light. “I’ll say . . . I threw it at him during our fight. Maybe he took it . . .”
“No!” says Jo. “You’ll lie as little as possible. And not about stupid shit! That’s how you’ll fuck up!” She sounds livid.
I’m not thinking straight. What we’ve done is too awful.
I stop twisting the diamonds and look out at the ocean. It feels alive: a vast roiling beast flexing its muscles, our boat a flea on dark skin. I shiver. Thick black blood flows beneath us. My eyes glitch on the spot where we dropped him. There’s movement in the blackness. I gasp and point. “Look!”
It can’t be, yet it is: Stan’s blue tarp, rising up. Any second now, he’ll lunge out of the water.
“What?” gasps Jo.
“It’s . . . He’s . . . floating.”
“What?” She twists around. “No, he’s not!”
“But I saw . . .”
She throws up her hands. “There’s nothing there!”
I can’t move. Am I seeing things?
“Dana?” She sounds scared. I know she feels it too, a curse upon us. We’ve unleashed something. “Come on, Dana! Get moving!”
I want to move but can’t. Every nightmare feels possible. The boat won’t stop rocking. Or is it just me? The biggest island looms closer; the surf seems louder.
Jo crawls back and shakes me. “We’re near the rocks! Start the fucking motor!”
I jolt back and reach for the starter-rope’s toggle. One tug. Two. My blisters burn. The engine sputters.
Jo gasps: “Don’t flood it! Fuck! That’s all we need!”
I imagine us shipwrecked and stranded like that scrawny old cat. I let go of the toggle. “Fine.” I sound twelve, scared to my bratty self. “You try.”
Jo crawls over the bench and squats beside me. One sharp yank gets the motor going. “I’ll drive,” she says tightly. “Move to the middle. And keep an eye out for debris.”
I crawl to the central bench and sink down. Jo turns us toward shore. Distant lights twinkle. Wind catches my hair.
It’s a relief to be moving, to flush my lungs with cold air.
I pull my hands into my sleeves. I’m wet through and chilled. My teeth chatter. For some minutes, we ride in silence.
“Dana?” Although she’s driving slowly, we’ve started to bounce again. Jo sounds ill.
“Yes?”
“Did you love him?”
I look back, over my shoulder, toward my huddled friend and the black knuckles of islands. I find the spot we left Stan. I bite my lip, hard, and spin the way we’re headed. “Yes. I still love him.”
It’s the truth, isn’t it? Or it’s part of the truth. My eyes fill with hot, angry tears. I hate that I loved him, just like my father. How could I have repeated that stupid, dreadful pattern? My head hangs.
I never told anyone about my dad, not even Jo. Not even now. I’m still not sure why. Shame, maybe.
In kids’ stories, people are good or bad, all neatly labeled. The Wicked Witch. The Good Fairy. Real people are jumbled, like that monster in England who raised millions for cancer while molesting sick children. Even bad people have some good in them, and vice versa.
Stan had big helpings of both. He was the life of every party. He fought ocean pollution long before it got trendy. He was brave and sentimental. He once jumped into a filthy drainage ditch to save an old lady’s labradoodle.
I sound bitter: “I didn’t marry him for the money, if that’s what you think.”
Jo snorts. “I never thought that.”
I hug myself. “Most people do.”
“Well, fuck most people, Dana.”
I smile. Jo’s always been loyal. That’s why we’ve stayed friends for so long.
It’s hard to forge friendships when you’re richer than everyone you know. There’s the uneasy sense that people want something from you—maybe not money, but the glamour they think it brings. Beauty’s the same. People think you think you’re hot shit. They assume things about you. And they get jealous. But not Jo. I think back to the day we became friends:
For some reason, I was late for PE on the second day of sixth grade. When I entered the gym, I found the girls divided into small groups: two on the mats, wrestling, with a third meant to referee.
I slowed to watch. The teacher, Mr. Granger, was at the far end, instructing his favorites. Closest to me, Kitty Myers was grappling with the weird new girl—the one with the home hack-job haircut.
They stumbled backward and forward, locked together. From Kitty’s flushed cheeks, she was obviously trying. This was interesting. While Kitty had twenty pounds on her opponent, she was soft. The new kid looked wiry and feral.
“Dyke!” grunted Kitty.
The new girl pushed her down and held her.
“Let go of me!” squealed Kitty.
“Stop!” said Angie Zukovitch, who was reffing them. She raised her hands above her head in an X, like it was the WWE. The new girl released Kitty and stepped back. By then, I wasn’t the only one watching.
When Kitty sat up, she was red-faced and snake-eyed. “Did you see her grope me?” she hissed to Angie. “No wonder her name’s Jo Dyke-stra!”
The new girl blinked in shock. She opened her mouth to protest, but I beat her to it.
“You wish, Kitty,” I said. I smiled at Jo. “I need a wrestling partner.”
Jo flushed with embarrassment and relief. She clearly knew who I was. “Um, sure. Okay.” She dusted herself off, then followed me to another mat.
“Ignore them,” I told her.
“Okay.”
We got into position. She was skin and bones in my arms, like I was hugging a wild bird. It didn’t take long until I’d pinned her.
“You didn’t even try,” I said as I let her up.
She flashed a half smile. “No point, was there?”
I smiled back. She played that well. I liked that. That’s when I decided she would be my best friend.
The boat jolts over a wave, bringing me back to the moment. My teeth clack.
Behind me, Jo’s retching again. Poor Jo. Nausea’s awful. I had terrible morning sickness with the twins. I stare at the horizon, then check my watch. We only have about two more hours of darkness.
The boat smacks down hard. Shock waves hum up my spine. Cold spray hits like bird shot.
Behind me, Jo groans. I twist to look at her, neck rigid and mouth puckered.
“Jo?” I say.
She grunts.
“I . . .” Gratitude overwhelms me. I can barely speak. “Thank you.”
“Oh, fuck.” She leans over the side and retches. A streamer of vomit flies behind us.
I wince. She gags again, then straightens. “Look where we’re going! There are deadheads.” Her voice is raw. She wipes her mouth with her sleeve.
“Jo? I’m sorry.”
Her nostrils flare. “I know.” She takes a deep breath. “I know you’re sorry. Just . . . keep it together.” She slows the boat and spits over the side. “You can thank me when this is all over.”