Her sophomore year in high school, Amber Craig, reporter for the Mattauk High Herald, was sent to interview the area’s oldest resident, who’d recently turned 102. The woman lived in what had once been the guesthouse of a gilded-era mansion that her family had erected more than a century earlier. When Amber rang the bell, she expected the door to be answered by a nurse or a housekeeper. Standing there instead was the woman herself, as alert and high-strung as a rat terrier. They spent the better part of an hour chatting about Mattauk over the decades before Amber got to the clichéd question her journalism teacher had insisted she ask.
“So what’s the secret to a good, long life?”
The woman leaned forward as if she’d been waiting for that very question. “You must do whatever you can to rid yourself of bad luck.”
Amber chuckled politely, imagining it was some kind of old-person joke.
“If it finds you, it will stick to you.” The old lady was dead serious, Amber realized, and she believed her advice was urgently needed. “Should that happen, you must not be afraid. You’ll need to fight back with all your strength. Do whatever is necessary to free yourself quickly, or else you will never escape.”
Amber sat there with her mouth wide-open, unable to muster a response.
“I am telling you this because you are a sweet, smart, pretty girl. I was like you once,” the woman informed her. “Bad luck waits for women like us around every corner. When it found me, I dealt with it expeditiously. And that is the only reason we are here talking today.” Then she smiled, as though it were a relief to have unburdened herself of such weighty knowledge. “Now, would you care for some more apple strudel, my dear?”
Six months later, it was this advice that led Amber to set her softball coach’s beloved boat on fire.
Amber’s father had always wanted a boy. Everyone knew it. He didn’t complain, nor did he do anything to hide his disdain for the feminine creature he and his wife had produced. A lobster fisherman, he spent long days offshore. His wife worked full-time as a receptionist at a clinic in town. Every night, she came home to a second shift of cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Amber was expected to help her mom with the housework, while her father sat drinking beer and watching any baseball game that happened to be on TV. After her chores were done, Amber would often sit beside him, cheering for whichever team he seemed to prefer. Unless she was handing him a fresh Budweiser, her father didn’t seem to know she was there.
Looking back on that time, Amber couldn’t recall ever feeling deprived. Her family wasn’t rich, but she had everything she needed. She ate three balanced meals every day. She had clean clothes to lay out at the bottom of her bed every evening. She made good grades and won awards at school. She had plenty of friends and could name no enemies. Then she joined the softball team.
It was only a lark. The guidance counselor had suggested a sport would look good on her college applications. Amber never expected to excel at anything physical. She was as surprised as anyone when she hit a home run her first time at bat. When the coach put her on the mound, she only gave up one hit. She saw him watching from the dugout, arms crossed. As usual, his face gave nothing away. It was the astonishment of the girl sitting beside him that told Amber everything. Jamie Roberts had been the team’s best pitcher for the previous two seasons, and she’d just been blown away. Amber couldn’t help but notice the girl looked thrilled.
“Keep pitching like that, and you’ll have a full ride to any college you like,” the coach told Amber after practice.
Until then, Amber had kept her hopes modest and her ambition in check. Her father wasn’t a lawyer. Her mom wasn’t a doctor. There was no college fund sitting in a bank account with her name on it. Now the coach of the island’s best softball team was saying her options might soon be limitless. And John Rocca wasn’t the sort to lie. At thirty, he was already a decorated police officer and a deacon at St. Francis. His prim, pretty wife and three little boys attended every softball game. Though Rocca was ten years younger than her father, he was the kind of man her dad held in high esteem.
“That girl of yours is a phenomenon,” Rocca informed Amber’s father the day of her pitching debut.
Over twenty years later, Amber could still see the pride on her dad’s face. Until she was sent to juvie, he never missed one of her games.
Everything was going well. Amber didn’t want to jinx it. So when it all started, she tried her best to brush it off. Rocca’s appearance in the locker room when she was getting out of the shower was an accident, as was the way his hand often landed a little too high on her thigh. She wrote off all the lingering hugs as evidence of his affectionate nature. It had to be her imagination that he always seemed to find excuses to touch her. The other explanation just didn’t make sense. There was no way a handsome, happily married police officer would be making the moves on a gawky fifteen-year-old. Rather than make a fuss or complain, she always managed to squirm away.
Jamie, the pitcher who’d been sitting beside Rocca the day Amber tried out for the team, quit two weeks into the season. She was a senior, and she wanted to enjoy her last year in high school. At least that’s what she told the other girls on the team. But whenever Amber saw her, Jamie never seemed to be having much fun. She sat on her own at lunch and walked home alone every afternoon. Amber caught her staring whenever they passed in the hall. Then one day, the girl reached out a hand, grabbed hold of Amber’s sweater, and yanked her over to the side.
“You been out on his boat yet?” Jamie asked, her voice low and serious.
“No,” Amber said. There was no question Jamie meant Rocca. Other than softball, the boat was all he talked about.
“He’ll ask you soon,” Jamie said. “Don’t go.”
“What do you mean?” Amber asked.
“Are you dumb?” Jamie demanded. “Just don’t go, okay? And don’t tell anyone that I said so.”
It seemed so preposterous. Why would Rocca invite her out on his boat all alone? What would his wife say? What about her parents? They would never agree to something like that.
Two weeks later, Rocca stopped her family as they walked to their car after another winning game.
“This Monday is the beginning of spring break,” he said. “You folks want to come out on my boat to celebrate our perfect season?”
Her parents couldn’t, of course. They both had to work.
“Then would you mind if my family and I take Amber out for an hour or two? She’s been working hard. She deserves to have some fun. What do you think? Would that be all right?”
Her parents thought she was lucky—and said so. Amber wasn’t so sure. She could still see Jamie’s face in her mind. What should she have said? What magic words might have freed her? Twenty years later, she still didn’t know.
That Monday, she walked the three blocks to the marina where Rocca’s boat was moored. As she drew closer, he appeared alone on deck.
“Where’s everyone else?” she asked as dread rose inside her.
“The boys came down with something last night,” Rocca said. “Juliet had to stay home to watch them. Don’t worry. It’ll be more fun without them, anyway.”
For the first twenty minutes, everything seemed perfectly normal, and Amber almost relaxed. Once they were out on the ocean, with only the tip of Culling Pointe in sight, Rocca brought the boat to a stop and stepped away from the wheel. He’d slipped his penis out of his pants. And Amber realized there was nowhere to go.
He let her keep her virginity. He’d save it for another boat ride. From that day forward, oral sex always made her seasick.
Going to the police didn’t seem like an option. Quitting the team would mean giving up on her future. But she couldn’t go back out on the boat. Then a solution occurred to her—a way to rid herself of the bad luck once and for all. The night after the boat ride, she snuck out of her house at two in the morning and walked the three blocks to the marina, clutching the gas can her father used to fill the family lawn mower. She poured the gasoline out on the deck of the boat, lit a kitchen match, and tossed it over the rail. She’d never set anything on fire, of course. She had no idea the explosion would be powerful enough to singe her eyebrows and wake the neighbors.
Amber couldn’t prove what Rocca had done, and Jamie refused to talk. But two witnesses had seen Amber sprinting out of the marina that night, and the police found her father’s plastic gas can floating in the sound. It was more than enough to send Amber to a juvenile detention facility for the remainder of her high school years.
The lobsters around Mattauk had been dying in droves, and countless businesses had been dragged under. One afternoon when Amber was in the second year of her incarceration, her father jumped over the side of his boat and swam out to sea. Unable to pay the mortgage after her husband’s suicide, Amber’s mother lost the house later that year. Six months after that, she moved in with an abusive boyfriend, who knocked out her front teeth and introduced her to meth. The old woman Amber had interviewed died a few weeks before Amber was released from jail. Amber likely never would have known if a shocking discovery inside the woman’s house hadn’t made the news. Two bodies were found in the basement—both men. One was the old lady’s uncle, who’d vanished when she was fourteen. The second was the woman’s first husband, who’d supposedly run off the year she turned thirty.
Two decades after the fire, Amber still fantasized about what might have been. She’d decided long ago that if she could do it all over again, there was only one thing she’d change. She would still go out on the boat with Rocca. But as soon as they were far enough from shore, she would push the motherfucker over the side.
She’d had her chance, and she’d missed it. There was nothing she could do now. The bad luck had found her, and now it stuck like glue.