“I promise.” Shy glanced back at the motorboat, then told her: “I don’t know what the hell happened, though. Who would shoot doctors?”
“They’re doctors?”
“I think so,” Shy said. “Or scientists. Look, lemme check everything else and I’ll come back and transfer us over, okay?”
Once he saw her nod he started toward the bridge, pointing the flashlight out in front of him. He wasn’t able to get the motor started, though, because the entire control panel had been shot up. The GPS, too. And there was no more fuel. Where were these guys going with no gas and a bagful of medicine? And who had climbed aboard and gunned them down? And where was that person now? Shy knew ship pirates were a possibility, but he didn’t think anyone would be out stealing right after the tsunamis.
There wasn’t any food or water in any of the supply cabinets. There wasn’t even rope or extra flares.
Shy weighed the options. If they moved to the motorboat they would no longer have to sleep in cold ankle-high water. And the cabin would protect them from the sun during the day. But it was much heavier, and he’d never be able to reach the water from the front end, so using the oar was out of the question. They’d have to stick with their broken lifeboat if they wanted to keep moving.
Before he went to get Addie’s opinion, he ducked back into the cabin to look around one last time. He shined his light on the bodies, the charred walls. Then he reached down and grabbed the gun, flipped open the barrel, saw that there were three bullets left. He dropped it in the brown and blue duffel, then slung the duffel over his shoulder and headed back up the stairs.
“Everything’s all shot up,” he told her. “And there’s no gas or supplies. If we transfer to this boat we’ll just be sitting here, waiting to be rescued. If we stay on the lifeboat we can keep moving. What do you think?”
They looked at each other for a while, then Addie said: “Shouldn’t we keep moving?”
“I think so,” Shy told her and he climbed down into their sad little lifeboat and undid the knot that had kept the two boats together.
They sat against the side in silence, Shy’s arm around Addie’s shoulders for warmth. Shy stared at the little bit of water they had left. And only two more flares and a flashlight. They had to reach land tomorrow or it would be over. He thought of the two dead men he’d found on the motorboat. Someone from the island must have shot them. But why? And what did that say about the island? Or what if they had shot themselves?
He looked up at the sky, thinking about the gun in the duffel bag. Would it get so bad that he and Addie would consider doing that? Using the bullets to stop their suffering? He fingered the ring in his pocket, thinking about that.
It was a starry black night that seemed to reach out forever, all the way back to the ruined coast of California. He tried to imagine all the lives that had been lost. All the families ripped apart, the property destroyed.
To believe that two kids on a boat had any special meaning was a fairy tale.
Shy listened to the change in Addie’s breathing as she slowly fell asleep, and he watched the motorboat drift away from them, into the darkness, until it was only a shadow in the night, then nothing, and still he watched.
Day 6
38
The Subject of Love
By morning the water inside the lifeboat was several inches higher. Shy staggered to his feet and looked all around the boat, trying to figure out what had happened. He found a large, jagged crack in the hole he’d patched. It must’ve happened when the two boats collided.
He and Addie bailed as much water as possible, and he repatched the crack, praying it would take. Then he went back to working the oar through the ocean, concentrating on the sun as it slowly crept into the sky and warmed his stiff arms and legs.
Too soon it was directly overhead again, beating down on them. He put his shirt on his head to protect himself from it, though this time he resecured the life jacket over his bare chest. His lips were cracked and his stomach was cramping. Sores now blistered up and down his legs, under his jeans, and on the tops of his feet. He felt so weak he barely had the lifeboat moving at all, and his mind was beginning to slip. He stared out across the shimmering ocean with little hope of spotting land, aware of the two sharks that had returned. Like they sensed it was coming to an end.
Addie fished in silence at the back of the boat, the tarp over her head to protect her from the sun. One thought kept creeping into Shy’s head: how strange that the two of them had ended up here together. They were from opposite worlds. In real life they wouldn’t have been friends in a million years, but out here they were all each other had.
Addie eventually came to fish beside Shy.
She said when it was too quiet her mind got stuck on worst-case scenarios, and she’d have little panic attacks. “So, can you just talk to me?”
“About what?” Shy asked.
“Tell me about your high school. Or how you got the name Shy. It honestly doesn’t matter.”
He shrugged. Addie would never catch a fish on his end of the lifeboat, not with the baited hook so close to his moving oar. It would scare away any potential fish. He didn’t say anything, though. He was better off when they were talking, too.
“My old man used to call me Shy when I was little,” he told her. “And it just stuck.”
“Why though? Were you quiet as a kid or something?”
“Not that I know of.” As Shy pulled the oar feebly through the water, he thought about all the times he’d been asked about his name. He usually made shit up out of boredom. A different story for every new person. But out here, on this broken boat with Addie, it didn’t seem right to make stuff up.
“According to my mom,” Shy told her, “any time I fell or knocked something over my dad would be like, ‘Damn, this kid doesn’t know shit from Shinola.’ It happened a lot, I guess, so he started calling me Shinola. By the time I started school he’d shortened it to plain old Shy. And everyone else just sort of went with it, I guess.”
Addie looked horrified. “And what’s Shinola?”
“Some old brand of shoe polish. The saying basically means ‘You don’t know anything.’ ”
Addie shook her head, staring at him. “That’s like the saddest story I’ve ever heard.”
“Nah, he’s just like that. Always messing around.” Shy wondered what she’d say if she heard the rest. About the abuse and why he eventually left. “Anyways, who knows why some nicknames stick and others don’t.”
They talked about a bunch of other things, too. Addie’s friend back home who got hit by a drunk driver. Her private high school in Santa Monica, where celebrities showed up every afternoon to pick up their kids. The new Lexus she got at the start of summer for keeping a high GPA. Shy talked about his last basketball season and how tight his family was and how messed up everything got when his grandma passed from Romero Disease.
It was like they were getting to know each other while they still had the chance. And Shy realized there might be more to Addie than he first thought. Maybe it was like that with anyone you actually sat down and talked to.
Eventually they wandered on to the subject of love. Addie told him about the two high school relationships she’d had so far, but said neither of them were serious. “With both guys,” she said, “we never actually broke up. We just sort of stopped texting and talking on the phone. Isn’t that weird?”
Shy kept working the oar as he glanced back at Addie. “So, you never been in love, then?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But it’s complicated. Because how do you actually know if you have nothing to compare it to?”