The Living

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?”

“You probably just know,” he said.

“So, what about you?” Addie stared at him for a few seconds. “Were you in love with that chick you work with?”

“Who, Carmen?” Shy was shocked Addie even knew who Carmen was.

“How would I know her name?” Addie said. “The girl I saw you talking to by the pool before you gave us stuff for Ping-Pong.” Addie pushed her hair out of her face. “She’s pretty.”

“She’s all right,” Shy said. “But we were just friends. We grew up in the same kind of neighborhood.”

“You sure?” Addie said. “I saw how you were looking at her. There was, like, drool on your chin, I’m pretty sure.”

Shy frowned and shook his head. “We were actually in an argument when you saw us.” An odd feeling came over him. Here he was starving and dehydrated, weaker than he’d ever felt in his life, and he was worried about being disloyal. Like it was wrong to even speak of Carmen to anyone else.

“So we’ve both never been in love, then,” Addie said. “It’s sad, isn’t it? Like, what if we never get the chance?”

“You can’t think that way,” Shy told her, though he had just been thinking the same thing.

Addie shrugged and looked over the side of the boat at her fishing line. After a minute or so, she said: “There’s only one thing sadder.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“How you got your stupid nickname,” she said with a slight grin.

Shy turned to her in shock. “Really? ’Cause I don’t know if ‘Addie’s’ the sweetest name I ever heard either.”

She gave him a dirty look and then they both started laughing. Hard. Like their little back and forth was ten times funnier than anything they’d ever heard. He pulled the oar out of the water and kneeled down and just let himself go. Because it felt good to laugh. He didn’t care how much it hurt his ribs.

After a while, though, Addie’s laughter changed.

Her face crinkled up and Shy saw that she was crying in silence. He dug the oar back into the ocean and kept his eyes fixed directly ahead so she wouldn’t think he was watching.

39 Final Two Flares

The sun started to set, and Shy was now on the opposite end of the boat. But Addie still wanted to talk. “Tell me more about your grandma,” she called out to him from the front of the boat.

“My grandma?” Shy asked.

Addie pulled the oar out of the water and faced him. “It’s just, I heard Romero Disease was made up by the media to scare people.”

Shy recast his line with the last of his hooks, trying not to get pissed off at her ignorance. “Didn’t seem made up when her eyes filled with blood and she started clawing at her own skin. Or when she died within two days.”

“I didn’t mean—” Addie looked down at the oar in her hands. “God, that’s what happened? I’m sorry.”

“Who told you it was made up?”

Addie turned back to the ocean and resumed digging into the water with the oar. “My dad. I figured he’d know since he spent a bunch of time in Mexico the last couple years. That’s where it started, right?”

Shy wished he could tell Addie the truth. That her dad was an idiot. But it didn’t seem right with him missing, so instead he told her what he knew about Romero Disease. She was right, it had started in Mexico and then crossed into U.S. border towns like his. He listed all the symptoms his grandma had, explained how quickly her condition got worse and how freaked out his whole family was when she died so quickly of dehydration. He also told Addie, for the first time, how his nephew had it now, too.

“I’m so sorry,” she mumbled.

It went quiet between them for a while, and then she cleared her throat and added: “I don’t understand why he would lie to me. I’m not some naïve little girl he has to protect from reality.”

A few minutes later Shy felt a powerful tug on his line. He peered over the jagged side of the boat and saw a pale fish, three times the size of the first one he’d caught, fighting to break free of his hook.

He wrapped the line around his shirt-covered hand several times, his heart speeding up in excitement, and lodged his foot against the base of the boat.

Addie was beside him now, peering over the side at the struggling fish. “Look how big it is!” she shouted.

Shy jerked the line toward him again, wrapping the slack around his wrist. He did this several times, as fast as he could, watching the fish get closer and closer to the surface. But then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted movement—one of the sharks was darting toward the fish.

“Shy!” Addie shouted, ducking behind his line of vision.

It looked like the shark was preparing to launch itself right at the boat. But the fish was only a few feet away from the surface now, and Shy continued pulling. There was no way he was going to lose this fish.

At the last second, the shark opened its massive jaw, and Shy’s gaze locked onto the rows of jagged teeth before turning his head, still pulling the fish but also bracing for impact.

The shark crashed right into the side of the boat, nearly tipping it over. Shy fell onto his back, staring at the severed line still wrapped around his shirt-covered hand and wrist. Not only had the shark made off with the fish, it had taken their last hook.

When he looked up again, he saw Addie leaning over the side of the boat, aiming the flare gun at the shark. Shy scrambled to his feet just as she fired, a ball of light shooting down into the water, where it quickly sputtered out and died.

“What are you doing!” he shouted.

But she was already loading the second flare and aiming the gun at the water. Shy got to her just as she was pulling the trigger and all he succeeded in doing was changing the direction of the flare. Instead of slicing though the water, at the shark, it launched overhead, and they both stood there watching it arc through the darkening sky and then fall uselessly onto the ocean’s surface less than fifty yards away.

Addie fell to her knees, sobbing. “I can’t take this anymore!” she shouted. “I just want it to be over!”

“It’s okay,” Shy said, kneeling down beside her. “We’ll figure something out, Addie. I swear.”

But they both knew there was nothing left to figure out. Not without the fish. Or hooks. Or flares. Or strength. With barely any water.

“It’s okay,” he repeated again and again.

Even when he saw that the water was dripping through a crack in his patch job again—because of the impact of the shark. Or when he realized the oar was no longer in the boat, but floating on the surface of the ocean somewhere.

Still.

He repeated these words to Addie.

“It’s okay.”

“It’s okay.”

40 Veins of the Earth

The dark quickly took over the sky and a nearly full moon rose above them. Shy and Addie were back against the side of the boat again, huddled together in silence. Shy was so weak now it took effort just to breathe. His thoughts were faraway and clouded. All he understood as he stared up at the moon was that they were going to die.

And once he accepted this fact, a weight lifted from his shoulders. Because this was how everything worked. The ocean’s whispering and the earthquakes and the fires and the sinking ship and people diving overboard and dying and new people being born. Some are lucky enough to be given a part to play, but when that part ends the world doesn’t end, too, it goes on spinning just like before.

Shy reached into his pocket to feel the oilman’s ring, and it told him what he had to do.

He struggled to his feet, sloshed to the other end of the boat and grabbed the water jug. He held it up in front of the moonlight, saw the little bit that was left, then he went back to Addie and uncapped it.

He held it out to her, meaning that they were going to finish it and be done, and she seemed to understand.

Before putting the bottle to her lips, though, she reached out for his hand, linked her fingers in his—not a test but the real thing.

She took a sip and handed it back to Shy, who drank, too. They did this twice and then the water was gone.

He dropped the empty jug near their feet and continued holding her hand as they closed their eyes on the night, and Shy sat there wondering what he’d see next, if anything.

Time marched past him holding out a trayful of memories. Sprinkling food flakes into the bubbling fish tank in his and Miguel’s dirty room. The alley behind his building where he’d sit alone on an overturned plastic bucket to think. Pulling books from his locker while Maria went off about some girl who had pissed her off. And he was finally able to remember the faces of his family again, even his dad.

Then he thought back to a basketball game from two years ago. One that had come down to the final seconds. They threw him the ball and he raced down the court, dribbled around a screen, and launched a long jumper over the outstretched hands of two defenders. Time slowed as the ball arced through the air—everyone’s eyes stuck on its game-deciding path. The refs looking up, whistles hanging from their mouths. The players on both benches on their feet. The coaches holding them back.

When the ball found the bottom of the net the entire gym erupted—everyone on his team jumping up and down and hugging him and shouting his name. It was the first and only time he’d ever nailed a game-winning shot. After a few seconds, he separated himself from the celebration to search the stands for his mom. Spotted her high in the bleachers, off by herself, waving her arms around and looking so proud of him.

Maybe this was the moment, Shy thought as his mind hovered high above the boat, in this other time and place. Maybe this was his reason for being here. Some people probably wanted to look back at the end and feel like they’d left some kind of legacy in the world. Like having kids. Or making a movie. Or inventing something that made lots of money. Or they wanted to feel like they’d done something heroic. But Shy decided he was happy knowing he’d made his mom feel proud.

Shy’s eyes were still closed, his thoughts switching back to the sensation of the cold ocean water creeping up his legs, into his lap, when he felt Addie’s breath against his ear. “Just so you know,” she whispered, “I think I was going to love you, Shy.” He tried to turn his head to look at her, but she stopped him with her hands. “Please don’t say anything back.”

He didn’t, but his heart quietly swelled inside his chest. Because of her words. And the feel of her fingers linked in his. And because he now understood how lucky he was to have experienced a life in this world. He could never use a bullet on himself. Or Addie. The world would have to take them the old-fashioned way if that was what it wanted. And as his mind continued drifting away from his body, he had one final realization. The world itself was alive, too. It swirled around you and sped past your eyes and ears, so fast you could never see it, but slow at the same time, like a tree growing taller in a park. And all the sounds you heard—the wind whipping past your ears and the ocean’s whispering and the trickle of whitecaps against your boat—that was the earth’s blood pumping through imperceptible veins, and some of those veins were nothing more than people like Shy or Carmen or Addie.

And when the end came it smelled like morning dew and brine and everything around you morphed into a man, and that man shined a flashlight in your eyes and kneeled down beside you to pet your hair, and he said: You’re gonna be okay, young fella. Now come on.

And he lifted you into his arms and carried you like a child into a hidden cave, where you would grow back into the earth’s rich soil from which you came and where you would forever belong.