Page 139 of What Boys Learn

“Fucking help me with this,” he shouts at me, more annoyed than irate, and I know I’ll be forgiven if I just follow his orders.

“She fell overboard,” he says, as if it’s already done. He clamps his hand over her mouth. “It happens. Especially when teens are foolish enough to drink.”

He tries to heave her over the side, but she has his shirt clutched in one fist. She lands a kick to his knee. A less powerful one to his gut. No more swearing from Dr. C. No more requests. Not a word. He’s furious and he’s focused.

Her feet pedal—thunk thunk thunk—on the shiny white molded cockpit bench, tip of her sandal trying to find purchase on the edge of the boat, but it’s white and rounded, slippery smooth, like the edge of a bathtub. Dr. C grunts as he tries to lift her higher. Almost. Almost.

I’m paralyzed.

He grunts and twists and then . . . he drops her and she sort of bounces off the outer side of the sailboat. I hear the splash.

If she’s really not a good swimmer, like she said. And even if she were. If she hit her head.

I try to think. Quotes I memorized. Song lyrics. Swift comebacks. How to be strong. How to fight back. How to be a man. How to make them sorry. How to make themseeyou.

It’s all noise. And Dr. C’s eyes, locked on mine, are the opposite.

There’s no way to think my way through what comes next so I don’t. I just close my eyes and jump.

52

ABBY

In the yacht club office, I ask the young attendant to look again—you’re sure the Campbells let their membership lapse, and there’s noParadoxin a slip here?—when Robert comes closer, pointing to his phone. I follow him outside, expecting him to tell me for a third time that I’m on the wrong track. He wanted to go find the orange Jaguar. Curtis would be nearby. But I didn’t like it. That damn car, so obvious, so visible. It’s a decoy. Why else would a man of bad intentions drive such a memorable vehicle?

Of course, Curtis was having a midlife crisis at the time, so it might have been a lapse in judgment, even for him. I look over at Robert, still busy on the phone.

A midlife crisis. And not the only thing he indulged. Is that the time he bought the sailboat, too? Not likely. His father gave the impression they had owned it a long time.

I try to remember what else Curtis said.I could have sold it, but the car’s a souvenir in a way.

I see, unbidden, the face of Harper McKibben again. I feel her hovering behind all of this.

Appetites long suppressed.

Less stable times.

A souvenir.

We all have those less stable times in our lives. . .

But he’s not going to get away with this one.

“They’re already searching?” Robert says into the phone. “Okay. Thanks, Pete. Next time you’re near Chicago . . .”

After hanging up he tells me, “Bad news is we can’t go with them, because they left the marina a half hour ago. Good news is that they’re already on it. Girl’s father didn’t put out an Amber Alert, because he assumed it wasn’t an abduction, just bad teen judgment. She evidently texted him that she’d met a new friend at the Oshkosh docks. When he couldn’t get her on the phone, he put in a call to the sheriff, asking him to keep an eye out.”

“Oshkosh?” That’s twenty miles north.

“Thought she’d be home by two o’clock. At least she described the boat. Twenty-two-foot Catalina.”

“Trailerable size, right?” I say, remembering. “That’s why they don’t belong to the yacht club anymore.”

The sailboat in the framed photo in Sister Lucretia’s office looked elegant, but I know nothing about boat types and sizes. It was only the name that had struck me briefly.Paradox.

“The Coast Guard started the search from Fond du Lac, though?”

“That’s where the auxiliary is. No regular CG in Oshkosh, only sheriff’s boats. Anyway, Curtis’s car was in town—”