Chapter 26
WILLIAM
As William vomited over the side of the boat, Andrew rested his hand between his shoulder blades.
“Let it out, just let it out,” he said, while the other men swore under their breath.
William wanted to return to the shore, but no one offered, and it felt impossible to ask.
The only thing they had to rinse out his mouth was warm beer, which he swished and spat back out into the bay.
“Well, you did tell us you never sailed,” Ken said. He was the only one who laughed, and William thought he preferred this over the other men’s annoyance or Andrew’s concern. At the moment, he didn’t feel particularly deserving of compassion.
The wind was dying down, the boat no longer skimming the waves, its sails slackening.
It had been beautiful to watch in its own way, how they had killed the motor and set into motion, pulling ropes and swinging the boom, tying intricate knots that reminded him of the woven cherry-red tassels pinned on the walls of the Buddhist temple.
They were no longer the groomsmen making off-color jokes in the church, but a disciplined outfit of sailors.
With the motor quiet, the only sounds were the wind and the waves, and William was happy he had come until the boat turned and he felt his stomach turn with it.
“So who’s going to be married next, then?” Ken asked. “I put my money on Smith.”
Smith, bringing a beer bottle to his thin lips, shook his head. “I think I’ve still got some time. But if Val’s sister gets engaged before her, I’m a dead man.”
“Then that’s the night the lights went out in Georgia,” the other groomsman—the shortest among them, his eyes wet and brown like a deer’s—sang in an exaggerated drawl.
“Val’s from Missouri.”
“And that’s not really what that song’s about,” Andrew corrected. “It’s about a girl shooting . . . someone.”
“It’s about the husband’s sister,” Ken said. “You never know the lyrics.”
“Baby, I was born to—aw, fuck,” Smith joked in a Springsteen growl, and they all laughed, even the short groomsman.
William liked them more than he’d thought he would.
Though they made sport out of one another’s flaws, unable to let something as insignificant as tripping on the dock go unnoticed, there was an easy love here, the warmth of brotherhood.
The wind shifted slightly, the sails rippling in agitation, and Andrew and Smith rose to change course. William felt his stomach lift again, bile lapping the bottom of his throat.
“I’m going to try lying down over there,” he said, pointing to the bow, the only place on the boat long enough for him to unfurl.
“Just be careful you don’t roll off,” Ken shouted as William clambered away. “I don’t want to tell Shay we lost her brother at sea!”
William took deep breaths, gripping what looked like a large metal thimble as he stretched out his legs.
He closed his eyes and felt the boat settle.
The sun warmed his jeans, and he wished he could strip them off.
The day’s heat was peaking. After a moment, he heard someone moving over him, and he found Andrew taking a seat.
“You all right?” Andrew asked.
“Better,” William said. “Sorry, you really don’t have to hang out here with me. I’m fine.”
Andrew brushed this away. “Shay got sick too, the first time we went out. And then she insisted we go out the next day, and the next, and the next, until she didn’t feel sick anymore. Took the whole week.”
“That sounds like Shay,” William said, and Andrew laughed, nodding.
Above them, there was a thin skein of clouds, floating like wisps of cotton. William found it surprisingly calming to have Andrew beside him. The silence felt natural, unstrained.
“I hope you know, I feel really honored to be marrying your sister. I’ll do my best to take care of her.”
“Yeah, I know,” William said. “I know you will.”
“How does she—seem to you?”
Andrew rubbed the back of his neck, and William felt like he should sit up, that it was odd to have this conversation lying down, but his stomach bubbled at even the thought of moving.
“She seems . . . good,” he said.
“Really?”
“Well, better than when I last talked to her.”
Andrew nodded. “I’m glad. It’s been a hard year.”
“Yeah, I know. I mean, it must have been.”
“I really thought they were good people at first. I mean, it seemed kind of silly, but I had a buddy of mine from work who did est, and it sounded kind of like that. Obviously when she said she was going to stay there, that she wouldn’t even be able to talk to me or anyone else for three months, I thought that was crazy, but she’d dropped out of law school by then, and she said if we were going to get married, we had to trust each other, that I had to trust that this was what she needed, and you know Shay, she can be so unyielding, so I just thought, all right. I trust you.”
A seagull hovered above them with its wings outstretched, buoyed by the wind. William wondered how they appeared from that height. Perhaps as unremarkable as two men talking about the weather.
“Then those three months passed,” Andrew said.
“And she called to say she needed to stay longer. I showed up there, even though she told me not to, and that’s when I could tell something was off.
Her head was shaved by then, and it was so odd, seeing her without all her hair, and she was saying she wasn’t sure when she would leave.
If we’d still get married in the summer. ”
“Did you call the police?”
“Of course, but she had gone there willingly. They went, after I called in a few favors, but they were assholes. ‘Do you know what we deal with every day in the city?’ one of them said. We called our family lawyer, and he was talking to people in the mayor’s office, but then, all of a sudden, she was home.
One morning, she just unlocked the front door, showered, and got into bed.
I woke up when I felt her beside me. Nearly had a heart attack.
If her head hadn’t been shaved, a part of me would have thought I’d dreamt the whole thing.
That it had just been one long, horrible dream. ”
William swallowed, imagining Shay emerging into the dawn and hailing a taxi, slowly walking up her building’s staircase, marveling at the seeming mundanity of taking out her apartment key—the final step of her escape.
But would they have really let her leave?
Hundreds had left before, but the program had changed so that no one ever graduated, members becoming more militant and desperate, insisting that Synanon was its own religion, its own family.
He thought of the figure he’d imagined in the golf cart, the shifting symbol in the church, and wondered whether Andrew was haunted by the same ghosts.
“I understand if you blame me,” Andrew said. “Maybe I should have never let her go, or I should have waited outside the building every day once I realized something was wrong, but I called—”
“I don’t blame you,” William said, though it took a moment for him to realize this might not be true.
Andrew looked relieved. Maybe he could have done more, but Andrew’s goodness was a blunt object.
He was always respectful and earnest, shaking hands with William’s uncles, their doorman, ma?tre d’s, and so it was difficult to assign him any sin.
William had never thought of Andrew’s inner life.
That, as he was standing beside Shay last night, his father extolling all the ways he was proud of his son, he could be sick with guilt just as William was.
He wondered what Andrew would say if he told him about the missing check, if he would take care of everything or if he’d just go to his father and mother, the little boy in the sailor suit.
“That’s really good to hear,” Andrew said. “I know how much Shay means to you, and I don’t want you to think I can’t look after her.”
But you didn’t, really, William wanted to say. Instead, he asked a question.
“When she left, did they try to make her come back?”
“There were some phone calls, for a month or so, but she said she didn’t know who was actually calling. When I’d pick up, there’d be a click, and then the line would go dead. The people there aren’t all bad. I don’t know, that’s what she said.”
William nodded, though this did not make him feel at ease—that Shay would speak well of people who abandoned their children, who had stockpiled their own arsenal.
“Bullshit!” Ken crowed, and the others laughed. “Andrew, have you heard this story about Smith and Betty?”
“I don’t think I want to,” Andrew said over his shoulder.
He leaned forward, briefly patting William’s thigh.
There was a lightness to his movements, like William had absolved him, and William wanted to share this lightness, to have everything suspended like the seagull that had floated above them.
But then the boat shifted, and William had to shut his eyes, feeling nothing but the threat of fresh waves.