Chapter 26
My heart is going berserk as I choke up on the throttle, maneuver jerkily alongside the shipwrecked vessel.
Corrine watches me over the rims of her small gold sunglasses, her face intermittently betraying her surprise and disgust at the implications inherent to my presence on the island, all between repeated declarations of gratitude, that she is such an idiot for not checking to make sure she had enough gas before she left the lot, that she was this close to abandoning the boat and swimming to shore, that Campbell would have killed her if she’d left the boat.
A stilted laugh, at the mention of Campbell’s name. My tongue tastes sour.
Corrine coaches me through dropping my fenders and untying and retying lines so that we can raft up without dinging the paint, because Campbell will also kill her if she dings the paint.
Another tinny and unconvincing laugh I wouldn’t believe Corrine capable of producing if I had not heard it for myself.
She must know he’s cheating. She must have come here to catch him out.
I recognize the hallmark forces of humiliation tugging down the corners of her mouth.
I’ve seen gravity take premature hold of my beautiful Hollywood friends who have been scammed by men who wear lifts in their loafers.
It is anatomy-changing, to know that others know you have been cast aside.
There is a spare tank of gas at the back of the runabout, and I have decided that I will share that with Corrine and also let her know that I am going to shore to call the police and she should come with me.
She will undoubtedly ask why, to which I will tell her she has two choices—to come with me or not, but that I cannot answer her question just yet.
I have no idea how she will react to the truth—that Campbell and Henry were responsible for Sarah’s death all those years ago, that this set off a chain of events that left PT dead and, now, her husband, whom I will tell the police I killed in self-defense.
Then I will somehow get to Emma before they get to her, and I will self-finance her shitty unwritten script if that’s what it takes for her to back up my story.
She’ll probably never finish it. I have that going for me.
“That should do it,” Corrine says after we’ve tied the lines in an X shape from bow to stern, stern to bow.
I’m sweating from the labor, from the strange and unseasonably strong sun, but Corrine’s T-zone is matte and her deeply tanned skin shows no signs of pinkness or agitation.
“I have to admit,” she says with another hollow laugh, “when I heard another motor on the lake, you were the last person I expected to see.”
We are barely clear of the inlet, bobbing dangerously on deep-water currents, and at various intervals, I rise above Corrine and she above me, like we are girls on a seesaw, ribbons fluttering in our hair.
My stomach has that roller-coaster feeling, impossible to tell what is gravity and what is gut.
Do I feel queasy because my organs are in free fall or because my body knows something my conscious mind won’t yet acknowledge?
I swallow down the urge to retch over the side of the boat.
The last thing I ate was a screwdriver at noon.
“Not my proudest moment,” I admit to Corrine on my way down.
Corrine stares at me obliquely behind her small sunglasses. “None of this is,” she says, though in a tone that is not unkind toward me. I hear it in her voice. She knows. She’s known since the first time Campbell came home smelling like Emma’s dry shampoo, probably.
“Corrine,” I start, suddenly flush with generosity toward her, “I know I’ve never been your cup of tea—”
Corrine laughs sharply. “That’s how you see it?”
Some sneaker wave rolls underfoot. The water smacks the sides of the boat, sloshes overboard, sends my feet slipping in opposite directions. I hook an arm around the back of the captain’s chair and catch myself before I fall.
“I tried to help you,” Corrine says, steady on her feet.
I study the natural expression in her forehead, a map of her commitment to the sun over the years. “When? When exactly did you try to help me?”
“Back then,” she insists, with a vague flick of her hand. “In school. I told you about Henry. I told you how he treated Berry. And you laughed like I was some kind of narc.”
In my mind’s eye, I see Corrine standing on the patio, unlit Pall Mall in her hand, her blond hair longer and tucked into the collar of her fleece, telling me that Henry used to handcuff her best friend to the radiator before he left for class.
“It didn’t feel like that,” I say to her now.
“That’s fair,” Corrine says in a surprise show of compromise.
She is quiet a moment, gazing out at the blueberry-colored water.
“I’m sure everything was a bit of a… culture shock to you.
I would have been wary of all of us too.
But at eighteen years old, Faye?” She looks me square in the face.
“I thought you were about the biggest asshole I’d ever met. ”
A sloppy formation of birds sails overhead. I watch the weakest link struggle to straighten the line.
Corrine murmurs something I can’t quite make out.
“I’m sorry?”
Corrine pushes her small sunglasses into her thin blond hair, scrunches up her eyes. “I said, Joke’s on me.”
We catch the same current, Corrine and I, plunge downward at the same time. I stumble, grip the ledge. “It was all a long time ago,” I assure her. I know where she is going with this, and we simply don’t have time.
“It was Campbell who should have come with a warning,” Corrine says.
I feel a spirited flash of camaraderie with Corrine in that moment. Pigs fly. I’ll need a down coat in hell. “We need to get out of here,” I say urgently to her. “Something very bad is going on.”
Corrine blinks once, then not again for a long time. This is a sign of trust in some species of animals, isn’t it? “Something bad,” she repeats, almost sadly. She thinks I’m about to tell her Campbell is here with another woman. She has no idea that we are beyond that ordinary kind of bad.
“I can’t explain right now, but we need to go to shore together, and then I’m calling the police.
” I let go of the captain’s headrest, take flat, careful steps toward the back of the boat, where a jerry can of backup fuel is strapped to the swim deck.
Here it occurs to me that this is the one way a boat is like a car.
The gas tank is concealed within the body of the vehicle, there is actually no way for me to know if Corrine is on empty, and now I am turning over what she said to me, wondering if that is the sick in my stomach—When I heard another motor on the lake, you were the last person I expected to see.
She knew someone else was on the water before she saw them.
She had time. To turn off the engine. To drift toward the embankment. To stage this whole scene—
“Took you long enough,” Corrine says in a revived voice, a cunning one that suits her much better than the voice of a woman who has been stranded and humiliated. I turn slowly, woozy with sun and my own latent stupidity. Corrine is pointing a pistol at me, of course she is.
“Where’s Henry?” she asks.
There is a long silence between us. Corrine seems to understand that I need a moment to process this question.
Not Where’s Campbell? But Henry. Henry. The sun is suddenly too much of a strain on my eyes.
I close them. I see Campbell twitching on the deck of the clubhouse, one eye seeping something yellow. Open is better, actually.
“I just want to go home,” I say to Corrine, and then I laugh at the futility of this statement. I am very far from going home.
“Then you should have made a run for it in Albany,” Corrine says without sympathy.
Albany. She knows we went to Albany. My stomach burns with vodka and citrus, and now my chest, my throat—I lurch over the edge of the boat and vomit bright bile into the clear water.
I sink down on my knees, rest my head on the back of my hand, take deep, raspy breaths.
“Where’s Henry?” Corrine asks again.
“The cabin,” I manage to answer.
“You locked him in?”
I raise my head. Wipe my nose on the back of my sleeve. Nod.
“Idiot,” Corrine seethes under her breath.
There is something right about seeing her with a gun in her hand.
It’s the reddish, reckless color of her skin, like one of those maverick Florida men with YouTube channels that secure them political appointments.
“Okay,” she says, scanning the inlet behind me, thinking, thinking.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to drop anchor and climb in with me.
Don’t do something stupid like jump. You see this water, right?
It’s clearer than plastic. I won’t miss. ”
“I don’t know how to drop the anchor,” I say, outmaneuvered.
“I’m going to tell you what to do, just like Henry does. You like that, don’t you?”
I stare at her, my stomach still churning, and I think, whatever happens, she is taking me back to Henry.
I am suddenly desperate to see him. To look into his wide eyes with my own.
Corrine is here, and she is ordering me around at gunpoint.
Can you believe it? My brain writes a prescription for this scenario, over and over, until I am drugged into believing it as memory.
Any other outcome is not just neurologically out of reach, but simply not what happened.
Henry will be just as shocked as I am. He will be concerned for my safety.
He will want to save me. This is what will happen, what practically already has; otherwise my legs will give out when I stand.
I will fall overboard and I will be shot dead by a Connecticut housewife with a prized collection of bento boxes, and that is not how I plan to go.