Chapter 27
Jerry Baugh
Jerry crumpled his fifth can of beer and tossed it toward the trash bag on the floor. He missed.
“Nice one,” Madden said from her place slouched in a mountain of cushions.
Lainey, who was lying on the floor with her feet on the wall, chuckled and hiccupped. The Old Eileen roiled beneath them, but the screaming wind didn’t seem to bother any of them anymore.
Jerry looked around for more beer. They’d been trapped in the salon for hours, drinking and watching television. Now the hurricane
was picking up speed, and he wondered how he had spent all those storms alone in Sheila 2.0’s minuscule cabin.
A sound like a whip cracked outside the porthole, and Jerry flinched. Madden raised her head to look through the boards.
“What’s the damage?” Jerry asked, words running together.
“Dock line down,” Madden asserted. “Should we fix it?”
Jerry thought about one of them going out on the dock right now. The wind would slam them into a tree or worse, fling them
into the raging water. Better to lay low.
“Eh,” he said and turned up the TV. They had surfed all the channels, and nothing good was playing. They were lucky the TV was still running at all.
Lainey watched him. “You good, man?”
Jerry humphed and broke open his sixth beer. He was buzzed for sure, but it didn’t feel like enough.
Lainey let her feet fall to the floor. “You just seem on edge.”
Jerry opened his mouth to deny it, but a roll of thunder sent him to his feet. The Old Eileen rocked unsteadily under him.
“No, no. Just, well, maybe this wasn’t such a good plan. Being in here.” He threw away the crushed can on the floor to make
it seem like getting up had been his idea.
“Why not?” Madden played with the lip of her empty gin bottle.
More thunder. More wind. The Old Eileen felt alive. Jerry scratched at his stubble and flattened himself against the back of the sofa so he could see the entire
room in case anything was trying to get inside.
“Cause it’s a goddamned ghost ship,” Jerry heard himself say. There was something on this ship, something he wasn’t convinced
had left completely after that night with the bilge panel. Not that he had any proof of it.
Madden scoffed. “You tellin’ me Jerry Baugh believes in ghosts?”
“Just in this damn creepy boat, and that damn dead family, and goddamned Ida who ain’t shut up for a second.”
It was Madden’s turn to flinch, and Jerry caught himself too late.
“I didn’t mean . . . I was talking about the hurricane.” He laid aside the sixth beer. Six beers in and words vomited plumb
out of his mouth.
Madden fiddled with the badge on her chest. “S’alright . . . She woulda gotten a kick out of it, you know. Hurricane Ida.
I would have been stuck calling her that for the rest of time.”
Jerry wasn’t sure what to say to that.
Lainey sat up. “A friend of yours?”
Jerry wondered if Lainey was sober. She seemed to be. But Madden also seemed to be until her oak eyes overflowed, and she
started to weep.
“My wife,” she managed to say. “In all the ways that count.”
Jerry shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He didn’t like crying, especially if someone around him was doing it. The last thing
he needed was to be trapped in the belly of a murder boat while the detective bawled her eyes out.
Lainey seemed to have no such discomfort. “Tell me about her,” she prodded gently, zeroing in on Madden.
“Um . . . She gardened,” Madden said. “Taught kids karate. Raced dinghies on the weekends. That’s how we met. I, uh . . .
I got hired by her sailing club after a couple of their 420s got stolen.”
Jerry wished she would stop talking. He considered jamming his hands over his ears but decided against it in case either of
them noticed. He didn’t like remembering people like this, all rosy-lensed about their hobbies and quirks. It made a person
sound unrealistic as well as dead.
Even though he fell into the same trap with Steve.
But Madden and Lainey were locked in a world all their own, with Jerry flying at the fringes.
Madden went on. “We dated for a year, then got a place in Cherrywood. Across the street from Jerry and his ex.”
Jerry tasted bile in the back of his throat. Cherrywood. A chipped-paint town with pastel flats and palm trees. Jerry and Sheila’s house had been yellow with a flea-rotten front
door and a pot of Russian sage on the porch. How had he ever lived like that? Newspaper on the driveway, ants in the cabinets.
The closest beach was a two-hour drive.
It had been Sheila’s idea. Let’s get away from the coast. From all the bad memories.
And at the time, it had somehow made sense. Jerry did want to get away. Just not from the sea.
“We couldn’t really afford the place,” Madden was saying. “But Ida’s soul lived in those walls. She grew a salsa garden in
the backyard and designed an office for me in the spare bedroom. We went to the neighborhood book club and painted the house
tissue pink. I remember the name on the paint wheel—isn’t that dumb? Tissue Pink. Like we were living in a box of Kleenex.”
Madden’s fingers unwrapped from the gin bottle and stretched ever so slightly. As if she was reaching for something. “I think
I hated it. But now it’s something I miss. Which is also pretty dumb, I think. If she hadn’t died, I’d have gone on and hated
it till the end of time. But she died, so I moved downtown, and now I miss the pink house and the book club politics. Sometimes
I miss most what never happened. There’s a German word for that. Anyway . . . we’d just started researching IVF when she got
sick.”
“Shit . . .” Jerry said, unsure when he’d gotten rolled up in the story. He couldn’t recall Sheila saying anything about Ida’s
illness. It must have happened around the same time that Sheila threw him out. They’d both been too busy dealing with their
lives to wonder what the folks across the street were going through.
Madden pushed her hand across her nose. “I thought she would make it to her fortieth birthday, one more decade, but her organs
gave out the month before.”
Jerry shuddered. Steve had been about to turn thirty when he died. Jerry had already picked out his present, a used guitar
wrapped in the Sunday comics, when he got the call from his mother.
“I don’t believe in ghosts.” Madden looked from Lainey to Jerry, and he felt as though she could tell he was squirming. “But if I did, this storm is her. And she’s screaming.”
Lainey got up to hug Madden, but Jerry couldn’t make himself move. He didn’t know how to reach out, how to comfort this woman
who wasn’t even exactly his friend. Lainey was hardly an adult, and yet she knew how.
Jerry stared at his shoes instead. They stunk of fish, and flecks of dried blood decorated the tired laces. The wind whined,
and Madden cried, and Jerry didn’t dare look up for fear of seeing the people he knew were dead.
“M-my brother drowned,” he said at last. How else could he comfort Madden besides relating to her?
The women looked at him, and he was sure he’d been wrong to speak, but Madden nodded. Listening.
“My kid brother . . .” Jerry lifted his head, and his heart sank.
He was there. Steven Baugh, frozen forever at twenty-nine years old. He lived at the margins of the salon standing over the
galley freezer. Blond hair dripping wet. Eyes gaping. This time Jerry didn’t look away from his brother’s bloated skin and
blue lips. He couldn’t look away.
“I was older by a year, but he was braver. By a long shot. He never bothered with anything less than what he wanted. And what
he wanted was adventure.”
Damn it, now he was doing the rosy-lensed thing. Jerry racked his brain for his little brother’s flaws, which used to be so easy to recall.
“He was a bit of a stoner. He was always knocking stuff over and not always cleaning it up. He couldn’t have dark moments.
Only wanted to talk about the good stuff. The fun stuff. But he was unflappable. Worked as a raft guide, an outdoor camp counselor,
a sailor. Anything to keep the momentum going and spend his life outside.”
Jerry blinked hard. Steve remained there staring. “And he died for it. It was in a storm like this, I think. So maybe . . . I guess I do believe in ghosts. His ghost. Maybe this hurricane is both of them tryna’ get our attention.”
Lainey crossed the room and hugged him too. Jerry tried to protest, but she was already there, arms around his neck. Her shaved
head blocked his view, and when she pulled away, Steve was gone.
“It’s all righ’,” Jerry told her, patting her shoulder awkwardly. Tears welled behind his eyes. “It’s all righ’,” he repeated,
willing them to evaporate.
They didn’t. Jerry stood hurriedly. It was one thing to see Brenna Madden cry and quite another to let her see him cry. “I
need to get more beer,” he said.
Lainey glanced at the case which still held well over a dozen cans, but she didn’t say anything, and Jerry headed into the
hallway.
“Good Lord,” he muttered once he had shut the watertight door. The tears threatened to fall, so he kept walking, like he could
outrun them. He found himself in the crew cabin, the one with the three beds, two stacked on top of each other and the third
alone. He was about to collapse on it when he realized someone was already there.
The ugly old cat crouched on the pillow. He was awake, his paws digging at the pillowcase at an intense pace. No, not digging—kneading.
How did he even get over here? Lainey must have rescued him from Sheila 2.0 before the hurricane.
The kneading was a sign of love, or so Sheila had insisted when her awful fluffy cat had done the same to Jerry. Nursing kittens
did it to their mothers to get milk flowing and to show affection. Making biscuits Sheila called it. The stupid thing was kneading a pillow, though, not a person.
Jerry’s throat felt thick. Who used to lie in this bed? Had the cat loved them? Did he miss them? How many times had the creature come to this room and kneaded the pillow in the hopes that his person would return?
How many times had Jerry hoped the same thing for his dead little brother?
This time there was nothing he could do to stop the deluge. Jerry broke down and fell onto the bed. The cat regarded him with
alarm, then slowly, cautiously crept closer. He didn’t shove it away. He gathered the animal in his arms and wept in a way
he hadn’t done for decades.
He wept for Steve’s crooked smile and sun-bleached hair. He wept for Madden’s wife and their hideous, happy home in Cherrywood.
And he wept for the cat and its people who’d vanished from The Old Eileen and left it there alone.