Page 56 of No One Aboard
More thunder. More wind.The Old Eileenfelt 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 toJerry, 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?
