The Getaway, Part 2

Part 3 will be along shortly--the final part, I promise.

Thanks for sticking with me here, folks. I know this one's a lot longer than anticipated but I hope the payoff will be worth it. Let me know what you think in the comments!

                The bungalow was faux-Spartan, with a thatched roof layered over waterproof, sunproof insulation and an AC unit humming merrily in the corner of the large living room. The bedrooms encircled the central hut, which was dominated by a flat-screen TV hooked up to an underground, soundproofed generator. This was the kind of place rich men came to hide away, to flee reality, to become invisible. Sandra wanted to love it, she really did. She wanted to appreciate what Josh had done for them, by bringing them here. But she knew he hadn’t done this for them. On some level, she knew.

                The bungalow had no plumbing. It was ironic; there was a mini-fridge stocked with Aquafina and a functional ceiling fan, all the comforts of civilization, but no plumbing. Whenever they needed to go, they had to march out to a skinny outhouse covered in peeling white paint to do their business, and afterwards dump some kind of powder down the chute that rose in clouds and choked them. She dreaded using the outhouse, but she supposed some sacrifices had to be made in order to enjoy the Gulf undisturbed.

                And they truly were isolated, out here. In three days, they had seen only a few distant, plodding white sails and one enormous cruise ship, which had been so far away it had appeared as a fleck on the iridescent horizon. Their one link to the mainland was the chunky satellite phone, hanging by the front door; it was so big it actually needed a strap, like a laptop bag. A sheet of instructions on how to use it was nailed to the back of the door on a gleaming brass tack.

                Sandra was trying to get some morning reading done, before the kids began their little tiff. Josh had already wandered out (with beer, no less; who needed beer at nine o’clock in the morning?) and the twins had settled down to play a game of Scrabble, a pastime they were quickly growing bored of. With the few precious outlets occupied by the fridge and TV, power was scarce, and Charlie’s precious iPad had already gone the way of the dodo. Same with Tam’s Kindle Junior. Sandra thought that once they ran out of DVDs to watch, the kids would probably eat each other.

                “No fair. You’re cheating.” This timeless accusation came out of Tam, whose pout could stop traffic and whose suffering Sandra had been forced to hear about ever since they arrived. She loved her kids very much—what mother didn’t?—but every hour it was a new gripe. The sun was too hot, the water was too cold, Charlie was putting sand in her luggage. This last one was true, and if Sandra caught him doing it again, she would pull out the nuclear option and bring Josh in from his fishing. There was simply no room for this kind of behavior in their family. Also, she’d left all her conflict resolution books at home and wasn’t sure how to help Tam without appearing to play favorites, something her books had instructed her never to do.

                “Am not.” Charlie rolled his eyes at his sister, several times to make a point, and then snuck a letter from the bag when Tam turned around to grab her Doritos. “You’re cheating. ‘Redrum’ isn’t even a word.”

                “Is too! I saw it in a movie.”

                “Which movie?”

                The pout began to return; it was always strongest when Tam knew she was cornered. “Okay, somebody told me it was in a movie. Doesn’t matter, it’s a word.”

“Whatever… Liar.”
               

Sandra tried to focus, stretching on the threadbare couch with its Jamaican flag pattern (an interesting décor choice, as they were nowhere near Jamaica) and tuning out the low-key squabble. This exchange was pretty tame by the standards the kids had set lately, and she wasn’t going to interrupt her Guide to Meditative Parenting unless there was blood involved or someone was crying. She reminded herself again how much she loved her children.

She needed a lot of reminding, these days.

This was mostly because her husband Josh was, in the words of her immortal office-gossip friend Shelly DuBois, “kind of a pill.” He had been depressed and moody for months, ever since that raise he’d gotten at work; she knew that extra pay came with extra responsibility, but come on. The man acted like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. And he was so paranoid! Just last week he’d insisted they keep the blinds shut “because of those goddamn peeping neighbors.” Their neighbors, of course, had about as much interest in Josh’s life as they did in the price of eggs in China. They were mostly young couples, like she and Josh had been once upon a time—trying to get their start, trying to keep things together. And, again like Josh and Sandra, most of them were failing. There were even rumors that a young woman one street over had overdosed on pills. A drug overdose, in their quiet little town! It was so frightening.

Sandra had no idea what was wrong with Josh, but she was worried. His constant complaining and bad attitude were having an effect on the children; she suspected this was why they were fighting so much. It was right there in Meditative Parenting: “Instability in the parental unit descends downwards, like a river, to the innocent.” In other words, thought Sandra, shit runs downhill. Never a truer statement had been written.

The bungalow was getting hot; it was now almost eleven, and the rising sun was beginning to overcome the AC, as it did every day. Sooner or later they would have to go outside and face Mr. Manly Man himself, the fisherman. She wasn’t looking forward to it. Why did he go out there every morning? He never seemed to catch anything.

To get away from you, her mind told her. She dismissed this thought immediately. It was a negative thought, and negative thoughts had no place in Sandra’s world view. They were gratuitous, like a third nostril, and she tried not to let them control her. But she had a nasty suspicion it was true. Josh had taken such great pains to be away from them, lately; she would have had to have been an idiot not to notice. All that solitude seemed to be having an effect on him. Am I really so awful? she thought, trying not to be negative, trying not to wonder why her husband was so determined to ignore her, so disinterested in touching her. They hadn’t gotten busy in… God, how long had it been? At least half a year. She was no sex fiend, but the absence of it left her cold, lonely. Like she was gratuitous, the third nostril. It made her feel unworthy.

She decided she would go talk to Josh. He had avoided them enough; worse, now the negative thoughts were buzzing in her head like wasps, too many to dismiss out of hand. You’re too wrinkled, he thinks you coddle the kids, you got fat when you were pregnant and it never went away and now he hates you for it. She tried to tune them out, but it was hard, so hard. Between the kids and Josh, she was a solitary weaver, trying to knit their family back together, and her hands were getting tired.

“Mom. Mom.”

“What?” She almost barked it, and was ashamed. She’d attended too many parenting seminars to bark at her kids. “What is it, Tam?”

“Charlie’s cheating.” The pout was on in full force, but it was suffused with a selfish anger, a refusal to accept that her parents might be capable of not listening to her needs. “He’s taking my letters and he’s writing the wrong scores down and he’s being…” She paused, ready to drop the verbal bomb. “A dick!”

Sandra sat up; normally, she would be indignant, but all she could summon after three days of their bickering was a grumble. “Hey. We don’t say these words. Not in this family. Why don’t you and your brother play something else?”

“There isn’t anything else. Daddy took out Monopoly 2000 and Scene-It to put in his fish stuff.”

Sandra, mother of two, wife of none but she didn’t know it yet, said “God dammit.”

“We don’t say those words in this family,” parroted Tam, crossing her arms in her best Mom imitation. Sandra’s knuckles tightened, but she said nothing. When children pushed boundaries, it was because they needed to know the limits of a relationship. So said the book, and the book’s word was law. Without the book, she wasn’t sure if she would survive this vacation. Because doing the work of a single parent when you were married was just absurd.

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” She squeezed Tam’s shoulder; the girl beamed, and she was reminded why she’d had kids in the first place. “Tell your brother if he keeps stealing your letters, Mom is going to sit down and have a talk with him about family dynamics and the importance of getting along. It’ll take at least an hour.” Charlie groaned from the other side of the room, and she gave him a look. “I mean it. Now I’m going to go out and check on Daddy. You two behave responsibly, and consider each other’s emotional wants and needs, okay?” The kids glared at each other, and her shoulders fell. They would probably fall back to arguing five minutes after she left—but at least she’d get a break.

The warm Caribbean air enveloped her as she left the bungalow, the tiny bubble of air-conditioning giving way to a hot breeze washing off the Gulf. She blinked behind her sunglasses. Josh’s chair was visible from the low ridge where the bungalow stood, its plastic legs half-sunk into the sand. His beer and tackle box lay beside it. The tide was coming in, and a tongue of ocean spray pushed a single open beer can up and down the shores.

The island was incredibly small, maybe half a mile from end to end, and trees and shrubs were so scarce she could scan the entire horizon from where she stood. The shack housing the generator was the only other structure on the island; the whole place had seemed charmingly deserted when they arrived. Now the desertion seemed less charming.

“Josh?” she called out. She half expected him to loom up behind her, drunk and looking to startle her like a monster from a Hammer Horror film. He’d had a sense of humor, once, before his job siphoned it away. She missed that version of him.

“Josh!” Her voice was carried away on the wind, which whipped at her yellow sundress and threatened to carry her hat right off her head. She had no idea where he could have gotten to: there was literally nowhere to go on this sun-drenched speck of land, and they had no boat. What the hell was he up to? She shouted his name again before deciding she sounded like an idiot and giving up. Maybe he was passed out in the bushes, somewhere.

Yet when she approached the fishing chair, his sacred spot, his throne, she saw the eighteen-pack was still full except for the one can rolling up and down the sand, the aluminum scraping quietly on the beach’s surface and occasionally clinking against the foot of his chair. She had begun to worry, a nagging fear eroding her exhaustion from being cooped up with the kids all morning. Something, she sensed intuitively, wasn’t right.

Had he left? He’d been so brusque today. Perhaps he’d decided to ditch them and find a tiki bar; maybe he’d snuck a call on the satellite phone, called the guy with the boat—what was his name, Marlow—and run off to hit on a few beach floozies. But she didn’t think so. She wasn’t sure how she knew; There was no evidence, no hard obvious proof. Yet she’d been with Josh for almost twelve years now; she knew his habits, his moods, both good and bad. She had watched the man she married vanish under layers of sullen anger, his hope for the future dissolve with the stress of children he’d never expected to have. Yet he wasn’t so far gone as to just disappear, to leave them on an island and run off with his tail between his legs, or elope with a bimbo. Josh was stubborn: he stuck things through. No, something had happened to him.

Something bad.

She checked the outhouse, then the generator shed, with its iron ladder stretching down into a soundproof cellar smelling of leaked exhaust from patchy vent pipes. She did a walk along the shore, sweat beading and then evaporating on her skin, slowly growing dehydrated. He’d only been gone for a few hours, but a few hours was a long time when there were no emergency services for dozens of nautical miles and a single accident could be fatal. She’d agreed to the trip because it had sounded so romantic, so sweet, and in some ways it was, but where was her husband?

She saw the object in the water without recognizing, it at first. It was only the flicker of sunlight off the gold band that caught her eye, and when she went back, she stared at it without thinking. Without breathing.

It was a finger.

Josh’s finger, with his wedding ring still attached. The stubby digit was pale, drained of all blood, its skin shredded at the knuckle and drifting in dangling white chunks, toyed with by the tropical surf. She worked the sight through her head, processed it, digested it and still came up with nothing, no rational response she could deploy—outside of pure, unadulterated terror.

Offshore, something rose under the waves, a dark hump that parted the waters and then disappeared.

Her stomach numbed, Sandra staggered away from the finger. She didn’t scream, which she thought was to her credit, but she also didn’t touch it. Touching it would admit that it was real, that it wasn’t just a sick joke, that the father of her children was gone.

There were marks on the finger. Pointed, scraping marks, like teeth.

She didn’t formulate a plan, or try and rationalize what had happened. She ran for the house, for the fragile wooden box with its flat-screen TV and its precious, God-blessed phone. She had a call to make, right away, right now, quite possibly the most important call of her life.

               

As she stumbled weeping up the slope towards the bungalow, something wet and sinuous slithered out of the waves, and plucked the finger from the sand.

--

                While Sandra was calling her late husband’s name, winding her way towards a horrible conclusion like a blindfolded child in an abattoir, the children had escalated their war.

               

Charlie was not a cruel kid, or a spiteful one. He was actually quite smart, a dabbler in ham-radios and the kind of computer code he wasn’t supposed to get classes about for another eight years. He wasn’t a genius savant, just very clever; sometimes, his mother wondered if he might have been the next Einstein, if only she’d added a different father’s genetics to the amniotic stew. Yet for all his smarts, at eleven years old he was still a sore loser, and he’d been losing to his little sister ever since she had been born—seven years ago.

                Mom had told him that his pack of Sunny-D, sweet ambrosia in a bottle, must’ve been lost over the side when they took the speedboat out towards island. Charlie knew better, however. It wasn’t enough for Tam, sweet puckish adorable Tam, to hog all their parents’ attention, their love, their time. It wasn’t enough for her to be the favorite, to get all the best birthday and Christmas gifts, to turn him into an afterthought despite how hard he tried to show them his smarts, his grades. No, she’d taken the Sunny-D and stashed it. And after three days of being stuck with her, his only playmate and companion on a desert island, he’d started to go a little nutty over it.

                “S-C-R-E-W,” he spelled out, placing the Scrabble tiles with patient dignity. “As in, ‘screw this.’” He gave her a pointed look. Charlie hadn’t quite mastered his sister’s ability to bend their parents with a glance, but he had acquired a pretty powerful stare behind his child-sized bifocals.

                “That’s rude,” chirped Tam, crossing her arms. She was losing, and she knew it. And without any parents in the bungalow to cry at, Charlie thought, she would finally have to accept a loss. He was the older one; he was the superior sibling. It’d taken him three days of isolation and grumpiness to come to this conclusion, the marvelous qualities of their island paradise quickly growing stale when he had to sit around with Tam all day, play with his dumb sister, treat her nice like she was smart when everyone knew she was going to grow up to be one of those bimbos on TV, like a cheerleader or something. He knew this with a cruel, selfish certainty; he had already decided her fate for her before it was written. “You’re such a butt. Mom says—”

                “’We don’t use those words in this family,’” he mimed, high-pitched, and to his surprise she giggled, hands up over her mouth. This disarmed him. He couldn’t maintain their all-important rivalry when they were sharing a joke. Clearing his throat, he tallied the scores. “Looks like I’m beating you by, let’s see… A jillion points. Give up yet?”

                Thunderclouds gathered on her forehead again. “No. I’m gonna win. If you stop c-h-e-t-i-n-g.” A pointed  spelling, if incorrect. Really, he thought, she was pretty bright for seven. Not as bright as him, but getting there. She placed P-E-T on the board. Was she messing with him right now? What if she surpassed him, in life and in Scrabble? What if she won?

                That he couldn’t abide. What if she turned out to be some kind of genius? Then he would fall forever into her shadow—her ridiculous, tiny, bratty shadow. Hurriedly he reached for his tiles, struggling to find a word big enough to cement his lead, to crush her completely. “B-E-A-S-T-L-Y,” he spelled out, delighted with his cunning. “That puts me… wow, another twelve points ahead. You done?”

                The thunderheads grew more intense. She wasn’t nearly as cute, he noticed with ugly delight, when she was scowling. She threw out the words every sibling thinks at some point, so easy to throw out but so difficult to take back: “I hate you.”

                With supervision absent, he felt confident pushing his luck. “What you gonna do? Cry about it? Sorry, Tam, sooner or later you gotta suck it up. Can’t run to Mom.” It was vicious, but he knew plenty about vicious; on the last day before summer vacation, he’d been roughed up by a couple older kids who’d called him a certain F-word and spat on his glasses. Why they’d done it, he didn’t know; he’d never met them, stacked as they were in the grades ahead of him, grades he had been planning to blaze through on his meteoric rise to middle school. He didn’t think they’d done it for any reason, though: sometimes the universe, people, just wanted to mess with you. It saw a weakness, and it came after you, like he was doing to Tam now. Except unlike him, the world wouldn’t stop when she broke down  crying and called him a jerk, or a dick. The world would never stop.

                She needed to understand.

                She did, in fact, begin to cry. Great huffs and hurks jerked her chest up and down under her tiny floral dress, her throat hitching. “Why do you always do this? Why are you such a… such a…” She seemed to gather her strength, looking around the stuffy bungalow with its cheap paintings and fakey wood paneling as if to summon their parents with a wail; in a moment of shameful terror, he thought she might scream. But she didn’t.  “Why are you such a cunt?” she spat.

                His jaw dropped. Neither of them knew what the word meant, but it was a Big One, a verbal A-bomb. He wondered where she’d learned it, but the answer was easy. Dad. Their father was not exactly a gentle speaker, and in times of duress he exploded with profanity that sent their mother scuttling from the room in thin-lipped disgust. It shouldn’t surprise him—although it did make him a little sad—that she was so willing to resort to Dad’s words, when pushed around.

                Then he smiled. “Wow… Wow. Cute little Tam, not so nice when Mom’s away.” She was sniffling, furious, and he wondered if she might throw a tantrum; he wondered if she might even hit him. Wouldn’t that be something! What would Mom say if her precious baby girl left a bruise on her big brother’s face? That would be the event of the year. “You’re the… the cunt, Tam. You always get what you want. Well, I’m winning. Deal with it, and stop being such a spoiled, little brat!” Swearing was really easy when there was no one around to punish him for it. He’d have to do it more often.

                Tam stood up. Something inside her little frame had snapped at being called names with no repercussions, no consequences. She was used to a world that was Fair, that operated on Fair Principles; if something wasn’t Fair, then Mom or Dad would step in to change the rules until things were Fair Again. Her mother was thirty seconds away from finding her father’s severed finger, complete with “I do” jewelry; if she had waited just two minutes to have her meltdown, to unleash her post-toddler fury, they might have escaped the thing outside. The waiting thing. The hungry thing.

                But she didn’t.

                “Shut UP!” she screamed. Her shrieks were high-pitched but so strangled with pent-up frustration that she could barely get them out. Charlie backed up a little, scooting on his rear as his sister’s face went beet-red and she swept all the Scrabble tiles off the board, scattering them under the ratty couch and sending them skittering into the rounded edges of the beach-house. “Shut up, shut up, shut up! You always wreck everything!” Thick sobs hitched her collarbone up and down; snot oozed from one nostril as Charlie looked on with something approaching fiendish delight. “Mom and Dad are doing real bad, and they were gonna have fun on the beach, they were g-g-gonna be happy here! Why d'you always have to ruin things?”

She began hurling the tiles at him, and he held up an arm as if they were a hail of bullets; this was better than he had ever imagined it would be. She was incoherent, the “ball of sunshine” disguise falling away and replaced by a squawking capuchin. “Woah, calm down,” he said, half-laughing in his shock. “Jesus, I didn’t—”

“You’re stupid, shut UP!” She picked up the Scrabble board, and for the first time he felt a little fearful. She truly had her father’s temper, and in that second she looked ready to beat him to death with the piece of laminated cardboard. “They were going to be happy but you ruined it whining about your stupid… your stupid orange drinks!”

She hurled the board at him. He ducked, and the laws of aerodynamics took hold, the Scrabble square coasting on the currents of air in the room, whirling like an Aborigine boomerang. Something must have taken hold of it then; fate, destiny or simple horrific bad luck. Because the thing whirled around the room and smashed into the satellite phone beside the door, knocking it to the ground.

Normally, this wouldn’t have been a problem; the woven reed mat under the door should have cushioned the fall, leaving their only connection to the mainland shaken but unharmed. Instead, the heavy plastic brick ricocheted off the pile of beach toys Sandra had assembled for the two of them, an emergency release valve for the tensions inside the bungalow, meant to be plucked up on the way while ushering her angry little urchins to the beach for some enforced relaxation. The phone spun, its strap twirling, and it landed on the cool slate of the bungalow’s floor, the only part of the rich-man’s-retreat not designed for comfort.

It smashed into dozens of pieces, coming apart at the seams, circuitry and wires vomiting across the floor to join the scrabble tiles. Both of them froze, utterly horrified. They had somehow, together, done a Very Bad Thing—and neither of them could comprehend how bad. All they know was that Mom (currently sprinting over the sand, running to make sure her babies were alive, that her babies were safe from whatever had killed her husband) and Dad (currently digesting or drifting in pieces across the beautiful blue) were going to be mad. Very mad. They were in trouble.

They didn’t say anything for a time, Tam’s sniffles echoing through the empty bungalow. Finally, the shock of the destruction washing away his spite, Charlie turned to her. “Tam,” he said, taking off his glasses, “I’m s—”

Sandra burst through the door in a whirl of yellow blouse and panicked gasps. She slammed it behind her, fumbled for a lock—there was none—and turned to her kids. “Get in the bedroom. Now, get in the—” Her foot crunched on a piece of plastic. She looked down, as if absorbing the mess, grasping it, struggling to understand it. At last she came to some kind of conclusion, and looked at her children with a sad, uncomprehending fury. Why? Asked her eyes. The two of them had never seen such raw panic and rage in their mother’s eyes, and Charlie, the diplomat, fought to find the words to get them out of being grounded or lectured.

“Mom—we’re sorry, we didn’t mean—”

“Your dad’s gone,” she said flatly.

“What?” He felt his fist go tight around his glasses. “Mom, what…”

“Your dad’s gone. Something in the water… He’s gone. Something took him.” It was important to be honest with children, her book had told her; it was important for your desire to protect them not to cut them off from the world, make them into protected, sheltered, too-delicate adults. What the book had really meant, she thought grimly as she looked on the frightened faces of her kids, was that lying to your children only shelters them from reality. “I don’t know if it’s a person, or… We have to get out of here, we have to get out of here now.” She looked at the satellite phone, on the edge of madness, insanity dancing in her irises. “You broke the phone?”

“We…” Nothing in Charlie’s lonely, introverted short life had readied him for this. Even as Tam ran for her mother, to hug her legs, to apologize, Charlie tried to keep up with what was going on. “We’re sorry.”

She tittered. “Now. Of all times, you broke the phone now.”

The children sat in silence. She felt herself teeter on the edge of a screaming fit, then come back. She was the authority here: she had to take action. So she did.

A quick hug for Tam, and then she was fully in Mom Mode, sweeping up her daughter and carrying her towards the bedroom. “Put the mini-fridge in front of the door,” she told Charlie. “Now.”

He did as he was told. There was no question, in his mind, that this was how he would win his mother’s approval back—by obeying. It had worked before, and it would work now. The phrase Dad’s gone flashed across his mind and he let it slip away. He couldn’t deal with it in a dozen years of therapy, much less right now. He unplugged the fridge, which was surprisingly light, and began dragging it in front of the bungalow door.

“You. Stay in here,” said her mother. She had not realized it, but the reason she’d commanded them both to stay in the bedroom was that the bedroom, unlike the other few rooms jutting off the central bulk of the bungalow, had no doors to the outside. No scenic patios, no delicate screen-coated wooden frames. Nothing could get in. More importantly, nothing could see them. Whatever was waiting out there—a serial killer, some kind of wildlife—might not realize there were more people here, more meals to be had. For all she knew, it was gone already, but she wasn’t taking that chance. If it was a shark, she would have just kept the children away from the water. But a shark shouldn’t be able to get into the shallows, much less steal her husband without even a scream. No, this was something else. Something worse.

Sandra would not let it have her children.

“Good,” she said, finding Charlie standing like an automaton in front of the fridge. She squeezed his shoulder, strangely calm. It was always good to be level-headed in a crisis, and she thought with wry horror that this pretty much qualified as a crisis, damned if it didn’t. “Now get those pieces, bring them in with Tam.”

“What are we going to do?”

She took a deep breath. “That radio kit you’ve been playing with since Christmas. You know how that works, right?”

He nodded.

“And a phone has… Some of the same pieces of a radio. Right?” What was she saying? She’d majored in culinary arts, for fuck’s sake. “Can you fix it, Charlie? Can you fix the phone?”

The weight of the task fell on his shoulders, but he considered the parts. A receiver, there. An extendable antennae, there. Everything in between was just guts—just innards, like the intestines of a fish that had been sliced open and strewn across the floor. Unlike fish, though, machines could be put back together, made to live again. But only if you were smart enough. “I… I think so.”

“Good. That’s what we’re going to do.” The sun lanced through the windows at them, as if peering in to watch the show unfold. It was long past its zenith now, she realized, and back in New Hampshire—back in the real world—it was winter. The days were short, even this close to the equator. It would be night in just a few hours.

Then they would be alone, in the dark, with something out there on the beach. Something that had eaten her Josh.

As she marched back to the bedroom to comfort her terrified daughter, Sandra picked up Meditative Parenting off the couch. You never knew when good parenting techniques would come in handy, after all.