The Voice inside My Head (8 page)

I
run into Reesie when I step out of the shower room wrapped in my towel. I’m holding all three of my shirts and my only shorts, freshly laundered with bath soap. Reesie’s got her pail and cleaning brush and gives me an irritated look before she tries to push past me.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” I smile, deliberately stepping into her path.

“Don’t bother trying your flirting on me.” She scowls.

“I was hoping to talk to your brother this morning.” I keep my tone friendly, but this girl’s as cuddly as a sea urchin. “He’s gone to the cays. Won’t be back till tomorrow.”

“The cays?”

“Yeah, you know, the little islands just west of here. The
cays
,” she enunciates. When I don’t respond, she shakes her head in disgust and brushes past me into the shower room.

I stand there listening to her fill her pail. I was really counting on talking to Jamie this morning. Zach’s revelation that Pat was drinking a lot on her last night makes me think she must have been upset about something. Of course, she could have been celebrating. Either way, the most
likely person to know her state of mind is her alleged fiancé.

Something’s biting me. I suddenly notice tiny red spots covering my chest and arms. What the hell?

Reesie emerges from the shower room and pauses when she notices me examining myself. “They really got you,” she observes.

“What are
they
?”

“You really don’t know anything, do you?”

I shrug.

“Sand flies. The bites’ll start itching fierce in about twenty-four hours. You want to get yourself some medicine before then. Some people find salt water helps. You planning on swimming?”

“Not likely,” I say.

She cocks a brow. “Tea tree oil might help. You can pick it up most anywhere, but if you want to get away from ’em right now, there’s a strong wind at the end of the dock.”

I look down the path to the dock and notice for the first time that the Shark Center boat is out. It must have left while I was in the shower. The sun looks hot on the dock, but it might dry my clothes faster. I can’t go anywhere till I have something to wear.

“Thanks,” I say. “Will you tell your brother I need to speak to him?”

“He knows that.” She smirks. “You told him yourself last night when you were … busy.”

I blink. “Right, well, see ya.” I stomp past her down to the dock and walk straight to the end.

The water beneath me looks about ten feet deep but could be deeper. The ocean’s so clear, it’s like looking into your
bathtub, if you had creepy coral heads and bizarre fish in your tub. Near the shore it’s pale blue; then, about thirty feet out, it gets darker all of a sudden. The coral’s still visible, but it’s shadowy, like monsters lurking under the bed. If a shark attacked in this water, you’d see it coming long before it bit you. You’d still be dead, but it’d be quite the sight.

The wind is strong and I can’t feel the pricks of sand flies anymore, so I lay out my clothes and settle down to enjoy a few moments of relief. There are at least fifty docks, some only a few feet apart, jutting out from one end of the town to the other in a curve around a natural harbor. There’s constant coming and going, mostly fishing and dive boats leaving and narrow rickety dories arriving, a few loaded with people but most with a single boatman. Like the buildings in town, most of these boats have peeling paint and chunks out of them. They don’t look very seaworthy, but the grizzled captains handle them with relaxed confidence.

I hang my legs over the edge of the dock and watch a steady parade of fish swim underneath. The colors and shapes are amazing. My sister had some unusual fish in her aquariums but nothing like this. There’s a couple I’ve only seen in books — big boxy things, with elaborate spots and patches. I pull my feet up fast as a huge dark shape approaches from the deep. It’s about five feet wide and quite a bit longer, with winglike fins that undulate slowly. My heart speeds up as it glides beneath me, turns under the dock and swims out again. It’s the first time I’ve seen an eagle ray in the flesh.

“What’re you doing out here all by yourself?”

I look up in surprise to see Reesie looming over me.

“I’m drying my clothes.” I prepare to be told off again, even though it was her idea I come out here. If I’m breaking some kind of moral code sitting here in nothing but a towel, she should have thought of that earlier. Not to mention the fact that Tracy didn’t have a bikini line. What does that tell you about the local dress code? I may not bring that example up, though.

She doesn’t say anything, just plops down beside me and joins my fish-watching. She’s probably trying to get my guard down before launching another attack.

“That’s not what I meant.” She takes off her sandals, swinging her bare feet over the water. “What are you doing here in Utila?”

“We’ve had this conversation. I’m looking for my sister, remember?”

“No.” She turns to me and doesn’t continue until I look at her, which I take my time doing. “Your parents already lost one child. Why’d they let you come here, alone?”

I look away fast.

The ray has circled back and wings under us again. It’s strange that it keeps returning to the dock.

“Their pups are born with everything they’ll ever need to survive,” I say. “They have a barb on the end of their tail to protect them, they know how to find food and their mouth plates are fully formed. They don’t need their parents for anything.”

“All you tourist kids think about is fish.”

“But no one knows why they jump. Sometimes the females jump when they’re giving birth and the pups drop out of them in midair. Some people think they jump to evade predators.”

“They probably jump because they’re bored,” says Reesie.

“I didn’t think they’d let me come,” I confess. “I didn’t ask them until after I’d bought the ticket, but even so, right up until I walked in the room and told Mom to put down her drink, I thought one of them would stop me.”

“They didn’t try?” She’s doing a poor job of keeping her voice neutral.

“My dad asked if I had enough cash. Mom didn’t say anything. I think she was happy to see me go. It’s not like I was doing anything important back home, and they’re as anxious for me to find Pat as I am.” I pause to focus on breathing as tightness spreads across my chest. I know I shouldn’t feel hurt
that my parents let me go off alone to the same place Pat disappeared. They’d already been down here ahead of me, so they probably felt comfortable it wasn’t dangerous; but if they believed that, what do they think happened to Pat?

“Anyway, Mom’s got her own problems,” I say, as much to myself as to Reesie. “She can’t be worrying about me all the time.” I’m hoping Reesie will leave it at that and not push me to explain that Mom never seemed to worry about me, not when I cut school or got suspended for smoking dope — not even when I got busted for selling fake IDs and she and Dad had to come down to the police station to bail me out. She told me not to do it again, but she never got angry and she never once punished me. That was weird, because Pat could make the smallest mistake — oversleep and miss swim practice or get a B on a test — and Mom would be all over her. Maybe she figured with me there was no point. I’ve never been particularly good in school. I don’t have my sister’s brains or ambition.

I feel every contour of the wood as my hands grip the dock. Reesie covers my hand with hers, and we sit like that for a while. I can feel her waiting, and a part of me would like to spill my whole life story. I imagine it would be a relief to talk it out with someone, and as bad tempered as Reesie is, there’s something solid about her. I feel I can trust her. But I’m scared if I start talking, I might not know where to stop.

I’m quiet for a long while. This girl is patient; I’ll say that for her.

“Pat has a scholarship to study marine biology in the fall,” I continue finally. “It’s everything she’s always wanted, everything she’s worked for, but she came here instead.”

“But just for the summer, right?” asks Reesie.

“Sure,” I say unconvincingly. “But the thing is, she didn’t need to come here at all. If she’d stuck to her own plan, she’d be safe at home right now.”

“So she took a detour. I expect most of the tourist kids here are doing that. It’s not so surprising, is it?”

“But that’s not like her. From as far back as I can remember, she had this plan for her life. She never deviated, never hesitated, until the last couple of months. Things changed.” I hesitate, trying to figure out how to explain, without telling her everything. I’m not sure what I want from her; absolution, maybe, though I know it’s not hers to give. “Pat never really had much chance to be a kid. The first time it dawned on me our mom might not be up to the job of parenting us was when she forgot to pick me up from kindergarten on my first day of school. Pat was only six, but she showed up at the classroom door and made the teacher let me go home with her. I threw a tantrum, wanting to wait for my mom, but Pat insisted Mom wasn’t coming. Turns out she was right. Mom had fallen asleep watching her daytime soaps. It was years of that kind of thing before I realized she had a drinking problem, but I think Pat always knew.”

“My daddy died a few months ago,” says Reesie quietly. “He was working on a ship off the coast of West Africa and took a fever.”

I turn to her but she’s staring down at the water, so I flip my hand over and curl my fingers through hers.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“Sixteen.” She says it like a challenge, like it might be too old for something or too young.

“Don’t you go to school?”

She looks at me then, her eyes blazing.

“You really are dumb, aren’t you?” She snatches her hand away. “Didn’t I just tell you my daddy died? You think my family’s got money to send me to school now?” She scrambles to her feet.

I leap to mine, ready with an apology. My towel does not leap with me.

“Ah,” I say.

“You dropped something,” she says.

“Right.” I snatch up my towel and hastily wrap it around my waist.

The first attempt only somewhat covers my butt, and one end hangs ineffectively down my leg. My equipment is still feeling the cooling breeze off the Caribbean. I turn my back on her to make some strategic adjustments.

“Everything all right over there?” she asks sweetly. I can tell she’s enjoying this.

Would it be ungallant to shove her off the dock? She’s an islander; I’m sure she can swim.

“Fine,” I snap.

When I turn around, she’s sitting down again, swinging her bare feet and grinning.

I hesitate. I don’t much feel like sitting with her anymore, but I don’t have anything else to do. I thump down and resume my fish watch.

“So why did your sister come out here if that wasn’t in her plan?” she asks.

“She and my mom fought all the time. Mom was always pushing her. Nothing Pat did was ever good enough.” I’m
not sure how to explain why Mom was so hard on Pat when I never really understood it myself. “Don’t get me wrong. She’s proud of Pat. She used to brag about her all the time when Pat wasn’t around. She had a box in her room where she saved every one of Pat’s report cards and every award. I found it once when I was looking through her closet.” I don’t mention I was rifling through Mom’s pockets for cash to buy drugs. “I don’t think Pat ever knew about the box, and I never told her either. I wish I’d told her, but I don’t know if it would have made any difference. As angry as Mom was at Pat, Pat gave it back a hundred times over. I think it might have enraged Pat more to think Mom was hoarding proof of her achievements — like Mom was trying to share credit for her success.”

“It must have been hard to be in the middle of that,” Reesie says sympathetically, taking my hand again.

I give her a crooked smile. “I don’t know if I’d say I was in the middle, exactly; more like on the sidelines, worrying about how it was all going to play out.” I don’t tell her that sometimes I envied Pat her battles with Mom. How twisted is that? But at least Mom noticed her.

“So you supported Pat coming here to get away from your mom?”

“Something like that,” I say, feeling my face heat up. I look away.

“I’m really sorry I said mean things about her,” Reesie says. “I only saw her drunk once or twice and, even then, she wasn’t really drunk. And she was always nice to me, not like some. She gave me a book once. Sounds stupid, but that really meant something to me. I came in to clean her
room and she was reading it. I asked her if it was good and she offered to give it to me when she was done. Didn’t occur to her I might not be much of a reader. Fact is, I used to love reading when I was in school, but I’d kind of lost sight of that in the last little while. I read that book from cover to cover. I kept meaning to tell her how much I liked it. I had this plan that maybe we’d discuss it a little; maybe I’d even ask if I could borrow another. It was probably a dumb idea anyway.”

“Why? I’m sure she would have liked that.”

“I don’t know. The kids who come here don’t necessarily think about us like that.”