Useless Bay(19)

There was no pulse. No pulse.

What the hell was going on?

All right. Here were the facts: There was one me and there were two Grays. I made a choice—the kind I hoped I’d never have to make again.

I kicked Frank aside and went to work on Pixie.

I found the spot on her rib cage and started pounding on her. Hundred beats per minute. That was how often you were supposed to press down. And I thumped. And I thumped.

I don’t know how long I had been keeping this up when Dad pulled me away. I screamed. “Jesus Christ, Dad! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He wore his business face, which pissed me off. This was the wrong place to be managing anything, least of all me.

“You’re in the way. You’re duplicating effort.”

“Yeah, well next time your girlfriend dies, I’ll tell you something just as comforting.”

Too late, I realized my mistake. His wife was lying dead twenty feet down the beach. The two of us sucked at interpersonal skills, and we definitely weren’t huggers.

But Dad was better than me on one point. He’d gotten me out of the way. A swarm of first responders was now working on Pixie, who was so swollen she was unrecognizable.

Joyce was three paces behind my father, talking in that clipped voice into her headset, tapping on her electronic tablet. Probably to legal. “That’s right. Nondisclosure statements all around. There are a lot of people involved. When the press gets ahold of this, they’ll have a field day.”

Meredith was there, too. “Who’s that on the ground next to her, Henry? Who else are they working on?” She sounded desperate.

“I think that’s Frank,” I said. “Where’s Sammy?”

“How should I know?” Meredith said. “We went out searching together but then split up.”

Dad’s face looked like putty, features that had been formed and re-formed over and over in the past hour. Finally, he said, “No sign of Grant?”

“Nothing at all. Pix has been out swimming in the bay. She should have been searching for him on land with the dog . . . ,” I said. Come to think of it, where was the dog? I hadn’t seen her since we were in the guard shack. “Maybe somebody should go inside and get a piece of Grant’s clothing. Maybe one of her brothers can run the dog. If they’re not all down.”

He paid no attention to the last part. Apparently I was the only one who wondered if all the Grays had dropped at once.

“Good thinking,” Dad said. “Joyce?”

Joyce pushed a button on her headset. “Mmm?” she asked Dad. “Clothing. Probably something dirty, correct?”

Dad looked to me, as though I were the search-and-rescue expert, having learned by osmosis.

“Yes,” I said, because it just made sense and gave me something easier to think about than Pixie dying in front of me and her brother Frank dying at the same time for no apparent reason. I picked at the scars on my hands until I drew blood.

“Hold on, Pix, hold on!” An EMT worker was shoving another one out of the way. The first had apparently been trying to run a line in her vein and had screwed up, because a spray of blood squirted from her elbow into the air.

Interesting, interesting, I thought. She has her own blowhole.

Dad saw what was happening, and just like that, he became the person I needed him to be. I could see it in the slump of his shoulders, hear it in his deepening breathing. Of all the things that could have flipped him, all the tragedy that had happened and was still happening, Pixie’s spurting blood was enough to make him remember I was his child.

“Don’t look, son,” he said, his voice full of compassion.

He pressed my face to his shoulder.

Dad wasn’t usually a hugger, but that night he was. He was as damp as I was and doughy around the middle, but it was a kindness, and he didn’t drip many of them on me. So I accepted.

At the same time, someone hovering over Frank shouted, “Clear!”

There was a whir and a kerpow.

Nothing happened.

“Look away. It’s okay to look away if it’s too hard. Marilyn would understand.”

I sometimes forgot that Pixie’s real name was Marilyn.

“I think I need to see this, Dad.” And I faced her. All I could do was watch.

I’d never made her any promises, so there was nothing to be broken, but still it felt like a breach of contract, all the things we’d never get to do together flooding into my brain.

We’d known each other for years, and I just assumed we’d have time for all that stupid crap, like sitting around a campfire, eating s’mores, and listening to some guy playing acoustic guitar. The things you do on a beach, the easy way you wrap your arms around someone and hold them tight in the firelight and know that even if you don’t have forever, you have this moment.

But that was always the problem with Pixie, wasn’t it? We were too close. A moment wouldn’t be enough.

And now it looked as though I wouldn’t even get that.

Dad had told me to look away. My bad eye was still killing me from my fracas with Todd Wishlow, who thought Pix was worth only a moment.

Pixie was worth much more than that, even though I hadn’t realized it until right then, when she was leaving me. She wasn’t just a weekend friend. I’d known her for six years, and when you’ve known someone for that long and you start to think about them romantically, it automatically gets serious. And no matter how many lectures Dad gave me about getting serious too young, that was what I wanted.