The Unsinkable Greta James(22)

She stops walking when they reach the seventh-floor landing. Ben does too.

“This is me,” she says, nodding down the endless hall of doors.

When they turn to face each other, she realizes how tall he is, and without quite meaning to, she thinks about the logistics of kissing him, whether standing on her toes would be enough, or whether he’d have to meet her partway. It’s true he’s gotten more attractive with each drink—the easy smile, the warmth in his eyes, the way he sits forward when she talks, like he’s not only listening but absorbing everything she says—but it makes no sense because he’s still technically married and she’s still technically a mess, and the only reason this is even crossing her mind is because they’re both drunk and alone in the middle of nowhere. In the real world, on dry land, in the light of day, they’d be completely wrong for each other.

As she stares at his lips, she finds herself thinking of Jason, then of Luke, then of Ben’s wife back home with his two daughters. The boat is tilting beneath her feet, and it’s hard to tell what’s alcohol and what’s the ocean, what’s real and what’s not. She puts a hand on the wall to steady herself, and Ben looks startled by the movement. Something flickers in his eyes, but she’s not sure what it is. He clears his throat.

“I think,” he says slowly, “that Future Ben would be really mad at Current Ben if he didn’t ask if we could hang out again.”

Greta feels a wave of relief, and then, before she can fully examine this, a rush of pleasure. She gives him a bleary nod. “I’ll be around.”

“Good,” he says, taking a few steps backward. “Then I’ll find you.”

“Thanks,” she says, already heading down the hall, and though she knows this is the wrong thing to say, the response not quite matching up to the statement, it’s also true. She’d like very much to be found.





Chapter Ten


Sometime after midnight, the cabin phone rings. Greta’s muddled brain is so convinced it’s the alarm clock that by the time she knocks that to the floor—the red numbers blinking off, the windowless room going inky black—the ringing has stopped.

It starts again a few seconds later, and she picks up this time.

“I’ve been quarantined,” says the voice on the other end, and it takes Greta a few seconds to formulate a question.

“What?”

“Quarantined,” he repeats. “In my room.”

“Why? What happened? Are you okay?”

Her dad sighs heavily. “My stomach has been funny, so I called to see if I could get a refund on the cannery tour tomorrow, and apparently the cruise ship people panic when passengers don’t feel well so—”

“The cannery…?”

“In Juneau,” he says impatiently. “We’re supposed to— You know what? Never mind. The point is that I’ve been quarantined.”

The ship rocks steeply from side to side, and Greta squeezes her eyes shut, thinking that she shouldn’t have had so much to drink yesterday.

“You’re sick?” she asks, feeling a little queasy herself.

Conrad lets out a grunt. “I’m fine. You toss your cookies a couple times and they treat you like Patient Zero. Never mind that the goddamn ship is rolling around like we’re in the Bermuda Triangle. I swear I—”

“So you’re not allowed to leave your room?”

“No.”

“For how long?”

“At least another eighteen hours.”

“Jesus.”

“I know.”

They both go quiet for a second, and then Greta forces herself to say, “Do you want me to come over there?”

“Nobody’s allowed in,” he says without bothering to hide his exasperation. “That’s the whole point of a quarantine.”

She tries not to let the relief creep into her voice. “Okay, well, do you need anything?”

“I’ll be fine,” he says. “Can you tell the others I won’t make the tour tomorrow? You can take my place if you want. It’s the cannery and then a ride on the tram.”

“Oh,” Greta says, and her voice goes up an octave, “yeah. Maybe I’ll—”

“You don’t have to,” he says gruffly.

Again there’s a pause. The room is so black it almost feels like she’s floating. She grips the phone harder, remembering how she used to creep out into the backyard after their fights, sitting on the old childhood swing set until it was too dark to see. They fought about everything then: about her grades, about her sneaking out, about the fact that she cared about the guitar more than math or science, more than anything, really.

Even then she missed the days when Conrad used to stand at the entrance of the garage and watch her play, a silhouette against the setting sun. But she was no longer an eight-year-old kid with a too-big guitar, her tongue stuck out in concentration. She was twelve, and then thirteen, and then fourteen, perpetually clad in flannel and scuffed Converses, already chafing against the great injustice of growing up on the outskirts of Columbus, where nothing ever happened. By then, her father had already seen enough to know that he would lose her to music, that she would choose that over everything else, and the great big spotlight of his attention had swiveled to Asher, who was a kicker on the high school football team and tried hard in math, who wore an Ohio University sweatshirt and dreamed of all the same things Conrad had once dreamed of, all the things he’d never had: college, opportunity, getting a leg up in the world.