Neverworld Wake(22)

“Everyone knows adolescent love has a short shelf life,” Whitley explained with shrug.

Now it was clear that Whitley and Cannon boarded the Last Hurrah for no reason other than that they’d decided that boat was their mad, twisted playground to tear into, as if they were two wild monkeys locked in a cage.

It was their padded cell. The soundproof room where they could scream their heads off.

The first night, I watched Wit get so drunk she vomited all over the dinner table on the platters of lobster and sirloin steak.

“Whoops,” she said, wiping her mouth.

The second night, she danced provocatively with Ted Daisy. When his wife, Patty, saw what was happening, she called out in a drunken voice, “Ted! Ted?” like their fifty-year marriage had suddenly turned into a phone call with poor reception.

On another occasion, Cannon and Wit stripped down to their underwear and, climbing up onto the ship’s railing, screamed, “Carpe noctem!” Holding hands, they jumped, falling the fifty feet into the sea. Alarms sounded. Women screamed. Engines gasped to a halt. The crew members swarmed, shouting orders, two diving in with life vests.

“Find them!” shouted Ted Daisy, desperately peering over the railing. He looked like he was having a heart attack. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to jail because of those wackos!”

“We’re going to lose everything,” wailed Patty.

“We should have tied them up the moment we realized something was mentally off with them. We should have called the coast guard.”

“It’s your fault!” screamed Patty, her stiff blond hair standing up like pieces of potato chips. “You invited them aboard because you wanted to impress that little blond piece of ass. You thought you had a chance with her. Ha! Hope you’re happy now!”

Hysteria. Panic. Fury. Despair. Fear. Alarm.

It all happened aboard the Last Hurrah on a day that would not stop happening.

I watched from back rooms, spare bedrooms, an electrical supply closet. I put on the extra crew uniform I’d found, and no one looked at me twice. I kept waiting for the right moment to appear, to try to talk down Cannon and Wit, bring them back from the razor’s edge. I couldn’t find it. I knew them too well. When they were like this, there was no stopping them.

I remained where I was, peering out at the nightmarish scene through a crack in the door, terrified, sick, sometimes crying, wondering when it would stop.

Then one night Cannon smashed a decanter over Ted Daisy’s head. Ted shoved him into a display case stacked with crystal goblets. They began wrestling, overturning coffee tables and the dining room table. Then Cannon was sitting on the man’s chest, strangling him.

I’d had enough. I ran out of the closet and knelt beside Cannon, trying to pry off his hands. The old man was spitting and blubbering.

“Stop it!” I cried.

It took Cannon another minute to let go. I tried CPR, compressing the man’s chest, counting the way my dad had taught me. I checked his pulse. He was alive, but barely.

“You have to stop,” I whispered.

Cannon surveyed me like I was a distant relative whose name he couldn’t recall.

“You’re making it worse. Because we remember. These people don’t. But you do. And the destruction will eat away at you.”

“Oh, shut up, Bee,” said Wit.

She’d risen from the sofa, where she’d been passed out cold.

“What are you even doing here? Spying? When will you realize we want nothing to do with you? We’re not your friends anymore. You blew that when you went MIA after Jim. You think you can just ditch your friends like that and get away with it?”

She shuffled toward me, her eyes red and threatening. I turned and ran, barging past the other guests, who’d been woken by the noise and were now, in their white terry-cloth robes and matching slippers, gaping in shock at the scene. I ran to the third-floor deck and spent the rest of the wake in one of the rescue boats, sobbing, hoping no one would find me.

I never returned to the Last Hurrah.

Cannon and Wit went the very next wake. Wit left me a message scrawled in high-drama red lipstick across the kitchen counter.

STAY AWAY.



The threat was unnecessary. I could never go back there.

Would repetition eventually render even the Last Hurrah boring, whereupon they’d return to Wincroft? Would one of them decide they wanted to live, to escape the Neverworld, to vote? Or would they simply move on to devouring something or someone else? The Neverworld held an infinite number of playgrounds, so it was possible, horrifying as it was to consider, that I’d never see them again.

I couldn’t think about that. Not yet.

Instead, I turned my attention to Martha.

It was funny how I’d almost forgotten her. And I suspected it was just what she wanted.





Martha no longer spent the day hiking Wincroft. Now she would hurriedly enter the mansion, retrieve a raincoat, and drive off, never returning.

“Where do you go?” I asked her.

She whipped around in surprise. She hadn’t seen me sitting in the rocking chair on the porch. Recovering, she pulled out her car keys, then opened an umbrella.

“I visit this silly Baptist church buffet up in Newport.” She shrugged, her face turning red. “I’ve turned it into my personal biosphere. Like I find a guy and see if I can get him to say ‘I love you’ by the end of the night. Or I approach a woman and see if I can get her to leave her husband. I’m trying to prove a theory about human nature. That anyone is capable of anything at any time, given a certain set of conditions.”