“That’s not like Mother to let some random dude take us camping,” says Bess.
“He was an old friend,” I say.
I try to recall Buddy’s face, but it isn’t there. His whole self isn’t really there. I can remember the hot dogs and, now that she told the story, Penny washing her leg and yelling about it. She was wearing sky-blue athletic shorts, and her dirty white sneakers sat on the shore of the creek beside her. I remember keeping the pink jelly beans for myself, too, and doling out green and black to my sisters, since I didn’t like them. Bess extending sticky palms, asking for more candy.
His face won’t come up, though. It is like he never existed for me. Buddy Kopelnick is only a scratched-out face on an old photograph.
Bess and Penny have stopped thinking about him. They are tipsy, singing “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?”
They’re doing just as I asked them to. As we Sinclairs always do.
Pretending. Lying. Trying to have a good time.
* * *
—
WHEN THE SUN comes up, we drink the coffee from three of the four thermoses. We eat the potato chips.
I tell them about Rosemary and me, that time we had the potato chip breakfast when she was alive.
Bess wants to drink more whiskey, but I say no. We have to be sober and smell of seawater and coffee when we get back.
Instead, we pour some of the coffee from the fourth thermos into our own cups. Into “Pfeff’s” thermos, a tall one, we pour a large amount of whiskey, leaving room at the top so it looks like he drank at least half. We have no idea how fingerprinting works, and we should have put Pfeff’s mouth and hands on the thermos, but it’s too late now, so we wipe it with a beach towel and plan to say it fell in the water with the lid on. That’s the story of why his prints aren’t on it. If anyone asks. But there’s probably no police record of his fingerprints, I tell my sisters. So it likely doesn’t matter what’s on the thermos.
We eat the Pop-Tarts.
We toss the whiskey bottle into the ocean.
With a towel, we wipe the boat seat where Pfeff lay. Then we spray the towel with cleaner, soak it in the ocean, and wring it out, stretching it to dry. We take Pfeff’s blood-stained gray T-shirt, my sweater, and everything any of us have worn this past night and wind them together into a tight ball around a large stone. We sink the ball. It goes down slowly, but it disappears.
“Rest in peace, good gray top,” says Bess.
“Rest in peace, best jean shorts,” says Penny.
“Goodbye, pink sweatshirt,” I say.
It is more than any of us said for Pfeff when he went under. But there is no use pointing that out.
When we are certain the boat is irreproachable, we go swimming, wetting our hair and swimsuits. Later, when we return to Beechwood, our cover-ups will be convincingly damp, and our towels, too.
We leave one towel, Pfeff’s towel, neatly folded. We crumple the shirt we took from his room and put it on the floor of the boat next to his shoes and socks, like he took it off to go swimming.
We wipe our prints off the spray cleaner and toss it into the sea.
We are so far out we can’t even see land, but the compass guides us as we head home.
It is 6:48 in the morning when we pull up to the island.
62.
WE TIE UP the boat and leave it a mess. We run up the dock.
Tipper, Luda, and Harris are in the Clairmont kitchen, which smells of coffee and cinnamon rolls. They are startled as we burst in.
We girls all talk over one another. Penny cries. Bess cries. I cry.
We went out to do an Early Morning with Pfeff, we explain. It was one of these adventures we’d been going on, to enjoy the sunrise.
Pfeff brought the coffee and
we brought snacks and it’s
true
we thought Major and George were coming, but they weren’t there. We don’t know why. It was Pfeff’s idea and maybe he forgot to tell them. Or maybe they just slept in.
Anyway, we went out, like usual, except this time, Bess got to come.
And Pfeff was acting funny, like maybe he was drunk.
He was zigzagging the boat and being wild,
and it’s
true,
it seems impossible for someone to be drunk at six in the morning, but we are pretty sure he was, because he was like, singing and being weird.
We tried to get him to eat some breakfast, but he said no, and when he stopped the boat, we all went swimming, like we usually do.
We should probably have tried to make sure Pfeff didn’t swim, because of course you shouldn’t swim when you’re drunk,
and we really are very careful, usually, but we weren’t thinking. Well, it’s true
Carrie did say “Don’t go in, Pfeff,” but he just laughed and jumped in anyway.
Then we were swimming and he went kinda far away from the boat, really far, but he was laughing and everything was fine and then Penny got out of the water.
She was leaning over the edge talking to Bess when something went funny with the anchor. The yellow nylon thing, the rope that goes down to the chain part of the anchor, that was like, all frayed, and Penny heard a flop sound and she was like, “Oh my god, I think the rope just broke.”
Carrie and Bess got out of the water to look and we pulled up the anchor and it wasn’t even there anymore. The rope had broken.
We were all busy with that and we were worried you’d be mad at us for losing the anchor, Daddy, even though it wasn’t our fault, but it’s true
that we hadn’t checked the cord was strong and we do know you’re supposed to check the cord is strong every time you weigh anchor, but anyway, it’s true
we were totally distracted and when we looked up, we couldn’t see Pfeff.
We called him and called him, and we looked all around, and he just wasn’t there.
He went under.
We couldn’t find him.
We started the boat and we went around, looking for him and looking, and calling, but he wasn’t there.
It could have been a shark, because you know how people talk about sharks in the water, even though we’ve never seen one, or it could have been just that he was drunk
and he choked on some water, or breathed it in, and we don’t know, he went under.
We called and called and looked and looked, and finally, we came home, to you,
Mother and Daddy.
We’re so scared.
63.
TIPPER WANTS TO ring the police, but Harris isn’t sure. He says he doesn’t want them involved. He says it is a family matter.
Tipper counters that with an accidental death you have to call the police. And they could search for Pfeff. Maybe he’s still alive.
“He’s not alive,” I say.
“He could be,” says Tipper. “Clinging to a buoy or trying to swim ashore.”
“He was nowhere,” I say. “We looked.”
“I don’t want police on the island,” says Harris.
“Darling, please,” says Tipper. “We have to do right by that boy.”
In the end, my father agrees and Tipper rings the police—but it is three hours before their boat arrives, and even Tipper has to admit that Pfeff would have swum to shore by now if he had any hope of doing so.
She is somber as we meet the police boat at the staff dock. It unloads two Martha’s Vineyard officers in uniform. Both are ruddy white guys. One is burly and young, a buffalo of a man. The other is wiry, weathered, and quite a bit older, more of a python.
They assure us that a team is looking for Pfeff at sea. They ask us questions about where we were anchored when he died.
We lie.
They accept coffee from my mother. They say they do not need to talk to Major and George, Luda or Gerrard, but they speak briefly to my parents and interview me, Penny, and Bess separately.
My sisters and I all know our story.
I sit down with the officers in the dining room. My skin feels sore from fatigue but I force myself to look them in the eyes.
What time did you take the boat out?
“Five-thirty.” I know my mother’s alarm rings at 5:45.
That’s awfully early.
“We wanted to catch the sunrise.” I looked the time up in the morning paper.