“Don’t move any further,” I admonished him when I’d gotten him to the end of the dock. “Stay right where you are. I’ll get a car and swing back to pick you up.”
Twenty minutes later we were in a white-curtained examination area in Mass General’s emergency room, Max’s pants scissored away and three interns swabbing, stitching, and setting up a transfusion. Then a gunshot wound drew them away and Max and I were alone.
“Did you know?” I asked. “About what he did to your sister, I mean?”
“No. I couldn’t know that.”
“So you called it an accident?”
“I called it my fault. My parents called it an accident, but that was only because it was less horrible to think it was an accident than anything else.”
“You said your sister’d been left in a bath by herself lots of times. Didn’t you wonder? Didn’t you think that Ricky…?”
“I don’t know. I know I left the house for a few minutes of pickup ball. I know I told Ricky I’d be right back. I was gone maybe twenty minutes. I know that.”
“He said you knew what he was,” I said. “Did you?”
“Sometimes you can’t know what you know,” he said. “You know that.”
I did.
We sat side by side for another half hour, waiting for a doctor to return and decide what to do with him next. I said, “Max, what happened tonight on the Rubber Duck, nobody’s going to blame us. And nobody’s going to find Ricky’s body.”
Max had managed to get blood in his hair as well, and now it stood out from his skull, matted where it had congealed and dried. I patted a clump of it down. I slipped my fingers along the bloody line he’d left on his cheek, down to his throat.
“Justice is done,” I said to him.
*
Before our hospital stay ended, we laid out the facts of the evening’s events for the authorities as thinly and plainly as we could. The interrogators looked at Max’s condition and asked him if he wanted to press assault charges against his brother, which made him laugh, not in a sane-sounding way. The staff left again, a nurse saying that Max would have to be admitted for the night because he needed another transfusion. Stay put, she said as she walked away.
“Thank you,” he murmured. “For saving me. For getting me here.”
“You’re welcome.”
Max Luhrmann looked as ravaged and windblown as a man coming from a storm at sea, which I guess is exactly what he was.
“Neave?”
“What?”
“You are so beautiful.”
The words sent a little electric trill through my chest. “Max, you took that painkiller the nurse gave you? The little white one?”
“Yes. It’s why I can say what I think. It doesn’t mean I don’t think it.”
I looked at him so carefully, so afraid I’d see a man who was too drugged to say what he meant. The man I saw looked entirely like himself, only bleeding and disheveled and a little slowed by the painkiller. He looked like he was in charge of his mental faculties.
He said, “You’re in my head almost all the time.”
I was still wearing the bloodstained pajamas I’d driven to the hospital in. My hair was jammed in a lumpy ponytail. I’d found a pair of old sneakers on the boat and slid my feet into them. There were holes in the toes. One of my hands lifted like the movement was its own idea and went to his lips. He stayed very still and then, slowly, put his hand on my neck. I pulled his whole body directly, entirely, against mine. I drew his head down and kissed him. He kissed back. I pulled away.
He reached for my hand and caught it. He pulled me onto his gurney. “Again,” he said. So I kissed him again.
NEAVE
Message in a Bottle
Ricky Luhrmann’s body was never recovered. They stopped looking when no trace of him surfaced over a ten-week “search.” Now he is a missing person who is missed by no one. Nothing will ever mark a grave or commemorate a date. His feet could be on a beach in Ballybunion and his head could be on its way to Reykjavik. Nobody has been accused of his murder because there is no body. There is only Max, who thinks that if he hadn’t walked out of the house that afternoon when he was ten and Ricky was eight and a little sister played in the bathtub, that everything could be different. He’s looking for something that will explain his brother.
I’m not. The world has Ricky Luhrmanns in it and sometimes there’s no explanation for what they are. They hurt people because it feels good. If Ricky Luhrmann had been fished out of the water and dried off, he would have gone and gotten a piece of wire and wound it around my neck. Then he would have nailed my hair to Max’s office door.