But he has a weakness. He likes fast cars. And he likes to drive them fast, even our beige Lexus SUV—a vehicle so huge it takes up two lanes on the freeway. And there’s the thing you probably don’t know about, which is that he likes to argue with law enforcement once he’s been pulled over.
There are 31.2 miles between our house in Medina and the Whidbey Island ferry. I don’t know how much those thirty miles have cost us in terms of speeding tickets, since Dad refuses to look at bills (he has people for that), but they’re worth it, because once we paid the toll and maneuvered onto the ferry, Dad would release his grip on the wheel, roll down the window, and inhale a bouquet of salt air, fried fish, and bus exhaust. He would lean back in his leatherette chair and let his shoulders sag. To my dad, that smell was like crack.
The Friday before Grant disappeared, we pulled into the holding lanes and parked behind a rusty pickup with a vanity plate that read DCPTION. Somewhere behind us was a car that had our “travel team”: Joyce, Dad’s admin, because God forbid he’d get an idea and have to jot it down himself; Hannah, our cook; and Edgar, our go-to guy. Yuri, our security dude, had gone ahead of us. Dad liked them to remain as invisible as possible. When he was at the beach, he wanted the illusion of it being just the family, the sand, and the easy come and go of the waves.
Although that afternoon, I would’ve welcomed a distraction of any kind because when Dad pulled the key out of the ignition, his shoulders were still up around his ears. I was still in trouble.
My stepmother, Lyudmila, said, “Don’t you want to roll down the window?”
“It’s raining,” he said, and began drumming his fingers on the dash.
Grant, who was sitting next to me in the middle row of the car, unbuckled his seat belt and leaned forward to put his head between Dad’s and Lyudmila’s.
“So are we going for soft-serve today, Dad?” he asked. On the Fridays with the full shoulder slump, Dad took Grant for “ice cream” at the clam joint as we waited for the cars to be loaded. I don’t know what that swirly stuff was. It definitely wasn’t dairy. It tasted amazing, though.
Dad shook his head. “No ice cream today, son.”
“Why?”
“There’s not enough time,” Dad said. “See? The next ferry has already docked. It’s unloading passengers now. We’ll be next. We need to be ready.”
This was a lie. Okay, a half lie. It was true—the last ferry had already pulled up to the dock and was vomiting cars—but that had never stopped Dad from getting ice cream when he was in a good mood, which he wasn’t this afternoon.
I wanted to call him a liar to his face, but that would only make him madder, and he was plenty mad at me already.
Grant said aloud what I was thinking. “It’s because of Henry’s eye, isn’t it? You don’t feel like getting ice cream because Henry got beat up?”
“Not quite,” Dad replied. He was still drumming his fingers on the dashboard. “It’s because he broke another kid’s clavicle. You know what a clavicle is, right, Grant?”
My half brother jerked his shirt to the side and fingered his collarbone. “It’s this bone right here. You can’t put a cast on it. So that makes it tough to treat.”
“Good.”
“I learned that in Emergency Medicine,” Grant said. “Also that when you save a victim from drowning, you should roll them onto their side so they don’t choke on their own vomit.”
My brother went to this swanky, plaid elementary school. Every spring they held “awareness week” for kids in the fifth grade, when they taught the kids how to play the bongos and what an erection is.
I wanted to say my eye didn’t hurt that much, but it totally ached. Worse, Dad said I couldn’t have any painkillers until I’d “learned my lesson.” Which, supposedly, was not smacking someone in the boathouse with an oar and fracturing his clavicle.
“That’s not it at all, Grant,” Dad said.
Liar.
It would’ve been okay if my brother had stopped there, but Grant pressed on. He tugged on his chapped lower lip. “What does ‘nail’ mean?”
Dad wheeled around. “What?” he said. “What kind of stupid-ass question is that?”
You know how parents like to get together and say, “I don’t care if kids swear—they hear worse from us at home”? Our family was like that. Only with a bigger vocabulary. Lyudmila, my stepmom, was Russian, and the Russian language has more swear words than any other language on earth. Or so I’m told. They even have one that means “woman who farts a lot,” which I think is pretty cool.
Grant blinked. “I know that a nail is a thing you pound with a hammer. But Todd Wishlow used it like a verb.”
I pulled up my hood and sank into the beige leather seat.