Blown Page 18

  She nodded. “Weather report says we should have good sailing by the afternoon.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  She gave him a smirk. “I’m not taking you to fucking New York.” She cranked a rope and tightened the sail. “And I’m not taking you to Grand Cayman.”

  Neal didn’t know why she was in such a bad mood. “It doesn’t matter. Anywhere will do.”

  “Good. Because I was thinking maybe Suriname.”

  Neal realized he didn’t know where Suriname was. “What? Where’s that?”

  “In between Guyana and French Guyana.”

  “Do they have an airport there?”

  She looked at him as if he was a complete moron. “I reckon they have airports everywhere nowadays.”

  Neal decided that maybe he would sign up for a geography class at the New School. He should know where those countries are. If the New School didn’t have a class, maybe he could go to a travel bookstore and read up on places. Maybe he should travel more. Bart had always wanted to take one of those gay cruises, a naked gay cruise, but Neal didn’t know if he could do it; he felt too paunchy, too pasty to be naked on a boat with a bunch of buffed and burnished men. Although now that he thought of it, there were probably loads of men just like him. Maybe he should go on a naked gay cruise.

  “Have you ever been on a cruise?”

  “Like a ship?”

  Neal nodded. “Yeah. One of those fancy ones.”

  Chlöe shook her head. “I hear they’re heaps of fun, but it’s out of my price range.”

  “I think I’ll go on one when I get back. It’d be a good place to meet someone.”

  The wind picked up and the boat began to move. Chlöe turned and looked at him. “You sound awfully desperate to meet someone.”

  He realized she was probably right, but before he could catch himself he said, “I’m lonely.” But then he added, “Or I was lonely. Now I think I’ll be okay.”

  She laughed. “I’ll alert the press.”

  He laughed with her. “It’s weird, but I’m starting to feel good again.”

  “Ready for dessert?”

  “Sure.”

  He watched as she locked the tiller into a strap and walked into the cabin. Neal relaxed. Even though having his arm strapped to the rail was uncomfortable, it was a small price to pay to keep from starving to death. And soon enough he’d be back home, eating at some trendy new place, having poached halibut with a side of sautéed spinach. Perhaps he’d indulge in a cocktail, maybe a boulevardier. After dinner he would stroll back to his apartment and lie on his couch. There was plenty of room to spread out on. Everything was possible. The CEO would probably give him a bonus, and then he could take a proper vacation. A naked gay cruise sounded like just the thing.

  Chlöe came out of the cabin carrying a couple of smoothies. She handed one to him. “Protein shake. Not the best-tasting item in the galley, but it’ll give you some energy.”

  Neal took it with his free hand. “Thanks.” He took a taste and winced. “This is terrible.”

  Chlöe nodded. “Yeah. But it’s all protein and vitamins. I just chug them.” And with that she raised hers to her lips and slugged it down. Neal drank the shake as quickly as he could, silently vowing never to have another one again.

  Chlöe held the tiller steady, letting the sail catch some wind, feeling the boat moving, picking up speed. She was about a hundred miles off the coast of Venezuela heading southeast. Her original plan—putting in promotional stops in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires—was about to change.

  She looked over at Neal. He was unconscious, his head lolling from side to side with the swells. He fucking should be out; Chlöe had crunched up seven Vicodin and mixed them into his protein shake. She was glad he finally conked. If he’d continued going on and on about his miserable love life, she might’ve just beaten him with a hammer. But the drugs eventually kicked in. That was one consolation. He might be about to die, but he wasn’t going to feel any pain, which made her feel a bit better, as if she was a humane murderer. It reminded her of the time she had to euthanize her dog. It was sad, but he had doggie cancer and it ended his pain.

  The idea of killing someone had never really occurred to her. Not seriously. Sure, she’d imagined blowing away some would-be rapist or taking a hatchet to a sexist asshole at the Melbourne Yacht Club, but she’d never really thought she’d find herself in a situation where homicide was justifiable. Not that it was legally justifiable or even ethically justifiable, and yet she figured almost anyone in her position would do the same. She would never be able to have money like this, ever, no matter how famous she was, no matter how many times she circled the Earth in a small boat. She could circle the moon and they wouldn’t pay her this much.

  And it was so easy. For all anyone would ever know, the gay accountant went down with his ship.

  It was time. The sun was setting, the wind was strong, and she could start putting some distance between herself and this part of the world.

  She crouched beside Neal and pulled out her folding knife. One quick slice of the strap and Neal’s right arm was free. Chlöe lifted him up and sat him on the edge of the boat. She didn’t want to dwell on it, didn’t want to hesitate or change her mind. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. She gave him a gentle push and Neal tumbled into the water.

  She immediately regretted it. She threw the sailboat into a sharp turn and began to drop the sail. She circled back to the spot where he’d gone in but there was no sign of him. No bubbles, nothing. He’d sunk into the sea without a trace.

  It was twilight. The sky shifted from pale blue to indigo, the water turned black. The wind was picking up and waves began to bang against the hull as she let the boat drift. It was too late for Neal.

  Chlöe sat down on the deck and began to sob.

  Orestes Pérez pulled on the rope. It was heavy, which was good, because it meant that there would be something in the trap. With any luck it might be a few lobsters, maybe a couple of stone crabs, hopefully not a clump of kelp. His small boat rocked back and forth as he pulled. When the trap was near the surface he stopped and rested. It was hot out, and he was sweating like a roasting pig, the salty perspiration burning his eyes, soaking through his tank top. And he was hungry. He’d been dancing last night at the bar, which meant that this morning he hadn’t had an appetite. He’d knocked back a cup of sweet black coffee and then he was out on the water. His plan was to work the traps quickly and get back to shore by lunchtime. Then he could spend the rest of the day in his hammock.

  Luckily the sea was smooth and he could check his traps without too much effort. He hauled the trap out of the water and dumped the contents on the floor of the boat: five big lobsters and a mature stone crab. It was a small miracle. He quickly put the crustaceans into a bucket of seawater, baited the trap, and chucked it back in. Orestes grinned. The lobsters were all good-size. They would bring a lot of money from the chef at the resort.

  There were other traps to check, but he decided not to push his luck. Also his hangover was starting to get the better of him. He could come check the other traps tomorrow.

  As he set a float on the trapline, he saw a bottle bobbing on the surface. It drifted over and banged against the hull of the boat, knocking on the wood as if it wanted to come aboard. Orestes didn’t believe in ghosts, but he didn’t not believe in them either, so he fished the bottle out of the water. No wine. Just a small piece of paper with some writing on it. He couldn’t read English, so he didn’t know that the card was from Neal Nathanson, employee of a prestigious Wall Street investment bank. But the bottle looked promising. The cap had a tight seal. A good glass bottle was always useful.

  Orestes put the bottle on the floor of the boat next to his bucket of lobsters and began rowing toward shore. When he got close to the beach he jumped out and dragged his boat up onto the sand.

  He was surprised to see Yanet sitting in the shade of some coconut palms. She s
tood to greet him and gave him a coconut with a straw in it. Orestes smiled.

  Yanet looked into the bucket and her eyes widened.

  Orestes fell in love easily—some people said that was his downfall—but how could he resist Yanet? He offered to make her lunch right there on the beach. The biggest, fattest lobster. He would sell the others to the resort.

  Quickly gathering some small pieces of wood and some twigs for kindling, he began building a fire. He had a small metal grate that he carried in his boat for alfresco lunches on the beach and put that over the wood. Using one of the sticks, he carefully pulled the paper from inside the bottle and struck a match. It caught fire quickly and Orestes used it to ignite the kindling.

  While the fire got going, he took his knife and split the biggest lobster down the middle, cleaned the lungs and guts out of it, rinsed it in the sea, and laid it on the metal grate to roast.

  Orestes and Yanet didn’t know that the business card was the only remaining evidence of what had happened to Neal Nathanson. They didn’t know that, as far as anyone could tell, he and his colleague Seo-yun Kim had vanished without a trace. It didn’t concern them. They were falling in love.

  POSEIDON

  As the ferry neared Skiathos, Cuffy Ebanks hung his head over the side and looked at the water. It was the same water that Odysseus had sailed, water that had seen the Greek fleet battle Xerxes and his invading Persian army, a sea that had endured the best and worst of human activity for a few thousand years, and yet it was immaculate: epic blue and crystalline. The same history had happened on land, but had left scars: ruins and wastelands. Cuffy had a lot of respect for the power of the ocean. The sea had been good to him, had saved his life, and now that he was in Poseidon’s backyard, he felt a surge of bittersweet regret mixed with a kind of life-affirming euphoria.

  A bird swooped overhead, and he looked up and saw the city, a pile of white boxes with orange roofs lining a perfect crescent beach.

  The gangplank dropped and Cuffy disembarked with the other tourists. He wandered the front street, past a string of restaurants and cafés facing the water. He stopped at a kiosk offering tours to visit the locations from the movie Mamma Mia! Cuffy hadn’t seen the film but knew it was based on the songs of palindromic supergroup ABBA. Was it weird that a Swedish pop group would be an economic boon for a small Greek island? Was this the globalization everyone was talking about?

  The town was beautiful and, like all the other Greek islands he’d been to, riddled with quirky footpaths and stairs that were painted white, as if they were meant to create trompe l’oeil flagstones. He didn’t understand why.

  Cuffy found a café and sat at a table. Unlike the other tourists, he didn’t check for Wi-Fi. He had no email, no social media, no internet presence of any kind. Not that he’d become antitechnology; he had a smartphone that he used to look up information, to book hotels and flights.

  An espresso sounded like a good idea, but he ordered a Fix instead. He liked the idea of a beer named Fix, even if he was drinking before lunch. Or maybe he was just blending in; beer before noon might be just the thing on Skiathos, a place the guidebooks called the “most cosmopolitan island in the Northern Sporades.”

  He had a couple of hours before he could check in at his hotel, so after he finished his beer, he ordered another one. And after that, a third to go with the grilled octopus and Greek salad. It had taken him almost two years to get here, and still he wasn’t sure if he was on the right track or not. It wouldn’t be the first trail he’d followed to a dead end.

  Cuffy found the hotel easily enough. He meandered up several flights of winding stairs toward the top of the town, following nicely painted signs that said HOTEL THALIA in a Hellenic-style font. The tourist shops selling T-shirts and bottles of olive oil were closer to the harbor, and as he climbed farther up the hill, it became more residential. There were little cafés, greengrocers, bakeries, bookstores, and scooter repair shops mixed in with homes and apartments. He could see the appeal of a place like this.

  The Thalia was one of those boutique hotels—an austere modern design imposed on an old building—and boasted a swimming pool and cocktail bar. It had only recently opened and was the second hotel on the island to be awarded four stars.

  An athletic woman with a deep tan and an Australian accent greeted him from behind the front desk when he walked into the lobby. “Checking in?”

  “Yes.”

  He handed over his passport. She looked at it and began typing on an iPad. “Mr. Ebanks. Right. Staying for three nights.”

  “Correct.”

  She looked at the passport, then at Cuffy. “You’re British? You don’t have an accent.”

  “I’m from the Cayman Islands. We’re part of the Commonwealth, so … you know … UK passports.”

  She handed his passport back and their eyes met.

  Cuffy smiled at her. “You’re the sailor, right? Sailed around the world all by yourself.”

  She nodded. “Wouldn’t want to do that again.”

  “I imagine it was quite an adventure.”

  The room was nice, austere but surprisingly comfortable, with an intentionally minimal and elegant vibe. Cuffy was pleased to see a typewriter from the 1960s next to a Nespresso machine.

  He dumped his backpack on a chair and went to the window. His room had a beautiful view of the bay and a couple of smaller islands in the distance. It was stunning. Even with the economic crisis Greece was suffering, the property must have been expensive.

  He sat on the bed and read the brochure he’d picked up in the lobby. Hotel Thalia had opened only six months ago after a multimillion-dollar renovation. He was surprised that the brochure didn’t mention the owner, the famous sailor. Perhaps she wanted to be left alone. He couldn’t help noticing that her eyes had a haunted look: the look of someone who didn’t sleep well, someone who was weighed down by guilt and grief and regret; they were the eyes of a murderer. It was the same look he saw in the mirror every morning.

  Chlöe loved her hotel. It was everything she’d hoped it would be. Only instead of it being in Melbourne, where she could be close to her family and friends, it was in Greece. She could have built it at home, but she wasn’t comfortable in Australia anymore, didn’t like who she was, the woman who sailed around the world. She didn’t like being a role model or an example for other women. Didn’t want to make up lies about where she got the money.

  If she was being honest, she didn’t like herself.

  At first there had been mood swings. Then came the panic attacks—heart pounding, cold sweat, adrenal glands in overdrive—the feeling-that-you’re-dying kind of panic attacks. She’d seen a doctor but got a clean bill of health. Chlöe had tried talking to a psychiatrist but, without revealing her big secret, it didn’t really help. She had a prescription for antianxiety meds, but they just made her feel weird. Much better was a bottle or two of wine or a few cocktails. People say self-medicating is bad. As far as she was concerned, those people could go fuck themselves. Dealing with a hangover, or kicking some one-night stand out of your bed, was way easier than trying to think through a pharma fog.

  She tried confessing to a priest, but when it came time to unburden her soul she couldn’t do it. There were selfless attempts at making amends. For a brief while she was an ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, doing speeches and meet and greets to raise money to bring books and classes to underserved Aboriginal populations. She volunteered at homeless shelters and gave sailing lessons to poor children. And when all this charitable work started to make her feel like a fraud, she traveled to Nepal to learn meditation from a Buddhist monk. Meditation didn’t help. Her mind was restless, she couldn’t sit still, so she roamed. People back home thought she’d caught the travel bug, as if that were some kind of virus that compelled you to drift from city to city, mountains to seaside. She began to feel fatalistic, preferring dangerous forms of transportation, always hoping the motorcycle would crash, the ferry would sink, the b
us would run off the road.

  It was during her travels that she discovered Skiathos. It was beautiful, quiet, and best of all, she wasn’t a celebrity here; no one cared about her exploits. She could start over. Be a better her, whatever that meant.

  And that’s what she did.

  He’d spent the day idling: doing some reading and taking short walks around the city, coming back and seeing that she was still working. He wasn’t sure how to approach her or what to say to break the ice. She probably didn’t want to talk about it. Why would she? But as the sun began to fade, he saw her say something to the night clerk, grab her purse, and head out.

  He followed her.

  He kept her in his sight as she left the hotel and turned the corner, walking up several flights of stairs, turning to the right, up another flight, then a left, until she entered a small church tucked between what looked like apartment buildings. The church was tiny, maybe big enough for five people, freshly whitewashed with cobalt paint on the door and window trim. The door hung open, and Cuffy watched as she lit a candle and bent her head in prayer. He didn’t want her to see him when she came out, so he walked to the end of an alley, where he found a white cat curled in a shaft of sunlight, trying to catch the last rays before night. Cuffy scratched its head and the cat began to purr.

  He heard her footsteps echo on the stairs going down and he followed her. She was walking faster now, downhill, gliding through a series of careening switchbacks through the alleys and small footpaths between houses. He tried to keep up, losing her at one point and having to sprint along an alley to catch a glimpse of her going down another set of steps.

  He eventually found her outside a small taverna—the sign said TAVERNA MESOGIA—sitting alone at a table for two. Trying to be as casual as he could, Cuffy sauntered up to her. “Hey. Is this place good?”

  She looked up at him. “Mr. Ebanks. Why, yes, this place is ace. Best food on the island.”