Be True to Me Read online

  “I suppose you think you can make mistakes all day long,” Julia continued as if she hadn’t heard me, “and none of them will count. But if this turns out to be our worst nightmare, and we learn there was any chance that Fritz could have been saved—” She paused, making sure every word counted. “—then, Jean Custis, I will make sure you pay for it. I will tell everyone, and I mean everyone, exactly what you did. You will never be forgiven. And you will never come back to your precious Sunken Haven again. Never.”

  FRITZ

  Rip currents are a change of the ocean’s heart. They’re when the sea looks totally beautiful but, underneath, it isn’t your friend. Then you realize, maybe too late, that it never was. It doesn’t want you to be safe, doesn’t give a crap if you live or die.

  My voice was hoarse from calling for him, but Gil hadn’t heard me. He didn’t seem to be anywhere. Getting so far away from him was my mistake. I’d thought I could swim out past Ocean Bay Park, to Robbins Rest. On another current, I could have done it.

  He’d only had the one oar, and he’d told me the plan. Then he’d stubbornly stuck to it. He’d given me his word, and he’d played by his rules.

  Now I couldn’t see land, and I wasn’t sure where I was going.

  Eventually, I began to wriggle out of my waterlogged dress. I couldn’t control everything, or even anything, but I would not go down in this dress.

  I kicked and squirmed until I was free to my slip.

  As the dress got bogged down and slurped under the water in a candy-cane swirl, some long-ago Minnows class advice returned to me.

  If you ever get caught in a rip current, swim gently alongside the current. Never against it.

  That tip had always seemed like such an abracadabra. One of those magical promises that didn’t count when life got real. Because what dummy would be out performing a stunt like swimming in a riptide?

  Me, so it seemed. A dummy with a death wish.

  My pulse pounded like the surf in my ears. I held my gaze locked ahead. I kept my head in line with my spine. I made my arms into rudders, each one a perfect mirror and balance of the other. One easy breath at a time.

  And do not think about Jaws for even one fucking second.

  Gil had broken my trust. Maybe he’d even made me lose my mind temporarily, if that’s why I was out here. But now the thing was, facing it, I knew one fact for sure: I really, really didn’t want to die.

  “Alongside.” I spoke the word out loud so it would sink into me.

  If I was going to swim along the current, then I also had to calm down. I’d have to split in two Fritzes, and betrayed-Fritz needed to sit this one out while survivor-Fritz kicked in.

  Survivor-Fritz was the one I trusted to save my own life. If I breathed evenly, and as slowly as I could, then I’d have a better chance of not short-circuiting my lungs. Slow and careful also meant I wouldn’t burn up energy every time the water lifted and resettled my body farther, farther, and farther from the strip of sandbar that I was almost losing sight of.

  Was Gil waiting for me on shore? Was he panicking? It probably never occurred to him that I wouldn’t do exactly as he said and head to Ocean Bay Park, so that he could sprint right on back to Sunken Haven to play perfect nephew again. Make his apologies, clean up his mess, accept his punishment. But there was nothing more the Burkes could do to me. I was free of all of them.

  I pushed toward shore. Gently, gently. I couldn’t figure out how to break out of the current. I’d really screwed this one up. Was there even some tiny, remotest chance Gil was still out here? Could he have gone in and then gone out again?

  “Gil!” I heard the saw of desperation in my voice. A cry like a baby. My lungs spending precious force.

  He was nowhere. My course had been diverted so wide that I couldn’t even see around the inlet where Sunken Haven’s boats were kept.

  Last summer, when Julia was dating Tiger, the three of us had gotten into an afternoon habit of swimming in the ocean until we came to Ocean Bay Park, where we’d then swim in to shore, follow the boardwalk until we hit a run-down old beachfront bar on Evergreen Walk that served fifty-cent taps plus burgers and paper twists of the best greasy shoestring fries we’d ever tasted.

  All we’d ever needed for those swimming field trips was the key to get back into Sunken Haven, along with Tiger’s waterproof wallet, which held all our fake IDs plus fifteen bucks for lunch all around. We’d be dripping wet in our bathing suits, of course, but the bar was exactly the type of joint that didn’t mind kids with no shoes and hilariously phony drivers’ licenses. We’d gorge ourselves, play some pool, then trudge back by land to Sunken Haven a few hours later, buzzed on Schlitz and feeling lazy as bears.

  I kept my brain floating on those easy, summery thoughts. Trying to hold on to serenity there. I had to. I swam in a steady burn. I thought about myself like a movie, a girl swimming on the TV screen, while the real me sat in the kitchen at Fort Polk, eating a big bowl of Cheerios and telling Mom and Dad how it happened, pointing myself out, a tiny speck in the ocean. Watching Dad’s slow smile lift his blond mustache—“See, and that’s why we named you Fritz! Look at you go! You’re tough as any soldier in the marine corps!”

  I made myself banish the fatigue as it pushed from inside my lungs. Every stroke became a stitch, and then a gnawing ache, until, finally, I was living the nightmare, the total horror that I might be really, truly losing this one.

  Don’t drown, Fritz. I whittled myself down to this one command.

  To give up, to drown—that would be a total defeat.

  Julia had always been downright terrified by my impulses. She’d never come out and say it; she wasn’t the type even to let her fear show in her face. But my chair jump off the pier, or when I’d climbed to the top of that plum tree one summer—even the way I did a backflip or sped my bike along the ridge—unsettled her. She’d be so mad at me right now, if she knew.

  No, I wouldn’t let her be right. I’d get back home to her.

  I focused my willpower. Stayed in control of my terror.

  The current dragged at me like a claw, and then when it finally released me, I felt so lightheaded with exhaustion that it was hard to hold on to my point of orientation. I wavered, kept going, sunburnt, dry mouthed. I felt the sun turn chilly in the sky.

  All I could hear was the hush of the water, the strangely comforting animal sound of my pounding heart. I was all out of options. I kept going.

  JEAN

  If he were more blamed, then I’d be less blamed.

  I ached with Julia’s words, even after she’d turned away from me and stole inside the house. She seemed so sure that she had accused me rightly of jealousy, of sickness and greed. Awful things, and I knew she mostly said them because she was petrified. Still, any exchange with Julia made me feel tired—the same old worn-out, empty tired I felt every time she made me stare down the hole of our abandoned friendship.

  I didn’t want to follow her, so I lingered outside on the lawn, hoping for Bertie to show.

  “Were you waiting for me?” he asked, as he appeared on the walk.

  “I was.”

  He looked quietly pleased. It felt wrong, that I could make Bertie so happy when I offered him so little.

  Whisper was packed and stuffy with people sitting or standing around in a state of wait and worry. I hadn’t been here in years—not since I was a little girl. Julia and Oliver were together, their bodies dipping the middle of Mrs. Tulliver’s old maroon loveseat. I saw that the cotton curtains were faded, and the pine-green kitchen linoleum had gone bald in patches. Still, the familiarity depressed me, reminded me of when this house had been a happy destination for Julia and me, once upon a time, after lunch or swimming

  Weeze and Carpie and some of their New York friends all stood in the kitchen, mostly not drinking the Genesee cream ales that Mr. Tulliver was passing around, whether anyone wanted them or not. A shortwave radio was out on the kitchen counter, but it didn’t sound like anything had
been tuned in.

  Carpie kept checking his watch and commenting on the lateness of the police, who were supposed to be at Whisper at any minute.

  “When did they say they’d get here?” he’d ask the room in general. Or, “Saturday night, I bet you most cops have been dispatched to the Pines. They’ve had to go break up, you know, all those homosexual orgies.”

  Nobody was paying much attention to him. Nobody had any more information than Carpie about what kept the Bay Shore police force preoccupied on Saturday nights.

  Someone had turned the television to the Olympics, but few people were watching except Junior and his friends, who’d eventually come in from the bay to sprawl on the floor in front of the set.

  “Check it out. That’s Bruce Jenner,” Junior said, at one point, leaning forward and pointing. I glanced at the screen. The papers had been filled with pictures and stories of the buff sports hero from California, but I hadn’t seen him on TV yet.

  “Two solid days of decathlon competition,” Junior went on, though nobody had asked for more information. “What a stud, that guy.”

  Gil strode to the set and snapped it off. “Not helpful.”

  “Then what do you want me to do?”

  Julia lifted her head from Oliver’s shoulder. “We want you to shut up, Junior.”

  “Nobody could survive out there this long,” I heard Weeze say, softly, a moment later. This was the general, whispered theme of conversation—that Fritz had no chance. I tried not to hear it, not to think about what that meant.

  When the phone rang, everyone jumped—but it was only Mr. Wolfe letting Mrs. Tulliver know that his grandson, Bennett, had seen Fritz at the candy store, where she’d been making a milkshake.

  “That was three hours ago,” Gil said impatiently. “Before we went out on the boat.”

  “She left the party to go make a milkshake in the candy store?” Mrs. Tulliver’s forehead was flexed, working to piece these events together.

  “Yes. She did,” said Gil. “I was there, too.”

  “But . . . why?” asked Mrs. Tulliver. The open, connecting rooms of Whisper went quiet. Everyone was listening.

  “She was upset,” said Gil. “And she went there, and that’s where I found her.”

  Some of the mothers were exchanging looks all around. I felt tugged by the sense that Gil’s story sounded strange. Horrible as it would have been to admit, the vague recklessness of Gil’s and Fritz’s argument put me slightly at ease. If he were more blamed, then I’d be less blamed.

  A timer pinged. Mrs. Tulliver shifted her attention to remove a deep-dish apple cobbler from where it had been warming in the oven. She placed it on the kitchen table along with a stack of paper plates, and Mr. Tulliver set out a platter of grilled cheese sandwiches—which some of the little kids had decided they needed, earlier. But once it was presented, smelling thickly of Velveeta and butter and greasy toasted bread, hardly anyone touched the sandwiches. Nobody really wanted food or drinks at all.

  “I’m not going to call them just yet,” Mrs. Tulliver would tell one of her friends, usually Mrs. Flagler, every five minutes or so. Everyone knew “them” meant Fritz’s parents in Louisiana. “I need to let the Coast Guard do their job. We have no information. No need to panic anybody now.”

  Their friends would nod agreement, and then Mrs. Tulliver would make another round of the kitchen. Opening the fridge or setting something in the oven or on the stovetop, occasionally glancing at the telephone on the kitchen counter, and trying generally, like all of us, to hold her hopes high.

  Nothing bad ever happens to anyone here. My parents often said that, when I was younger. But unhappy things did happen at Sunken Haven. Like, when old Mr. Todd’s cottage had burned down two years ago, Mr. Todd had burned up right with it. This summer, Tracy Gibbons-Kent was gone, and nobody—not even her parents—was telling us a story that anyone believed.

  Gil and Tiger moved in and out of the cottage like restless animals. Sometimes when they slammed outside, I could hear them on the porch, as they thought up new places where Fritz might have gone and then, with voices raised, they ordered other kids to check these hunches. And while Gil knew I was right here, he never looked my way.

  Of all the awful things I felt, of all the fear that permeated this night, in some ways the very worst part was that Gil wouldn’t look at me.

  But I stayed where I was, chained to my little space with Bertie, on the living room windowsill. Gil hated me now. It was awful, but my heart clenched in defensiveness, resistant to all that he might want to heap on me. What had happened tonight wasn’t all my fault. I had been coerced. Dragged back in by the Burkes, after I’d made a point to stay out of Gil’s way. After I had found my new life at the Coop.

  I had been a good sport, and I had been a good loser.

  In fact, I was the very definition of a gracious loser, considering I wouldn’t have had to be a loser at all if it hadn’t been for Fritz.

  What if Fritz had never come to Sunken Haven? What if I’d held on to my friendship with Julia, and hadn’t told everyone about her being adopted, accidentally trading our friendship for gossip? Julia had brought Fritz to Sunken Haven the very next summer to replace me. I had been shocked when that happened, despite the fact that the entire school year before, Julia had cut me off. I’d written her four letters back in fifth grade, and she’d answered none of them. But I’d hoped it would all blow over. I’d certainly never thought she’d find an outsider to replace me.

  What if I hadn’t betrayed Julia? Hadn’t shared her private story with everyone? What if there’d been no fight, no falling out between us? What if there’d been no Fritz O’Neill that first summer?

  Then there would have been no Fritz O’Neill this summer.

  Gil and I would have shared that night at Hollander’s, and then shared this summer, including Lobster Night, and it never would have ended like this.

  The noise of crackling radios and calls of greeting outside signaled that the police were finally here. My heart was thudding, my palms slick. What kinds of questions would they ask me? Would they be angry, would I be in trouble? Had my lie about seeing Fritz broken the law in some awful way that I didn’t know?

  In the next minutes, two male officers in blue uniforms had laid siege to Whisper. Their bulky presence, their unfamiliar voices, their shiny boots and stiff caps instantly pulled the throttle on everyone’s attention. Police were a rare sight. The officers were only from Bay Shore, but neither of them—skinny, popeyed Officer Plano or beefier, older Officer Novack—had ever been here.

  As Mrs. Tulliver got them coffee, Carpie spoke for all of us. “Strange to see you boys. We never get police visiting.”

  “Will you hear news on the water immediately . . . from that?” Mrs. Tulliver asked, indicating their walkie-talkie.

  “Yes. We’re in direct contact with the Coast Guard,” answered Officer Plano.

  Officer Novack asked the questions, while Officer Plano took the notes on Fritz—her height, her age, her hair color, what she was wearing tonight. Dot mentioned the French braids, Julia knew her exact weight, and the Tullivers had week-old Polaroid pictures ready to offer.

  I couldn’t figure out exactly when it began, but sometime during the volley of questions and answers leading up to her disappearance, both of the officers started focusing in on Gil. And it wasn’t long before they were targeting him, and the questions become pointed.

  Gil’s answers stayed simple.

  “She left the party because she was angry at me.”

  “You left the party together?” Novack asked. Plano’s pencil hovered over his legal pad.

  “She left and I followed her. I chased her down.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she was so upset.”

  “Either of you drinking? Drugs?”

  “No, neither of us.”

  “He was drinking water,” Tiger said.

  “Not even a little pot?” Officer Novack had one of those kindly
voices that the nice adults used on those ABC Afterschool Specials, but he didn’t fool anyone.

  “No, sir.”

  “You two get physical at any point? How bad was this fight?”

  Gil looked unhappy. “In the candy store, I held on to her arms—it wasn’t a big deal. She broke away, and I followed her to the harbor.”

  “So you were still chasing her?”

  “At first, I chased her. But then I caught up. And we walked together.”

  “Who got in the boat?”

  “She did first. Then me.”

  “And in the boat? Did things get physical?”

  “She kind of kicked at me in the boat.”

  “This wasn’t a little fight. You push her out of the boat? By accident, I mean? Cause her to fall out?”

  “No, no, I didn’t. Not at all. She jumped.”

  “Pretty angry, I take it. Why’d she do it?”

  Gil ran his hands though his hair. “She wanted to cool off.”

  “How’d you get that cut on your hand?”

  “Trying to save the oar. It went in when she jumped.”

  “Coast Guard says in your initial radio, you told them the two of you were about twenty minutes from shore.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Outside of the oar, was the boat compromised?”

  “When Fritz jumped, she tipped the boat. There was some water in the hull.”

  “You follow her in the boat?”

  “I did, but she’d swum so far out, and I only had the one oar. She was faster swimming than I was rowing.”

  “So what’d you do next?”

  “When I realized I couldn’t overtake her, I kept calling for her to come in. I told her I’d meet her at Ocean Bay Park.”

  “She say she would?”

  “She didn’t say she wouldn’t. She was getting away from me so fast. I had this boat to deal with. So when she went around the inlet, I turned in. And I towed the boat in, tied it up, and I ran right to the bar—Ramps, it’s called—where we agreed to meet.”