Mariah Rigg is a writer from Honolulu, Hawai`i. She has an MFA from the University of Oregon and is currently pursuing her PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Four months after my dad’s death, I went on what would be the last fishing trip with my friend Jack. It was August, one of those days that feels like a pot boiling over, and Jack had spent the summer trying to get me on his boat. He and I had been friends since we met on the playground of Waikiki Elementary, but had grown distant in the months following my dad’s funeral. When I agreed to the trip, Jack was stoked.
“Let’s cruise Moloka`i,” he said. “We can camp on the beach.”
On the day of the trip, Jack was busy watching a soccer game, so we started late. I had a stomach ache, so I downed Dramamine when we launched.
Jack drove through Koko Marina, weaving through parasailers and banana boaters as I sat beside him. Before us, the bridge grew and soon we were under it. We skipped out of the Marina, through Maunalua Bay, and into the open water of Ka`iwi Channel.
My mouth was paper dry from the Dramamine. Searching the cooler, all I found was bait and beer. It was a quarter past noon, according to my watch.
“I must have forgotten water,” Jack said, when I came back with a beer.
But I knew Jack. He’d intentionally only brought booze. To him, water was dead weight.
“Hand me a brewski,” Jack said, and I did.
We bounced over the waves of the Channel. The shock of each landing shot through my body. It was hard to talk without biting our cheeks or tongues, so we didn’t.
I thought back to when Jack and I’d met. We were ten and I had to switch schools after Dad and I moved to Kapahulu. At recess, the bullies closed in on my new kid smell, their ringleader pinning me to force a beetle down my throat. Jack pulled him off. From then on, I’d followed Jack on every daredevil whim of his—from skateboarding the drained swimming pools of Kahala to night surfing Waikiki. In our twenties he went to college on the mainland, but when he came back we dirt biked the muddy trails of Kahuku, and paddled on the same six-man canoe team. We even married girls who were best friends. In the first years of our marriages, Roxanne and Michelle were the mirror of Jack and me.
In the time it took Jack and me to cross the Channel, we each pounded three Heinekens. At Moloka`i, we anchored off Papohaku Beach. I tossed our bottles in a garbage bag as Jack got the poles from the storage compartment.
“Can you set this shit up?” he asked, holding the poles out.
I took them and walked to the back, where I snapped the poles into the makeshift flag mounts Jack and I had screwed in a few years earlier, when he’d upgraded from his fifteen-footer. Above me, the sun hung, haloed in vog that had blown in from Kīlauea’s eruptions. My head ached from the sulfur. I took an Advil and rubbed zinc sunscreen over my face and neck.
Jack walked past me, a lure box in hand.
“What are you, a yeti?” he asked, making fun of my white chest.
It made me think of my wife, Roxanne. If she were here she’d tease me for the thick hair I’d grown on my chest. She liked to call me her big bear. When we met, I’d been smooth-skinned.
A week earlier, I’d asked Roxanne about fishing with Jack. She was reading under the mango tree, laid on a blanket she’d sewn out of old sheets. We’d finally bought our own house, and the yard was a luxury after years in apartments. Our eight-year-old daughter, Lia, played a few feet away, her fingers sticky from snapping stalks of heliconia.
“I don’t want you to go,” Roxanne said.
The last time I’d hung out with Jack had been after my dad’s funeral. We sat on the breakwall at Tongg’s beach, throwing beer bottles into the waves. At two a.m., Jack drove me home, swerving through the three-laned highway. I tried to open the door quietly, but Roxanne waited, quietly furious on the living room couch. Vases of flowers filled the room, and a bed of lasagna lay on the coffee table, a fork dug into its layers. While I’d been out with Jack she’d handled the reception at our house, the people who’d come with condolences. She asked why I hadn’t called. When we fought, I pushed her. She looked up at me from the floor and I knew I should have felt sorry, but I was drunk and mad.
“This always happens after you and Jack are together,” she said.
On the water, Jack strung the fishing poles. Spidery white circles scarred his back. Jack and I had spent four decades in the sun, but even after a bout of melanoma, he refused sunscreen. I’d asked him about it once.
“I’d rather burn than be covered in that shit,” he’d said.
I slathered more lotion over my arms.
“Where we casting, cap,” I asked.
“Just before the preserve.”
The preserve on the North Shore protected Kalaupapa, where the lepers had been sent. Dad and I had gone once, the summer before I met Jack. The mules we rode down to the valley had slipped with each step. I’d never ridden before, and was afraid of being thrown over the mule’s head. Because of this I’d gripped its sides so tight that when we got to the bottom I could barely stand.
Jack drove the boat around the western tip of the island, taking it slow so the poles wouldn’t fly off or snap.
“I heard Roxanne didn’t go on Michelle’s trip,” Jack said.
“She couldn’t get the time off,” I lied.
Every year, Michelle invited a group of friends to stay in her family home on Kaua`i. This time, when Roxanne told me about Michelle’s trip, she said that a weekend spent with Michelle would feel like babysitting. I’d told her to go anyway, thinking it would be good for her. I hadn’t understood what she meant.
One of the poles bent, and I stepped forward to check if we’d gotten a bite.
“Roxanne’s been off the radar,” Jack said. “You guys good?”
“She’s just stressed,” I lied again.
But really, Roxanne and I had been having problems. Part of it had to do with Roxanne’s decision to pull away from Michelle and Jack. It started when our daughters were born but in the last year had finalized. Michelle’s family had missionary money, leftover from the land they’d stolen from my ancestors. I tried hard to like her for Jack, but part of me resented her because of this. While Roxanne stayed late at the law firm she worked at and I took the early morning flights for extra pay to provide the best life we could for our daughter, neither Jack nor Michelle had to work. Now that we were older, Roxanne often spoke of a sense of lack she felt surrounding Michelle and Jack. That the cushion of Michelle’s family money meant they didn’t appreciate the value of things. In bed, she wondered aloud to me if it went deeper than materialism, if it extended to life and love, if they were as happy as they seemed. I wasn’t sure I agreed with her. Sometimes I was jealous of the apparent ease with which they lived, though I, too, had been finding it hard to connect with Jack. All he wanted to do was party, and while that had been fun when we were young and without responsibility, it was impossible to fly a plane hungover at four a.m.
Now, Roxanne only spent time with Michelle and Jack when necessary. Our daughters were the same age and went to school together. Michelle often invited Lia to playdates, which my wife passed off to me. At her house, Michelle encouraged nudity. She said it was an exercise of freedom. Our daughters ran naked through the house, the yard, off the dock into the cool salt of the ocean. They splashed in the pool without suits. I thought it was weird but Jack didn’t seem to mind, so I didn’t say anything. Roxanne had been fine with it, too, when the girls were younger. To ignore it I drank, which led to Roxanne and me fighting when Lia and I came home sunburnt.
In the past few months, Roxanne and I had taken to declining the playdates altogether.
I pulled on the taut line, and it went slack.
“Michelle bought me a Yamaha for my birthday,” Jack said. “We should go dirt biking.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“It’s okay that you forgot.”
Jack’s birthday was in July. In the past, we’d celebrated it by parking his boat outside the break by Jack’s house and drunk surfing all day. This year I’d forgotten, and in fact, we hadn’t celebrated the year before, or the year before that. I missed how reckless we’d been in our twenties and early thirties, when death was something I’d not yet come to fear.
Jack looked at me, and I saw myself reflected in the tint of his sunglasses. Signs of my age were everywhere: in the lines of my forehead, the gray of my chest.
He stopped the boat and we stood on the bow, drinking as we cast. Over the next few hours I perfected my draw, the flick of my wrist. The afternoon was calm, with no wind, and in the quiet I thought of my dad and Kalaupapa.
We’d stayed for three days in the valley, guests of Kimo, a resident and my dad’s cousin. Kimo had leprosy as a child, and was one of the few who’d qualified for treatment. He was cured, but the disease left him marked, his face wrinkled over and hairless from the scars. Though the isolation law had long been repealed, he’d stayed on to live in Kalaupapa. His life seemed happy, but also lonely, and I’d asked him about it on the last day, early in the morning when my dad was still asleep. We sat on the porch eating breakfast. I watched him spear a slice of sweet potato. Kimo had said there was nothing in the outside world that was better than his life in the valley. Watching his profile, I could see that bits of his ear were missing, and his right pinky was gone. I remember flexing my own fingers under the table, the feeling of each joint as it bent.
My fishing pole was thin and flexible. It moved like a small whip. I watched Jack reel in a fish that was too small to keep. The water was all glare, a reflection of the sun behind us.
“I’m done with this shit,” Jack said as he threw the fish back. “Let’s go set up camp.”
I was warm and a little hazy. Casting a final time, I reeled it in slowly. The float bounced over the water, breaking the surface.
The sea cliffs rose above us as Jack drove into the preserve. Light tumbled over ridges and crags, fell alongside waterfalls and spotlighted the clouds in cloud . Ocean spray hung in the air, leftover from waves that hit the coast. Kimo’s house was a mile inland from us, maybe less.
The last of the sun passed over to the west. We were driving through the shadows. It felt like we were circling the last corner of the earth, about to plummet into another realm. In the valley, Kimo had told me legends about these waters. That hundreds of years ago, rival ali`i had disappeared into them. He’d said they were trapped there, forever at war.
I pulled on my shirt, and my skin tightened with sunburn. Jack’s boat rocked in the backwash. I wondered what it would feel like to be swallowed by the ocean.
I didn’t want to return to the shore.
We passed the cliffs. I watched an old pickup truck drive the coast alongside us. At the beach, Jack dropped me off with food, his guitar, and our sleeping bags, then anchored the whaler offshore so she wouldn’t beach herself. While he swam through the shore break, I found a flat place to sleep.
Kimo was the only family of mine that came to the funeral. My dad didn’t have any siblings, and his parents were dead. It had been thirty years since I’d seen Kimo. In high school he and my dad would talk over the phone, and sometimes I’d shout a quick hello to him through the receiver. When I saw him at the back of the church, he looked the same as he had in Kalaupapa, only the lines around his mouth were deeper, and his grip was shaky when I took his hand.
I dug a firepit out of the sand, using a stick to loosen the hard earth.
“Good shit,” Jack said, when he saw the work I’d done. “I’ll get some wood.”
The sun had just set, and the sea was lined in gold. I piled lava rocks and dried coral around the hole I’d dug as Jack set off into the overgrown kiawe. Then I sat back to watch the waves curl over the reef, their long tubes breaking into whitewater.
When I’d pushed Roxanne to the ground on the night of my dad’s funeral, she’d taken the lasagna down with her. The Pyrex shattered, and its glass cut my hands as I tried to clean it. I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t tell what was marinara and what was blood.
The next morning, Roxanne told me she was done. She was tired of my drinking, of how I acted after I’d been with Jack. She said if I couldn’t give it up, she’d leave me. Until this trip, I’d been able to give it up for four months.
In the distance, Jack swore.
He emerged from the trees limping, his arms full of dried branches and driftwood.
“I stepped on haole koa,” he said, but I was looking at my hands, at the fresh scars of my palms.
Jack dropped the kindling and put a hand on my shoulder. I nearly fell into the sand as he pulled a thorn from his foot.
“Damn, the poison stings,” he said.
“You should piss on it,” I joked.
“Fat chance,” he said.
I made a triangle with the wood he’d gathered, and we toasted bread over the fire using a metal grill Jack had brought to make tuna sandwiches. I wasn’t hungry, full from the beer and sick from thinking of Roxanne and my dad. The sandwiches were dry and hard to swallow. They reminded me of the dried squid Kimo had fed Dad and me on the first night of our trip. I’d forgotten my toothbrush and the squid had stuck in my teeth, resurfacing in salty smoked chunks over the three days we’d spent in the Valley.
“Try this,” Jack said, as I looked down at my half-eaten sandwich.
I took the joint he passed.
“Dude, gross,” I said as I took a hit. “You slobbered it.”
The wood popped as it burned, and Jack took the joint back.
“Michelle wants me to sign a prenup,” Jack said.
The waves broke, empty, on the shore behind us.
“But you’re already married,” I said, surprised.
“You can make them retroactively or some shit.” Jack wouldn’t look at me. “Her dad’s probably worried I’ll go for their money.”
“Are you getting divorced?” I asked, and thought of what Roxanne had spoken of in bed, of how I hadn’t believed her.
“I don’t want to,” Jack said.
He finally looked at me, and I noticed then the hollow of his sunken eyes. They’d hidden the whole day behind sunglasses. I wondered how long it had been since he’d slept without the help of alcohol.
“Fuck, man,” he said. “I love her.”
It was in Kalaupapa that Dad admitted Mom had left us. That she’d flown back to Denver, tired of the Islands. Back on O`ahu, he took down the family photos. Over time they were replaced with pictures of the two of us. Mom never came back. She never tried to contact me. Before she left, I had spent most of my time with her. Dad was a geologist, and often worked off-island. His excuse for our trip had been that Kimo wanted to survey some land. Without Mom I was alone for weeks at a time; it was then that I grew close to Jack to avoid the memory of my mother. It was like she never existed, or if she did it was in an untouchable space that I tried not to think of.
Jack had been married to Michelle for twelve years, two more than me and Roxanne. In fact, it had been Jack who introduced us. Roxanne and Michelle had gone to college together on the mainland, which is where they’d become friends in spite of both living their whole lives on O`ahu. The thought of Jack and Michelle splitting made a fear I’d lodged deep inside me burst. Since my father’s funeral, I’d worried that I’d drive Roxanne off, that one day I’d return and find her gone, just like my mother.
I exhaled, and Jack’s form shimmered in the dark.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I could find no words of comfort. I had nothing else for him.
We smoked and drank the rest of the beers we’d brought to the beach. The sandwich didn’t look so bad anymore, so I ate it. Jack plucked at the guitar, and the exhaustion of the day fell over me. Warm with beer and sunburn, I lay back. The stars blinked in and out of familiarity—Maui’s curving Fishhook, the soaring frigate of five-starred Cassiopeia.
At Dad’s funeral, Kimo told me that Mom had asked Dad to come with her. It wasn’t us she’d grown tired of, it was the Islands, the claustrophobia of knowing how each day would begin and end. Dad wouldn’t go. He told Kimo that he’d tried to imagine his future in Denver and it had all seemed off-balance.
I wondered why he had not let me go with my mother.
That night on the beach I dreamt of my father. His face was naked and hairless as Kimo’s. He danced around the fire, and I watched him. He danced around the fire, and I danced with him. The flames jumped, stained blue and purple with salt. Dad stepped into the fire and I followed. My skin burned.
I woke in the morning to ants crawling over my arms and back. I was in their nest. Throwing the sleeping bag Jack had draped over me off, I stood and hopped in a circle to brush the ants off. My eyes stung with smoke. The wind had changed overnight, and was blowing the fire towards me.
“You ready to catch the big fucker?” Jack asked.
Coffee and oatmeal balanced on the grill. I blinked, rubbing the crust from the corners of my eyes and mouth. My face was swollen from the booze and sun.
Jack handed me a bowl of oatmeal and I ate it. A tickle reached up my throat to my nose as we packed up and made our way down to the water, where I waited for Jack.
On the boat, my stomach pooled with nausea. The ocean was rough with a swell. We bobbed out the channel and through the surf, heading to where we’d fished the day before. A pressure built between my eyes. I pushed Jack’s hand aside and pushed the throttle up to stop the boat.
The contents of my stomach surged as I rushed to the side of the boat. Falling to my knees, I retched until nothing but bile dripped from my lips. It floated, foamy, quickly dispersing in the rough water. Small fish rose to nibble it.
Jack handed me a plastic cup.
“You had water this whole time?” I asked, irritated.
“That’s melted ice,” he said.
I drank it.
Using the boat’s railing, I stood. My stomach felt like a vacuous hole, pulling inwards.
“Get me a beer,” I said.
Jack handed me one from the cooler. The first sip was foam, but I gulped until I got past that, and soon I loosened up. Slowly, Jack drove to where we’d sat the day before. In the storage compartment below the wheel, I found a hat, and pulled the flaps over my ears, blocking the glare that snuck around my sunglasses. When we stopped, I went to the front to cast.
“Don’t fall off the bow,” Jack joked, and I didn’t reply. He stayed at the back.
A few hours later, fishless, we sat at the wheel, under the shade of the canvas. Jack ate tuna out of a can. I ripped off small bites of bread, chasing with flat beer. My throat burned from the fish I’d thrown up. A chunk of it was lodged in my sinuses. Everything inside me felt a little too big.
Dad’s cancer had started like Jack’s, with melanoma. The doctors removed it, but not before it could metastasize to his brain. They told us he had six months. It had stretched on for two years. I’d wanted him to move in with us, but our apartment then was small and he’d refused. He put himself in a home. In the afternoons I took Lia with me to see him. I sat beside his bed and he let my daughter spill his lunch as she tried to spoon him whatever mush was on the menu. When he passed, he left me the money I needed for a down payment. I’d been both relieved and guilty.
“I haven’t drunk since my dad’s funeral,” I admitted to Jack.
“Fuck, man, you going soft?” Jack teased.
“Maybe,” I said.
Kimo had given me my mom’s number at the funeral. I tried to call her the morning after, alone in the ER, a nurse stitching my hands. I wanted to tell Mom how Dad had died, asking for her, slipping back to the days before she’d left. I wanted to prove to her I’d turned out all right in spite of her absence. To tell her how I’d filled my days with my friendship with Jack. But when she picked up, I couldn’t speak.
Together, Jack and I cast off the bow. The boat rolled with waves that bounced off the point. Roxanne was probably awake now. I imagined her in the kitchen making pancakes for Lia, the hollow fluff of the first whisk sending flour over the bowl’s edge.
Jack broke the silence to tell me about a guy he’d heard of who’d shot himself with a spear gun.
“Shit went through his fucking jaw,” Jack said.
“Like, through his brain?” I asked.
“Yep, through his brain,” Jack said. “But he could still speak.”
“What about after they got it out?” I asked.
“I don’t know how they did it,” Jack said. “But the lucky fucker lived.”
The boat turned in the current and strained against its anchor. Finishing my beer, I thought of how much force a spear would need to break a man’s jawbone and skull. I wondered if the man had time to hear the bone splintering, or if it had happened too fast. I imagined pushing the spear like one would an arrow, through the meat of the brain, through the skull, stripping the damaged tissue so that when the hole healed, it healed clean, like there had never been a wound.
The bell on one of the stern lines rang, and the line shot out, pulled by whatever had bit. Jack threw down his casting pole and ran.
I dropped my own pole and began hauling up the anchor. My hands shook with excitement and a sudden rush of adrenaline as I joined Jack behind the wheel.
“What are you doing? Grab the pole,” Jack said. He put the boat in gear.
The reel of the pole emptied in my hands. Jack idled towards the fish. When there were only a few wraps left, I grabbed the handle, and the pole bent. Planting my feet wide, I braced my body to reel the fish in.
I pulled in twenty yards of line before Jack said I could rest. Then Jack let out the line to begin the process again.
By my fourth shift, my hands were raw and my back seizing. A small voice inside me whispered to cut the line. Then the fish turned.
“It’s swimming towards us,” Jack yelled. “Get that fucker before he turns again.”
I reeled as fast as I could. The fish began circling. It was so close I could see the blue and green of its sides change color as it twisted. Jack took the pole.
“I’ll finish it,” he said.
I watched Jack palm the reel. For a second, I hoped the line would break. Then the big eye tuna slammed against the whaler.
“The gaff!” Jack yelled.
The curved pole was cold in my hand. I hooked the tuna through its gills and pulled it in, the sun hot on my knotted shoulders. It was thirty pounds, the biggest Jack and I had ever caught. Kneeling, I held the fish’s writhing body in my arms. Its fins tore my skin. In his excitement, Jack forgot about his club and bashed the fish’s head in with an empty bottle of Heineken. Sweat dripped from my scalp down my forehead and stung my eyes. The ahi’s sides faded to silver.
Its body was too big for the cooler, so we anchored again. Jack filleted the ahi, and its blood spilled over the white floor of the whaler, ran down into the ocean through the drain in the back. I couldn’t bring myself to cut it, thinking, each time I held the knife, of my bloodied glass-torn hands.
When Jack stood, his eyes were flaming, red from the sun.
“We fucking did it,” he said.
Behind him, the ocean spit in white foamy crests.
We drove home that night, exhausted, a day before we’d planned. The hour-and-a-half passed so quickly I don’t remember much. What I do remember is the sun drowning in the haze blown in by the Kona winds. Across the water, its light stretched. It felt as if it were reaching for us, or past us, towards whatever lost youth we had spent.
When we got back to the Marina, to the house where Jack and Michelle lived, I was so tired and hungover that I stumbled, dragging my legs off the boat and onto the dock. I tied the boat up, then Jack and I unpacked.
Inside their house, Michelle sat in front of the TV. Holding her bottle of white wine up, she toasted our entrance.
“The weekend warriors are back,” she said.
She was in her underwear. I tried not to look at her. Part of me wondered how she and Roxanne had ever been friends. Jack sat on the couch, unfazed by her lack of clothes. Throwing an armful of bloody Ziplocs on the coffee table, he opened one of them.
“Have a bite, babe,” he said, offering her a hunk of ahi.
Blood dripped from the fish and onto the white lace that covered her chest.
“You got it on my fucking bra,” she said, and pushed him away. I wanted to laugh but didn’t. The half-drunk bottle clinked on the glass coffee table. “Now I have to change.”
She stalked out of the living room and down the hall to the back.
I washed the blood off the Ziplocs of fish I’d been carrying in the kitchen sink, putting half in the fridge and half in a plastic bag. When I turned to look back into the living room, Jack sat alone on the couch, eating the raw tuna with his hands.
“You staying for dinner?” he asked.
Through the wall, I heard Jack’s daughter talking to her stuffed animals. I thought of Lia and Roxanne lying in bed, the spine of a book creasing Roxanne’s thigh as they read together.
“I should head home,” I said.
Jack made me promise to fish again. Before I left, I called a goodbye down the hall to Michelle, but she didn’t answer.
I drove home, and when I walked into my house Roxanne was in the kitchen, dicing onions. She didn’t look up, and I knew she was still mad at me for going fishing with Jack. Lia stood on a stool beside her.
“Daddy,” she yelled, and ran to hug my knees.
I bent to kiss the top of her head and she sniffed.
“You stink,” she said, and I laughed.
The water that ran from my legs and down the basin of the tub was brown from the dirty beach and the blood of the ahi. I scrubbed myself pink.
Back in the kitchen, I fried the ahi in butter and lemon as Roxanne sautéed onions and bok choy with garlic. The silence needled between us. Lia was oblivious, and every now and then, she would pretend to help, sprinkling whatever spice was closest over Roxanne’s pan. By accident, she dumped cinnamon instead of cayenne, and for a moment the kitchen filled with its sweet scent. Roxanne scooped it out before it could ruin the meal.
We took our plates out to the lanai and sat on the floor around the coffee table. Roxanne took her first bite of fish and laughed. She put a hand up to her full mouth.
“You overcooked it,” she said.
I took a bite. The ahi was too tart and dry. Spitting the bite out into my napkin, I felt my shoulders bunch with disappointment.
“Can we make dino nuggets?” Lia asked.
“We're going to eat the fish,” Roxanne said. “Your father worked hard to catch it.”
She took my hand across the coffee table, and I knew I was forgiven my time with Jack.
Later, in bed, after she’d read to Lia and I’d cleaned the kitchen, Roxanne snuggled into me, tucking her head into the place between my chin and chest. Her breath was warm and wet against my skin. I tried to forget about my disappointment, about the space I’d felt opening between me and Jack, but some soft part of me had desiccated, and what was once warm and alive was now withered and black.
. . .
Three decades have passed since then. I feel my age in every step. Roxanne often complains of the slow creep of alopecia up her forehead, of our spotted hands. On my worst days, when my joints swell with arthritis, I think of the story Jack told, of the man and the spear gun. For the most part I’ve gotten used to growing old. It helps that I still have Roxanne.
Michelle left Jack a year after our fishing trip. He never signed the prenup. Michelle got the house on the Marina, which she sold, and Jack kept his boat and twenty million from Michelle’s trust. For the first few years, their daughter was split between them, before they gave her to Jack’s mom to take care of.
Jack and I barely talked after that trip. Every now and then he’d send me a text and I’d agree to get-togethers that I’d later cancel on. Soon we stopped talking altogether.
The other day, Roxanne came home and told me that Jack was dying.
“He’s living in a house on Moloka`i,” she said. “With some chick from the mainland.”
“What does he have?” I asked.
“Michelle said Parkinson’s,” Roxanne said. “I ran into her at the grocery store.”
I sat on the couch, and she sat beside me. She leaned her head on my shoulder.
I thought of Jack when we were kids. One day, a month or so after he’d saved me from eating a beetle, Jack convinced me to jump the fence of an abandoned mansion in Kahala so we could skateboard in the drained pool. He fell on the lip of the edge and cracked his skull. While we waited for the ambulance, I wrapped my shirt around his bleeding head.
“My mom’s gonna kill me,” Jack said, and I told him not to worry.
We got to the Emergency Room, and I called my dad. He picked me and Jack up and forged a signature at the front desk. In the back of the car, Jack, in pain and half-drugged, asked about my mom.
“How come I’ve never met her?” he said.
I told him how she’d left and he blinked, eyes glazed with opiates.
“Fuck that,” he said, and never mentioned her again.
On our last fishing trip, driving back across the Channel, the wind had blown Jack’s hair to reveal the scar at the base of his skull. It had taken twelve stitches and some glue to patch him up. I’d abandoned Jack that day in his living room, watching the muted television that Michelle had left. When he said goodbye to me his shoulders were slumped, his voice was low and flat. I wondered what he’d do now if I called, if he’d ignore me or if he’d call me back.
