“Buddy,” says Bess. “That was his name.”
“How do you even remember that?” says Penny sleepily.
“My brain is more powerful than you know.”
“Buddy Kopelnick?” I say, understanding.
“Maybe,” says Penny.
Buddy Kopelnick took us camping. Took me camping.
“Kopelnick?” asks Bess.
“Yeah, that was his name,” I say, remembering more now. “We had the hot dogs on sticks. He put the ketchup on a paper plate and we all three dunked our hot dogs in there.”
“It was supposed to be just you,” remembers Penny. “Because you were the oldest. But then I pitched a fit and Mother said I could go. And Bess pitched a fit, and so we all went.”
“That’s not like Mother to let some random dude take us camping,” says Bess.
“He was an old friend,” I say.
I try to recall Buddy’s face, but it isn’t there. His whole self isn’t really there. I can remember the hot dogs and, now that she told the story, Penny washing her leg and yelling about it. She was wearing sky-blue athletic shorts, and her dirty white sneakers sat on the shore of the creek beside her. I remember keeping the pink jelly beans for myself, too, and doling out green and black to my sisters, since I didn’t like them. Bess extending sticky palms, asking for more candy.
His face won’t come up, though. It is like he never existed for me. Buddy Kopelnick is only a scratched-out face on an old photograph.
Bess and Penny have stopped thinking about him. They are tipsy, singing “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?”
They’re doing just as I asked them to. As we Sinclairs always do.
Pretending. Lying. Trying to have a good time.
* * *
—
WHEN THE SUN comes up, we drink the coffee from three of the four thermoses. We eat the potato chips.
I tell them about Rosemary and me, that time we had the potato chip breakfast when she was alive.
Bess wants to drink more whiskey, but I say no. We have to be sober and smell of seawater and coffee when we get back.
Instead, we pour some of the coffee from the fourth thermos into our own cups. Into “Pfeff’s” thermos, a tall one, we pour a large amount of whiskey, leaving room at the top so it looks like he drank at least half. We have no idea how fingerprinting works, and we should have put Pfeff’s mouth and hands on the thermos, but it’s too late now, so we wipe it with a beach towel and plan to say it fell in the water with the lid on. That’s the story of why his prints aren’t on it. If anyone asks. But there’s probably no police record of his fingerprints, I tell my sisters. So it likely doesn’t matter what’s on the thermos.
We eat the Pop-Tarts.
We toss the whiskey bottle into the ocean.
With a towel, we wipe the boat seat where Pfeff lay. Then we spray the towel with cleaner, soak it in the ocean, and wring it out, stretching it to dry. We take Pfeff’s blood-stained gray T-shirt, my sweater, and everything any of us have worn this past night and wind them together into a tight ball around a large stone. We sink the ball. It goes down slowly, but it disappears.
“Rest in peace, good gray top,” says Bess.
“Rest in peace, best jean shorts,” says Penny.
“Goodbye, pink sweatshirt,” I say.
It is more than any of us said for Pfeff when he went under. But there is no use pointing that out.
When we are certain the boat is irreproachable, we go swimming, wetting our hair and swimsuits. Later, when we return to Beechwood, our cover-ups will be convincingly damp, and our towels, too.
We leave one towel, Pfeff’s towel, neatly folded. We crumple the shirt we took from his room and put it on the floor of the boat next to his shoes and socks, like he took it off to go swimming.
We wipe our prints off the spray cleaner and toss it into the sea.
We are so far out we can’t even see land, but the compass guides us as we head home.
It is 6:48 in the morning when we pull up to the island.
62.
WE TIE UP the boat and leave it a mess. We run up the dock.
Tipper, Luda, and Harris are in the Clairmont kitchen, which smells of coffee and cinnamon rolls. They are startled as we burst in.
We girls all talk over one another. Penny cries. Bess cries. I cry.
We went out to do an Early Morning with Pfeff, we explain. It was one of these adventures we’d been going on, to enjoy the sunrise.
Pfeff brought the coffee and
we brought snacks and it’s
true
we thought Major and George were coming, but they weren’t there. We don’t know why. It was Pfeff’s idea and maybe he forgot to tell them. Or maybe they just slept in.