The Invisible Husband of Frick Island - Colleen Oakley Page 0,7

guy looked like, but he pictured him as one of those Ken doll Bachelorette contestants from Kelsey’s favorite show—a guy with coiffed hair and skinny jeans and K-Swiss sneakers tossing tennis balls at the park for Lola, showing off a row of perfect toothpaste-commercial teeth when he threw back his head in masculine, effortless laughter.

Movement on the wall drew his attention, and Anders jumped up, letting out a squeak and grabbing the can of Raid he kept out for this purpose. With lightning-quick speed, he popped the top off and directed the nozzle at the offensive target scurrying across the beige wall, leaving a trail of God knows what disgusting diseases in its wake. The cockroach dropped to the ground on its back, its fibrous legs still twitching, as if looking for purchase. Heart thudding, Anders sprayed it again in disgust, waiting for the poison to take effect. He glanced back at the screen of virile dogs and noticed it had gone black, so all he was looking at was the vague reflection of his own freckle-painted pale skin and unmanageable cowlick that refused to be tamed no matter how much he smoothed it. He thought of the coiffed hair, the tennis balls, the teeth.

And he sighed for the third time that evening.

* * *

—

Once, in a fit of paternal (and scotch-induced) bonding at his high school graduation party, Anders’s father gave him three pieces of advice. Anders couldn’t remember the first two, but the third made so much sense, it stuck with him like a piece of gum to a shoe: Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

Which was how Anders found himself sitting on a fiberglass bench in the middle of a passenger boat destined for Frick Island wearing a long-sleeved dress shirt and khaki pants as if he were heading into a budget meeting at the New York Times. Unfortunately, the August sun blazed like a furnace in the cloudless sky, raising the temperature of everything it touched to burning, causing his shirt to feel more like a stifling down coat by the second.

At least he had forgone the tie.

The boat rocked heavily as it churned through the water, and the motion roiled the Pop-Tarts still digesting in Anders’s stomach. That plus the familiar tang of the sea air conjured vivid and unwelcome recollections of his last deep-water venture on a boat. He closed his eyes.

An old man stood at the helm, speaking into a handheld mouthpiece tethered to the dashboard by a spiraled cord, but Anders couldn’t hear him. The latest episode of This American Life filled his ears, with the goal of drowning out everything unpleasant around him—the crackling voice distorted by the boat’s ancient speakers, the vague lurching in his stomach, and the all-too-top-of-mind realization that Anders was smack in the middle of the ocean, at the mercy of an ancient boat captain on an even older boat, with no control over the destination or his motion sickness or the strength of the sun’s rays.

After thirty long minutes, a strip of trees appeared on the horizon, and Anders breathed a small sigh of relief that the end was in sight. That is, until the boat chugged closer and he had a better view. Shacks—about ten of them—sat on the shore, each with its own wooden dock reaching into the water like a crooked finger, the planks like the keyboard of a broken-down piano. Anders knew these were crab shanties he’d read about in his research—the shelters where watermen sorted through their catch and stored supplies—but he did not know they would have all the craftsmanship of a clubhouse nailed together by a child. Each one looked less sturdy and in a greater state of disrepair than the one before. After the last shanty, the ferry pulled up alongside a small dock parallel with the shore, rather than perpendicular. Just beyond the dock sat another small white shack with a hand-painted sign:

Frick Island Marina

Captain BobDan Gibbons

555-6728

Anders blinked. Marina? This tiny building with one dock and a couple of benches? It was like stumbling upon a lone apple tree and calling it an orchard. When the boat was secure, Anders stood, Ira Glass’s voice still blaring in his ears, and followed the other passengers shuffling forward to disembark. When it was his turn, Anders stepped off the boat, dug a crisp ATM-fresh twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket, and dropped it in the bucket proffered by the captain, but then froze.