A compulsive debut of literary suspense, Goodnight Stranger follows one young woman held captive by her past and the stranger whose arrival unearths long-buried family secrets.
Lydia and Lucas Moore are in their late twenties when a stranger enters their small world on Wolf Island. Lydia, the responsible sister, has cared for her pathologically shy brother, Lucas, ever since their mom’s death a decade before. They live together, comfortable yet confined, in their family house by the sea, shadowed by events from their childhood.
When Lydia sees the stranger step off the ferry, she feels an immediate connection to him. Lucas is convinced the man, Cole Anthony, is the reincarnation of their baby brother, who died when they were young. Cole knows their mannerisms, their home, the topography of the island—what else could that mean? Though Lydia is doubtful, she can’t deny she is drawn to his magnetism, his energy, and his warmth.
To discover the truth about Cole, Lydia must finally face her anxiety about leaving the island and summon the strength to challenge Cole’s grip on her family’s past and her brother. A deliciously alluring read, Goodnight Stranger is a story of choices and regrets, courage and loneliness, and the ways we hold on to those we love.
Praise for Goodnight Stranger
“Somewhere the ghosts of Shirley Jackson and the Henry James of The Turn of the Screw are smiling, because a wildly talented young writer has joined their lineage. What a taut, keenly intelligent, and provocative debut Goodnight Stranger is. Deeply compelling and enjoyable, suffused with a genuinely thrilling new mode of literary energy.”
—George Saunders, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo
“Miciah Bay Gault is one of the most naturally talented writers I’ve ever read, and Goodnight Stranger is a testament to the capacious scope of her talent. This book has the exceptionally rare quality of being at once lyrical and a page-turner, finely-wrought and hot with speed. This is a monster debut.”
—Daniel Torday, acclaimed author of The Last Flight of Poxl West and Boomer1
“Miciah Bay Gault has written a perfect novel. A story as propulsive as a thriller, characters rich and vivid enough that I will be haunted by them for years, and prose so immaculate that every sentence gleams. Here is a debut that instantly places its author in the realm of Donna Tartt and Celeste Ng—books you can’t put down that are true works of art.”
—Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
“Goodnight Stranger unfolds close to the bone, deep in the gut, right on the edge of every nerve. Bravo to Miciah Bay Gault on a brilliant look at loss, at family, at identity, and at all the many loves we feel.”
—Robin Black, author of Life Drawing
“Goodnight Stranger is an uncanny, propulsive novel in which even the most stable-seeming ground moves and shifts like water does. I read with my heart in my throat.”
—Clare Beams, author of We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories
“Miciah Bay Gault casts a spell with every sentence she writes. Lydia, her brother, and the island itself pulled me into their web—a land of saltwater, secrets, isolation and desire—and didn’t let go, not until long after I’d turned the last page.”
—Robin MacArthur, author of Heart Spring Mountain
Miciah Bay Gault grew up on Sanibel Island, Cape Cod, and other beautiful places. A graduate of the Syracuse MFA program, she now teaches in the MFA in Writing & Publishing at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the coordinator of the Vermont Book Award. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, three kids, and some backyard chickens. This is her first novel.
Goodnight Stranger
Miciah Bay Gault
For Jeff
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Acknowledgments
1
Baby B was our brother, and he’d been dead all our lives. For a long time I thought I’d see him again, but by the time I was twenty-eight, I believed that the dead stay dead. I knew that the space he left in our lives would have to be filled in other ways.
That summer I was working in the information booth on the landing, as I had every summer for ten years. It was August, which meant that humidity and the smell of dead sea animals hung in the air like fog. Masts clanged and seagulls cried out in the harbor. The water was blue, green, and gray, and the sight of it made me thirsty.
The ferry was a little white toy as it rounded the tip of the island, growing larger and more substantial as it lumbered into the landing and let down its planks. Passengers descended, blinking and lugging suitcases, and I leaned back to await their questions.
I recognized everyone who stepped off the boat. They all fit into one of three categories: tourist, islander, returning visitor.
I was an expert on tourists. They didn’t know me, but I knew them. With a glance, I could tell why they were here. Some arrived armed with cameras and pocket money, trying to capture the island, fit it onto a scrapbook page. Some came because they loved beauty. Some came to remember the past, or to refuse the future.
And then there were those of us who were born here and never left. That was me, and my brother Lucas, and about half the class we graduated with from the tiny island high school, and the old fishermen, the Portuguese and Cape Verdean grandpas and their sons and grandsons, and the shop owners, the barkeeps, the waitresses, and hotel clerks. The people who stayed had various and complicated reasons for staying. For me it was because of my brothers—Lucas, the living brother, who needed me to look after him, but also my dead brother in the little island graveyard. They held on to me the way families do—that love-anchored gravitational pull.
I felt a shadow and looked up to see Eddie Frank standing by the information booth. The crooked expression on his face was completely familiar to me, one eyebrow up, one corner of his mouth raised in a half grin. I’d known him all my life, like almost everyone else on the island. We’d been in the same classroom from preschool on. When others from our graduating class had gone, we’d stayed behind on the island together.
He leaned on the booth. “You coming into the bar tonight?” he asked. “It’s been a while.”
“I told you—”
“You look like you could use a drink.”
“I’m trying to be a good person, okay?”
“That means no drinks?”
“That means no drinks with you.”
“Sometimes a drink is just a drink,” Eddie said.
I shook my head and he went away, back to the bouncer’s stool outside One Eyed Jack’s, the bar across the street from the information booth. I watched him as he went,
his broad back, his already thinning hair. I put my head down, closed my eyes.
* * *
That night my brother Lucas didn’t come home after work. I opened the mail, swept the kitchen floor, and read the first few pages of a novel recommended by Elijah West, our new librarian. When Lucas still didn’t show, I retrieved a folder I kept hidden on the top shelf of the pantry, under a waffle iron we hadn’t used in years. This was something I couldn’t let Lucas see—so I worked on it at times like these. I took the brochures out of the folder, the applications for scholarships.
I didn’t intend to hide it from him forever—just for now, while I completed the applications. There was always the chance that I wouldn’t be accepted, wouldn’t get enough scholarship money to make it possible, and then Lucas would never have to know.
And if I were to be accepted... When I imagined it, I felt something like a wave breaking in my chest, a crash of joy and fear. For so many years I’d known that out there beyond the bay, people were living busy, complicated lives. One of those busy lives was supposed to be mine, and I wanted to go—wanted off this island. It was one of my earliest memories, longing to leave, dreaming I’d burst past the edges of this little sandbox, leave it all behind.
Footsteps outside. I hid the college applications in the pantry and slipped into the yard to greet Lucas. But it was the Grendles next door, opening and closing their garage. They were ancient and grouchy, and had been my neighbors since I was born.
“Lydia!” I heard Mrs. Grendle call. “What are you doing out here? Spying on us?”
“I heard clanging and wanted to see what was going on.”
“Not a goddamn thing,” she said, “except we needed the wheelbarrow.”
I made spaghetti and ate it alone. I slipped onto the screened-in back porch overlooking Bhone Bay. Growing up, Lucas and I preferred the porch to any other room in the house. Our bedrooms felt lonely and far away. The living room was the realm of adults: books with no pictures, dark paintings of lighthouses and cliffs. The porch was where we set up forts, devoured books, napped, ate our meals. I always had the impression that our parents resented us for not making better use of the rest of the house. They had bought it to be filled with kids and traces of us—not for us to be separate, unto ourselves.
I looked out at the sailboats, bare masts swaying, at the houseboat that had been in Bhone Bay for as long as Lucas and I could remember: tiny, red, rocking like a cradle all night long. We used to pretend it was ours.
At nine it was dark, the house too quiet. Fuck, I thought. Where was Lucas? I didn’t want to worry, but I had to worry. That’s how it was with my brother. I grabbed a sweater off a chair in the kitchen and left, letting the door slam and echo over Bhone Bay.
On the shore, the air smelled of beach roses, and the bushes were covered with the plump shadows of rose hips. I saw shapes in the water and started, but they were only seals. On Clara Day Street, a few lingering weekend tourists walked up and down with ice-cream cones and baby carriages. A group of teenagers was skateboarding in the street and a car honked at them. The old wooden door to Jack’s was propped open, and Ed Frank was lounging on his bouncer stool outside.
“You came after all,” he said. “Guess what I heard. Kevin Bacon’s on the island tonight. Supposedly.”
“So?”
“So...it’s Kevin Bacon. Footloose?”
“I never saw it.”
“Where were you all those years? In a cave? He’s on the island, but I don’t know where he’s staying.”
“Listen, have you seen Lucas?”
He shook his head. “I’m glad you’re here, though. Let’s go in. I’m buying.”
“I have to find Lucas,” I said.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh, it’s fine. I don’t know where he is, but I’m sure he’s fine.” I turned to walk down Clara Day Street and then pivoted back to Eddie. “Lucas has been really happy lately,” I told him.
Which was true enough. He was happy in his own way. Lucas had too many fears, too many anxieties to ever experience the kind of happy-go-lucky contentment other people did. The psychologist he went to when we were little called it pathological shyness. But calling it shyness was like calling a hurricane a frisky breeze. It felt more like a fear, a phobia, of people. I didn’t understand it. But when you love someone you don’t have to understand them, you just have to accept who they are, and that was who Lucas was.
What it meant was that all the small things one does to take care of business on a daily basis, Lucas was incapable of doing. The mere thought of talking to a teller in a bank left him shaking with dread. He couldn’t go to the grocery store. He never used the telephone.
In other ways he functioned like any other adult. He went to work every day, did half the house chores, made a reasonable baked chicken. But he didn’t have friends, and never girlfriends. And if it weren’t for me, I’m not sure how he’d get food into the house. If it weren’t for me, he might actually die of loneliness.
That was why I was twenty-eight years old and only just getting around to finishing those college applications. It wasn’t that Lucas was any more capable of taking care of himself now than last year, or the year before. But increasingly, I’d been feeling that my chances were running out—that it was now or never, that if I didn’t leave soon I would literally sink into the sand of this island forever.
Mady’s Diner wasn’t open. Lucas wasn’t at Island Pie or the Island Inn, but I hadn’t thought he would be. It was after ten when I returned to the dark house. I wrapped up in a chenille blanket on the back porch and waited. I looked at the bay, the tops of the waves pearly in the moonlight. I worried, the way my mother used to worry. Lucas at the top of the lighthouse. Lucas slipping on rocks, slipping under the black water. And then there it was: the same old irrational thought, that I was to blame, that the act of filling out college applications had somehow led him into danger.
At eleven, I picked up the phone. I cradled it against my chest, listening to the drone of the dial tone. Then I called the island police. I almost hung up, but George Samson answered on the fourth ring, very sleepy, very grumpy, and then it was too late.
“It’s Lydia Moore,” I said.
“Not again,” he said.
“He’s not home. I’m worried.”
“I’ll let you know if I find him,” he said.
In bed, I listened to all the sounds of the island, a whole orchestra. The wind scratched the door, tapped the windows. A raccoon clanged the trash can lids together. Someone stood on the sand waving a conductor’s wand, a tall and regal woman. My mother. I could almost see her, on the outer edge of every dream. “I’m sorry,” I said to her, as she turned slightly in my direction. “I’m trying to take care of him, I really am.”
Then I heard the front door. I heard fumbling in the fridge. He was getting a beer. He was sitting alone at the kitchen table. I could see it as clearly as if I were in the room with him. I grabbed for the phone and called the island police again.
“George,” I whispered. “He’s home. I guess I was overreacting.”
I heard him yawning. “Okay. Happy ending,” he said.
“Did you even go out looking for him?” I said. “Or did you go back to sleep?”
“I’m awake,” he said, yawning again. “I looked for him! But, Lydia, you know as well as I do that when he doesn’t want to be found, there’s no finding him.”
It didn’t matter. Lucas was home. I told myself I’d tear up the college applications. I told myself I had all I needed right here. I knew it wasn’t true, but I was euphoric with relief. I took a deep breath and dived headfirst into a deep sleep.
2
Voices pulled me out of my dreams. A kind of pure white light reflected up from the bay, filling the room. The voices belonged to the ripples of light on the wall, then to t
he waves out in the bay. Then I was fully awake, and the voices were just voices.
I slid out of bed and pulled on pajama pants. Crept down the stairs.
Not voices—music. I paused to make sure it wasn’t the record player, the old Nina Simone album—because that would mean things with Lucas were worse than I thought. But it was Leonard Cohen, which meant things were okay. Lucas was making scrambled eggs. His hair was tousled, sticking up, as if he’d slept on it wet. This time of year, late summer, his skin was brilliant and brown, and his shoulders and cheeks glowed with sunburn.
“You were out late,” I said.
He slid a plate of eggs in front of me without a word.
“Were you at the lighthouse?”
He sat across from me, fixed me with his earnest stare, his complicated amber eyes. Lucas was a child of the earth. He was all rocks and bricks and dirt, sun-warmed things, molten things, dust and leaves and pollen. One of his eyes had a dark brown stripe through it, the other a single fleck of gold.
“Well?” I said. “Were you?”
“Don’t you ever miss him, Lyd?”
“Who?” I said, but I knew.
“I just want things to be the way used to be,” Lucas said.
“He’s been dead all our lives, Lu.”
“The way things were supposed to be, then.”
That was a dangerous line of thinking. How did anyone know how things were supposed to be? Our destinies weren’t like clothes laid out for a party, they weren’t some one-size-fits-all costume to slip into. But I understood why Lucas was thinking about Baby B and how things should have been. That was the turn thoughts took when loneliness grew too big and unruly. Island Loneliness was more terrible than regular loneliness. Loneliness could be just sad, sweet solitude. Island Loneliness was solitude with wind and crashing waves, and it wasn’t at all sweet. Island Loneliness meant looking toward the blue edge of the world and longing for something that existed only on the other side.
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