They were in the living room watching football. This was remarkable since Lucas had never watched football in his life. When Dad had thrown us a football, we’d studied it as if it were a bird with its wings pulled in tight against its wobbling body. “Catch it!” Dad had yelled. “Why are you just looking at it?”
Now Cole said, “He’s big but fast. That’s what people don’t realize. They’re worried because he’s a rookie, but he has the arm that’s going to win us the Super Bowl. I have a premonition about this.”
“Hi, Lyd,” Lucas said. “We’re watching the game.”
Cole said what sounded like “giant eagles” and looked up at me as if I’d know what that meant.
“This is our team now,” Lucas said.
“Preseason,” Cole said. “Watch this. Oh man, he threw that ball away.”
“You mean it’s Cole’s team?”
“Well, we didn’t have a team,” Lucas said.
“I didn’t know we needed a team.”
“Everyone needs a team,” Cole said. “Believe me, you won’t be sorry. These boys are good. And this is their year. They can’t lose.”
They leaned forward in one synchronized motion. I was struck by the ease between them. Lucas was smiling, his shoulders relaxed. Carefree, happy.
I imagined for one minute that my mother was here, and my father, too, that this stranger really was Colin. That he’d come home from his life somewhere else—New York City, London, Tokyo—for a family vacation. I imagined us all standing together in one room, everyone drinking beer from cans, toasting each other. I yearned for that family that didn’t exist anymore, that had never existed.
I wandered out to the dock and sat on the end with my feet hanging over and watched the movements of the water. A school of fish swam by, embroidering the surface. The sun turned orange and slipped lower. The objects around me took on a bright-edged insistence, the old splintered boards of the dock each separate and unique, the white sails in the bay popping out from the background.
I heard the screen door and turned to see Lucas coming toward me.
“Cole wants ice cream,” he said.
“We haven’t had dinner yet.”
Cole strode out the back door. “I like ice cream after a game,” he called to me. Lucas hurried after him.
“We haven’t had dinner,” I said again, but they were going, and I jumped up and followed them.
We sat on a bench down by the ferry landing and looked out at the lights of Martha’s Vineyard. The late ferry would be coming in at nine. I knew that boat as if it were my own body, I’d been watching its comings and goings for so many years.
“I’m going to look,” Lucas said.
“Good luck,” I told him.
Cole and I licked ice-cream cones and watched Lucas crouch by the water and poke the sand with a stick, searching for phosphorescence.
“We couldn’t get a better night if we ordered it from a catalog,” Cole said. He leaned back and surveyed the water. I noted again the way he looked at everything with an expression of ownership—as if it were already his.
“I don’t really order my nights from catalogs,” he said. “That’s a good way to get the wrong size. No, the way I do it, I go to the store, I try a bunch on, see what fits, what feels right, then put it on the credit card.”
“Mine are hand-me-downs,” I said.
“Really? Who had them first?”
“My mom. Lucas. Baby B. I don’t know. I don’t even know why I said that.”
Cole licked the drips around the bottom of his scoop of ice cream, put the rest of the cone in his mouth. “I could eat another one,” he said. “I’m basically always hungry.”
I looked at him through the dusky light and felt a familiar feeling rise up. A desire for something out of reach, something in the past, or the future, something lost to time, or not meant for me.
“You know,” I said, “all this will probably make things harder for Lucas when you leave.”
“I’m not planning to leave anytime soon.”
“Just to be clear, I don’t believe you’re the reincarnation of my dead brother.”
“You say believe like it’s a filthy thing. Don’t you believe in anything?”
What did I believe? I didn’t believe he was Baby B, but I did see something almost familiar in him, one small thing that made even a stranger recognizable. Cole also longed for hidden things to rise to the surface, wanted something more, something deeper, something buried. I remembered the feeling of his hands on my wrists, how I’d opened my eyes to find him examining me, as if he were trying to find someone, something.
Then Lucas was there, his hands full of sand, and when he moved his fingers, the luminous phytoplankton lit up like stars, and then went dull and dead. The water was so dark behind him, a thick green-black, the air chilly. The air held something else that was harder to describe, something I couldn’t see or hear or touch. Something that emanated from Cole, light, or frequency, or pheromones. Whatever it was, I recognized it, and it recognized me.
5
I sat at the bar at Jack’s until Eddie abandoned his bouncer stool and sat down beside me.
“So, Lyd.”
“So, Ed.”
“I saw you tonight,” he said. “With this new guy.” He spun around on the stool and surveyed the bar. The same CD was playing that was always playing in Jack’s. It belonged to the bartender, Eliot Moniz. A girlfriend had made it for him years ago, and he kept listening to it, long after she broke up with him and moved off the island. It was all Van Morrison and Tom Waits, sad, romantic songs. I’d begun to associate those voices with the smells and tastes of the bar, the salty scent that permeated the air of fish, both fried and fresh, the thick, heady stench of spilled beer. “I guess that’s how it’s going to be. That’s the end of us.” He stared morosely at the bar where something had spilled earlier, leaving a long, dark streak.
“I already ended things between us,” I reminded him.
“I’m trying to be happy for you,” he said. “This guy looks nice enough.”
“I hope he is.”
Ed looked surprised. “You hope so? Don’t you know whether he’s nice or not? If the guy’s not nice to you, Lyd, I can help you out.”
“It’s not like that.”
“If I’m being honest, I got a weird feeling when I saw him,” Eddie said. “I thought something might be a little off. You don’t have to take shit from him or anyone. You want me to talk to him?”
“It’s nothing serious. I’m not fucking him,” I said. “Or dating him, or whatever people do.”
He looked relieved. “Everyone’s been saying you met him on the internet,” Eddie said.
“I don’t even know him, Ed. He just showed up. Honestly. He and Lucas think they know each other from a past life.”
“That sounds like a load of bullcrap.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.
“What makes it so complicated?”
“Lucas is crazy about him. And you know Lucas. He doesn’t usually warm up to people.” Imagine you had a brother like mine, I wanted to say, a brother who liked imaginary people best, who was always longing for some impossible happiness, a brother who suddenly grasped on to something, someone, with ease and joy. The way he was with Cole. Laughing and talking. I’d never seen this before. Not with anyone. Not in all these years.
“You know about my brother Colin?”
“Only that he passed away when he was a few months old.”
“Weeks old,” I said.
“Oh man,” Eddie said. “Poor little guy.”
“But for Lucas he was always really present. Even years later. I know that sounds crazy. Lucas thinks this guy is Colin, you know, reborn.”
Eddie whistled.
“I know,” I said. “
It sounds so wild. But listen, Eddie, you don’t need to worry about me. This isn’t your problem.”
“Please,” he said. “Your problems are my problems.”
“No,” I said. “I’ve been trying to tell you. They’re not anymore, okay?”
“You know what I’m going to do?” Eddie said. “I’m going to stop by and see you and Lucas. Just to show my face. I haven’t been over in a while.”
I couldn’t remember Eddie ever stopping by to see us—we tended to see each other in the storeroom of Jack’s after hours, in the stacks at the library, the Biography section where no one ever went, or—once—in the bathroom at the drugstore. I knew by offering to keep an eye on Cole, Eddie was being overprotective, jealous even, but Cole was, after all, a stranger, and I wanted him to think there was someone looking out for us.
“Anytime,” I said to Eddie. I touched his big hand just to feel something real, and warm, and safe.
He went back out to the bouncer stool, and I waited for Lucas and Cole, who had gone home to eat dinner, while I’d come straight to Jack’s, not hungry. At this time of year, when the rest of the island restaurants were full of tourists, Jack’s was often a haven for islanders. A few locals sat at the bar: an old fisherman named Sebastian, who’d sat at that barstool every night for as long as I could remember; a couple named Stephan and Steph, who I’d gone to school with. They’d been in love forever, since childhood, or maybe before. They sat there at the other end of the bar, and Steph put both arms around Stephan’s neck, and they looked like they were on their first date, so much in their own world. I couldn’t imagine being that in love for so many years. What would that feel like? Weren’t they exhausted?
The whole place was full of people I recognized, the people I’d gone to school with, the people who took care of the island, serving its food, and cleaning its rooms, and patching its roads, and sweeping its sidewalks. They sat at big tables with barrels for seats and ordered pitchers of beer and laughed together.
“I haven’t seen you in here in a while,” Eliot, the bartender, said to me. He nodded at my empty glass. “But I guess you needed a night out.”
“Lucas is meeting me here,” I said.
“Lucas, your brother?” Eliot looked incredulous.
When the door of the bar next opened—I heard the jingle of bells like the tinkling of shells in the waves—Lucas and Cole walked in, the door swinging shut behind them. Everyone looked up, surprised. Lucas didn’t often go out in public, not since we were in school, and even then it was pretty touch and go. He’d even been homeschooled for a while. When we had the funeral for my mom, he’d hid in the woods the whole time.
“There’s Lydia,” I heard Lucas say.
He cupped one hand around his eye, a kind of half blinder, and made his way across the room. He sat on one side of me, and Cole on the other. Lucas stared at the floor.
“What would you like?” Eliot asked Lucas from behind the bar, and Lucas looked up, startled by the question.
“I’m just going to bring you a really good beer,” Eliot said.
“You were right,” Cole said to Lucas. “This is a great bar.”
Eliot brought their beers and Lucas and Cole took long sips.
“It is a great bar,” Lucas said. He looked at me and smiled, and I felt inexpressibly happy. I felt the kind of happiness that goes along with fragile things, little shells, dried flowers, beautiful in part because they’re fragile. I felt the weight of that complicated feeling, as if I were holding gorgeous, crushable things in my hand.
Beside me, Lucas lifted the beer to his mouth, an unselfconscious action, like any other man, like someone else’s brother. I took a long sip from my drink and felt it burn my mouth, my throat.
I pointed out Steph and Stephan, and told Cole about how they’d been in love as long as we could remember, since third grade, second grade. Cole introduced himself to Eliot. Lucas drank a second beer and laughed when Cole pretended he could read the scratches in the wooden floor like hieroglyphics. The rest of the bar lost interest in Lucas pretty soon and went back to their own stories over their own tumblers.
Later, drunk, we walked Cole back to the Island Inn. Lucas was chatty, nostalgic. He remembered Eddie finding Lucas’s lost harmonica in second grade. He remembered when Eliot’s mother drove her car into Hiram’s Bounty, the grocery store, right through the big glass door. He remembered eating at the Island Inn restaurant with our parents, the waitress bringing him maraschino cherries in a cup. I listened to Lucas, to the waves rolling onto the sand. I wanted Lucas to talk forever. I wanted to stay for a long, long time in that moment on the beach, with the warm air and the rhythmic shushing of the waves.
We stopped before we got to the inn, near Tame Jaw Beach, and I watched the two men walk toward the water. The air was humid, shimmering with moisture, and I was still drunk and thinking about the past. “You know what I don’t understand,” I said. “What about the dreams?”
“What dreams?” Lucas turned toward me.
“The dreams about Colin. We know exactly what he looked like. And it wasn’t anything like—”
In every dream, his hair and complexion had been dark, almost oily, and his eyes amber like Lucas’s. He had a smooth dark head and a sleek nose. The whites of his eyes glowed, as if he had to light his own way through our dreams. I held out my arms for a moment, as if I could see him away across the water.
Lucas shook his head. “In your dreams Baby B looked the way he would have looked if he’d grown up with us. But after he died, he was born in a different place, to a different family. Cole doesn’t look like us. He doesn’t share our DNA.”
“Then how is he Baby B?”
“Soul,” Lucas said.
My mom had believed pieces of the soul could splinter off over time. You didn’t notice it happening, but from that point on you were—in small ways—crippled, going through life without the benefits of a whole, intact soul. A shaman could lead you back on the path of your life, looking for the missing parts.
My mother had found her missing part in a dressing room in Saks Fifth Avenue. Her soul was seven years old and had been in the store trying on hats for fifty years.
Lucas went to the very edge of the water, and lifted his shirt over his head, let his jeans fall to the ground. Naked, he walked into the water, vanished. Cole and I sat down on the sand, watching the dark surface, waiting for Lucas to reappear.
It was almost midnight, a clumsy swollen quarter moon overhead.
“Have you moved to room eleven?” I asked.
“Not yet. But I put in a request. The clerk looked horrified.”
“You don’t seem like someone who’s afraid of ghosts.”
“Depends on the ghosts, I guess.”
Far out in the water, I saw Lucas’s head. Wind picked up, ruffled the surface.
I watched the spot that was Lucas, small and unremarkable. Could have been a seal or a rock.
“All my life I’ve had dreams,” Cole said. “About certain places. About this place.”
I felt suddenly sober, the celestial feeling of scotch in my bloodstream dissolving into a kind of foggy humidity. “You dream about the island?” I asked.
“And about certain people,” he said.
“What people?”
Lucas was swimming to shore, he was standing in the shallow water. He was moving toward us, naked, beautiful, sea-creature, moon-creature.
“Shit!” he said. “Cold!”
“What people?” I asked again.
Lucas pulled his clothes on, shivering, exhilarated. He was grinning. He looked like he might take off flying, unfold surprise wings and lift into the darkness.
Cole laughed. He turned to me. “Ignore me,” he said. “I’m drunk. I’m drunk and nostalgic. I’m having déjà vu.” He touched my arm, and I felt warmth radiating from that spot, star, sta
rfish, sunspot, gold.
6
When I woke in the morning the house was empty. I felt haunted by a dream, something that lurked at the edge of my memory just out of reach. Lucas’s bed was a tangle of sheets. There was a note for me on the kitchen table in Cole’s unfamiliar handwriting. We have gone together to seek our fortunes, it said. Meet here for lunch? I went to work, but after the noon boat had come and gone, I felt restless. I’d thought Cole would stop by the booth. I’d looked for him. I wanted to see him. When I left for lunch, I didn’t even tell Jim Cardoza I was going.
From the beach, our house looked shabby: the missing shingles we hadn’t bothered to replace in the roof, the faded paint. I wondered how it looked to Cole. Where was Cole, and what had he done all day while we were at work? Was he at the inn, or was he here in the house waiting for us? I pictured him opening the doors of our house; I imagined his fingers touching the old pages of our books; I saw him looking into all our mirrors.
I stood in the doorway of my home. “Hello?” I said. The house was quiet and sunny, dust suspended in light coming in the living room windows. I crept upstairs and peeked in all the bedrooms.
From my bedroom window, I could see the lawn and the dock and the bay. And I could also see Cole, who was sitting cross-legged at the end of the dock.
He was centered on the dock, his back straight and tall, one hand on the back of his neck. My heart gave a strange small jump, because for a moment he reminded me of my mother. This was the place my mother used to go to meditate, and this was exactly the way she sat, with one hand on her neck. I remembered her fingers in her hair. I touched the window screen. I watched him for a long time, but he didn’t move. He was like my mother in that way, too—a heavy, unmovable stone with Lucas and me dancing around her in the current.
Goodnight Stranger Page 4