We sat in silence for a long moment that gradually became more and more uncomfortable, until I stood, suddenly tongue-tied.
“That’s my cue,” Cole said, and stood up as well. “Sweet dreams,” he said. He slipped out the kitchen door. From the window I watched the dark shadow that was him moving away from me along the beach.
7
I went away to college when I was seventeen. Everyone forgets that. They think I’m one of the islanders who never left, and sometimes I think of myself that way, too. But I had almost an entire semester in Providence before I came back to the island.
I took four classes. Intro to psychology, intro to Shakespeare, library research, and a freshman seminar about modernism. I had notebooks labeled with the name of each class, and very little in life had given me as much joy as all that blank paper.
I liked school. I liked my professors. I liked my roommate, who struck me as supernaturally uncomplicated. She was sleepy when it was time to sleep, she woke up when it was time to wake up, and she was hungry when it was time to eat. When it was chilly she said, “I’m chilly,” and put on a sweater.
I liked campus, all the old brick buildings with their domed windows and iron gates. The buildings I was used to on Wolf Island felt like extensions of the island itself, gray and brown wooden things, driftwood and bone. But in Providence the buildings were massive red and gray boxes, with pretty roofs and orderly windows.
Mostly I liked the town itself, with its brick sidewalks, its galleries and coffee shops. There was a footbridge I walked over almost every day so I could look down into the Providence River and think about how it ran into Narragansett Bay and then opened into the ocean.
One night in September I stumbled upon a tradition I hadn’t known about before. The river, I found, was on fire. At least one hundred tiny bonfires were blazing on the river itself, lit by men and women in gondolas with long torches who floated silently past, leaving fire in their wakes. Water fire. I felt the shock of it deep in my system, the beauty of the flame and the cool water reflecting it. I’d never felt a contradiction so viscerally before.
I was only seventeen. Everything was new to me, and not just the buildings and the river and the classes. The sensations were new. The feeling of being alone in the world. I missed my mother, and I missed Lucas, but even missing them was a good feeling, because unlike missing Baby B or my dad, I would see them again, at Thanksgiving.
But when I’d been at school for almost six weeks, my mom called to tell me that Lucas was on top of the lighthouse.
“Again?” I said.
I was alone in my room, Amanda having gone to the library before dinner. I was in my bed, that narrow dormitory bed that I already loved. This was only the first of many rooms I was going to sleep in, I felt sure. I meant to see the world. And more than see it. Know it. Fall asleep in rooms and wake up in rooms and smell their scents and notice how light illuminated those rooms.
Light fell in stiff lines through the venetian blinds of my dorm room, deep gold afternoon light, the light of October at four in the afternoon. It put stripes on the wall across from me, the warm orange stripes of a tiger cat, and I’d been watching the stripes lengthen and widen all afternoon as the sun sank swiftly. Already I knew this room intimately. It smelled of peppermint tea, and coconut oil, and pencil shavings.
“He’s been up there for hours,” my mother said.
“He’s up there now?”
“And the police got involved, so he’s scared to come down.”
“Call them off,” I said. “He’ll come down when it’s dark.”
She sighed. Just hearing her voice on the phone transported me from my dorm room back to the rooms I’d known best and longest. I could smell my mother’s sandalwood oil, which she dabbed on her skin and threw in with her laundry. The house’s perfume of mildew and wood.
“Now it’s a breaking-and-entering issue,” she said. “I can’t call them off, my friend. We’ll be lucky if they don’t arrest him.”
“I don’t know why you’re calling me,” I said. “I’m trying to write a paper, and it’s due tomorrow. And I still have to go to dinner.”
“Forgive me for thinking you’d want to know.”
We were both quiet, and I listened to her breathing. Her posture—I could see it clearly—would be perfect yoga posture. She was a tall woman to begin with—a full inch taller than my father, who himself was tall. Her yoga practice seemed to increase her height, or the impression of height, a full inch or more. She towered. When she sat, she rose from the seat like a pillar. When she stood, she reached the sky, an oak tree, a mountain. Her spine was the envy of middle-aged yogis everywhere.
“I’m not coming home,” I said.
“I wasn’t asking you to.”
“I’ll be home at Thanksgiving. He can stay up there until Thanksgiving if he wants to be stubborn. I’m not coming now.”
“You know it’s not stubbornness. And I wasn’t suggesting you come home,” she said again. But of course, that was exactly what she was suggesting. She was a woman who fiercely defended her independence while handing you her shopping bags to carry. She was used to being taken care of—first by her big family with four older brothers, then by my father, then by Lucas and me, but she told the world a different story and expected us to corroborate.
I felt a surge of anger, which seemed to gallop in alongside my own growing sense of independence. If she was going to pretend to be so independent, so capable on her own, then I certainly wasn’t going to race to bail her out.
“You’ll just have to figure it out yourself,” I said. “I have to go.”
Lucas did come down. Fell down, actually, some time in the night when I was sleeping, or lying awake in my dorm room, which felt smaller after that conversation. Lucas broke his wrist when he fell, but saved himself from being arrested since the police on the scene felt guilty about his injury. They drove him to the clinic and waited for him while Dr. Lyle set the bone. Then they drove him home, and literally, I’m not making this up, they gave him a lollipop.
That fall at Brown when Lucas was in trouble and I didn’t come home, that was the first time I took a stand against my mother. That was my rebellion. It’s funny to think about it now, my arrogance. As if I were somehow stronger than the forces that pull us together in this life. As if I could make a plan, a guess, a reasonable estimate of what life would hold for me.
Late that night, the night I hung up the phone on my mother, I went to the river. The river wasn’t on fire, but it was still beautiful, aglow with the reflection of the city’s streetlamps and headlights and lit windows. I walked over the footbridge and then back again. I touched the railing of the bridge, felt the heat from the day.
I sensed someone beside me, and turned uneasily—I was still young, and this was a city and totally new to me. The girl standing there was someone I recognized only slightly. She sat behind me in one of my classes; I’d noticed in passing her thick plastic glasses. She was pudgy, doughy in the way some little girls are, and she wore her hair in pigtails, with thick overgrown bangs hiding her forehead. She was my age, I knew, but she looked like a little girl in every way except one. She had a small scar like a tiny star on her cheek, and this gave her a sophisticated look, as though it were a beauty mark. I took all this in, the way I took everything in, saving it all for some later moment when I’d have time to analyze and make meaning out of what I’d seen.
“You want to go in?” she said, nodding at the river.
“No,” I said.
“Come on. Let’s get closer.”
We crossed the bridge and scrambled down its edge and made our way through the thick growth of jewelweed and knotweed growing there. We scrambled to the very edge of the water, and stood together looking at the cold reflections of the city.
“I don’t think we better,” I said finally. “I don’t think it�
�s supposed to be very clean.”
We heard the sound of the river lapping against its shore. We heard the city all around us, the gentle roar of cars.
“If we don’t go in, we might regret it when we’re old,” she said.
I turned and looked at her. This thought appealed to me in a profound way. Even as a child I thought about the past with an intensity that bordered on brooding, obsessively categorizing memories in order to hold on to them for as long as possible—forever I hoped. And because I was seventeen, I thought a lot about the future, too, what it might hold for me, who I would be then, in the unknown places of my life. But to combine the past and future like that, to imagine the present moment as I might remember it in the future, this layering of time, this positioning and repositioning myself in relation to time: it felt like a gift this girl was giving me, and I looked at her with gratitude.
Her name was Mary. We did go in the river. In some future world, our future selves smiled and were pleased that we did it, even though the shock of the cold water and the difficulty of exiting a swift current onto slippery, weedy banks made it far more dangerous than we’d expected.
We had stashed our clothes in the brush where we’d gone in, and then drifted swiftly in our underwear far from that spot. When we climbed out, naked except for bras and underwear, cold and shivering and laughing and scared and full of adrenaline, we had to creep along the banks looking for our clothes in dim light. The moon, the water, the lights reflected in the river, all contrasted with the trash along the river, the old fast-food bags, and newspapers, and plastic cups, and the shapes we glimpsed in the brush we thought were homeless men in sleeping bags.
We were so cold when we found our clothes, we couldn’t stop shivering, but even that felt good. The danger of the night felt like something our future selves would approve of. In intro to psychology the next day—that was the class we shared—I sat by Mary. And even this felt new and strange, this making a friend. On the island, we’d all known each other for so long, we were more like some big extended family of cousins, forced to play together, than like friends who’d found each other. But Mary was a friend I’d found, or who had found me. I imagined all the memories my future self would have of Mary and me, our adventures. Maybe we would backpack across Europe together the way my parents had. Maybe we would move into an apartment together when we graduated. We would be maids of honor at each other’s weddings, godmothers to each other’s babies. Our husbands would be best friends, as would our children.
I could see the future, as clearly as I’d ever seen anything. It was full of love. And it was mine alone, not Lucas’s or my mother’s. There was a freedom in that thought as sweet and forbidden as the October swim in the Providence River.
When my mother called a few weeks later to tell me she had cancer, I went home right away. I had to this time. I only mourned the one lost semester, the spring, somehow thinking she’d get better fast, that I’d be back next fall.
My mother never mentioned the lighthouse to me again. But she told me again and again that I had to look after Lucas. The sicker she got, the more desperate she sounded. You take care of him. Don’t leave him alone. Of course I was going to look after Lucas. I wasn’t a monster. She got smaller and smaller, her head tiny-looking with its wispy crown of hair. And when she died, like Baby B, she continued to hang around. Lucas said he saw her in the bathroom mirror. The smell of sandalwood sometimes wafted through the house, a ghostly cloud of it. He said he felt her embracing him just as he was falling asleep.
Please stop, I told him. I knew there was no ghostly mother hanging around. There was no one hanging around. The smell of sandalwood was everywhere, but that didn’t mean we weren’t suddenly and terrifyingly alone, or that our future plans hadn’t been obliterated with swift and absolute disregard. When she died and her body was gone, the silence in the house was overwhelming. Whole systems of movement and vibration evaporated. It felt wrong, like the air before a storm, to be without parents.
We were twenty when she died. We had no college education, no way of making money, a house three times too big for us, a mortgage, and a sudden necessity to readjust everything we thought the future held. The only thing I understood clearly was what my responsibility was in regard to Lucas. I could not leave him alone. Never. What kind of sister would do such a thing?
There was no alternative, so I gave up thinking about alternatives. Anyway, I was happy on the island with Lucas. Loving my brother was the biggest feeling I’d ever had. It was a ferocious feeling, almost angry. It was bigger than anything I’d felt at school, I told myself. Who was Mary, a friend I’d had for a few weeks, compared to this relationship between brother and sister? And Lucas wasn’t an ordinary brother.
When my mother told me to take care of Lucas, it was because he honestly needed taking care of. Despite his shyness, or because of it, as kids we were always together. He needed me to talk for him. Even with the islanders, he was rigid and reserved. And with new people? He turned pale; he trembled; he broke out in a cold sweat. He could barely breathe. He was afraid of other people. Or afraid of how they made him feel. My parents made him see a psychologist for years—but he never learned to like people. Only me. I was his sister, and his friend. And after Mom died, I was his mother, too.
He was happy that way; at least most of the time. He knew the deserted stretches of beach. He knew the hidden forest paths. He began his job as a landscaper at the Day Estate the summer after we graduated high school, and he’d worked there ever since. The plants and seeds and sod and mulch and leaves and moss and old stones never tried to make conversation.
He wore an old sun hat when he went out, so he could pull it down over his eyes when he passed someone.
That summer, when Cole came to Wolf Island, Lucas and I had been alone in the house for almost ten years, and I’d been looking after him all that time. The desire to leave the island—to go back to college—was usually smothered by another force: the need to take care of him, which was strong and palpable, a physical pressure in my chest. Sometimes when I remember those years together alone, I think: we were happy. Sometimes I think: we were dying of loneliness. With Cole, I felt the arrival of a new force in our lives—a new desire—and I had the strange feeling that we’d spent our whole lives preparing for this change.
Everyone has their own way of dealing with loss. Lucas saw ghosts and went to the lighthouse. I read books and organized drawers. I gave out information, piece by piece. Everyone finds a way to cope with grief. So what if Lucas’s way seemed eccentric? It was only music. It was only light. The cinnamon cookies were excellent. That’s his way, I told myself. He has his way and I have mine. What harm could come of it?
8
Cole stayed for three days, four days, five. It felt like a miracle—a brother returned to me. And I don’t mean Colin, I mean Lucas. He bloomed and flourished, was confident, happy. It was as though Cole made him into a different person altogether: someone who could interact with the world without fear. I might have worried more about this brotherly infatuation—except that Cole seemed to have nothing better to do with his time than whatever Lucas wanted him to do.
They went clamming, fishing. They went to the movies. Cooked dinner together. I felt like I was watching an after-school special.
I didn’t ask him how long he planned to stay, but he gave no indication he was thinking of leaving. He moved to room eleven at the Island Inn, but there were no ghosts, he said, with disappointment.
“You’re the ghost,” I told him.
Sometimes I thought about what he’d said about dreams, about the Quahog Pit, or about the coincidences with the skipped stone, the way he sat like my mother. Those were strange little flags, asking me to pay attention. But it was so much easier to pay attention to other things. How he laughed at what I said, making me feel funny and bright, like a different girl, someone like Kim. How he asked about the islanders as if
they (and by extension I) were fascinating exemplars of human complexity. The way he paid for groceries, made dinners for us. If he was a guest, he was a very pleasant guest. If he was a ghost, he was a sincerely helpful ghost. And anyway, I was used to being haunted.
I sometimes asked myself what he was getting from us, what he was hoping for. That seemed like the right question, but the answer was tricky. I had a realization about him on the second Sunday of his stay. On Sundays Lucas and I always cleaned the house, dividing up the chores, and that Sunday, Cole offered to pitch in. He cheerfully dusted. He vacuumed. He said he preferred not to do bathrooms.
“I prefer not to do bathrooms, too,” Lucas said.
I said, “Someone has to do them.”
“I don’t even live here,” Cole said.
“Fine.” Lucas held up his hands. “I’ll do them.”
All morning it rained. The inside of the house was dim and cool. When I gathered up shopping bags in the afternoon, Cole said, “Grocery shopping? I’ll come.” And he slid off the kitchen stool and fell into step beside me.
I backed the car out of the garage and Cole watched from the doorway, then darted toward me through the rain. It was a rust-colored 1983 Volkswagen Rabbit. He eased into the passenger’s seat. “I wondered if you ever drove this thing,” he said.
We passed Mr. and Mrs. Grendle next door; I saw them through their kitchen window. Did they see me? Did they worry, seeing me with a strange man suddenly after so many years?
The rain drummed on the roof of the car. The grocery store was a mile inland, part of a knot of ugly boxy buildings where South Street intersects with Hatch. The store was called Hiram’s Bounty, a name Cole found amusing.
I had been terrified of Hiram, not because he was mean, but because he’d had a tracheotomy and spoke with a mechanical voice through a little box attached to his throat. That voice seemed to issue straight from a nightmare. He’d died maybe twenty years earlier, and someone else owned the store, but the name stayed. That was the unspoken agreement among islanders: we will do our utmost to keep time at a standstill. The same sand will sit on the same shore for a million years. Hiram’s Bounty will forever remain Hiram’s Bounty. Children won’t grow up. Parents won’t die. At least that was supposed to be the agreement. My antiestablishment parents were never good at following the rules.
Goodnight Stranger Page 6