“Where’s the shopping list?” Cole asked. He held a shopping basket firmly at his side. The place was small and cramped. All around us, multicolored packages were stacked precariously on tall shelves. You had to climb up step stools to reach the tops. I had the impression of children’s blocks rising in castles on the verge of tumbling down. It smelled like childhood, too, like the inside of a refrigerator.
“There’s no list.”
“How do you remember what you need?”
“I just know.”
“How do I know what you need?”
“You don’t know,” I said. “I have to tell you. Milk, for starters.”
He peeled off and found the dairy section and then found me again down a crowded aisle of canned things, and I sent him back with his two percent and told him to get whole milk, and then to look for olives and tomato sauce. For a while we shopped like that. I moved in solid lines and Cole circled back to me, each time with a heavier basket.
We ran into my old piano teacher in the bread aisle. I’d stopped taking piano lessons when I was fifteen, but Mrs. Mabe wrapped her arms around me in a hug and demanded I tell her every little thing I’d been up to.
“Nothing new,” I said. “Except, I guess, this is Cole. A friend of Lucas’s.”
“Lovely,” she said.
“A pleasure to meet you,” Cole said, taking her hand in both of his.
She gave me a conspiratorial look and mouthed the word cute when she said goodbye.
When we got in line to check out, Cole said, “Here. I’ll get these groceries.” He pulled several bills out of his pocket. “But, question for you—why introduce me as Lucas’s friend?”
I picked up a pack of gum and then put it back. “You’d rather I say you’re the reincarnation of baby Colin?”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, why Lucas’s friend? Aren’t I your friend?”
He tilted his head, looked at me, unsmiling, and I felt a sudden warm rush to my cheeks.
Later that day in front of the Lobster Claw, our hardware store, we saw Allison Ferrera, who had been two years behind me in school. Both her kids were crying by the wheelbarrows. She waved at me and then stared at Cole the whole time I was talking. She’d always been pretty, but a little stupid, and disproportionately beloved, in my opinion.
“Who’s this?” she said, nodding at Cole. I introduced him as an old friend of mine from college. I’m not sure why I lied, but Cole looked at me approvingly when I said it, and I felt a surge of warmth, the two of us connected, creating something together, even if the something was a lie.
“I thought you didn’t go to college,” Allison said.
“I left early because my mother died,” I said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Allison said. “I put my foot in my mouth, didn’t I?”
“We met freshman year,” Cole said. “That sounds right.”
“Sounds right?” Allison said.
“Who can remember freshman year?” I said.
“What class was it?” Cole asked, snapping his fingers, as if trying to remember.
“I think it was psychology.”
“It was history,” he said, suddenly serious, almost angry.
“Well, it’s good to meet you,” Allison said. “Welcome to Wolf Island. The prettiest, most boring place on earth.”
I had the sense something important had just taken place, and I looked at Cole’s face for a clue, but it was pleasant and impassive again. It was as if I’d just seen a flash of his desire, what it was he wanted from us. The story. The lie. It didn’t make any sense.
That week Cole walked me to work in the mornings. He began to meet me for lunch. He accompanied me to the post office, the bank. Everyone stared at him.
When I introduced him, he told an increasingly detailed story of how we met freshman year. “There was a train somewhere near campus,” he told my boss in the Ferry-All offices. “And we could hear it from the dorm. Do you remember that, Lydia? The whistle of the train? And all the crows in the fall? The sky black with crows.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t remember that.”
“It slips away from you, doesn’t it?” he said. “Memory.”
Here’s what I realized that day. Memories were of special interest to him. He collected them, studied them, as if the thing he wanted from us was our memories, as if memories could make a man rich.
But I couldn’t tell if he was trying to take memories away from us or offer them to us.
The memories of train whistles and crows, the history class in college—maybe that was his way of being generous, offering me a gift in his favorite currency. But I wasn’t sure I wanted this gift. I only had a few memories from that semester in Providence, and now they blurred, ran together with Cole’s fabrications. Now, when I thought back to my dorm room that fall ten years ago, I heard the train. I saw the shadows of crows.
When we were eight, my mother took us to watch The Wizard of Oz at the little cinema inland. During the Munchkins’ song, she leaned down and said something in my ear.
“What did you say?” I asked her.
“This is the part you’re going to remember,” she repeated. Even then I felt resentful. I would choose my own memories, thank you. But the funny thing is that that was the part I remembered, for years. It haunted me and I wondered if she had somehow, powerfully, created the memory, or if she were simply prophetic.
How would my mother have responded if Cole had shown up while she was still alive? I put her face together carefully, not leaving anything out: her heavy, pale hair, her orange lipstick, the way she pushed her reading glasses up on top of her head. I tried to remember her as she really was: my mother, not some dream. I imagined her in the doorway, with Cole Anthony standing across the threshold. She watched him carefully. He told his story. Something stirred in her face, but she didn’t make a move yet. Some fissure in her belief system needed to widen before this new belief could enter. Her breathing got fast. The fissure widened. The belief entered her completely. She gasped. Opened her arms. Pulled him close.
In some ways it was like that for me. Slowly, day by day, hour by hour, almost without my knowing it was happening, I allowed Cole Anthony into the inner circle of trust where really only Lucas had been allowed before. He didn’t talk about his past, but I slowly began to accept that there were private—justified—reasons for that. Maybe he was recovering from a broken heart, from a large and powerful grief. Maybe he really hadn’t liked the person he used to be and wanted nothing more than to start over. In some ways he was just like everyone else who came to Wolf Island—he was looking for something. Memories, I thought. A new story, a new past. Or maybe a future.
I liked having Cole around for a few reasons, but when I was honest with myself I saw that a primary reason was that he took some responsibility for Lucas. For the first time in so long, I wasn’t always needed. If I didn’t come straight home after work, they simply made dinner without me. I could leave early in the morning, and they would make breakfast and Lucas would go ahead to work without me. It was like some vista opening up. I could see farther than ever before. I could see into the future, a future where I could make choices for myself.
A week turned into two weeks, and then into three weeks, and September was in full glow and Cole was still spending every evening with us. Here, conveniently enough, was a brother to take care of Lucas in my place. We don’t choose our prisons, but we do come to love them. I loved Lucas deeply and honestly; I hardly knew who I was without him. But—I knew I was someone; I knew someone was there in me, some sliver of a girl who hadn’t had a chance to grow up yet. That was why in unguarded moments when asked my age, I still immediately thought eighteen. Or sometimes thirteen. Or even, ten. As if I were trapped in time. Sometimes I felt a passing sadness for that girl, the one I’d been, or still was, frozen under a magician’s spell.
/> In Cole, I saw that girl’s release.
Lucas is happy with Cole here, I told myself. And so am I. What else matters, really?
I fell asleep watching a movie with Cole and Lucas. When I woke, Lucas was gone. My feet were pushed up against the outside of Cole’s thigh, and when I pulled them away, groggy, blinking in the light, he reached out for my foot. His warm hand enveloped my foot, and the heat traveled to my ankle, my calf and shin, my knees, my thighs. A current of danger. I tried to remember how long he had been here. Exactly how many days. He came in August. I remembered the heat and the smell of the sea.
“How long are you planning to stay?” I asked, removing my foot from his touch.
“A long time. As long as it takes.”
“As long as it takes for what?”
He didn’t answer. The movie was still playing, a dirt road, two boys running away. Dust and weeds along the edge.
“Isn’t there anyone waiting for you?”
“I told you, there isn’t.”
Outside, moths were banging against the screen. It was dark and still, but every now and then a fierce wind would rise up and shake the trees. I wouldn’t want to go outside, not this late, not on a windy night.
“You can stay here tonight,” I said. “We have a guest room.”
It was actually Baby B’s room, and no one had stayed in it for a long, long time. We always joked that it wasn’t a guest room so much as a ghost room. “I’ll show you,” I said and led him upstairs. It was still furnished for a baby. There was a little twin bed against the wall, a dresser with teddy bear knobs.
He stood in the doorway. I wanted to explain to him why I hadn’t invited him before this. I wanted him to know what it was like for me—needing to protect Lucas, watching out for him. “I’m not sure you understand what it’s been like since our parents died. We only have each other. There’s no one else. We’re it.”
Cole nodded. He looked kind, almost sorry for me. “I’m not sure you understand,” he said, “how much things have changed. Now he has me.”
The words chilled me, a strange mix of relief and fear.
“Goodnight,” he said.
Goodnight brother. Goodnight ghosts. Goodnight shaky old wonderful house. I climbed into my own bed. Goodnight memories. Goodnight moon. Goodnight stranger in our ghost room.
9
I heard a small sound coming from the hallway, a weak little cry. It was the dark, quiet hour before dawn. I got out of bed, and stood at the top of the stairs. There were all the usual nighttime sounds, the whine of the refrigerator, the sound of wind outside.
Once I’d heard my mother crying in the night. I was six, maybe seven. I’d walked down the hallway and stood listening. She came out of the bedroom and shrieked when she stumbled over me.
“What are you doing up?” she said.
“Are you crying?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I had a dream, that’s all. I dreamed he came back, and I was happy.”
“Then why are you crying?”
“Because I woke up.”
It was like that. We all missed him. It was so easy to miss him. Baby B was everything we wanted that was just out of reach. This was true even today, Lucas and I all grown up.
The night was chilly, the house quiet, and whatever I’d heard was apparently from a dream.
But then I noticed—or felt—something that didn’t belong. Light, or movement, a disturbance in the equilibrium. My mother’s bedroom door, ajar.
I crept to her door, stood on the threshold, listened for my mother, or Colin, listened to hear which ghost it was. I flipped the light switch on. No ghost, of course. It was Cole, shading his eyes from the sudden flood of light. He raised himself up from the bed where he’d been lying. The bed wasn’t made, just covered with an old quilt. He lay on top of it.
“What are you doing in here?” I asked. “Were you sleeping here?” My mother’s bed! Her quilt. Her room was a space we hardly ever entered, following an unspoken decision to leave it alone, pristine. I felt a wave of anger and moved as if to pull him off the bed.
He swung his legs over to sit up. Rubbed his face, disoriented. “I sleepwalk,” he said.
“Your room is across the hall,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” He stood. He was shirtless, his eyes unfocused. He walked out of the room. “I sometimes sleepwalk,” he said as he passed me in the doorway.
“I heard you the first time,” I said.
He shuffled into Baby B’s room, closed the bedroom door with a small click. I didn’t go back to my room. I was wide-awake now. Instead I sat on my mother’s bed, felt the warmth there from Cole’s body. I looked around the room carefully.
The closet door was ajar. The top bureau drawer was open an inch. Had it been open like this before tonight? I couldn’t remember. It might have sat open for months, years. I crossed the room and opened the drawer, ran my hands over the little cardboard jewelry boxes. I took out each little box, pulled out necklaces, rings, bracelets. Shook the tiny silver casket that held our baby teeth. Little tooth rattle. In the closet a few of her dresses still hung, sandalwood in the folds. I closed the closet door, closed the bureau drawer.
I went to Lucas’s room.
“Move over,” I said. I stood at the edge of Lucas’s bed. In his sleeping face I saw the combined pieces of our parents that were there in my face, too.
“In the garden,” he said. “Under a toadstool.”
“Wake up.”
“What?” He lifted his head. “What’s wrong?”
“Nightmare.”
In our family, it had always been acceptable to wake someone in the night to tell them your nightmare since the telling of the nightmare was the best power over it. I never minded waking or being woken. I didn’t even mind the nightmares. My mother’s bed was the best reward. In the night she was warm, comfortable, happy. Maybe I liked her best when she was half asleep. She would pat my back, then fall asleep with her hand heavy on me.
I crowded into Lucas’s bed and lay on my back looking at his ceiling. I couldn’t see much, but it didn’t matter. I’d memorized his ceiling, which was different from my ceiling only in the shapes its rain stains had taken.
“What was it?” he asked. “What’d you dream?”
“I dreamed that Cole wasn’t Baby B,” I lied. “I dreamed that he was a stranger after all.”
“It was just a dream.”
The sound of the bay was part of the darkness somehow, some inner organ pumping out tremendous quantities of darkness. As long as we’d been alive, we’d heard the bay outside our windows all night long.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” I said. “Those parties at the golf course.”
“In high school?”
“Remember we would go, but then we would just stay in the woods watching. No one knew we were there.”
“It was better to watch than to be down there talking to people.”
Outside I heard splashing. I went to the window and peered out but there was only darkness.
“How are you so comfortable with him?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you so at ease with a person. How can you just talk to him like—”
“I’ve been talking to him all my life.”
“Lucas—”
“He remembers things. He knows things only we could know. He knew how to turn the hose on, even with the spigot hidden under the porch stairs. And he knew the trick for opening the shed. And when I asked him how he knew, he had no idea! He just knew, that’s all.”
I thought of how he sat at the end of the dock with his legs crossed, the way our mother used to sit. With his hand on his neck, in his hair, how he looked so much like her.
“This morning,” Lucas said, sitting up, “he grabbed that old net with the long handle and started spinning it the wa
y I used to. Remember I would do that for hours.”
“How does he know that stuff?” I said. “If he were Baby B, he wouldn’t be able to remember any of that. He was a few weeks old.”
“You can trust him,” Lucas said. “I know it.”
“I just found him in Mom’s room,” I said. “I think he was sleeping in there. But I don’t know. The closet was open, and the top drawer. He says he sleepwalks.”
“Then he sleepwalks,” Lucas said.
“It feels like there’s something else going on. Like he’s not telling us the whole story. My heart is telling me not to trust him.”
“Then our hearts are at war,” Lucas said.
“Jesus Christ, Lu. Don’t say things like that. No one’s at war. I want what you want!”
That was a lie, though. Lucas wanted to go back in time. I wanted a future. But the problem was the same for both of us: we were stuck here—the two of us together—perpetually in this present moment, this tender scene, a page ripped from a calendar, a little childhood.
I returned to my bed but only to sit awake looking out the window as the bay became visible, an apparition rising from the darkness, sailboats, houseboats, docks, and dinghies. I asked again the question I probably should have been asking more insistently. What was he doing here, with us? A few tarnished old memories weren’t really enough to hold his interest, and I knew it. I knew it but I didn’t want it to be true.
What do you want with us, Cole Anthony?
* * *
When it was light, I dressed quietly and left the house, so I would avoid talking to either Cole or Lucas. I felt anxious, unmoored. And worse than that, I felt like a fool. I wasn’t any freer now than I’d been. I certainly wasn’t going to leave Lucas, not now that a mistrust of Cole had sprung up overnight. I was still stuck on the island, and maybe more alone than ever, watching Lucas and Cole growing closer and closer in a dangerous brotherhood that excluded me and everyone else.
Goodnight Stranger Page 7