The waves were frothy on top, and they tossed the boats. I sat in the booth holding my hair to keep the wind from whipping my eyes. I bit my fingernails even though I’d recently kicked that habit. I felt cross with the tourists. Yes, no, over there, here’s a brochure. An old Lab walked past, grinning the way some dogs can. A little boy ran by barefoot, holding a dead fish.
I was restless, tired.
I refused the doughnuts Eddie offered.
“Not worried about getting fat, are you?” Ed said. He stood in front of me, blotting out the light.
“I’m just not hungry for doughnuts.”
“Because you have nothing to worry about,” he said.
“Thank you. I just don’t like doughnuts.”
“That’s a mystery I guess I’ll never understand,” he said.
“It takes all kinds,” I agreed.
Eddie played with the zipper of his Jack’s hoodie. The logo for One Eyed Jack’s was a mean-looking pirate with an eye patch and a parrot on his shoulder and the words yo ho ho floating out of the parrot’s mouth.
“How’s old Returned-from-the-Dead?” Eddie asked.
I thought about Cole, sitting cross-legged in the sunlight, his unapologetic paleness. Perpetual vacation, he kept saying about the island. I remembered the warmth of his hand as he touched my foot. Now he has me. I pictured his bare chest and confused expression when we’d looked at each other in my mother’s room in the night.
“He’s great,” I said. “Just fantastic.”
“He’s certainly making himself at home.”
“That he is.”
Eddie shook his head. “What are you doing, Lyd?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen you with him. He’s not a good guy. This whole story he and Lucas are telling each other. Are you buying it now, too?”
“Of course not. It’s not that simple.”
“I think it is that simple. I think there’s something else going on.”
I felt a swell of anger. “What are you trying to say? That I like him being here? That I want him to stay forever? You know what, Ed Frank? You don’t get to give me advice. Not anymore.”
He looked hurt and surprised. But I turned away, stared furiously at the brochures until he walked off. I wouldn’t let myself regret snapping at him. What right did he have? If he hadn’t married Kim, if things had been different—but things were the way they were.
* * *
Before lunch, Cole appeared at the booth.
“I’m sorry about last night,” he said. “That must have scared you.”
“It did.”
“I shouldn’t have stayed over,” he said. “Or at least I should have warned you about my sleepwalking.”
“That would have been a good idea.”
Lucas came around the corner and joined us.
“Wait, what’s going on?” I asked. “Why aren’t you at work?”
Lucas shrugged. “Taking the day off. Cole and I are going to the Cape.”
“The Cape? For what?”
“Just to look around.”
“Come with us,” Cole offered.
“I’m working.”
“Take the afternoon off.”
I grabbed a stack of brochures, shuffling them like playing cards. “I can’t take the afternoon off,” I said. “There’s no one to fill in for me.”
“There’s no one here,” Cole said, looking around. “No one needs you.”
He leaned against the booth. He had good posture, straight teeth. His features were symmetrical, his jaw strong and square. He was handsome, but it was a closed-off kind of handsomeness. It was impossible to learn anything from looking at him. He breathed in luxuriously. I pictured the world around him sucked into his powerful lungs: air, buildings, boats, booth, water, sand, flora, fauna.
“Oz is waiting,” Lucas said, looking at me shyly. I raised my eyebrows. It was strange to hear the teasing in his voice, see his shy, proud smile. He was trying out a new identity: ordinary person, normal brother, little devil, dangler of spiders, snapper of bras.
“Oz?” Cole said.
“The guy who works at the information booth on the Cape looks lionlike, like the lion from The Wizard of Oz,” Lucas said.
“He just has this mane,” I said.
“And Lydia likes him.”
“No,” I said. “Lydia does not like him. Lydia doesn’t know him. I just see him sometimes at the Ferry-All meetings, and I don’t know, I like the mane. Anyway, I’m not going. So it doesn’t matter.”
“That’s okay, Lyd,” Lucas said. “You don’t have to come.” He walked toward the Ferry-All office with Cole. “She can’t really leave the island,” Lucas said.
“I can leave the island,” I called. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
Cole looked over his shoulder. He didn’t say anything but I could see some realization crossing his face. Then he turned and said something to Lucas, too quietly for me to hear.
10
It was hard for me to leave the island.
That was true.
It was physically difficult to leave the island. Everything just seemed to speed up off island, everything in me: my pulse, my breathing, my racing thoughts. I don’t even know when it started. After my mother died, I guess.
It was hard for me to leave the island, but it made me angry to hear Lucas say it like that, in that tone of voice. As if I were the one crippled by anxiety issues. As if he were the one who had to look after me.
After the 12:30 boat lumbered away, a front swept in, and the air turned soft, cool, and gray, and the sudden change in weather changed my mood as well. I settled down, quieted.
It started to rain, and you should have seen how sad the tourists were. They wanted sunshine! They walked around wearing clear rain ponchos and blank expressions.
All afternoon the rain drummed on the roof of the information booth. When I ran into the post office for the mail, inside there were five buckets set up to catch the drips coming through the roof, and they, too, made a cacophonous drumming. The postmaster was also the leader of a bagpipe band. They sometimes practiced behind the post office, as they were doing now, crammed together under a little back awning, the melodies of the bagpipes flocking over the water.
The sound of the instruments seemed to tug at my memory, nostalgia rolling through me like the fog over the water. I felt closed in, claustrophobic. I was wearing a big plastic poncho I got from Jim Cardoza, but by the time I got back to the office, my legs were soaked. Jim handed me a towel and I handed him the mail.
“I can’t stand the feeling of wet jeans,” I said.
Jim nodded sympathetically.
“Do you have a blow-dryer?” I asked.
He didn’t, but he looked around anyway, as if one could materialize from looking. I sat in a chair by the window and patted my legs with the towel. The sound of the rain overwhelmed all the other sounds, so the few people I saw outside seemed to be in a silent movie.
“Forget the blow-dryer,” I said. “I might run home early today, if that’s okay with you, Jim.”
“In the rain?” he said. “Better wait until it dries out.”
But I was out the door already. I was running through the wet sand, out of breath. I didn’t stop until I reached the Island Inn.
The girl at the desk had long dark hair pulled into a ponytail. On weekends she lifeguarded all day, and worked here at night. She was saving money to leave the island, but I could already tell that it would never happen. Soon enough, she’d fall in love, or get pregnant, or her parents would get sick, or she’d just learn to be scared of anywhere else. She was a lifer, I was certain. What mattered to me now was that she was scared of ghosts.
“Can you do me a really big favor?” I asked. “My friend left h
is ferry ticket in his room, and they won’t let him cross if I don’t show it to Jim by four. He said it’s in his jacket pocket—do you mind grabbing it for him? He’s in room eleven.”
“Eleven?” she said. She tapped her nails on the counter. They were painted, but chipped, lavender, dusk colored.
“Or, I’m happy to run in myself,” I said.
“Would you?” she said. “We’re just having a really busy day.” And she handed me the key, relieved to have avoided the haunted room.
I stood outside room eleven for several seconds. I put my hand on the doorknob and waited to feel something, but the knob was only old, cold metal.
I pushed the door open slowly and stood looking in, feeling the silence more than hearing it, the complete emptiness of the room. Cole had unpacked his duffel bag. It was empty on the chair like the skin of the bear when the enchanted prince has crawled out. A pair of shoes were lined up at the foot of the bed.
What was I hoping to find? I wasn’t entirely sure. I knew what I didn’t want to find: a diary documenting a scam of some kind, a newspaper article revealing Cole as an escaped convict, suspicious artifacts, evidence of hypnotism.
What did I find? Mostly just clothing in sharp, efficient folds, stacked in the dresser. There was a creased New York Times beneath the bed. I looked at the date. Yesterday’s. On the nightstand was a stack of books, popular literary novels. When did he read? While we were at work, I guessed. Inside the nightstand drawer, I found a spiral notebook. The first several pages were ripped out, a few clinging shreds of paper left behind on the spiral binding. The next three pages were covered with Cole’s neat handwriting. Our phone number was there among other numbers I didn’t recognize, although I could see they were island numbers. I saw our birthday listed, month and day, the name of two plumbers, the address of a store on the cape that sold guitars.
Seeing his notes and lists gave me a strange feeling. He had drawn little pictures in the margins, boats and houses, all with dark firm pen strokes. He’d written sideways on the third page, She Is Alive.
I looked at the words, and felt my face flush, felt something shift inside, tiny fault lines. Who was she? I wanted it to be me, although I hardly understood why. I wanted, I guess, for those words to be mine, to act as an incantation, bewitching me into some higher level of existence. She is alive. She is alive.
I closed the notebook, placed it back on the nightstand, and continued my examination of the room. His empty duffel bag on the chair. The smell of the room—dusty, hot. I touched the blanket on the neatly made bed. I touched the pillow. I kneeled down beside the bed and examined it. There was no indent from a sleeping head, no stray hairs.
I remember my mother once told me you could tell a lot about a man by looking in his pockets. To demonstrate, she went to my father’s old camel hair coat hanging by the door and reached into the side pocket. She pulled out a matchbook, a handful of coins that clinked together in her hand, and a bird’s nest.
“I rest my case,” she said.
“Found it on the path behind the school,” my father had said. “Maybe wren.”
In the closet, Cole had hung a jacket, and I reached in both pockets. A quarter. A receipt for coffee beans. I knew just when he’d bought them—one morning early after we’d discovered we were out of coffee entirely.
I returned to the duffel bag. I checked the outside pocket first and found it empty. On the interior, though, was a slim little pocket, which I unzipped, and inside was another zipper. A pocket within a pocket. When I unzipped that, I found a piece of paper, stationary size, folded into quarters. I almost didn’t open it, sure it was another receipt, because it was that kind of thin, faded paper. But I did unfold it, and when I did, I felt a shock, a seismic shift, my feet no longer on solid ground. My heart pounded in my temples.
It was her pointy, calculated letters, my mother’s handwriting. I turned it over to see the signature. Cecily, my mother’s name. I shook as I read it.
Dearest C,
This is the time of year I think about you most, surprisingly. Not at your birthday, not the time of year when you died. This time of year feels like it should be your time because of the colors, because it’s hot and cold both at the same time. Because the whole fucking season is about death, and I think about you when I think about Persephone and her new, dark world away from her mother, away from the sun, in the rocky palace under the earth.
That was what we chose for you, wasn’t it, in the end? I know it wasn’t better for you that way; it wasn’t better for Persephone either. But the earth needed seasons, and Persephone was sacrificed. And you were also sacrificed, for the good of the others, or maybe for the whole world. Who knows? Sometimes that’s how I have to look at it.
But I’m sorry, my love, to digress. Actually, I should get right to it. Things are not looking good, and time is running out. Please come home. Please visit. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I will soon be dead, and then there will not be another chance, unless we meet in the underworld. You should know your family. I want to feel your hands. I’ve stopped punishing myself, and you should, too.
I’m sure someone else can do the work. I’m sure someone else can feed your dog. Leave that behind and come to the island. We all want you.
My love,
Cecily
I felt a shock of emotion, a thundering in my ears. I clutched the letter. I backed slowly out of the room, closed the door behind me.
“Find it?” the girl at the counter asked me. I nodded and slid the key toward her. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You look pale. Did you—did you see something in there?” She nodded sympathetically, but she had no idea.
I walked home in the rain, the letter tucked under my shirt, next to my skin, to keep it dry and safe. In my own room, I stood, wet and dripping, looking around like someone in a dream. T-shirts piled in the rocking chair. Discarded pants on the floor. Lotions and sunscreens. A towel hanging from the door, a bathing suit hooked on the corner of the mirror.
I thought, She is alive. Did he mean my mother after all? The letter had been written in September, in that last year of her life. Dearest C. Had she meant Colin or Cole? Or both? There was something strangely specific about the letter. What had she said? Someone else can feed your dog. As if she knew all about his dog, as if a dog were the thing keeping him from visiting her in those last months of her life. The intimacy between them was palpable in the letter, as if they’d talked dozens of times.
I looked around my room and felt a rush of tenderness, almost nostalgia, for my old things, as if a new life was nudging its way in. Already everything we did was affected by Cole. He had something to do with our breakfast, our lunch, our dinner, and he had something to do with our walks on the beach, and the way we took care of our house, and the magazine articles we read, and the conversations we had, and our thoughts and our dreams.
I felt a sudden stab of desire to go back to a time before he came. I imagined walking home on the beach in the late afternoon, the long shadows making a path in front of me, a path toward home, always knowing, all those years, what I would find at home. The predictability like the sound of the bay, always there.
I wondered and wondered what my mother had meant, and how they had met, and why she’d never told me about him. I thought about what Eddie had said about my dad being a Scout leader, how everyone had loved him. What else did I not know about my parents?
It continued to rain, the scent of electricity in the air. Normally I liked a gray day, but because of the letter from my mother, the gray seemed startling, ominous.
I held the letter. I read it over and over again. I put the letter in my pocket. Then I sat on the couch on the screened-in porch and watched the red houseboat rocking, until it was too dark to see it.
Soon after the nine o’clock boat came in, their voices floated toward me from the beach.
“Lydia?”
Lucas said, peeking onto the dark porch.
“Hey,” I said. “I was waiting up for you.”
“Are you okay?” Lucas asked.
Cole appeared behind him.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just having a quiet minute out here.”
“Mind?” Cole said, walking past Lucas and standing above me.
I moved to one side of the couch. “Go ahead.”
“We saw your lion-boy,” Cole said, sinking down beside me. I was aware of his warmth, the smell of his skin, something more than heat and dust. I reached into my pocket and felt the edges of the letter.
“We told him you said hello,” Cole said, laughing, but he didn’t sound amused. “How old is that kid?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t know him. As I told you.”
We listened to the waves, the small splashes on the sand. Then a larger splash, as if a seal had surfaced and crashed back under the water.
“I’m surprised you’re still up,” Lucas said. “I’m going to bed.”
“Let’s stay up,” Cole said quietly to me. “I have something to tell you.”
We listened to Lucas climb the stairs, listened to water rushing through the pipes—a soft, high-pitched keening—as Lucas brushed his teeth. What was Cole going to tell me? Was it about my mother? He seemed in no hurry to speak. He leaned back and stared straight into the darkness on the other side of the porch. His breathing was quiet and even.
“I have something to tell you, too,” I said.
He reached down and touched my leg, just below the knee, below the ragged hem of my shorts. My legs were brown and scratched, dotted with mosquito bites. Cole ran two fingers from my knee to my ankle. My heart seemed to beat everywhere all at once, in my fingertips, my skull. I felt dizzy.
“You’re not a child,” Cole said. “That’s what you don’t realize. You’re a woman. And you’re beautiful.”
Goodnight Stranger Page 8