This was not how I’d expected this conversation to go. I stood up, my heart racing, and he held out a hand to stop me. “You’re wasting your time with that kid in the information booth in Carson Cove. You’re wasting your time with Ed Frank.” His voice slowed, and he enunciated every word. “You,” he said, “have so much more to give than Ed Frank could ever ask you for. You have things to give that he doesn’t even know exist.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I said. My heartbeat filled my ears. The wailing of water started in the pipes again.
He said, “I thought maybe no one had ever told you.”
I swallowed. “No one has,” I said.
11
When we were thirteen, Lucas made friends with a summer girl named Katrina. Or rather, she made friends with him. Lucas didn’t make friends, but if someone bossed him skillfully enough, he’d do what they said. We’d known Katrina for years; she came every summer, but she was a year older and while we were still digging for baby clams in the black sand around the rocks or making drip castles on the sandbar, she was enisled on the clean blue of her beach towel in a pink bikini.
When we were thirteen, she developed an interest in Lucas and started toting him around like a beach bag.
“Do you like her?” I’d asked Lucas that summer.
“She’s nice to me,” he said, although he looked terrified.
“Her hair is like plastic.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s hair spray.”
She smelled like flowers. Her legs were smooth and slick with baby oil. She had blondish hair that always seemed damp, and intoxicating whiffs of floral chemical clean issued from her when she ran her fingers through it.
Lucas sat beside her on the beach, while I crouched jealously in the shallow water, grasping fistfuls of sand and squeezing so the sand squirted out. Lucas could hardly look at her but I did. She liked to sit with her arms behind her for support, her head thrown back, and her eyes closed, offering up the defenseless hollow of her throat and the perfect scoops of her breasts.
Once I saw her with Lucas in the bathhouse at Tame Jaw Beach. The door was locked, but I climbed up on the seat of a bicycle parked nearby and looked through the tiny screened window. They were sitting side by side on the bench, Lucas’s eyes were closed, while her hand moved inside his bathing suit.
He would be mortified if I brought this up with him now, even though it’s the most normal thing in the world, for a thirteen-year-old boy to mess around with a pretty girl. It wasn’t normal for him, though. It wasn’t normal for us. A funny thing happened to me as I watched them that afternoon in the bathhouse. I can’t even say what it was exactly—a kind of disassociation. As if I were floating. I went back to the water, I remember, and poked blue crabs, which moved sideways, suspicious, through the sand and into the water as if to drown themselves. But even though I was in the hot sand, in the shallow water, I could hardly feel the sun, the water. Part of me was back in the bathhouse perched on the window like a spider, watching Katrina’s awful hand moving.
Now, I stood with my back against the closed door of my bedroom, wondering why I was thinking of Katrina at a time like this. But I knew. It was because that was the first summer that desire confused things for us. And desire can be such a heavy, unwieldly thing, too big to conceal, the thing that makes you visible, public, as the poem goes, like a frog. And yet, it’s also the thing that makes you somebody.
Fuck this, I thought. And I meant fingernails on skin. I meant the warm hand around my foot on the couch. I meant crows and train whistle. I meant mother. Brother. Stranger. I was angry that my mother had kept secrets from me, and that Cole had secrets, too. I was angry that Cole had distracted me from finding the answers I needed. But most of all, I was angry at myself—because alongside the anger, I felt something else blooming—a longing as terrible as thirst, but tender also.
My heart beat ferociously. The old life receded into darkness. The new life raced toward me. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. As if thinking about him could prevent the new life from gathering speed. The letter was still in my pocket. I hadn’t said a word about it when I’d had the chance, just fled to my bedroom like some frightened child. And why? Because he’d touched my leg and said I was beautiful. It was different when he was a stranger. The things you want from strangers are tiny things, disposable.
I’d thought that the attraction I’d felt when I saw him that first night had disappeared the moment we began to pretend he might be our lost—and returned—brother. But the desire was still there; I felt it when he touched me, felt its delicate leaves and roots, alive and growing somewhere in my rib cage. Now the things I wanted from him were complex and frightening, a whole jungle. I wanted the secrets he held. The past, the future. I took the letter out and smoothed it against the dark window. I read the words again and again.
When I finally slept, I dreamed of my mother.
“What do you want?” I asked.
She led me into the hallway. She had lit a hundred candles. Incense burned in a little clay pot she kept on her bedside table, with markings around the rim like bird tracks, something small, a wren. I could hardly see her through the smoke of the incense, with the candles winking everywhere.
“Where are you?” I said.
She was young again, younger than I’d ever known her. Beautiful, animated, alive.
“You’re worrying for nothing,” she said bitterly. “She is still alive.”
And I woke up.
Graininess of dawn. Milky fragrance. A door closing downstairs. Footsteps in the hallway. A shadow in the doorway.
“Where is it?” Cole said. I scrambled out of bed, disoriented. I wasn’t dreaming this time. Cole was standing furiously in the doorway, his eyes black, shining with rage, or tears.
His shirt was buttoned wrong, as if he’d dressed in a hurry. Somehow this fact, the buttons askew, the small white flash of skin showing where they failed to line up, compounded my sense of disorientation, the feeling that I was spinning, that all around me the world was blurred beyond recognition. There was something so starkly beautiful about his face. I thought with profound sadness of the bones of his skull, right there, just under the surface.
“Were you in my room?” he demanded. “Did you take a letter? I want my letter back.”
“It’s from my mother,” I said. “So it’s not yours. It’s mine.”
“Give it to me,” he said.
“What does it mean?” I demanded. “How did you know her?”
“Show me the letter,” he said.
It felt as though everything inside me were speeding up, blood racing through veins. I stood on the edge of a cliff, about to fall. I took the letter out of the pocket of my sweatshirt and opened it. Saw again her handwriting.
“What does it mean she stopped punishing herself?” I asked. “What does she mean about sacrifice?”
In one swift, furious motion, he crossed the room and took the letter from my hand. He held it crumpled, looking at me with an expression of deep rage, maybe worse. I wondered for a moment if he was going to hit me. His jaw seemed to grow larger. His eyes looked pure black. I was watching a transformation, a strange and terrifying metamorphosis. He was changing, becoming something fanged and brutal, a hungry beast, a wolf.
“Give it back,” I said. “That isn’t yours.”
“It’s all mine,” he said and walked out. I was frightened and angry. My heart was a frenzy of wings and feathers, too heavy but trying, trying to fly.
12
Cole didn’t return to the house that morning for breakfast. Lucas went off to work, but I waited at home for Cole. I was sure he would come, and I waited for him, practically vibrating with fear and anticipation—but he didn’t show up. Then I began to worry. What if he was gone for good? What if the 9:30 ferry had carried him away? What if he’d taken the letter? I wo
uld never know the answers to the questions that now haunted me like little ghosts, little voices in my ear: Who was he? How did he know my mother?
I needed to find him and ask for the truth.
At the inn, the girl at the counter eyed me nervously. “Actually, I’m not supposed to let anyone in there,” she said.
“I just want to know if he’s here.”
“I saw him this morning,” he said. “He was pretty mad about someone being in his room. I didn’t tell him it was you.”
“Thank you,” I said. She nodded.
“You can knock, I guess,” she said. “I’m just saying, he seemed really mad.”
But when he answered the door, he didn’t look mad at all. He smiled serenely. His shirt was buttoned, hair combed. He had shaved. I had the distinct feeling that I was looking at someone wearing a mask—only this mask looked almost exactly like the real face underneath. His expression now was gentle and earnest. And when I asked if we could talk about the letter, he nodded and followed me out of the room, locking the door behind him.
Standing just outside the diner was a man everyone on the island called the-man-with-the-cat. He was middle-aged, tired-looking and bony. His particular craziness had to do with his cat, who he draped over his shoulders and took with him everywhere: down the aisle of the supermarket, into the post office, on his bike. Once I saw him teaching her to swim. Also, he introduced the cat as his wife.
Now he was sipping coffee from a paper cup, and his cat was wrapped around his neck like a fox fur collar. He looked me over as I approached, and I nodded.
“I see you found your child,” he said.
“What?”
“You’ve got your child,” he said, enunciating as if I were stupid.
“I don’t have a child.”
“You think I can’t see her? She looks just like you!”
“This is Cole,” I said.
“Have you met my wife?” he said. Then he bowed his head gravely and said, “Good day,” while the cat scrambled to stay aboard. He walked away with stiff precision, as if he were on a balance beam.
“Holy shit,” Cole said. “That guy is crazy.”
“Right,” I said. “You’re our dead brother, but he’s the crazy one.”
The diner was full of the same fishermen that hung out at One Eyed Jack’s every night. I saw Sebastian, who was my favorite of the old fishermen, because he seemed wholeheartedly sad about something, but he was also kind, and his sadness made him familiar to me. They hunched over their coffee the way they hunched over their beers. Today it was quiet. No laughing and clinking bottles. No talking. Maybe everyone was sleepy, or maybe without alcohol they couldn’t think of anything to say.
We sat at a table in the back of the room. The waitress, Diane, brought us coffee and pancakes. She was another islander I’d known my whole life. She used to be young and pretty. Now she was old and pretty. The fishermen looked at her gratefully when she refilled their mugs. No one looked at Cole or me, and I felt chastened. This breakfast ritual had existed for a long time and I hadn’t been part of it. How many other secrets had been kept from me on the island?
Cole shook a packet of sugar into his coffee. He kept shaking it long after the last of the sugar crystals had dived into the mug.
“Now will you tell me about my mother?” I asked.
“This is what I’ll tell you,” he said. “And when I’m done talking, you can stop asking, because I won’t say another word. I don’t like to be badgered. I did know your mother. Okay? We met because—we’d both suffered a loss. And she recognized something in me—or we recognized something in each other. We felt we belonged together.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Did you meet on the island?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“So—like a grief group or something?”
“Yes,” he said. “Or something.”
“This is maddening. Can you give me a straight answer?”
“What exactly do you want to know, Lydia?” He sounded tired, bored of me.
“I don’t know where to start. I mean, is Cole even your real name?” The idea occurred to me so suddenly, I felt slapped by it, out of breath. I saw something on his face that wasn’t there before, as if surprise had opened a back door and let in what he was trying so hard to keep out. Then he carefully shut that door, and smiled at me, but it was too late. I’d seen the shadow falling over him.
“Not exactly,” he said. “You’re right about that.”
“Not exactly? What is your name?”
“I’d rather not tell you.”
“Why?”
“I’m starting over,” he said firmly. “The name, it represents everything I left behind. New name, new person, new life. I hope you don’t mind. There are just—things I want to forget.”
“No,” I said. “Don’t look at me like I’m supposed to just accept this. Everything has been a lie with you. You knew who I was all along. You targeted us.”
“I didn’t know who you were,” he said. “I had no idea. You chose me. Out of all the men that step off that boat every day, you chose me. You saw something in me. I didn’t know until Lucas started talking.”
“But you recognized the house. I remember now. You stopped on the beach and stared at it like you knew who lived there.”
“I wondered when I saw the house. I did wonder if it was the same house, that’s very perceptive of you. But I didn’t know until Lucas started talking about Baby B. And then it was like the universe had lined everything up. Led me here. Led me to you. Or led you to me. It’s so perfect how things line up sometimes, like a machine. Like a set of intricate gears. You turn one lever and the whole thing cranks to life.”
“You got the tattoo because of my mother? The lady’s slipper?”
“Yes.”
“Did she think you were Colin?”
He wrapped his hands around the coffee mug. “Yes.”
I took a drink of water, suddenly thirsty. I wished we could swim. I wanted to feel surrounded by cool water. “Why didn’t you tell us right away?”
“She didn’t want you to know.”
“But she’s dead. She’s been dead a long time. What she wants doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
“So why are you here? I mean why now?”
“Because that’s also what she wanted. She wanted us to be together. All of us. She wanted that before she died, but I couldn’t. Not then. But now that I’ve met you I feel...compelled...to respect her wishes.”
“But—what do you want from us?”
A shadow passed the window. The new librarian, Elijah West, was setting up a tripod in the street and aiming a square, old-fashioned camera in the window of Mady’s. He moved as if he were spring-loaded, hopping from place to place. He fiddled with the camera, then hunched over and pulled a black cloth over his own head and the camera. In his right arm he held a small black box, which was attached to the camera by a cord. It was the clicker for the camera, and, headless, he held it extended from his body and then clicked. He would develop the picture, and there I’d be, at the table in the back with my cracked white mug lifted in both hands, and my elbows leaning on the table, and my hair in two braids, Cole and I drinking coffee together, surrounded by fishermen, as if we did this all the time, as if we liked each other tremendously, as if we loved each other. And Cole was barely even real! He was a ghost. He was here for my mother, not me.
“I just want to be with you,” he said. “I want us to be together.”
“I know that isn’t true,” I said.
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because no one wants to be with me,” I snapped. “My own mother didn’t want to be with me. Nobody does.”
I stood up so quickly my chair tipped backward and I had to catch it before it crashed to th
e ground.
Outside, the air was sweet with the smell of warm earth, browning leaves, the metallic tang of seaweed washed up on the sand. Cole tried to catch up with me but gave up when I kept walking. I tried to take deep breaths.
I felt ridiculous—acting like a baby. I thought about my mother, pulled up a series of memories I liked to go over when I had a chance. It went like this, in this order, as if the memories were one of those children’s stacking games that could only fit in one particular way: me swimming from the end of the dock to the shore, my mother, resplendent in a red bathing suit applauding above me. My mother laughing at something I’d said, a joke, her laughter like a prize I’d won, a reward. A viola concert in sixth grade. My acceptance letter from Brown. It occurred to me now that the memories were all times she’d been proud of me.
Then I remembered what it was like to come home to take care of her. It was never pride I saw in her eyes all those months she was sick. It was something else: fear, resentment. I sometimes had the sense she was about to tell me something, divulge some great truth or secret. But she would always grow silent, turn away from me. Whatever she knew about life, whatever message she had for me then, I needed it now more than ever. I didn’t need obscure dream sequences with candles.
By the time I reached the information booth, I felt a great swelling in my throat, and it seemed to belong to many different emotions, pushing and shoving for real estate in my body. I felt confused, with formidable questions rearing up again and again. Why hadn’t she told us about Cole if she believed he was Colin? Where had she met him? And why did he suddenly want to be with us so badly, after all this time? Did he actually think he was Colin, too?
At lunchtime I went to the Day Estate where Lucas worked. He was raking the paths. Scooping up the twigs and leaves into a garden cart. There were smudges of dirt on his face, his bare arms.
“I have to talk to you,” I said. “It’s about Cole.”
I told him that Cole wasn’t his real name. I told him about the letter. He listened in stillness. Afterward, he asked to see the letter, but of course I didn’t have it anymore. We sat down on a bench overlooking the water and the four sharp rock jetties stretching into the turbulent waves. Everyone called them the Claws.
Goodnight Stranger Page 9