“You see?” he said, his eyes bright and glassy, but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be seeing.
“He’s hiding things from us,” I said.
“She told me once that she’d found Colin. She told me she knew who he was and where he was. She said he was coming here. But this was when she was really sick, and her mind was wandering. I didn’t believe her.”
The water before us churned rhythmically, beating on the rocks.
“I should have believed her,” he said.
I felt a sweet familiar ache, what it felt like to take care of him. What is it about brothers? We take care of them, protect them, and feel grateful to have that important job—but under all of it runs a current of resentment. Because why aren’t they taking better care of us?
That evening when I got home, Lucas and Cole were huddled at the kitchen table. Lucas’s eyes were wet, bright. I sat down with them, the three of us around the tiny table. It was warm in the kitchen, that familiar hum coming from the refrigerator.
“I can’t believe she knew,” Lucas said. “She knew he was Colin. She sent him to us.”
It felt as if something had changed inexorably. Something was...decided. I felt it in the air, as inevitable as weather.
“Wait, wait,” I said, holding up my hands, as if that action could suddenly turn back time. They waited patiently for me to go on but I wasn’t sure what I could possibly say. I felt a terrible rushing, my blood, my breath, my circulatory system on overdrive. A shift had taken place, and I had no power now. I clapped my hands together just to feel in control of something, one small action, one small noise.
“So—what?” I said to Cole. “Now you just live here. You’re part of the family. I mean, don’t you have a life somewhere else? Don’t you have to work at some point?”
“He doesn’t have to work,” Lucas said. “We have plenty of money.”
“We don’t have plenty of money.”
“But enough,” Lucas said.
I shook my head. The house was paid off now, but between taxes and insurance and repairs, there wasn’t much extra.
“He’s going to help us take care of the house,” Lucas said, as if he’d read my mind. He was quietly crying, his cheeks wet. I felt for one vertiginous moment that I was occupying the same space as him, existing inside his body, feeling his chest bursting with emotion, the great swelling sadness, desire like a tidal pull. “The shingles, the side porch, the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom, the foundation. We probably should have done more to keep it in good shape all these years...”
“We did our best.”
“But now Cole is here to help us. We’re going to get a home equity loan. It’s where you—”
“I know what a home equity loan is,” I said, stiffening. “It’s basically turning the house over to the bank. I mean, at least now we have the house. That’s the one thing we have, whatever else happens. And anyway, there’s no way we can afford it.”
“But, see, if we go in on it with Cole...”
“Like put his name on the loan? Are you kidding me?” I looked at Cole, where he sat impassive. “If his name goes on the mortgage, then he would own part of the house. You see?”
“Well, in a way? He has a right to it. They bought it for all of us.”
Suddenly I was crying, too, my face damp, my nose running. They were tears of anger, the tears of the powerless. It had something to do with my mother loving another boy, a stranger. The old fears. She was so desperate to love someone who wasn’t us, even a ghost was better than her imperfect living children.
I shook my head, embarrassed to be crying, embarrassed by everything I was feeling. “The answer is no.”
“We don’t need you,” Lucas said to me. When he was angry, his mouth parted to show his white teeth, like a small angry animal. I always thought of Peter Pan, wild irresistible boy-beast, how he still had all his baby teeth. “There are things about me that you don’t know,” Lucas said. “You think you know who I am, but you don’t.”
I didn’t want to think about not knowing him. It reminded me of the conversation with Ed Frank about my father being a Scout leader, filled me with an uncomfortable sensation, as if I were looking in a mirror but didn’t recognize the face staring back at me. There were too many things about my family I didn’t know already.
“Don’t do this,” Lucas said in a different voice altogether.
“What now?” I said. “What exactly have I done to you this time?”
“Don’t make me choose between you two.”
* * *
I shivered all night and didn’t sleep well. I dreamed about secret chambers, about letters. In the morning, very early, unable to sleep, I took my blanket and went down to the porch where I sat filling in a crossword puzzle with one small lamp on. Maybe the words were clues. Adhere. Ode. Derail. Lament. Dawn broke. The water was silver, placid, but I felt raw and edgy. I jumped when I heard a door open and close in the house. Feet on the stairs. Cole settled quietly beside me on the wicker couch, still in pajamas. I pulled the chenille blanket over my chest.
“What’s wrong?” Cole said. “Can’t sleep?”
“Did you stay here last night?”
He nodded. His face was composed, his gaze straight ahead at the bay. The little red houseboat swung on the placid surface, and we both looked at it, not at each other.
“You’re scared of me again,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“We want the same thing,” he said.
“Please don’t tell me what I want.” What I wanted was a mystery as unfathomable as everything else. I wanted to strike him. To bite him. Thank him. Shake him. I wanted to leave and to stay. I wanted my mother. “What I want is up to me,” I said. “And my memories are mine alone, and you know what else? My mother is mine. And so is my brother, and you—”
“Shut up,” he said.
I looked at him in surprise. He was angry, a faint red glow was climbing up his neck, his mouth parted. But then, just as quickly as it appeared, the anger disappeared. It was like watching a sheet smoothed on a bed. The crease disappeared from his forehead. The redness drained from his face. I felt startled by this kind of emotional discipline.
He leaned back on the wicker couch and stretched his legs out in front of us. I thought about running my fingers from his knee to his ankle. I felt my face blazing with frustration, embarrassment.
The sun bathed our porch in light. The boats in the harbor had all become visible in the morning light, the white sails, the wooden hulls, the tall masts with seagulls perched atop. The little red houseboat, the other little houseboats. Across the water on the cape, morning began. The citizens of that real place woke up and went out for jogs. On our island, morning began. Footsteps up above. Shower water.
“Lucas is awake,” I said. I stood up, but Cole caught my hand before I could walk away. My breath of surprise was so fast and sharp, so loud in that quiet intimacy of dawn, so like the breath of arousal that I flushed.
He pulled me onto the couch, onto his lap, onto his warm body, held me there for a minute as the sun came up entirely and the smell of salt rose off the bay into the brittle air, and the warm and dusty smell of his skin made me dizzy. We sat together breathing and being quiet. I felt the life that pulsed in him. Inside our clothes, inside our pockets, our bodies strained toward one another, and we heard Lucas’s footsteps on the stairs, and I stood up, blushing and confused.
13
Anxiety beat in me all morning. A feverish pulse. I couldn’t stop thinking about his skin, so much heat just beneath the surface. My head ached. My throat felt dry. I could feel the shape of things between us, a specter rising in that lonely space, something that wasn’t him and wasn’t me but was a third entity, strong and cruel and radiant. Another front was moving in, and the air felt thick and still and heavy.
At lunchtime I sat in Jack’s with a notebook and made some lists. The first one was titled What To Do Now, but the only items on it were 1) find out more about Cole and 2) find out more about my mother.
Eddie was sitting at the bar, filling out a time sheet. I waved him over.
“I’m really sorry for snapping at you,” I said.
He sat down across from me. “I already told you. Think nothing of it,” he said. Then he looked at me in surprise. “Did something happen?” he said. “Why are you so—you look like you’re going to cry.”
“You know what I was remembering?” I said. “That time in fifth grade when the fire alarm went off at school, and we lined up outside and then just decided to go home. All of us, remember? We just walked home. The teachers and principal were so mad. No one thought to look for us at home.”
“Actually, I didn’t go home. I went to Kenny Costa’s house because he had cable.”
“Well, I went home. That’s what I always do, I guess. My mom was home, but it never occurred to her I was supposed to be at school.”
“You bring up shit I haven’t thought about in years. You always do that! You remember everything.”
Those memories were like anchors tethering me in place, keeping me from floating into an increasingly turbulent sea. I didn’t understand if the turbulence I felt was inside me, or out there in the world. But I felt it, that storminess, every minute.
I reached for his hand, flipped it over on the table, and ran my fingers over his wrist, the bones and tendons, the blue-green veins, the skin as soft as water. The only place on his great body leftover from childhood, hairless and tender.
I heard his breath accelerate. He leaned toward me. “Let’s go somewhere,” he said. I dug my fingernail into the soft flesh of his wrist, just a little, heard his breath respond. I remembered how powerful it felt to have so much control over his body. “Come on,” he said. “It’s been too long.”
I shook my head, and he pulled his wrist away from me.
“I’m trying to remember stuff about my mom,” I said. “I think maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought.”
“Everyone feels that way,” Eddie said, a little terse. He stood to leave. “We all feel bad about the dead.”
I added to the list: 3) stop feeling bad about the dead.
Jim Cardoza came out of the Ferry-All office when he saw me return to the booth. “You’ve been looking pale,” Jim said to me. He noticed these things.
“Don’t worry about me, Jim. I’m fine.”
I wrote on the list: 4) find more letters.
“You seem awfully dependent on this job, that’s all,” Jim said, when I lifted my head.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It ends in a couple weeks, that’s what’s wrong. You’ve had your head in a cloud.”
In the winter, no one needed information. The tourists disappeared, the booth closed down, and starting in October, I collected unemployment for six months, like the waitresses, cooks, dishwashers, and housecleaners. Usually I liked this time. Lucas and I did projects around the house. We built fires in the fireplace and curled up in front of it and read the novels Elijah West recommended. We slept long, ten-hour nights. But now I couldn’t imagine being home all day with the two of them—Lucas and Cole. The house, big as it was, would feel miserably claustrophobic. I would forever be brushing past Cole in hallways, sitting next to him on the wicker couch on the porch. I was instantly dizzy, just thinking about it.
The worst part was that Cole was right. He hadn’t targeted us. I’d targeted him. I’d brought him home, introduced him to Lucas. If I’d been a different person, a better person, it never would have happened. If I hadn’t been trying to forget about Eddie, maybe I would never have noticed the stranger. If I’d long ago gotten married to some nice island boy, I wouldn’t be thinking about fucking strangers in the first place, right? If I hadn’t been so selfishly sure he was going to take Lucas off my hands and set me free, I wouldn’t have let him enter our lives.
But now? Was it too late? Did I want him to go? Did I trust him to be in our lives?
I stared at the list in my hands. The truth was I wanted him to stay. I wanted answers. I wanted to know what he knew about my family.
The wind came off the harbor and got into my bones, a chill that stayed with me, penetrating deeper and deeper as the day wore on. The tourists turned their collars up, and dug their hands into their pockets.
I wanted him to stay because he had something to show me, about the past, or maybe about myself.
Everyone was searching. I was not alone in this. All the islanders, all the tourists, scouring the beaches, scouring the streets, scouring the woods and the rocks and the lawns and the restaurants and the shops and the movie theater and the bathrooms at bars, looking for what they’d lost.
This island was only seven miles long. How could so many lost things be crowded into such a small space? I thought of my mother’s lost part of her soul in the dressing room, not taking up any space all those years. Lost things don’t always take up space outside of us. What exactly had I lost, I wondered, and when? An image of dark water came to me then, and something like a face beneath the surface looking up toward the light.
And then I thought, without meaning to, of my mother on the ferry that night when Baby B died. Who cared about the part of her soul in the dressing room? The real loss was that baby. I imagined her taking great greedy breaths of air, trying to breathe for him. No wonder she wanted to believe he was still alive somehow or reborn. Stop feeling bad about the dead, I told her, and I was also saying it to myself.
14
I left work early. I walked quickly as if chased. I wasn’t sure what I was running from, or to. All I knew was that I couldn’t go home. It hurt my chest in a complicated way to think that somewhere in the house I loved so much was the stranger. I felt a knot of fear inside my ribs, a tough bud threatening to blossom open. Instead of going home, I went to Island Pie and ate two slices with tomatoes and broccoli. It began to rain and I stood under an awning on the street. The drops started fat and distinct, making satisfying plunking sounds on the gutters, drumming on the leaves. Then more rain, and more, one long blur, a murmur. The nails holding shingles in place gleamed. The masts of boats flashed out in the harbor.
Eddie, a kind of blur through the rain, waved me over to One Eyed Jack’s.
“Get out of the rain!” he said. “I think I just heard thunder.”
“I guess I’ll have one drink,” I told him.
“Totally on me,” he said.
“You’re a real gentleman.”
“Where are the two musketeers?” he said.
“Home.” I felt the muscles of my jaw tighten as I said the word, imagining Cole and Lucas, eating dinner together in a circle of light at the kitchen table, maybe drinking wine out of mason jars. Home certainly didn’t feel like the haven it had always been for me; I was putting off returning to all that was waiting for me there.
Eliot Moniz brought me a scotch and soda. Beside me were the old fishermen. I couldn’t hear their conversation, just comforting cackles of laughter. Over near the back porch, Elijah West was having a beer with his dad and brother. At nine, a band called Gin and Soda started strumming guitars in the corner near the porch. Eddie helped plug in their amp and microphone. Gin was the name of the bass player, an angular girl with thick dark hair. She’d grown up on the Vineyard and she still lived there, but she had a sense of otherness about her somehow.
The whole place was full of people I knew, plus the heartiest of the lingering tourists, artists probably. I liked the late lingering tourists. They typically had a we’re-in-this-together attitude. At the table next to me, the tourists were yelling out the names of towns in New York. New Paltz! Ossining! Poughkeepsie! Redding!
I was lonely. I was envious of the people talking about New Y
ork towns. “Saratoga. Ticonderoga. Utica!” They all cheered. The band was playing weepy songs, drawing out the guitar.
Elijah West stopped to say hello on his way out. Elijah had grown up on Wolf Island, but after high school he’d stayed away for fifteen years. He’d become an art photographer. He’d published a book of photographs of bridges that half the islanders now had on their coffee tables.
“You’ve been busy lately,” I said. “I’ve seen you everywhere, snapping away.”
“You saw me, huh? I’m doing another book. On islands. The islands of the world, the charming, forgotten, undiscovered islands. The best islands.”
“Are we one of the best islands in the world?” I asked.
“I think so,” he said. “But I don’t know which ones my editor will pick.”
“What other islands have you done?”
“Remember when I went to Europe last year? There are a lot out there. One of my favorites is St. Michael’s Mount in England. It’s—”
“Oh, I know that one,” I said, “with the little causeway, at low tide.”
“And how it rises out of the, you know, stone. The castle. You’ve been there?”
“I’ve seen pictures.”
“An island is the best place on earth,” Sebastian, the old fisherman, said from nearby. I looked up at him, and he took off his hat. His hair was thick and wavy and white as the dawn.
“I agree,” I said.
“I’ve been all over this earth,” he said, “and no place feels like an island. It’s where you leave your heart. Every time.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to capture in this book,” Elijah said.
I beamed at them both. They understood. I loved the island so much I wished I could find some means of expression for my love, but I couldn’t. I was envious of Elijah and his camera, trying to understand the island that way. If I’d been an artist, I would have painted it. If I could have eaten pieces of the island I would have, slabs of rock and sand. If I could have had sex with it, I would definitely have had sex with it. I felt a sudden conviction that the island was in danger, that Cole would do it harm, and it was up to me to protect it.
Goodnight Stranger Page 10