“I’ve always lived here,” I said.
“I know,” Elijah said. “Me, too.”
“No,” I said. “You left.”
“I came back,” Elijah said, offended. “Same as you.”
Elijah walked out, and I was alone again, listening to the music: sad, dreamy stuff. I felt displaced, floating, as if my vision and sense of direction were suddenly impaired. I thought, I don’t understand anything. Only what existed in that room. The sounds of the band. The sounds of bottles. The sounds of New York towns being spoken aloud like spells. The smell of salt, beer, and fried fish. The smell of damp wood. The dim light. The sense of companionship between me and Gin and Soda and the bartender and the tourists from New York and Sebastian and the other fishermen.
The scotch went straight to my hands, weighed them down, turned them heavy and tingly. I felt out of touch with them, with my whole real corporeal self.
“There are three types of people in this world,” I told Eliot Moniz when he brought me one more Glenmorangie. “The ones who are dangerous. The ones who love the ones who are dangerous. And the ones who protect the ones who love the ones who are dangerous.”
“True enough,” Eliot said.
I was a little drunk.
“But which one am I?” I asked.
“I guess that’s the question,” Eliot said.
I went into the bathroom. It was a tiny room with a sink, a stall, and one open window letting in the smell of the ocean. In the bathroom mirror, my lips were swollen and my pupils enlarged. I recognized something I’d seen in other faces, usually at the bar after midnight when people began to look like their doppelgängers. It was as if something I was used to seeing on my face had been lifted, some subtle shading of constraint. Underneath was another self, someone I didn’t know at all.
When I flushed the toilet, I heard my name, but it was immediately swallowed by the sound of the water rushing through pipes. I ran my hands under hot water and looked at myself again in the mirror above the sink. I listened, but I didn’t hear anything except the faint thump of the music.
Someone knocked and I jumped. “Someone’s in here,” I said.
“Lydia,” I heard.
It was Cole. I looked at my reflection, looked hard into the eyes of that twin. Asked her what we were going to do exactly, although on some level I already knew. We were going to be in control, for fuck’s sake, we were going to take the reins. We were going to protect all that was ours.
I unlocked the door and he came in. We looked at each other.
“It’s almost midnight,” he said.
“I know that.”
“We didn’t know where you were.”
I shook my head. “What? Did I miss my curfew again?”
“Funny,” he said. “But really. I can’t sleep when I don’t know where you are.”
“Aha,” I said. “But you don’t sleep.”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “No need for sarcasm.”
“I don’t need your permission to stay out late. I’m a grown-up,” I said. “Aren’t I?”
“It doesn’t matter how old you are, you have to treat your family with respect. That’s one thing I know.”
I knew that on the other side of the bathroom door, Eliot Moniz was ringing the bell for highest tipper of the night, and there was beer in bright bottles, and rows of liquor, and seats made of old barrels, and lobster nets on the walls. All manner of comforting things on the other side of the door. Familiar streets running down to the ferry landing. The information booth, a little nut in the center of the island. One gull asleep on a streetlamp. A seal on a rock. Dinghies and dories wobbling in the cold water, their reflections like twins just beneath the surface.
“The thing is,” I said to Cole, “we aren’t family.”
I looked up at the small, high bathroom window for a glimpse of the night outside, but instead of dark sky or stars or any other comfort, I saw a sleek dark head, the flash of a face. Floating for a moment, then gone.
“Did you see him?” I said, and Cole looked at me strangely.
“Who?” he said. “How much have you had to drink?”
“This has nothing to do with drinking.”
I reached out and touched Cole’s arm, felt the muscles. Tried to circle his wrist with my fingers. The skin inside his wrist was the same baby-skin as Eddie’s, soft as milk. I lay my fingers in his palm, and his hand closed reflexively around them.
“Let’s go,” he said, and led me out into the bar and then outside.
The rain had stopped, but the beach air was charged with electricity, as if the storm were pausing to gather strength. I got the feeling someone was behind us. When I looked there was no one, but I felt a presence. I heard breath.
“Don’t you hear that?” I said.
I held my jacket closed around my throat. Then there was a sudden absence of noise, as if whoever—whatever—had frozen, stopped moving, stopped breathing.
I imagined my mother stepping out of the shadows, see-through but comforting.
“Yes,” she’d say. “It’s me.” And then what would she tell me? Take care of your brother. Take care of the house. Don’t forget Baby B. Don’t forsake him.
What about the letter? I wanted to shout at her.
But no one stepped out of the shadows. No one was there. Only Cole.
I moved toward the water. The air smelled like rain. I heard far off a low rumble. I loved a storm. A storm brought wondrous things to shore, and the morning after a storm was always a morning of discovery. I kicked off my shoes and stepped into the sea.
“Not really a good time for swimming,” Cole called to me.
The water bit my ankles, shockingly cold. Ahead of me I saw something moving. What was it? People? Children? No, seals. I could make out their smooth heads. They rose off the rock so I could see their full beautiful silhouettes.
Cole had kicked off his shoes and was wading toward me.
“Seals,” I told him, pointing. But when we both looked, they’d gone.
Cole steered me back to shore. We stood on the sand and waited for our feet to dry. We waited for that and the storm, if it was coming. My brain was busy cataloging. Sand. Stars. Drops of water. The scotch was still shimmering in my bloodstream. It made everything beautiful. Sailboats. Houseboats. Seagulls. Minnows. Hermit crabs. Jellyfish. Mother. Father. Brother. Lover. We were chilly from wading, but the heat from Cole’s body warmed us both.
“Tell me more about the letter,” I said.
“I’ll tell you a story,” Cole said firmly. “Okay? When you and Lucas were in high school, your friends had parties at the golf course, right?”
“They weren’t exactly our friends.”
“The point is you had a golf course. We had a bridge.”
“You had parties on a bridge.”
“On it. Under it. Not parties exactly. We went there all the time. On dates. With buddies. Alone. It’s like we were drawn back there again and again.”
“Like moths.”
“The attraction,” he said, “was that the bridge was haunted.”
Then he told me the story: a long time ago, there was a beautiful girl. Her parents were wealthy, and she was their only child, and they doted on her. She fell in love with a local boy, handsome, kind, salt-of-the-earth. Her parents thought he wasn’t good enough for her and told her she couldn’t see him, but forbidding her only made her love grow stronger, and she and the boy made secret plans to elope. They planned to meet at midnight on the bridge.
“Can you guess what happens?” Cole said. “This is an old story.”
Her parents discovered the plan and paid someone to kidnap the boy, and when the girl arrived at the bridge in the middle of the night, no one was there. She waited in the dark, getting chillier and chillier, but her lover never showed up. The first
light came up softly, and she knew she’d been forgotten, or jilted. When her parents found her later that morning, she was swinging from the bridge with a rope around her neck. They saw her shadow swaying on the water.
Cole said, “Her name was Emily. Emily. Say it.”
“Emily,” I said.
He looked furious for a moment. Then he turned away from me and went on with his story. Emily haunted the bridge. She was still waiting for her lover to show up. All the kids in Cole’s town went in the middle of the night to catch a glimpse of her shadow on the water, swinging from her rope. Or to hear her crying. The bridge shook, cars parked on it overnight rolled back and forth, even with the emergency brake on; cars came off the bridge with long scratches through the paint; kids came off the bridge with long scratches down their backs, their T-shirts ripped.
“So what does it mean?” I asked.
We picked up our shoes and began to walk home.
“Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”
My shoulder bumped against his. I reached out and stopped him walking. “Some things last past death,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Some things continue on.”
I pulled him toward me. I pressed my cheek against his shoulder. I saw the threads of his jacket, each stitch. A strong wind blew my hair off my face, my clothes against my body. The sand hit my ankles, a little shower of artillery.
I wanted to know the things he knew, to have the things he had. I wanted what he had with Lucas, that effortless ease. I wanted the intimacy he’d somehow forged with my mother. My consciousness zinged around to each part of me that was touching a part of him. His fingers, my arm. His shoulder, my cheek. His hip, my waist—
Then the rain came. It happened in an instant. The sky went black. Cole put his arms around me. “Fuck,” he said into the roar of the rain. I leaned my face against his rain-soaked chest. Water so near us, sand all around, air full of rain, clothes and skin soaked. The wind was rising, blowing birds out of trees. I put one hand on his neck, one on his chest as if listening for a heartbeat. We fell to our knees in the wet sand. Then we lay down in the wet sand. He reached into my clothes, peeled them off so there was nothing between me and the sand—between my skin and his. The rain crashed around us, and he pressed against me, and into me, and all my thoughts exploded into a million fragments, and then came together, floated together, like so many drops of water converging into one bright ocean. I had just this one thought with hard, impenetrable edges, just this: now you are ours.
15
“Wake up,” I said.
“What is it?”
“I want to talk.”
“Nightmare?” Lucas said. I sat on the edge of his bed.
“I dreamed you were so mad you stopped talking to me,” I said.
Lucas sat up in bed. Something struck me as strange, but I couldn’t tell what. Then I realized: it was a proportion problem. Lucas, with his broad shoulders, looked ridiculous in this twin bed. I didn’t know why I’d never noticed before. His feet and hands were enormous. His chest seemed to take up the entire width of the bed. He looked like what he was: a grown-up in a child’s bed.
I saw he hadn’t put an extra blanket on his bed even though the nights were cold now. I went over to his closet and grabbed an old down comforter.
“I didn’t mean it,” he said sleepily, and at first I couldn’t remember what he was talking about. Then I remembered how he’d said we don’t need you. “I just don’t want you to say no without considering the house—”
“It’s not that. Listen, something happened tonight,” I began. He had to hear it, he had to. I was resolved. If anything could help him see Cole clearly, it was this. And I needed Lucas on my side again, needed him as an ally helping me figure out what the fuck was going on. This would be hard, but it would shift the balance of power still further—hopefully in my direction. “There’s something you should know about Cole.”
After I told him, he looked out the window. Maybe he could see in the dark. I waited for some burst of emotion from him, something to match what I was feeling.
“You realize,” he said, finally, “that this is it for me. This life?”
I looked around the room. “Me, too.”
“No, it’s different for me. I’m stuck here. It’s not like I’m going to grow up and get married someday. I’m not going to have children or a career. Don’t look at me like that, Lyd. You know it’s true. I’m not good that way. I’m only good here, in this house, with the family I already have.”
“Well, I’m not exactly heading toward marriage or any of that either.”
“But for you it’s a choice. I don’t have a choice.”
“Of course you do.”
“No, it’s not worth it, it’s not worth it.” He looked determined, sad. “You and Cole are the only family I’ll ever have. It’s all I have. Why are you trying to take it from me?”
I shook my head. “Me? I’m not—it’s him. He’s the one who showed up and changed everything—”
“You could have someone else. If that’s what you’re looking for, you could find someone else. He’s my brother. Do you understand what a beautiful thing it is to have a brother?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“You can’t take everything. You can’t have everything. You can’t have anything. You can’t have him. You can’t take it all away from me.”
I heard a rush of static, felt humidity and pressure rise up into my throat and into the back of my head. For a moment I couldn’t orient myself in the room. Which way was up, which was down, which direction led into the hallway, and which led out into the raw night?
“He’s not our brother,” I said, my voice rising. “Just stop with that.”
A light came on in the hall. We felt a shadow in the doorway. Lucas sprang out of bed and stood facing Cole across the threshold.
“I don’t want to see you,” Lucas said, pushing past him. We heard his feet on the stairs, we heard the kitchen door. He didn’t come back all night.
16
Rain continued, a fierce low rumble. Rain crashed against the windows. I wasn’t worried for Lucas’s safety, not at first. He had disappeared before and always returned home safe. Disappearing was a coping mechanism for Lucas. He knew how to hide, and he knew when to reappear. But as the hours passed, I began to feel scared. The night was cold, wet, and unrelenting, the wind off the water vicious. Around dawn, George Samson at the police station sent out search-and-rescue to check the woods and the shallow water, but there was no sign of Lucas.
Cole and I sat awake all night and into the morning. Cole’s mood seemed to blow in and out like changing winds. “What were you thinking?” he asked me bitterly. “Why would you tell him?” Then he seemed to grow sentimental. He said, “Love scares him. That’s the problem for Lucas.”
I felt wretched. On the beach the night before, out of breath, the rain on our faces, Cole’s chest rising and falling, he’d looked at me and I knew what he saw: my eyes black, the pupils dilated into inky pools, cheeks flushed and hot. I had a birthmark on my cheek, a faint mark, like a brush of pale ink. When I blushed, it darkened, brightened. I sat up in the rain. I kissed his mouth, which tasted of rain and sand and sex. I remembered the notebook in his room and what he’d written. She is alive. I was, I was. I felt powerful, in control.
“The three of us are meant to be together,” Cole had said. “Look at this.” He scratched a deep line in the wet sand, then two more: a triangle. “We’re the three arms of this triangle. You, me, Lucas. We’re this solid thing, this shape.”
Now I felt anything but powerful. With Lucas out there in the cold, I didn’t feel like a solid shape. I felt adrift, alone.
He didn’t come home all day. In the evening I walked to the old lighthouse and looked up, imagining what it was like on the top. Nothing stirred at the li
ghthouse, but still I waited below for a long time. I sat on the nearby rocks watching for its light to strobe on the water, a dull, lonely light that I couldn’t imagine did much good in warning boats or attracting ghosts.
I was lonelier than I’d ever been.
I thought about going home, turning off all the lights, leading Cole to my bedroom, my narrow bed. I imagined the heat of his body, his beautiful ribs. I imagined how every thought and feeling would fade to nothing, leaving behind only that dense, bright, black hole into which all other feelings disappear—desire.
Instead I went to Jack’s and sat at the bar with Gordon and Sebastian and all the old fishermen. I was as lonely as they were. I found myself telling them about Baby B, about Cole showing up and claiming to be my brother. I told them Cole wasn’t his real name. I told them that he wouldn’t tell us where he came from or what he left behind. I couldn’t stop talking. I didn’t mention his skin or the feeling of his feverish hands on my waist, although I thought about it the whole time. I didn’t tell them how I felt caught in a fierce current, my head barely above the surface, being swept farther and farther away from the things I loved. I didn’t tell them that every time I was near him I felt myself traveling miles away from any familiar shore. They listened attentively, nodding. Sebastian kept his eyes closed. When I was done with the story, he opened his eyes and whistled.
“Yes, indeed,” he said.
“Sometimes I feel like nothing’s mine anymore,” I said. “He’s taking everything. Lucas is my brother.”
“Sure,” Sebastian said.
“And it’s my island.”
“Wait a minute, now,” Sebastian said, looking surprised. “This isn’t your island.”
Goodnight Stranger Page 11