“I was born here,” I said.
“That don’t make it yours,” he said. “My granddaddy lived on this island. He came over from the Azores, little girl. You just showed up yesterday.”
The fishermen looked at me with sympathy. My eyes welled up, and I felt embarrassed. They were right of course. People had lived here longer than I had. Families had passed down land over generations. Yet I felt deeply that it was mine, that I had some special ownership of the island because I loved it so much. Or because it was all I had.
Grow up, I told myself. Stop agonizing over everything. So you made a mistake, miscalculated. You can fix this.
* * *
The next day, I went to Eddie and Kim’s place, a tiny apartment over Reeni’s Salon. There was no actual Reeni, but the owners, two friends, both named Jennifer, thought it sounded more authentic. Kim cut hair there, and the smell of the place permeated the apartment as well, a clean, chlorinated scent. The hallway was full of it. I stood there knocking on the door, inhaling the fragrance of perms.
“Lydia,” Eddie said, when he opened the door.
“Can I come in?”
“Um, yeah,” he said. “Of course. Come on in.”
I’d only been inside the apartment once before and I had the same reaction then that I did now, that while the furniture matched the curtains, and the curtains matched the pictures on the wall, none of it matched Eddie. It wasn’t that Kim had bad taste, it was just a taste all her own. She liked ferns, that much was clear. Eddie and I sat across from each other at a table draped with a fern-print tablecloth. Hanging by the window were both a framed picture of a fern and the actual plant itself. The window looked over Clara Day Street.
“You can see the information booth from here,” I said.
“I know.”
“It looks lonely this time of year.”
We both looked out at the landing, the dark water, the empty booth. Did he watch me from here? I felt that buzz of tension between us, something that skidded back and forth, like the puck on an air hockey table. And even here, Cole was somehow part of the tension.
“I think you were right,” I said. “About Cole. He’s—not right. And I think I just made everything a hundred times worse.”
“Uh-oh,” he said. “What happened?”
“I don’t even know where to start. He—well, he knew my mother. That’s one. They had some sort of relationship, but I can’t get any answers out of him. Oh—and Cole isn’t his real name. But he won’t tell me what his real name is.”
“That’s fucked up,” Eddie said. “It’s fucked up to lie about your name.”
“And now with Lucas off hiding somewhere... What I need is a place to stay. Maybe just for a night or two.”
Eddie scratched the back of his head and looked gloomily out the window. I looked at the empty harbor.
“Do you ever want to be a new person?” Eddie said. He shook his head. “I’m tired of being the same person I always was. I still feel like I’m fifteen. Nothing feels different. Nothing feels better.”
“I think everyone feels that way sometimes. At least I do.”
“It’s just you and me. Other people grow up.”
“We grew up,” I insisted. “Look at us.”
Eddie raised his eyes. “When I look at us, I see children,” he said.
“I have gray hairs.”
“I’m talking about inside.”
“I know.”
“I want to help you,” he said. “I would do anything—but you can’t stay here. Of course you can’t.”
“Oh,” I said. “No, that’s fine. It was a stupid idea. You don’t have the room.”
“It has nothing to do with the room, and you know it.”
When I said goodbye, Eddie handed me fifteen dollars. “It’s all I have at the moment,” he said. “But maybe you could get a room or something for a night.” He hugged me tightly. “You know what you have to do, right? You have to learn his name. His real name. Names matter.”
He sighed and I felt his breath on the top of my head. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “Find his name,” he said. “That’s the only way to have any power over him.”
I looked back once from the hallway, and Eddie was still standing there.
* * *
Lucas came home the next morning. Or, was brought home. George Samson stood, ill at ease, in the doorway and told me he’d found him on the lighthouse eventually. Lucas looked pale and puckered, cold. He wouldn’t talk to me. Wouldn’t look at me.
Cole showed up after lunch, and the two of them moved the woodpile from the backyard to the woodshed. They stacked wood in each other’s arms. I felt sharp envy. All was forgiven apparently for Cole; I sat in the silence of the house, wondering when I would be forgiven.
It was October. How did it get to be October?
When I couldn’t take the silent treatment anymore, I took off for the landing. But soon, Cole caught up with me. We walked together in silence until we reached Clara Day Street. The landing was empty, and it felt as though we were the only inhabitants as we strolled the sidewalks.
“I should have said this right away,” I began.
There were bright orange pumpkins and dark red chrysanthemums in front of every store. Jack’s had decorated its doorway with a string of orange and black lights. I was shivering from the wind, or maybe from the invisible exchange I felt between us, something dark and overripe. I thought of berries, of brambles. I stopped walking, turned to him.
“It can never happen again,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to say. I thought—I don’t really know what I was thinking. It was a onetime thing, a mistake.”
I saw a look cross his face, a tiny shadow, as if somewhere above him a small winged thing had crossed in front of the light. His jaw tightened.
I waited for him to agree, or argue. But he did neither. Instead, he put both hands on my neck, gently stroked the hollow of my throat. I looked around to make sure no one was watching. I shivered. His fingers sought out the most vulnerable spot on my throat in a way that didn’t feel tender or romantic, as it could have. It seemed calculated, the way he touched me, as if he were doing research. I took a step back.
“It’s cute,” he said.
“What’s cute?”
“The way you think you have control over things. It’s innocent. Like a child.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. His fingers explored the ridges of my clavicle, and electricity coursed outward from that place like a star, like a sun. “I mean it will happen again, because it’s bigger than you, or me. It’s bigger than your will, or my will.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, uneasy, afraid. “I don’t even think I like you. In the end.”
“The thing between us has nothing to do with what you like or don’t like,” he said. “The thing between us is already decided. It’s written in the stars.”
“I don’t believe in that.”
“Really?” he said. “I don’t see how you can be your mother’s child and not believe that.”
“Leave her out of it.”
He moved closer to me. “You know what she believed? She believed in tides. She believed that forces push and pull all of us the way the sun and the moon pull the tides. Low tide has nothing to do with the desires of the ocean. You must agree with that? And the forces that control us have nothing to do with our desires, not really. As for me, I can’t wait to see how this ends. I’m breathless.”
My thoughts were muddy and roiled, my body tense as a spring: stomach, diaphragm clutched. I didn’t believe that the sun and the moon and forces bigger than me were pulling this way and that on the tides of my body, but what else explained the warm effervescence in my belly, my thighs, that sea foam of sensation?
“I’ll see you tonight,” Cole said, backing away from me. “I�
�ll make a nice dinner.”
After he walked away, I went straight to the Martha Day Memorial Library. Cole seemed to be gaining power and speed like a weather front, and I wanted to arm myself with the only thing I knew how to gather: information.
The library was a squat building that smelled of paper and glue and something sweetly yeasty, like bread dough. It was one of my favorite places on the island, a safe, familiar spot. Most of the books were on the second floor, which had steeply slanted walls like an attic. You had to duck to get at the books. On the ground floor there was a cheerful reading room with armchairs and racks of magazines, a couple of computers, and two librarians.
One librarian was Martha Day. The library was named after her mother, who had died when Martha was born. It was amazing to think of her as an infant, because as long as I’d known her she’d been ancient, wrinkled, and scrawny, and often looking sharply in a direction where exactly nothing was happening. She wafted around the library with an air of secrecy. Today, her eyes landed on me sitting at the computer, and she seemed to snap into focus. She nodded at me, and I picked up my hand and waved. If she’d kept looking at me like that, like she knew something more than the rest of us, then I would have told her about Cole. But she looked away and hurried off to shelve books.
Elijah West had returned to the island to be the head librarian—and part of the job description was convincing Martha he wasn’t there to replace her but to aide her, which he pulled off impressively.
I turned to the computer screen, typed Cole Anthony. A few people popped up, none of them him. I typed Baby B, which turned out to be a company that sold babyproofing paraphernalia. I typed Pastlives.com, and a silvery screen appeared, with bold dark letters in some sort of handwriting font. This was a website Lucas used to frequent, and I would tease him about it.
Welcome to pastlives.com. According to the ancient beliefs of the Hindus and many other religions of the world, we are not born once, but again and again. We live many lives and learn many lessons as we make our way toward nirvana, the final state of bliss. Although many of us don’t remember people, places, and events from our past lives, a few do. On pastlives.com you can discuss your past life memories and reach out to people from past lives.
I skimmed some of the forum discussions. One woman wrote that she and Harrison Ford had been in love in another life. That means he’s part of your soul group, the circle of people who remain together life after life, someone had responded.
But I can’t reach him, she wrote. He won’t answer my letters, and I can’t get him on the phone.
I read their queries and comments. A sense of belonging was waiting for them somewhere out there, and they were simply in the wrong place, the wrong body, the wrong life. Queries ranged from curious to desperate. Some people had specific memories of previous lives: a hoop skirt covering a long scar shaped like the letter S. For some it was just a vague sense that they didn’t fit where they were now. Some people were aggressive in their insistence that past lives were real. Some were embarrassed but “had to give it a try.”
There was nothing to help me understand Cole.
Beside the computer was a round end table, with a glossy coffee table book—Elijah West’s book, the one he’d left the island to make, all the most beautiful bridges of the world. The cover showed a long causeway, with an orange sun balancing on its highest point. I picked up the book and thumbed through.
“Can’t you find something better than that to read in here?” Elijah said, appearing behind me. He looked at the pages as I turned them.
“I guess I’m desperate,” I said.
“Take it home,” Elijah said. “Share it with Lucas.”
He was so proud of the book.
“It’s beautiful,” I told him, and I meant it. “Seriously. I’ve been wanting a chance to look through it and really take my time.”
He beamed.
* * *
At home, I tried to show Lucas the book, but he still wasn’t talking to me. It was a lonely night—a long bleak dusk and silence in the house. I was restless. After eating alone, I shut myself in my room. In my notebook, I started a new list: Ways to Make Things Better. I wrote, wait, apologize, leave, stay.
I began to flip through the pages of Elijah’s bridge book. It started with a series of New York City bridges: the George Washington Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Queensboro Bridge, Hell Gate Bridge. They rose up into the sky like bones, like the rib cages of giant fish, wrecked on the beach. Rib after rib. I had the strange sensation that Elijah’s book, like a bridge itself, was connecting me to the rest of the world.
I turned the pages and saw bridges over streams. Log bridges. Bridges made from planks. A bridge made from the bottom of a boat. A bridge made from window shutters. Firm little walkways from one bank to the next. Then longer bridges. The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the Seven Mile Bridge through the Florida Keys. Suspension bridges. Swaying bridges. The covered bridges of New England.
Stop.
I leaned closer to the book. The bridges of New England were all dark wood against bright red and yellow leaves. Pretty and charming, but that wasn’t what caught my eye.
I put my finger on the page and skimmed the caption, which told the story: the girl who hanged herself on the bridge when her lover didn’t show up for their planned elopement. No evidence that this is historically accurate, Elijah’s book said. But the story was passed around, a legend.
Emily’s Bridge.
A long time ago there was a beautiful girl. The story Cole had told me on the beach. The bridge was in Lindenberg, Vermont, the caption said. Maple trees, yellow leaves, red barns. A real, tangible place. Emily’s Bridge, the place where Cole and his friends had thrown parties like the ones Lucas and I went to on the golf course. I could feel my face burning with something. Excitement. Fear. The ghost in my house grew up somewhere. And maybe this was where. Just thinking the name of the place gave me an electric surge. Lindenberg.
Learn his name, Eddie had said. That’s the only way to have any power over him.
Cole had been a child, a teenager. I imagined him riding bikes on a cul-de-sac. I imagined him eating bologna sandwiches. I already felt more powerful. Names did have power. Even the name of the bridge had power. And the name of the town was uplifting as a song. It was as if Cole were coming into focus, a Polaroid photo.
17
The summer I was seventeen, when I was preparing to leave for college, I’d felt something in the air around me, in the treetops, in the waves. It was as if the island were breathing, as if the heart of the island were pumping powerfully. I felt it when the wind swayed the branches or pinned the gulls’ wings in place as they flew. I felt it when the rhythm of the waves became so loud and insistent, my own heart began to beat in time. I felt it somewhere deeper and quieter, too, in buds and blossoms, in the undulations of jellyfish, in the air molecules that shimmered with heat. I felt all around me the powerful opening and closing, filling and emptying, inhaling and exhaling of a living being.
I started to wonder if the island’s breath and heartbeat were specially aimed at pulling me firmly to earth. I became aware of my own gravity. I was afraid that I would, in the end, be unable to get off the island. At night I dreamed I was escaping in a paddleboat. I exhausted myself pedaling, then glanced back to see myself still on the sand.
The day I finally left, I stood on the upper deck of the ferry, surprised at how easy it was to go. The island was like a glowing light that dimmed when we rounded the four sharp jetties, the Claws. Dimmed when we entered Vineyard Sound. Dimmed except for one speck of light, which was bright and painfully hot and scorched as I waited for it to disappear, one scorching speck of light, which was Lucas, waving from the dock.
But then my mother got sick, and I came home, stayed home. It sometimes felt like it was the island that had brought me back. But I didn’t care. I loved it. I ha
d to. When my mother died, I loved it even more. It was my new mother. It was all I had.
Every time I got on the ferry, I felt it again, the spark of light—my connection to Lucas as bright and electric as any lighthouse strobe. Every year it seemed to grow larger and fiercer, a whole blaze. And now it wouldn’t dim. It never dimmed. It stayed hot and lit, pulling at me with its heat and brightness. Who could blame me for not wanting to ignite that blaze?
But here I was on the uppermost deck of the ferry, watching Wolf Island grow smaller and smaller behind me. I had made a decision to pursue the one clue I had about Cole’s life—I was on my way to Lindenberg, to Emily’s Bridge. It wasn’t much, but sometimes all you need is one thread, one quick pull, and everything unravels.
I clutched the railing. Birds rode alongside me on the gusts of wind. The people back at the landing were like miniature versions of themselves. The postmaster was playing the bagpipes, the instrument like some outsize heart he had to hold outside his body. And there was Eddie lumbering down the street. I felt an intense desire for him to look up and see me. I wanted him to know that I was leaving the island. I wanted someone to know. I saw Jack’s. I saw Mady’s Diner. The Island Inn. The information booth. I could almost see myself there. I was waving. Goodbye. Goodbye.
When we reached the landing in Carson Cove, I drove off the ferry into the brightness. The sound of my tires on the grooved plank sent blood pumping through my temples. Carson Cove had a bright sky. On the sand was the carcass of a huge fish, pecked over by birds.
I parked the car and went into the Carson Cove ferry terminal.
There were rows of benches, a snack cart, and a counter with three stations for selling tickets, the workers behind plexiglass like tellers in a bank. The walls were lined with maps and displays of brochures. In the corner opposite the snack cart was the information booth where a young guy sat leaning back in his chair, looking bored. His mane of golden hair was as glorious as ever. Hello, Oz. It seemed inconceivable that I had ever joked about this boy with Lucas, even with Cole. It seemed like years ago, but really only a few days had passed since Cole had touched my leg on the porch, running his fingers from knee to ankle. You’re not a child, he’d said. You’re a woman. And you’re beautiful.
Goodnight Stranger Page 12