I went to the coffee cart, but it was closed.
“Coffee?” Oz said. “Over here.” He had his feet on the counter near a coffeepot and a stack of Styrofoam cups.
I went toward him gratefully. He wasn’t conventionally handsome, not in the way Cole was, but I liked the way he looked—hopeful, buoyant somehow, with wild hair and a too-big mouth.
“What happened to the coffee cart?” I asked.
“Closed until May, but—” He gestured toward the coffeepot on the counter and handed me a cup. He watched me sip feverishly. “Did you run out of coffee at home or something?”
“I like to have coffee throughout the day.”
“I used to love coffee. But I gave it up. Last year when I started eating macrobiotic.”
“I’m sure that’s much healthier,” I said.
“So where are you going?” he said. He nodded out the window to the dreary October rain.
“Vermont,” I said.
“Nice,” he said. “I went to school in Vermont. And my family used to go skiing in Vermont every winter when I was little.”
“I’m going to the mountains. Lindenberg.”
“That’s where we used to go,” he said. “You’re a skier?”
“No. I’m—I’m looking for someone.”
He peered up at me. “Okay,” he said when I stayed quiet. “Intriguing.”
“Is it all right if I—” I indicated the coffeepot.
“Go right ahead.”
“I’ve never been to Vermont, so I have no idea where I’m going,” I said as I refilled my cup. He stood up so he could rummage around under the counter for a minute. He finally produced an old road atlas and spread it out on the counter.
“This is kind of an old map,” he said. “But I think it will give you the right idea.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Not a problem.” He considered the map. He was wearing a faded pair of work pants, a yellow shirt, and a brown hoodie. He stood on one foot for a second while he itched his ankle with the other shoe. People came and went, buying ferry tickets, grabbing brochures, using the bathroom, taking the free coffee. It felt good to stay put while others had to get back in their cars and leave. It’s amazing how quickly a place can start feeling like home base.
“Here’s the route you want,” he said. “I’ve been this way a dozen times. It only gets tricky here.” He put his finger on the map. The roads were tiny capillaries crisscrossing. “Seems like you don’t have GPS. Why don’t you just take this with you? You can return it when you come back through. I’ll just highlight the road.”
“Maybe you should come with me,” I said.
He considered me for a minute. He didn’t laugh.
“I’m kidding,” I said. “But thanks for the map. That’s super nice.”
“Yeah, well. I’m super nice,” he said.
I took the atlas from him. I liked the line he’d drawn with a pink highlighter, like a river I could follow to an important source.
“Bye,” I said. He smiled, pushed his hair off his forehead.
I went to the door of the ferry terminal. People were rushing down the chilly street with their hands in their pockets. I saw my car in the parking lot, and I imagined myself walking toward it, sitting in the driver’s seat, closing the door. I imagined myself driving down the road, leaving Carson Cove behind, joining the great migration of cars crossing the Cape Cod Canal, flooding onto the highway, heading north, heading to a town that might have a name I needed.
But I couldn’t go.
The sound of cars rushing past came at me, and my heart started to pound. There’s nothing wrong with tires on a cold street, I told myself. But my heart thumped, and blood coursed beneath my skin. There’s nothing wrong with tires on a cold street. I decided to walk out the door, to my car. I saw it there and I decided to walk to it and get in and close the door and drive. But I could hear through the open door the rush of cars and trucks, and the rush was like the rush of blood in the ears, the rush of a terrible wave, of everything being extinguished at once—
“Is something wrong?” Oz had come out of his information booth and was standing behind me.
“I just changed my mind.”
He said something, but I could hardly hear him. His voice was lost in the roar.
“What?” I asked.
“Are you hyperventilating?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said, a little angrily.
“Shit,” he said. “Can you just try to breathe a little?”
I did try to breathe. But it felt like every breath was the same breath, a used-up breath, never big enough.
A small group gathered. Normally I would have been mortified. But who cared who gathered and gawked now? They closed in, murmuring what sounded like shame, shame, or maybe what a shame; I wondered if I was dying.
“I can help,” someone said, a young guy with a shaved head and a beard. “I mean I’m no doctor, but—”
“I think we need an actual doctor,” Oz said. He had a phone against his face.
“Is it your heart?” someone said.
“It’s my heart,” I said.
My heart was a bird flung against a window, that terrible thump over and over. The man looked into my eyes. He held my wrist between his moist fingers.
“Has she eaten today?” he asked. The crowd of people waited to hear.
“Have you?” Oz said.
“Breakfast.”
“Breakfast,” Oz reported to everyone. “And lots of coffee.”
“You’re having a panic attack,” the kid with the shaved head said with certainty. “My old girlfriend used to have these. You need some drugs. You need like Valium.”
“I need to look in a mirror,” I said. And then everything went gold, and someone led me away, blind.
* * *
When I could see again, I realized there was a little mirror in my hands. I found my reflection among some scratches and smears. There I was, the same person, the same face. I wasn’t gone or altered in any way. I held the mirror tightly and looked around to see where I was. A quiet room, an office. I saw manila folders in stacks on a metal desk.
“We’ve got an ambulance coming,” someone said. It was Oz, and he was sitting on a plastic chair near me.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere in an ambulance.”
“Well, you need to get some kind of medical treatment from someone.”
“I’m totally fine,” I said. “Look, watch.”
I stood up. He stood up, too.
“I’m sorry about this,” I said.
“Stop right there,” he said, holding up his hand. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”
“I’m still not going to the hospital,” I said.
“I heard you the first time.”
I raised the mirror to my face and focused on the tiny blurred reflection of myself. Tiny Lydia. Smear of a face. My heart was calm now. Everything was slow and quiet.
This was what I meant when I said it was hard to leave the island. I had never thought to call it a panic attack. I always just felt waves, crashing, racing, drowning. Looking back, I realize I hadn’t tried to leave the island for years. Since my mother’s death, time had slipped by, and I hadn’t needed to go anywhere—not really—so I didn’t know how fierce it had become, the force pulling me home.
But now, another, equally important force was pulling me away. I was looking for Cole. Not for the Cole who was probably still happily stacking wood with Lucas right now. The past Cole, the real Cole, the Cole who had a different name altogether. In other words, I was trying to understand his history, his identity—and I had one clue, only one: Lindenberg, Vermont.
I looked up from the mirror.
“Do you want to stay here for a while?” he said, this beautiful boy.
We sat there together, and we sat there together, and we sat a little longer.
* * *
So this is the story of how I met Tuck, because that’s what his name actually was, not Oz of course. First Tuck sent the ambulance away. Then he went out onto the street somewhere and brought me back a little bowl of chowder and a bag of oyster crackers. We sat there in the back office.
“Don’t you need to—what about the booth?”
“Who cares about the booth?” he said.
A few people drifted in and out of the back office where we were sitting, but mostly we were alone.
“Panic attack, huh?” Tuck said.
“I guess so.”
“First time?”
“I’ve had them before. But I didn’t know they were panic attacks.”
“What did you think they were?”
“I’m not sure. I thought there was really something to be scared of.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I know how that feels.”
I doubted that. Everything about him—his posture, his legs, his open face—seemed to say not afraid. But I knew he was trying to be kind, so I smiled and kept on eating soup.
If I couldn’t leave the ferry terminal without having another panic attack, then my only option was to go back home to Wolf Island. There was no room on the four o’clock ferry for my car, so I made a reservation for the nine o’clock boat. I migrated from the back office to the waiting area, so I could look out the windows at my car and the rippling water in the harbor. Tuck was back at the information booth, talking with tourists, chatting with locals. He was tall, smiling, friendly. People gravitated toward him. He was totally unselfconscious, throwing back his head to laugh, not caring who saw or heard.
During a lull, Tuck came over to me on a bench looking out over the harbor.
“I pretty much saved your life, right?” he said. “I figure you owe me.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“Kidding,” he said. “Sort of. What I mean is I’m curious about you. And since you don’t have anywhere to go, I think you should tell me your story. And I brought you gumballs.”
He rolled six small green and red gumballs into my palm.
I looked at him. It started in August. It was August, and you know August, how the smell of dead sea creatures is always in the air.
“Okay,” I said. “Why not?” I started slow. I told him about Baby B, about Lucas and the candles, I told him about the day Cole arrived, about Eddie’s advice, and how Cole waved to all the islanders as if he’d known them forever, how he’d been helping the Grendles clean their gutters. How he had a tab at Hiram’s Bounty, and at Jack’s, and at Island Pie.
“Holy shit,” Tuck said. “He’s weaseling his way into your life.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s so creepy.”
“But see, he’s also really charming. And...handsome. Everyone loves him.”
I opened my mouth to tell him about Cole and me, that night on the beach, but I couldn’t. My heart contracted unpleasantly. I shook my head. “I think he grew up in Lindenberg,” I said. “Just based on some things he’s said.”
“Way to sleuth.”
“And if I want to learn his name—I have to go there.”
“Or just get in touch with the right people in Vermont. Email them pictures. You can do these things remotely. I’m getting the sense it might be hard for you to, you know, go anywhere.”
But I wanted to go there. I wanted to see Emily’s Bridge. I wanted to stand on it and know that Cole had been a teenager there, in that very spot. That somewhere nearby he had had a house, and a bed, and a mother. He’d done homework at the kitchen counter and eaten peanut butter crackers. He’d been a child.
But Tuck was right—that would have to wait, and until I could leave the island without falling to pieces, there were other ways to investigate.
The closer it got to nine o’clock the better I felt. I could breathe deeply again. I could think again. I thought about Tuck leading me into the office and placing the little scratched mirror in my hands, and I felt layers of embarrassment at this display of vulnerability. I wondered what Lucas and Cole were doing. I closed my eyes and tried to feel what the house felt like without me. I felt a chill, even though I wasn’t cold.
Then, just as an exercise of thought, I imagined myself in Providence, where I went to college that one semester. I was wearing a blue hat and walking down a narrow street past a tea shop with a wooden sign hanging above its door. I saw the door of an apartment, and I knew it was where I lived, although it wasn’t anything like the dorm I’d lived in when I was actually in Providence. Over the small sink in the kitchen was a window and through it were tall fir trees and beyond the fir trees tall buildings. And in the branches of the fir trees, crows. I heard the chaos of the crows’ lonely voices. And then the train, its whistle.
No. I shook my head. The trains and the crows—that wasn’t my life.
At six someone came in for the evening shift in the information booth, and Tuck came over to me.
“Should I go get dinner?” he said.
“Yes. You’ve been really, really nice today. Please don’t feel like you have to stay any longer.”
“No, I mean bring dinner back here.”
“Oh no,” I said. “I can eat when I get home.”
“Please,” he said. “You can’t wait until eleven or whenever to eat.”
He touched my shoulder and said, “Be right back.”
He was nice. Nice. Nice. Nice. Unafraid and nice. What if he were my boyfriend, what if we were both twenty years old and neither one of us was afraid? What if I were someone else suddenly, someone like him, with his pretty childhood, and luck with the ladies, and that unselfconscious laugh. It was a relief to be someone else for a minute, even just in my imagination.
* * *
From our window, we could see most of Water Street, which was like Clara Day Street. Tuck pointed out the buildings, told me what they were and who worked there. There were several large scientific labs on Water Street, because Carson Cove had two big science institutes.
“Let’s play a game,” he said, “called local, tourist, or scientist.”
“I’m really, really good at this game,” I told him.
“I’m really good at this game.”
While we ate fish and chips out of paper cartons, we eavesdropped on conversations of groups coming in to buy tickets or use the bathroom. When we heard bits of conversations about bones and neurons and cartilage, Tuck and I listened intently, as if the word Dinoflagellata held some sort of important clue.
Tuck smoothed the take-out bag and produced a pen from his pocket, which he used to draw a map of Carson Cove, the important parts of town we couldn’t see from our window. A pathway along an icy pond. A bell tower rising up out of a garden where, Tuck told me, local kids went to get it on. He ran out again, for coffee, and came back holding two blue ceramic mugs, the liquid still steaming. “I’ll bring the cups back when we’re done,” he said. “The last thing you need right now is a paper cup.” We ate pastry, left over from the morning, so half price, and we sipped coffee and suddenly it was after eight and time for me to get in line for the ferry.
I felt strange leaving Tuck; we’d spent so many hours together. “Seven hours,” I said out loud, and then blushed.
“I know,” he said. “It’s been an unusual day at the old Carson Cove Information Booth.”
I thought of the information booths, his and mine, separated by a strip of cold, deep water.
“You know what would be fun?” he said. “To do this again, only leave the building.”
I laughed.
“Or you know what?” he said. “I could come over to Wolf Island.”
“Oh. Okay,” I said.
“To meet this
dude,” he said.
“You’ll probably love him. Everyone does.”
Tuck walked with me to my car, staying close, like a bodyguard. When we reached the car, a seagull swooped near us, and Tuck lifted his arm, as if to shield me, but the bird hovered, staring at us with its black-bead eyes.
“This guy’s the reincarnation of my long-lost brother,” Tuck said.
“Learn his name.”
“His name is bird.”
“I’m beginning to think,” I said, “that the only way to escape your family is to move far away.”
“To another island?” Tuck said.
“Just far away, and never have kids and isolate yourself from everyone. That’s the only way to really escape your family.”
“Or just stop believing in this crap,” he said. “Just leave all this crap behind and live your life.”
I sat again on the upper deck of the ferry in the cold night wind. I couldn’t stand being indoors: the stuffy enclosed space, the windows with their warped views. I sat in the frozen air, under the dark sky and let myself be pulled back home. Gulls zipped past. I watched them watching me.
Bird, I thought, relieved to be able to name something.
18
When I arrived at the house that night, headlights making a wide path of light across the dark lawn, I saw that the kitchen light was on, and had a flash of what I would find inside. Cole and Lucas at the kitchen table, drinking, waiting. And there they were, exactly as I’d envisioned it. Cole did all the talking, not asking where I’d been, or why I’d gone, but politely, coldly reminding me that the car wasn’t mine to take. What if they’d needed it? What if there’d been an emergency?
“Don’t do it again,” Cole said.
“Don’t tell me what to do,” I said. But they ignored me, walked into the living room. I followed, watching in baffled silence as they climbed the stairs. I ran up behind them.
Goodnight Stranger Page 13