I started in my mother’s room, looked once again in the drawers of her bureau. I went into the closet, where a few of her dresses were still hanging. The smell of sandalwood was still there, faintly, in the folds of her clothes, in a few sweaters still folded on the high shelf. I ran my hands over the dresses, felt their ghostly flutter. I put my hands into her pockets, but there was nothing there.
In the upstairs hallway, I stood for a moment smelling the house’s familiar scent: salt, dampness, bread, coffee. Cole and Lucas were out, and the house was quiet.
I pulled the attic ladder down silently and climbed through its trapdoor onto the dusty plywood floor.
“Hello?” I said, although I knew no one was there.
Then something moved in the corner, large and dark, and I caught my breath. For a moment I felt trapped, in danger. My nightmares. But it was my own reflection I’d seen moving in the old walnut-framed mirror my mother had brought back from her grandmother’s funeral a long time ago. The glass, now under a thick layer of dust, had always been strange to look into—a kind of wavy, distorted reflection. I didn’t know why she’d wanted it.
The attic reached the entire length of the house, and was built around the big brick fireplace, which stretched up from the living room. It was relatively bright for an attic, with big windows on either end, one looking over the side lawn, and one looking out on the driveway and street.
Boxes of Dad’s stuff made a kind of wall on one end of the room. His clothes, the books from his office. Boxes of Mom’s stuff created another wall on the other end of the room. Her clothes, her perfumes and lotions from the bathroom. We didn’t want to throw it away. It was as if we thought she’d come back and want it again. We’d packed everything neatly and brought it up here.
Behind the chimney were old pieces of furniture: a futon, three ladder-back chairs with broken rungs, an armchair, a wicker patio set missing cushions. The furniture leaned all up against itself like pickup sticks, like kindling laid for a fire. Two boxes were open on the armchair. I peeked inside. Photographs, paper, an old paperweight one of us had made in grade school.
In an old wooden filing cabinet, I searched for information about the house, the bank account. I discovered a file entitled COLIN. It was a thin little manila folder. There couldn’t be much inside, but still, my heart began to pound as I opened it.
Inside I found three things. The first was a half-page program from Colin’s memorial service. I hadn’t known there’d been one. I envisioned my mother, tall and well dressed, greeting each mourner with regal finesse, the way she had at my father’s service. Where had Lucas and I been during Colin’s memorial service? Who had taken care of us? Who had attended the memorial service? My mother and father had only just moved to the island. They wouldn’t have known very many people yet.
There was also a letter from my mother’s mother, who had died twenty years ago. I’d met her only once. I opened the envelope and drew the letter out.
Dearest C, it said.
God doesn’t give us more than we can handle, so I know you’ll be all right. You may come home whenever you need to. You know they’ll never forgive you. But we will.
Love and condolences,
Mother
At first I thought the letter must be meant for Colin, or for Cole, but I quickly realized C was also for Cecily, my mother. I imagined my stern grandmother, basically a stranger to me, and wondered what she meant when she said they will never forgive you. For what? The letter was so brief, I thought it might be the culmination of a longer correspondence. But if so, the rest of the letters were somewhere else.
The final document was Colin’s death certificate. It was a strangely cheerful document, like the awards I used to win in school for good penmanship. There was even a gold seal at the bottom of the page. I read through it.
Name: Colin Matthew Moore. The middle name struck me suddenly. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten his middle name; I just so rarely thought of it. Date of birth: that was our birthday of course. Date of death: less than three months later. Address at time of death: the same address we still used. Primary cause of death: drowning.
I held the paper closer to my face.
Primary cause of death drowning?
This made no sense. Colin had died of pneumonia, on his way to the hospital with my mother. I’d heard the story from my mother. I could picture it as clearly as if it had been me on the deck of the ferry so many years ago.
I shuffled through all the papers again, as if I might find an answer I missed.
“Lydia?” I heard my name faintly, someone calling from downstairs. I closed the folder and held it against my chest.
“I guess she’s in the attic,” Lucas said. And I heard their feet on the ladder coming up, Lucas first, his head, then shoulders, then the rest of him. “What are you looking for?” he asked suspiciously.
“I thought I heard something,” I said. “I thought something was moving up here.” I put the folder quickly behind my back.
Cole emerged next, and I felt both afraid and inexplicably guilty. But they didn’t look at me. Instead, they moved from thing to thing in the attic, touching what they saw: an old double stroller. Two tricycles. Four old suitcases with broken zippers. It’s both sad and comforting to stand among the detritus of your life. Your mother’s stuff, your father’s stuff, the treasures that belonged to you as a baby, a child, a teenager. Except for the boxes that were open or out of place, the rest was thoughtfully organized and stacked, even labeled. We might not have gotten rid of stuff easily, but we knew how to put it away.
I watched Cole touch the roof of a broken dollhouse. I watched him run his fingers over my father’s suits on the garment rack. For a minute I felt sorry for Cole. This whole room was about memories, the past. Maybe that was what the whole house was about. We could look through these old things anytime we wanted, we could gather the past around us, touch it all, count it all. And his past was somewhere else, inaccessible.
And then he looked at me, and I understood that he wasn’t sad about what he saw. He was exhilarated. His eyes were black and shining. He was a collector, only he wasn’t interested in collecting any of this old stuff. What he collected was much more complicated: our memories, our past. It was as if he wanted these things for himself.
“Here’s what you heard,” Lucas said from near the wall of Mom’s stuff. I took the moment to stash the COLIN folder under the old futon. Then I turned to Lucas. He was poking something with the toe of his shoe. It was a bat. Tiny and curled into a ball, like a stone thrown through the window. “Dead,” he said.
At the bottom of the attic stairs, Cole grabbed my arm.
“What is it you’re looking for?” he asked. He tilted his head and waited for me to speak. When I didn’t, he reached out and took a lock of my hair and held it between his thumb and finger, as if testing it for strength. He let it slip between his fingers. Your name, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Fear and exhilaration seemed to inch higher, into my chest, my throat. I felt like a high striker at a carnival. Cole was holding the hammer, trying to send that marvelous little puck right up to the bell. I felt the bell in my throat, in my mouth, that fearful ringing.
That night I lay awake for hours. I was thinking about Colin and his cause of death. Maybe drowning was what they called it when your lungs drowned in fluid from pneumonia. I knew that couldn’t be true even as I thought it. No, our parents must have lied to us about Baby B and how he’d died. Was this what my grandmother had thought my mother could never be forgiven for, this lie? He was seven weeks old. He was the size of my mother’s forearm. She’d told me that once, that she could hold each of us on her forearm, our heads cradled in her palm, the rest of us fitting neatly between wrist and elbow. How had he drowned? I imagined him in the bathtub, and shivered.
At some point in the night I heard a sound above me, a creaking, a slow tapping. I
sat up in bed, straining to hear. It was Cole, I felt sure, looking through files in the attic. I crept out of bed and into the hallway, but the trapdoor to the attic was closed, the ladder hidden away behind the door. Cole’s bedroom door was closed and quiet. I went back to bed, but all night long I heard noises. I told myself they were the sounds of the house, the small adjustments and settling of a house a hundred years old. But so often in the night the noises sounded like small footsteps, like tiny fists knocking against a closed door.
21
On my first trip back to Carson Cove, Tuck met me at the boat.
“Hey,” he said, grinning.
We walked to the coffee shop on the corner and sat so I could see the ferry and the expanse of water leading back home. That was as far as I was willing to go. Tuck picked up a pack of sugar and ripped the corner off, then shook the sugar into his coffee, leisurely, like he had all the time in the world.
“Well, I’m impressed,” Tuck said. “Half a block from the ferry, and you’re cool as a cucumber. I guess you’ve been working hard at this.”
“Please,” I said. “I’m shaking, I’m sweating. My knees almost buckled when I walked off the boat. I’m a mess.”
“You’re perfect,” he said.
Later we sat on the shore, our coats buttoned up against the wind. In the sound of the waves, I heard the funeral march of Annabel Lee, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell Tuck about that. I would tell him later, when I could explain the whole story, all of it, when the nightmare had faded. Instead I told him what I’d found in the attic.
“The crazy thing is that they told us this detailed story about his death, how he had pneumonia, how he was struggling to breathe. They told us the same story a dozen times. And it wasn’t true.”
“That’s wild,” he said.
“I don’t even know who to ask about it. It’s embarrassing to admit I didn’t know my mother at all. I didn’t know anything about either of them. What else were they lying about?”
“People will remember drowning. That’s not just sad, that’s news,” Tuck said.
We looked out at the water. It was funny to think that water was the thing that grounded me, but I was immediately calmed being near it, soothed by the movement of waves, its intricate systems for filling up space. And I liked the idea that in the midst of the rise and fall there was me, solid and still, the one who didn’t go anywhere.
“I’ll find out more before my next Carson Cove trip. I vow it.”
“Solemnly?” he said.
He walked me to the ferry and waved as it slid away. I stood on the deck in the bitter wind, sad to be returning home, scared of what I’d find there. It was like that other time years ago when I stood on the deck of the ferry, returning to my sick mother, my lonely brother. Those old feelings were still there, the way old feelings are, dusty but alive, the layers of anger and sadness and fear. This time, though, it was Cole who had somehow brought it all about, Cole who had stirred up the placid water until all that lay beneath rose to the surface, a roiled, cloudy mess.
* * *
George Samson groaned when I walked in.
“That’s so impolite,” I said.
“What has he done now?” he said. “Let me have it.”
“This isn’t about Lucas,” I said. “It’s—well, it’s about my other brother, Colin.” I took a deep breath. Why was it so painful to talk about him? I felt my face grow hot. I was embarrassed, afraid. George Samson looked confused, and I made myself keep talking. “Do you remember I had a brother who died when he was a baby? This was almost thirty years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. And he seemed honestly sorry. I wondered if maybe I’d misjudged George Samson all this time. Maybe he had a kind heart underneath his bluntness.
“And I’m not really sure how to say this,” I said, “but I’m confused about how he died exactly.”
George dropped his head into his hands. “Of course you are,” he said bitterly. “Why am I not surprised? Well, you’re going to have to talk to Marlene. I’ve worked here eleven years, as you know. So I can’t tell you anything about your brother from way back when.”
Marlene appeared as if summoned from the back of the station. She moved with the same pugnacious cheer. She made me weary. I felt like she would cheer me to death.
“Look who it is!” she said. I found it strange that we didn’t acknowledge that the last time I was here, Stephanie had been blubbering with a black eye. That was part of the code of islands, I guess. Nothing changes, stores are never renamed, children never grow up, and secrets are kept secret even after every last detail has been revealed. “Now, what can I help you with?”
“Okay, here goes,” I said. I told her about Colin, the dead brother, the baby. “It looks like there are some conflicting stories about how he died,” I said. “I guess I thought there might be a police report.”
“Oh my goodness,” Marlene said.
“We were always told our brother died of pneumonia,” I said. “But his death certificate says drowning.”
She leaned back in her chair, regarding me. “Honey, he didn’t die of pneumonia,” she said. “I remember it. That baby drowned.”
“But—how?”
She nodded her head sympathetically, her ugly curls bobbing up and down. I hated her face, poor Marlene. “He went over. That’s all we knew. It was a terrible accident.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “The ferry?” She nodded again. “When you say went over, you mean—the railing?” I pictured Baby B soaring through the dark night toward the water, and felt a kind of darkness moving over me, like a swarm of insects all around my head. “I better go outside,” I said to Marlene. But outside I felt only a little better, the cold wet air as heavy as a blanket.
“You need me to get you some water?” Marlene said, from the doorway.
“No, thank you,” I said. I need to be by the water, I told myself, and headed toward Tame Jaw Beach. When I got there I kept seeing seals by the rocks, their silver heads as smooth and round as infants.
Baby B hadn’t died of pneumonia on his way to the hospital. He’d drowned in the harbor, in the channel, or the bay. I couldn’t think of anything worse. It was the secret fear under every other secret fear. Whenever Lucas came home late or didn’t come home at all, that was what I wasn’t letting myself imagine. The dark water, all around. This was the worst kind when it came to my nightmares, the one I awoke from gasping.
* * *
I couldn’t stop thinking about Colin, the ferry, the water. I tried to use Dr. Brent’s meditation techniques, but it was no good. The thoughts wouldn’t go away. How had it happened and why had they lied? And underneath those questions was Cole. Did he have something to do with it? How was that possible?
I saw the Grendles, our neighbors, in their driveway, both of them eightysomething and plump, always in jogging suits. We’d lived next door to each other all my life.
“Sorry!” I said. “Sorry to bother you, but I have a question about my family. It’s about my brother who died. Remember?”
“Of course we remember,” Mr. Grendle said.
“Do you remember how he died?”
“Do you think we’re senile?” Mr. Grendle said.
“It’s not that,” I said. “I just found out how he died. I always thought he died of pneumonia.”
“No,” Mr. Grendle said. “That’s not how it happened.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I said. “Do you know why our parents lied?”
“I don’t know what your parents meant by it,” Mrs. Grendle said. “But as for us, we don’t make a habit of chasing other people’s pain. Why would we bring it up? It’s not our story.”
“But how did it happen? I mean, how could he possibly go over the railing?” My throat felt like it was twisting shut. I made a little gasp.
“Y
ou’re not doing yourself any favors worrying over it,” Mrs. Grendle said.
“And my parents? Were they—they must have been—I mean did they blame themselves?”
“They went into the house and didn’t come out,” Mrs. Grendle said. “They just closed the doors. But by summer they were okay. Not the same, you understand, but they could live with themselves.”
“Your mother lost her looks,” Mr. Grendle said. “She came out of it ugly.”
“It was the look of someone who’s seen the shadow,” Mrs. Grendle said. “I’m sure that’s why they never told you. They were trying to protect you.”
When I talked to Jim, he looked at me in surprise. “I assumed you knew,” he said. “You never talked about it, so I thought it was too painful to bring up.”
I asked Elijah West to help me find old copies of the Island Sun or the Cape Cod Paper, something that might talk about a ferry accident, a baby’s death. He showed me how to use the microfiche in the basement.
“It’s kind of old-fashioned,” he said. “But we have every single issue cataloged. You won’t miss anything.”
“It would have been January,” I said. “And really, I’m looking for an obituary, or any information about an investigation.”
Elijah looked at me curiously. “About a baby? That’s not the kind of thing you like to hear about, ever. Even in the past.”
“My brother,” I said.
“Oh Christ,” he said. “I never knew.”
“It seems like we’re the only two people who didn’t know. The whole island knows more about it than I do.”
The first thing I found was an article about my father. Or not so much about him, but he was mentioned in it. It was about the college where he worked in Boston, about how he was resigning following the birth of triplets. There was something profound even about seeing this in print, the reality of the three of us. There it was in black and white. We had existed, all of us. Not that I had doubted reality—I mean how could I? Our lives had been tainted permanently by the birth and death of Baby B. But that reality had felt for so long like an internal thing, a legend, a story, a private truth.
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