The article ran a picture of my father, a small black-and-white photo. It was even a little blurry, the way he had been. Ill defined. Quiet. Muffled. What other man would have been the right match for my mother, with her habit of bright, loud insistency? There was no doubting her, no questioning her. She didn’t just make the decisions in our lives; she defined our lives. We existed because she told us: exist. Things had names and meanings because she said it was okay. My father went along, the way we had. Agreeable. I felt a kind of haze of love as I looked at his tiny, blurry, colorless picture.
There was no mention of my mother in the article, not even her name. It seemed unbelievable. She was the creator of the world, wasn’t she? I almost laughed. Maybe all little girls thought that about their mothers. But why would I still feel surprised that the world and all its journalists weren’t forever writing articles about my mother?
Mother of Two Insists on Adding Nutritional Yeast to Orange Juice for Health Benefits. Mother of Two Allows Swimming in October. Mother of Two Fills Room with Candles Again.
She lit candles around the room on our birthday, and sometimes other days as well, the light like a beacon that Colin might see. Her own private lighthouse. She lit so many candles the quality of air in the room changed, grew dazzling, smelled sweet, mouthwatering. I could feel the wax between my teeth.
Once firemen came because neighbors saw the dancing light through the window. They stood in the kitchen, while she explained. She didn’t mention Colin. She said, “I light candles.” That was all. No apology, no explanation. And yet, when the firemen left, one of them looked back at her with pity. I could still see his expression, feel it like scar tissue still there after so many years. After they left, she was small and sad. It was a terrible sight. Stripped bare, that blurry vulnerable look of someone wiped clean of makeup, someone without their glasses, that terrible feeling that you can almost, but not quite, recognize someone who should be more familiar to you.
I don’t know why I thought of this that day in the library. I wondered if memories were surfacing because I was approaching the truth. But as I read through those old papers from so many years ago, I felt further and further away from any truth.
But then I found it: Tragic Ferry Accident Leaves Infant Dead. It was front-page news, of course. I read it in a kind of panic, wanting to know more, but afraid to. The night had been stormy. The baby had been sick. The boat had pitched in some rough water, and baby and mother had tumbled over the side.
Baby and mother?
Both of them?
I looked up from the article, reimagining the night once again. Baby and mother. That doesn’t happen, I thought. You’d have to climb onto the railing to tumble over.
My father was quoted in the article. “‘We’re devastated,’ said William Moore, husband of Cecily. ‘We’ve lost our son, but we’re trying to count our blessings. I could have lost my wife as well, but she’s still here today. She is alive.’”
She is alive. The last line chilled me. It had to be a coincidence that the quote matched what I’d seen written in Cole’s notebook. Still, the hair on my neck stood on end. It seemed incredible that no one on the island had told me the story before. Hadn’t any of the kids we’d gone to school with heard the story from their parents? How had we been protected from the truth for so long? The truth was beginning to seem like a strange and duplicitous thing. There were truths inside truths, many-headed truths, infinities of truths. Everything I knew to be true about my mother, for instance, might have come into being after we were born, after Colin died. She had lived forty years before we were alive. I had known her for only twenty years, I realized, less time than I’d known everyone else on the island.
At home, there was a fire in the fireplace. Cole was reading on the couch; Lucas was tying flies at his desk. I wanted to tell them the whole story. It was eating at me, a nightmare. And telling the nightmare is the best power over it. But when I saw them, cozy like that in the living room, something like déjà vu swept through me, and then a terrible tingling, the sensation of rain in my head. For a moment I couldn’t tell what I was feeling, and then I knew it was anger, a thousand points of anger like the pinpricks of fast falling rain. The fire, the furniture, the room, the house, none of it felt like mine anymore.
How had he managed, after all, to take my home from me like this? Seeing him so at ease, sitting where I should be sitting, reading a book from our bookcase, I realized that bank or no bank, refinancing or not, the house was more his than mine now.
That night I dreamed of the seals standing sternly at the foot of my bed. They struck their flippers together.
“What do you want?” I asked them, afraid.
“You know,” they said.
I woke with a start. My bedroom door opened and Cole stood there.
“What do you want?” I cried.
“You know,” he said.
I woke with a thundering heart.
* * *
In Carson Cove later that week, Tuck and I sat on the sand again. His scarf flapped in the wind, and I took the edge and tucked it into the collar of his coat. Felt the warmth of his throat, the secret edges of his collarbone.
“So now there are two things to solve,” I said. “What happened to Colin, and who Cole is.”
“And how they’re connected,” Tuck said.
“Exactly. I feel like he has something to do with it. Like he’s responsible for Colin drowning. But that’s crazy, right? He was a baby then, too.”
“So what’s the plan now?” Tuck asked. “Back to Vermont?”
“This is like step one of phase one of even being a normal human being,” I told him. “I can’t go to Vermont, probably ever. I’m going to grow old and be an ancient recluse on the island, and kids are going to call me a witch and dare each other to knock on my door and run away. No, I can’t go to Vermont. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
He took up a handful of sand and let it trickle between his fingers. “Then we start the investigation here,” Tuck said. “Get a picture of him and email it around. You know, do you know this man? That kind of thing.”
“We? It’s your investigation now, too?”
“Yeah!” he said. “I want to learn his name.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“For you, though,” he said.
We looked out across the water, and pretty soon the ferry rounded the corner, getting bigger and bigger as it slid into the harbor.
“Get a picture,” Tuck said as I walked onto the ferry. “Email it to me. Then you don’t have to worry about you-know-who finding it.”
* * *
I did get a picture—on our birthday. Our birthday fell at the very beginning of November. It was the season of wind. Winds that met and tangled over the harbor, winds that whipped the bay into a frenzy of waves with little whitecaps, like invisible egg beaters, frothing up a meringue.
The night before our birthday, with wind moaning in the rafters, I took out the present I’d gotten for Lucas, wrapped it, and set it on the kitchen table. I stood alone for a minute, looking at the wrapped package, the color of the paper, so strange and sad in the darkness of the night. I looked at the package and listened to the wind and felt suddenly dizzy with sadness. What was happening to us? The life we loved?
When I came down in the morning, tired and on edge from the wind and my own uneasy thoughts, there was another, tiny package on the kitchen table, and Lucas was standing by the stove with a spatula and pancakes sizzling. I felt moved by the sight of him, grateful and heartbroken all at once.
I poured coffee. Lucas flipped pancakes. He was wearing the Kiss the Cook apron, and from the back he looked exactly like Dad. I hadn’t noticed the resemblance in a long time.
Cole took his coffee out to the dock and stood in the cool air, looking at the sunrise over the water. He was wearing a navy sweater
with a cable-knit pattern, and when he came back in, the sweater seemed full of the smell of outdoors. It reminded me of something, some elusive thread from way back. I felt dizzy, breathing in the smell of the woolen sweater, the scent held in its fibers—sun, salt, earth—and the smell of coffee and bacon, which were so familiar and wrapped up in home and family.
Cole’s hair was longer than when he’d arrived, and it looked rich and healthy. Had he gained weight? Just a couple pounds, enough to fill out his face. He looked healthy and vibrant, as if now instead of simply emanating heat, he also emanated light.
Later I caught the reflection of my face in the old coffeepot. It was distorted by the curve of the pot, but distorted or not, I saw my huge eyes, my pale skin. I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks, and that was probably why I looked the way I looked, but it occurred to me that Cole had been siphoning my well-being, stealing a vitality for himself that used to be mine.
After breakfast, Lucas unwrapped his present, carefully, without tearing the paper.
“Look at it,” he said. It was a camel hair overcoat. He held it up. “Like Dad’s,” he said.
“It’s like the one he wore when we were really little. I thought you would like it, even if you don’t get a chance to wear it much.”
“I love it,” Lucas said. He tried it on, and it transformed him even more than the Kiss the Cook Apron. It wasn’t even that he resembled Dad so much, I realized, as that he resembled a dad. We were grown up, or something like it. We were twenty-nine that birthday.
Lucas and Cole gave me a jewelry box, and inside was a silver bracelet.
“There’s more,” Lucas said, and held out his hand. Clasped there was a charm: a silver jellyfish. “You put that on the bracelet,” he said.
“I get how it works. Jewelry isn’t that foreign to me. I’ve seen it on TV.”
“Very funny,” Lucas said. Then Cole handed me a charm, a silver pyramid.
“Triangle,” he said, reaching out to fasten the charm on the bracelet. His fingers on my wrist. Both of us thinking of the night on the beach when he’d drawn the triangle in the sand.
“And,” Lucas said, taking out one more box from where he’d stashed it in the cupboard where we kept the cheese grater, “here’s one more. For you.” He handed it to Cole.
“It’s not his birthday,” I said and they both looked at me, offended.
Cole unwrapped it. It was something they sold at the little gift shop at the landing. A miniature island in a glass dome. When you shook it, sparkles rained down on the sand, the blue plastic waves, the trees in the center of the island, the houses, the shops, the tiny plastic seal on its tiny plastic rock.
“It’s not much,” Lucas said. “It’s supposed to be Wolf Island.”
I felt sick with envy. A stupid gift from a stupid tourist shop, a stupid snow globe. But I wanted it. I wanted it for myself.
“Okay, smile,” I said, grabbing the camera. My voice was bitter as metal, and they looked at me, surprised, suspicious. But they obeyed, standing with their arms around each other awkwardly.
“Got it,” I said. The envy seemed to change, mutate, grow spines, wings. It took off, great uneven breaststrokes through my own chest cavity. I was in charge now, I thought. I was telling the story. The next thing that was going to happen: I was going to find his name.
Tuck and I looked up email addresses and composed an email. We sent the photo as an attachment. We started with the secretary at the Lindenberg High School. “Secretaries are always helpful,” Tuck said. We also emailed librarians, the police department, and the fire department. This was my fifth trip to Carson Cove, and it was getting easier—incrementally—every time.
There was a weird reversal happening with my visits. It was now on the island that I felt crazy. I felt it in me like something boiling on a fire. Faster and faster, hotter and still hotter. I felt things evaporating at alarming speeds. The only relief was to be in Carson Cove with Tuck. There, things quieted to a simmer. It was so organized, so planned, those excursions off the ferry. Each step felt premeditated. We were like children working on a school project, that soothing level of safety. I felt like someone’s mom should appear at any moment with crackers and milk.
That afternoon Tuck waited with me for the ferry back to the island. Then he turned to me. “Why don’t I just go with you?”
“What? To the island? Now?”
“Why not? I could meet Lucas and Cole, and see where you live.”
I looked at him. The sun shone through his hair. His face was wide, happy. He was like a puppy wagging his tail. I thought he was beautiful. Every time I saw him I wanted to touch his hair. But there were other things, too. When I came over on the ferry, he would leave work to sit with me, walk right out, leaving the other employees staring after him. When I asked about his job, he shrugged. Didn’t matter. Who cares. Once he was drunk when I arrived, and his coworkers raised their eyebrows in a way that meant as soon as we walked out they were going to talk about him. I liked him drunk. He was sweeter than ever, even sentimental. “You’re so pretty,” he said that day. His long arms and legs seemed longer. Once he told me he’d gotten some mushrooms and asked if I wanted to take them with him. I declined. More than once we passed women on the street who looked at him and then me with a kind of vicious chill.
“Old girlfriend?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” he said. “Just a...friend.”
I thought I understood why he enjoyed being part of the investigation, why he was curious about Cole and Lucas, how fun it must have been to be on the edge of something dark, something scary. Safe but thrilled. That was fine with me. I appreciated his company and his help. But when he asked about the island... Well, there were things I didn’t want to share. Even my loneliness was private.
“Another time,” I told Tuck, about the island. “Soon, okay?”
I stood on the deck of the boat in the wind, watching Carson Cove get tiny as we chugged toward the island. The boat was almost empty. I made myself stand on the deck and look down into the water. I don’t know what I wanted to see or feel. Certainly, I thought about the baby. But I imagined it was me under that water.
22
November was gray and silver: water, sand, branches, sky. Tuck called to tell me that he’d heard back from the school, the police department, and the library of Lindenberg. No one recognized Cole.
“That can’t be true,” I said. “Are we at a dead end?”
“We have to keep trying,” he said.
I went to the Grendles again, one afternoon when thunderclouds were gathering in blooming masses over the water. The weight of water in the air and quiet in the house made me feel like a spinning top, unable to be still. I stepped out into the chilly yard. I picked up a rake, then leaned it on the house again. I wanted to do something, to make a list, solve an equation, answer a question. Finally, I marched across our yard and into the Grendles’.
Mrs. Grendle was home alone. She waved me in without a word. Inside we drank bourbon at the kitchen counter, until her cheeks flushed, and blood vessels like rosy spiderwebs blossomed just above her cheekbones.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” I told her. “I’ve been trying to find out more about my mom. I don’t know. I just thought maybe you—being neighbors for so long—”
I thought, but didn’t say aloud, that I doubted how well she knew my parents even if she thought she knew them intimately. What we think we know about our neighbors is a veneer. Take Stephan and Stephanie, and the black eye, the cut cheek. Those were islanders I’d thought I knew pretty well, actually. But what I’d forgotten to account for was secrets, how secrets are as common as freckles. Perhaps to the rest of the island, Lucas and I looked happy.
No one saw that under the surface we were battling for control of our memories. No one imagined that I was haunted at night by dreams that alterna
ted between drowning in black water and drowning in a kind of terrible desire. And that every time I walked to the landing along the bay, I felt again the wet sand, the fierce wind, his mouth—when what I really wanted was to forget that night. No one looking at me would know that I was trying to unravel the secrets of my mother’s past, and what exactly had happened on the deck of the ferry twenty-nine years ago.
“Your mother was a memorable woman,” Mrs. Grendle said. “Beautiful, and a talker. She was very proud of you kids. You know it’s rare to have twins. It’s special. And she loved being special.”
That was an understatement. “Did she talk much about the baby?” I asked. “The third baby?”
“Oh sure, sometimes. It weighed on her.” Mrs. Grendle herself was talkative now, more than I’d ever seen. She swirled the liquid in her glass and took a slow sip. “Losing a child changes you in unexpected ways, and I know this from experience, but it’s not a story I like to tell. Your mother... One time I overheard her. I was at the table next to her at the Quahog Pit. I heard her telling a stranger, a tourist, that she had a third child, but he lived with another family.”
My stomach seemed to swoop like some seabird on the wind. I felt nauseous. I stared at Mrs. Grendle. What did that mean? A third child who lived with another family. What family? What child?
“The only other child is Baby B, and he drowned.”
“Grief makes us say strange things,” Mrs. Grendle said.
“But that’s not strange, that’s crazy,” I said. “Why would she lie? I don’t understand.”
Mrs. Grendle picked up her bourbon again and downed it. “Maybe she was protecting herself. It was easier to think the child had gone to live with someone else, better to believe a lie than to remember the real story every day of her life. Anyway, she’s dead and gone now. And this was probably fifteen or twenty years ago.”
Goodnight Stranger Page 16