I felt a whirling sensation. Yes, maybe in her grief she’d concocted an alternative story about Baby B. But maybe it was true. I was overcome with dizziness. He’d been dead all these years! His grave was by the fence in the cemetery, covered with lady’s slippers. I remembered standing by Cole in the kitchen that first day, how Lucas had said so happily, Lydia, it’s Baby B. And here he was resurrected again, in a new way. How many times could he come back to life?
* * *
The idea took hold of me with such force I couldn’t think of anything else. What if Baby B hadn’t drowned? What if he hadn’t died at all? What if he had grown up somewhere else, with another family, and come back to find us later? The thought was too much to bear. When I saw Cole now I felt instantly queasy, overtaken by seasickness.
He was everywhere. In the kitchen when I wanted breakfast. In the living room when I wanted to sit on the couch. He was in the bathroom when I needed a shower. On the stairs coming down when I started to go up, and going up when I wanted to come down. We were passing each other in hallways constantly like figures from an Escher dream. I couldn’t stand to think about him. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
Finally, I went back to the police station. I almost cried when I saw Marlene’s plump face.
“Why do you want to linger on something like this?” she said. Her curls bouncing on either side of her head felt sinister, like something out of a horror movie. Shirley Temple’s hair on an old woman’s body. Maybe this was how Marlene’s past self met her future self, right here in this moment with a crash of curls. “This can’t make you feel good,” she said.
“All I want to know is which direction the ferry was going? Were they coming home, or going to the cape?”
“I don’t remember, honey. I try not to think about it.”
“Did they find him?” I said. “Or is he still out there?”
She blinked at me several times. “I don’t know about his body,” she said. “But he went to heaven and stayed there, honey, in the bosom of our Father.”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “It’s not that simple.”
“You can decide how simple you want it to be,” she said. “That’s your choice.”
She looked at me with a terrible expression. She was sorry for me. She was scared of me. Me!
I hated her, but then on Clara Day Street, I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the T-shirt shop. I was hunched forward, my whole posture announcing to the world how afraid and anxious I felt. When I tried to stand up, I looked stiff and ridiculous. No wonder Marlene looked at me like that. I hadn’t slept, hadn’t eaten much of anything. All I’d done for days was think about my mother and the baby, and whether or not he was alive. It was the worst thing I could imagine.
I spent the following days looking for someone who remembered the accident, someone who had been involved in more than a marginal way. The fishermen, Sebastian and Gordon, remembered it, they said, but they hadn’t been around that night, and they hadn’t been at the funeral. I had lunch with my mom’s old friend Peggy, who lived inland by Hiram’s Bounty.
Her house was tiny and cramped, and she seemed that way, too—a bony woman, who lived alone, and seemed intent on taking up as little space as possible. She crouched in her seat as if there were low-flying birds above her. We ate a tiny lunch—apple slices, cheese, crackers, and pickles, arranged on a plate. When Peggy talked she moved her hands, but in such small ways it looked like she was knitting. No wonder my mom had liked her—Peggy left plenty of room for my mom to take up. She’d been at my father’s funeral, and at my mother’s funeral, but I hadn’t seen her much since then. She hadn’t been at Colin’s funeral, she said, because she wasn’t yet friends with my mom at that point. She hadn’t even met her.
“Are you sure there was a funeral?” she said. “It might have been very small.”
“I found a program from a memorial service. Did my mom ever say anything about it? About Colin?”
“Oh sure. All the time. She never stopped talking about it. Losing a child is the most traumatic event in a woman’s life. It defines you.”
“It defined all of us,” I said. “Our whole family.”
I thought about that as I walked away from Peggy’s house. Being defined. What your meaning is, what your very existence means. All my life we had meant grief and sadness, we meant missing something that could never come back. We meant loneliness and isolation. We meant being stuck here. But we meant other things as well, I told myself, remembering sitting on the porch with Lucas, looking out at the bay night after night: love, intimacy, intensity of closeness. Passionate care.
I asked Jim over and over again about the night of the accident.
“I didn’t own the place then,” he said helplessly. “I don’t have records. I know about it the same way you know about it, Lydia. Just heard about it. Linda cried when she found out, I do remember that. We were twenty-five. We weren’t even married yet.”
I found out that there was no medical examiner on the island, but someone from the cape handled all our deaths. When I called, though, it turned out that the medical examiner who would have been working at the time had died himself twenty years ago.
There was one funeral home on the island, and it doubled as a photography studio—specializing in passport photos. It was run by Jonathan Day, who I’d gone to school with. He’d taken over the place from his parents a year ago. He’d never been a likable guy, but things had gotten worse since I’d last seen him. His large face was expressionless. It was as though he were incapable of smiling. He stared at me morosely across a tiny desk in the corner of the room, showing no sign of recognition.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Lydia. Lydia Moore.”
“I know who you are,” he said. I looked at him and thought, embalmed. I wondered why he didn’t get a bigger desk. His knees seemed to bump against this one. I remembered that his mother had been very small. Maybe it had never occurred to him that he could use a different desk, the way we didn’t change the things our parents had arranged in our house.
I explained what I was looking for. Even when I said the words brother, and baby, and dead, the expression on his face didn’t waver.
“You can buy the records,” he said when I was done.
“Buy them? Like with money?”
“Yes, with money.”
“Are you sure you can’t just give them to me? I mean, my parents probably paid for the funeral arrangements in the first place. So.”
“Five hundred dollars,” he said.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No,” he said.
“I literally want to know one thing—was there a body?”
“If we were involved there was probably a body. Otherwise why would we be involved? But who knows? If you want to know for sure, you can buy the records.”
“You can go to hell,” I said.
* * *
I found Cole in his bedroom. I stood in the doorway. He was in jeans and a gray T-shirt, barefoot, handsome. I remembered the sound of that terrible poem, the feeling of him holding me in place. I thought about the snow globe in his hands, and inside the transparent dome our house, and in the doorway a Lydia and a Lucas trapped under glass, forever. Tiny brother, tiny sister.
We looked at each other, and my heart raced. His expression softened. He waited, smiling. I wondered what he thought I was going to say. We hadn’t spoken directly since the night at the inn. I’d avoided him, practically fled from the room when he arrived. I’d locked myself in my room at night and left the house as soon as possible every morning. He thought now I was going to—what?—ask him about that night at the inn? Tell him I was afraid? Tell him I missed him? His smile told me he was expecting to enjoy whatever it was I was going to say.
“I need money,” I said.
His smile faded. “What for?”
<
br /> “I’m trying to find out about Baby B. About his death—about his burial.”
Cole looked at me now with an odd expression. I was never good at reading him—there was too much going on—and now there was definitely too much. A whole landscape of emotion. I heard a faint sound like a little horse galloping, and thought it was his heartbeat. Then I thought it might be mine. Then I saw his foot tapping.
We heard the kitchen door. We heard water from the kitchen tap. We both pictured Lucas, the way he sometimes put his entire head into the sink to drink straight from the tap.
Cole placed his hands on my shoulders and pushed me into his bedroom. I tensed and lifted my arms, ready to fight, but he shook his head and closed the door silently.
“Leave him out of this, that’s all,” he said, nodding toward the hallway. He meant Lucas.
I stood with my back against the door, and he stood close to me. I was aware of his body, so real, so close, so wolfish with its heat and scent and that notion of blood coursing just below the surface.
“Money has nothing to do with the past,” he said.
“I found Baby B’s death certificate,” I said. “Cause of death? Drowning. Okay? He fell off the ferry in the night, he and my mom both. At least that’s the story. But there’s a piece of it that doesn’t make sense. I want to buy the report from the funeral home, to understand more about what happened that day. Unless you know more than I do?”
Cole turned abruptly away from me, going to the window. He stared moodily toward the bay. I joined him at the window and looked where he was looking.
“Why are you always staring at that thing?” Cole snapped.
“The houseboat?” I said. “I don’t know. Habit.”
He snorted as if this were an outrageous thing to say.
“I just want to know for sure how he died—and if he died. What if—” I looked at Cole’s face. “What if he didn’t die? What if he grew up? And—”
“He died,” Cole said stiffly. “He was buried in the earth. Trust me. You’re worrying about the wrong things. Playing detective, digging up the past. And meanwhile your house is literally crumbling into the sea.”
I heard the waves outside, the wind in the trees. I heard the sounds of the house all around me, the creaking and settling.
“Don’t change the subject,” I said.
“You don’t believe me? Come here.”
He led me down the stairs, through the living room, into the kitchen, and down the basement steps.
“What?” I said, suddenly stopping and holding on to the railing. “Do you have a cage of some kind constructed down here? Are you planning to hold me prisoner? It won’t work. I have plans tonight, just so you know. If I don’t show up, they’ll come looking for me.”
“Shut up,” he said. “Just look.”
I descended the final steps, and we stood in the damp chill until my eyes adjusted to the gloom. The house was built only shortly after the Day Estate, one of the earlier houses on the island. Its foundation, like the big Day house, was made of flat slate slabs stacked into an intricate underground wall. But where it rose above the earth, I saw, it was leaning precariously inward, tilted. Over the years the leaning stones had actually pushed the basement stairs over, until they were slanted and cramped under the ceiling. How had we not noticed this? How fast was it moving? I tried to remember walking down the basement steps in childhood; had there been more room?
The adjacent wall was leaning outward, toward the bay. I saw the cracked and crumbling slabs all along the ground. A tomb by the sounding sea.
“You think the ground beneath your feet is solid? It’s quicksand. It will swallow you whole. Start seeing what’s right in front of you,” Cole said, “or you’ll lose it all.”
From then on, in addition to worrying about Cole, and Baby B, about my mother and father, about Lucas, about how long we could go on together like this, about what secrets the past was holding on to, I also worried about the house. It seemed vulnerable, both to Cole and to the degradations of time. I walked from room to room. I noticed suddenly all the ways it was falling apart: the pitted, scratched floorboards that seemed to slant toward the bay, the walls that almost sagged under the weight of moisture or salt, the rusty pipes seeping amber water underneath all the sinks.
Instead of sleeping at night, I lay awake and worried. During the day I walked to the graveyard and read the old inscription. SON~BROTHER. I sometimes felt there was someone behind me, over my shoulder, a little flash of movement. But when I turned my head, there was no one.
23
There was a knock on the kitchen door, as I was washing dishes, my eyes gritty from exhaustion. I stopped dead, my hands in the soapy water, and waited for something more—a long pause in the evening. Finally, I went to the door.
Tuck was on the doorstep. He held up his hands and grinned, like he was saying surprise. He was wearing the threadbare yellow shirt he’d been wearing the day I fainted by the Carson Cove information booth, a brown jacket with patches on both elbows. His hair was standing up all around his head, as mane-like as ever, and I wasn’t entirely clear if I was looking at curls or tangles. “I came over on the nine o’clock boat,” Tuck said.
“But—why?”
“I don’t know. Wanted to see you, I guess. You haven’t called in a few days, and—I don’t know. Maybe they had you tied up in the basement.”
The night was cool, and there were small bright clouds passing over the moon. I looked behind him at the lawn, the dock, the bay.
“And now I’m glad I came,” he said. “Are you okay? You look—”
“But how did you know where I lived?”
“I just asked at that bar where the ferry comes in. Everyone knows you. I didn’t even have to say your last name. Which is good, because I don’t know your last name.”
A gull screeched. From the living room, I heard the sound of something small falling to the floor, a spoon maybe or a comb. Tuck looked over his shoulder in the direction of the ferry landing, which was empty now. The boat was gone. It wouldn’t come back until morning. He looked at my face. “Um. I can find somewhere to stay,” Tuck said.
I smiled, shook my head. “No, no, I’m being stupid,” I told him. “Of course you can stay here. I’m just surprised to see you. I mean, I’m happy to see you, too.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s a relief. Because I have no idea where I would go.”
I was happy to see him, but there was more to it than that. A faint tension was growing between my shoulder blades, a strange little gnawing pain.
“I don’t know how they’re going to react.” I nodded my head in the direction of the living room where we heard Lucas’s and Cole’s voices, a low rumble.
“Who cares!” Tuck said. “Anyway, let’s go find out.”
When he crossed the threshold, I reached out and touched the hem of his shirt. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe to feel something that was real between my fingers. It felt rebellious, subversive even, to bring Tuck into the house. It was a house full of ancient and dead things, and his footsteps were already stirring up dust.
“I like your house,” he said. “This place is, I don’t know, haunted house meets beach shack.”
Cole walked into the kitchen. He stopped inside the swinging door, looking at us. I couldn’t read his face. I didn’t know what he was thinking.
Tuck threw his arms up in the air. “There he is,” he said. He went for Cole’s hand and shook it so eagerly Cole seemed taken aback. “It is great to meet you.”
Lucas came into the kitchen, and we all stood there looking at each other. Lucas was in a panic of shyness; Cole was stiff and formal. Only Tuck seemed at ease, as if he were honestly enjoying himself.
“This is unexpected,” Cole said.
Tuck nodded in agreement. “I decided to come over on the spur of the mo
ment.”
“The spur of the moment,” Cole repeated. I could see the little bone of his jaw, moving mechanically like a clock spring, tight and meticulous. I could see he was trying to smile and having a hard time. I felt scared for Tuck.
“So you’re our girl Lydia’s friend,” Cole said.
“That’s right.”
“Making a visit on the spur of the moment.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Now, how old are you exactly?” Cole asked him.
Tuck paused. Blinked. He seemed to consider Cole for a moment. “Twenty-one,” he said finally.
We heard a quick patter on the roof. Sudden rain drummed and flashed outside the kitchen windows. Cole looked like he wanted to hit Tuck or maybe devour him.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said to Tuck. “Right now.”
“You do that,” Cole said. “Take a walk in the rain. Take a walk on the beach. The beach is glorious in a storm.”
“I know all about the beach,” Tuck said agreeably.
“Maybe you do,” Cole said. “Did you know how much Lydia loves a storm? Lydia loves the beach in a storm.”
“Stop saying that,” I told him.
We threw on yellow slickers and escaped into the night. I gulped cool air, realizing I’d been holding my breath in the kitchen. We stood at the end of the dock, looking out into the rain-pitted bay, our breath making strange little clouds around us.
“Pretty tense in there,” Tuck said.
“You have no idea.”
“So, are you okay?” Tuck said. He must have noticed how thin my face looked or how dark the circles were under my eyes. I considered telling him about the dreams that haunted me at night—the thoughts I couldn’t shake during the day. But they were too private, too wretched. Tuck seemed to like me, he wanted to help me. How could I tell him that against my will I still dreamed of Cole almost every night? That in my unguarded dreams I sometimes loved him, and sometimes ran for my life from a monster that was him, and sometimes Cole wasn’t there at all, just Colin, and I was the one holding him on the deck of the ferry, and I was the one throwing him over the edge and watching his body—with relief—as it sank.
Goodnight Stranger Page 17