“You’re twenty-one?” I said instead. “Sorry, that’s just younger than I thought.”
“Why does it matter?” he said.
“It doesn’t. I don’t know. I guess I’m surprised you didn’t leave home when you had the chance. Everyone leaves.”
“I did leave. I went to college,” Tuck says. “I went for three years. I have a year left.”
I looked at him in surprise. “What are you waiting for?” I asked. “Why not finish?”
“Once you graduate, then it’s time to do something, and I don’t know what I want to do. Once I figure that out, I’ll go back.”
“So as long as you haven’t graduated, then you’re still technically a student? I’m officially a college student, too, then,” I told him. “And I have been for ten years.”
He laughed and turned back to the bay. The red houseboat rocked quick and fast out on the waves.
“Imagine living in that thing,” Tuck said.
“Oh, I have.”
“It would be like a miracle,” he said. “Waking up every day like that.”
We heard a splash and looked down toward the water.
“Seal,” I said.
Tuck looked but couldn’t see it.
“They’re everywhere,” I told him.
Then we heard—faintly—the chimes from the old clock at the bank on the landing, eleven small chimes.
“Eleven o’clock,” I said.
“At midnight, I think I’ll kiss you,” Tuck said, turning his face toward me.
I looked at my hands, at my fingernails, at the white calcium deposits like specks of confetti in the pink nails. When we were young, girls said that each white spot on your fingernails was a boy who liked you.
“We’ll be in bed at midnight,” I said.
“Even better,” he said. “I wasn’t going to ask, but—”
“I mean—we’ll be sleeping.”
“Okay,” he said, good-naturedly. “I get it.”
“I’m twenty-nine,” I said.
“So what?”
“So—I don’t know exactly. I just don’t want you to—get any ideas about something, you know, happening between us.”
“Because you’re eight years older than me?”
“Yes. Or no. I guess it’s not that. I just don’t want to ruin anything.”
“Maybe there’s nothing more you can ruin. I mean, think about it.”
“You’re obviously not used to this,” I said. “You’ve probably never been turned down in your life. I mean, look at you.”
“Stop, stop,” he said, laughing. “I’m sorry. Don’t be mad. I won’t kiss you. I promise I will not kiss you at midnight. Nothing you could do would make me kiss you at midnight.”
We stood on the dock, thoroughly chilled. I had a bad feeling about what was coming next but for a moment I couldn’t remember what that thing was. I’d rather think about kissing Tuck at midnight.
“Can I make it up to you?” he said.
“Maybe,” I said. Suddenly I wanted to tell him something true about me and my family, something to invite him closer. I wanted him to know more about me, even if it scared him away. I had to make that offer.
I began to tell him about my conversation with Mrs. Grendle, what my mother had said about having a third child who lived with another family. How uncomfortable Cole had seemed when I told him.
“Whoa,” he said. “So what does that even mean?”
“It means—what if he didn’t die after all?”
“You said there’s a death certificate, though? And you found that article about it. And there’s a grave.”
“But—what if the whole thing was faked somehow? I know that sounds crazy, I know. Don’t look at me like that. I went to get records from the funeral director, but he’s trying to charge me an outrageous amount for them. I can’t find anyone who was actually there when it happened. I mean, no one saw his body.”
“Then what’s buried in his grave?”
I put my hands over my mouth, felt my breath warm on the tips of my fingers. “We could find out,” I said.
Tuck rocked back on his heels, regarding me. “No. No way.”
“We won’t find him if there’s no body. But if he’s there, we can put him right back.”
Tuck ran his fingers through his hair. “You know this is fucked up, right?”
“It’s the only way I’ll know for sure.”
“And probably illegal.”
“It can’t be illegal. He’s ours.”
“But you still can’t just dig people up. Even your own people.”
We heard splashing again and this time we both saw the seal, its smooth dark head popping out of the water nearby.
“Will you help me?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “For fuck’s sake, Lydia.”
But he followed me back to the house. We rummaged as quietly as possible in the shed, then walked to the graveyard in the rain, each of us carrying a shovel. I had a trowel in my raincoat pocket as well. I was glad it was raining—it would make the earth soft, and somehow make us less likely to be discovered, hidden by the soft pattering, hidden by the blur.
The only light we had was Tuck’s key chain flashlight. There was no moonlight. Even so, our eyes seemed to adjust to the darkness, once we found the grave. Tuck shone his light on the headstone. He touched the letters. Son. Brother. I stood above him.
“This will kill the lady’s slippers,” I said.
“Well?” he said. “What do you want to do?”
“Kill them, I guess,” I said and stuck my shovel into the earth.
Besides swimming in the Providence River with my freshman year friend Mary, I was basically a rule follower. I wasn’t prone to wild abandonment of reason. I didn’t follow my passion. I didn’t dance like no one was watching. I didn’t revere risk. I didn’t need to! My home was on an island; I was brought up by a possibly insane mother, a pathologically shy brother, and a father who might as well have been absent. I was haunted by my dead brother. There were uncertainties of weather and tide to contend with in my life, and there was the unpredictability of strong personalities touched by grief.
Those things were all around me, so I stayed still, and quiet. That was who I became. Lydia, still and quiet. I didn’t act, I was acted upon. I never would have gone into the Providence River, except that Mary convinced me to. I never would have gone to college in the first place, except that a teacher told me she could imagine me there, in Providence, and that was enough for me. I never would have come home except that my mother needed me.
But now I had made a decision wildly uncharacteristic of me and I was acting on it. I almost laughed, struck suddenly by the ridiculousness of what I was doing. And why was this important to know? What would it tell me? That my mother was a liar. I knew that already. That Cole was my brother after all. I didn’t want to know that ever. I had made a decision all right, and it seemed like it might turn out to be a very bad decision in the end. But I couldn’t stop now. I found my hands shaking as I gripped the shovel. I felt a deep hunger to know what was under the earth.
The digging took longer than you might imagine. We struck the ground again and again and only managed to unearth clumps of grass and lady’s slippers. Then we heard our shovels tearing root masses, that terrible ripping sound, like muscles, tendons, sinews, coming unattached from their moorings, bodies ripped limb from limb. Then we hit rocks of all sizes. Although the night was chilly, before long we were drenched as much with sweat as with rain.
“This has definitely taken a very weird turn,” Tuck said, pushing his wet hair off his forehead.
“You’re under no obligation to stay.”
“Shut up,” he said. “I’m just saying it’s weird. Sometimes you have to say things out loud.”
The hole emerged slowly over hours. I had blisters on my hands, soft, raw, raised patches of puffy white. Everything about what we were doing made me feel like someone I didn’t recognize, a stranger. A few times I stopped shoveling to laugh, but when I did Tuck stopped shoveling, too, and told me I was a lunatic and asked if I was done. No, we were most certainly not done. I didn’t let myself think too much about what I was looking for, what I might find. I concentrated on the physical act of stabbing the earth with the sharp shovel blade, lifting as much dirt as I could out of the slowly growing hole.
Twice we heard cars on the road, but they passed us by, and although I didn’t like the sound of tires on a wet road, I never stopped digging. I began to feel a growing excitement. I couldn’t believe it had never occurred to me to do this before! The act of exhuming suddenly made such perfect sense. Wasn’t this the culmination of all I’d been doing since Cole arrived in August? Every time I looked in my mother’s drawers, the boxes in the attic, when I talked to Marlene at the police station, when I looked for articles in the Island Sun, all of that was a kind of gentle digging. This was simply more physical.
Tuck’s shovel struck the corner of the coffin when the hole was only three feet deep. I shined the little key chain flashlight into the hole, saw the casket there. It was the same color as the earth. I climbed into the damp hole and touched the casket, brushed the dirt away. It was wooden, plain. We’d been digging in the wrong place, I realized, and had to extend our hole away from the gravestone in order to uncover the rest of it.
“Keep going,” I said.
“Lydia,” Tuck said. “Do you still want to do this? Are you thinking clearly about what you might see?”
I was sure there was nothing to see inside the coffin. It made powerful sense now. It explained everything. My mother hadn’t dropped—or thrown—Baby B over the railing of the ferry. She’d given him away that night, left him in the care of some other family, and returned alone, and he was out there still. He might be Cole, or he might be some other man. But I had another brother, still alive, still in this world, which meant I wasn’t alone. We weren’t alone after all.
I realized I was crying. Covered with rain, and dirt, and now tears.
“Have you actually gone crazy?” Tuck said.
“Maybe,” I said.
Once, at the booth, Kelly Cardoza had handed me her baby to hold while she ran into Jack’s to make a phone call. I set it on my lap. It turned its head to look at me, curious, wary. I experienced a complex feeling. On the one hand, I felt comfortable, as if I were biologically programmed to know what to do, but it was like the programming was blinking in and out. One minute I found the baby beautiful. The next minute I was horrified by the drool and mouth empty of teeth. The baby rocked back and forth like an animal. But the baby also felt good to hold. Felt solid and right. Like the right-sized stone in my pocket. I held the baby for ten minutes. We looked around together. The baby put its hands in my hair and then on either side of my face. The baby touched my nose.
When we lifted the lid of the coffin, I knew we were looking at a baby right away. He was there, and not there, his bones skin flesh hair withered as a ghost. His clothing was only dark shreds now, like cobwebs, but he was a perfect shape there in his tiny coffin, the bones visible under the flesh. He was the shape of bones, even if the bones were covered.
“Holy fuck,” Tuck said. We sat on the edge of the hole in the earth, both of us, looking into the coffin. I was shaking I realized. Soaking wet. The rain had poured down the neck of the raincoat, drenching my sweater.
“I can’t touch him,” I said. I wanted to pick him up. I wanted to hold him in my arms like I’d held that other baby. But I knew he might break into a hundred pieces if I picked him up. I knew the flesh would come off, and the bones would scatter.
“No,” Tuck agreed. “Don’t touch him.”
His whole head was the size of my hand, smaller than my hand. He had eyes. He had lips. His nose, though, was mostly missing, two blank holes in a skull. I felt so sad about his nose.
The smell from the coffin was surprising. Not a smell of death. It was sweet and sour, an ancient primordial scent: earth, mud, leaves, and underneath that a faint chemical smell. And something else as well, something I wanted to understand. A smell that reminded me of a lost time, and I breathed in the air from the tiny coffin, trying to spark that memory, trying to send myself backward in time. But it was elusive, not a smell of death, but also not meant for the living.
“Baby B,” I said, wondering. “He’s so much smaller than I thought.”
“Also more, you know, intact,” Tuck said, reaching out for me, touching my soaked hair.
“Yes, that’s really surprising,” I said.
“What do we do now?” Tuck said.
“Put him back,” I said. “What else can we do?”
But I didn’t want to close the lid. He was ugly, his skin gray and desiccated. There was nothing cute about him. But still, here was his body, here were his small hands, here were his cheeks, his forehead.
“Little brother,” I said.
I closed the lid, and, trembling now, we shoveled the dirt onto him again.
24
Cole was waiting for me at home. He would be forever waiting for me. In every house, in every room, at every table, in every chair. We came in through the kitchen, and stood there, soaking wet, our faces and arms streaked with dirt.
“Where were you?” Cole said, looking scared. Was this the first time I’d ever seen him scared? I couldn’t remember. But I liked it. I hadn’t thought about what I’d tell him. But I didn’t need to think up anything, because Tuck answered for me.
“We were digging in the graveyard,” Tuck said cheerfully, and Cole’s fear seemed to deepen, break the composure of his face.
“Say what you will,” Tuck said, “grave robbing is hard work.”
“I have to wash off,” I said.
We took turns in the shower. Cole stood in the doorway of his room, watching us as we passed in the hallway, furious.
“You really thought he wasn’t dead?” Cole said. “You thought it was all a dream you could wake up from. It’s not a dream. He’s dead, Lydia. She killed him.”
“What does that mean?”
But Cole disappeared into our ghost room and wouldn’t come out again. Of course, that was the new question I had been asking myself. Had she killed him? I hated Cole for saying that, because we hate the things that give voice to our fears. We hate them and we’re grateful to them—sometimes against our wills.
Tuck fell asleep on the couch, and I went to my room. From the window, I looked out at the dark lawn, serene now in a sudden patch of moonlight as the clouds cleared. The road, the woods, the cemetery, all quiet now. I didn’t want to think about the tiniest baby, my brother, his fragile bird bones, the way he’d flown—just one moment suspended, levitating, and then—
I had to protect Lucas. That was the thought I couldn’t escape from that night. I’d lost one brother, and I couldn’t risk losing another.
I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t sleep. And I felt a kind of dissolution. I was crumbling like the foundation of the house. I longed for the past. Or the future. I wanted Tuck, and I almost went to him. I imagined kneeling beside him in the living room. I thought about kissing him at midnight. But I also thought, he may be helping now, but at some point, he’ll figure out what he wants to do and go back to school. And I will still be here alone, just me and the demons down under the sea, brooking and bucking the pull of the tide, panting and clawing and fit to be tied, tumbling down by the festering side, of our darling, our darling, our life and our bride. In this tomb by the sounding sea.
* * *
We walked to the landing in the morning, Tuck and me. The beach felt disorderly, with piles of shells and rocks and seaweed, with small dead creatures strewn about. Everything was wet, a
nd I breathed in the smell of rain and leaves, the smell of gasoline in the harbor.
Outside Mady’s, the man with the cat greeted us gravely and politely.
“Do you see my kids?” I asked. “Do I have them with me today?”
“Just the one,” he said. “She’s standing right there.”
“What does she look like?”
“She looks just like you. In fact—”
He studied my face for a moment, confused. Then shook his head. “Have you met my wife?”
“Yes,” I said. “She’s lovely.”
“She’s my whole world,” he said. “She’s my apple pie. She’s the reason I get up every morning.”
“Do you know who I am?” I asked. “I’m Lydia Moore. My mother was Cecily Moore. Did you know her?”
“No,” he said, sadly. “I don’t know your mother, little girl. Are you lost?”
“I hope not,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”
Not lost, old man, but different. When I looked at the landing that morning, it was as if I were seeing it through new eyes. I noticed things I’d never seen before, although they’d been there all along. Chips in the sidewalk. Rust on the old No Fishing sign hung from the post office dock. And there were other differences, too—the coffee we bought from Mady’s tasted like bitter soil.
And I was different in a way I didn’t yet understand. I was separated from everything and everyone around me, as if I’d brought something back with me from Colin that had changed me. Not from the grave, not from the coffin, or from his body. From somewhere else, wherever death is. I’d brought back a shadow that fit over me, something transparent, undetectable, but there, every inch of me covered by it, like another skin. It wasn’t a mood, an emotion, it was a state of being, and it felt permanent. I was permanently shadowed. I would never be without that shadow.
Goodnight Stranger Page 18