In the spring I would resod the grave. I would plant different flowers—daffodils and tulips. Until then I would visit the disturbed earth and say comforting things to that littlest of brothers beneath the earth.
When the ferry arrived, Tuck and I stood in line. The planks came down. He held out his hand and I took it. We walked onto the boat.
I remembered the smell of the grave. He was a child and I was a child. I remembered the tomb by the sounding sea. I remembered the dirt under my fingernails. I remembered the terrible days after my mother had died. I remembered my mother weeping in the night.
The ferry whistled. Its motors churned us backward.
Tuck and I stood shoulder to shoulder on the upper deck of the boat. I had nothing with me but my wallet and a wool jacket. I didn’t watch the landing disappear. I looked instead at the wide gray water, the cape getting closer and closer and more and more real.
25
On Emily’s Bridge, Tuck and I both fell asleep. We’d reached the bridge midafternoon, exhausted from the drive, and we’d sat down on the narrow bridge to wait, and without meaning to, slipped into sleep.
When we woke up, it was very dark, and we couldn’t see anything but each other and the wooden boards we were leaning against. I felt a whirl of confusion, but it settled slowly, and I remembered where I was, and who I was with. I looked at him, messy hair, wide mouth. We scrambled up, since Emily’s Bridge was so narrow there was barely room for a car, let alone two sleeping bodies.
“I’m frozen,” he said. I nodded. I heard wind in the leaves, and cars on the highway far away. I felt stiff with cold.
I’d thought about Emily’s Bridge obsessively for days, the smell of it, the sweet rotten odor of damp wood, and the sound of the river below. In my imagination Cole’s identity was waiting for us here. We’d pluck it down as easily as sliding a jacket off a hanger. We’d go back home with that garment and throw it over the man himself. And he would disappear.
But I hadn’t imagined this disappointment, as fast and chaotic as the water racing underneath us, at finding...nothing. No clue, no hint, no trace of Cole. I should have known, shouldn’t have held on to such a thin—almost invisible—hope that the bridge was somehow the key to his identity.
“Where should we go now?” I asked as Tuck and I walked off the bridge. All was still and quiet now. No cars. No ghost. No shadow of a noose over the water. We climbed back into his car, the little rusted Honda Civic that had driven us here today.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let me think. I had a weird dream on the bridge when we fell asleep.”
“I had a weird dream, too.”
“I dreamed I jumped in,” Tuck said.
“I dreamed someone pushed me in.”
“That’s almost the same dream,” he said. He looked at me in the dashboard lights. “We better find a hotel.”
“Together?”
“Most rooms come with two beds.”
I felt my cheeks going red. “It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “I won’t sleep either way. One room will save money.”
He glanced at me with a strange look—he was smiling, but sad. It occurred to me for the first time that I didn’t know what Tuck was hoping to get out of all this. It had felt at first like a way for him to pass the time—to play detective. But now?
“One room, two beds,” I said more gently. “We should stay together tonight.”
He nodded and drove.
The motel we found had a big empty parking lot and little dingy rooms. The desk clerk was a middle-aged woman with a red face, angry and pinched. I was glad Tuck was with me, until we got into the room, and then I was suddenly overcome with awkwardness. I immediately climbed into one of the beds fully dressed and lay there looking at the ceiling, while Tuck took a shower.
“Sleepy?” he asked when he emerged from the bathroom, smelling damp and warm and like soap.
“No,” I said. “Well, yes.”
He grinned. “Was this a mistake?” he said. “You seem uneasy.”
“No. I’m not. I’m just not used to being—”
“With a naked man?”
“I was going to say away from home.”
“Want to watch TV?” Tuck asked. “That’s a nice normal wholesome activity.”
I sat up in bed, and Tuck gave me the remote. I clutched it, exhausted. I felt worn-out from the drive. Tuck’s Honda Civic was a rusty rattling thing with a dented door and a missing mirror on one side. The rust and rattling didn’t bother me, but the whoosh of cars coming past us on the highway, the flicker of highway markers as we raced past them, all the sounds of the highway and the reminders of how far away from home we were—those things nearly did me in.
Earlier, as we’d driven away from the cape, I’d sat in the passenger’s seat holding a little blue hand mirror, something normal women use for putting on lipstick. I’d used it for the hypnotic effect of looking into my own eyes. Okay, okay, okay, I kept telling myself. And we were okay.
At some point in New Hampshire, my body gave up, too exhausted from two hours of adrenaline to do anything but sleep. I leaned my head back and sank into a tumultuous doze. And when I woke up, I was calm. The highway was still a flash of road signs and trees and other cars, and the sound of it was still the roar of another ocean. And I was still in the center of all that noise and motion. But I was calm. I was my own anchor, I guess.
“I’m okay now,” I’d said to Tuck, amazed, and he’d beamed at me from the driver’s seat.
In the motel late that night, we turned the light off. But I couldn’t sleep. I listened to Tuck breathing. Long after Tuck was asleep, I lay in bed, feeling a terrible thickness around my heart. I looked at Tuck’s face as he slept and felt separated from him by a wide gulf. He was too young, too happy, too beautiful, too optimistic, too good, too twin-less, too much of everything that I wasn’t. The substance around my heart felt like a rubbery denseness. The shadow was there, even there, inside me—that darkness I’d carried away from Colin’s grave.
I lay in the motel bed, listening to Tuck breathing, longing for home, and for Lucas, for my mother and father, for Colin, and for that old life that would never return. Mostly I longed for the old life, with its familiar griefs and those old beautiful fears that seemed quaint now, like things encapsulated in a museum display, not at all like the new fears that gnawed at me like hungry animals.
* * *
The town of Lindenberg felt familiar from all the poking around we’d done online. We parked the car downtown and sat there for a few minutes, looking at the sweet, carved signs hanging out in front of shops, bright leaves on the slender trees on the hillside behind the town. I felt tired, gritty eyed, impatient. Maybe just hungry, I thought.
“Where first?” Tuck asked.
We maneuvered through the sunny streets and finally found our way to a diner on the corner. We ordered eggs and toast and coffee, and a young waitress with a kind face, who reminded me of Diane back at Mady’s, served us.
“May as well start right now,” Tuck said. He pulled the snapshot of Cole out of his wallet, and handed it to our pretty waitress, who looked at him curiously. Her bangs were so long they kind of fell into her mouth, and she kept brushing them away with her little hand.
“Do you recognize him?” Tuck asked her.
She shook her head, looking regretful.
“Wish I did,” she said. I got the sense it was Tuck she wished she knew. She smiled at him and kept on tucking her hair behind her ears in a charming way. I felt awkward, as if I were interrupting something.
“Why do you ask?” the waitress asked, her eyes wide with curiosity.
Tuck shook his head. “We’re trying to track him down,” he said.
“Good luck,” she said and refilled our coffee.
Wherever we went, women were anxious to help us out. Maybe they l
iked the mystery, or maybe—probably—they just liked Tuck. They wanted to help, but no one recognized Cole at the beauty salon, the office supply store, the wine and spirits shop, the clothing boutiques, the sandwich place, the toy store, the consignment shop, the shoe store, the pizza parlor, the flower shop, the movie theater, the Thai restaurant, or the library.
We went to the police station.
“Is it an emergency?” the receptionist behind the counter said.
“Not exactly.”
“We’ve got a retirement thing going on,” she said, pointing through a door where we could see several men and women wearing pointed paper hats. “But if it’s an emergency, I can get the guys.”
“We just want to know if anyone recognizes this man. We emailed a picture a few weeks ago, but we thought we’d try in person.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” the woman said, and took the picture and Tuck’s cell phone number.
It was after one, and we were tired and hungry and discouraged. And there was still the drive home to think about, and what I had to face at the end of that drive. Life in the big, rotting house. Life with Cole.
“This is hopeless,” I said. “You were so certain, I started believing if I could just get here, it would somehow be easy.”
We sat on a bench outside the coffee shop. There were window boxes full of dead mums, their spidery flowers brittle and brown.
“Worst-case scenario?” Tuck said. “We don’t find anything out. You go home and gather more intel.”
“I can’t go home.” I slumped down on the bench. “I can’t keep being around him.”
Tuck stretched his legs out on the sidewalk in front of us. “He doesn’t seem that scary to me. I feel like he has some sort of power over you, but to the rest of the world—”
“It’s a nightmare,” I said. “I didn’t tell you everything. I didn’t—”
I could feel the birthmark on my cheek catching fire.
“What more could there be? The ferry, and the grave—” Then all at once his eyes widened with understanding. He waited but I didn’t say anything. “Wait. Did you—you slept with him?”
“No,” I said. “Yes.” I stopped talking and watched the expression on his face, the permutations of surprise and confusion and maybe betrayal. I wanted to tell him about the Island Inn, and Annabel Lee, about that night in the storm, the way I’d felt caught in some fierce current—how I’d wanted to hold on to Cole, keep him close, invade and conquer him—because he held answers I needed, and even the questions were something he had brought to me. How I hated him, but I was grateful to him as well. Even now. Even still.
“Wow.” Tuck leaned back and ran one hand through his hair. “When did this happen?”
“Before I knew—before I realized—before I met you in Carson Cove that day. I feel so stupid.”
He looked around at the cold, sunny streets, the Christmas lights in windows, the carved wooden signs. Classical music piped out from one of the shops across the street, triumphant violins and cellos totally at odds with the way I felt. I was the opposite of triumphant. I was triumphed over. I was tiny.
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Tuck said. “Obviously. But I’m wondering what we’re even doing here? Because now—”
“Now I have to find out who he is. Now more than ever.”
“Because now you like him?”
“No. Because I—I feel like he’s taking everything from me. He’s taking my place.” I leaned toward Tuck. “It’s like I don’t have a home anymore. We have to do something before it’s too late.”
Tuck stood up. He looked up and down the street.
“Maybe it’s already too late,” he said, cool and cruel. “I’m going for a walk.” He went to the corner and then disappeared. I knew from being Lucas’s sister that it’s better to let someone walk away. They’ll come back when they’re ready, when the walking has cleared a good space in their thoughts, when they’re ready to forgive, or agree on a truce.
But I waited for an hour, getting colder and colder, and Tuck didn’t come back. I bought a sandwich, and walked back to the motel, where I saw with relief Tuck’s rusty car still in the parking lot. In the dark motel room, I ate the sandwich and waited for Tuck.
I waited all afternoon.
Periodically I took a moment to catalog my situation. I was in a strange town, alone in a motel room, waiting for someone who may or may not actually ever show up. I didn’t have enough money to pay for the motel room alone. And it was unclear how I would get home if Tuck never reappeared. Would I take his car? Could I find a bus? Did I even want to go home? I thought about waiting tables in the little diner where we’d had breakfast. I could change my name, dye my hair, start over again far away from any ocean.
And what about Tuck? I had no way to call him, no way to reach him. Was he at least inside somewhere? Or was he out in the cold?
I put on my jacket and stepped outside, walked toward downtown. The air was crisp and sweet smelling, and the whole town had a kind of Christmassy cheer. People with rosy cheeks were hurrying down the sidewalk. Children in mittens were trailing after their mothers.
I wasn’t hungry, but I made myself buy a slice of pizza. I took it to the bench where I’d last seen Tuck, and worried half of it down. I sat in the dark, watching the happy people of Lindenberg holding hands and walking dogs.
Then I heard drums.
Not right away, but after hearing them for several minutes it occurred to me that Tuck was somehow responsible for the drumbeat. And once I’d had the thought, it became a conviction. He was communicating with me in that most elemental way, hands on skin, heartbeat.
I threw away the rest of the pizza and took off toward the drum sound.
But if you’ve ever tried to follow a drumbeat, you know it’s almost impossible. The sound ricochets off buildings and trees. It echoes. It’s everywhere. I walked to the end of Main Street, and heard it closer than ever, but when I turned a corner, it was suddenly so faint it was almost gone.
I grabbed someone’s coated arm, a man, who looked at me in surprise.
“Where is that drumming coming from?” I asked.
“Dunno,” he said. “Maybe Calderwood Park? That’s what it sounds like to me.”
He pointed, and I went in that direction.
I found the entrance to the park, a path into the dark woods. It was the right place for the drumming. I could hear it louder than ever. I had no flashlight, but there was a half moon, and the sky still looked blue-black, with the faintest light. I took the path, walking half blind, feeling my way forward tentatively. Then I saw brightness ahead.
And after a few minutes, the path opened up into a little meadow, where a small fire was sending orange and yellow sparks up into the night, and bodies crowded around it, swaying. I crept toward them, and no one seemed to notice me. There were about fifteen people, all young and stoned and gorgeous, and the air smelled like smoke and sage. Someone turned and looked right into my eyes, and then handed me the joint they were smoking.
“Go ahead,” he said kindly, and watched when I held it to my lips and breathed in the ashy heat of it. More people emerged from another path and joined the fire, and people from the fire left to go into the trees.
“Excuse me,” I said, to anyone who was listening. “I’m looking for my friend. Tuck. Does anyone know Tuck?”
Two people, a guy and a girl, turned toward me.
“He’s beating the drum,” the girl said.
“No, those are hammers,” the guy said.
They looked at each other and laughed, their beautiful faces lit up orange. The girl’s face was painted with splashes of color all along her cheeks and temples.
“Is he building something?” the guy asked.
“I definitely think that’s a drum,” the girl said.
Then more p
eople came out of the trees, and with them was Tuck, no coat, his face painted with the same splotches of color.
“Oh my god!” he said, when he saw me. “This is amazing. How did you find me?” His eyes, what I could see of them, were pools of ink, irises swallowed up by huge black pupils. “Come on!” he said, and led me to the fire, where he lay down, so close to it, that I worried the soles of his shoes would melt. I watched tiny sparks leap from the fire and land on Tuck, one of them burning a hole in his sweater.
“What’s going on here?” I said.
“It’s like preparation for the solstice,” he said. “It’s a festival welcoming the dark.” He closed his eyes and grew quiet.
“Let me take you home to sleep,” I said.
“Not yet.”
The firelight swirled, the leaves made their respiratory sounds in the trees. Everyone laughed. Someone started to dance. The sky was full of stars, and then the moon went behind a cloud, which was sad and beautiful, and then it came out from behind the cloud, which was just as beautiful and just as sad.
I finally led Tuck back to the motel, through the cold streets, and he took a shower. I had to turn the water on and tell him to undress and get in. Then after ten minutes, I had to turn the water off and tell him to dry off.
“What exactly did you take tonight?” I asked him.
“A couple things,” he said. “I met a girl named Ramona, and she had this little silver bag, and it was full of pills of all colors, and they were so tiny, like fairy pills.”
He lay down on one of the beds and looked up at the ceiling fan. I sat on the edge of the bed, not touching him. Looked at his face. His lips were parted in an ecstatic expression, as if he were trying to take a sip of the night.
“Why don’t you like me?” I asked.
“I do,” he said. His eyes widened, seemed to snap into focus.
“But no more than you like anyone else.”
“What are you trying to say exactly?” He rose up on his elbows. “I feel like you’re giving me some mixed signals. I mean, what is it you want?”
What did I want? Well, what was the opposite of loneliness? Twin-ness. Could he give that to me? Could anyone?
Goodnight Stranger Page 19