“You made me dig up a dead baby,” Tuck said. His voice was thick and slurred. “That was a bad experience.”
He rolled over and closed his eyes, and I thought he was asleep. But a minute later he started talking again.
“I wanted to fuck you as soon as I met you!” he said. “I mean not when you were passed out, but basically ever since. You haven’t been very encouraging.”
“Well. I don’t think I want to just fuck. That’s not my end goal.”
“You wanted to fuck him.”
“That was more complicated.”
“Well, this doesn’t have to be complicated. You’re making it complicated.”
“You’re the one who’s twenty-one.”
“You don’t like me because I’m young?”
I sat on the bed beside him, watching him. I opened my mouth to answer, and then realized he really was asleep now, his mouth parted, breath shallow and noisy. I pushed the hair off his temples. I leaned over him, put my lips on his forehead, smelled his scent of trees and liquor and earth. I watched him sleep for a long time, and all the while I felt the shadow, that same film of despair I’d brought back from Colin’s grave. I felt it on me and on him. It was between us. I could almost see it, almost feel it like a second skin.
26
I felt Tuck’s warm arm, his hair near my face. I had fallen asleep on the bed beside him, fully dressed. I tried to roll over and couldn’t. In his sleep he’d thrown his arm over me. The smell of toast and coffee and the hot room and his arm, it all coalesced into an unformed understanding of something, a hint, a flash of the future. This body smelling of shampoo and old liquor. This falling asleep and dreaming the same dream. This is what people want, what everybody wants. This moment, the toast and heat and Tuck—this was the opposite of loneliness.
I fell asleep again, and when I woke up, Tuck was sitting on the opposite bed, wide-awake, looking at me.
“I just got an idea,” Tuck said. I rolled over, rubbed my eyes. “You know where we have to go? I can’t believe we didn’t think of this. Bus station.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“Right? We’re transit people.”
“We’re information people,” I said.
I dressed in a hurry, and we went out into the sunshine. Neither of us mentioned the night before, and that seemed best. There were no buses in front of the bus station, and inside only a couple of benches, a rack of brochures, a water fountain, and an information desk with an old man sitting behind it.
We produced the picture of Cole, and the man listened and glared, all the while smoothing his mustache.
“I told you, I’ve never seen him,” the man said.
“You haven’t told us anything,” I said. “This is the first time we’ve asked you.”
“Well, I can’t help you,” he said.
“Did someone else ask about this man?” I said.
The man said, “I thought it was you.”
“Can you describe who you saw?” I asked. “Anything about them. I mean, old or young? Male or female?”
“I can’t help.” He wouldn’t say any more.
Outside, the day was bright and cold and still. A long, slow day. We stood in front of the bus station door. “Someone else is looking for him,” I said.
Tuck nodded. “This is how we find him,” he said.
What a relief to think that we were not alone in this search, that we had never been alone. “Who is it, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Tuck said. “But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Someone from his past life would try to contact him.”
“Don’t say past life.”
“Former life?”
“Real life.”
We went back to the motel with a whole pizza and sat on the bed, watching old episodes of Who’s the Boss? as the morning passed and the afternoon unfolded out the window. Who was the other person looking for Cole? Every few minutes we said this out loud. But we never had an answer.
“I should call home,” I said.
“What are you going to tell them?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just that I’m not coming back yet.”
“Do they know you’re with me?”
“Hopefully. Because then they’ll just assume we’re on some romantic weekend.”
“It’s kind of romantic,” he said. “But I know how you feel about romance, so...”
I didn’t have to answer him, nor did I have time to call home, because Tuck’s phone rang and he answered it.
“It’s the police,” he said. He listened for a moment. “It’s about the picture. Thank you. Yes, we’ll go right over. This is really helpful.” He hung up the phone and looked at me triumphantly.
“Well?”
“They don’t know anything about it,” Tuck said. “But someone’s wife came in, and her uncle was in the hospital for a week recently because of...it sounds like kidney stones.”
“Okay,” I said. “But what about Cole?”
“She recognized him, but not because she knows him. She said she’s seen a picture of him. Another picture. Somewhere in the hospital. It’s like two towns over.”
“In the hospital? That’s strange.”
“The whole thing is strange.”
“Let’s go to the hospital,” I said.
There was a nurse sitting at the front desk reading. She was so engaged with her book, her mouth hung open a little, and she didn’t look up until we were hovering over her. When she saw Tuck, she arranged her face to look prettier.
“We talked to Dan Graham at the Lindenberg police station,” Tuck said.
“Oh sure, Dan,” the woman said.
“And he thought we’d better bring this over here. We’re trying to track down this man? And he said this picture might match a picture you’ve got here?”
“Um,” she said, looking at us over her glasses. “Can you hold on for a sec?”
“Do you recognize him?” Tuck asked.
“Just stay here,” she said. She slapped down her book and went walking away in her white shoes. Maybe this was what happy people looked like, I thought, this ponytail, this soft body in soft clothes, easy walk, paperback book.
We sat down in the little waiting area. There was a fish tank behind the row of chairs, and Tuck and I watched the fish do their laps around and around the tank.
“That’s a tetra,” he said.
“Look, that one’s stuck in the castle,” I said.
We watched a white fish with moon eyes poke in and out of the castle window, unable to move forward or retreat into the plastic fortress. His huge eyes were terrified.
“He’s probably been stuck in there for days,” I said. “He can’t get to the food. He’ll die.”
I looked around to see if anyone could help, but the place was empty.
“This is a super small hospital,” Tuck said.
“I’m going to find someone.”
“You know what? If that fish has been stuck there for a couple days, it can stand another couple minutes.”
A man walked through the big swinging doors, and I went up to him. “There’s a problem with the fish,” I said.
“I’m a doctor here,” he said in alarm.
Then the nurse came back, with a second woman in tow. A small woman, with short hair and wrinkles around her eyes and her mouth. Some deep emotion registered on her face when she saw us. She marched toward us. She didn’t waste anything. Not words, not energy.
“Let’s see the picture,” she said.
Tuck handed it to her.
“That’s him,” she said and looked up at me, looked me in the eye, looked completely and unguardedly for a long moment. “I don’t know where he is either. Welcome to the club.”
“We know where he is,” I said.
>
She took a deep breath. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“God, no. What do you mean? He’s very much alive.”
She let out her breath. She swiped at her eyes with one tan, wrinkled hand.
“How’d you end up with this photo?” she asked. “Who even are you?”
“I’m Lydia. Who are you?”
“I’m his mother,” she said. “That’s who.”
I stared at her. “You must have been out of your mind with worry.” Then I felt the question tumbling out. “What’s his name?” I asked before she could say anything. “His real name.”
She looked at me.
“Anthony,” she said, and I was sure she wanted to say his name as much as I wanted to hear it. “Anthony Evan Coletti.”
27
The room at the end of the hallway was bright and sunny, with pink walls, and white sheets, and a vase of lilies on the windowsill. It was lined with machines and monitors, several of which were hooked up to the woman in the bed. She was sleeping, and Cole’s mother didn’t pay her any attention after giving her a quick glance through the doorway when we got there. We sat on folding chairs in the hallway just outside the room, speaking softly. My heart was racing, each beep and click of the machine in the room a little trigger setting off bursts of adrenaline. Anthony. Anthony. Anthony with a mother?
I looked into the room where the woman in the bed slept. Who was she? I looked at Cole’s mother, and she looked at me.
“So?” she said. And when I didn’t say anything, she shook her head. “Where has he been?” she asked us.
“Wolf Island,” I told her. “Since August.”
She blinked.
“It’s off of Cape Cod,” I offered.
“I know where it is. Why would he go there?” she said.
“I’ve been trying to figure out the same thing,” I said.
“I haven’t been there in a long time.”
“We can take you there,” I said. “We have a car. We’re going back. We can bring you with us.”
“I don’t want to see him,” she said, looking at me in surprise. “I never want to see him again.”
“I thought—I was sure you would want to—”
“No,” she said. “I don’t want anything to do with him. But it’s good to know where he is. Just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“In case she wakes up.”
We all looked through the doorway toward the woman.
“But who is she?” I asked.
“That’s Emily,” she said.
I stared at her blankly. Emily’s Bridge. Emily’s Bed. Emily’s Ghost.
“Who is Emily?” Tuck asked.
“His wife,” she said, impatient with us. “Anthony’s wife.”
“His wife,” I said. Anthony had more than a name. He had a past, a history, a home, furniture, pots and pans, and food in a fridge, and—I was swirling with the news of it—it made him a man, not a ghost at all, someone who was once a young man falling in love.
I felt these facts settle in me, with a mixture of emotions. To know something like this about him, finally, after so many months of only guessing, filled me with something like elation. But I felt sorrow, too, without understanding why. I felt that I was losing something. For instance, I knew suddenly with certainty that the history class he told people we took together in college, that was the history class he took with Emily. And the sound of the train, that was a sound he heard with her. And the crows were crows in trees outside the window when he was falling in love with her. I had always resented those false memories, but now they felt worse than false, they felt stolen. It wasn’t that they didn’t belong to me—they belonged to another woman, and I had no right to them.
I felt a surge of anger. He’d had—and left behind—the very thing he claimed to want so badly now. Family. All this time he’d been slowly leading my brother away from me, and he’d had a family of his own. A wife! When he’d held me, put his mouth on me. A wife and a mother! A mother. And my mother was gone and never coming back. He’d had everything, but he’d wanted more. I thought I might need to stand up and walk down the hallway just to keep from exploding with the pressure and confusion of feelings.
“Wait—what do you mean if she wakes up?” Tuck asked.
“Didn’t he tell you anything?” she asked.
“She’s in a coma?” I said, understanding suddenly. “He put her in a coma.”
I stood up, and the folding chair’s legs lifted and banged on the floor of the hospital hallway.
“He didn’t put her in a coma,” his mother said. “But he certainly didn’t stick around to take care of her.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“Only she knows. Anthony came home one day and found her like this. There’s a police report—that’s how I found out what happened. He got her to the hospital, but by the time I arrived he was gone. He vanished. He left her like this. They think she fell down the stairs.”
Tuck and I looked at each other.
“He had nothing to do with it,” his mother said. “He was at work. Neighbors saw him getting out of his car at the end of the day. And seconds later he was calling the ambulance. There wasn’t time for him to hurt her. He called the ambulance and he rode with her, and he waited for an hour, until they told him she wasn’t awake. Then he went home, packed a bag, and disappeared. He’s weak, you see. He couldn’t face it.”
The machines in the room made a kind of electric drone. I could see the white bed, the pale hair.
“You go back and tell him what you saw,” his mother said. “Tell him she’s not awake, but she’s alive. Tell him I’m taking care of her, and neither of us wants to see him ever again.”
I stood up and went to the doorway.
“She can hear everything we say,” the mother told me. “I don’t want you to scare her.”
I walked to the bed and stood over her. She had pale blond hair, and her face looked puffy and white. But other than two clear tubes snaking into her nose, there was nothing to indicate that she wasn’t just asleep. The light came in the window and made patches of gold on the white leaves of the lilies on the windowsill. I wanted to say something to her—I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve this. You’re safe now—but nothing seemed right.
“She’s a beauty,” his mother said. “Maybe you can’t tell now. But she is a beautiful girl.”
“I’m sure she is.”
She beckoned me ferociously into the hallway. “It’s best if you leave,” she said. “You don’t know about Emily? I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t he tell you?”
“We don’t know anything. We know he grew up here and that’s all—”
“He grew up on Long Island,” she said. “She’s the one who grew up here. I brought her here once she stabilized. I thought she’d rather be here in the town she knew.”
“You’re the only one taking care of her?”
“She doesn’t have anyone else,” she said, and then an afterthought, “and neither do I.”
* * *
We took Anthony’s mother out to dinner. The restaurant she chose was dark with heavy olive-colored curtains and wood beams, a steakhouse. She ate an entire steak, and a baked potato, and a salad with ranch dressing. Her body seemed too small for such a meal, but she ate steadily and doggedly until every bite was gone.
She alternated between defending him and insulting him.
“I washed my hands clean of him long ago,” she said.
She ordered cheesecake for dessert.
“He’s been claiming to be someone else,” I said. “He gave us a fake name.”
“Why am I not surprised!” she said, then immediately put down her fork and looked at me angrily. “His life hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses. Unless you’ve been kissed by tragedy,
you wouldn’t understand. But we were kissed by tragedy many times over.”
I watched her eat the cheesecake. She seemed to derive zero pleasure from the act, but she kept at it. When the slice of cake was gone, she scraped her fork along the plate and ate the last crumbling remnants she’d collected.
“I would lie about my name, too, if I abandoned my wife,” she said. “I’d be too embarrassed.”
Here was one more person with a private grief so large and ungainly she could barely contain its bulk.
“Strange question. Did he ever mention my mother?” I asked her.
“I don’t know your mother, so.”
“Did he ever talk about someone named Cecily?”
She had just lifted a cup of coffee to her lips, but now she set it down and the liquid sloshed over the edge onto the tablecloth. “Yes, he talked about someone named Cecily,” she said. “But I don’t think that could have been your mother. Cecily was a friend he made as a teenager.”
I leaned toward her across the table, feeling a swirling sensation, that terrible dizziness of discovery. “But it could have been my mother. I mean Cecily isn’t a very common name.”
“No,” she said. “That doesn’t make sense. How would he meet your mother? We were only there—we stopped vacationing that year. Cecily. Cecily was a girl. I’m trying to remember, but—I’m sure of it.”
I felt certain that this was proof he had known my mother. I tried to imagine how they met. I pictured my mother grocery shopping, checking out books from the library, sweeping into yoga class, meditating at the end of the dock, draining spaghetti. Where in that life was there room to befriend a teenage boy?
“When did you vacation on Wolf Island?” I asked.
“You know what?” the mother said. “I’m tired. I don’t much like to think about him, if I’m being honest. Why don’t you kids go back to where you came from now. And give him this message. You tell him I don’t want to see him anymore. Tell him Emily doesn’t want to see him.”
I pictured Emily, back at the hospital, still asleep, unable to tell anyone what had happened to her, unable to say if she wanted to see him or not.
Goodnight Stranger Page 20