“All true,” he said.
Eddie appeared from the kitchen. “Look what the cat dragged in,” he said, happily, throwing his arm around me and squeezing me to him. He smelled of the bar, the brine of beer and oil from the kitchen.
“You okay?” he said.
“Oh sure,” I said. I wanted to hug him, to hold him for a long time, hold on to everything he meant to me—childhood and love and the simplicity of wanting something you can’t have.
On the beach on the way home I saw a ghost moving toward me, larger and larger as it emerged from the fog.
No. Not a ghost. Cole.
We stood facing each other on the sand.
“You know what I like?” he said finally. “This.” He touched the birthmark on my cheek. “It looks like the wind blew it there.”
“Let’s go home,” I said, and we walked side by side.
In the doorway I paused, listening, because it was my habit now to pause and listen in doorways, even when the thing I was listening for was just there behind me.
“Where’s Lucas?” I asked.
“He won’t bother us,” Cole said softly.
I looked at him in alarm. “What do you mean? Where is he?”
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I just meant he’s out. He has an appointment at the clinic to look at his hand. They want to do an X-ray. He might be a couple hours.”
“Someone should be with him.”
“He can go to a doctor’s appointment by himself,” Cole said.
I felt sluggish and hot. Haunted by the ghosts of whores. By Cole sleeping on the other side of the wall night after night. By Emily. And Anthony. Lydia and Lucas and Colin. And my mother, who seemed like a stranger to me when I thought of her now.
I went to my mother’s room. I’m not sure what I thought would be in there. I don’t know why I wanted to go into the room, and sit on the bed, and then lie down. The bed was bare, stripped of its sheets. But still it was soft, and the pillows comfortable, and the faint sweet smell of dust and sandalwood rose all around me. I felt for a moment as though I were floating—my body adrift in some ocean. Maybe, I thought with a start, this isn’t my body at all, maybe this is somehow her body, my mother’s—wasted and almost ready to die, giving in to the pull of its mortality.
I looked up and saw Cole in the hall. He’d followed me there. He came close and sat on the bed. I held my breath. His hands rested on the bed beside me. I saw a scratch on his hand, just beneath the thumb. I saw one fingernail was jagged, as if he’d torn it off.
“Hello, pretty,” he said. I tensed, thought of the girl in the bed. “I’m glad you came back,” he said.
“It’s my home,” I said.
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Listen,” he said, softly, urgently. “We can find a way to be together without hurting Lucas. We can have all of this.”
He took my limp hand and held it. He pulled it to his face and pressed his mouth against it. He put my fingertips between his teeth, and I let him. I thought about him holding hands with Emily. Eating breakfast with Emily at a corner diner. I imagined her body full of him on some expanse of sand somewhere. She must have loved him, I thought. I bet she loved him so much.
“I want to make you happy,” he said to me. “I want to keep you safe, and happy. You and Lucas both. I’ll find a way for us to be together.”
Mom, I thought, help me. But I knew she couldn’t. Then I thought, I will say his name, I will say it over and over, like a protective chant. I’ll say it in my sleep.
“Cole,” I said. “What do you really want? What do you want from us? Why us?”
Cole shook his head. “You think it’s some big mystery. But there’s nothing mysterious about what I want. I want to be home,” he said.
Both our bodies sank into the mattress now. My heart was clumsy, flapping around in my chest. I felt a weight on my ungainly heart. It was all elbows and knees in there. Beneath, between, inside my body, my mother’s body shifted a little and settled more firmly into place. She liked all this. She loved a ghost, she loved a stranger, she loved the dead.
“So—you meet a girl and get married,” I said. “Start a family of your own. Make a home.”
“It doesn’t work out the way you think,” he said, a profound sadness in his voice. “You think it’s one way and it’s not.”
From underneath my mother’s bones, a faint pulse. My blood reacting. Beginning to move.
“You know what your problem is, Lydia? You try to keep everything under control,” Cole said. “You bind yourself with all sorts of rules you’ve made for yourself. But you can’t keep that up for very long. You’re too tired. You can’t keep running. Someday you’ll just—stop.”
“What happens when I stop running?”
“Well, here you are,” he said. “You’re not running. What happens?”
My blood, my bones, my muscles, they sprang to life, inflated suddenly, shaking my mother’s bones out of place, scattering those old ghosts of bones into the dim room. What happens? I felt my body filling up with something. I felt my heart pumping, regular, thrumming, warm.
I’d been quiet for so long, listening. Listening in the silent house. In the grocery store. Listening in the sound of the wind, in the sound of the waves, in the rustling of newspaper pages turning over. I was listening for it now. I listened for a sound to blossom out of the silence. His name. That name. I wanted to say it, just to feel that it was mine.
I turned toward him. I didn’t expect to feel this way, sad, sympathetic. “I know who you are,” I said.
I saw his body tensing, but it was with pleasure, with desire. He didn’t understand.
“I mean,” I said, “I know your name. I met your mother. I saw Emily.”
30
The moment I said the word Emily, a change came over him. Swift and sudden. He darkened, his features changed. Something in him wanted out, and the name Emily called to it. I scrambled to my knees. Off the bed. He reached for me and grabbed a handful of my T-shirt. It ripped in his hand, but I didn’t turn around. He could keep that shred.
We dashed out of the room and down the stairs. Into the kitchen, where I stood behind the table. The smell of sautéed onions was in the air, and a pile of shredded cheese sat on a plate on the counter.
Cole came toward me. His face was full of ugly rage. His chest looked strange—rigid—and his arms robotic. For one quick moment I thought he was reaching for a knife on the counter. I could see it shining there in the light from the bulb over the sink. But then I realized that what looked like reaching was a reflexive motion, an involuntary pulling back. His arms swung behind him, tensed, fists clenched, the veins in his wrists popping—his shoulders, elbows, everything pulled back as if an invisible presence were holding him back while he strained to come at me.
He didn’t need a knife. If he wanted to hurt me, he could do it with his hands.
“Do not,” he said, “talk about Emily.”
“No one thinks you did that to her. I—I don’t believe you pushed her—”
“Didn’t push her? Of course I pushed her,” he said. “But it wasn’t me pushing her, do you understand?” He looked at me intensely, glanced down at his hands, and then back at me. “It was my hands,” he said. “But they were just tools, the way we’re all just tools. It was Divine Justice. She was a bitch of a liar being punished by the great hand of the universe. It was the tides moving her toward that punishment. Because you know what? I loved her with every ounce of my being, and she never loved me, not really. She kept secrets. She held herself secret from me. That’s not what love looks like.”
He moved toward me again, coming around the table.
“Everyone gets the punishment they deserve,” he said. “I looked down at her, so helpless at the bottom of the
stairs, and I was glad. I thought she was dead. I hoped she was dead.”
“She’s still alive,” I said.
“You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t keep track?”
Naturally he kept track. He was a puppeteer, holding all the strings at once, twitching this way and that while we went through our routines. I wondered how he monitored her without being found out. But there were more pressing things to worry about now. His arms were still behind him, elbows locked, fists awkwardly out. I backed toward the door.
“Lucas will be home any minute,” I said.
“You think so?”
I found the kitchen door behind me. The knob.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said.
I’d never seen him like this, with something in him set loose, called forth by the name of the girl in the bed.
Then I thought, If her name calls out the monster, maybe his name calls back the man. I knew his name, but I hadn’t said it out loud yet. I’d been waiting to know how to use it.
This was how.
Help him find his better nature.
I said it softly.
His name floated through the kitchen.
Anthony. Anthony.
In the second it took him to process the name, I’d turned the knob on the door and slipped into the night. Where was Lucas? In my confusion I thought he must be out here somewhere.
There was someone at the end of the dock. For one fleeting second, the figure was clearly illuminated against the darkness. Lucas! That was where I ran—toward him, toward help. But the figure dissolved the closer I got. Became nothing, a ghost. And Cole—Anthony—was behind me on the dock. Advancing rapidly, his strange, awful arms still pulled behind him as if some force inside were wrestling him.
I turned and faced him. “What are you going to do? Put me in a coma?”
“If you’re lucky,” he said.
“You know you can’t.”
“Why? Because you’ve been so kind to me?”
“Because you’ll go to jail.”
“I don’t exist,” he said. “There’s no such person as Cole Anthony. Cole Anthony will disappear. Then you and I will both be gone.”
There was no getting past him on the skinny dock. The only way out was the dark bay behind me. I did what I had to do. I jumped.
31
The water was icy, and the shock of it slammed into me, stopped my breath. I gasped. Breathed. Moved my arms and legs reflexively. My waterlogged shirt and pants weighed me down. But I didn’t need to go very far. The night was thick with fog, and he wouldn’t be able to see me when I resurfaced. I’d be nothing more than a rock, a seal, a sea wave.
I broke the surface, trying not to splash or breathe.
“I just want to talk to you,” he bellowed from the dock.
I went under again and swam out into the deep water. The trick was to stay underwater as long as I could, but not so long that I’d gasp when I resurfaced. Everything depended on disappearing and reappearing in silence. Getting as far from him as possible without him knowing what direction I’d gone.
I felt something brush my body, a strand of seaweed I hoped. I broke the surface. He would think I’d stuck close to shore. That I was swimming along looking for a place to go ashore. But I was going straight out to where the water was deep. I had a destination in mind: the houseboat. That small red cradle of a boat I’d watched rocking in the bay every day of my life.
When I reached it, I held on to its sides for a few seconds, staying in the icy water. I looked toward the shore, and I saw the light of the house, but I couldn’t make out whether anyone was standing on the dock or not. I listened, but I only heard the water lapping at the houseboat, and my own breath, and my own heartbeat in my ears.
Then I moved hand over hand around the edge of the structure, until I came to a ladder that led up to a narrow deck and the door of the house. The whole structure tilted when I pulled myself onto the bottom rung of the ladder, but I climbed up easily. On the deck, I sat shivering, looking across the water to my house, looking at the dock, which I could see now was empty. I went to the door of the houseboat. Obviously, it was locked.
I was freezing and scared. And the longer I stood on the deck, the more chance he would be able to see me, I knew. The fog that rolled in with the dusk was rolling off across the sea now, and soon my body on the deck of the houseboat would be clearly visible from shore. I felt the cold wind on my wet skin. The thing I wanted most was to get inside, but how? I tried the window to the right of the door. There was no way to open it from the outside. I pounded on it a little with my fist, but that didn’t do anything.
But the window on the other side of the door—that one wasn’t closed tightly. There was the smallest crack under the window, enough for my fingers to fit underneath and pry it up. It didn’t move. When had these windows last opened? I wiggled it and felt the window begin to loosen. The fog seemed to blow all around me, and above me the sky began to clear. Hazy light poured down, clearer and clearer. The moon, not full, but bright. I pounded the window with my fist and then wiggled it open a fraction of an inch. I hit it again. Soon, I could fit my hand under and push upward with more strength. Something seemed to give, and the window opened. It was a tight squeeze, but I pushed myself through, headfirst into the interior of the houseboat.
I carefully closed the window behind me and sank to the floor, breathing hard. The place was stale and warm out of the wind. Moonlight came through the window and lit the room. It was just as I imagined it would be: small and safe. The entire structure seemed to be one room. There were benches with cushions around three walls of the room, a table against the fourth wall that seemed to double as a bed—I could see the Murphy bed in the wall above it that lowered onto the table. Above me were two bunks, just big enough for beds.
I huddled there, catching my breath, with the smell of damp things all around me, a thick stench of mildew and disuse. I breathed in and out and tried to think how I was going to get out of this. There was only one way back to shore, that was clear. But when could I go home? How did I know Cole wouldn’t be waiting for me, whenever I made my way back? I’d have to stay all night. I would strip off the sopping clothes and wrap myself in curtains. I could do jumping jacks until I warmed up. When it was day, when it was light, I would swim home, or even to the landing.
I concentrated on the sound of my breath, an almost violent rhythm. Then suddenly, I realized the rhythmic sound was not my breath. A slow even thwack, almost like a slap on bare skin. Then silence for two or three seconds, then thwack. It was a strange sound but also completely familiar. I struggled to place it, all the while hearing it become louder, nearer, with every thwack.
All at once, I knew. It was the rowboat. It was the sound of the oars slicing the water. The rowboat coming closer. Thwack. He couldn’t possibly know where I was; he couldn’t have seen, not through the fog.
Then the rowboat bumped up against the side of the houseboat.
I held my breath. I heard his footsteps on the ladder. The door was locked, I told myself. And he couldn’t fit through the window. He would think I’d jumped back in the water. He would go after me again in the water.
He was on the other side of the door. His hand on the knob. I waited for him to swear when he realized the door was locked. Instead, a small sound of metal on metal. The doorknob turned, the door opened, and Cole walked into the cabin.
I don’t know how much of me he saw. Maybe I was just a dark shape on the floor of the cabin. He was bright and clear in the doorway, illuminated. We looked at each other across the dark room.
“How did you get in the door?” I asked, as if that were the thing that mattered most.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Just shut up about her. I won’t hurt you if you shut up.”
“Okay,” I said.
&nb
sp; He looked around the cabin, then reached for something on a hook over the window. A flashlight. He tried to turn it on, and when nothing happened, he dropped it.
“Come here,” he said.
I wouldn’t. I stayed where I was on the floor, watching him.
He crossed the cabin in three steps and stood above me, his features all erased in the gloom now. I wouldn’t offer him my hands, so he pulled me up by the armpits like a child. We crossed the room and squeezed behind a kind of half wall, into a small space with only a bench and an old-fashioned steering wheel, the kind that looked like a star. Cole pushed me gently onto the bench. He stood over me, looking out the window at the dark water. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring of keys, one of which he used to turn the boat on. The motor rumbled. The boat shook.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
The boat began to move. Beside me, Cole’s body tensed. I turned to look at his face. His fast breathing. His strange look of fear. Afraid of what? Of me? Of what he was doing? Stealing a boat. Afraid that he would hurt me, after all, whether I shut up or not, that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself?
The boat maneuvered through the dark water, around Bhone Bay’s other inhabitants, the sailboats, the motorboats. It was slow and rough, rumbling through the water like some ungainly creature, half above the surface, half below. Cole steered with one hand, keeping the other on my shoulder.
“You are really something,” Cole said. “You are about as selfish as they come, Lydia. Really, you disgust me.”
The boat ground against something. A rock? A buoy? I couldn’t see anything out in the foggy night. Cole didn’t seem to hear it.
“Does it surprise you that I call you selfish?” Cole said, looking down at me. “It shouldn’t. You don’t think of anyone but Lydia. It’s all about Lydia.”
I looked from his face to the water we were moving through so swiftly, trying to gauge which was the bigger danger.
Goodnight Stranger Page 22