“I used to think you had the perfect life,” Cole said. “Perpetual vacation! That’s what I thought, but I was wrong. It’s perpetual childhood. It’s you and Lucas running around like children in your big house, with your little summer jobs and your little disagreements. You think that’s life? No. That’s playing house.
“There are people out there living real lives, Lydia. And when they have fights, they’re real fights. And when they get hurt, they get really, really hurt. And the things you lose are enormous things, but you don’t spend your whole life looking for them! You leave the dead things behind, Lydia. That’s how it’s supposed to go. But you couldn’t have been more thrilled to have me be your dead baby brother. You practically laid out the welcome mat for me. You got what you wanted, didn’t you? Here I am. And now I’m not going anywhere.”
His face was flushed, his hairline damp. For once the heat from his body did little to warm me. The cold had seeped deep into my bones, as I sat there shivering in my wet clothes, watching the dark water be swallowed up by the slow-moving boat.
“How could I possibly start to like you?” Cole said. “But I did, Lydia. I really liked you. You thought it was a trick, but that was real. And what happens next? You fuck me and then literally skip town.”
“That’s not how it happened,” I said.
“That’s exactly how it happened. I don’t go around feeling sorry for myself like you do, Lydia. But if we were going to have a pity party, I would win that party. From the very beginning, I’ve lost everything that mattered. You know what I’m talking about. My wife is the living dead. My girlfriend fucks me over.”
“I wasn’t your girlfriend,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“No, that never even occurred to you,” he said. “You never thought about me, not for a minute.”
“I just want to go home,” I said.
“I do, too,” he roared. “But I don’t have anywhere to go.”
Then he looked down at me, and his face changed in an instant. His expression grew soft and melancholy. Even his grip on my shoulder softened.
“Let’s go back home together,” I said quickly. “I’ll make coffee. And we’ll find Lucas and just sit and talk. We’ll talk all night. Just the three of us. Like you wanted.” He shook his head, looking disappointed.
“Let’s go to the house,” I said. “Let’s—I mean, you can’t do this. You can’t steal a boat.”
“Steal it?” he said. “I’m not stealing. It’s mine.”
I glanced at his face to try to understand—and just like that I did understand.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh no.”
Because I knew who he was. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been clear to me before. I’d spent all this time trying to learn his identity, when I already knew. I knew all along.
“Anthony Coletti,” I said. “The little boy in the red houseboat. The boy with the straw hat. I remember you now.” With the silent parents and the drowned sister. All those years in Bhone Bay when we were young. He must have seen us from his houseboat the way we’d seen him from our porch, our lawn, our dock.
“This is your boat,” I said. “And you remember us.”
He looked around the little cabin, his eyes resting on the mildewed cushions, the hooks hanging over the table with pots hanging from them.
“Oh god,” I said. “That’s how you knew about the shed door, and the way Lucas used to spin the net. And how my mom used to sit like that on the dock. You spent years watching us. You knew about the lady’s slippers. Oh my god. And your sister. Your poor sister. You killed her.”
“I didn’t kill my sister,” he said, disgusted. “Would you kill Lucas? A sister is sacred. I long for my sister every day. You of all people should understand that. Jesus Christ, Lydia, are you some kind of monster? Kill my sister! Like I would ever lay a hand on her. She was ten years old. Ten years old.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“But Lucas still had his sister, didn’t he? Jesus Christ, I hated him. Before I ever met him, I hated him. I hated you both. The way you were always together. Always! And I had no one.”
“But your mother...your parents. You had them.”
“No, I didn’t have my parents.” He shook his head at me, as though I were so stupid he couldn’t believe it. “They were like invisible people after Holly died. They couldn’t stand to be around me. They couldn’t stand to be around each other. Luckily, I had your mother,” he said. “She was the mother I wanted because she understood what it felt like to have no one.”
“But how did you—how did you know her?”
“She swam out to me. She hung on to the edge of the boat and talked to me, said she’d been watching me. You know why she believed I was Colin? Why she was so desperate to believe? Because she was dying of guilt.” He leaned toward me, his face coming closer and closer. So many expressions on his face at once. His eyes were angry—and then he lifted his eyebrows in a sorrowful way, a pitying way. But when he spoke next his mouth was malicious. “She killed him,” he whispered. “She sacrificed him for you and Lucas. And then she couldn’t live with herself.”
And then the boat hit something. The jolt sent Cole against the wall. And in that instant, I rolled off the bench onto the floor.
Heart crashing, I scrambled around the corner and across the small room, to the door. I burst out into the night. Cole was behind me, reaching out for me. He was between me and the ladder, but that didn’t matter. I climbed up on the railing, about to jump. But something was in the water beneath me. For one split second I saw—a face looking up. It was like seeing my reflection in the water, only I knew it couldn’t be, not in this blackness. Cole was behind me, and the boat was lurching, and my feet were slipping. I had to jump. Right away. Then I felt a blow of pain on the back of my head. I plunged into cold water. And it felt familiar and right. To be suspended like that, a particle of light. A relaxed kind of darkness settled over me.
32
They say drowning is painless. People resuscitated after near drowning describe a deep chill, a feeling of weightlessness, then ringing in the ears and beautiful visions of light and color.
Yes.
Drowning is a good dream.
The lungs like full tumblers. Every other piece as light as air.
One time we’d stood on the deck of the ferry and had seen shooting stars overhead, Lucas and I. Nine years old, and we’d seen nine stars cross the sky. They seemed to be messages for us. Their light burned a long time before sizzling out into darkness. If you focused only on the stars, and shut out everything else, it was like you were the star, suspended in space, dazzling and bright. Heavy lungs, and all the rest flying like a star.
One time I’d fallen asleep on the beach and woken up underwater. I thought it was a dream, but it was really happening. At first I was scared. It was dark. I couldn’t see my own body, but I felt my hair floating around my face. Which way was up and which way was down? Then I saw pinpricks of light, phosphorescence around my body, invisible creatures with their visible light, and I saw a pale glow, moonlight. I was able to move toward the surface.
Where was I now? This seemed to be the place of lost memories, this depth of water near the edge of the houseboat. What else was down here? My father’s voice? That was something I couldn’t remember, I could never remember, no matter how hard I tried. But apparently it had been here all along, and I heard it, a deep roar in my ears. Take me out to the ballgame! He was singing. I almost laughed in delight. Nothing was lost after all. It had been here all along. What else was here?
There was the baby, for one thing. I saw him suspended beside me, his naked arms and legs healthy and fat. I caught him as he drifted past, pressed his cold skin against me. His heart beat where my heart beat. His old memories were here, too, just like mine. I saw the light coming in a win
dow onto a clean sheet. I heard her voice, my mother. I felt the electric shock of the cold water as he plummeted from the deck.
Glancing around, I saw a living room: couch and chairs and an end table with a lamp. Barnacles blistered the arms of the furniture, and seaweed drifted past. I thought I’d just arrived, but it appeared we’d both lived here a long, long time. There were my books, and there were my sweaters, and there was a mirror I could comb my hair in. The baby played on the sand, stacking quahog shells like blocks. I’d been taking care of him all this time.
Drowning isn’t entirely painless. It doesn’t hurt exactly, but the anguish of wanting to breathe, that’s a profound and complicated pain, to want something with all the force of your mind and instincts, to feel meant to breathe and at the same time kept from breathing. To feel like you must breathe because the stars and the tides and the moon and sun have instructed it thusly. I opened my mouth. I felt the cold water. The baby grasped my finger with his cold, cold hand. His eyes were the milky white of the blind. He never cried. I took a breath. I tried to take a breath.
33
I was rocking.
That’s what I knew first.
I almost drifted back to sleep, cradled and moving like this.
Then I heard water.
Then the thwack, thwack of oars.
I felt the water all around me.
My consciousness seemed to swim up from some deep place. I rose and rose and when I broke the surface it was with the sudden awareness that I was in the bottom of the rowboat, moving swiftly through the water. I opened my eyes and saw the winter sky all foggy and dark.
I thought, I’m not dead, but I’m probably going to die tonight. I didn’t feel scared, but I did feel aware suddenly of how much I liked being alive. There were so many good, gentle things. So many nights like this with fog and stars. I loved fog and stars. I thought about how I hadn’t yet had dinner and about how much I loved dinner, all kinds of dinner. I thought about how alone Lucas would be. And I thought about Ed Frank, and Jim Cardoza and Ferry-All, and Gordon and Sebastian and all the old fishermen, and the Grendles next door, and Martha at the library, and Elijah, and Tuck.
There were so many brothers, and who would take care of them all?
I would have to stand up and jump overboard. I’d have to be fast. The moment he saw me he would reach for me. I’d have to dive deep again, and swim underwater for a long, long time. And I didn’t know where we were, or if I’d encounter the baby again. How long had we been rowing? The other trouble was that my head felt broken, with a sharp pain moving through it in waves.
And then—the rowboat swung, and I opened my eyes, and saw that we were at a dock.
I heard Cole say, “Oh no.” I tried to lift my head, and the pain sliced through. I put my hand on my head. I heard Cole breathing. Then he said, in a different tone altogether, “Thank god you’re here. Help me get her up.”
“Who? What happened?”
I thought I must be imagining Lucas’s voice. But no, there he was, looming above us on the dock, the bandages on his hand bright in the moonlight. “Lydia!” he said. “Oh man, I knew it. What happened?”
“She hit her head,” Cole said. “She was climbing on the railing of the boat and slipped and hit her head on the deck. Here—take the rope?”
“What boat? Why was she climbing on the railing?”
“Running away from me.”
I rolled myself over and sat up. My head was full of liquid that swirled and eddied and bumped over obstacles.
“Are you okay, Lydia? What are you guys doing out here anyway?” Lucas asked.
“I didn’t slip,” I said. “He hit me with something.”
“Listen, man,” Cole said, his voice strangely pitched. “She could have a concussion or worse. She fell hard, okay? I rowed from the—the boat—all the way...”
“Why didn’t you bring her home?”
“I wanted—to—bring her to a doctor.”
“He’s lying,” I said.
“All right,” Lucas said. “Come on. Up you go. Grab my hand. Jesus Christ. Are you bleeding?”
I stood, and Lucas pulled me up. My head sloshed and burned. I was dizzy, nauseous. We were on the dock behind the post office, where the postmaster practiced bagpipes. I could almost hear the goose-honk of those notes. I could see through the buildings a slice of Clara Day Street. I saw half the sign from the T-shirt shop. I saw the window of Island Pie. I saw shapes moving through the streets. The people I’d known all my life. They were coming out of bars, they were eating ice-cream cones. God, I loved them, I loved them.
34
Everything happened in one fluid motion after that. Someone called Sean Alameda, the island’s sole paramedic, who drove an old Subaru station wagon we called “the ambulance.” He unlocked the clinic and brought me inside. Someone put a sweater around my wet shoulders. Dr. Lyle showed up in pajamas to check if I had a concussion or hypothermia. I kept telling them to call the police. I sat on the table shivering. Dr. Lyle felt my wrist, shined a light in my eyes. He listened to my heart, my lungs. Then Dr. Brent was there, wanting to know if I jumped in on purpose. “Were you trying to harm yourself?” Someone put a space blanket around me.
I said, “I wasn’t trying to harm myself. He was trying to harm me.”
I was still dizzy. It was hard to look at just one thing.
“He hit me with something,” I insisted. “Maybe a flashlight.”
Dr. Brent looked into the lobby, and Lucas and Cole both stood up.
“I’m pretty sure he was trying to kill me,” I said quietly to Dr. Brent. “He tried to kill his wife, but no one knows. He confessed it, though.”
“Is she okay?” Lucas asked. He took a step toward me, but Cole put his hand on Lucas’s shoulder and held him back.
I remembered him calling me his girlfriend, the hurt and angry look in his eyes. There was something in him, some monster in there. I could see it every moment. A smaller, meaner creature concealed in the body we all saw, a creature full of wild rage. The Anthony inside the Cole. I could see them both, the two men, wrestling each other.
But then something amazing happened. All at once Anthony vanished and left only Cole. I saw it happening before my eyes, a transformation into calm, controlled power. And I realized it was because Lucas was there, that Lucas somehow had the power to make one man disappear and the other come to life. I knew one name, and Lucas knew the other, but now I knew that I’d been wrong about names all along; Cole was dangerous and desperate, no matter what we called him.
* * *
By the time George Samson showed up, Cole was gone, as I’d known he would be. George listened to me tell the whole story, skeptical but quiet.
“He has a wife,” I told him. “Up in a hospital in Vermont. The official story is that she fell down the stairs, but it wasn’t an accident—he pushed her. Her name is Emily.”
George Samson wrote EMILY in a little notebook. I felt happy to see her name in his handwriting. I felt happy that everyone was listening, George Samson, and Dr. Brent, and Dr. Lyle.
“He hit me with something,” I said. “I felt something hit my head, and I tumbled into the water.”
“He says you hit your head on the railing,” George Samson said. “He says you were trying to jump over the edge, and you slipped. Is there any way that could have happened?”
“No, no! I don’t think so. He was trying to hurt me,” I said.
George Samson said he’d call the police in Lindenberg and check in with them about Emily. “And I guess we’ll bring him in for the night.” He looked at Dr. Brent as if she’d know more about police protocol than he did. “I guess we’ll find him and bring him in for the night and question him.” He began to sound a little more sure of himself. “I definitely will want to question him, if we can find him.”
“You
won’t find him,” I said.
“You just get some rest,” George Samson said, “and let us catch the bad guys.”
Sean Alameda drove Lucas and me home, down the inland road. Dark branches hung over the road, fir branches, sweeping and dipping whenever a gust blew through. I kept looking out the window at the dark trees, thinking I saw a figure ducking behind each trunk.
I let out a laugh, and Lucas jumped, startled.
“I didn’t know there were bad guys,” I said. “Not here. Not until he came.”
“There aren’t,” Lucas said.
At home, I saw someone in the bushes by the kitchen window, peering inside. My heart raced, and my hands went heavy with fear. But it wasn’t Cole. I recognized the mane. It was Tuck.
Sean Alameda stopped the car and let us out. Tuck came loping over.
“What the hell happened?” he said.
“What happened to you?” I asked. “You’re soaking wet.”
He took my hands. “Is that blood in your hair?” he said.
We went inside and Tuck dripped all over the kitchen floor. His pants and T-shirt were drenched, and he was barefoot.
Lucas said, “Would someone please just tell me what is going on tonight?”
“Let’s warm up first,” I said.
Tuck got in the shower, and Lucas found a set of clothes for him to wear. Cole and Lucas were both considerably smaller than Tuck, so Lucas had to search the attic for a box of my dad’s clothes. He pulled out a long underwear shirt, a sweater, a pair of corduroy pants. They had a faint musty smell but weren’t as bad as you’d think. I set them on the bathroom counter for Tuck to put on when he came out. Then I stood outside the bathroom door, wrapped in the old chenille blanket, waiting for him.
“Why don’t you lie down or something,” Lucas said.
I shook my head.
When he was dressed, Tuck and I sat on the couch wrapped in blankets, and Lucas built a fire for us. We kept holding our hands out to soak up the heat. Tuck drank a beer, and I drank hot water with nothing in it.
Goodnight Stranger Page 23