“Who’s going to start?” Tuck said.
“He chased me into the water,” I said. “We were on the houseboat, and when I tried to escape, he smashed my head with something.”
Lucas shook his head. “You fell and hit your head,” he said. “Cole said you were balancing on the railing.”
“The police are looking for him,” I told Tuck.
“Listen to me,” Lucas said, leaning forward. “You have this all wrong. There’s a lot about Cole that we didn’t know. He told me tonight. And maybe I shouldn’t say anything, but it might help you understand. See, he was married, and something happened to his wife. She was in an accident, a bad one. She was in a coma, Lyd. So when you hit your head tonight, it brought back a lot of those old memories. That’s why he ran off. He couldn’t face that happening again. I’m actually really worried about him.”
“You know who he is?” I said. “He’s the little boy from the houseboat. He spent summers on that houseboat every year until his sister died... Holly.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “You’re confused, Lydia. You’re mixing up a bunch of different stories.”
I leaned my head on the back of the couch and rested my eyes for a minute. When I closed my eyes I still experienced the sensation of rocking. I was in the red houseboat swinging on the waves; I was in the rowboat lurching toward shore. I opened my eyes and looked at my brother, at his golden eyes and hair. He was such a beautiful man. I knew not everyone would see him as I saw him; the sunburn, the chaos of clothes and hair wouldn’t be beautiful to everyone. But to me, there was no one more lovely.
The way Lucas saw Cole, it was like he was looking at a photograph. He didn’t see the real man, only the snapshot. He saw only what Cole wanted him to see. Or maybe he saw what he wanted to see. When we looked at Cole, Lucas and I were not seeing the same man, that was for sure.
I was too tired, too achy, too dizzy to argue with Lucas tonight. And in the back of my head was the thought that there would never be a time to talk to Lucas about Cole. Because Lucas wouldn’t believe me. He wouldn’t. I understood this so clearly. When he stood to go to bed, I felt a sharp, fierce loneliness.
From this point on, I kept thinking. From this point on. But I didn’t know how to finish that thought.
* * *
In my bedroom, Tuck and I stood by the window, looking out at the lawn, the dock, the dark water. We leaned toward one another and our shoulders touched.
“Why didn’t you wait for me?” Tuck asked.
“I meant to. But it just tumbled out. I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s progress I guess. The police will find him; the whole story will come out. This is good news. We should have a party. We should make a cake,” Tuck said.
Tuck lay on the floor beside my bed. I climbed under the covers and let my hand fall down to him. He held it.
“You never told me why you were all wet,” I said.
“I got off the ferry, and I saw you immediately,” he said. “I saw you swimming along the shore down by the landing. Yeah. I thought you’d gone totally crazy. And I yelled to you, but you wouldn’t look at me.”
I closed my eyes and leaned back on the pillow. I was so tired now, and it was that sweet heavy exhaustion, as powerful as a sleeping pill. “I was on the houseboat. And then I was in a rowboat,” I said. “You couldn’t have seen me.”
“It was you,” he insisted. “You were swimming out farther and farther. I went in after you like a fucking maniac. I followed you to the houseboat, but no one was there. I thought you drowned,” he said.
I squeezed his hand. “Still alive,” I said.
Cole didn’t show up in the night, not even in my dreams. But I couldn’t sleep for long. I woke up hearing voices. Tuck’s voice. Outside somewhere, out where it was cold. Then I realized he was here, with me, my hand still in his.
In the morning, my head ached. I was hungry, and we ate mountains of scrambled eggs, slice after slice of toast. Then Kim and Eddie showed up with bagels and cream cheese and we ate those, too.
“I don’t know exactly what happened last night, but it doesn’t sound good,” Eddie said. “I saw Sean Alameda this morning.”
“I don’t even know where to start,” I said.
Later, once Kim and Eddie had gone, Tuck and I sat at the end of the dock.
“Is Tuck your real name?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure why it occurred to me so suddenly.
“My real name,” he said, “is Jonathan.”
“Jonathan?” We began to laugh. “I don’t even know why that’s so funny,” I said.
“Jonathan Edward,” he said.
We howled with laughter. Laughed until tears rolled down our cheeks.
“It never felt right,” he said.
“Maybe names don’t matter after all,” I said.
When the laughter ended, we grew serious.
“Do you know for sure he hit you with something?” Tuck asked.
“Are you sure of what you saw? Someone who looked just like me swimming in the water?”
“I had been drinking,” Tuck admitted. “Did I tell you that part? But I’ve never seen anything that wasn’t there, drunk or not drunk. It was you.”
We looked out where the red houseboat used to be. I didn’t know where it was now, but I did know that the bay looked completely different without it, like a different view out a different window. A different bay off some other island.
Maybe there were ghosts: spirit swimmers, widows looking out to sea, the ghosts of whores, tiny faces at the window. I didn’t know if Baby B was a ghost following me around the island. Maybe he did exist. But everything I had to fear existed in the human realm. It was the same stuff everyone here feared: lost love, loneliness, death. Slipping off the rocks into the cold water.
That afternoon, Lucas found me in the kitchen. He’d been crying. There was dirt smeared across his cheeks, and his eyes were red.
“He’s gone,” Lucas said. “He’s not coming back.”
“Did they find him?”
“They’re not going to find him.”
I looked at Lucas’s face. “Is he dead?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Lucas said. “But he can’t be with us anymore. And he said I couldn’t come with him either.”
Would Cole continue this way, transforming himself into someone else’s brother, someone else’s husband or son? He would arrive on some other island, handsome and powerful, and I felt sorry for the girl on that island who he decided to love.
“He said he has to disappear,” Lucas said. It seemed he was past crying, his sorrow heavy and immovable, the sorrow of rocks, of stones, of things that take years and years to erode.
I pitied Lucas, but there was nothing I could do. His grief, like mine, was a private thing. For the first time in so long, I didn’t feel the need to grieve—I wanted to have cake and champagne. Walk on the cold beach. I wanted to go to the grocery store and fill a cart with food, enough for a month. I wanted to eat and then sleep, I wanted to shout, to laugh.
Cole was gone. Cole had disappeared. For now.
* * *
“Did I ever tell you about the ghost?” I said.
“No.”
“I started seeing it in my dreams. This was after my mother died. Then I thought it was following me around, in my daily life. I kept catching glimpses of it, but then it would vanish.”
“Wait, what are we doing?”
“I’m telling you a story.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Okay,” Tuck said. He looked around the room groggily. An almost full moon over the harbor was filling the room with pale light.
“Come up,” I said. And he stretched out on the bed beside me.
“What
did the ghost look like?” he asked.
“A seal,” I said. “Sometimes. And sometimes like a skinny girl. Maybe that was what you saw when you jumped in the water.”
Then I said, “Oh!” and a realization flooded through me, icy as ocean water. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my face, because I must have been an idiot not to have realized it long ago. That little face I glimpsed through the window in the bathroom at Jack’s. The sense that someone was behind me. That flash in the waves. Those weren’t seals. Not a ghost. Not Baby B either.
It was me.
It was always just me.
Little Lydia, lost all these years, wandering the island, haunting the Claws, swimming back and forth alongside the ferry, where I must have lost her to begin with, that spring I came home, when my mother got sick.
“I thought it was Baby B,” I said. I felt something pressing against my throat and eyes, ballooning large and insistent. I was definitely going to cry. I lay beside Tuck and pressed my face into his neck. His neck smelled like ocean water. He put one hand in my hair.
“You’re always seeing ghosts,” he said. “How did you know it wasn’t just a regular person?”
“I know everyone on the island.”
“You didn’t know me.”
“I knew you weren’t a ghost.”
“Are you sure about that?”
He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt his body, strong and human and kind—a celebration. Then all my thoughts dissolved into a warm blur as he pulled me on top of him.
35
The morning light was steady and bright and almost green.
“Oh my god,” Tuck said, waking up. His eyes were only half open, and he smelled warm and sweet. “Let’s do that again.” He found my body under the sheet and pulled me toward him. I felt myself relax against him.
I didn’t feel compelled to be with Tuck. I didn’t feel driven by external forces. Being with him felt comfortable, happy.
We went to Mady’s for breakfast. Diane greeted me kindly, and she poured my coffee with the intimacy I’d once noticed between her and the fishermen. And I started to think: this feeling I’d had with Tuck these past months, this working together to solve a mystery, maybe that was being a normal person. Only usually there was no big mystery, it was just working together to buy a cup of coffee, working together to change the oil in your car, working together to take care of your home or your children.
Walking back to the house, I thought about how solid, how real he was, how warm and human, the dust-and-pollen scent of his hair, the seawater smell of his neck, the sound of his voice on the phone, the way life seemed to run through him like water through a sieve, coming out the other side cleaner and colder and better, his laugh, as refreshing as a cold drink. For several weeks now I’d known that I wanted to be the one to make Tuck laugh. But something new occurred to me. It wasn’t just that I liked Tuck, it was that I wanted to be like him. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to be alive like he was alive. When I said I wanted to be a normal person, what I meant was I wanted to be like Tuck.
* * *
Lucas didn’t come out of his room. All day there was the smell of Tuck grilling bluefish and scallops in the chilly yard. I stood outside Lucas’s bedroom and begged him to eat with us. But he wouldn’t. The dock stretched out into the blue water. The afternoon galloped into evening. We stood by the grill in the smoky winter light.
We made love in the dark in my narrow bed. In the morning we had breakfast at Mady’s. After breakfast, we walked to the empty information booth and Tuck kissed me there, in the shadowy booth, near the empty brochure racks.
“You want to sit?” he said.
Jim Cardoza came out and stood near us. He shook Tuck’s hand. Everyone knew something had happened. They knew Cole had hurt me. They knew he had vanished, and that the police were looking for him. They knew Tuck was here to help.
That night we walked to Jack’s for beer. We sat so our knees touched under the table. It went on like this for a few days. I felt again as if I were holding something fragile and precious in the palm of my hand. More precious because I knew any moment I might close my hand and feel it crushed beyond repair.
We waited for word from the police. We waited to hear they’d caught up with Cole—I mean Anthony—but as I suspected, they didn’t.
Then one night in bed, Tuck turned to me, touched my face. “I have to go,” he said. “I mean leave the island.”
“Oh,” I said, deflated but not surprised. “Okay. Of course you do. But I guess I just—when exactly?”
“Soon,” Tuck said. “I’ve decided to go back to school. Spring semester starts in January.”
“I guess you figured out what you want to do next.”
“Maybe,” he said.
* * *
After Tuck left, the weeks were lonely. Jim Cardoza would often invite us over for dinner, and when Lucas refused to go, Jim would show up at our door with small meals. On Christmas, Eddie and Kim knocked on the door early, ridiculous Santa hats on their heads and their arms full of packages. The gifts were nothing we wanted—a word search book, a shot glass from Jack’s—but I held them, feeling like I was holding treasure.
“I don’t even know what to say,” I told them.
“We just wanted you to know—you’ve got a lot of friends. You’ve got us,” Kim said. The look she gave me was uncharacteristically fierce. She didn’t laugh even a little. I thought maybe this was her way of forgiving me, and I felt something give way in my chest, something hard and icy slipping into liquid. Warm and warmer, until it was all fiery gratitude and love for both of them.
I had friends. I felt it all the time now—a sense of community. I had Jim Cardoza, and Elijah West, and Sebastian and Gordon, and in the spring, I would have the information booth again, all the tourists with their questions. I had all this love suddenly—for the islanders, the tourists, for Lucas. Home began to mean something new.
After Christmas I made a decision. Although it scared me, I knew I had no choice. I needed a life of my own, a place that was mine to fill up. A place where I would make my own memories as pristine as a newborn’s.
I found the folder of college applications, half-filled-out, and put them all in the fireplace one by one. That was a leftover dream from when I was seventeen, and I wanted to grow up, grow older, make a new dream. Whatever life had in store for me, it was here on the island—that seemed suddenly clear to me. But that didn’t mean I was a prisoner to my mother’s ghost, her dresses in the closet, the furniture she’d chosen. That didn’t mean I was a prisoner to Lucas or the house.
The week between Christmas and New Year’s was surprisingly warm. I went to the landing. Clint was practicing bagpipes again, and I thought, as I always did, of each note as a seagull, soaring out over the water. Behind the post office, I watched the postmaster, facing the harbor and holding aloft his bagpipes, with all the strange arms and necks and valves, that big heart of an instrument.
A little sign was hanging on the shingled wall just to the side of the post office’s back door. This was what I’d come for. I reached up and took it down, held the paper in my hand. For rent. One bedroom. Includes heat.
I looked up the wooden steps to a closed door on the second floor of the old building. There must have been several apartments up there, since this was once a big, beautiful house, the home of a sea captain. I knew there were apartments above all the shops on Clara Day Street, like the one Eddie lived in. But this one. This door. These steps. The notes of the bagpipe suddenly became a story, and it was the story of a future, a real and possible future, and I could see myself walking up those steps and walking through that door and sitting on a couch and picking up a book. The couch and the book were both things I’d chosen carefully, and the cupboard was filled with cans and containers of foods I’d chosen to eat.
I could almost hear it, th
e ringing of this future. It filled my ears, shells crushed under a wave, the roar of a tide.
36
There are only three things left to tell you, what Tuck calls miracles one through three.
(“I don’t believe in miracles,” I tell him.
“Are you sure about that?” he says.)
When I moved into the apartment over the post office, I left Lucas in charge of the house. Brother of mine, you can have the boxes in the attic. You can have the old bicycles in the garage. You can have the beds and the clocks and the blankets, you can have the ghosts. But all Lucas wanted was Cole. And since he couldn’t have Cole, he didn’t want anything. He stopped going to work. He stopped mowing the lawn. I visited him every day, but it took a long time before he wanted to get dressed, eat a decent breakfast, leave the house.
“Just come home,” Lucas sometimes said. But I felt safer in the apartment alone. And even there I locked my doors at night, and the circles under my eyes darkened from sleeplessness. So many nightmares.
The way Lucas felt about me was complicated. He missed me. He wanted me to come home. But he blamed me for Cole’s leaving. He didn’t come out and say so, but I felt it when he looked at me. All his sadness, he thought, was my fault. All that lost love.
I’d spent so many years taking care of my brother, it was terrible to think that I was the cause of his misery. I worried about him all the time. I worried he wouldn’t make it. I didn’t know how to take care of him anymore. It was a long winter, the worst one we’d had.
But it didn’t last forever. That’s miracle number one.
In the spring, when the sting of Cole’s leaving had dulled for Lucas, he showed up at the information booth and told me he’d gotten a new job, at the aquarium.
Yes, after all those years, Lucas had to find a new job. The Day Estate had been sold, the whole deal somehow shrouded in mystery. Developers, everyone said, whispered it like it was a dirty word. I didn’t know what would happen to that old house, those paths and gardens, the long thin rocks that made the claws of Wolf Island.
Goodnight Stranger Page 24