I just knew that Lucas was out of a job, and I worried.
But it turned out the change was good for Lucas. He started off doing a bit of landscaping for the aquarium, then cleaning lobster tanks. He did some construction on the new seal tank. He brought fish for the seals when the trainer wasn’t in.
He began to talk again about refinancing, so he could fix up the house. He wanted to add skylights to some of the bedrooms. He wanted to look up at the stars all night. He was suddenly back in the world.
I love him as much as ever, but my heart breaks a little every time I see him. Breaks because we are not the brother and sister we used to be, breaks for the closeness we had that we lost. Perhaps hearts are supposed to break open—like acorns—so that new growth can green its way out. That’s how grown-ups love, I suspect. And that’s what I’m trying to be now—an adult. Someone who makes decisions for herself, even if they’re sometimes mistakes.
I sometimes wonder about the shadow—that skin of despair I brought back with me from Baby B’s grave. I’ve grown accustomed to it, almost grateful for it. I watch the other islanders; they all have shadows of their own. I thought the shadow had something to do with Colin, with my mother and what she may have done to him, something to do with secrets and lies, and the things we bury deep under the earth. But maybe the shadow has more to do with leaving childhood and a child’s simple sense of the world far behind—finally. Maybe the shadow is the grief we feel for the children we used to be, not the children we bury.
* * *
Miracle number two is that Emily woke up.
Anthony Coletti’s mother wrote to tell me so. I gathered from her letter that Emily wasn’t quite the person she’d been a year ago. Neither are any of us, I thought, but I knew what she meant. It took her a long time to recover, to relearn what it meant to be human. To walk and talk, to do things like wash dishes and make sandwiches and write letters. By spring she could do all these things.
And then she wanted to talk about Anthony.
It was August when Emily came to Wolf Island, a full year since Cole first arrived. From far away I saw the boat that Emily was on, a toy out there in the water. Closer and closer, and bigger and bigger, and it bumped up against the loading dock and let down its plank.
Emily stepped off the boat.
I saw her and she saw me. I knew it was her, and she came toward me and we stood and looked at one another.
I’d never met another person so exactly my height. I looked into eyes level with my eyes.
“Just start at the beginning,” she said.
We walked along the shore in the dusky August light. The beach was so pristine it filled me with a great swell of nostalgia, as if I would never see it like this again. I looked around, trying to memorize what I saw: the gold sand, the hazy light on the water.
“It was August,” I told her. “And I was working in the information booth.”
We walked for hours. We went to the house, so she could see where he’d been for many months. I pointed at the place in the bay where the houseboat used to be. She shook Lucas’s hand. “His wife,” I said to Lucas.
He held on to her hand as if he couldn’t help himself, gripped it so hard she opened her eyes wide in surprise. Carefully, as if it hurt him to do it, he raised his chin to look her square in the face. “Do you know where he is?” Lucas asked. She shook her head, and he dropped her hand, his expression of hope collapsing all at once.
Later, alone at the end of the dock, Emily and I watched the boats swaying. I still wasn’t used to the look of the bay without the red houseboat. I still scanned the bay for it, even though I knew I wouldn’t see it. So much of my life had felt that way, that more was missing than was there. I wondered if Emily felt that way, too.
“Do you remember it?” I asked her. “Falling?”
She shook her head. “Not really. But I remember him standing at the top of the stairs beside me, and he was angry. He was always angry. He was a deeply jealous person. It’s like he wanted to possess me, and whenever he realized he couldn’t, not really you know, he would freak out, become enraged.”
“I can see that,” I said.
“He thought I was plotting to leave him, run away with someone else. Whenever I got a letter, or a phone call, or came home five minutes late from work or the store, he’d be sitting there, waiting for me. He was always trying to catch me in a lie. I felt like I was under surveillance all the time. I just, I finally got tired of it—I started standing up to him. That was it, I guess. He couldn’t take it anymore. I think he really wanted me to die.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said. I realized, with surprise, that I was crying. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried.
“You know the really sad part?” she said. “I didn’t want to leave him. I was never plotting anything. I wanted to grow old with him. There was never anyone else.”
We would never, not one of us, tell the same story. We would never see the same truth. In that way, there was no escaping loneliness.
Before Emily left I asked her about my mom, if she thought Cole knew my mom at all.
“Her name was Cecily,” I said. “And I found a letter from her in his suitcase. He said he knew her, that she believed he was Baby B.”
“He had a friend who was an older woman,” she said. “I don’t think I ever knew her name. It could have been your mom. He said they understood each other because they both understood losing someone, and she was the only person he knew who had lost something big enough to—you know—ruin your life.”
“But everyone has lost things.” My mother felt irretrievably lost to me. I would never know the truth of what happened that night on the ferry, if she’d meant to kill Baby B, if she’d meant to kill herself. It was terrible not knowing, but sometimes I thought it would be worse to know.
“He never thought other people’s griefs were as real as his,” Emily said. “Except hers, this woman. He said she found him, that she used to watch him when he was a little boy, and that was how she knew about his grief. He said they’d been friends since he was thirteen. His parents never knew.”
“That was her.”
“People are weird,” Emily said. “Love does weird things to people and so does grief. I still miss him. Every day. He tried to kill me, and I still miss him. I still think about walking home from the movies with him holding hands. I know I’m crazy, but I can’t help it.”
I understood what it was like to have contradictory feelings, that duel between what you longed for, and what was good for you. When Emily had gone, I felt empty. For weeks, I felt myself flounder looking for something to fill me up. A past, no, a future. A blue hat on a busy street, a wooden door with small black numbers outlined in gold. The bell tower in Carson Cove, a garden with star-shaped flowers. A bridge over a stream, where two people fall asleep and dream the same dream.
* * *
Miracle number three is Tuck.
He went away to finish school, but then he came back. And when he told me he wanted to stay, some little voice that I hadn’t heard in a long time said good.
We made love in my new bedroom in my tiny apartment over the post office. The clean white sheets tangled up under us.
I woke up during that first night and looked at him in the dull light coming from the street. The waves, the hot golden sand, the cries of frogs and gulls: these were my sounds, my memories. This feeling—easy, plentiful, slow to blossom—this was the kind of love I wanted now.
Tuck has been with me for a long time now. “Five years?” I ask him.
“Almost five,” he says.
He loves the apartment as much as I do. He loves a lot of things: dogs and dinner and beer and walking until his body is exhausted. Loves the taste of just-picked vegetables. Loves yoga. My mom would have liked him. He joined search-and-rescue and goes out on the water late at night. H
e writes poems. He grows a patio garden. A widow’s walk garden. Tomato plants hang from hooks, beans climb up the old railing. Pots of basil and thyme and oregano spice the air.
Sometimes when we’re making dinner together, or cleaning house, or grocery shopping, sometimes when I’m reading in bed waiting for him to come home, sometimes I still think, This is what happy people do.
We think about Cole often; we wonder where he is and if he’s coming back. I think back to the night in the houseboat, and I remember drowning. The beauty, the stillness, the ache of wanting, with all the force of my being, one more breath. Sometimes now it feels to me that I was drowning all along—that the tumble into the water was only a culmination of a long, slow suffocation. Drowning in family, drowning in love, drowning in guilt and loyalty and loneliness. Drowning in a childhood I couldn’t grow out of.
Now I dream about Baby B. I dream of what I saw under the water, little lost soul, living in his underwater home there for years. Little soul waiting to make his grand appearance. Water baby. Water baby.
The summer I’m thirty-five, I get pregnant. When we know for sure, we sit on the couch under a blanket looking out at the island. The streets are busy, the restaurants full. There is music drifting out of Jack’s.
“I don’t think I can do it,” I say. “I’m afraid it’s him.”
Tuck holds my hand under the blanket. “Him?”
“Still wanting to be born.”
Tuck nods. But I see what’s there in his expression. He wants this, wants a son or a daughter. He has so much love—more than me.
“Not this one,” I say. “Let’s wait. This one’s him, I feel it.”
“Maybe it’s always going to be him,” he says. “Every time.”
That night I walk up and down Clara Day Street alone. The lights are multicolored, reflecting in the harbor. I try to feel around inside myself, to feel him there. What is he after this time? I look deep inside and ask him, why me?
I have something of yours, he says.
“What is it?” I say.
Something you need, he tells me.
You really want to be born? I ask.
Yes! he cries. Yes! He shouts yes at the lights and the stars and the water all around us. He shouts yes at the buildings that rise into the night, the lit windows, the sparkling streets. He shouts yes at the parking meters and road signs and the music coming from the bars. Color and light and noise is what he wants. Smells and tastes and the feel of the wind. One more breath. He wants a sensory life.
“Okay,” I say to Tuck climbing into bed with him.
“Seriously?” he says.
His body is a wonder to me still. I lie in bed beside him, not knowing what will happen now. I’ve never been so conscious of a future stretching out before us, a life reaching in two directions, into the past and into the future. Either way I look, there is sadness and loss, there is loneliness, inevitably. But when I look ahead, to the future that Tuck is part of, I feel prepared for all of that, prepared to have more than I ever imagined having, and prepared to lose it, too. Tuck rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. I look out the window at the harbor with its buoys and boats. The masts clang in the wind, like clocks keeping time. I think, This is only the beginning.
* * *
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Jenni Ferrari-Adler, my incredible agent, who labored over every line of this book in all its incarnations, and to Laura Brown, editor of my dreams. I’m forever in debt to both of you, with your sharp eyes, patience, humor and steadfastness. Thank you to Sally Wofford-Girand and Taylor Curtain at Union Literary, and to the whole team at Park Row, HarperCollins and Harlequin: Shara Alexander and Laura Gianino, Stefanie Buszynski, Mary Luna for stunning book art, Chris Wolfgang for scrupulous copyediting, Kristen Salciccia for supernaturally good proofreading, Erika Imranyi, Margaret Marbury, Loriana Sacilotto, Heather Foy, Linette Kim, Randy Chan and Amy Jones.
Deepest thanks to early readers of this novel: Nicole Griffin, Clarence Lai, Tia McCarthy, Sarah Madru, Jericho Parms, Carolyn Scoppettone, Robert Solomon and especially my dear friends Laura Farmer and Eric Rosenblum. Without Jessica Hendry Nelson, Sean Prentiss and Julia Shipley and their insights, I wouldn’t have made it through the final drafts. Thanks to creative friends and colleagues who have inspired and supported me over the years. Your sweet friendship has meant the world to me: Lauren Antler, Julianna Baggott, Jedediah Berry, Matthew Dickman, Sian Foulkes, Vicki Kuskowski, Jeremy Lubman, Kerrin McCadden, An Na, Christa Parravani, Sonya Posmentier, Liz Powell, Jess Row, James Scott and Tolya Stonorov. Endless gratitude to Liz Knapp, who’s been my champion and best friend for thirty years, the kindest person I know and the most fun.
Thanks also to my wonderful Syracuse teachers, Arthur Flowers, Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, Mary Karr, Michael Burkard, Brooks Haxton, Chris Kennedy and Bruce Smith, from whom I learned so much about craft, kindness and generosity. For encouragement and inspiration from the entire VCFA community, especially the faculty, students and staff in the MFA in Writing & Publishing program, I am deeply grateful. Thanks to Clint McCown, Ellen Lesser and the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at VCFA. Mentors along the way, so much gratitude to you, too: Mona Simpson, Brad Morrow, Melissa Weidman, Barbara Stephens and Carl Phillips.
The Vermont Studio Center and the Vermont Arts Council provided the gifts of funding and time to write. A special thank-you to all the Vermont Book Award winners, finalists and judges these past few years. And thanks to the Hunger Mountain staff and writers, true superheroes of literature.
Endless appreciation for the Montpelier community, where my mailman, hairstylist, yoga teacher, neighbors and my children’s dear after-school teachers have been supportive of my writing career. I am so lucky to live here.
Passionate thanks to my talented and wondrous writer friend Robin MacArthur for reading and commiserating, and all that help with the bad list. Thank you to Ann Cardinal for daily pep talks and for inspiring me with your unrivaled work ethic; so glad we could write our predawn, naptime, lunch-break novels together, my writing sister. Thanks to Dan Torday, who I call almost daily with questions, who always has an answer and who works so hard he makes me want to work harder. My friends, I’m a better person because of you, and this book certainly couldn’t have been written without your help.
Thanks to the Fournier and Hodgson clans, especially Dot and Bernie, Bug and Meg, Aaron, Darcy, Lucy and Rebecca. Thank you a million times over to my family, who fostered my love of art, filled my life with books, built me a writing shed on Oyster Pond and encouraged all my ambitions: Mom and Tom, Mary Jo and Peter, Dad, Auntie Ann and Aunt Mollyann—and Grandma Mary, who said, “Hitch your wagon to a star.” So I tried to. Thanks to Teddy and River for their endless curiosity and love of a good story. Thanks to Lily, who once when she was little gave me a (step)Mother’s Day card that said, “I love you like a magisine loves its edidor.” And finally, thank you, Jeff, for your patience and hard work, for believing in me, believing in us. But mostly, thank you for defying expectations and breaking the rules. This book is actually a love story, and it’s for you.
ISBN-13: 9781488051012
Goodnight Stranger
Copyright © 2019 by Miciah Bay Gault
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