“Only if you want me to totally retch all over you,” Samantha replies without thinking. Then, realizing what she has said, she glances over at Dan and Traci and starts laughing again, a hand fluttering up to her mouth trying to stifle it.
They all start to laugh, then, except Dan, who stares at Traci with his mouth hanging down. He looks pretty comical.
Kara leans against Sam, sighing as her giggles subside. “All right, since we’re in spooky mode, you guys want to do that ‘light as a feather’ game?”
Samantha knows this game. One of them is on the ground and the others gather around and pretend that person is dead. Then using only two fingers of each hand at strategic points, they try to lift the corpse up as high as they can. It shouldn’t work, but she’s done it before. She knows it does. Brian tells her it all has to do with leverage and mathematics, but he’s never really explained it to her satisfaction and so Samantha still thinks it’s pretty freaky.
“I’ll pass,” she announces.
But the others don’t. Everyone except Brian agrees to play and so he comes to sit by her while Tim is on the ground with his arms crossed over his chest and his eyes closed. Samantha doesn’t even want to look at him, the image is so disturbing.
“You want to go for a walk?” she asks Brian.
He smiles and stands up, brushes the sand off his ass and offers her his hand. She takes it and he hauls her to her feet. There are catcalls and taunts about their cowardice, but Brian and Samantha are together in this and when they’re together they can put up with just about any amount of shit. It just feels different to her when Brian’s with her.
Kara hushes them all and silence falls upon the beach, save for the caw of distant gulls and the rush of the surf. For the moment, Samantha and Brian stay to watch.
“This is Tim,” Kara says. She is kneeling by his head, two fingers beneath his skull. The others are lined up around him and they echo her words.
“This is Tim.”
“Tim is driving home late. He’s been drinking,” Kara says, and the circle repeats her words. Samantha is surprised that there are no jokes, no chuckles. “Too fast, he rounds a corner. There is an oncoming truck, taking up too much of the road.”
Again they repeat her words.
“They collide.”
“They collide.”
“Tim is dead.” - “Tim is dead.”
Samantha shivers, reaches for Brian’s hand and they turn together to walk away. Behind them, the group begins to chant, insisting to the spirits or the gods or just the darkness around them that Tim is both light as a feather and stiff as a board, repeating the words over and over. Soon, Samantha and Brian have walked far enough that they cannot hear the chanting anymore, only the surf, and the rumble of car engines passing on the shore road beyond the row of beach houses.
It’s dark enough that when they pause and look back, they can barely see their friends.
“I hate that stuff,” Samantha says.
“I know.”
There’s something in Brian’s voice that makes her pause, then glance up at him in concern. He has wide, beautiful turquoise eyes that are bright and shining when he’s laughing, but dark and troubled when he’s not. There’s a cast to his eyes now that sends a chill through Sam, as though he bears some wound she cannot see and that he hopes to hide.
Brian glances away, feeling her scrutiny upon him.
“What?” she asks, slightly urgently, worried for him.
His smile is shy, and a little sad. “Nothing.”
Samantha pokes him hard in the chest, grinning. “What?” she demands.
“Just gonna miss you, that’s all,” he replies, shrugging. “We’re going to be so far away from each other. I mean, I know we have to go. This is life, right? But I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”
A sweet warmth spreads through her, melting away the chill she had felt before. “You big goof. We’ve got the rest of the summer. And then, even after, we’ll run up ridiculous phone bills and we’ll see each other during breaks and holidays.”
He draws his palm across his chin and it rasps on the stubble there. Brian hasn’t shaved all weekend. Samantha frowns; her levity is not having its desired effect.
“Hey,” she says softly, touching his arm.
“I’m such an asshole,” Brian mutters. He takes a deep breath and as he shakes his head and at last meets her gaze, an ironic smile crosses his face. “I’ve been in love with you practically since the day we met. A million times 1 wanted to tell you, but I just couldn’t get up the guts, I was afraid if you didn’t feel the same way I’d lose you completely.”
It’s like all the air has been sucked out of Sam’s lungs. Her mouth is open just a little and for a few seconds she thinks absolutely nothing at all. Her mind hasn’t even begun to confront his feelings, to turn them over and attempt to interpret them with her own heart.
And then he lifts her chin and he kisses her, soft and light, sweet and perfect, and Samantha breathes in quickly, a tiny gasp with which she inhales his warm breath. She feels weak suddenly, and she is about to kiss him back hungrily, all thoughts of Kat gone from her mind. But then Brian breaks off the kiss and pulls back, searching her eyes for reassurance.
Samantha breathes deeply, takes a step back. She can’t smile, but she wants to. Her thoughts are scattered and she wants to put them together, but she starts to shake her head out of disbelief. Brian sees it and she can tell from his expression that he has assumed rejection. Samantha panics; she needs time to digest it, that’s all.
She’s about to tell him that when a scream tears the darkness around them, echoes out across the waves and along the beach. They turn together and stare back the way they’ve come.
“That’s Kat,” Brian says, breathless.
They begin to run, kicking up sand. There are more shouts of panic and alarm as they rush toward their friends, who are all still gathered there on the shore. Scottie kneels by Tim, one ear against his chest, and it looks really silly and profoundly unnerving all at once. A gag. It’s got to be a gag.
But it isn’t.
Samantha and Brian reach the circle and the others are freaking out. Scottie shouts at Dan and Traci to run back to the house, to call an ambulance. They take off, Traci crying and Dan whispering “Jesus” over and over, somehow half-prayer and half-curse.
“Come on, Timmy!” Scott snarls as he begins to perform CPR. He breathes into Tim’s mouth, then presses on his chest. “Fuck! Breathe, you motherfucker!”
“What happened?” Brian asks as Kat clings to him fearfully. ‘How the hell did it happen?”
Kara is hugging herself, staring down at Tim’s too-still form with haunted eyes, and suddenly Samantha knows they are not kidding around. This isn’t a gag. Tim is dying. Maybe he’s dead already.
Scottie keeps up the CPR, but he’s losing it a little bit, cussing like a lunatic. Samantha doesn’t blame him. The houses around them are silent. The moonlight casts a yellow glaze over their faces, so that each of them looks just as still and dead as Tim does right now, like his body is the hard plastic of a department store mannequin, not the jock who’d been trying to get her in bed for the last four years.
“Oh my God,” Samantha whispers, her voice so small and frail that the words are almost unborn, nearly stolen away by the wind and the crash of the surf.
She can’t look at Tim a second longer and so her eyes move up and away from him, to the houses again, up the beach to where Dan and Traci have run, wondering how long it will take for them to call, for EMTs to arrive. Then she glances out across the waves and she sees the island.
A fire is burning.
Back from the cruel, rocky shore, up on the hill in the midst of the woods on the island, the glow of fire burns high and swirls with black smoke. It is bright and fierce and Samantha stares at it in stunned silence. How can it be, with all the gulls there? And the gulls themselves have not moved. Some still swoop above, but most of them roost on the stones,
unruffled by the blaze at the peak of the island.
Then Samantha sees the women. Three of them, draped in red, beautiful things with skin like alabaster and hair raven black. They stand on the shore of the island, their arms spread wide, palms up, and flames dance upon their open hands.
Samantha cannot breathe.
The women begin to walk out across the water.
Someone shouts, “Yes!”
Shuddering with fear and a bone-deep chill, Samantha glances over to see Scottie grinning, nodding to himself. Then she sees why. Tim’s eyes are open. He’s breathing again, awake, still pale but very much alive. The smile of relief that washes over Sam’s face is fleeting; she turns to look back out at the island.
The fire is gone.
The women are gone.
In denial, she shakes her head. This isn’t her imagination. They weren’t illusions or phantoms or some crazy shit like that. She saw them, saw that fire. Quickly, she turns to the others and notices that Brian is also staring out across the water, gazing at that island with an expression that is pan dread and part disbelief.
Brian saw them, too. “Are you trying to tell me that you don’t remember any of that?”
Brian smiled. “Well, obviously 1 remember the part where you broke my heart.”
He said it off the cuff, just two old friends razzing each other after too long apart, but Samantha knew he meant it. There were a million arguments she could have made, a million ways she might have tried to explain, but she had given up feeling like it was her fault years ago.
“Hey, you were with Kat, and you can’t blame me because you didn’t have the balls to speak up before that night.” Samantha arched an eyebrow, daring him to argue. “Things got crazy after that and there just never seemed to be a chance to—”
“Whoa! Whoa, Sam. Hold on,” Brian replied, leaning back in the booth and raising both hands. “I still love you. Maybe we haven’t seen each other in forever, but you were my best friend for a lot of years. I’ll always love you. But I’m over it. No worries.”
Samantha smiled sheepishly. She was warmed by his admission of affection even after all the time they’d been apart. But in the back of her mind, his words echoed. I’m over it. The tragedy of that was, she did not think she was.
All those old emotions charged the air between them, still alive, still electric. But that was not what she wanted to talk to him about. That was not what she needed him to remember.
* * *
The day had been one long series of hugs and handshakes, staring at vaguely familiar faces obscured by the curtain of her own tears. Unable to cry at first she had found herself incapable of stopping once she had begun. After the graveside service, Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Ken had invited mourners back to their home in Andover. Relatives had besieged Samantha with memories of her father; most of them charming, some of them funny, and some tragic. Those three adjectives had pretty much summed up his life.
Brian had spent that time circulating through the room, speaking to her relatives and family friends who had known him in the high school years when he and Samantha had been best friends. None of them had seen him since that time, but truth be told most of them hadn’t really seen Samantha much either. The people who recognized him treated Brian like a long-lost cousin.
Several times Samantha spotted him, but both of them were constantly engaged in conversation. It was not until the afternoon had worn on and most of the people had left that she stumbled into the kitchen looking for a quiet place to sit down and found Brian and Aunt Evelyn talking, with Brian doing the dishes. He had stopped midsentence, a tea saucer suspended in midair, and stared at Samantha. No smile, no welcome, just a sort of sadness to his features that she knew must mirror her own.
Aunt Evelyn might have left the room then, but Samantha did not even notice. Later when she thought about it, she could not recall at what point her aunt had departed.
“Hey,” Brian had said, his voice lower, raspier than she remembered. But that might just have been emotion.
Samantha opened her mouth to respond. A simple “hey” would do it, just the way he’d said it. It was the way they had always greeted each other back when, in person or on the phone. The word would not come out. She was incapable of producing that single syllable. Samantha bit her lower lip, fresh tears springing to her eyes. Silently she damned them, for she had thought the crying over. Then she moved into his embrace, though perhaps fell would be more accurate.
Brian crushed her to him and she sobbed against his chest. He shushed her and whispered nonsense words that spoke to her heart only. Trite, hollow words that reminded her how incapable human beings were of eloquence in such moments. And yet it wasn’t the words themselves that soothed her, but merely his voice, his touch, and the knowledge that he was willing to bear some of her pain.
“I miss him,” she whispered, her voice choked with grief.
“Ssshhh, honey, I know you do.”
“I fucking hate him,” she snarled, not at all concerned that someone might overhear.
Brian stiffened but held her just a little tighter. Samantha bit her lip as though that could hold her anger back, but it came spilling out of her.
“Why didn’t he love me, Brian?”
“He did love you,” Brian replied, voice hitching. “He was your dad, Sam. He was proud of you.”
“But he never told me that. And after he left us it was like he didn’t care if I was ever in his life again. 1 hate him for leaving before 1 could make him say he was sorry.”
There were no words after that. Her tears dried. Brian held her for several more minutes until Aunt Evelyn came back into the kitchen to ask if Samantha was all right and to tell her that her mother was looking for her. It was time to go.
Samantha glanced at Brian, saw the reluctance in his eyes and felt it in herself.
“I’ll take you home later if you don’t want to go now,” he offered. “Maybe we could get a cup of coffee.”
So here they were, sitting in a booth in the back of Java Man in Newburyport. Samantha watched through the plate-glass windows as the early evening sidewalks of the eccentric little seaside town churned with people who had not spent the morning at a funeral and the afternoon pretending not to grieve. They spilled out of offices or emerged from cars to trek toward trendy restaurants and quaint shops.
The world moved on. But there was a stone in her heart that would trouble her forever if she did not find a way to remove it, to stop the pain it caused. Its sharp edges cut her on the inside, where the wounds would not show.
The moment she had seen Brian at the cemetery, the memory of that night up in Maine had come flooding back in painful, breathtakingly precise detail. She could even recall how the salt air had tasted on her tongue. The image of that fire and the spectral women across the waves was etched finely in her mind’s eye. That night on the beach she had spoken to Brian about it, and he had admitted that he too had seen that fire, that burning funeral pyre, and those women. Even so, she had done her best over the years to convince herself it had been imagination or inebriation, and then forced herself to forget.
In the time they had spent together this afternoon she and Brian had caught up on each other’s lives, talking like weeks had passed instead of years, happy just to be in each other’s presence again. But now she stared at him, shaking her head.
“You’re really saying this,” Samantha said, voice soft. “Don’t do this to me, Brian.”
The apology in his eyes never made it to his lips. “I don’t know what else to tell you, Sam. I remember that stupid game and the thing with Tim. Scott gave him CPR and got him breathing again. It was scary and, yeah, a little freaky, but this thing with the island—”
“Can I get you folks anything else?”
They both looked up at the waitress and Samantha wondered how the woman had appeared beside them without either of them noticing. Her name tag identified her as “Juliette” and with her apron and the peach-colored uniform Java M
an made her wear, she looked very much as though she had just arrived through a time warp from a 1950s diner. Even the coffeepot clutched in her right hand had a sort of antique quality about it.
“I’d love another cup,” Brian told Juliette.
The waitress topped off Brian’s cup and turned to Samantha.
“I’m good, thanks.”
Without another word, Juliette did a half-pirouette and sauntered off as though pouring coffee were her greatest ambition in life. And maybe it was. Samantha smiled to herself at the thought. It would have been nice if her own life were that simple.
The echo of her conversation with Brian seemed to whisper in her ear then and a chill swept over her. She wished she had not sent Juliette away. Some hot tea would have been welcome. Samantha cast a glance at Brian, her expression grave. He added cream to his coffee and stirred it, but he seemed uneasy under her gaze and in that instant, Samantha understood.
“You’re afraid,” she said.
Brian blinked, his mouth open in a little circle. His nostrils flared and he shook his head. “Don’t do this, Sam. Think about what you’re saying. It’s completely outrageous.” He squirmed as he said it, tapping the edge of his mug with his spoon. When he raised the mug and blew steam off the top, he watched her over the rim as he took the first sip.
Her heart ached. She knew it had been a very long time since they had last seen each other, but she still cared deeply for Brian and she had believed him when he said he still loved her. But now he was lying to her, and, she thought, to himself as well.
“Don’t bullshit me, Brian,” she said. “It’s not fair. Don’t do that to me.”
Slowly he began to nod. He set the mug of coffee down and did not look at it again. His gaze met hers steadily and suddenly all her memories of the high school boy he had been were sloughed off and replaced by this man she felt as though she was noticing for the first time. This handsome, rugged-looking man with wide, kind eyes. Those, at least, had not changed.
“All right, Sam. Let’s say I saw something. For the sake of argument, of course.”
Four Dark Nights Page 9