“What the fuck, Brian?”
But he was staring back along the path they had followed. “Sam, his shoes,” he rasped.
They had been hauling the corpse along by its arms, its feet trailing along the ground. Now she saw that it had no shoes. Somewhere along the way the dragging had pulled them off, left them on the grass back behind them in the dark.
“Forget it,” she said.
“But—”
“Brian, they’re going to notice the hole. Never mind the shoes.”
They started again and in a few minutes they were working their way through the fence. Together they dragged her father’s corpse back to the rented van. Brian worked the rear doors open and Samantha took the legs as they lifted the body into the back. They closed the doors with a quiet double click.
The moon cast its yellow gleam down upon the orchard and a strange pattern of shadows and ghostly light played upon Brian’s‘ face. He looked haunted.
The hell with him, Samantha thought. It’s me who’s haunted.
And then she realized maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe he had been haunted all along—by her.
“What if it doesn’t work, Sam?” he asked, staring at her.
Ignoring him, she turned and climbed into the passenger seat of the van. Brian slipped into the driver’s side and put the key into the ignition. He paused with one hand on the wheel and the other on the key, but he did not look at her. Instead he stared straight out the windshield at the fence and the graveyard beyond.
“Jesus,” he said again, this time in a whisper. “What if it does?”
5
It was midnight.
Though Samantha had been aware of the passage of time she’d had no idea it had taken them so long at the cemetery. The only things open at this hour were a couple of twenty-four-hour pharmacies and all-night gas stations. But there was no way that they were driving all the way up to Maine with a dead man in the back of the van without covering him up with something. After a brief debate on the subject Samantha agreed that they ought to return to her apartment.
Brian waited in the van, just in case.
Now she stood in the middle of her living room and it seemed as though worlds were crashing together. Whatever woman it was, whatever daughter it was, who could do something like this, she didn’t live in this apartment. This was a whole different world—a world of cookbooks and an prints and a Chinese fighting fish named Leo, of bills that needed to be paid and books half read, of Sting and Nelly Furtado battling it out on the CD player.
For the first time in her life, Samantha felt like an intruder in her own home. She gazed stupidly about the room at these things that belonged to her and yet belonged to someone else entirely. There was a ton of leftover Chinese food in the refrigerator and she felt suddenly hungry at the thought of it. Her stomach rumbled.
Quietly, like some peculiar prowler in her own home, she went along the hall to the linen closet and hauled out an old bedspread covered in a design of pastel clouds that had been hers in college. Across her mind flashed the faces of friends who had slept beneath it on the couch here in this apartment and lovers who had shared it with her during her days at Rutgers.
Now it was a death shroud.
She stepped gingerly back through the hallway toward the kitchen as though afraid she might wake her other self, the girl to whom this evening’s actions would seem an abomination. Samantha grabbed a plastic grocery bag from the narrow hollow between the refrigerator and the cabinets, opened the fridge and stuffed it with leftover Chinese food and several bottles of spring water, then grabbed two forks from the drawer.
After a moment’s hesitation, she took a box of matches and sealed them in a plastic sandwich bag and stuck the bag in her pocket. There was a plastic gas can in the back of the van, but they had forgotten matches. It would all have been for nothing if they couldn’t get the gas to burn.
When she went to leave, Samantha froze just inside the door, feeling the apartment at her back and the darkest of nights ahead of her. Her skin crawled, flesh tingling with the oppressive weight of the air in the apartment crushing her as if it wanted to drive her down, pull her back, prevent her from going. But she wasn’t that woman tonight.
This girl she was did not belong here.
Back down at the van she rapped sharply on the passenger window and Brian jumped, startled. He had been staring straight out the windshield as if unable to look back at what they were transporting. Now he stared at her dumbly a moment and then, as if snapping awake, jumped out of the van and went around to the back.
Brian hesitated at the open rear doors.
“I’ll do it,” she told him. “Just shut me in and get back behind the wheel.”
A look of relief washed over his face. This small task, this one thing he did not have to worry about. Samantha understood completely, but she still wanted to crack her fist across his face.
Samantha climbed into the back and Brian closed the doors behind her. When he was back in the driver’s seat, she slid the bag from her kitchen between the seats at the front of the van and dropped the bedspread on the floor in the back. For a long moment she only stared down at her father’s body, at the thread eternally tugging his lips into a horrid rictus grin. She heard the rustling of the plastic bag as Brian looked inside.
“What the hell is this?” he muttered, more to himself than to her. Then he spoke up. “Sam? What is this?”
As if she had not heard, she picked up the bedspread and laid it over the corpse. She tucked it beneath him on one side and then rolled the body over so that she could press it under. As horrible as that preserved face had been, in some ways the blank, shrouded shape of his features beneath the spread was worse. Samantha rolled the body over and shoved it against the wall of the van so that it looked more like a carpet swathed in blankets than anything else. She tucked the gas can up against it.
When she was done she scrambled back into her seat, grabbed her seat belt and strapped in. Brian was still staring at her. She rocked forward a couple of times as if her own motion might get the van rolling.
“Let’s go,” she urged.
“What’s with the Chinese food?”
“What do you think?” she replied, although suddenly any hunger pangs she had felt were gone. The very thought of eating anything made her stomach clench. The water was there, though, and that was good.
Neither of them mentioned the food again and neither touched the bag for the entire ride.
At first they were confined to back roads where stoplights made them pause frequently, exacerbating their anxiety and impatience. As quickly as they could without the risk of being pulled over by the police, they made their way to Route 495 and headed north. Biddeford was off Old Route One on the south-em coast of Maine. It didn’t have the wealth or cache of Kennebunkport or Cape Porpoise or even Ogunquit, but anywhere along that shoreline was beautiful.
The summer homes and cottages in Biddeford were stacked practically on top of one another. With the exception of a single phone call her sophomore year of college, Samantha had not talked to Scottie since the summer after high school graduation. She did not even know if his parents still owned the place. Somehow, though, she managed to navigate well enough to find Biddeford Pool and thread their way into the oceanside neighborhood where they had spent that weekend five years ago. Brian had been there as well, but he was useless. When Samantha pointed out a convenience store that she was sure had been there the last time they were up this way, he only shrugged and gazed blankly at the building.
“Take this left,” she instructed.
After a period of trial and error, Samantha told Brian to drive down a narrow lane that led to the beach. She stepped out and walked out to the sand to gaze up and down the sand. Off to the south, she saw the island.
Once she had an idea of its location it was a time-consuming but simple enough matter to maneuver through the intricate network of tiny roads and beach houses. They drove down a short road t
hat looked familiar to her and passed a cottage she thought might have been the one. Samantha remembered it as yellow, but it was green now; though, of course, it probably had been painted in the meantime. A fuchsia Mazda four-by-four flatbed sat in the driveway.
“That it?” Brian asked.
“I think so. Obviously we won’t be parking here.”
Ahead the road began to turn west, away from the beach. At the next left Brian turned and a moment later the ocean came into view again. When they reached the end of the narrow road there was a small parking lot, sand blowing across the cracked pavement. A large white sign proclaimed it as beach parking and announced a list of activities that were prohibited. Among them was overnight parking.
“Shit,” Samantha whispered.
But then that particular dilemma was forgotten as they drove into the lot and saw another car parked there.
“What the hell is this?” Brian muttered. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“Pull up right next to them,” Samantha said.
The van rolled up beside the car and Samantha looked down at it, saw that its windows were steamy. People were moving inside, pale limbs flailing. The arrival of the van had set things in motion inside that car. There were shouts and laughter as the people behind that filmy window scrambled to pull their clothes on.
After a few moments the driver’s window rolled down and the face of a guy not more than twenty poked out.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he barked. “Freak!”
Whatever amusement or excitement had been fostered in the couple by the interruption was now overridden by their anger at not being able to finish what they had started. Samantha did not smile, did not even reply. The guy gave her the finger as he backed out of his spot. Tires spun on the loose sand as they drove away.
Brian killed the engine and they sat in the van a minute.
“You know, we’re probably gonna get towed.”
Samantha spun and gaped at him as though he was the one who had lost his mind. Then, after a moment, her grim expression cracked into a smile and she started to laugh. Brian gazed at her oddly for a moment and then he began to laugh as well. The lunacy of what they were doing had caught up with them. Samantha knew that they were just venting the tension of the moment, but it felt good.
Then the gravity of it all swept back into her and she wiped at her eyes, which had begun to water with her laughter.
“Doesn’t much matter if we get towed, but I think we’ll just get a ticket. As long as we don’t get stopped before we get out to the island.”
She did not want to say it any clearer, didn’t want to say that what was really important was that nobody caught them with a corpse in the back of the van.
Brian blew out air and turned to look at her. “Guess we’d better hurry then, before someone comes.”
6
The tide was coming in.
Biddeford Pool wasn’t much different now than it had been the last time she was here. The formation of the Maine coastline at that spot created a zone of complacent waters. At low tide, you could walk out to Monument Island. If you were particularly tall, the water would rise only chest high. Shorter people might have to swim a little when the waves came. But even now, with the tide coming in, the waves weren’t very high.
Even with the ache in her shoulders and back Samantha had been able to help Brian carry the corpse in its bedspread sling out of the back of the van and quickly out onto the beach. They dragged it to the sand and into the water. In an instant the spread became saturated and it clung unsettlingly to her father’s familiar features. Then the corpse began to sink.
Samantha groaned as the weight of it tugged at her and had to adjust her grip to keep the body from being dragged out of her hands by its own heaviness and the gentle rhythm of the tide. Something popped in the back of her neck and she hissed air in through her teeth.
“I thought it… I thought he would float,” she whispered, words barely audible over the soft wash of the ocean on the shore. “Aren’t there supposed to be gases or something?”
Brian stared at her. “What the fuck you asking me for? Besides, he’s been…”—his voice lowered so she could barely make out the word dead—”.. . for days. If there’s supposed to be something inside to make him float, I’m guessing it’s been gone a while. And he’s…” embalmed—”so I’ve got a feeling that might let the air out of the tires.”
A ripple of anger and unease went through her at the sheer inappropriateness of his words and Samantha turned to glare at him.
“Have a little respect,” she warned.
Brian shot her a hard look that let her know exactly how crazy he thought she was. She didn’t remind him that he was out here with her, and that his reasons weren’t as simple as him still having feelings for her, or wanting to get into her pants to consummate something they’d flirted at a long time ago.
“I just thought this part was going to be easier,” she said. Then she glanced past him at the dark cottages that lined the beach both north and south as far as she could see. Most were empty or sleeping, the only light or life within the gleam of moonlight on blank windows. But there were several that had deck lights on and windows that glowed from within.
“Just hurry,” Samantha said.
The strange umbilical that connected them now grew charged with both bitterness and determination. Their joint purpose compelled an uneasy cooperation, but it was enough. One hand wrapped in the end of the bedspread and the other gripping it tightly, Samantha held on to her end of the burden and slipped deeper into the water. Her jeans and her sweatshirt were soaked through by increments as they moved farther from shore, and by the time she was immersed up to her thighs, the waves lapping at her waist, she realized how frigid the ocean was.
And she thought of fire. Looked forward to the pyre. She wondered if, saturated with seawater, her father’s corpse was going to be difficult to burn. Her gaze ticked toward the plastic gas can, only a third full, that bobbed along behind Brian, tied to his belt with a bungee cord from his car.
A wave rose high enough to soak her top and sweatshirt around her navel, and Sam’s teeth began to chatter. Brian was holding on tight as well and now they were halfway out to the island and she began to feel at last as though they had arrived at their destination. No alarms had been raised from the shoreline; no blue police lights strafed the cottages.
The farther from the shore they moved, the more distant the hush of the surf. But as Samantha edged backward, glancing over her shoulder now and then to navigate, new sounds reached her ears. The surf again, but now a slap against hard earth and stone rather than the soft rasp of water over sand. And other sounds, the shifting flutter of wings and a throaty choral trilling that Samantha would have thought of as cooing if it had come from more elegant birds.
But these were scavengers. They were gulls.
Anxious, she renewed her grip on the bedspread, wrapping her hands in it, and then glanced over her shoulder again. The action twisted their burden around so that they were approaching the island at an angle now. Samantha could see it looming there in the dark, its stony, rough-hewn shore forbidding and farther up, not far from where the thick brush grew up, the gulls; a carpet of gulls that undulated as if the ocean tides formed waves in their ranks as well as the swells of the sea. Their feathers reflected the starlight with a queer iridescence.
She hated them. Always had. Filthy animals not much better than pigeons. But the gulls on Monument Island were not like any others she had ever seen. There were hundreds of them by conservative count, more likely thousands, though she did not want to admit that to herself.
Thousands.
Some of them in the sky, some sitting on the waves the way gulls often did … but none on the shore. These were scavenger birds, but not one of them fluttered down to land on the beach and scrounge for bits of discarded food. In her mind, Samantha saw images of seagulls stealing cookies from beach blankets, digging in the sand for a
melon rind or a crust of sandwich, trying to eat anything they could find, including plastic candy wrappers and lipstick-stained cigarette butts.
Not these. The legions of gulls on Monument Island circled their territory, but they did not leave it.
“Hey,” Brian whispered. “What’s up with the—”
“Shush.”
A wave crested high enough to wash over her breasts. It took a moment for the cold water to saturate her layers, but when the frigid water soaked through to her nipples Samantha gritted her teeth and shivered violently. Her left hand lost its grip on the bedspread and the corpse began to shift and slide in its hammock-shroud. Samantha stopped and bent to catch the edge of the fabric again, pulled it up tight, and as she did so, another wave washed over her back, so cold that it made her bones ache, a pain subtler and more profound than the burning of her overtaxed muscles.
I’m going to get pneumonia and die out here, she thought, and chuckled softly. That was pretty funny.
Again she glanced at the floating gas can, rising on the waves, eddying with the light current that swirled around Brian’s chest. The tide was coming in, but it was still low enough that Samantha realized the water was already becoming shallower. She turned to look at the island again.
A pair of gulls floated on the water nearby. Black eyes stared at her. She tore her gaze away and shot a preemptive glance at Brian. Don’t say a word, she thought. Just keep quiet. She had no idea if he understood, but he remained silent regardless, his eyes ticking sideways to stare past her at the floating gulls.
With a slap of wings against the air, a third gull came down from the night sky and settled upon the waves. Three others followed in quick succession and shortly there were half a dozen of the creatures floating on the surface of the ocean staring blackly at them. Samantha took a step forward and felt a tug on the bedspread. She glanced back sharply to see that Brian had paused. She gave a light pull on their burden to get his attention and when he tore his gaze from the gulls, he stared at her with an expression of even greater reluctance than he had worn at her father’s grave.
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