‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘You’re the same as everyone. But you think you’re different.’ Tomasin didn’t believe anything she was saying and didn’t know why she was saying it. ‘You don’t talk, you don’t hang out, you hide under this porch.’
When he didn’t answer, she looked to see how he was taking it. He looked so withdrawn into himself that she felt nervous and kept talking. ‘But so what,’ she said, ‘to hell with it, you know. To hell, who cares!’ Then she pushed him.
The further from his hiding spot he went, the weaker he felt, and now he felt weak tonight even before leaving. It felt like he was slipping down toward the water. He would roll a cigarette, he decided, but as he tried, his hands slipped and he spilt tobacco on his jeans. He only had a little bit of tobacco from Noah Coke, so he picked at his pants and at the ground to collect it.
Tomasin laughed at him, ready to push again.
He rolled the tobacco and bits of dirt into a cigarette, put it between his lips, and now – with smoke filling his mouth and going down – he could breathe. His breath spread out in front of them, reminding Tristan of the width of the calm that was only his, not hers. He would wait her out.
Marie didn’t want to know. Tomasin was working the dining room at breakfast, and every time she came through the swinging door into the kitchen, she brushed across Marie’s side or back.
‘What a long night.’
Marie tried to step out of the way but was bumped again, this time at the hip. ‘That hurt me,’ she said.
‘When I’m tired like this, it means I was really doing something, you know. I like being tired.’
The sky was encouraging her, Marie thought, looking out the back window filled with light like a swimming pool. The sky couldn’t be more blue. It wasn’t the blue of clothes or bedspreads, not the blue of a pen, and not even the blue of painted things, like the handles of her father’s tools, which he painted blue so everyone knew they were his. Marie slowly grew infuriated that she could draw no comparison between this blue and something that she could put her hands on. It was infuriatingly blue. The idea of blue. Not her idea. It was someone else’s idea, someone like Tomasin.
Marie called for rain.
Tomasin pushed herself on Marie, waist to waist. ‘It’s not going to rain,’ she said, ‘fuck that.’
Marie could smell her and liked it, but couldn’t say what she smelled like.
Girls like Marie were supposed to defer. As if it would rain – there had never been a more blue day or a less urgent morning. It was the kind of day things happen for people, or at least people like Tomasin. Not that there were more people like her. There were people like Marie, of course, but no one like this – if there had been, Tomasin would have been the first to admit it and to change herself.
Marie saw Tomasin’s green eyes, red around the rims. ‘What should I do?’ she asked, pinned at the counter by Tomasin’s hip and pelvic bone, one then the other.
‘Nothing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she offered.
‘Sorry for what?’ said Tomasin. ‘You don’t have to say sorry for being wrong. It’s its own punishment.’
‘I’m just sorry,’ she said.
‘Well, I hate it when people say sorry for no reason. Even if there is a reason, I hate it. What they want’ – Tomasin pressed right in – ‘is for you to feel sorry for them.’
‘That’s not what I want,’ Marie said. She could only think that Tomasin was beautiful, but dreadfully.
‘You should never say sorry,’ Tomasin told her. And here was this tendency of hers to tell someone something that she was really telling herself: ‘Whatever happens, just never say it, Marie.’
‘Okay,’ Marie answered. She was sweating around the neck. So was Tomasin, sweating and smelling of something Marie still couldn’t name but liked. It was her skin.
Tomasin pulled off and Marie went to the sink to wash her hands. She had washed them earlier but it seemed like a lot had happened. She ran her hands under the cold water and held them there, spreading out her fingers. It wasn’t right to ask the lake to do something for you. It was stupid. Rain for me, she had said, sorry to remember it. There was no rain on demand. It was the kind of thing Richter and his people were always saying. They thought the sun should shine when their skin ached for it; and later, when their eyes were tired, they thought clouds should roll in. Marie cupped water in her hands and rinsed her face, wiped the back of her neck and the front of her chest, then dried her hands against the sides of her dress, over her thighs. The modest dress she was wearing became less modest. Here was another embarrassment, but who would notice.
It was suppertime and they were out on the steps, the two Wares, Jer LaFleur, and Noah Chaperone, as Noah Coke liked to call himself when there was no one to talk to but these boys. Tristan was also there, but not with them. After work, he’d been so hungry that, as he knelt to rinse his hands off the dock, the water didn’t feel like anything. He’d stirred his hands around, put his wrists in deep, but couldn’t get to the cold. His hands were too hungry to think. Now he sat near but not with the others, not touching his supper, two sandwiches on wax paper across his knee.
Tomasin’s arrival interrupted them all, but she went straight to Tristan. ‘What now?’ she asked, as if they’d been spending the day together and needed to choose the next thing. When he didn’t answer, she talked about herself. ‘I worked all day and can feel it in my legs. I said, Anuta, have mercy, let me sit down. I told her I can’t take it. She said I don’t do anything, why am I tired? I told her doing nothing is exhausting. I thought I couldn’t take it, but I took it, you know. The bell rang. There is no bell but you know what I mean. I was so tired leaving, I fell down the porch stairs. Missed the top step. I might have liked falling, enjoyed it, but I’m not sure if it hurt. I think it hurts.’ She was looking at Tristan now, at his mouth. She wanted him to say he knew what she was talking about. ‘Right now, this second, I feel like I could run on the same legs that wanted to buckle all day. What is that?’ she asked him. ‘You aren’t listening to me.’
He wasn’t sure if he was listening. He stared at his sandwiches.
‘I want to run. Do you feel like running against me?’
‘Right now?’
‘Now or ever.’ It was so frustrating talking to him, and she liked it.
‘I know how to run,’ said Tristan, ‘I could run.’
The others watched them, and their laughter and looks were like bits of shot, meaningless one by one, but together delivered a blow. Tristan stood up to leave, gathering his sandwiches.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Where he was going, she would go.
Tristan didn’t have conversations, so he didn’t know how to get out of them. He didn’t know conversations never end, they’re only abandoned.
‘Hello?’ said Tomasin.
So overwhelming was his desire not to be seen anymore, or to be considered by her, or anyone, that he stopped breathing. His eyes, so dark no one could see in, turned dark to him from behind, until he couldn’t see. He rubbed his eyes and stretched the skin around them.
‘Hey,’ Tomasin said, shaking his arm.
It was like being awake in bed in the middle of the night, eyes open, but there was no light to scrape things together. It was like those nights in the shed with the lamp and no oil, just the smell of it on his hands from digging in the bottle.
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ Tomasin said. Something was wrong, she could tell – his body was so tight it was twisting.
He was thinking about how his mother used to tuck him in too tight and he couldn’t move his legs. He would pretend to fall asleep, then wouldn’t be able to sleep all night.
‘What is it?’
‘I’m so hungry. I haven’t eaten all day,’ he said.
‘Come on,’ she said. She would help him, but he had to come with her.
‘No.�
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‘Come on.’ She took his hand and tried to pull him, but he pulled his hand back.
When Tomasin was insulted, she would say, ‘This is religious.’ ‘You’re religious,’ she told him.
Tristan wrapped up his sandwiches in the wax paper and walked away holding one in each hand. Tomasin went to her friends on the stairs and told them, ‘Look at him. He’s religious.’ Religious meant she couldn’t understand and it wasn’t her fault. She liked to place emphasis on the word, and did, putting her foot on the second stair, stretching her leg out, and they watched her. There was no putting emphasis on boys who pulled their hands away.
The wind was incoherent and the sun shook in its bracket. There would be storms, he thought.
Anyone who didn’t go to Treble Island or to town in a caravan of boats was swimming and drinking down by the water. Tristan never went to Treble Island now. He didn’t want to go there, and besides Keb had told him not to, saying he might run into Codas, and Codas still wanted to get rid of him and send him south. What was south? None of them knew, but ‘I think he’d pay for your ticket himself,’ said Keb. That was Keb taking care of him.
Tomasin said she wanted to get off the island, was there anywhere they could go? She wasn’t afraid of storms and he should take her.
Tristan wondered what she was doing as she dropped her shirt off her wrist and slipped out of her pants in two pulls. She seemed to wander to the water though it was right there. He couldn’t see her, only the dropping off and slipping into the blue. When she dove, he was relieved she was gone.
Tristan hurried to get into the water before she rose, but she caught him. ‘Dive!’ she cried. ‘Dive in!’
‘But I’m in,’ he said, almost there.
‘You have to dive for the way it feels!’
Standing on the shore rocks, he watched her somersault in the shallows, her skin flashing black and white like a fish pulled up to the surface.
‘I’m coming over there to get you,’ she told him. ‘Let’s dive together.’
He would have to tell her he didn’t dive now.
‘Why are you standing there? Can’t you swim?’
‘I can swim.’
Tristan had brought her here, to Breaks Bay, a place of warm shallow coves, because he would only swim where he could see the bottom. He would never swim in deep water again after his mother was gone. Deep water made him feel like he was falling asleep. His feet stopped kicking a lot. His legs grew heavy to his waist. Where he could see the bottom, he could fall only that far.
‘Let’s dive. Tristan, please.’
‘I don’t have to.’
‘No, you don’t have to.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But you might.’
‘I can’t do it like you.’
‘I’ll teach you!’ she said. ‘I will be a wonderful teacher for you!’ She would love to teach him something.
He kept standing there with his hands in the water.
Tomasin pulled herself out, first her small round shoulders, her bare stomach, all the way. And she dove again perfectly. She was showing off, he knew, but didn’t blame her. He wanted her to be impressive, too.
She came in for the last time and started to dry off. ‘Come on and get out,’ she said. ‘You’re shaking.’
He was shaking.
‘Come here.’
He let her tell him what to do. And when he reached his clothes, she was leaning over next to him, hanging her head and wicking her hair with her hands. They’d forgotten towels.
‘Use your shirt,’ she said.
She threw on what she always wore, jeans and a loose buttoned shirt. He watched her do the buttons and roll her sleeves. Sometimes she wore a shirt with the sleeves cut off but not today.
‘Would you throw me my undershirt?’ he said. It was on the other side. ‘The white thing.’
‘White?’ she said, holding it up.
‘White but you can see through it, I guess.’
Tomasin shook it a couple times to straighten it out. ‘This?’
‘That.’
It was a woman’s shirt, Tomasin thought, almost a dishrag, but a woman’s.
‘Can I have it?’
The shirt made her affection for Tristan grow more serious somehow.
‘Please,’ he said.
She didn’t throw it but handed it. She liked him more and more. Usually she liked people less and less.
On the way back to the island, Tomasin talked and Tristan listened. Dark clouds gathered in the north and bore down on them and made the water they were pulling their paddles through darken.
‘If you don’t know how to dive, what else don’t you know?’ Tomasin called back from the bow.
‘I don’t know if we’re going to make it home right now,’ he answered her, pressing his cheek against his shoulder to stop himself from smiling. He was so happy to be back out on the water just in time for the storm to come. It would make things hard for them, which he liked.
‘What do you mean?’ Tomasin asked, turning around to face him. ‘If we aren’t going to make it home, where will we be?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ she answered, looking at him still. ‘Just wondering. But I trust you.’ And she smiled too.
What darkened was only Prioleau: the water dripping from their paddles, the waves, the near shore too thick with trees to land – these things, but not them. They moved through the new dark in danger but with little care, with only what they felt for each other then, and they felt light. They were radiant.
They couldn’t see anything but water. It poured down their faces and arms and swished around their knees in the bottom of the canoe. There was no such thing as direction. When lightning lit up the sky, they saw only more water. Tristan cared for pulling through and nothing else, and he somehow knew that she cared only for what they were doing too, pulling without knowing where they’d come to land, ducking now and then in reflex to the strikes of lightning that felt close, even warm. They bowed their heads, couldn’t see and didn’t mind.
There was a small raised cabin behind the lodge where the workers went to break and for cards and drinks late. It was also where the three dock boys slept, Philip and the Ware brothers.
Sean and Adrian Ware were confident boys where they came from, but awkward here. They were from the city and used to places that were flat and well-lit, like playing fields. Philip, on the other hand, came from a farm about an hour and a half north of Prioleau. The land there was dirt over rock, a layer so thin it scraped off where you put your foot down. His family blunted their shovels and sharpened their shovels until their shovels were nubs. If you asked them why they farmed that land in particular, instead of land that had some give, they would say it was where they lived. Philip had come to here to make some money and would split it, one half for his parents and one half to buy an ATV.
The Ware brothers called Philip ‘Baby’ because he was smaller than they were, only fifteen to their sixteen and seventeen, with Sean the eldest and biggest by at least four inches around his waist. But there was nothing baby about Philip since he was all sinew. Not a strip of him would give under your finger – you’d feel only his pulse, like a pulse coming from a table where you’ve rested your elbow.
Along the right wall of the cabin, there was a bunk for the Wares, and along the back a cot for Philip, which wasn’t bad and almost suited him, hard as a cot himself. They called their cabin ‘the Crib’ after dock cribs, those underwater rock piles packed into criss-crossed log walls. It was Noah Coke who came up with the name. He loved naming things and hated building dock cribs, standing in the water and wrestling with the logs so freshly peeled they bobbed, rolled, and slipped as he tried to drive footlong nails into their thick middles. Then there were the rocks to fill the big basket. They had to be found on far shores, lifted and carted by boat to crib-side, where they had to be pulled again up your thigh, then pushed off your stomach and in. Noah always ended
up swimming, either to fix a twisted log or to find a few last rocks because he hadn’t brought enough in the boat, then with his head underwater he would think about how useless this all was. The winter ice would make the crib come undone, maybe not this year but next year, and these same rocks would spill across the bottom like a bowl of cereal and get sucked in by the silt, inhaled. It was amazing how the silt swallowed things whole.
Everyone packed into the Crib like it was a market basket. They edged and were edged, not only by each other but by boxed dry goods, body bags of flour and sugar, loose columns of linen, stacks of plastic chairs, baggy boat covers, rolled sails, water skis, coiled ropes, boxes and trays of screws and nails, odd cuts of wood, buckets of paint and stain, and paintbrushes soaking in jars of turpentine. There were things they knew how to use, and things they didn’t know how to hold. It was easy to lose things in there, but also easy to find something you didn’t know you wanted until you had your hands on it. West of the fishing docks, past the tennis court, there was a workshop and storage shed, but it was more convenient to keep things here in the Crib, so that’s what they did. They kept everything for the kitchen, the boats, general maintenance, and even wood and pipe work.
The smell of the Crib was pleasant to the initiated. But to the uninitiated, nauseating. It was like being in a tent: if you wanted to be alone, you got up and left. If you were in, then you were allin. They made up games, or Jer LaFleur and Noah Coke did, then taught their games to the others. Mercy was a favourite. It was a kind of quick boxing match that was always okay because it was over before you knew it. It was a favourite, but that didn’t mean it was fun. The Mercy rules were simple: you had thirty seconds. The count was kept by a third party who was usually biased, but that was part of it. One foot on the line. No singing or dancing. No scratching. If you wanted out early, you cried mercy.
It started to be Mercy at the clearing every night. If you were there, it meant you were in. The clearing was where they burned brush and trash once a week in a bonfire. It was inland, a short walk to a wide circle cut twenty feet around so no branch or bit of thicket could spread the trash fire and burn the whole island down.
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