It didn’t occur to me until after he’d driven away that I should have thanked him. In these last, long days I’d come to accept everything he did for me as a matter of course.
SARAH AND I WERE downstairs watching Blue’s Clues when I heard a car pull into the driveway. Sarah sat on my lap, damp blonde curls tickling my chin, her hands resting on mine as she stared intently at the TV. The door banged open awkwardly, and in walked Ladd carrying a large cardboard box. He dropped it in the doorway between the foyer and the living room. The top flaps yawned open, revealing a mound of clothes, and instantly I recognized the collar of a white linen shirt. I put Sarah on the couch beside me, then got up and walked toward the box and knelt beside it, opened the flaps still wider.
“Daniel said you wanted his clothes,” Ladd said. “I figured I better go by there and get them before they start clearing the place out.”
I didn’t think to ask how he got in. The clothes, such basic day-to-day items only a few weeks ago, felt like remnants from a long lost time. They weren’t carefully folded or neatly stacked. Instead they lay in a tumble, as if they’d been grabbed from drawers and off of hangers, and thrown in carelessly. The way Charlie himself would have packed them.
Charlie! A scent that had been lost to me these many days rose from the box: of sandalwood and garlic and rosemary and sawdust. I plunged my arms into the box, cradling the garments, each sleeve and pant leg and button delivering a particular image, a particular day. There were the scrubs they’d given him at the hospital when Sarah was born. His Aran sweater, the one my mother sent him, itchy and damp with lanolin, his face across the table, ladling out Portuguese fish stew. For the first time, I realized that I didn’t have his wedding ring, which was also my father’s wedding ring.
Sarah slid off the couch and walked over to inspect the box herself. She pulled out an old Herring Run T-shirt worn to silken thinness, with a fine line of holes stretching from one shoulder blade to the other. She examined it for a moment, then pressed it to her cheek like a security blanket. I heard Ladd retreat, closing the door behind him. I kept my face buried in the clothing and didn’t picture Ladd walking across the lawn, to the path between the scrub oaks, back to his cottage.
I pictured Charlie. I pictured Charlie. I pictured Charlie.
Once in the fall when I was hugely pregnant with Sarah, Charlie and I walked along the beach from his father’s house to the bluff right below Daniel’s house. He wore these jeans and that flannel shirt. We found a fox, dead on the rocks, its fur a brilliant and burnished orange, its bared teeth gleaming white and perfect. He wanted to pick it up, float it back out to sea, but I didn’t want him to touch it. “Anyway,” I said, “it will just end up back here, won’t it?” Later we called the Audubon Society, and they said it had probably drowned trying to navigate the rocks at high tide. It had already floated out to sea and then returned. In the morning, Charlie walked back out and dragged it up, beyond the rocks, in the dunes where the tide would not be able to reclaim it. I wondered if its bones lay there still, bleached by the sun, the teeth still gleaming, sharp and curved as if they were carved out of marble.
Sometimes I’d thought of our marriage as happy, and sometimes I’d thought of it as troubled. I’d imagined it continuing and ending in both veins, I had felt exalted and I had felt trapped. And in the midst of those pivotal moments—dramatic or tumultuous or romantic—there had been simple everyday pieces of life, lived out beside one another. These were the pieces I couldn’t imagine living without. I couldn’t give them up when I found out about Deirdre. I didn’t see how I could give them up now.
Neither, it seemed, could Sarah. She hung on to his T-shirt all day, mostly pressing it to her cheek, but sometimes just slinging it over her shoulder, much the way Charlie used to cook with a dish towel over his.
AFTER MRS. DUFFY MADE dinner and then went to sleep in the room down the hall, I lay awake for hours, watching the overhead fan rearrange the darkness into regular, swirling patterns. Earlier, I had remembered old photographs of the Lindbergh kidnapping, the ladder leaned against the side of the house, and closed the window. But enough air had entered during the past few days that it still smelled salty and fresh. In the moving shadows, Sarah’s face looked perfectly at rest, a faint smile turning her lips upward, her little fist closed around the collar of Charlie’s shirt. She looked very much like the ultrasound photo I still had, somewhere, perhaps tucked into one of the Emily Dickinson books or perhaps back at the Moss house. A fierce imperative rose in my chest, the same instinct that led me to close the window, as if I needed to protect her not only from imminent danger but my own compulsive reordering of the past.
Because no matter how I arranged things, it felt like my whole life unfolded in a series of interactions with Eli, all of them creating a string of worry beads in my mind. I could roll each bead one at a time between my thumb and forefinger before moving on to the next. Starting with that first day I ever saw him, trying out for the musical, mirroring each other’s movements across the dance studio. Summoning me to the party where I met Charlie, or filling my room with balloons, or rescuing that scraggly kitten. Holding my newborn baby. Pacing the lawn, decorated in Charlie’s blood.
Lying there in the dark, listening to the absence of Daniel beneath me, I felt flooded with a clear and certain knowledge that another bead had been added to the string. Maybe it was Lightfoot, who jumped up, skittered to the window, and placed her paws on the sill. Her little tail started to beat, back and forth, slowly at first and then faster. I sat up and placed a hand on Sarah’s heart. Then I took off my nightgown and pulled on a pair of jeans, a bra, a T-shirt—before going to the window and seeing exactly what I knew I would: Eli, making his way down the path between the scrub oaks from Ladd’s cottage, heading toward us.
My purse sat right by my elbow on top of the little desk. I could have reached in and grabbed my phone. But instead I left it there. I picked up my flip-flops but didn’t put them on, one more thing to risk waking Mrs. Duffy. Even with Lightfoot at my heels, it seemed to me I made almost no noise at all, already a ghost.
I could have gone into the kitchen and used the old-fashioned wall phone. Dialed 911, made the world converge here. How long would it take for the police to arrive and arrest him, or worse? I didn’t bother finding out. I just opened the front door, letting the dog burst through and onto the grass. Lightfoot ran down the hill to greet him. I stepped outside, locking the door behind me. The night air stood close and dark, one note of chill amid the dense summer breeze. No, I realized, not summer anymore, but deep enough into September that it had officially become fall. Beach grass swayed beyond the manicured lawn. Eli had bypassed the path to the house and now stood under the eaves of the shed. The sky sat clear and dark above us, the air dry, but Eli’s posture suggested huddling away from rain. I could see him, stringy blond hair hanging down his back, his shoulders hunched. Lightfoot ran in joyful circles around his feet, then stopped to jump up on his legs, stretching toward him, asking for a return greeting. But Eli didn’t bend to pet her. He looked so helpless, a forlorn shadow leaning against the shed. When could he have last eaten, or slept in a bed? I wished I’d thought to grab some food before leaving the house and felt acutely aware, these past few weeks, how well I’d been tended, first by Maxine and then by Daniel and Mrs. Duffy.
“Brett?” Eli said, into the darkness. His voice sounded hoarse and garbled, unpracticed, and still just exactly like himself.
“Yes,” I agreed, loud and clear, no mistaking that he would hear me. “It’s me. It’s Brett.” I left the path to walk across the grass, my arms outstretched before me as if I meant to embrace him. Eli had somehow managed not to trigger the automatic floodlight, but as I walked toward him it detected my movement and washed the lawn with a faint yellow glow.
His face looked wolfish, starving, with a patchy, unsuccessful beard. At the sight of my approaching, he let himself break into a smile. I knew it would just be one moment of the old
Eli. But that was enough to let me muster my courage. I dropped one arm but kept the other one in front of me. As I approached he reached out and clasped my hand, and we stood there, facing each other in the eerie slant of light, examining each other’s altered faces, the careful and fascinated way you greet a friend you haven’t seen in a long time—someone you knew when you were very, very young.
PART FOUR
In this short Life
That only lasts an hour
How much—how little—is
Within our power
— EMILY DICKINSON
15
Three boys grew up on a stretch of beach, summer their most important time of year. Each one looking forward, through the drudgery of school, the slushy forever of northeastern winters, to the lush and persistent light of June, widening above sand and shore. The tide pools with crabs and periwinkles. Sea stars clinging to the rocks under the jetty.
Twice a day an ice-cream truck pulled into the beach parking lot and summoned the children away from plastic shovels and boogie boards. Of the three, Charlie probably missed the truck most often, walking out to the very end of the jetty, jumping from rock to rock, waving to the other two when he reached the end, standing out in the thick of the bay. Ladd would have been more civilized, swimming in races, and sailing, playing tennis. Eli played tennis, too, but what he loved most was mountain biking through the trails behind Daniel Williams’s house, balancing in the deep sand, ducking his head under arches of tree branches.
All his life, when Charlie had no place to go, and no plans left, he came to Saturday Cove. When Ladd was finished with his travels, he came back to Saturday Cove. And Eli. The boy who built sand castles out on the rocks at low tide and watched as the ocean swept in around them. The boy who won science grants, and wanted to be a doctor, and laughed with his whole face, and loved to throw parties. That boy had seeped out of his original shell. Where he had gone I couldn’t say. I only knew that the connective tissue between those three men and me was Eli, just enough left of him to come back to this place, to Saturday Cove, like a homing device that someone else had left behind.
Together, we walked down to the beach.
THE SAND STRETCHED FAR out toward the ocean, littered with seaweed and beach glass and pebbles. When I’d first known Eli, he’d carried a citrusy scent, somewhere between lemon and grapefruit. Ever since he’d gotten sick, even when he was medicated—even when he’d just showered, and wore clean clothes—he carried with him an odor of anxiety and decay, as if the lemon had begun to rot. When we got to the bottom of the beach steps, and he stopped just beside me, his sour sweat overpowered even the low tide. Away from the bath of Daniel’s floodlight, it took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust. Grime caked and pooled in the hollow of Eli’s collarbone, his hair was matted. But the clothes he wore, a white T-shirt from the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, an unbuttoned denim shirt, and khakis, were clean. And they were Charlie’s. Eli couldn’t have been wearing them since that day three weeks ago. Maybe as early as this morning, he had been at the house. Maybe he had been there, hiding, when Ladd collected the rest of Charlie’s clothes. There was no writing on the khakis, but Eli’s hand kept moving as if he were scribbling, an imaginary pen clutched in his right hand. I remembered the jeans he’d been wearing the last time I saw him. What would the writing on them reveal to me if I could manage to decipher it?
“Eli,” I said. “Where have you been?”
He didn’t answer but turned and started walking, toward the public beach, the opposite direction from the Moss house. Darkness settled comfortably around us, but I didn’t want to walk too far and let the morning find us exposed, out on the beach, for everyone to see.
“Eli,” I called, to his departing back. I wished I’d thought to grab my car keys—though the noise of the engine might wake Mrs. Duffy or, worse, Ladd. A stream of words tumbled out of Eli, buzzing around his head like a cloud of mayflies. I said, “I’m going this way.”
I jogged toward the rocky stretch of bluff, which we’d have to pick our way across. Eli lurched around, bone-thin and lumbering, all his natural grace gone. As he walked toward me, I tried to imagine where he’d been, how he’d been eating—if he’d been eating—and how he’d avoided getting picked up by the police.
“When did you get Charlie’s clothes?” I said when he reached me. “Where have you been?”
He waved his hand, shooing my questions away. “Are you ready?” he asked as we stood facing the direction of the rocks, the dark, his childhood home.
I presented my beckoning hand outward, toward the bluff, a ladies-first gesture in reverse. The truth was, I didn’t feel afraid. It was Eli. Even now, he only scared me in theory. Even now—in this florid state, incomprehensible, alarming. I was used to him. Which didn’t mean I was willing to turn my back.
“After you,” I said.
AS I TRAVELED IN the dark behind Eli, it was impossible to imagine the sun would ever rise. Words from his stream floated back to me in a paranoid staccato. Lightfoot trotted along cheerfully, overjoyed by the midnight outing and the reunion. Out here on the rocks, under the sky that hung low around us, we were surrounded by the detritus of animals that had met timely or untimely ends. Withering skates, and the abandoned husks of horseshoe crabs. Tiny snails crunching beneath our feet as we stepped, and for a moment the oppressive scent of a seal carcass, battered by the tide and sun, now seeping into the air. Eli didn’t seem to register any of it. He kept his shoulders hunched, his voice low and persistent. I had the feeling I could take him by the shoulders and point him in any direction, and he would just maintain this posture, muttering and walking forward like a windup toy.
All I held as fact were the sand and rocks and debris beneath my feet. The sky above my head, and the ocean traveling its way all those thousands of miles east. A million worlds surrounded me, and the only one I cared to know occurred weeks ago, less than a mile in the direction we now headed. What happened? Maybe if I listened hard enough, the answers would spill out from Eli. Maybe they already had, in some nonsequential order, and I’d missed them.
By now, we’d crossed over the rocks and alighted on a clear stretch of sand. Eli stopped—not just moving but talking. It startled me, the sudden cessation of that voice. He turned toward the water, staring out toward the tide, and I stopped walking, too.
“Brett?” he called in a long and questioning syllable. As if he couldn’t see me through what little darkness stood between us.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m right here.”
And then the words started spilling out again. Words that peppered and repeated. Important words like Charlie and blood, and my own name, jumbled together with enough other words that I couldn’t begin to put them all together.
“Eli.” I walked forward, right next to him, and put my hand on his shoulder. He jerked his head sideways, toward me, and shrugged my hand away.
“Brett,” he said, his voice newly sharp and clear.
Just behind him I could see the roof of his house rising above the bluff. I stepped back to give him room. This would happen sometimes. A break in the stream. Moments of conversation, like logic had broken through the flood. It wouldn’t last long. Above us, the slightest shift in the dark sky, the fading of stars, a hint toward gathering light. I needed to get him inside before morning.
“Why did you kill Charlie?” Eli asked.
“Me?” I pointed to my chest, feeling a flood of relief. Finally someone was accusing me of the thing I had done. And here we stood, out on the beach alone, nobody in the world even knowing enough to look for us or to worry about me. Sarah lay sleeping, safe upstairs, far down the beach. Would Daniel keep her if I never came home?
“Eli,” I said. “Let’s go up to the house.” And then, thinking he must have some sense of being pursued to have remained undiscovered so long, I added, “We can hide there.”
He nodded and ducked his head, then brushed past me. I followed him up the stairs and across th
e lawn. He marched straight to the deck, bypassing the low stairs to step directly onto it, then put his hands on his hips, surveying. I stopped on the lawn. In the days since I’d last been there, someone had started to rebuild the deck. To the north lay a pile of the discarded boards, dark gray, replaced by fresh slats, their pale brown color visible even in the darkness, the scent of fresh wood settling around us. Eli stopped at the precise spot Charlie had fallen. He knelt and pressed his hand to the boards.
“Here’s where he died,” he said. Then he stood and walked to the rail. He leaned forward, crossing his elbows, and dropping his head on top of them, exactly the way I’d imagined Charlie, braced for the first blow.
“Here’s how he stood,” Eli said. His voice should have been muffled, pressed against his arms, but it came out clear. “Just before you got him with the hammer.”
I walked up onto the deck. A wintery breeze blew in from the direction of the discarded boards. It would leave a film of dew on every leaf, and then the light would come. Not impossible to imagine the scenario, me killing Charlie, so much more directly than I ever could have imagined. I was still so hurt, and so angry. Maybe I’d done it in my sleep. Maybe I’d used these past few weeks to rearrange all memories in favor of myself, forgetting this unspeakable act.
“I should have stopped you,” Eli said.
“Where were you?” I asked. I almost wanted to add, I didn’t see you there.
“Just over there. With the dog.” He looked down at his feet as if seeing Lightfoot for the first time. She wagged up at him and he knelt to pet her. “Hey,” he said, the lucidity gathering. “Hey Lightfoot.” She put her paws on his knee and licked his chin.
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