The Storm King: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  With her lips on his, Nate found that he could even forget that time proved all promises to be lies.

  Seven

  “But why were you outside to begin with?” Meg asked.

  Nate was in the emergency room at the little hospital in Gracefield, one town over from Greystone Lake. They’d checked him over and stitched the cut on the crown of his head. He believed he had only a minor concussion, but the emergency room doctor insisted on a CT scan.

  “I was checking for storm damage,” Nate told her. This was essentially true.

  “And some kid clocked you?”

  “I didn’t get a good look at him. I think he was a kid.”

  “You’re lucky Bea heard the commotion. Is she still there?”

  “She went to get me some dry clothes.” Nate didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious on the lawn, but it’d been time enough to get soaked through. His phone hadn’t been spared. An ominous discoloration spread across its screen. “I’m really completely fine.”

  “A man doesn’t call his wife from the ER at three in the morning to let her know he’s fine. He calls to let her know he isn’t dead. You understand the difference, right?”

  Despite Meg’s suggestion to the contrary, Nate knew from experience that she would have been more upset if he’d waited until morning to tell her he’d been hurt.

  Soon after they’d begun dating, back when Nate still had a habit of getting into a particular kind of trouble, a minor incident had landed him in the ER. When he’d showed up at Meg’s apartment the next night and startled her with a split lip and two fingers in splints, she’d been furious that she was only then learning of his injuries.

  Nate had never seen even a hint of her anger before this. You should have told me the second you had a free hand to dial, she’d shouted at him, I could have helped! He realized that Meg wasn’t upset for being kept in the dark, but because she’d imagined him suffering for a day without her even knowing. This had been a concept long lost to him: that pain could be diminished by being shared. It made him wonder for the first time if this thing between them could be love. A gentler genus of love than what he’d known before, though a species not without its teeth. He felt the sting of its bite now, in this ER at three A.M., in this cold plastic chair not far from his hometown, where lies so often felt like mercy.

  “I’m telling you—”

  “Yes, that you’re fine. Other than the concussion. Other than the bruise to your brain that you got when a random hoodlum smashed you over the head with a stepladder. I don’t suppose you asked him why he was carrying a stepladder around in the dead of night in the middle of a hurricane?”

  “I’m alive. I’m not going to die. I’ll get a second opinion on the CT scan as soon as I get home, just to be safe.”

  “I wish you’d never gone back there.”

  “That makes two of us.” His first real lie to her. They were quiet together for a few moments. “But I really am fine.”

  “I’m actually glad now that you didn’t drive there. But taking a bus back is ridiculous. Can’t you fly from Albany or something? Or are you even supposed to fly with a concussion? God, then there’s this damn hurricane.”

  “I’ll figure it out, love. You need your sleep now. Solo monkey duty and all.”

  “Don’t worry your sweet little head about all this complicated medical business, dear,” Meg said in her grumbling facsimile of Nate’s voice.

  “Exactly right, dear.” Even woken from a dead sleep by an emergency call, she could make him smile.

  “Be more careful, please?” Meg said after some silence.

  “Believe me, if I see another stepladder, I’m running in the opposite direction.”

  “I’m serious, Nate.”

  And he knew she was.

  “Come back here the fastest, safest way you can, as soon as you can.”

  “I will, love. I promise I will.”

  They said their goodbyes, and when Nate hung up, the waiting room seemed colder and emptier than it had been.

  He was tired but actually did feel mostly fine. The stitches on his scalp felt tight, but he hardly had a headache. He was cold, though. The hospital was refrigerated, and his clothes were still wet.

  While he waited for Grams and the CT technician, Nate tried to sear the details of the vandals he’d tussled with into his memory. He’d caught only the edge of the boy’s profile, but he thought he’d have a decent shot at identifying the girl. The light hadn’t been great, but he guessed her age somewhere between thirteen and fifteen. That put her between eighth grade and sophomore year.

  In Nate’s day, Greystone Lake’s school district had hovered at around a hundred students a grade. The classes were probably larger now, but it still wouldn’t take him long to go through a yearbook.

  He could find this girl. Once he did, he’d have them all. He’d know everything they knew.

  Outside, sirens crescendoed, and Nate guessed he wouldn’t be alone in these fluorescent halls for much longer.

  His phone startled him with a sound like that of a live cat being skinned. He’d hoped it would survive getting wet, but this looked increasingly unlikely. It wouldn’t even display the name of the incoming caller.

  “Hello?”

  “Nate, thank Christ you have your phone on. You’ve got to get to the hospital.”

  “Tom?”

  An ambulance shrieked to a stop outside the emergency entrance, its revolving lights blazing through the automatic doors.

  “Dad just called. There’s been an accident.”

  “I’m already here. I’m fine, though.”

  Police and paramedics were clustered like a fist around a stretcher they ran through the doors.

  “There was an explosion at the Union. I don’t know much, but—”

  Nate missed everything else Tom said. He repeated the words he’d heard to himself. He rearranged them and tried all kinds of punctuation, but couldn’t find a way to make them mean anything else. The smell of smoke entered the room with the emergency squad.

  He would have recognized the form on the stretcher anywhere, but he still searched it for proof of identity.

  The scuffed shoes, the singed strips of a cardigan.

  Her familiar hands, charred and blistered.

  His grandmother’s blackened face under the fogged plastic of an oxygen mask.

  Eight

  Ten percent of Grams’s body had second- and third-degree burns. She had a fractured spine and two cracked ribs. She’d been unconscious when they found her and had yet to wake up.

  From interrogating police and paramedics, Nate constructed a skeleton of what had happened.

  His best guess was that Grams had been on her way to Bonaparte Street to get him dry clothes when she drove by the Union and noticed that its lights were on. The pub should have been locked up hours ago. She’d had the foresight to call the police before entering the place to investigate.

  Perhaps things in the bar and eating areas of the pub looked as they were supposed to, but she’d been drawn to the kitchen. When she opened its swinging doors, she’d breathed fresh life into an oxygen-starved fire that smoldered there. This triggered a flare-up powerful enough to knock her across the room. An officer, responding to her call, saw the explosion and pulled her free of the blazing pub.

  Nate had seen her chart. They were keeping her fluids up and were worried about her lungs. Her face was blistered, her hands and arms ravaged, and she’d fractured two vertebrae. Nate couldn’t shake the smell that had accompanied her arrival at the hospital. Melting plastic and burned food. He’d washed his face a dozen times, but couldn’t flush it from his nostrils.

  He’d been the doctor-grandson and fired questions at the staff, grilled the paramedics, and double-checked the IVs and infusions and doses. He’d woken acquaintances with burn experience in the middle of the night for their advice. He wanted her airlifted to a burn center, but she was too unstable to move, and flying in this weather had its o
wn risks.

  The crisis had given Nate focus and direction. Lucy, the troubles of the Lake, and the ghosts of his youth were pushed to the rim of his concerns. But now that the active phase of the disaster was over, he was deep into the desolate territories of waiting. Here, the reasons he’d returned home cast their shadows over everything, each doubt and question and regret intensifying in shifting umbras and penumbras.

  It was dawn, and he’d spent the last hour with his head in his hands.

  Nate had been tested by water, but on that long-ago night when they’d burned Adam Decker’s house, the fire had but tasted him. It had been a kind of baptism, that dip into flame: the true beginning to their Thunder Runs, when Lucy joined them and together they reigned over the shore like bloodied angels. A world of new possibilities opened to him that night. Beautiful and terrible.

  Someone tapped his shoulder. Tom in police-issue rain gear.

  “What took you so long?” Nate asked. Tom had called him hours ago.

  “It’s crazy out there.” Tom collapsed into the chair next to Nate. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot. His stubble made him look twice his age. His shoes and trousers were splattered with mud. “The hurricane. The vandals. How is she?”

  “Not good, Tommy. She shouldn’t be alive at all.” It was amazing that she’d survived, but the spine injury alone could lay her up long enough for her to develop pneumonia, and that wasn’t her biggest problem. Even under the best circumstances, a full recovery was hard to imagine. Nate wanted to break his fists against the wall, thinking of how unfair a way this was to close out a good and gentle life.

  “But she’s going to be okay?” Tom asked.

  Nate felt as if he was on the threshold of a precipitous descent. A furious and familiar creature waited for him on the other side of the drop. Its eyes burned like ice, its smile was a blade, and it was now so close that Nate could feel its cold breath lick across his face.

  “McHales are hard to kill,” Tom said, looking at him uncertainly. It was a risky thing to say.

  “Some of us.” Despair was as useless an emotion as there was. But it had a dangerous cousin. As Nate sat up in his chair he felt himself slide a little closer to it.

  “They’re finished now, you know,” Tom said.

  The vandals, Tom meant. Nate was certain they’d set the fire at the Union. Maybe they hadn’t meant for anyone to get hurt, but their intentions were irrelevant. “Yes.” The creature inside him tried to affix its serrated smile to Nate’s face, but he still held it at bay. “Finished.”

  “This is a felony.”

  Nate nodded, though the letter of the law had never held much interest for him. He’d long followed his own commandments.

  “Unless it really was an accident,” Tom said. “We’ll run tests to find out.”

  Nate wished he could believe bad wiring or some flaw in the installation of a gas line was to blame. The universe was senseless in its violence, and another curse from it would be easier to accept than the fact that it was all his fault. But he was sure that the fire had been set deliberately, and that the old pub had been targeted because of his connection to it. He also knew that Grams never would have been outside at that time of night in the first place if not for him.

  “What happened to you?” Tom asked, pointing to Nate’s chest. Nate looked down at a bloodstain on his T-shirt. It took him a moment to remember how it got there.

  “Some of those kids were about to do something to Grams’s house. One of them knocked me out with a stepladder. Joke’s on me, I guess. Should’ve been more worried about the pub.” The CT technician still wanted pictures of Nate’s brain, but he’d been waving him away.

  “You saw them? Can you make an ID?”

  “One of them, maybe. A girl.”

  “I’ll get the yearbooks from the high school and middle school. If we find her, then…” Tom trailed off.

  Nate followed his friend’s gaze to his own hands. Droplets of blood trembled from the white promontories of his knuckles. He didn’t need to examine his hands to know that his nails had sliced into his palms. For years his hands had been marred with such half-moon scabs.

  He wiped the blood onto his jeans. There were ruined anyway. Next to him, Tom’s face was an amalgam of alarm and dread. They’d been here before, the two of them, in this place between action and reaction. In this space between victimhood and vigilantism. And not a single good thing had come from it.

  Before Tom could say anything, a torrent of swearing permeated the emergency room’s glass doors. They slid open, and Johnny hobbled through, heavily supported by Owen.

  Tom stole another look at Nate’s bloodied hands before hurrying to meet the pair struggling through the entrance. Johnny slung his free arm around Tom’s shoulder when Tom reached him. “What happened?”

  “Little shits broke into my house and slicked oil or something all over my stairs.”

  “How bad are you hurt?” Tom asked. “How far’d you fall?”

  “Half a flight maybe. I don’t know. Marble looks good but it’s a real bitch once you get down to it.”

  “Why didn’t you call an ambulance?” Nate stooped to examine Johnny’s injured leg. The bloodstain on his pants had prepared Nate for something awful, and the splintered stalk of bone lancing through rent flesh didn’t disappoint. Compound fracture of the tibia.

  “They’re so loud.”

  “Holy God,” Tom said, seeing the state of Johnny’s leg.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck,” Owen said.

  “Yeah, the second I saw my leg tricked out like a George Romero prop, I thanked God for how amazingly lucky I am.”

  “They’ll need to operate,” Nate said. “How are you even able to speak in complete sentences right now?”

  “There might have been some self-medicating going on,” Owen said.

  “Go and narc on me, Owen. Christ.”

  “You need to get that treated, like right now.” A sleepy-looking orderly was ambling toward them with a wheelchair, and Nate motioned for him to hurry up. “And make sure to tell them whatever meds you took.”

  Chief Buck came through the automatic doors. His rain gear was slicked with water, and his expression was as dark as the sky.

  “You, too, Johnny?” He grimaced at the wound, then glanced at Tom. They stared at each other for a moment, and Nate watched something pass between them. The chief wrapped his arms around his son and Tom hugged him back.

  “I’m so sorry about Loki,” the chief said.

  “Loki?” Nate asked.

  “Tom’s black lab, you asshole.” Johnny’s voice was saturated with disgust. “Poor dead Loki.”

  “Your dog died? I didn’t know you had a dog.”

  “You don’t know anything. And he didn’t die, he was murdered. The bastards drugged him or something and put him behind the back wheel of Tom’s cruiser.”

  “So you—”

  “I—ran over him. After I called you, to tell you about Grams, I was on my way here. And then, when I pulled out of the garage—I—” Tom’s voice wavered as he kept his eyes fixed on some imaginary point. “The second I felt the car lurch, I just knew. He was my—” He swallowed and closed his eyes. “He was a good dog.”

  Nate realized that Tom’s eyes were red and his clothes were covered in mud because he’d been burying his beloved pet.

  “I was heading over to help him when I fell down the stairs,” Johnny said. “It probably shocks you to learn I’m not usually up and about at five in the morning.”

  “I wish you’d told me, Tom. I’m so sorry.”

  Tom shrugged and looked away.

  The orderly and a nurse eased Johnny into the wheelchair and pushed him toward triage.

  Tom and Owen trailed Johnny then settled into chairs across from where Nate had been seated. He was about to join them, but the chief’s grip on his arm stopped him.

  “How’s Bea?”

  “Not good, Chief.”

  “Is sh
e awake?”

  “No. If she does wake up she’ll wish she hadn’t.” A tsunami of agony awaited Grams if she returned to him.

  “I’m going to see her. Don’t go anywhere.” Chief Buck exchanged words with the nurse at the intake desk and disappeared through a set of doors.

  “Did they hit you last night, Owen?” Nate asked as he dropped into his chair.

  “Not this time.”

  “They got me instead,” Tom said. “I was an idiot for thinking they’d leave me alone.” He spoke without heat, as if his front door had been egged and not his dog murdered. But his eyes were wide and gleaming with tears.

  Medea’s carnage played mutely from the waiting room’s television. Roiling mud where a highway had been, parking lots filled with submerged cars, Coast Guard rescues from foundering ships. All of the footage, blurred and choppy and water-slicked.

  These were scenes from the lives of the unlucky. Edited, packaged, and broadcast to places where electricity still ran in lines through the walls instead of in bolts that splintered the sky. Viewers, from the comfort of their couches, were the fortunate ones. But luck doesn’t last forever. In the carousel of disaster, Nate knew that everyone gets their turn.

  “It’ll be okay,” Owen told Nate. He’d leaned across the space that separated them. “No matter what happens, it’ll all be okay.” It was a platitude people used as a placeholder for something better, but Owen delivered the words with conviction.

  “I don’t think so, O,” Nate said. “Not this time.”

  “When my mom had her stroke, I didn’t know how to handle it.” Owen shook his head. “Dad was gone by then, and I had to deal with all of it. The doctors, the bills, the rehab. Everything. It seemed totally impossible. Because it was new, and horrible, and changes everything in your life. But people do stuff like this all the time. People who aren’t as tough and smart and well-off. Because we’ve got to, you know?”