“We can still talk our way out of this. The kids’ll listen to you,” Owen told Tom. “It’s like when we burned the Deckers’ house back in high school. That fire bound us all together. Just like killing Lucy tied the two of us together. And that kind of makes up for all the bad stuff, doesn’t it? When something good comes out of it?”
The smoke had fully erased the Century Room. Flames devoured the pile of furniture that had blocked the exit to the promenade.
“It’s too late for him, Tom,” Nate said. Talking was like lighting his throat on fire. “Come here and we’ll get out of here together. I don’t blame you for Lucy, and neither would she.”
“You can’t trust him,” Owen said. “After everything he did to us? How can you believe a thing he says? Look at my leg, Tom. Look at what he did to me. You really think he’ll do what’s right for you instead of what’s right for him?”
Nate was nearly to the window, but he felt the approaching inferno like hands on his back.
“He’s getting away, Tom,” Owen said. “He’s got the kid, and he’s got your future, too. You’ll lose everything when it gets out. Your job, your family. What’ll your dad say? If they don’t put you in jail they’ll run you out of town. Then where’ll you go? With him? Just like in college, huh? He’ll have you over for dinner three times a week, right?” Owen laughed. “But just imagine life without him, Tom.”
Fingers closed around Nate’s bicep. Nate turned, utterly relieved. The cloth across Tom’s mouth was gone. But the look on his friend’s face wiped clear Nate’s smile and drained what remained of his strength.
“I can’t do it, Nate,” Tom said. “I just can’t.” The hand holding the gun came up.
“Imagine being free,” Owen said.
Tom’s face was anguish. “I’m sorry.”
He hurled himself at Nate.
Upon impact, Nate and the boy he carried crashed through the window, landing hard on the boardwalk. Through the shattered glass, he saw Tom turn back to Owen and point his Glock at the dance floor. The rotted wood beneath Nate buckled.
Then Nate was in the air, falling through the broken boardwalk and into the bottomless mouth of the lake.
One moment he was suspended like a gull on the wind, then he was under the surface. The body slam of its cold was more painful than Owen’s foot in his side. Up and down, air and water, alive and dead. Everything became uncertain in the dislocation of the collision. But his arm was still crooked around James’s limp body, and the last bubbles of his breath pointed him back to the living world. With a grip on James’s shirt, he kicked them both for the surface.
When he was within arm’s reach of the air, the purgatory of the lake exploded into the most glorious of dawns. The waters burst into rippling mosaics of flame shadowed with the lacework fractals of waves.
Twenty-seven
Worlds perish in all kinds of ways. The Night Ship both burned and drowned.
A blast of heat singed Nate’s lungs as he broke through the surface and gasped for breath. He pulled James’s head clear of the water. There was too much noise to hear if the boy was breathing. Nate had to put his ear to the teen’s mouth to make sure he was still with him.
Above the waterline, the lake was undone.
Rafts of flaming debris flared amid whitecaps like cities burning across the tundra. Medea scoured water, smoke, steam, ash, and sparks into gusts that blazed and seared and chilled.
Nate’s back took the brunt of the impact as the current crushed them into one of the pilings. Above them, the floor of the undercroft gaped with an enormous hole rimmed with fire. There’d been an explosion, Nate understood. One of the tanks of propane the children had kept in the nightclub. He was certain Tom had shot it on purpose.
Tom.
Nate screamed for his friend as the lake whisked him through the rest of the pilings. Something within the nightclub collapsed, and it dislodged a large section of the pier’s undergirding. Its plunge reared walls of water that again submerged Nate. This time it was harder to kick back to the surface.
He had his arm slung around James’s neck in the same way Owen had, though with the opposite intention. The boy lagged behind him as Nate struggled to keep them both afloat. Around them, torrents of fire reached for the sky and were whipped by the hurricane. Not all the wreckage from the pier was aflame. Shingles from the roof bobbed like leaves across the water. The waves broke against massive sheaths of rotted woodwork.
When he regained his breath, Nate again called for Tom. The wind swept away his voice. He could barely hear himself.
He watched as the Night Ship’s last spire collapsed into a galaxy of sparks. They curled like a nebula into the storm and then were extinguished. With the end of the pier unsealed by the explosion, the hurricane fed the blaze within the promenade, sending it to the landward side like a blowtorch. Where the waves weren’t black, they were dipped in flame.
He didn’t know if the children had taken both the kayak and the motorboat, but it didn’t matter because he couldn’t see either.
James’s face fell below the waves again, and Nate fought to give him a better angle, but it was impossible. The water was too rough. The waves crashed into them without pause, and Nate was at the end of his strength.
The current had them, and he couldn’t see the shore.
His legs should have burned from the exertion of keeping afloat, but the water was so cold they’d gone numb. Another wave threw the two of them back under, but this time Nate saw something: a light ahead of him, but also underwater, where no fire could burn. He held James above him as he dunked his head again to look. It didn’t make sense. Twin columns of illumination sliced through the clean water like the headlights of a car.
A car in the lake, Nate thought.
Impossible.
But it wasn’t impossible. He knew this better than anyone.
He struck out for the lights and the current urged him along. Perhaps this was where the lake had always wanted him to go. He swallowed its water by the mouthful as he tried to breathe and keep James afloat. He passed debris on the way, but none of it was significant or stable enough for him to steal even a moment’s rest.
The lake drew them closer to its center, and Nate let it. The town along the shore became a memory. Had he lost his mind? Nate wondered. He tried to remember the exact effects of carbon monoxide intoxication.
They were far from what remained of the Night Ship, but close to where Nate thought he’d seen the headlights. He confirmed this by another sojourn under the surface. Instead of two, there was now only a single beam of light, and he didn’t know if this was good or bad.
A raft of flotsam was ahead. It had none of the contours of Victorian style woodwork. It wasn’t furniture or a fairyland tower. It had the beacon of a lit flashlight fastened around one wrist and the profile of Nate’s best friend.
Tom floated face-up, rocked by the waves. Nate shook and screamed at him but got no response. He couldn’t tell if he was breathing. The skin of his face was cold, but so was Nate’s own.
With his swollen hands, Nate grabbed the collar of Tom’s raincoat and dragged him along with James. For a few moments this seemed like a possible way to continue.
Away from the blaze and smoke of the Night Ship it was easier to see the shore.
Far ahead he could see the stony beach where he’d once been both saved and damned.
The beach loomed and then receded. The currents had carried him this far only to tease him. He kicked for the shore, but the lake pulled him and the others away from land and up to its northern bulge. Its waves pummeled his face and flooded his throat. Tom’s head fell below the water and Nate tried to lift him, but then James began to sink.
No longer burning, his arms felt like stones. They pulled him down along with Tom, James, and their sopping clothes. Deep into the cold water where his dead had waited so long for him.
In the flares of the storm, Nate saw the dim spike of a person on the beach ahead. She
stood among the stones, her coat whipping in the gale like the shrouds of a wraith.
Perhaps June wanted him safe, but the universe was an uncertain place. What kind of ripples would saving him cause this time, she might wonder. Would a third chance bring more blue string than red? Impossible to know. Dangerous to guess.
This time he’d have to save himself.
His lungs screamed and his breath grew shallow. Above him cannon flashes burst and sparked in volleys between thunderheads.
Nate realized that he was drowning.
He was drowning.
He understood that they weren’t going to make it. He’d killed his best friend and his first love’s little brother.
“I’m sorry, Meg.” Another mouthful of lake forced its way into him. “Livvy.” His voice was torn by the roar of the storm and crushed by the relentless slaps of the waves. “I’m sorry, Tommy.”
Lightning strobed the shore. A last glimpse of a world lost to him. The air crashed like a giant pounding against the door of the sky.
“Do you hear it, Nate?”
Tommy.
Nate didn’t know how powerfully he’d been anchored until he was freed. His burdens, his regrets, loosed like weights through the colorless waters.
His friend’s hand tightened on his wrist.
“Do you hear the thunder?”
THE TALE CHANGES with the teller.
One day, twins named for the two prettiest months of the year were born to a woman who could not bring herself to kill them.
One day, a man drove his family along a road that switchbacked into the clouds then plunged them under the waves.
One day, a clapboard farmhouse in the foothills burned in a barrage of hail.
The Lake loves its stories. They are told and shared and treasured.
But they aren’t the truth.
Details are embellished, characters dropped or added or made composite.
The rendering of emotion and action through words is an uncertain alchemy.
You see, you change a story just by telling it.
And sooner or later the bottle runs dry, the boat returns to its slip, or the fire burns to coals. Every story ends.
But life? Life has loose ends.
—
THE NIGHT SHIP was gone.
Weeks after Medea, they were still clearing its debris from the shores. Parts of the promenade’s iron ribs still arced from its charred base, but it would all be gone soon. Some of the Lake’s hurricane recovery funds had been earmarked for its demolition. Nate watched crews chip away at its carcass. The sound of their saws glided across the waters to the Wharf like the calls of birds.
“You should show Livvy the beach,” Grams said.
“Good idea. We can skip stones.” Nate had taken all of them to the stony beach the day before. He’d had to carry Grams there, but she weighed only of bones and sweaters. It was difficult to reach the nook along the shore, but it had saved his life twice.
Fall was thick among them now. The leaves and their color were falling away, preparing for the drop into winter. The sky was blue and held nothing more sinister than cumulus clouds. Sailboats sliced across the silver water for the lake’s northern bulge. But Nate and his grandmother had eyes only for what remained of the Night Ship.
“I wonder if they’ll forget,” Grams said. Her mind was like a damaged record. Sometimes it caught on repeat. Sometimes it played verses and tracks out of sequence. But if you knew the score well enough, you could follow the tune.
“They won’t.” He believed this.
Nate heard Livvy’s staccato run before he saw her. She barely slowed before barreling right up to Grams’s wheelchair.
“Johnny says the Night Ship ghosts could be anywhere now!” Her face was red from the wind, and her eyes were bright with delight.
“What should we do?” Grams asked.
“Run! We run!” She sprinted down the boardwalk, startling a flock of gulls into flight.
“Having them for coffee’s more my speed, dear,” Grams said.
Sometimes she was like her old self.
Johnny hobbled toward them on his crutches.
“You have a real way with her,” Nate told him. “Should the therapist send bills to the Empire or directly to your home address?”
“Tell her a story, I thought.” Johnny was out of breath. He was terrible with the crutches. “Kids like stories, right? The ice cream was where I went wrong. Where does she put it all?”
They watched Livvy terrorize the birds, sending them fleeing from railings to benches and back again.
Beyond her, Tom and Meg leaned against the boardwalk’s railing, watching the demolition to the north. Tom wasn’t in his uniform. He’d never wear a uniform again.
The Night Ship’s destruction was a cataclysm, but a fairly self-contained one. When that world ended, it took many of its sins with it. But there were still consequences.
Owen was gone. Both Pete Corso and Nate had heard him confess to the murders of Maura Jeffers, Mr. Liffey, Mr. Vanhouten, and Lucy. The man’s imprisonment and torture of his own mother proved him capable of such crimes. The story had its monster, and the monster was dead.
In one small way, the Storm King had been right about the equations of pain. Nate’s Thunder Runs and the recent spree of vandalism these had inspired had mostly canceled each other out. The vandals who’d been stalked by Owen as the Night Ship burned firmly believed that Nate and Tom had saved their lives. They were even. Mostly.
Tom had resigned from the police force as soon as he was released from the hospital. There’d been an internal investigation. Nate wasn’t sure what arrangements were made or deals struck, but Tom’s father retired from his longtime post as Greystone Lake’s chief of police soon after. Nate didn’t know how much of Tom’s involvement in Lucy’s death or the chief’s tampering with evidence had come to light. In hard times, small towns make their own rules. What Nate did know was that Johnny had made substantial campaign contributions to several local politicians facing difficult elections next year.
The Lake loved its stories, but it enjoyed its secrets, too.
Nate’s phone chimed, and he pulled it from his pocket.
JAMES: INSPECTION GUY SAYS OK FOR TUES
Tom was managing the contractors tasked with rebuilding the Union, with James and Tara assisting. There was structural damage to the building, and it’d be months before it reopened. When it did, the twins would help manage the place.
“You’re a kind boy,” Grams said. Sometimes she wasn’t there at all, and other times she seemed to possess a kind of telepathy.
“Working on it.”
Nate understood now that the Storm King’s equations of pain were problems that could never be balanced. One side was always in deficit. Its math was designed for reciprocity, its stakes going ever exponential.
Nate’s grandmother would never be whole in either mind or body. Tara hadn’t meant to hurt Grams when she set fire to the Union, but she had. It gnawed at Nate. Every day it was like a blade in his gut. The unfathomable unfairness of chance.
He had so little practice with forgiveness. When Grams repeated herself, or forgot trips to the stony beach, or was stumped by Livvy’s name, he had to remind himself that Grams wouldn’t blame Tara, and that she wouldn’t want Nate to, either.
She’d tell him that it was never too late to be good.
Because everyone is guilty of something.
Everyone deserves to be punished.
So where does it end? Because it had to end. It had to.
For her part, Tara knew this clemency wasn’t easy for Nate. That’s what made it worth so much. That’s what made it matter.
Still running at full speed, Livvy leaped at Tom. He had a welted scar cupped like a hand from his jaw to his left ear, but it didn’t scare her. His eyes went wide for a moment before their collision. When he caught Livvy, his face broke into the same pure smile he’d had as a boy.
A pod of Daybreakers
cut through the waters to the south. Their dry suits were dark flecks against the vast mirror of the lake. Nate couldn’t tell if June was among this group of swimmers, but wherever she was, he hoped that the ghosts that drove her to these cold waters haunted her less fiercely than they had. He believed that she’d be happy with the way he planned to live this third life.
Strong but also true. Tough and also kind. Not assembled, but whole.
But to start it right, he knew he had to start it clean.
He’d told Meg everything. After surviving what he had, telling her about the boy he’d once been and the things he’d done hadn’t been as hard as he’d feared. The truth had changed things in subtle ways between them, just as it had changed Nate himself. But they were okay. They were good. And this gift exceeded every other stroke of fortune Nate had enjoyed, because he knew he’d spend his life trying to deserve it.
Meg kissed Livvy’s head, and their hair mingled in the wind. With Tom, the three of them grinned at something as they made their way toward Nate, Johnny, and Grams.
The vicious boy Nate used to be had a lot of ideas about the future, but he couldn’t have imagined an afternoon like this. A day when power wasn’t confused with happiness or fear mistaken for love.
If he could, Nate would tell that boy that a life built on revenge and buttressed by rage is no kind of life at all. He’d tell him that mercy and strength could be the same thing. That no matter how dark things seem, good days are ahead of him. Really, he cannot imagine how good these days will be.
Meg, Tom, and Livvy reached Nate. A different kind of smile on each of their faces.
The lake returns what it takes.
It’s a warning, but it’s also a prayer.
Acknowledgments
The Storm King: A Novel Page 36