by Hadley Dyer
I pulled smoke deep into my weary lungs and held it for as long as I could stand it. I’d gone overboard on my morning run, the kind of workout that turns you uniformly red from the neck up, ears and all, and you’re still dewy with sweat when you get out of the shower. I was trying to run off the seven pounds that I’d gained over the summer—the corner pockets of flesh that had appeared on the insides and outsides of my thighs, which my scrawny brother was too happy to remind me about every chance he got. I was also trying to run off the sting of what Lisa had said at the Grunt, but her words ricocheted back at me with every step: cold-blooded, cold-blooded, cold-blooded. Even for you.
It hadn’t pricked at the time, but was slowly working down like a splinter, past Joshua, past all the other disappointments with all the other boys, to a more sensitive place. Because the truth was, I didn’t miss Sid and it had been worrying me. I mean, I did, but not the way I thought I would, the way you were supposed to miss someone you’d been hanging out with since seventh grade. I missed him like my favorite TV shows in the summertime. Sure, it was better when he was around, but I knew we’d be together again, and I could go a whole day, even two, without thinking about him. I didn’t say this to the others, just nodded like a robot when they talked about missing Sid and said, “So much.”
I’d called Nat from work to ask if she thought I was cold-blooded. You had to be certain you wanted the answer when you asked her about these things because she always left you a bit clenched. “You don’t do big feelings,” she’d said. “You hate ballads, sappy movies. The last time I saw you cry, you’d caught your hand in a car door.”
“I have feelings. You’re the one who always pokes me with your bony elbows if I try to hug you.”
“Yeah, but you never lose your head. You probably need to if you’re going to fall in love.” She sighed. “Anyway, that’s what I told Lisa when she called to talk about you.”
Typical.
“What did she say?”
“She said you don’t want to be a member of a club that will have you as a member. Woody Allen.”
“Woody Allen quoting Groucho Marx.”
“Point being, if Joshua didn’t like you, you’d be all over him. You just like the chase. Oh, and Bill said—she called Bill too—he said that’s true, but no one would think it was a big deal if you were a guy and we should lay the hell off.”
The closest farm stood on a ridge above the lighthouse, and through a stream of exhaled smoke, I could see a man winding his way down from it. He drifted in one direction, then the other, occasionally ducking into the tall grass. Was he searching for something or hiding from it? I scanned the fields, but the only unusual sight was him.
As I watched this silent film, I thought again about what Nat had said. Was that my thing, catch and release? Or was I too sane for love, if that’s even possible? I took another drag from my cigarette and forced myself to remember the kiss and the moments leading up to it. Maybe Lisa was right; maybe it hadn’t been so bad. Maybe I should give Joshua another— I gagged as the memory of his tongue reached the back of my throat.
Sputtering smoke, I saw the man was close now, approaching the lighthouse through the waves of grass. He was almost severe-looking, dark and angular, but an overgrown haircut and beard softened the edges, as did the rosy sunburn across his nose. Slightly taller than I was, midtwenties, I guessed, with an expression that was somewhere between concerned and amused.
He was not from the valley—that I could tell at a glance. A flare shot through my chest. It felt like fear, but it wasn’t fear.
“Light,” I said. By which I meant Lighthouse is open, if you happen to be interested in touring this lovingly restored local landmark, but light was all I managed to croak out.
“Life?” he said.
“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “I am choking on life.”
“Sounds like a line from my high school diary.”
The cute response would have been Best thing I ever read, but I was reminded of something Sid said when he heard I used to fantasize about being the fourth Pointer Sister: “Sometimes you don’t meet a person a minute too soon.” I stubbed out my cigarette. “Sorry.”
“Sadly, that is true,” he said mildly. “Do you work here?”
“Did you want a tour of this lovingly restored local landmark?”
“Actually . . . I was wondering if you’d seen a pig.”
“Ever?”
Don’t ask me why; just my smart-ass reflex.
“More like, in the last twenty minutes. I’m after one that’s gone AWOL.”
His voice was a little raspy, like the feeling of running your hand along a plane of unfinished wood.
“Ah. No, sorry.”
“Man, I don’t want to sound paranoid, but I think he’s hiding,” he said, scanning the fields. “I usually have to sneak up on him.”
I resisted the urge to ask how often he lost this pig, and instead offered to take him to the top of the lighthouse to see if we could spot it from the lantern room.
The lighthouse had a narrow, three-story wooden tower attached to an octagonal-shaped building that housed the old diaphone fog signal. From a distance, it reminded me of a lady in a bright white dress with an extravagant bustle. The heritage society had restored the interior to its original condition and then some: hand-woven rugs, wrought-iron banister, grandfather clock, an adorable potbellied stove in the keeper’s quarters.
“This is impressive,” he said as we climbed the curved metal stairs, our footsteps echoing through the tower, and it was, especially up in the lantern room, where the sun blazed in as it set between the mountains.
“Behold—the hay,” I said, tapping one of the diamond-shaped windowpanes. “Very dangerous at night. Not to mention the potatoes. The apples. Over yonder, the corn.”
I was aiming for witty and had landed somewhere closer to Lisa’s father after a couple of wine coolers. So I was grateful when he said: “Have you ever lost a vessel?”
“I crash them into the corn all the time.”
“I think I’ve heard your siren song. That’s home, the farmhouse on the ridge.”
“And you live there with this pig?” I asked.
“Why do you sound surprised? Don’t I look like a local?”
“Uh . . . yup.”
“Damn, I thought I was pulling it off. How did you know? Is it the threads?” He was wearing a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, jeans, Converse, and the leather-brimmed lighthouse keeper’s hat that he’d plucked from its hook downstairs.
“I dunno, you can just tell. You don’t have an accent.”
“Neither do you.”
“I live in town.” Like our village was so much more sophisticated than the surrounds. “We have a traffic light,” I added in the poshest voice I could muster.
“I think you’re saying I couldn’t even pass for a townie. Out of curiosity, where would you guess I’m from?”
I pretended to give him the once-over, but really, what did I know? I’d never been anywhere. “Hard to say.”
“If you had to guess—”
“Away.”
“I come from away?”
“My nan would say you’re a Come From Away. But then, she also thought Catholicism was a cult.”
He leaned in. “Isn’t it?”
Yes, I liked him. I liked how he played along with my late grandmother’s casual bigotry, how talking to him was like a good tennis rally, how he purred with energy that made it seem like he was moving even when he was not moving. He was cool yet curiously eager to blend into a place where bean sprouts were still considered ethnic food, and his absurdly blue eyes were as round and bright as a toddler’s. And so when I spotted the pig trotting from one cluster of trees to another, I did not say anything quite as helpful as There’s the pig. I said: “Where are you from?”
“Out west originally, but I’ve lived all over. And now I’m here.”
He didn’t offer a reason why. Did people like
him just decide one day to become people like us? The only Come From Aways I knew were the parents of Doug O’Donnell, former first-grade flasher, present senior-class stoner.
“That was a trick question,” I said, “if you’re not from anywhere.”
“Afraid so. Tell me, Captain—”
“Keeper—”
“Tell me, Keeper, what would happen if I flipped that switch over there?”
“You’d turn on the lantern. . . .”
He flashed a mischievous smile and glided toward it, his eyes never leaving mine. I waited until he had his hand on the switch.
“. . . and blind us. You have to flip it and run.”
The switch was for a small lightbulb on the ceiling. The real lantern switch was wired down to the service room, but you had to leave the lighthouse to see the effect, and I wasn’t ready to let him go yet.
He slumped. “If you can’t play with the big toy, what do people do for fun around here?”
“Depends on what you mean by fun. Shunning outsiders?”
“Talking is nice.” He took off the cap and handed it to me, and I felt the flare in my chest again. “How about Long Fellows? Is that a good place?”
I shrugged, made a noncommittal so-so face. Did he think I was old enough to get into a bar? Bill claimed I could pass for nineteen, the drinking age Down East. He was always trying to get me to pick up liquor for him, but when your dad’s a cop, you know how to measure risk. I drank, but not too much, stayed away from drugs, although that was more because my friends couldn’t stand to be around me when I was high.
How old was he anyway, this Come From Away? Twenty-five? He wasn’t nearly as tall as Joshua or as stocky as Bill, but he was more present than any boy I knew, more substantial somehow, and as I watched his shirt pull about the roundness of his shoulders as he leaned against the window frame, I thought—
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
Sylvia Plath.
“Are you worried about something?” he said.
“Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Poetry. I read some great stuff in your high school diary.”
He grinned. “Are you a poet?”
“God, no. Do I look like a poet?”
He studied me. “As a matter of fact, you do.”
I kissed him. Stepped through the beam of sunlight that had turned the lantern lens into a giant gold jewel and kissed him. Even as I felt his whiskers against my skin, his lips on mine, his tongue, blessedly, nowhere, it seemed impossible that I was doing what I was doing, but from his startled look when we pulled away, I knew that I had.
I also remembered that I’d been smoking and probably had potbelly-stove mouth.
“Sorry, I needed to replace a bad sensory memory,” I said.
My heart was thudding so hard it felt like my shirt was moving.
“How bad is bad?”
“It made me hate being a mammal.”
Now he was laughing. “Oh man, did you tell the guy?”
“Of course not!”
“So, he’s still out there, thinking he’s okay? What if he goes his whole life and no one tells him? Wouldn’t you want to know? I’d want to know. At least, I think I’d want to know.”
I had a feeling he thought that if he kept talking we wouldn’t have to deal with the question of what happens next. I didn’t even know his name. He was a complete stranger, a grown-up. And yet I had a hankering to do something insane—more insane than kissing him—to grab him, climb him, bite him till he bled.
“Oh, there he is! The pig!” And with that, the stranger sprinted down the perilously steep staircase.
I couldn’t see anything piglike, near the trees or anywhere else, was sure he was trying to escape me, that I had literally repelled him back up the mountain. But as I stepped out of the lighthouse to watch him bounding through the fields after the invisible pig, he turned, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted, “See you at Long Fellows!”
Five
When Dad first joined the RCMP, my parents had to relocate every few years and never knew where in the country they’d end up. Which might sound exciting, but we’re talking rural detachments, from the northern wilds of Nowheresville to the windswept grasslands of Greater Middle of Nowhere. Then, some luck: Dad was transferred to a detachment in the valley, so they got to start their family close to where they grew up, and Matthew and I got to spend our formative years visiting Nan on Sundays, which is probably why Matty is still today a nervous wreck. She dropped her teeth into everyone’s glass from time to time, but she definitely chose his the most.
Lisa and I met in a skating class when we were five, added Natalie in fourth grade, and the boys in seventh grade, and through all those years we thought that I was always on the verge of leaving, that my family could be transferred to Who Knows Where at any time. But Dad stayed at that detachment for almost nine years, and then he went to another valley detachment, and in the end, it was Sid who moved, just because his parents wanted to try living somewhere else, and Vancouver is about as different and far away from the valley as you can get. It seemed the only way the rest of us would get out of there, including me, was by making sure we had somewhere to go.
Which is why Lisa and I were in Veinot that afternoon, a town with five traffic lights and a mall with a bookstore that stocked a grand total of one book about theater. She was hoping to be chosen as the director of the school play to help her application to a program at Aurora University next year.
“I’ll give you five bucks if you ask the old lady at the counter for The Joy of Sex,” I said. “Got it right here in my pocket.”
“Ten,” Lisa said.
“I don’t have ten.”
“Well, do you have lip balm? Because I can’t find mine.” She was elbow-deep in her gigantic purse, like she was trying to birth a farm animal.
“You aren’t going to leave without paying for that.”
A young clerk was standing at the end of the aisle. He pointed to the book that Lisa had tucked under her other arm as she rummaged around in her bag.
“No,” Lisa said. “I mean, yes. Yes, sir, I’m going to pay.”
She was now holding the book out as though it was radioactive. As bossy as Lisa could be with her friends, she was way too fragile outside of the bubble wrap of our group to take on an adult, even an adult wearing seven layers of Band-Aid-colored pimple cream over his forehead acne and a name tag that read “Brenda.”
I swiped the book from Lisa and speed-walked over to the clerk, giving his sleeve a conspiratorial tug. “Hey, buddy, she just found out she’s really sick,” I whispered. “Not the best time to accuse her of stealing.”
The clerk’s hand went to his forehead. “I didn’t mean to . . . My boss asked me to check because we’ve been losing a lot of stock to high school kids.”
“We go to Aurora,” I said. “The theater program?”
“Yes, of course—”
“Besides, if she wanted to steal something, would she take . . .” The book was called Observatory Direction. It looked impenetrable. “Do you think someone who would read a book like this would steal a book like this?”
“No, of course. Of course not. I’m so sorry.”
I took the five-dollar bill out of my back pocket and put it in his pink-smeared hand.
“It’s more than five, but . . .” He waved the bill in Lisa’s direction and said, with too much pep, “Sorry for the misunderstanding! Hope you’ll be alright!”
I hurried Lisa out before she could decide she felt bad for him. “If you said what I think you said, you’re going to hell,” she said. “And not regular hell, the hell below that.”
“The furnace room of hell?”
“The hidden bunker under the furnace room of hell.”
She was still a little nervous as we wandered the makeup and perfume aisles at Thompson’s, and being overly cautious about keeping her hands fully visible. Non
e of the clerks bugged us, but none of them offered samples either, even though we were practically the only customers, and they were standing around with samples in their hands. A Clinique clerk, with bangs so teased and stiff they seemed varnished, tapped her red fingernails loudly on the cash register.
Lisa peered into the makeup case in front of her. “George? Uh, what time do we have to be at the hospital?”
“What time . . .”
“Chemo starts at six, which means what for prep?”
She was somehow managing to act like she was unsteady on her feet and trying to hide it. I covered my smile with a cough. “Five thirty,” I said. “But you know they’re always running late.”
“Let’s not hurry, okay? Let’s try to enjoy today.”
The clerk straightened up and tugged on the hem of her jacket. “Would you two girls like some lipsticks to take with you? What about nail polish? We’ve got very cheerful new colors.”
“Oo-de-lally!” Lisa said as we left the mall, a pound of samples clacking inside her bag. “Now we can go to the bunker below the furnace room of hell together.”
“Like we always dreamt!”
“Hey, listen.” She bumped me with her elbow. “Will you be my stage manager? If I get the play?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” Lisa had earned it, taking any backstage job she could get in every single school production, including the lip-synch battles and that traveling hypnotist who turned twelve kids into a flock of chickens. And though only seniors were allowed to direct the play, she’d had the chance to direct a whole bunch of things at this fancy theater camp that she and Sid had gone to the previous summer.
“Someone else might submit a better proposal,” she said. “Anyway, will you?”
“Is that props and stuff?”
“Yes.”
“Are you asking me because you think I have a natural talent for stage managing?”
“Yes.”
“Are you really asking me so I’ll make sure everyone listens to you?”
“Yes!”
“Okay, cool. Sure.”
We wandered over to Pierre’s, a chain of secondhand clothing stores. You could practically see the stench of BO rising from the clothes piled up in the raised wooden bins, but there weren’t many other options around, unless you wanted to dress like a secretary or somebody’s mum.