The Punch

by Noah Hawley

  Coming over the rise of the bridge, seeing the lobster boats bobbing in the water, Scott feels unexpectedly small. They are here suddenly, back at the place where their adulthood first emerged from the sea. It will all be different. He knows it before he sees the new town houses that dot the landscape. This place has not survived intact. In two decades the economy has boomed and busted, and in that time people from New York and Boston and Portland have built their dream vacation homes. They have installed swimming pools and cluttered up the open spaces. The sleepy coastal island with its small-time lobster trade has become just another weekend retreat for city folk. In order to have the moment they have envisioned, David and Scott will have to do this with their eyes closed, living in their memories.

  David drives the island’s main road. Everything is different and the same at once. It’s spooky, and though they had planned to stay the night, seeing it, they both decide independently to push for a return to the mainland. Once they have done what they came to do, they will head back. This is not a journey for reminiscence, after all. It is a bon voyage, and though you may stand around on the dock watching once the ship has pulled away, those who have been left behind do not linger. They do not stay the night.

  “Here?” asks David, and Scott says, Yes.

  David turns left, climbs the short hill. It is the middle of February and most of the vacation homes are empty, driveways abandoned, houses locked down for the winter. The short street jogs left at the rosehip bushes. David slows, pulls into an asphalt driveway. Theirs was the house second to the end. A thin layer of snow covers the earth around it, crunching under their feet as they climb from the car. The air is chilly, the sky gray, and they can see the white clouds of their breath. They stand for a minute listening to the silence, the quiet ticking of the engine, and the far-off echo of the waves.

  “They put on an addition,” says Scott, looking at the house. He remembers the wicker rocking chair that used to creak in the living room in the middle of the night, as if a ghost were shifting, trying to find a more comfortable position.

  “Let’s go,” says David. He leans into the backseat, pulls out his father’s ashes. Scott opens the rear passenger-side door, grabs his mother’s. They walk around the side of the house, and suddenly there it is, the ocean. It is like walking straight into a photograph, a memory. They stand for a minute, staring out—the angled field, the sudden cliff, and, beyond it, the flat plane of the Atlantic. Everything else may have changed, but this moment, this view, is just as they remembered.

  “What do we do now?” David asks, and the question seems somehow larger than the immediate future. It is a question about life. What do we do now that our parents have died? What do we do now that the women we loved have left us? What do we do now, as men in our late thirties, who have been suddenly left out in the open, exposed? How do we start again?

  “To the beach,” says Scott.

  They descend through the brittle grass, stepping over crusty piles of snow. It is the first time either of them has been here in the winter. There is a grandeur to it, a majesty to the landscape, the angry, roiling ocean. Scott imagines what it must have been like for women to watch the seas, waiting for their husbands to return. The wind picks up. He tightens his collar, stumbles down the hill.

  Behind him he can hear David humming, but he can’t make out the tune. They wind down through the woods, ducking under frosted spiderwebs, and emerge onto the hill overlooking the beach. The waves are louder now, pounding in rhythm. They are two men in suits carrying boxes, like Bibles. It is a funeral procession, but also an act of trespass. They are boys who don’t know how to cry, who have taught themselves to be strong, and in their blind delusion of strength have driven headlong into walls. They are humble now, regretful. They have come here, to land’s end, to the edge of the ocean, carrying the remains of their past in boxes. All they want is a chance to do it over, but time doesn’t work that way. You cannot go back and do things again. All you can hope for is improvement in the future. All you can hope for is change. Please let things change. It is madness to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. And yet what if this is the only way you know how to live?

  They climb down the shaley outcroppings, jumping and slipping to the rocks below. They can feel the cold of the ocean emanating from the water. It fills the air, tightens their skin. Somewhere out there predators lurk under the dark surface waiting to be fed. Below them is a bottomless black. The ocean is where we all end up sooner or later, thinks Scott, sinking down into oblivion.

  “Here?” says David, holding up his box.

  Scott looks around. It is all happening so fast.

  “Let’s walk a ways,” he says.

  They tread along the coastline, scrambling over broken rocks. Everything feels familiar, the sea, the beach, the cliff. It is they who have changed. Scott is the first to spot some, a piece of beach glass, glinting at his feet. He stops, reaches down, picks it up.

  “Fifty cents for blue,” he says.

  “A dollar for red,” says David. This is what their father used to pay them. Green glass was everywhere, brown. It was blue and red you never saw. They would spend hours scouring the beach, trying to raise money for comic books, candy bars.

  Now, as they walk with their parents’ ashes, they find themselves watching the beach. They are looking for the smooth remains of bottles, shiny coins of broken glass worn smooth by the sea. This is what happens when things break. The pieces separate, scatter. They are battered by the elements, buffed and polished smooth, then deposited on far-off beaches. All your hopes and dreams. The boys walk along uneven ground hunting for treasure. Dried seaweed crackles under their shoes. Driftwood lies where it has washed up, jagged Styrofoam buoys and the frayed webbing of busted lobster traps. There is an earthy stink to the muddy clay that Scott thought he had forgotten. It takes him back. He is six, he is seven, he is eight. They are both of them reliving those idle days of summer roaming, afternoon turning to evening without the sun ever going down. They would run wild over the island, lost in some invented adventure, waiting for their parents to call them home.

  Now look at them, cold and shivering in their matching black suits. They are neither young nor old. Instead they hover somewhere in between, like a ball tossed in the air—in that moment when it is no longer rising but has yet begun to fall—that moment of instantaneous velocity when the ball hangs motionless. This is how they are, no longer boys and yet not fully men, though what else do you call a boy who has survived his father, his mother? What else do you call a boy with children of his own? Who is a man if not him?

  David bends and picks up a rock. He tosses it out into the waves. It falls with a satisfying plunk. He is trying to imagine how he can fix things, get his family back. He is trying to formulate a plan. If he thinks about it too much, he feels dizzy, overwhelmed. There is still so much healing left to do. He knows this, though: It will require humility and perseverance. It will take time. And yet what else is time there for, if not to slog through the lonely act of reestablishment, if not to work piece by piece to rebuild the things you love?

  He will do whatever it takes.

  “Do you think…,” he begins, then stops.

  “What,” says Scott, hunting for a good throwing rock.

  “Do you think you could call Joy?”

  Scott thinks about this. If he called her, what would he say? He could ask her if she still planned to keep her promise. He could tell her that what happened in that bar didn’t matter. He could tell her not to let it make her bitter. She could laugh in his face. He could say the words that lay hidden in his heart, which are I will love you. I will be your supermarket man. I will make things right.

  You helped me, he could tell her. Now let me help you.

  He finds a good rock, fist sized, heavy. He puts down his mother’s ashes, takes a few quick steps, and hurls it into the ocean. The wave-head explodes, as if from a gunshot. David lays down the box he carries. He finds a bigge
r rock, throws it. Scott scours the ground. The challenge has been given. They stand there for an hour throwing weight into the ocean. The stones get bigger, the splashes deeper. Soon they are working together, lifting fifty-pound stones and dropping them into the surf. Their shoes are wet, their pants soaked to the knees. They are returning the rocks to the sea. Take it back, they are saying, as if they could reassemble the fortress from which the rocks have fallen, as if they could rebuild something massive just by putting the stones back where they belong. They throw their shoulders into the side of a boulder and try to roll it. It is unspoken, this mission. They will gather the hardness from beneath their feet. They will clear the beach of its wounded. Their suits fray and tear. The air around them fills with the deep hiccup of weight descending into water. They will stay here until they return every stone to the sea, until they erect a wall between themselves and the hurt. They will build a tower into the clouds and then, carrying their parents’ ashes, they will climb to its highest point. They will stand in the air, swaying miles above the Earth. Birds will pass below them. Planes will fly in the downward distance, and still they will climb higher, ascending into the stratosphere. They will keep climbing until they reach the afterlife, and there they will deliver their burdens. They will tell the gatekeeper, Take them. Love them. They were good people, despite their vices. They were our parents. Their weakness was their beauty. Their longing, their hunger, their fear. Do not leave them by the side of the road. Do not judge them just because they didn’t believe in God. They believed in each other and that was enough. They believed in us.

  The boys will build their tower. They will climb high into the sky and there they will finally let it go, all their pain and grief, all their guilt and anger, and when they come back down, they will be so much lighter that they will float like feathers on the breeze. They will fall like laughter and settle gently to the ground. They will lie there breathing in the soothing calm of the ocean air, the waves lapping gently at their feet, and the water will be warm and the sky will be blue and it will be summer again, summer forever.

  This is all any of us can wish for, to be unburdened, to forgive those who have hurt us, to set ourselves free.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you for reading this book. I understand you have choices when it comes to your entertainment and I appreciate your choosing The Punch. Thanks to my wife, Kyle, and my daughter Guinevere. Happiness and contentment are two different things. Who knew? Thanks to my agent, Jane Gelfman, and my editor, Jay Schaefer, for their wisdom and insight. Thanks to my family, without whom none of this would have been possible.

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  About the Author

  Noah Hawley is an Emmy, Golden Globe, PEN, Critics’ Choice, and Peabody Award–winning author, screenwriter, and producer. He has published four novels and penned the script for the feature film Lies and Alibis. He created, executive-produced, and served as showrunner for ABC’s My Generation and The Unusuals and was a writer and producer on the hit series Bones. Hawley is currently executive producer, writer, and showrunner on FX’s award-winning series Fargo and on Legion, from FX Productions and Marvel Television.

  Also by Noah Hawley

  Before the Fall

  A Conspiracy of Tall Men

  The Good Father

  Other People’s Weddings

  PRAISE FOR

  BEFORE THE FALL

  “[A] surprise-jammed mystery that works purely on its own, character-driven terms…Mr. Hawley has made it very, very easy to race through his book in a state of breathless suspense.”

  —Janet Maslin, New York Times

  “BEFORE THE FALL is a ravishing and riveting beauty of a thriller. It’s also a deep exploration of desire, betrayal, creation, family, fate, mortality, and rebirth.”

  —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning

  author of The Hours

  “Noah Hawley really knows how to keep a reader turning the pages, but there’s more to the novel than suspense…exposes the high cost of news as entertainment and the randomness of fate.”

  —Kristin Hannah, New York Times Book Review,

  “Notable Book of 2016”

  “A book that combines a thriller’s tight structure and addictive narrative with characterisation and thematic richness reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen.”

  —Sunday Times (London), “Thriller of the Year”

  “Imagine that Agatha Christie had set a closed-room mystery on an airplane and included Wall Street and entertainment executive types in her lineup of suspects. Now imagine that airplane crashing into the Atlantic before the story even gets going…Mr. Hawley, the expert TV showrunner, obviously had the skills to pull this off.”

  —New York Times, “The Top Books of 2016”

  “I started and finished BEFORE THE FALL in one day.”

  —James Patterson, #1 New York Times bestselling author and winner of the National Book Foundation’s 2015 Literarian Award

  “A masterly blend of mystery, suspense, tragedy, and shameful media hype…a gritty tale of a man overwhelmed by unwelcome notoriety, with a stunning, thoroughly satisfying conclusion.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A pulse-pounding story, grounded in humanity.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “A multilayered, immersive examination of truth, relationships, and our unquenchable thirst for the media’s immediate explanation of unfathomable tragedy.”

  —Karin Slaughter, #1 internationally bestselling author

  “Cathartic…BEFORE THE FALL is about the gulf that separates perception and truth, and the people who fall into it.”

  —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

  “BEFORE THE FALL kicks ass. A surefire summer read.”

  —Justin Cronin, New York Times bestselling author of The Passage and City of Mirrors

  “Like the successful screenwriter that he is, Hawley piles on enough intrigues and plot complications to keep you hooked.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “This isn’t just a good novel; it’s a great one. I trusted no one in these pages, yet somehow cared about them all. BEFORE THE FALL brings a serrated edge to every character, every insight, and every wicked twist.”

  —Brad Meltzer, bestselling author of The President’s Shadow

  “Highly entertaining…Hawley invests the same care with a soupçon of dark humor into BEFORE THE FALL as he does on the TV series Fargo.”

  —The Associated Press

  “A remarkable and memorable accomplishment by any standard…BEFORE THE FALL is brilliantly constructed and wonderfully told…a tale that will haunt you long after you read the last page, even as you wish the narrative was twice as long, for all the right reasons.”

  —Book Reporter

  “Essential reading this summer for anyone who likes a good story well told…You won’t read a more thoughtful page-turner anytime soon…irresistibly cinematic.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Remarkably fun to read, filled with suspense, memorable characters and incredibly visual scenes…a compulsive experience.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “Compulsively written and involving, BEFORE THE FALL is a stunning inquiry into human drive and desire…A powerful and genuinely surprising work.”

  —The Saturday Star

  “Abundant chills and thrills…Noah Hawley’s novel grabs you by the throat and won’t let go…BEFORE THE FALL is storytelling at its best, as Hawley presents a range of diverse characters with rich histories… Seeds of doubt are cast in what is sure to be the summer book you won’t want to miss.”

  —The Missourian

  “In the hands of a writer like Noah Hawley, who knows how to build tension from mundane moments, it is a remarkable thriller that most
readers will find difficult to put down…it moves toward a breathless ending.”

  —Washington Times

  “A complex exploration of human nature in an age of celebrity.”

  —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “BEFORE THE FALL won the hearts and minds of The Post staff. We’re certain it will be the big talker of the summer.”

  —New York Post, “Summer’s Hottest Reads”

  “[The] thriller of the summer.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “The crash and the flashbacks recall Lost and Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Bridge Over San Luis Rey, and Scott’s travails are the lot of every hero in a conspiratorial thriller going back to The 39 Steps.”

  —Slate

  “A thoughtful and compelling page-turner…Hawley’s writing is taut and clear, his characters richly developed…Readers may be moved to stand up and cheer.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “Noah Hawley’s BEFORE THE FALL isn’t a typical mystery. Perhaps that’s why I couldn’t put it down.”

  —TheAtlantic.com

  “Fast-paced, mysterious…reads like a great episode of TV.”

  —The Tennessean