Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  She gave him a tired smile. “Sorry it took me so long to come back for you,” she said. He returned the smile, aggressively festive, fearing at any moment that she’d ask for the book.

  “No problem. I wasn’t just waiting around. Paul’s kept me busy. Do you want to go for another drive?”

  “A drive? Where?” she asked. The sun had descended behind the roof, darkening the houses across the street.

  “I was thinking Jeff Trader’s.” Mills felt the need to get far away from Youngs Road for an hour. “I want to make sure those animals have been fed.”

  “I’m not sure we should go back there.”

  “Please,” he whispered.

  She nodded reluctantly and told him to bring a raincoat. “And the book,” she said. “I want to take it to the police. For what it’s worth.”

  “There’s a problem,” he mumbled. “I don’t have it right now.” He fidgeted his foot on the welcome mat. “I’ll explain in the car.”

  Beth’s jaw hung open, so wide that he could see three silver fillings. “What do you mean you don’t have it? I gave it to you to keep safe. That’s why I’m here. Mills, I need that book.”

  “It’s not far from here, and I’ll get it back. Please let me explain in the car.”

  She turned in irritation and headed down the porch. He studied the Muldoons’ home as he followed her, searching its windows for internal developments. A silver station wagon careened up the street, slowing in front of Paul’s driveway and stopping a few feet beyond it. The late afternoon breeze carried droplets from the Sound, cold and side-winding and unbraiding the leafless branches. Beth and Mills had almost made it to her Nissan when he heard the yawn of a screen door, and even before he lifted his head, he knew he’d find her marching toward him across her lawn.

  Pam Muldoon had changed her clothes in the hours since he last saw her. Her brown hair was tied back, and she wore an Orient sweatshirt emblazoned with beach chairs and a candy-cane umbrella, the kind that must be sold in Greenport gift shops for tourists who never crossed the causeway to fact-check their purchases. Her mouth was etched with wrinkles. She pointed her finger as she advanced.

  “You,” Pam Muldoon said. Beth stopped cold, and Mills knocked into her. “Don’t you walk away. I want to make things perfectly clear.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Muldoon,” Beth called, trying to lighten the mood or merely resorting to the tone used to dispatch neighbors with an economy of words.

  “Hello, Beth,” Pam responded, losing her mark for a moment to offer a dismissive nod. “This isn’t about you. This is about him.”

  “About Mills?”

  “Let’s get into your car,” he said.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Pam spat, halting a foot from the driveway. “I don’t know what you were doing up there. But you. Are not allowed. Anywhere near my house. Or my children. Is that understood?”

  Heat coursed through him. His body was standing still, but in his mind he was running away at high speed, going somewhere up above him, into the sky. The station wagon idled by the sidewalk. Mills turned to see Paul stepping onto the porch.

  “That’s a little harsh,” Beth said, wrinkling her nose. “We aren’t going anywhere near your house. I’m taking him to my car.”

  “Beth, I’ll ask you to keep out of this. Where is Paul? I want to talk to him about this abuse of my property and the endangerment of my children.”

  “Ma’am, I think you’re overreacting,” Mills said, staring directly at her even as he drifted behind Beth’s elbow. “I’m sorry if you got the wrong idea.”

  A simple apology, however halfhearted, was the worst offense. A cable snapped in the bridge of Pam Muldoon’s composure; then another cable broke, and the bridge began to crumble. She jammed her foot on the gravel, pointing her finger at his nose. Beth raised her hand and knocked Pam’s wrist aside, a gesture of protection that surprised Pam as much as it did Mills.

  “There’s no need to point your finger at him,” Beth stammered, clearly also surprised by her own reaction. “He’s an adult. He doesn’t need to be treated like a child.”

  “That’s precisely my point,” Pam cried. “He’s an adult, freeloading in the house next door to mine, and he’s a danger to my son. He’s a danger, and I’m not going to sit by while Tommy is victimized by some hooligan who was never given permission, not by me and not by Bryan—”

  “Wait, what exactly happened?” Beth asked.

  “Oh, plenty,” Pam wheezed. “Or plenty if I hadn’t been there to stop it.”

  Paul’s feet lumbered down the porch. His shoulders were pitched back, a wider, taller Paul than Mills had ever witnessed, his freshly shaven lip pursed, his eyes blinded by lenses the color of frost.

  “Good, there you are. Paul, I have been a very patient neighbor, but this is too much even for me.”

  “I think we all need to calm down,” Paul said, placing his hand in front of Mills’s chest. Mills didn’t move a muscle. Under those muscles, rebellion was breaking loose. He felt suffocated by the mother in front of him and embarrassed by Paul’s display of protection. Was this the kind of a desperate family scenario he had avoided in his years as a foster kid—a child to talk over, a pawn at the mercy of squabbling grown-ups? “I think you need to stop yelling at my guest,” Paul said.

  “Guest,” Pam repeated. Her anger was free-floating, a molecular rage collecting all of them in her storm. “I am not asking you, I’m telling you. This kid, this adult, has been in my home, up in the bedroom of my son, and I won’t stand for it.”

  The screen door yawned again. Tommy darted from the house, striding halfway across the lawn before stopping with his arms crossed.

  “Mom, stop it,” he whined, already bored by the subject, worn out by the fatigue of managing hostile forces. Mills had found him so beautiful earlier that afternoon, a rare specimen he had wanted so much that he would have given his pinkie for what they had done in his bedroom. Where had that beauty gone? Tommy was wearing the same yellow T-shirt and the same jeans that Mills had gently unbuttoned, camouflaged by the shadows of the oak trees and the gritty brick of his family’s ugly, turquoise-trimmed house. He looked like any young man haunting his own front yard, reckless in his pastime, kind when convenient, living beyond his emotional means, doomed to a life of crossed arms in the safety of his property. Mills smiled at him, trying to find the young man from before. Tommy looked at him coldly. “Mom, I was changing! Upstairs, I was changing! That’s all!”

  “That’s what you might have thought you were doing, but I know what this kid was thinking.”

  “That’s enough,” Paul said. “You have no right to come out here—”

  “I have every right,” Pam shouted. “I have every right in the world. And I will call the police next time before I have to come over here again. You don’t let your guest get anywhere near my house or my children. Am I making myself clear?”

  The doors of the silver station wagon opened. Sarakit Herrig climbed out, squinting up at the driveway as her two youngest children, pretty and fragile with plump lips and boneless cheeks, got out of the backseat. They were wearing fluorescent sweat suits, hot pinks and four-alarm oranges, hugging bright green backpacks. Their black hair was cut in the shape of cereal bowls. The smaller boy was crying. “I want to go to the mall! I don’t want to play with Theo. Please please please.”

  “We will go to the mall this weekend,” Sarakit promised, pulling her youngest by the arm. Her attention was caught by the four figures huddled against the side of the yard.

  “You’re on my property,” Paul whispered to Pam. “Please don’t come onto my property. Not if you’re going to behave like this.”

  Pam’s face melted, a tight ball of newsprint slowly losing its shape.

  “I’m a mother,” she said in anguish. “I have three children that I’ve raised in this house next to yours for twenty years. I helped your mother as much as I could when she was sick. This isn’t Manhattan, Paul. You’ve lived in the
city too long to realize what this neighborhood means. He can do whatever he wants in the rest of the world. I have no problem with that. I don’t interfere with the goings-on of strangers somewhere else. But not on my property. Not with my son. Do you even know where he comes from?”

  Paul responded in a voice that could have been asking for a stick of butter. “I’m sorry you feel that way. You’ve said your piece. Now please step off my property.”

  Theo ran from the screen door, bypassing by his older brother as he charged his play dates with a stick. Sarakit’s two boys shrunk from the impending blows. Pam lifted her hands up, realized that Sarakit was watching, then stepped theatrically across the division of gravel and grass. In that moment, Mills understood the meaning of private property: this side is mine and that side is yours. On this side, he was protected; on the Muldoons’ side he could be arrested or shot. It was as if all his rights evaporated as soon as the gravel ended and the grass began.

  As Pam retreated she assumed the posture of a harried mother. She approached Sarakit and the three children on the sidewalk and palmed Theo’s head for stability. Tommy had disappeared.

  “That didn’t go well,” Paul said, shaken. He looked at Beth. “I’m sorry about that. I suppose she’ll be asking for background checks on anyone I invite into my house in the future.”

  Beth shrugged. “The Muldoons were like that with my mom too. Once they decided they didn’t like her, they just went after her until she moved.”

  Mills no longer wanted to drive to Jeff Trader’s house. He no longer wanted to stay in Orient. Maybe the best solution was a train ticket back to New York.

  “She’ll come to her senses,” Paul said, clapping Mills’s shoulder. “But maybe it’s best if you keep off their yard for a while. Were you two going somewhere?”

  “Just for a drive,” Beth said. She looked at Mills. “Are you coming?”

  Beth didn’t say a word as she drove toward Main Road. She waited until she made the left turn before hazarding the obvious question.

  “What did you do to get her going like that?”

  Mills decided Beth could handle the answer. He decided he could handle speaking it.

  “I gave her son a blow job.”

  Beth doubled over against the steering wheel, laughing through the bends in the road. “Well, no wonder. And here I was defending you.” She let a minute of driving cushion the conversation. “Why didn’t you tell me you liked guys?”

  “Why would you think I didn’t?”

  “No reason. But I could have told you that you picked the wrong guy to get hung up on. The Muldoons aren’t nice people.”

  “I’m not hung up on him,” he grumbled. “And why shouldn’t I do what I want? Don’t you?” She didn’t reply, and Mills took her silence for judgment. He hated the idea that she might feel sorry for him, like he needed her to protect him from the nastier truths of the world. “Maybe I’m not nice. Maybe I don’t have to be.”

  The car sped across the empty farmland. Beth at least had driving to keep her busy. Mills picked at the rubber of the window frame. When the quiet grew too uncomfortable, he turned on the radio and searched the stations.

  “We’re having a party on Friday night,” Beth said. “My husband is, actually. But you’re welcome to come. It might be good for you to see some other young people—youngish, anyway. My age. Orient has other types than just the Muldoons. There are plenty of livelier, more progressive people out here if you dig deep enough.”

  “You mean gay? Just say the word if that’s what you mean.” It was the first time he’d said the word aloud to refer to himself. He took a slow breath. Miles from Youngs Road, he felt the anger leaking out of him and regretted attacking Beth when all she had been trying to do was help.

  “Yes, gay people too,” she said. “What, you think that makes you special?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Well, you should come anyway. If you don’t like it, it’s not a long walk home. Now, where’s Jeff Trader’s book?”

  “You aren’t going to be happy when I tell you. Tommy took it. It’s locked in his bedroom safe. Which wouldn’t be a huge problem if I weren’t forbidden from entering their house ever again.”

  “You have to get it back,” she demanded.

  “I will.”

  “I mean it. I don’t care how you figure it out, but you have to.” She glanced at him. “You have to do it for me. I need that book.”

  “You really think it matters? That it has something to do with those deaths?”

  She stayed silent for a minute, staring ahead. The dark sky was pocked with coast lights.

  “You know what I found out?” she said. “That photo we found in the book. It’s of a woman named Holly Drake. I was at her house today and saw her standing in front of her rosebushes. Red hair, yellow tracksuit.”

  “Did you ask her about it?”

  “No. What was I supposed to say?”

  “Why did Jeff Trader consider you the devil? Were you responsible for drowning a caretaker who no one seemed to care about?”

  Beth was too aggravated to use her turn signal.

  “You didn’t know Magdalena. So I can understand if you think I’m being ridiculous. All I’m asking is that you get that book back. She begged me to find it, and I need to respect that wish. She was killed because of something she knew about Jeff. It’s my duty to give that book to the police. Without it, I have nothing.”

  Mills decided to help her, or, at the very least, to humor her. There was no harm in pushing her suspicions a little farther into the darkness. He rubbed his legs as he told her what he had already discovered on Jeff Trader’s pages. “It seems like he was writing down secrets—or upsetting things, anyway—about the homeowners he served. Maybe he was killed because of something he found out. Maybe there’s a secret in there that one of your neighbors didn’t want to get out.”

  “You’ve got to get that book back,” she said.

  A love song came on the radio, and Beth changed the station. A weather report predicted a nor’easter moving up the eastern coast, consolidating squalls. The forecaster estimated a 70 percent chance of snow on the eastern end of Long Island within the next five days.

  “I’ve never seen snow fall,” Mills said as he watched the silver fields dissolve in the dusk.

  “It can get bad out here. When it snows in Orient, it’s the quietest place on earth.”

  “Are you happy living out here? Happy with your husband, with your—” He did not say life, because life seemed too fixed a word to describe as happy or not. Life was more like the houses they passed than the bodies inside of them.

  Beth dug her nails into the steering wheel. “I moved out here thinking it would bring us closer together. Or me closer to myself. But I don’t think either of those things happened.” She quickly touched his knee. “I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me. I guess I’d just forgotten how settled everything is outside of the city. You can see the sun rise on the bay and set on the Sound, and that’s the whole day, there it is, and another and another. I wasn’t prepared to be so settled.”

  Mills hadn’t grown up in a settled place. Modesto was the coin-return cup of America, valley of the spare-change people, all nickels and dimes who had tumbled like leftovers out of a country that had no use for them, with their hacking desert coughs and dirt from other places shoved under their nails. They were spinning around in the heat, waiting to be collected and counted up. Into what, he didn’t know. But Beth was right. There were no people like that in Orient.

  “Are you going to start a family here? That’s what you do when you’re married at your age out here. That’s the point of it all, right?”

  Beth turned to him, half-startled, and stared at his face, not unlike drivers who picked him up as a hitchhiker and proceeded to guess his worst intentions for the first few miles.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  They drove down Beach Lane in the dark and pulled into Jeff Trader�
��s driveway. A real estate sign hung by the curb, swinging in the wind. Beth waited in the car as Mills crept around the mobile home to the barn. The sheep were no longer in the stables. The bowls he had left for the cats had been cleared from the step and thrown away.

  PART 2

  The New People

  CHAPTER 16

  Winter makes alterations. It shrinks windows in their frames, freezes water to stress the pipes, and attacks the joints with arthritic compression. It clears the fields of autumn buds and the houses of lingering guests. Lights shine palely in windows through the reflection of frost, and smoke issues from chimneys, blown sideways like steam from moving trains. Storm windows are latched by hook and nail over openings that once let in flies and sun.

  In the village of Orient, the unsettled settle, and the deer hunters, bright as bloodstains in their jumpsuits, tag and field-dress their prizes with the speed of emergency surgery. Winter turns the sea first copper and then black, and, before the ice silences it, an anxious blue as it rubs against the shoreline. Smaller trawls and fishing boats are rare. Sails can’t hold the wind, and motors smoke from the strain of the current. The dirt is concrete, and the houses are liquid, white hides over shifting animals. Not-too-distant Greenport becomes cosmopolitan, and “out there” means over the causeway, where the lawns and beaches lie barren. Winter runs like a streak of fire, brightening all of the houses before they go dark.

  It used to be that if a house wasn’t sold by October, it would sit empty until March. It used to be that in these months, Orient was most like itself, a prudent clapboard village capable of weathering ocean storms, having weathered them countless times before. It used to be that everything had already happened here; now it seemed like very little had. An early winter storm front was headed from the south, due north toward the eastern fingers. The new people didn’t follow the weather, and so they changed what Orient was.