Orient

by Christopher Bollen

  “Yeah. When I hurt my hand. Tommy bandaged it.” Her eyes continued to study him skeptically. He decided to test his own suspicions on her. “He told me he saw you. Maybe when you were visiting recently, about a week or two ago? I remember him coming back home, saying he’d seen his sister somewhere nearby.” He watched her reaction. The intake of breath. The eyelids that opened and closed. The jaw reset by a lock of teeth.

  “You’re wrong,” she said, preferring the sight of the bird feeder to his face. A squirrel climbed along the oak branch, steadying itself for a jump onto the feeder’s perch. The squirrel couldn’t build up the courage, jolting forward and shrinking back. “I’ve been away at school. I haven’t seen my family since August. Otherwise I would have been here. In my house. With them. In Oysterponds Cemetery now.” She broke down again, coughing phlegm, her shoulders convulsing like she was being driven over potholes.

  “I guess I’m wrong. I thought he mentioned the Seaview.” She shifted, rising slightly, which tipped the bench, and Mills caught himself with his foot before he toppled to the ground. She returned to her seat, giving him the counterweight, but she pressed her knees together, shoving herself into the smallest quantity of space. “Anyway,” Mills said casually, “I’m not from around here so I still get places and people mixed up. And as I said, I didn’t know Tommy that well.”

  “Not many did. But I knew him. I loved my brother. Both of my brothers.” She stared at the charred walls and the black furniture that spilled across the grass. “And they were stolen from me. Not taken. Stolen. By some lunatic who didn’t think they deserved to live.” She roped her arms around her stomach and bent into them, the safety bar on a roller coaster. “And all I have is their absence. Every day of my life, all I will ever have is them gone.”

  “You have memories,” he said, the sentence ghostwritten by every movie he had seen. It seemed inadequate, and Lisa rolled her eyes in acknowledgment.

  “The police only got a few items from the house that were salvageable. Just junk. Nothing valuable or personal, nothing theirs. It took one match and my entire life up to this point was stolen from me. My bedroom, their bedrooms, the den. One match. Where are the pictures of us? Where are the little scraps of who we were? That’s why I fill the bird feeder every day. It’s the one thing that survived.”

  As much as Mills had decided not to like Lisa Muldoon, as hopeful as he’d been that the key to the crime rested at the feet of the last surviving family member, in that moment she reached for his knee, and he only felt pity for her. Her body slumped into his, and he was forced to hold her up, jamming his foot into the dirt to keep the bench from tossing them both to the ground. Her neck smelled of cigarette smoke and peppermint. She dug her chin into his chest. With nothing left of her family, all she could hold on to was a stranger.

  “I have something,” he said. “Tommy left his flask one night down by the beach. He forgot it, and I meant to give it back to him. It’s a silver—”

  Lisa lifted her head, her eyebrows rising, her mouth opening in confusion—every feature forming a zero. “I know that flask,” she blurted. “It belonged to my grandfather. It was given to Tommy when he died. You have it?”

  “Yeah. I meant to see him again to give it back, but I never did. But if you want it—”

  “Yes, I want it,” she said. She pulled away and settled on the side of the bench. “Can you get it for me now?”

  “Sure,” he said. Lisa blinked impatiently, as if she couldn’t accept a second’s delay before he followed her orders. He almost wished he hadn’t offered it to her. Mills stood up slowly, giving Lisa a chance to readjust her balance on the bench. He crossed the lawn and went into the house.

  The flask was in the birthing room, hidden along with Tommy’s watch and the necklace they’d taken from the motel. As he reached down to grab the flask, the poster of Bug Light caught his eye. The photo of the lighthouse must have been taken from the beach—the same spot where Lisa was headed next, according to the phone call he’d overheard. “Their place.” He kneeled back down and gathered the necklace in his hand. If he could prove that it belonged to her, that she was the L of the pendant, it would mean that Lisa had seen her father at the Seaview—that she’d been staying there long before her supposed return the morning after the fire.

  By the time he made it down to the porch, Lisa was standing on the walk, staring at the scrubbed egg stains. She had put on black knit gloves and was checking the time on her phone.

  Mills held out the flask and she took it, examining its smooth gunmetal surface. She didn’t need to thank him. Or she didn’t feel the need to.

  “I’m surprised he gave this to you,” she said, looking up at him.

  “He didn’t. He left it by mistake.”

  “It was a gift from my grandfather,” she repeated, as if he hadn’t heard her the first time. “He brought it back from the war.”

  “He didn’t mean to leave it. His mom, your mom, was calling and he was in a hurry. I think he filled it with some of the alcohol he found in your room.”

  She pursed her lips. Mills realized that every detail he had just mentioned—Tommy, Pam, her bedroom, the alcohol she hid in her closet—no longer existed.

  “I’m glad you gave this to me,” she said quietly. “I’m glad to have it.”

  He took his chance. His hands shook as he held the chain up, dangling the silver L in front of her.

  “I also found this on the lawn, right by one of the oak trees. I thought it might belong to you.” Lisa caught the pendant in her palm.

  “No, I’ve never seen it before. It’s not mine. My name doesn’t begin with a J.”

  Mills realized it was backward. He flipped the pendant until it became an L.

  “It’s still the wrong initial.”

  “But your name is Lisa—”

  “Short for Elizabeth,” she said. “I’d use an E for any expensive jewelry. Anything I cared about. You know, for when I become an adult.”

  He nodded and pulled the pendant away before she could close her fingers over it. She paused, glancing at him hesitantly, as if unsure of what to make of this unfamiliar young man standing complacently on the street that had been hers since she was born. “So you live here now, huh?” Lisa’s voice was almost flinty, like the sound of stones struck together, like her mother’s pinched tone mixed with a sorority girl’s laziness with vowels. Lisa had Pam’s deliberate eyes, and now she seemed to turn them on Mills for the first time.

  “I’m here for now,” he told her. “I’m helping Paul.”

  She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out car keys along with a pack of peppermint gum. She would want fresh breath if she were going to meet Adam Pruitt on the beach at noon, as she’d said on the phone. “I’m staying at the Seaview now. Maybe that’s why you were confused,” she said, chewing the gum with her back teeth. “And I think I saw you there two days ago. Why would you go there with Beth Shepherd?”

  Mills rubbed his mouth, accidentally breaking open one of his shaving scabs.

  “Just for a drink and to enjoy the view,” he said. “It has a nice bar.”

  Lisa dropped her head to study the flask. She held it the way a mother holds a diaper, pinched between her fingers. It still contained leftover Jägermeister that he and Tommy had shared. Mills thought of the blood from his cut hand, and the syrupy alcohol, and other liquids: his short involvement with Tommy had been filled with fluids, none of which his older sister would understand.

  “My brother had strange tendencies,” she said as she turned toward a white car parked on the curb. NORTH FORK RENTALS was emblazoned on the side door, bisected with speedy lines to indicate quick departures. Lisa slipped the flask into the empty birdseed bag. “He was too trusting, for one. And he liked people who didn’t fit in. He wanted to experience too much, and it got him into trouble.”

  Mills steeled himself against her insinuations, standing deliberately still.

  “I know he might have said mean t
hings about my family, but if he did he was only trying to impress you. He loved them. I like to think he died trying to save them from whoever found their way in. That’s why he was on the landing. Because he knew that person shouldn’t be there.”

  Mills flexed his hand around the pendant. “I like to think he died without much pain,” he said.

  “Yeah?” Lisa rasped. “You like to think that? Well, go on and think that if it makes you feel better.”

  “It’s too bad you weren’t at the Seaview before. It’s too bad you didn’t get to see Tommy like I thought he said you did.”

  “Like I said, you’re confused.” Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” She turned and walked to her car.

  Mills didn’t wave good-bye. He doubted Lisa bothered to look back as she pulled away. He hurried into the house to find a coat. Beth couldn’t drive him to the beach: she was in Greenport, buying Paul’s birthday cake, and he was supposed to meet her at two o’clock at her place. He had forty minutes to get to the beach across from Bug Light to catch Lisa with Adam—that would prove they were a couple. He couldn’t ask Paul for a ride, either: he’d already warned Mills not to hunt for trouble. Instead he rummaged through the scrap paper by the kitchen telephone and found the only other number he could think of.

  “Hi, Isaiah. It’s Mills Chevern, Beth’s friend. I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

  Isaiah Goodman’s old Saab was outfitted with new leather upholstery, but its original engine rattled when it backed out of Paul’s driveway. Isaiah also had two punctures above his lip, the site of former piercings. Peeking out from under his shirt collar were the letters RE, in black calligraphy, the tail end of a tattoo that graced his neck. Mills tried to guess the remainder of the word: Sabre, flare, lucre. Despite the vestigial evidence of a younger and rougher Isaiah Goodman, the current Isaiah wore a crisp blue button-down, black corduroys, and boat shoes. Isaiah’s dark hair was cut short before it could will itself into curls, and he had a sizable gap between his front teeth. A pinkie ring tapped along to the wailing Middle Eastern disco. He steered them onto Main Road, the car’s surround-sound audio system blasting a soundtrack of Algerian flutes and drums.

  Mills knew that Isaiah Goodman was (1) gay and (2) an artist, but he read as (1) straight and (2) the kind of corporate trader in Manhattan who bought up the rooftops of tenement buildings and erected Shinto shrines of one-way mirrored glass, marring the bleak romance of the skyline. Men who bought rooftops in the city tended to lack imagination and friends, dry-humping the residents below them with their real estate. Sceptre, vulture, perjure, leisure. Art must have kept Isaiah in shape, judging from his muscular wrists and the shirt buttons that squinted on his chest. Mills cupped his hand over his lips to hide his pimples. His feet kept slipping on the books that carpeted the passenger-side floor—The Land Remembers, The Tyranny of the Food Profiteers, Our Metaphysical Soil, all emblazoned with dated sunsets. “Don’t worry about stepping on those.” Isaiah laughed. “They belong to Vince.”

  Mills tapped his fingers absentmindedly on the window.

  “You in a big rush to get to the beach?” Isaiah asked. The sky was black-blooded with clouds. Stray drips dotted the windshield, never thickening into rain.

  “I want to see Bug Light,” Mills said. That hardly sounded urgent, so he elaborated. “And I have to meet someone.”

  Isaiah nodded. “And they couldn’t give you a lift? Must be an important meeting.” He held the steering wheel with one hand between his legs. “Vince and I went out to Bug Light last June. The Maritime Museum was offering a special tour by boat. We took the trip out and climbed on the rocks, gulls and cormorants spinning around our heads, trying to gouge our eyes out. Jesus, you wouldn’t believe how badly that lighthouse is constructed. Splintering wood, shattered windows, rickety stairs just to get inside—and then, once you’re in it, it’s just a mechanical light switch with a timer attached. Off, on, like a bomb.” Mills didn’t mention that Paul had helped reconstruct Bug Light in 1990, although he felt guilty for not defending it. “Vince actually asked the tour guide if it was for sale!” Isaiah found this immensely funny. The Saab swerved over the yellow lines as he laughed. “I said, no eff-ing way. We’re already isolated enough in our cottage. I don’t need to take a boat every time I want to reach civilization. But Vince has got a horrible romance addiction. When the other visitors weren’t looking, he found a patch of dirt between the rocks, pulled a little garden trowel from his coat, dug a hole, and dropped in a Japanese maple seed. He put something else in the hole too, but he wouldn’t tell me what. Last week he went to the beach with his binoculars and swears he saw a tiny green shoot out there, amid the snow and boulders. He calls it our tree. He likes that it will grow out in the open and no one will be able to do a thing about it.”

  Mills liked the gesture. Out there on the island, it might escape weeding. “That’s sweet,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Isaiah burred, irritated at having to agree. He tilted his neck: ore. “I guess it is. Another sun worshiper planting sedition among the year-rounders. At least until that millionaire Arthur Cleaver pays to have it ripped out.” When he and Vince had gone to buy their English cottage last June, he told Mills, they had both felt like unwanted squatters crashing a Republican convention. The cottage leaked water, holes punctured the floorboards, and mice had set up a free-love commune in the basement by the furnace. And still, every time they put in an offer beyond the asking price, they were instantly outbid. Vince soon got it into his photogenic head that Orient locals had banded together to buy the cottage just to keep yet another artist couple from Manhattan from getting their unfilthy hands on one of their precious Sound-front homes.

  “They’d reached their quota on fussy urbanites,” Isaiah said. “The other bidders were from here on the North Fork, so we felt they were biased against us.” Isaiah was content to back off and let the year-rounders have the cottage if they wanted it so much. It was a smudge of a place, a dismal version of a vacation, and they still had time to find a summer rental in the Hamptons. But Vince took the affront personally. He cleared out his savings, negotiated a loan from the owner of his former modeling agency, and went eighty thousand dollars beyond the reigning bid. “Vince convinced me it was a smart investment,” Isaiah wheezed, paying only mild attention to oncoming traffic. “Especially once Plum and Gardiners Islands go up for sale in the next few years. Then even the little houses in Orient will be worth a fortune.” But Isaiah knew it was really a matter of pride. “Vince would not be defeated. I’ve never seen a man so dedicated to so little, this box of stapled-together walls on a mud patch.”

  And now here they were in the poverty of their winnings, tiling the floors and stuffing steel wool in the kitchen cracks all by themselves because they didn’t have the money to hire a proper contractor. “Vince still thinks it was the right decision,” Isaiah said. “He thinks he’s won something. And now he wants to buy more land in Orient. He says he’ll find the money. He’s already got his eyes on other properties. Just like some of the other artists out here. Some of them think we should all go in on it together.”

  Isaiah looked over, checking his trapped audience’s attention span, admiring his occidental profile.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Isaiah asked suddenly. Mills hadn’t told Isaiah that he was gay. “Sorry if that’s a personal question. I’m not trying to corner you.”

  “No, it’s cool,” Mills replied. “I don’t have a boyfriend. I’m single.” It was the first time he had ever defined himself as single, which felt like defining himself as American in a foreign country. It sounded advanced and self-reliant and lonely.

  “Wait,” Isaiah moaned. “You aren’t going out to the beach for a secret date, are you?”

  “No,” he said in quick defense.

  Isaiah cracked his knuckles, using his thighs to steady the wheel.

  “That’s good, because you know they monitor the park with cameras, and
they’re not to cool around here with public hookups.” Mills wasn’t sure if Isaiah was joking or not, even when he ignored the road to present him with a pristine, gap-toothed grin, as if a glimpse of Isaiah’s smile was worth a crash.

  Mills checked the clock on the console. It was 11:58. Lisa Muldoon must already be parking her rental car, searching for Adam Pruitt along the beach. On Main Road there was traffic racing to the tip to catch the noon ferry to Connecticut. Ahead of them was a delivery truck with GREENPORT ARTISANAL FLORISTS written across its back doors in the same calligraphic script as Isaiah’s neck tattoo. A hothouse of yellow lilies quivered in the windows.

  “I’m impressed you’re willing to spend so much time out here,” Isaiah said. “When I was your age, I couldn’t stand to be outside of New York for a minute, paranoid that I was going to miss something. God, those years were tiring. I was in a band.” Isaiah pulled down the collar of his shirt and completed the word: encore. “That was the name of our group. We didn’t do encores. Maybe that’s why we weren’t very popular. But I guess the city isn’t as alive as it used to be. Now young people have the Internet and a zillion phone apps so you don’t need an actual place to congregate. You can be everywhere, nowhere, a floating message-spewing entity. We used to rely on drugs to get that sensation. No matter how crowded the party is, after a while you’re really only talking to yourself.”

  “I don’t have a phone,” Mills said. “Or a computer.” They passed the turnoff to the diCorcia farm; the flower truck took the next left, disappearing up a thin dirt trail.

  “Living in reality full-time is underappreciated. It’s a dying art. I think that’s why so many artists have moved out here.”

  “Totally,” Mills replied, as if his reasons for being off the grid were philosophical, not financial. Isaiah drove into the park entrance, passing the unattended ranger shack. Gray wood planks grew out of the ponds, nesting grounds for breeding ospreys. A few abandoned nests still crowned the beacons.

  Mills scanned the view. Sand and pebbles threaded through the grasses. Deep into the ash-blue sea sat the fat, sun-whitened lighthouse, a suburban clapboard marooned offshore. It looked defenseless there, one hundred yards out, an easy target for vandals like the ones who burned down the original in 1963. On the other hand, its impenetrable moat gave it a good claim to being the safest house in Orient. Mills imagined Isaiah and Vince living out there, standing under their maple tree. Maybe that’s what Vince had seen in the lighthouse, an island of safety just for them.