The driver tells me it will be at least a forty-minute drive. I nod in agreement, and as he pulls from the curb, I close my eyes less out of fatigue and more to prevent conversation, but within minutes, I’m asleep. It’s a bumpy, fitful half sleep, but qualifies as sleep because I have dreams.
I dream of the sea.
I’m a little girl, and our family is at Littlehampton Beach, where we would go for a few days every summer. In my dream, I’m running along the small sand dunes, and though I have no concept of how old I am, I see Thomas, and he’s just a tiny boy, so I can’t be more than about seven. The air is heavy with salt, and the sound of small waves licking the shore is louder than it should be. Crackling, like heavy static on a radio.
I chase Thomas through and over the dunes; he squeals with delight. He scurries behind a dune, and I scale it to reach the other side, only to find he’s not there. I look to my right, and somehow he’s now a hundred yards away, past the chalky-white sand and out in the water, where my mother holds him fast with both hands. My father is on the shore, building a sand castle, lost in his own world of creation. My father was often lost in creation.
I watch as my mother lowers Thomas into the water, belly first, positioning her arms beneath him. She’s teaching him to swim. She’s thin here, and quite lovely. Nothing like how she looks now. Thomas kicks and flails his arms, spastic attempts to keep himself afloat, but he starts to sink as my mother pulls her arms away. He panics, and she lifts him up again, reassuring him that she has him.
I can hear her so clearly.
I have you, silly boy. I’ll never let you go.
Then she repeats the process. Thomas kicks and flails, then slowly sinks until she lifts him from the water once again. This goes on and on, and I just stand on my dune and watch. In the distance, the sad, lonely warble of gulls echoes.
I look to my father, whose creation is suddenly massive and striking, but not a castle at all. He has rendered Mister Tender from a billion grains of wet sand. The bartender is life-size, rising from the ground like some kind of sea creature come ashore to feast. The creation looks at me, just me, smiling as my father fortifies its legs, making it stronger, protecting it against a swirling, rising tide.
Then, in the imagination of the dream version of me, I picture one of those legs moving. Breaking free of the beach, lifting of its own accord. Coming to life. But it’s real. I see it. My father steps back, nervous and proud, admiring what he has brought into this world.
Mister Tender turns to me and smiles.
His other leg lifts.
A small step, then a larger one.
He grows larger as he heads directly toward me, consuming the beach with every pounding step, adding height, weight. Depth. In seconds, he’s a tower. My father is gone.
The sand monster is coming to kill me.
Then, a scream. But it’s not mine. It’s Thomas’s. I look past the sand creature closing in and see my mother near Thomas, but this time, she didn’t pick him up after he began to sink in the water. She just left him, and the scream I heard was the last he made before he slipped beneath the surface. For a flash of a second, I see his little white hand poking above the top of the shimmering waters, but once it disappears, I see him no more.
My mother calmly walks back to shore, wiping her hands on her hips, back and forth, back and forth. For a moment, she is smiling, and then she wears no expression at all.
Shadows on my face. Then my view is blocked entirely.
The sandman is here.
I jolt awake when the taxi stops at a light, and I’m so disoriented and rattled from the dream that I grab the top of my knees to steady myself. A few deep breaths, then I turn to the window.
The neighborhood isn’t familiar to me, but the look of things is, as is the smell. Britain has such a distinct scent, I think. There’s such an age to it. The smell of centuries-old books.
Ten minutes later, things start to spark memories. The rows of houses, the grocers that haven’t changed in all this time, and then, finally, Gladstone Park. It’s out my window, and as we travel past, I decide to close my eyes again. It will be there if I want to look, especially since I’m staying nearby, but right now, I don’t care to.
The driver pulls up in front of the Quincey House Hotel, a three-story brick building that looks as if it could have been a small school a hundred years ago. I realize I’ll need to use my credit card to pay the driver. It makes me nervous, as it will be another part of a trail I’m leaving, but I have little other choice. I could take money from a nearby ATM, and will likely do that, but that’s a fingerprint as well. There is no easy way to hide.
As he hands me a receipt, the driver says, “Suppose this park is special to you. Not a lot to it. Most tourists prefer Hyde Park or St. James’s.”
I don’t want to tell him the park is special to me, because that’s not the word I would use. But I also don’t want to explain why I would use the word haunts.
So I simply reply, “I’m not a tourist.”
Inside, I tell the front-desk clerk I’m the person who just inquired about a room for three nights. He nods and smiles but thankfully engages in little small talk. I hand him my credit card, and he asks for my passport, which I lightly protest against, but he informs me hotel policy insists upon it. When I hand it over, he proceeds to make a photocopy. Any chance of anonymity is officially gone.
Upstairs, my room is decent if not a little antiseptic, as if whatever charm this building once had was efficiently sanitized away by uninspired hotel architects. But it’ll do. Before I bother to do anything else, I collapse on the bed, wriggle my feet under the covers, and sleep.
This time, there are no dreams. My ghosts have decided to get a little sleep of their own.
Twenty-Eight
I wake in darkness so suffocating, I could be inside a coffin. Dizzy seconds pass. I steady my breathing and try to remember where I am. I feel drunk, drugged, confused. A shaded window’s outline glows in some sort of distance, a faint rectangle of light. Then, with the fierceness of a bad memory, it all comes to me.
London. I’m in London. Gladstone Park.
I’m hungry. God, I am so hungry.
I turn in the bed and look over at the clock, which reads just after 8:00 p.m. Eight? I’ve been asleep for hours.
I sit up, place my feet on the floor. Blood drains from my head, and for a second, I think I’m going to topple. I could easily go back to sleep, but I fight it off. I don’t want that. I want to get up. I need to get up.
In the bathroom, I splash lukewarm water on my face, pull my hair back and tie it up, brush my teeth. Life begins filling me again.
Grab my bag, double-checking it for my laptop, wallet, phone. Shoes on. In the small lobby, I ask the same desk clerk the closest place for a bite, and at this point, I don’t even think I’d protest against fast food. Thankfully, he directs me to a pub down the street. Quick walk. Inside the pub, I nearly faint from the wonderfully heady aroma of a shepherd’s pie I order. I rarely drink beer, but here I have a pint, and as the last drops slide down my throat, I admonish myself for not drinking it daily. I order another. As the server drops it off, I ask him to remove the dinner knife from the table, telling him I won’t be needing it.
I pull out my laptop, boot it up, and connect to an open Wi-Fi network. There’s an email from Brenda. She tells me things are fine at the Stone Rose and asks again if I’m okay. I tell her what I wrote yesterday. All is good. Just need a few days to deal with some things. Thanks for your understanding. Nothing else. She has no idea I’m thousands of miles away.
No email from Thomas.
Nothing from Richard.
Most notably, nothing from Mr. Interested since his ominous text. I have a constant sense of his breath on the back of my neck.
I check the online news back in Manchester, and there’s no mention of a body bei
ng found in the White Mountains. I search Boston news sites, and there’s nothing about a missing drug dealer, though that might not even be newsworthy. But it’s not relief I feel. It’s more like anxiety, because I know what we’ve done doesn’t just go away forever. Nothing just goes away forever, much less a murder.
I open a blank Word document and start typing.
The book is postmarked London. Dad’s handwriting on the inscription, which tells me not to trust anyone. Is he telling me not to trust Mr. Interested? Did he even know him? Or is it all just a forgery?
Why does he call himself Mr. Interested? Because he’s interested in every aspect of my life?
I think about this for a moment, staring at the name. Say it aloud. “Mr. Interested.” There’s something familiar about the lettering, the sounds, the cadence. Then a thought hits me, and I switch over to my web browser. I Google anagram and find a site where I can type any word or words, and it will spit out all other possible word combinations based on those letters.
I type:
Mister Tender
Hundreds of results, but only one that isn’t nonsense. It’s the first result on the list.
Mr. Interested
I sit up straighter and stare at the screen. This feels like a meaningful moment, but I don’t quite grasp the significance.
It’s an anagram. Okay, I get it. Clever. One minor mystery solved. But does that really tell me anything? Is he telling me he is Mister Tender? If so, what the hell does that even mean?
Back to my writing.
What I know about him:
He’s older. Starks called him “fancy.” British accent. FIfty or sixty.
Assume he lives near me, but the book was sent from London—does he travel back and forth? He watches me, but hard to say how often. He’s been at my house, maybe even inside it. At least knows what the inside looks like. Says he’s been watching me for a long time. Somehow even knows about Jimmy and me and the night in Boston. Was able to track Freddy Starks.
He can draw like Dad. Maybe even mimic his hand-writing.
He has access to guns.
Tech savvy? Maybe. Enough to run a message board, which probably isn’t hard. He knows I’m in England. Is he tracking my phone somehow?
I stop, knowing I could write myself into circles. Really, there’s only one immediate question, and it’s the last thing I type on the page before shutting down the laptop.
Where do I go next?
I already know the answer, even if I haven’t fully admitted it to myself. It’s why I chose to stay in this neighborhood. Maybe it’s the real reason I came to England.
There’s a sip of beer left, and I swallow it. For a brief moment, I consider actually ordering another, but instead I pay my bill and provide an answer to my one immediate question.
I walk outside and head deep into Gladstone Park.
Twenty-Nine
Once I step outside, cool, moist air curtains me, creeping down my neck, burrowing under my shirt. Settling on my skin.
I enter the park from the southwest gate, the opposite corner from my old house. The park is nearly a hundred acres in size. I walk briskly, not caring to linger though I have nothing for which to be late. My path is lit by the occasional security light, and a CCTV camera is mounted next to every one of them. I have forgotten about the British obsession with monitoring. All the more reason to suspect Mr. Interested is a product of England. He comes from this culture of surveillance, one that watches every move. Records every breath.
As far as I can see, I am alone, which doesn’t at all mean I am. All I hear are my own hurried footsteps on the path and the distant hum of light traffic on nearby streets. I stop once and look directly behind me. Nothing.
There is a haunting nostalgia here, a childhood familiarity layered with seconds of sheer terror. I used to play in this park. I nearly died in this park. I chased young boys in this park. Over three pints of my blood spilled in this park.
Ahead are the trees I remember so well. They had been planted in such a way that the park seems to turn into a dense forest without warning. Thomas and I used to call this section Hundred Acre Wood, and I would always play Christopher Robin. Thomas would always be Tigger, bounding and bounding about, both reckless and delighted with himself. Sometimes a whole day would pass here, though we’d hardly be aware of more than a few minutes going by. I suppose that’s really the definition of childhood. As you age, the day eventually seems as long as it actually is, and toward the end of one’s life, I imagine a single day can feel like a lifetime.
I enter Hundred Acre Wood, and immediately I’m swallowed inside the dense covering of trees. The path snakes next to a small creek. The trees loom over me, like a million predators frozen in mid-pounce. Streetlights shine small pools of light on the ground, and it’s all I can do to convince myself to make it to the next one. One step after the other, though, these steps are slowing. Getting smaller. Less certain in their purpose.
There. Up ahead. There’s the bridge.
What am I doing here?
Closure, perhaps, whatever that really means. The truth is, ever since the moment I chose to come to England, I knew I would come here. To the place it all happened.
It happened, in fact, right there.
Up ahead, a small wooden pedestrian bridge crosses the creek, park benches bookending each side. In the fall, we would drop leaves off the bridge and watch them softly float away. Sometimes we’d follow them all the way to the edge of the park, where they would bunch against a grated culvert. I always wondered what was inside that culvert, where it led, and what sorts of things might call that dark, wet place home.
Sylvia and Melinda Glassin once said that was where Mister Tender lived. That he’d rise from the depths of the culvert at night and go to the pub, holding court until the last customer went home. Then he’d slither back home, turning his body into a kind of rubber so he could squeeze through the narrow bars of the grate. Of course I knew this wasn’t true. My father invented Mister Tender, after all, and he never wrote about where he lived. As far as anyone could tell, Mister Tender’s existence began and ended in a bar, and he never slithered anywhere else in between.
My pace slows as I step onto the bridge. I can hardly see the creek in the faded light of the streetlamps, but I can hear it. The slow-moving water trickling over rocks sounds ghostly in the moment. Empty. Lonely, almost.
At the top of the small bridge, I stop and then crouch to one knee. My fingertips brush the coarse wood planks by my foot, and if I squint in the dark, I can almost picture the blood. But surely it’s not here anymore. It’s been cleaned up, and perhaps these planks have been replaced altogether.
But here, right here, is where it happened.
Melinda took me by the hand, while Sylvia walked behind us. I remember thinking how odd it was that she wanted to hold my hand, or even that the twins had shown recent interest in me at all, considering I was seen as more of a freak than anything as my father’s books sold more and more. Mine was otherwise a quiet existence, so when the Glassin twins came over one night and asked if I wanted to “hang out,” I could hardly protest.
We’d spent the evening at their house, a few blocks off the south side of Gladstone Park. My parents weren’t thrilled with the idea of me spending time with the Glassin twins, going so far as saying the Glassins weren’t “their type of people.” They never explained what they meant by that. But I was fourteen and desperate for any kind of attention, so I protested loudly enough that my parents buckled beneath the weight of my teenage angst.
At dinner with the Glassins that night, the twins’ father asked me about my dad, about where he got all his ideas. I don’t know, I had replied. It was the truth. How his mind worked was always a beautiful and maddening puzzle.
“Surely you must know,” Mr. Glassin had insisted. “Surely he tells you such things. Tells
you his inner thoughts.”
“No,” I had replied. “I don’t know anyone’s inner thoughts. That’s what makes them inner.”
Mrs. Glassin told me they used to be social with my parents, long ago. Before I was born, even. But that they’d grown apart once the babies started to come along. “That’s to be expected,” she’d said. “Hard to find time for anyone else once you pour your life into your children.”
This was a surprise to me.
I remember thinking I wanted to ask my parents about their long-ago friendship with the Glassins. I never did.
After dinner, I spent the next few hours in the twins’ shared bedroom, where the girls proudly displayed each issue of my father’s graphic novels. The books exhibited the battle wounds of well-read volumes. Sylvia and Melinda peppered me with question after question about Mister Tender. Were there things about him I knew that no one else did? What was going to happen in the next issue?
But the question I remember most:
What would you do for him, Alice?
“Nothing,” I had said. “Because he’s not real.”
Oh, the look of disappointment. Anger even, especially on Sylvia’s face. Then Melinda calmly said, Of course he’s not real, Alice. But that’s not the game we’re playing, is it?
After that, there were no more questions.
We settled into a movie that we watched on a small television in their room. Lights off. I sat on the floor, the twins propped side by side on their bed behind me. I don’t remember the movie exactly, but it was scary. Scarier than I was accustomed to, but they had insisted on it, being near Halloween and all. I wasn’t very familiar with the concept of Halloween, but I sat there and watched a movie and tried not to close my eyes in fear, all because I wanted these girls to like me.
I could hear them whispering during the moments of silence.
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