“Cut the shit, would you?” Brandon grumbled.
“Bite me, dude,” Aaron fired back.
“You don’t toss that remote my way, I might start pounding on you.”
“Try it.”
“Again?”
Brandon shot his younger brother a danger-filled scowl. Aaron wound up and pitched. Brandon caught the remote in his ungloved glove hand and punched the dial down to a channel showing the latest weather updates.
“…big, bad Boris, that blowhard, is long last blowing out to sea,” an attractive weatherman with a brush-cut and a phony smile said, sweeping a hand toward a rough digital pinwheel moving away from New England and toward the Atlantic’s open waters. “After churning up the Sargasso Sea and making palms sweat from Palm Beach all the way up to Portland, Maine, the threat from this rare early, ugly beast of a June hurricane is about to fizzle. Let’s all thank our lucky stars, folks, because this one could have been a lot worse.”
“Yeah, only you’re not stuck at the Beaufort’s summer place, sleeping on their couch, dick-breath,” Aaron said. In the absence of ownership of the remote control, he fumbled with his cell phone. The familiar jangle of a sports app merged with the weatherman’s singsong voice.
“Of course, the massive front sweeping down from Canada that made Boris’s exit possible is a bit of a mixed blessing. Forget barbecuing outdoors any time soon, unless you’re in the extreme western edge of Berkshire County in the great state of Massachusetts…”
Rain. It had rained that night, too. The night he and the former Claudia Beaufort—she was Claudia Phillips now, the voice in Brandon’s head reminded—had made their doomed attempt at romance. He remembered his erection, pinned at a miserable angle in his then-khakis; the kind he knew would look spectacular once it got released from its prison to metronome in clear view. Monstrous, gorged in blood, so erect that he thought he might go mad from the pressure or explode. But he loved her too much to take advantage of her, he’d said. And truthfully, he thought he did. How much of his parents’ rigid conservatism or the fact Brandon really had wanted to be Claudia’s white knight shared in the blame no longer mattered. That love died unrequited, and they’d never been more than friends. Now, his old friend had married second best. Mark Phillips was the backup QB. The guy who would have been captain of the high school baseball team, too, if not for Brandon.
“…Canadian Maritimes still not completely out of the woods yet, but for all intents and purposes…”
Aaron hit another button on his phone, and a riff of bastardized mechanical rock opera tolled in counterpoint to the TV.
“…it’s over.”
The sound of people moving around in the kitchen crawled over Brandon’s flesh. People he didn’t know were out there, people he and Aaron had been forced to shack up with out of necessity. The freaks from Table Eleven, all the unwanted guests Claudia’s parents had seated together right in front of the bathrooms at the reception held at the yacht club. The guy making the noise had danced nonstop, from the slow through the chicken. What had at first seemed funny quickly turned embarrassing, fueled by an open bar. After the hurricane grounded the ferry to Hyannis, the forced cohabitation with him, the woman that was either his wife or his girlfriend, and four of their large, loud friends had grown unbearable.
No, not the kitchen. One of them was in the head, puking out his guts. The noise that shuddered through the beach house was doubly hideous, in that it sounded as though the puker was bellowing, “Yacht…YOT!” when he heaved.
Round three commenced. “YOHHHT!”
After the fourth invocation, Brandon killed the TV and stood. “Come on, we’re out of here.”
Aaron ceased fiddling with his phone. “Say what?
“Any place downtown’s got to be better than this.” His feet ached. So did his ass, and another minute condemned to the couch in this house was going to drive him mad. “Now,” Brandon snapped.
Aaron kicked his socked feet down from the loveseat. “What’s your problem?”
His problems ran deep and many in number, but Brandon was finished facing them for now. He reached out and grabbed the collar of Aaron’s wheat-colored button-down. The other man jumped up as the first stitches popped.
“Okay, point made. Christ, bro.”
Brandon checked his pockets, pulled his blazer from the back of the sofa along with the book he’d brought to help pass the time on the ferry ride, which now felt months overdue. He wanted to sleep in his own bed, in his own apartment, and use his own bathroom. Disheveled as those things were, they were his.
Aaron stretched and then yanked on his loafers. “I gotta piss.”
“Yeah, good luck with that,” Brandon said on his way to the front door.
“Dude, don’t forget your tie,” Aaron said.
Not sure why, Brandon backtracked, picked up the yellow abomination, and looped it around his neck.
It was raining torrentially, the kind of downpour that drains all the color out of the world and makes it impossible to see things even when they’re standing directly in front of you.
Brandon trudged forward, not knowing if he had passed from Sea Breeze to Main Street, and not caring.
“Dude, the six o’clock ferry isn’t for…” Aaron griped from behind him. In the pause that followed, Brandon imagined his brother fumbling open his cell phone’s lid. “Almost five more hours!”
Brandon sucked in a deep breath of air raw and briny from the ocean and soldiered forward without addressing Aaron’s complaint. Head low, hands shoved into his pockets, he turned right at the traffic circle, veered right again. The rustic wooden sign, slate blue with etched gold letters, read: Main Street. Finally. At least in this one instance, life had put him on the right path.
A rich, buttery smell cut through the marina’s briny fog. Brandon’s stomach rumbled in response. Eggs or maybe burgers, frying on a grill. It was lunchtime, he realized after glancing at his watch. Time over the previous two days had fallen off its track and had passed in different measures than minutes and seconds. Meals—when was the last time he’d had an actual solid meal? The lemon-drenched whitefish at Claudia’s wedding? The food was great, as it was expected to be because this was, after all, Cardigan Island, summer sanctuary of the well to do.
“Who gets married on a fucking Thursday,” he grumbled.
“Do what?” Aaron asked.
“Nothing.”
Brandon’s nose tracked the aroma past the Island Times newsstand to a small café directly across the cobblestone-lined street from the marina. His stomach, still as flat and muscled as it had been in high school thanks to time in the gym and pick-up sports, clenched with hunger. Warm air drove out the damp chill surrounding him. The Here and Now, he thought. Here and now, Brandon wanted a cheeseburger, medium-rare, with one of those huge garlic deli pickles on the side. And fries, with lots of salt and ketchup. Coffee, hot. Heavy on the cream and sugar.
A cute place, with a really cute waitress. Barista, corrected the voice in his thoughts.
“Come on in and get dry,” she said.
“Don’t mind if we do,” Aaron said in that cocky, confident tone that Brandon recognized as meaning he’d taken notice of her.
“What can I get you fellas?”
“A seat on the six o’clock ferry,” Aaron said, punctuating the statement with a chuckle.
Brandon shot his younger brother a disapproving scowl. “Two coffees to start with, and a menu.”
5.
12:24 a.m., Saturday the Thirteenth
The loafers, they bordered on ridiculous. Tan, some kind of expensive leather, no doubt, but the way they curled at the toes reminded Cary of a genie’s slippers. An evil, angry genie in the mood for taking rather than granting wishes.
Cary’s mind drifted. He reeled it in with a sharp, silent admonishment. Snap out of artist mode, would you, for Chrissakes—and start thinking like a man who’s just been crowned by some complete fucking psycho!
“You�
��re awake, good,” said the man in the trench coat with the curlicue loafers.
Cary choked down a heavy swallow, only to nearly gag on the film lying thickly over his tongue, what tasted like a mouthful of spare change. “I think so,” he said, “though I’d prefer it if this was really just some bad dream.”
The man checked the knots. “Sadly, no, I’m sorry to say that this is quite real.”
“Me, too. Real sorry.”
“I need a place to lay low, just for a while, and—don’t look at me!”
The outburst shook the O’Keefe Cottage with the strength of a thunderclap. Cary turned away on instinct, though the details of the man’s face were already imprinted on his psyche and committed to memory. If put in a room with a sketch artist, he’d easily relay the deets—thinning hair, slate-colored eyes, the length and width of his nose, and that slightly-ticking patch of skin above his left eye, memorable only because, while being tied to the bed’s footboard, only half-conscious, Cary had seen it pulse with ever-increasing intensity. Hell, he’d sketch the face of the prick who’d clocked him personally.
“Lay low?” he parroted.
The man grabbed at his ticking flesh, gave it a sharp pinch, and turned toward the backpack sitting next to the easel, upon which a blank canvas waited to be romanced. Something about his attacker’s darting glances made this quite bad situation even worse.
“So, can I offer you something to drink? Nice cup of hot tea, perhaps?”
The man smiled and then clocked him again, driving the back of Cary’s head into the footboard of the bed, where countless hopeful artists—some of whom had, no doubt, gone on to promising careers—had slept and dreamed and pleasured themselves and others. This latest chapter in the O’Keefe Cottage’s history was less creative and joyous. A loud crack thundered in Cary’s ears.
My skull, he thought before the world phased out of focus before going fully dark.
6.
2:00 p.m., Saturday the Thirteenth
Something had broken, but in the cottony gray fugue that welcomed him back to consciousness, Cary realized it wasn’t the back of his noggin that had shattered. He worked his fingertips along the bedpost and dipped them into his hair, which was damp and sticky in spots—blood—and, yes, made him wince. But the back of his squash was still in one piece.
Through slitted eyes and glasses no longer sitting flush with his face, he tracked the malevolent figure in the room. The evil genie now sat cross-legged on the floor, near the drawn curtains at the French doors. The backpack was beside his attacker, the top zipper open. Cary opened his eyes a hair wider, convinced that what he was seeing must be the result of his knock to the head.
A wig was jammed into a bloody plastic bag. No, a voice in his thoughts shrieked—a head.
A shiver tumbled through his insides, equal parts icy and hot. Cary’s arms tingled at the wrists. His guts and nuts ached almost as miserably as the patch of cheek and lips that the murderer in his private sanctuary had driven into his teeth.
Rain lashed the bungalow’s metal roof and sprayed the windows. A low, ghostly howl carried around the eaves. The monster, sitting two, maybe three yards away, whispered to the grisly object poking out of the backpack’s open pocket, rocked slowly back and forth, and the patch of skin above his left eye ticked.
He’s going to kill me, thought Cary.
Tensing, some unaffected part of his consciousness finely attuned to the dragging weight of the seconds realized what had really broken when the monster in the room drove the back of his head into the footboard.
At that moment, the monster glanced over. Their eyes met. Cary gasped. The man stood, and the backpack spilled onto its side, half-disgorging its grisly contents. Among them was the gun the genie had used to pistol-whip him.
Cary screamed. The monster gripped the gun and rose back to his loafers, spouting, “I’m sorry. So fucking sorry…”
* * * *
Brandon stole a glance at his reflection in the head’s mirror. Two days had passed since he’d shaved, and a decent five o’clock shadow was filling in his lower face at two in the afternoon. Another day away from a razor and he’d look less like a pirate and more like some crazed mountain man on the run. The ugly tie, now unknotted, hung messy around his neck. His hair, rejuvenated by the rain, looked okay. While urinating out two cups of coffee and a soda, he shrugged, acknowledging that he looked better than good considering the circumstances.
He washed his face, brushed his teeth with a glob of toothpaste from the travel-size tube he’d picked up at the corner store and his pointer finger, and rinsed his mouth. His shoes still squeezed his ankles and toes unpleasantly, but with the day moving steadily closer to night and clean breath after a burger with a slice of red onion, he again felt somewhat human. Claudia’s ‘rents’ beach house seemed, mercifully, part of the distant past.
A knock sounded at the door. “You dying in there, bro?” asked Aaron.
Brandon exhaled, checked his zipper, and grabbed a length of brown paper towel from the dispenser, which he used to unlock and open the door. Aaron strutted in.
“What were you doing, rubbing one out?”
“You caught me,” Brandon said drolly and tossed the paper towel into the garbage can.
He marched down the slender hall, one way ending at an exit, the other emerging back into the dining room. A single window located halfway between both points was submerged beneath a continuous waterfall, the passing of time toward evening neither confirmed nor denied by the last of the storm’s deluge. The ferry lurked somewhere in the murk beyond the glass.
His shoes pinched. The smell in the hallway burned in his nostrils, not as a result of its nearness to the men’s bathroom, but the Atlantic. Everywhere on Cardigan Island had absorbed the ocean’s brine; wooden walls, ceiling tiles, and linoleum alike, creating a bottled, perpetual mustiness. The remains of the hurricane offered no relief.
A shudder teased the nape of Brandon’s neck. He fought it, failed. On its tumble down his spine, he absently, perhaps foolishly, wondered if he’d ever be dry again.
In 1922, future famed painter and free spirit, Dame Ida Caruthers, roomed for several weeks at the Sugar Beach Artists’ Colony—in what became the O’Keefe Cottage. And there, she painted glorious canvases of salt marsh roses and stretches of white, grainy sand under skies both sunlit and somber. Many of the paintings that resulted from her stay became parts of prominent private collections or found their way onto museum walls—the Gardner in Boston, the Stanley Silver in Western Massachusetts, and the Guggenheim in New York among them.
When not painting, Dame Ida, as she came to be known, frolicked and caroused with numerous of Cardigan Island’s young, red-blooded, blue-collar fishermen and, as a result as legend went, the darling of the Roaring Twenties art world damaged the antique bed to which another aspiring young artist found himself bound to almost a century later.
Cary remembered the tale right as the madman-murderer reached for his throat; remembered that he’d joked about the bed’s notorious history, its pedigree, when he’d first checked into the colony.
“Clearly, the mattress isn’t the same one Dame Ida did her famous conga lines across,” the facilitator remarked. “Those have been changed. But be careful—”
Careful of that antique footboard, Cary’s inner voice proclaimed, shocking him out of his delirium, perhaps as a result of that final moment of fight-or-flight that would determine whether or not he survived. He wanted out of there, but in order to fly, Cary was forced to first choose the alternative.
He fought.
Thanks, Ida, Cary thought and, in one fluid motion, he heaved his shoulders back into the antique frame, focusing all of his might into the effort. The wooden slat not only detached from the frame itself, but the young painter rooming in the O’Keefe Cottage nearly a century after the libidinous Ida Caruthers, caused the wood to crack, adding another layer of infamy to that particular landmark for future visitors to ponder. This is w
here a man with a paintbrush beat back his would-be killer and survived to not only tell the tale but also paint about it another day!
Only he wasn’t quite there, not yet. Cary was still bound to a length of broken antique maple, his attacker still armed.
His captor howled something unintelligible, moved closer, and took aim. Not thinking—going only on instinct—Cary pushed up from the floor. Their heads collided. That same inner voice cheering him on joked that he would, long last, have the answer to that lifelong question both of his parents liked to pose at awkward moments.
What are you—thick in the skull?
He only hoped his skull was the thicker of the two.
A confused minute later—it could have been hours, thanks to the supernova of exploding stars that resulted upon impact—the cool, damp caresses of the ocean breeze welcomed Cary back. The man with the backpack was gone, having fled through the cottage’s French doors, which creaked and inched forward and back, depending upon the wind’s druthers. His backpack, too, was gone.
Blood flowed. Cary tasted it on his tongue, smelled it in his sips for breath that refused to come easily. Rising and wiggling out of his restraints, he checked his face in the bathroom mirror. The blood was from a nostril gummed up and looking like a piece of overripe fruit collapsing under the weight of gravity and rot.
He splashed cold water on his face and reached for his cell. The tiny telephone icon bore a damning bar across the handset—no signal.
Fight or flight. Some asshole ogre with a grudge had broken into his sanctuary, assaulted him right as he had mustered the courage to be open, be free, be done with running. He was done with all of that, and more.
Balling his hands into fists, Cary raced through the open French doors, ready to fight.
“Thanks, Ida,” he growled. The wind stole his voice and carried it out to sea.
Aaron Dunne browsed through the rack of magazines, noting the more salacious titles poking up from the top row, their covers but not titles hidden behind black plastic inserts.
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