Goodnight Stranger Read online

  “I’m late,” I said. “I have to go.” But I turned back from the doorway. “Let’s do something fun together tonight. You and me. I don’t know what. Make a big dinner or something.”

  “I could get clams?” he said.

  “Yes, let’s have a feast. Just you and me.”

  I hurried along the beach to the landing, the sky above me pearly like the inside of a shell. The red houseboat rocked lazily in the bay. A white egret was stalking in the shallow water, and cormorants perched on every rock, turning their heads one by one to watch as I walked by. Their necks bulged as if they’d swallowed a string of beads. They threw their heads back and the beads slid deeper.

  Wolf Island was smaller and plainer than Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. We were the girl-next-door island. No gingerbread houses. No bakery with a line around the block by eight in the morning. No kitschy restaurants that sold more T-shirts than food. Clara Day Street was only a few blocks long, and most of the stores were for us, not the tourists: grocery store, dry cleaner, pharmacy, Mady’s Diner, One Eyed Jack’s, Island Pie. The high school, community hall, and post office were at one end of the street in old slanty buildings. The ferry came in at the other end. From the information booth, I could see all of it, every gray and shingled roof, every widow’s walk and weathervane. Roses climbed up all the fences. Gulls circled overhead, their wings vanishing into the sky.

  Instead of going straight to my information booth by the docks, I went into the Ferry-All office building on Clara Day Street where Jim Cardoza, my boss, was working at his desk, surrounded by picture after picture of his daughter Mary-Ann, who had moved to New York and never visited.

  “What’s going on?” Jim said. “Why are you late?”

  “Long story,” I said. “Lucas was out late, and I—”

  “Is he sick? Why was he out so late?” Jim’s mother had died suddenly a year ago, and he was sure disasters were about to befall everyone he knew.

  “You worry too much,” I said.

  “There were people here at nine,” he said. “You missed everyone.”

  We glanced out the window. The landing looked like a ghost town. It looked the way it looked in winter. We shivered. And then we laughed. Jim’s laughter sounded very much like crying.

  The streets were busy again by lunchtime. I watched from the info booth as tourists filed off the noon boat, a huddle of energy in sunglasses and baseball caps, tugging at suitcases and snapping open brochures. A dad pushed babies in a double stroller. A college kid was bringing his girlfriend home for the first time. He loved his home and wanted her to love it, too. An old woman and her husband were here to visit their children. They couldn’t wait. They spent all year telling stories about their kids, and then for one glorious week each summer they became characters in the stories they told. Two boys with dreadlocks clutched cell phones in their hands like protective amulets. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that cell service was almost nonexistent on Wolf Island.

  It was a comfort to sit at the information booth and dole out information—a kind of currency. I told tourists which of the two inns was better for children. I told them where the aquarium was and warned them not to expect more than two sad seals and a tank of lobsters. I told them who had the best clam chowder. When the whale watch cruise left. Where there were mopeds for rent and where there were bikes.

  These were the questions I knew how to answer.

  Eddie came over from One Eyed Jack’s. He was wearing a T-shirt that said, “Wolf Harbor: A Quaint Little Drinking Village with a Fishing Problem.”

  “You want to get lunch or something?” he asked.

  “I’m kind of busy right now,” I said, handing over a map of the island to a young couple with a baby in a backpack.

  “After it clears out,” he said.

  In high school I’d worshipped Ed Frank. I was still trying to get over that, if I’m being honest, even though he’d gotten married a few years back to an island girl, Kim, who had been three grades behind us in school. Marriage had changed him somehow, aged him, but when I looked at him I still saw Ed Frank, seventeen years old, his face flushed from running, his head thrown back laughing—and maybe he saw the girl in me, too. I don’t know what we still wanted from each other, maybe just to hold on to the people we used to be. Despite Kim, and the fact that we’d known each other forever, it seemed somehow a natural progression—expected even—that we’d end up seeing each other secretly. I wasn’t proud of it, I didn’t like sneaking around, but it was hard to stop. Eddie, his warm belly, his clumsy hands.

  But I’d made up my mind to end all that.

  “You seem tense,” Eddie said.

  “I guess I am.”

  “I know some good massage techniques.”

  “Thanks, Eddie, but I don’t think that will help.”

  “Shiatsu,” he said.

  “I’m just thinking about the future,” I said.

  “Well, there’s your mistake,” he said. “Be in the moment.”

  I looked around me. I loved the island. Loved it the way you love home. Which meant that sometimes I hated it, love and hate being two sides of the same coin. I looked at Eddie, felt a little volcano of anger. Be in the moment. Easy for him to say; his future was one he’d already chosen, with Kim. Sometimes my past, present, and future felt more like stories being told to me than a life I had any power over. “I’m sick of the moment,” I said.

  “What you need is a distraction,” Eddie said.

  And that’s when the stranger stepped off the boat.

  I noticed him immediately because he didn’t fit into any of my categories. He was carrying a New York Times and a black duffel bag. He was handsome, and he seemed like an island himself, not in any way part of the commotion around him. He looked like someone coming home, but I knew everyone who grew up here. He wasn’t a tourist either, not on vacation. He didn’t really fit anywhere.

  He stood at the bottom of the plank and heaved his bag over his shoulder, looking up and down Clara Day Street. He wore a white shirt and dark jeans, had dark eyes and dark hair, too. His shirt was untucked, and his black hair was windblown, but he still gave the impression of neatness, formality, and precision. He looked around him with a complicated expression—I couldn’t read him, but it seemed at once hungry and content, a contradiction.

  He noticed me. I straightened. I was messy, unbeautiful. My hair was tangled, the color of sand. Lucas got the golden hair and amber eyes. I had sand-hair and mud-eyes. What was soft and sensual in Lucas’s face was just ill-defined in mine. But still, there was something about me that some men liked: sunburn, scratched skin, those little signs of danger and disorder. There was something pitiable about me, I knew, island girl, trapped here at the mercy of storms and boats. Some people spent all their lives looking for a girl like that. They wanted to be the one to give her the brave new world.

  The stranger lifted his hand, waved. I waved. Then he turned and walked away. I watched him disappear down Clara Day Street. I realized I’d been holding my breath.

  “Who the fuck is that?” Eddie asked.

  “No idea,” I said.

  I wondered where he’d come from, pictured those possible cities and towns. Throughout the day, I scanned Clara Day Street for a glimpse of him. A distraction. I imagined running into him on a dark street—maybe in the rain—sharing an umbrella, talking all night. Eventually, unable to part with me, he’d ask me to come back to whatever city he came from: long streets, tall buildings, buses and taxis and brick and bridge. What’s more important than this love? he might say. Only that was the wrong question, because the answer was: the other love, the first love. That’s what’s more important. Family. Brothers. The living and dead. Lucas. Baby B.

  What was wrong with me? I was hopeless. I couldn’t even fuck a stranger in my imagination without first thinking about my family obligations.
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  * * *

  That night Lucas brought home a bucket of clams, and we prepared them with corn on the cob. Our feasts were simple and transcendent. “Lucas,” I said, looking up, butter and lemon sauce on my fingers. “What would you do if I were to go away someday—I’m just asking hypothetically here.”

  “Like on a trip?” he said.

  “Yes. A trip.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Same thing I do now, I guess. Plus wait for you to come home.”

  “You might be pretty lonely.”

  “I’d survive.”

  “How would you, I don’t know, shop for food?”

  “You could shop before you left.”

  “Right but—” I didn’t know what I was hoping he’d say. “What if you got a roommate or something. Someone to stay here—while I was away—to shop, and keep you company.”

  Lucas laughed. “I don’t want a roommate, thank you. I’d be fine on my own. It’s not like you’ve never gone away.”

  “That was different. Mom was here.”

  “If you want to go on a trip, go ahead,” Lucas said, suddenly uneasy.

  “I don’t want to go on a trip,” I said. “I told you, it was just hypothetical. You know what I will do, though? Go out for a drink.”

  Lucas shrugged. “Fine with me. Have all the drinks you want.”

  We cleared the dishes in silence, stacked them in the sink. The night hadn’t gone at all as I’d planned. I had wanted to feel that old sense of connection with Lucas, but now I felt more alone than ever, and maybe Lucas did, too. I left through the kitchen door, headed for the beach. It was already dark, and the slapping of the water was amplified—little crashes over and over. I followed the noise down to the dock. But it was only the rowboat, nudging against the pilings as the water got choppy in the wind.

  From inside I could hear faintly the scratching of the record player. The unmistakable piano, like breaking glass, of Nina Simone, “Here Comes the Sun.” This was a bad sign—I could see in my mind Lucas bent over the record player. I could feel the intensity of his longing. I felt desperate to escape the sound of it.

  The lounge at the Island Inn was scattered all around with soft armchairs and little low tables. There was a small dance floor by a grand piano near the bar. A pianist in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt was playing “Take the A Train.” I wouldn’t normally come to this bar—I liked Jack’s where Eddie worked. But I thought I might see the stranger here, and I did.

  He was with the tourists at the bar. He was watching the room, taking it in with the same almost-possessive look I’d seen at the landing. Mine, all mine, his look seemed to say—to everything in the room, armchairs, barstools, piano, pianist.

  I crossed the lounge and sat next to him.

  “Hi,” he said. “I recognize you.”

  “From the information booth.”

  “No, from—” He shook his head. “Actually this is convenient, because I’m in need of some information.”

  “I thought you might be.”

  Laughing, he said, “I find islanders very accommodating.”

  “Some of us are.”

  I ordered scotch, which was what I liked to drink. I loved the way it burned, the way each sip seemed illicit, even long after I turned twenty-one. The stranger paid for it. Already, that force was blooming between us, a kind of invisible presence, air pressure, humidity, the fullness before a storm. The way the air around you grows arms and legs, a beating heart. He was here from New York, he said, not on vacation, more like a retreat. His name was Cole. He had no wedding ring. He smelled like salt, like corn flour.

  “What kind of information did you need?” I asked.

  He thought for a moment. “Best lobster roll on the island?”

  “Drake’s.”

  “Best pancakes?”

  “The diner. Mady’s.”

  “Bookstore?”

  “No, sorry. Library.”

  “Affordable hotel—for a possible extended stay?”

  I shook my head, considering. “The Sea Breeze is cheap. But you can stay here for the same cost if you ask for room eleven.”

  “What’s wrong with room eleven? Haunted?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t wait to find out what that means,” he said.

  “Do you already have a room?”

  “Number five.”

  “I’ve never seen that one,” I said. “I’d like to.”

  I watched his eyes dilate, that sudden opening to the light, darkness creating space for desire. But he shook his head. “I would offer to show you. But everything is...everywhere. It’s a mess.”

  “I like messes.”

  “Do you have a room?”

  “I have a house.”

  “I would love to see it.”

  “But—I also have a brother, and he will be there.”

  “I like brothers.”

  “You won’t like mine.”

  “I’ll risk it.”

  I held his arm on the beach. We bumped against each other’s shoulders. I felt reckless, like someone else, another girl. Lucas could hide in his room all night. He could sleep up on the attic bed. He could spend the night at the lighthouse. I wanted to forget him, just for one night, for an hour or two.

  “Oh,” Cole said, suddenly. My house was in front of us, and he stopped and stared at it. He looked over his shoulder as if orienting himself. The houses of the island all perched like seabirds on the sand—squatting gulls nestled against the wind or long-legged herons keeping safe from waves on rickety stilts. Our house was among those, looking out across the bay, over Vineyard Sound, toward Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. It was a rambling house with big, generous windows, shingles the color of the sky on a cloudy day. Now its windows were dark except for one upstairs bedroom, and the kitchen.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked Cole.

  “Nothing.” He shook his head. “I think I noticed your house from the ferry today, that’s all.”

  “Impossible. The ferry comes in on the other side of the island.”

  “I guess a lot of houses look alike.”

  Inside the kitchen, he took my wrists and pulled me toward him. I closed my eyes, waiting to feel his mouth. But a moment went by and when I opened my eyes, I saw that he was studying me, examining my face.

  “Is this an inspection?” I asked. “Am I going to pass?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was just—you’re beautiful—”

  “I already invited you home with me, so you can relax with the flattery,” I said.

  And then the door from the living room swung open and Lucas walked in.

  I hated watching Lucas freeze when he encountered someone new, his shoulders hunching into little mounds. I saw his body go rigid, his posture tense like a rabbit. He dropped his eyes. I waited for him to back out of the room, disappear.

  But instead, Lucas seemed to see something—I saw the little jerk of recognition. He pointed at Cole’s legs or feet. He moved toward Cole, and then bent over to examine his legs.

  “I’m guessing this is the brother,” Cole said.

  “Lu?” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “Are you...?” Lucas looked into Cole’s face. Then he turned to me. “It’s him,” he said.

  “Who?” His eyes were suddenly glassy, and I felt a tremor of fear, something rising up from the earth, through the floorboards, entering the soles of my feet, and racing through my veins along with my blood as it hurried toward my heart.

  “Lydia,” Lucas said, “it’s Baby B.”

  3

  Our family wasn’t like other families when it came to this lost brother, and how we grieved for him. We talked about him so much growing up that it sometimes felt as though he occupied a more elevated spot in our family’s hierarchy tha
n Lucas and I did. My mother didn’t just grieve for him, she longed for him. I longed for him, too, and so did Lucas, and for Lucas, the longing ebbed and flowed like some internal tide of his nature, rising, raging, crashing into something pathological every few years.

  The three of us were born together, triplets. Baby B’s name was Colin, but my mother often called him Baby B, as she had during the pregnancy, and so we called him Baby B as well. It reminded Lucas of a nursery rhyme. Big A little a, Bouncing B, the Cat’s in the Cupboard and Can’t see me. To me it seemed to rely on some simple, undeniable system of categorization. Baby: the very title of what he was. B: his place in the order, after me, before Lucas.

  My mother and father had married late in life, and at first hadn’t thought they wanted kids at all. My mother spent her twenties trying to break away from her own family, a dysfunctional cadre of Catholics from Chicago, whose enthusiastic mingling of love and guilt and—sometimes—violence was forever in her memory along with the scratchy sound of Bing Crosby on the record player. She’d had more than her fill, she always said, of the noise and the guilt and the God and the Bing.

  When she got married she decided my father was all the family she needed. They did all the things you do when you have no kids: threw elaborate late-night parties, up until dawn playing guitar, reading Edward Abbey and Tom Robbins and Jack Kerouac; the only ones for them were the mad ones, they agreed. They moved from Chicago to Denver to Atlanta to Boston, taking jobs at self-impressed liberal arts colleges, teaching literature courses or working in admissions offices. They spent holidays at the cinema watching Jaws and Carrie, congratulating themselves on how nimbly they’d escaped the life they didn’t want, which dogged them all the time: commercials with aproned mothers and suited fathers and children agog over fat golden turkeys on checkerboard tablecloths. They ate lasagna on Christmas Eve and made a big tofu and broccoli stir-fry on Christmas Day.

  But it was on Christmas Day my mother started thinking about kids. The way she always told it, she was watching The Sound of Music. She didn’t like that Maria gave up her goal of being a nun, but my mother, along with Maria, succumbed thoroughly to Captain von Trapp’s stern enchantment, and felt elated when he kissed that lovely governess and sang about his wicked childhood.