That at four o’clock in the morning, when a smart Southerner with a winter tan passed me a flask, touched my cheek, and told me I was beautiful, I would not be afraid.
His breath smelled like warm whiskey, and when he kissed me, he wove his fingers into my hair.
* * *
That was before a pretty, bloodless body on the side of the road—a blue-lipped omen in a cotton dress—showed me just how much there was to be afraid of. Out there, in houses and cars and hidden in the shadows, were dark and unsmiling things with hard fists and sharp teeth.
I knew better now.
My mother appeared over my shoulder, pressing the cool damp of a towel to my temple.
“In the sink, huh?” she said. “That’s classy.”
“I’m sorry.”
She chuckled. “Just aim for the toilet next time, okay?”
I gave her a thumbs-up and a weak smile.
“And, sweetie, I know this is tough, but you have to believe me: it’s all going to be fine. These things have a way of working themselves out.”
I nodded, and she left.
I wished I could believe her.
Because when James had kissed me last night, in the shadowed safety of the backyard, I had suddenly recalled the taste of Tallahassee’s mouth—a secret left unsaid and pushed away, one I hadn’t even thought of since the day that I came back and didn’t tell.
This time, it came with the overwhelming urge to vomit.
My plans had faded and crumbled, the way dreams do when you open your eyes and realize in the bright light of day that none of it was real, that none of it was even possible. My old self made me sick, and I was grateful for the cover of darkness over my guilty face. It wasn’t until James spoke, his voice vacant and hollow, that I realized he’d never have noticed. That he was miles away, calling back to me from a deep, dark hole made out of memory.
That, like me, he was thinking about someone else.
“Do you remember Brendan Brooks?” he’d asked, gazing into the distance.
My memory filled with a rush of glass-green water, bloodless hands, and open eyes, the ghost-pale boy body that lived eternally on the sinewy cusp of fifteen. James stared into space, cigarette dangling by his side, his pressed-tight lips not quite covering the sound of his grinding teeth.
“Of course, I do,” I said. “Why?”
I reached out to touch the thin cloth of his T-shirt, trailing the backs of my fingers over the hard muscle of his arm. “Why?” I said again. “What made you think of him?”
James shook his head and looked at me. Through me. His eyes were shadowed holes in his drawn face, and when he spoke, it was to the air that lay on my shoulder.
“Not him,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about his mother.”
And then he had gone. Dry lips brushed my temple; I smelled sweet smoke and old leather as he kissed me and turned away. The car door had slammed before I could speak. The taillights grew faint in the distance, then disappeared.
He didn’t look back.
AMELIA
M
inutes later, breathing hard and with raw, red spots newly sprouted on her knees and elbows, she peered back and smiled. Luke was kneeling behind her. One of his hands still clutched her hip, the other was reaching up to straighten his glasses. He looked dazed.
“Now that,” she said, “was amazing.”
Luke mumbled something into his palm.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Holy shit,’” he replied.
She laughed. He pulled away, grimacing a little, and sat back on his heels.
“I think I need a nap. Or at least a shower.”
Amelia picked herself up from the floor and scouted the room for her underwear, finally pulling them from under the bed. She stepped into them gingerly, then faced the mirror. Most of her hair had found its way into a tangled mass at the back of her head, except for a few renegade bits that were sticking straight into the air.
“You need a shower; I need a hairbrush,” she said. He stood up, teetered off balance for a minute, then leaned in to kiss her. His lips were sticky. She kissed him back, then licked the tip of his nose.
“Yuck,” he said, laughing. “Hang on, I’ll get you one.” He cast a glance toward the floor, looking for his clothes, then shrugged and strode out of the room naked.
She gathered her dress from the floor and pulled it over her head, trying to smooth some of the wrinkles in the cotton, then surveyed her reflection again.
The girl who stared back at her, in spite of her wild appearance, skinned elbows, and the red splotches that bloomed on her chest, looked good, confident. She lifted her chin and appraised herself—wide-set eyes, thin lips, straight nose, blond hair that had shaped itself into a near-bouffant from all that rolling around between the sheets—then turned to take in the room.
It was undeniably Luke’s room. She couldn’t say for sure, not having known him before college, but she suspected that everything was just as he’d left it the day that he packed his things and soldiered off to school. It was the space of an aspiring adult—all muted tones and black wood furniture, the kind that would be featured in a catalog with a name like “The Executive Suite.” The only sign of adolescent life was the poster that hung above his desk: a photograph of a blonde in a bikini, her lips pursed in a come-hither pout, one hand resting suggestively on her inner thigh. She had huge, fake breasts that seemed to float on her rib cage instead of being attached to it in any meaningful way.
Amelia rolled her eyes at the image. It wasn’t the picture that bothered her, exactly, more that Luke’s tastes could be so utterly . . .
Pedestrian,
she thought.
Pamela-freakin-Anderson, cardboard cutout dull.
“You’re thinking that I’m totally unoriginal, aren’t you,” said Luke’s voice behind her.
She turned, guilty but delighted that he’d somehow read her thoughts, and smiled at him. He was in the doorway, with a towel wrapped high around his waist like an old boxer.
“It was a present from my dad,” he said. The promised hairbrush was in his hand, too, and he passed it to her as he looked ruefully up at the sex kitten on the wall.
“Interesting present,” she said.
“I think he did it in lieu of having the ‘birds and the bees’ conversation with me,” he said, shaking his head and laughing at the memory. “He couldn’t bring himself to talk about sex, so my mom took over, and he just got me this poster. Like, ‘Here, son. When you jerk off, this is what you should be thinking about.’”
“Thanks, Dad.” She giggled.
“I should probably take it down.”
“Wouldn’t that hurt your father’s feelings?”
“Well, I could give it back to him. Say, ‘Hey, Dad, thanks for the masturbation material, but now I’ve got the real thing.’” He winked at her.
“Leave me out of it!” she laughed, cuffing him lightly on the ear. He caught her by the wrist and kissed her. She kissed him back. She kept her eyes open, watching him. How lovely it is, she thought, that someone so familiar can still surprise you.
He broke the kiss, moving his lips along her face and then planting a final smack on her neck.
“About that shower,” he said. “Do you want to take one?”
She smiled up at him and shook her head, brandishing the hairbrush.
“All right, I’ll just be ten minutes.” He opened the door that led to the adjacent bathroom and looked back at her. “Do you need to get in here, for anything? I always forget to ask.”
She shook her head again.
“I’ve never had to share a bathroom,” he said, smiling. “Guess I’ll have to get used to that before we move in together.”
He disappeared behind the door.
He didn’t notice that Amelia was standing frozen, the brush still raised in one hand, her mouth slightly open. Sighing, she turned to the mirror and brushed her hair, berating herself for not speaking up. She had been so close, the words were ready to come out—Luke, about that—but she’d shut her mouth on them. It wasn’t the right time to bring it up. Before this, as the semester wound down and the relationship seemed poised to go either direction, she hadn’t been sure that bringing it up would be necessary at all. Now it was clear, however much she dreaded the conversation, it still had to happen.
She looked toward the closed door, toward the sound of the running water and Luke’s atonal humming from the shower. In another hour, they would be on the road again, heading for a house by the ocean and a summer free of worry. Then, she thought, she would tell him. When the time was right.
CHAPTER
12
I
n a small town, there are things you simply grow up knowing. You need them all—the shortcuts, secrets, and scandals that make up the town’s collective unconscious, the whispered bits and pieces passed from older lips to younger ears. How you came to know what you know is not important; someone must have told you once. You might even try to think of when, but the details don’t come easy. And sometimes, beneath the surface of the local hive mind, there is nothing at all.
Our knowledge has no memory. We have always lived here; what we know has always been.
There has always been a blind spot in the A&P, where the rack of glossy magazines with their too-perfect cover models stands beside a sweating refrigerator case filled with beer, where a green glass longneck can slip undetected into the sleeve of your coat; you know this without knowing how. You know that if you walk into the dense woods behind the soccer field, fifty yards uphill through the crunch and musk of long-dead leaves, you’ll find a small but thriving patch of cannabis that no one will admit to planting and nobody will touch. You know that Jennifer Stanton, who sits next to you in trig, calls Tom Stanton “Daddy” but that he is not her father, and that Mrs. Missy Stanton, who used to get so lonely when Tom went on the road, once found a year’s company and comfort in the arms of the man who remodeled her kitchen with its sunny yellow wallpaper and tastefully painted woodwork.
And just as you know these things, you know—we knew—that a red Ford tractor with a long-armed front-end loader was hidden in the waters at the south end of Silver Lake.
The tractor had always been there—even though, if you had asked someone, they would grudgingly acknowledge that “always” wasn’t quite right. Certainly, there had been a time when there was no tractor. In the days before the lake was found and conceived and built upon as a back-to-nature destination; in the days before “Back to Nature” was a sought-after concept by urbanites who fled the asphalt heat of Boston; in the days before mechanical beasts of burden flattened the land by Silver Lake and cut it into lots, the murky green pool with its topside blanket of iridescent algae and its underwater forest of waving weeds had held water, and nothing more. Then, the lake had been a place to swim and fish, especially fish, where you could rest against the cool, gray rocks that peppered the water’s edge, dropping a baited line into the glassy pool.
We called it The Hole—a bad name for a beautiful place. A twisting back road that followed the irregular coast passed over the water here, a small bridge covering the slim gap where the lake squeezed itself between two tall banks, flowed quietly through a water-worn cut bordered by a steep, mossy face of old rock, and emerged into a deep, still, sun-dappled spot bordered on three sides by water-stained granite. Schools of small fish, shimmering sunnies and even some elusive perch, would swim the narrow gauntlet to nibble at the unlucky bugs that skittered on too many legs across the graceful surface. Locals, baited and tackled and armed with small coolers that came full of beer and left full of fish, watched the filament-skinny lines jump and tweak and grow taut, smiled broadly as dinner was hauled in. Small fish, always; even the avid anglers caught nothing larger than a foot, but it didn’t matter. The pleasures of solitary casting and the glassy pool and the flapping, gasping, gorgeous catch—these things were ours.
They were ours, until someone else—a self-made millionaire with an eye for development and money to burn—came, and saw, and signed a check that made Silver Lake his.
Even now, nobody can say exactly how the tractor had found its way to its final resting place, hidden under the water in the center of The Hole. Bud Schaeffer, the beer-bellied and flanneled man who had been sitting on it at the time, scratched his head at the bar that night and said, “The brakes just quit, I guess. Shot right out from under me. Shit, LaVerne, I never even knew the godforsaken piece of tin could go that fast.” Ten men, the lucky locals who were getting time and a half to clear the land, had seen but could not explain the machine’s astonishing arc from the highest bank, where it flew from the edge with its motor still chuffing and a green-brown spray of grass and dirt spiraling from either side, twisted in the air, and gleefully tumbled into the pool. Its spindly plow, with a few stubborn clumps of loose dirt still clinging to its blade, had been the last bit to sink beneath the surface.
The millionaire had been angry, but not too angry—the closeness of the road, the small, steel bridge with its rust-ugly cables, the algae that floated idly on the surface of the water, all meant that the adjacent land would never have fit his vision of the perfect waterfront destination. The best of what he’d bought was still pristine, untouched. And when it was Bud’s own equipment that lay at the bottom of the lake . . . well, what could he say? And so they planted a row of saplings back from the edge, to keep any would-be homeowners from investigating the pool too closely, and moved on to the next lot.
“What about your tractor?” the bartender had asked as Bud’s ruddy cheeks got redder and his tongue chased brew foam from his upper lip.
“What, that junker?” he slurred. “On its last legs anyhow. Gonna get me a nice new Deere.”
“But you gotta get it out of there, right?”
Bud took a last, long swig of his beer, belched loudly, and fixed the bartender with wavery red eyes.
“And just how,” he said, elongating each word with drawling sarcasm, “would you propose I do that?”
And so it stayed there, until years had passed and Bud Schaeffer’s tractor had become just another thing we grew up knowing. Jennifer Stanton’s daddy wasn’t her father, the mystery pot beyond the woodside goalpost was not to be touched, and when the lake was running low, if you peered over the side of the south shore bridge, you might just see the reaching tip of that forsaken plow in the green, dark water.
The rest of it, the quiet inlets and piney shoreline path and broad, shimmering, silver center, all were divvied up and closed off behind gated checkpoints—quaint little sentry stations with pretentious security barriers and even more pretentious uniformed guards, who seemed to have been hired based solely on their ability to sneer. But the south shore bridge, already there and maintained by the town, could not be denied to us. And with no other way to escape the summer heat, groups of kids began gathering above The Hole to get in, to get wet, to get in the water in the only way they could.
With the frightened fish long gone and a steel monster slowly rusting beneath its shimmering surface, The Hole still belonged to us.
* * *
The day that Brendan Brooks died was the hottest in anyone’s memory, so hot that cats lay down in the shade and panted, elderly women fainted under the weight of their support hose, and the newly paved parking lot behind the grocery bubbled and churned and turned into a viscous black pudding. The sun, silvery-bright and hot, so hot, blazed arrogantly down from a blanched and cloudless sky. It baked small bits of gravel into the soft asphalt roads, it melted popsicles off their sticks and over the grubby hands of porch-sitting toddlers, and it pounded relentlessly against the supple skin of the local kids who gathered at the south shore bridge to cool off.
Brendan could see them from his bedroom window, in the faux-rustic cabin that sat on the southernmost lot beside Silver Lake: ten teenaged kids, lithe-limbed boys named Billy and Jack and Jason, with spindly ribs and small, hard muscles that made shadows on their sallow backs. He sat inside, his body bathed in the sweet, chemical cold of the air conditioner, and watched them—watched as shoes were shucked off and T-shirts were peeled from sweaty torsos; watched as each boy clambered onto the rusty, studded guardrail of the bridge. He watched them, joking and goading and good-naturedly cussing at each other, until the bravest of the bunch suddenly gave a whoop and pushed himself, the muscles of his forearms taut as they lifted his weight from the ledge, and plummeted feetfirst into the green, still water below. A moment later, the boy’s head reappeared, hair plastered to his forehead and a wide smile stretching across his face. His shout echoed in the air.
“C’mon, you chickenshits!”
And then, as Brendan watched with widening eyes, the boys dropped one by one—shouting in the brief fall from over water to under, emerging elatedly in the frothing channel below the bridge, shoving each other as they grasped and slipped their way back up the bank to do it again.
Brendan, bored and lonely behind the walls of his family’s summer retreat, thought he had never seen anything so cool.
Later, behind closed doors and over a coffee-stained folding table at the police station, ten terrified kids and one inconsolable woman knit the two ends of the story together: how he’d called out his plan to walk down to the bridge; how his mother, watching the local boys splashing safely down in the cool water, had given her reluctant okay; how he had appeared, tentative but smiling, fifteen and fresh faced and wearing an old T-shirt that said “Blame Canada” on it.
He had waved at the sneering entry guard and trotted toward the group at the bridge, his scuffed sneakers kicking up small clouds of roadside dirt. He had said “Hey,” and then nothing else, had just watched them for a while, his freckled face full of friendly curiosity and even a little amazement as the boys continued splashing down and climbing up.
They had been surprised by his interest, still more surprised when he stayed and watched and, finally, began asking questions.
“Is it deep?”
“Deep enough,” they replied.
“Is it cold?”
“Nah,” they said.
And then, in a move that might have gone so far as to bridge the gap between the locals and the summerers had things not come to such a horrible, heartbreaking end, Brendan Brooks asked if he could jump, too, and the boys at the bridge just shrugged.
* * *
And made room for him.
He did as he’d seen them do, when he was still only watching them from the other side of the guarded entrance—peeling off his T-shirt, kicking off his shoes, taking his place in the perching row on the guardrail. To the drivers that passed on the bridge behind them, even to the boys themselves, he was indistinguishable from the rest of the group, just one more lithe young man with wiry muscles and a farmer’s tan and a couple inches of plaid-patterned boxer waistband sticking above the top hem of his shorts. One of them, or so close to, that it no longer mattered that his life—his home, in a place full of city grit and noise and high-rise luxury—was so far in distance and experience from Bridgeton that the boys he sat beside couldn’t have pictured it if you asked them to. He waited there, the sun baking hard and hot against his bare shoulders, his nose tickled by the hot tarry scent of the road and the vague still-water stench of the lake, until a few more jumpers had disappeared into the water and one of them, treading in the murky green below, called back.
“Hey, new guy! You jumping or what?”
Later, the boys all agreed that Brendan hadn’t hesitated for so much as a second. A broad smile broke through his composed demeanor, he nodded confidently at the heckler, and then he dropped.
And when he came to the surface, shaking water out of his eyes and raising a mock-celebratory fist in the air, he had still been grinning.
Things could have happened so differently, the afternoon wearing away on a path that didn’t lead to tragedy. It almost did; an hour passed while the boys jumped and climbed the banks to jump again, and everyone was getting hungry, and the sun had reluctantly sunk to a more comfortable place behind a row of tall pines that cast their spindly shadows over the bridge in dark, sheer ribbons. It was almost time to go. They were jumping less frequently now, a few of them choosing instead to lean against the guardrail and smoke cigarettes, letting their skin dry comfortably in the late-afternoon heat. Nobody took much notice.
They saw, but did not see, the new kid—padding barefoot to the other side of the bridge, peering over the edge into The Hole.
Brendan’s eyes had widened, the way that eyes do when they fall on something never before seen, a place made by nature, beautiful and fresh and far beyond anything city constructed out of stone and steel. The perfect circle of dark, still water; the overhanging trees rising gracefully around it; the cool, gray boulders worn smooth by time and weather—Brendan saw all of this and gasped at its beauty.
And then, smiling with the joy of his discovery, he had climbed nimbly over the guardrail.
It could have been different—if the tallest boy, the one with the high cheekbones and shock of shaggy hair, the one who, back then, still had a mother to run home to at the end of the day, had looked up from lighting his cigarette only a moment sooner. If Brendan himself had said something—“Watch this,” or “Check it out,” or any of the other things that boys say to each other before they take that jump. If, if, if.
Instead, the eyes of the group fell on him moments too late. They saw him standing on the other side, standing on the side where nobody went to jump, not ever, because everybody knows that on that side of the bridge you do not jump. They felt that something was wrong, and without knowing exactly why, one boy stood quickly and stretched out a hand and, in a voice so strange and quiet that he didn’t even recognize it as his own, said, “Wait.”
He might have paused; he might not. They could only say that if he had, it had been for only a moment—not long enough to stop him, not long enough even to say
Wait, wait
, again. And still smiling, he had leaped into space.