In Cambridge they were equals, close and getting closer in love. They saw each other some nights and every weekend; they saw each other whenever they could. Walker thought they could be together on Thanksgiving weekend in Fort Jude, but Lucy went back to her grandmother’s and he went home to Pierce Point.
‘I’m so sorry. Grandmother.’ Her face told him the rest.
He cried, ‘If I could only talk to her!’
‘Not yet,’ Lucy warned and she was begging. ‘Just not yet.’ It was Wednesday of the long weekend. She touched his cheek. ‘Pick me up at the club. She’s running the Thanksgiving dance – Friday night? She’ll be too busy to notice.’ She saw his face. ‘Please, hiding is only for a little while. She just doesn’t need to know.’
His heart staggered. ‘So nothing has changed.’
‘Not yet.’ She touched his lips, sealing them. ‘Not yet.’
He picked her up outside the club just the way he had on Labor Day weekend. The ballroom windows were ablaze. Another big party that she could leave without being noticed. They drove to the beach; it was what they did. She’d booked a room. They made love for the first time.
Walker thought:
Now. Everything will be different.
Coming in on the causeway, she had him take the Fourth Street exit. Walker said, ‘Why?’
‘Please, just drop me in Pine Vista?’
‘Why, Lucy? Why should I do that?’
Her face went eight ways to Sunday. Her voice was so low that he could barely hear. ‘I told her to pick me up at Bobby Chaplin’s house. She thinks he’s OK because his great-grandfather started the Fort Jude Club. It’s crazy, but I had to tell her something.’
Like a fool, he pressed for reasons. The more she tried to explain, the worse he felt and the more he pressed.
Finally Lucy pushed him away with both hands, crying, ‘I can’t let her find out about you and me!’
The bitch found out anyway. Somebody saw them coming out of the Laughing Gull Motel and phoned the house. Lucy never told Walker what went on between her and the old woman at the end of that long weekend. She came to his room in Cambridge, ashen. ‘I love you. She and I are done.’
It wasn’t only the old woman. The society stood between them. Walker said, ‘And Fort Jude?’
‘Hush. I’m never going back.’
Didn’t he take her into his arms and hold her tighter than ever then, and didn’t he love her even more?
He and Lucy were together in Cambridge all that spring. They made love in Walker’s cubicle in the cold cement block dorm at MIT and because he loved her so much they were careful, so very careful. Just not careful enough. In May, he gave her his mother’s ring.
When he slipped it onto her hand, she flinched. ‘What’s this?’
‘I love you. It’s time.’
‘I can’t,’ she said, but she didn’t take it off.
‘Please!’
‘I can’t,’ she said, and his world crumbled. ‘I just can’t.’
‘Why?’
Emotion reamed Lucy out and left her transparent. Everything showed in her face. Her choice and the consequences, what he was and who she was. Her voice was low; he could barely make out what she was saying but he could not deny that she’d said it. ‘I won’t let her hurt you!’ The next words came from some dark place that Lucy had never let him see. ‘You have no idea what she can do.’
‘She won’t hurt me.’ Walker was desperate. Angry. ‘And she won’t hurt you.’
God help them both, she was crying. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t let her. I’m out of there, I’m done with all that.’
Why did it kill him, knowing how much this cost her?
In Cambridge he and Lucy could be anybody they wanted, but Fort Jude was another story. He hated that she cared what the city thought; it ran in her blood. Without telling her, he drove to Florida to confront the old lady. Lucy was pregnant. They would be married. She would have his baby and Mrs Lorna Archambault, pillar of Fort Jude society, would damn well acknowledge it.
What Walker will never know is why old Lorna left her front door unlocked and ajar that night, or what she was waiting for.
He let himself in and went upstairs to the room where she sat with the television blaring. The door was closed. He could have left; the TV was so loud that she’d never know. Instead he knocked. Like a prom queen the woman inside lilted, ‘Harold, is that you?’
‘No Ma’am,’ he offered in the cultivated tone that pleased people in Cambridge. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but.’
‘Hal?’
‘It’s Walker Pike, Mrs Archambault. It’s about your granddaughter.’
‘At this hour?’
‘I’m sorry. I came about Lucy.’
The voice went cold. ‘Lucy is dead to me.’
You bitch!
‘It’s urgent.’ He opened the door.
The old woman was sitting right where he thought she’d be, commanding that recliner like the evil queen on her brocade throne. Regal bathrobe. Monograms on the purple slippers. Lipstick. Salon blue curls and massed diamonds on her knobby hands. That look. Everything about her telegraphed contempt.
Oh, it’s you.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Lucy and I are getting married.’
‘Oh. No. You’re not.’ She spat questions like poison darts. Walker did his best. Everything he offered made her angrier. Never mind what she said that set him off. It was vile. Never mind what Walker spat back. She used every word she had to revile him, pushing, pushing, ‘She’s an Archambault.’
‘Fuck that,’ he said finally, ‘she’s having my baby.’ It was all he had.
‘In hell.’ She coughed it up like blobs of phlegm. ‘I’ll get it reamed out of her.’
‘No.’ He was controlled. Drawn tight and vibrating with rage. ‘You’ll never see her again.’
Fuming, she rapped the wooden claws of her brocade chair with such force that her diamonds left scars. ‘I’ll file charges. I’ll see you in jail.’
The sound that came out of Walker then left him white and shaken. The terrifying words. ‘I’ll see you in hell.’
He said it more out of grief than anger although inside he was blazing with it. Rocking with hatred, murderous and stricken, Walker fled the place before he lost control and hurt her.
So in fact Walker may have done it; decades spent pondering and he still doesn’t know.
How could an unwitting kid like him suddenly set a woman on fire? With no matches, no flaming torch, only his consuming rage in the room between them, with nothing to strike sparks on but the hatred that consumed her, had he actually done this? She was smoldering before he cleared the city limits, although it would be hours before Walker knew it.
Nobody saw him come or go.
There was nothing going on in the darkened house behind him that Walker could see in his rear-view mirror. Still he left Fort Jude pursued by a sick, bad feeling. The encounter left him feeling soiled, corrupted by emotions like sparks that ignited somehow, filling the room behind him. Furious, he tried to outrun his rage. Anger kept pace, but whether it was his or hers, he is still not certain. He hit the accelerator hard, hurtling away from the house, but the anger followed, with guilt sniffing at its heels. In the dark street behind Walker Pike, something happened. He didn’t see it, but at the exact moment his gut twisted.
Knowledge went through him like a tremor along a fault line.
He drove straight through to Boston.
By the time he got there it was all over the news.
The
Globe
carried photos courtesy of the
Fort Jude Star
.
Walker locked himself in his room at MIT, reflecting.
So that’s what I am.
Lucy telephoned; she called and called but he was too deep in self-disgust to pick up the phone. Recognition came in stages. It marked him to the bone. Lucy knocked on his door, crying out, but he sat there like a figure cast in bronze, the image of what he had become.
The son of destruction.
She went away. For a long time he kept to his room, riven and terrified.
Before that night Walker Pike lived safely on the fringes but he was in it now, body and soul; he had no name for the power that rocked him.
He couldn’t begin to know what it meant, he only knew that he was dangerous. What he was, or what he was becoming put him outside society. He loved her so much! He couldn’t see her again. Not if he loved her and wanted to keep her safe. It moved and terrified him to care so much about a woman, and to be afraid to be around her for fear it would happen again.
Whatever I did.
His body shook to the foundations as certainty took hold. He was afraid for Lucy’s safety and the safety of the child he knew he would never see, and that was the end of them as a couple. Walker. Lucy Carteret.
He had to let her go.
Walker let her go because he saw what he was, and it was terrible. The knowledge and the potential.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen just once.
What kind of monster sets an old woman on fire without touching a match to her? What awful power does he have, that made him destroy another human being without getting close enough to light a fire?
He had too much to tell Lucy, too much he couldn’t tell her. To keep her safe, he telephoned. It almost killed them both. ‘I just want you to know, I love you.’
‘Did you do it?’ Her voice shook.
I love you and I always will.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you murder her?’
‘I love you, and I have to go away.’
‘Did you?’
He wanted to say he loved her at least once more; he knew it would be the last time, but the words seized up in his throat and he choked, ‘Forgive me, I have to go!’
He left for a year to take the job his department chair had lined up for him with Sony in Tokyo. He sent money to her at Radcliffe. It was the only address he had. Somebody rubber-stamped the envelope: NO FORWARDING ADDRESS and sent it back. Back in Cambridge, he went to see the Radcliffe registrar. With Walker sitting across from her, visibly distressed, she broke precedent and told him Lucy dropped out of college. Nobody knew where she went, the dean told him with a judgmental scowl. She was having a baby. He left Lucy to save her life. Its life.
That should have been the end of loving her, but it wasn’t. Some things don’t end.
He loved their baby too. He loved them both but given what he was, he walked away from them. He had to. For years Walker slouched along alone, miserable and shaggy. He went inside his work to hide.
On bad days he thinks of himself as the sea captain in the story Pop loved to tell back when he and Wade were small. The captain’s wife promised to keep a candle in the window until his whaler came back into port. Instead his ship went down with all hands on board, and he was reported lost at sea. The widow mourned, but finally she gave up hope and remarried. Pirates plucked the captain off a desert island – not dead! Joyful, he headed home, looking for the candle in the window. The house was bright but his candle was gone. When the long-lost husband looked inside he saw his wife, his children at the hearth with another man sitting in his chair, a nice, happy family gathered around the fire with their heads bent in the golden light. His heart blazed and then died.
For her sake, he turned and walked away.
For her sake he lived on other people’s happiness, glimpsed through lighted windows at night.
Walker became that person. He never went where Lucy was, but he kept track. He located her in New London; he knew their baby was a boy; he knew when she married Mixon; he’s never followed because he can’t let her be with him or come anywhere near, but he kept track. Dear God, has he kept track.
It was hard. He loved her. He missed them to extinction, but he managed. He managed until that freakish night when the kid turned five and he weakened and sent the clipping, as though one day he would find it and know. Walker left Lucy Carteret to keep her safe – to keep
them
safe – but he sent the clippings, trying to explain. He sent them because from the brain he was given to the whorls in his fingertips, this boy was his, and he should know.
But, God. What is he? What kind of monster abandons his only son?
Wham!
Walker jumps. This is what you get for drifting.
Someone’s banging on the roof of his car.
‘What,’ Walker shouts. ‘What?’
It’s the kid.
It’s Dan Carteret, with his angry mouth squared like the door to an open furnace and his eyes peeled stone naked, wider than Pop’s, glaring in at him. He rocks the car, shouting at Walker through the glass: ‘WHY ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME?’
Shit, Walker thinks, I guess this is what I saw coming. Sighing, he rolls down the window. ‘No real reason, son,’ he says evenly, although he has damn good reasons.
‘Don’t call me son!’
‘I’m sorry.’ Anything to talk him down. ‘Quiet. He’s sleeping in there.’
‘I know. I know!’
‘You don’t want to wake him up.’
‘The fuck I don’t!’
‘Shut up, will you? Shut up!’
Dan grabs the door handle, shaking it violently. ‘Get out of the fucking car!’ He kicks the door with each word.
With Walker unshelled, his son starts pounding on him instead of the car, livid, and yelling so loud that the commotion sets off Kalen’s automatic burglar lights. Suddenly the driveway is brighter than day. ‘What the fuck,’ he shouts, blinded by the glare. ‘What the fucking fuck?’
Walker takes advantage of the distraction and grabs the kid, holding him at arm’s length to make him stop hurting himself. Not only are his eyes peeled wider than Pop’s, they are the exact same cobalt as Pop’s eyes and Walker’s eyes, and the set of the brows, the whorl of hair at the top of his head, everything – even the line of that jaw – signifies that this crazed, out-there guy directly related to Walker can do more damage than he knows.
Straight-armed by Walker Pike, he digs his fingers into Walker’s forearm. ‘Let go.’ Wild, he is shouting loud enough to wake the dead-drunk.
‘Shhh, honey.’
‘I said, let go!’
‘Shut up,’ Walker says in a level tone, ‘shut up, if you don’t want the cops.’ He has been following this boy it seems like forever, frightened and proud and dubious and hungering for a glimpse, a moment in which he knows and the kid knows. For the first time since this thing started they are close enough for Walker to see him plain. Certain now, stricken and joyful, Walker lets go.
He looks like me.