Elsie’s exit sucked all the normalcy out of the room, at least for me. I couldn’t think of one thing to say. As my photographs chugged out of the printer, Cooper shuffled through them.
“Very nice,” he said. “I can see why Elsie picked you.”
“What do you mean, ‘picked me’?”
He grinned. “You’re her protégé. Don’t you know that, Jacqueline?”
Jacqueline. The name bounced around in my brain like a hard-hit tennis ball. “I don’t think—”
“Absolutely you are! Believe me, I know a protégé when I see one. I used to be Rudy’s, you know.” He jumped up on the desk, the spot Elsie had recently vacated, but somehow he seemed closer than she had.
“You aren’t anymore?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It’s not the same now. Rudy prefers to mentor the inexperienced and unpublished. Once you step into his limelight it puts him off a little. Also—” Cooper leaned over as if he were about to tell me a secret, even though there was no one else in the office. “I did a bad thing,” he said, grimacing.
I scooted my chair back a few inches. He was so attractive up close, I could barely look at him. Even if I avoided his eyes, there was no body part that didn’t make me nervous—his hands, his hair, the taut, tan skin of his arms. “What did you do?”
“Yesterday I was interviewed on NPR about my book.”
“Really? That’s amazing!”
“Yeah, well, maybe not. I said how grateful I was to my college English professors and my graduate school friends, blah, blah, blah, and somehow I forgot to say anything about Rudolph or the Center.”
“Oh. Is that bad?”
“‘Inexcusable’ will probably be Rudy’s word. I was so nervous and excited, it didn’t even occur to me until later. It airs next week, and I’m steeling myself for Rudy’s anger. I mean, of course I should have said something, but really, doesn’t the guy get enough adulation? There’s always somebody blathering about him in the New Yorker or the New York Times. It’s not like his stature is in any danger of being eroded because I forgot to mention his name. Still, I’ll have to grovel and apologize. That’s how it works—the more famous you are, the more you need to have your ego massaged.”
I gave a vague nod, not sure how much I agreed. Sure, Rudolph had a sense of himself—who wouldn’t in his position? But he never seemed self-centered or snobby around people who had fewer achievements than he did. Not like, for example, Carolyn Winter. But then again, I imagined that two novelists might be competitive with each other in ways I didn’t notice.
Cooper touched my arm lightly and I practically leaped out of my skin. “Speaking of the famous Rosenbergs, what’s the deal with you and Finn?”
“The deal?”
“Yeah, are you a couple now or what?”
“Me and Finn? Why would you think that?”
“The way he came looking for you when we left the gallery together the other night. I know he had some excuse, but it seemed to me like he was coming to claim his property.”
I wondered if Cooper could tell how thrilled I was that he’d finally mentioned Friday night, even though he had a completely incorrect take on it. “No, it wasn’t an excuse. Believe me, Finn and I are just friends, and barely even that some days.”
Cooper’s glittering eyes sought out mine and locked them down. I felt like he could see right into my brain. “Jacqueline, don’t let Finn fool you. Maybe he doesn’t admit it, but he definitely thinks you’re his. He might not be ready to stake his claim, but he doesn’t want anybody else to do it either.”
I was so stunned by Cooper’s totally wrong idea, I didn’t know how to respond. He hopped off the desk and put a hand on my shoulder where it burned through the cloth of my shirt. I was tattooed by his fingers. He stuck out his other hand.
“We’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Of course,” I said. I took his warm hand into mine and felt my fingers melt.
“Good.” He leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. The kiss accidentally grazed the corner of my mouth and I instinctively turned toward it. The slight brush of his lips against mine left me feeling bee-stung. Swollen.
He pulled away and grabbed a T-shirt off the stack. As he turned to go back to his own office, he pointed to me. “Jacqueline, I will see you later. That’s a promise.”
14.
Five eight-by-ten photographs of clouds were spread out end to end on the floor of my bedroom. I’d already rearranged their order half a dozen times and still wasn’t sure I had it right. The colors were muted—greenish water below gray-blue sky with just a tinge of sundown scarlet showing through the mackerel clouds.
Scraps of other photographs lay around me too. I’d been carefully cutting out images I thought I might use: birds, fish, lanterns, nautical flags, neon signs, store window displays, lobsters, rowboats. I strung the flags across the sky and then looked through some of the words I’d snipped from newspaper headlines—winners, coast, lost, bridge, blaze, mystery, guilty, break, crisis. I put crisis in the middle of the red streak of light and stood back to look at it.
“Jackie!” Dad yelled up the stairs. “Somebody here to see you.”
I went to the top of the stairs. “Who?” Charlotte usually called first.
Lucas stood there next to my father. “Hey,” he said.
I’d been wondering what his next move would be, whether he’d want to talk more, or if, now that he’d delivered his message, he’d just disappear again, strap on his new boots and hike out of town. At least he wasn’t running away this time.
“Come on up,” I said.
As Lucas climbed, Dad bellowed from below, “You keep that door open, you hear me?”
I almost laughed. As if. Dad wasn’t home much in the daytime, and he didn’t spend a lot of time keeping up with his children’s social lives. For all I knew, he thought I was still dating Lucas. Man, did that even happen in this lifetime?
Lucas ducked his head as he entered the room, as if he thought he’d gotten too tall for the space. “Your dad hasn’t changed much,” he said.
I kept my hands on my hips. “I guess you think you have?”
He sighed. “I know you’re trying to be snotty, but I have actually changed. I’m not the same person I was when I left. You don’t even know me anymore.”
I backed up and sat on my bed, thinking he was right about that. Lorna’s death had made us all different people.
“I think I met the new guy last night,” I said. “He was charming.”
Lucas stepped over the photographs on the floor and, though he hadn’t been invited to, he perched on the creaky rocking chair in the corner. “Not gonna give me a break, huh?”
“I don’t know what to say to you, Lucas. You disappeared for three months and then came back to tell us you slept with Lorna, she might have been pregnant, and you think she killed herself. Are you a big jerk or a big liar or a big idiot? Or all three?”
“Idiot I’ll cop to, and maybe jerk too, but I’m no liar. Jackie, we’ve been friends for seven years. Can’t you give me the benefit of the doubt? You always believed everything Lorna told you, even the crazy stuff.”
“Lorna never lied to me.”
“I’ve never lied to you,” Lucas said. “And that’s not even true about Lorna. She lied to us all the time.”
“No she didn’t!”
“She pretended afterward that she was joking, but she liked to see what she could get away with. Like that story about her father and the bear.”
Well, okay, he wasn’t wrong. Lorna had enjoyed fooling people. She liked to make up long, involved stories that were, technically, not true. Like the time she told us a tree had fallen on her father and severed his leg, which had then been picked up and carried off into the woods by a bear. She could be so convincing, you wanted to believe her. Then, when she knew she had you, she’d burst out laughing and admit she’d made it up.
“Those were more jokes than lies,” I said.
; “I’m not sure she knew the difference.” He leaned back in the rocker and I noticed that his eyes were bloodshot, as if he hadn’t been sleeping much. Well, who had?
I grabbed a pillow and hugged it to my chest. “Lucas, I’m not trying to be mean—”
“Sure you are. You and Finn have chosen sides and, as usual, Lorna wins.”
“Lorna wins? What are you talking about? She’s dead!”
“And therefore can’t be disputed.”
I sighed. “Okay, convince me. Why would Lorna sleep with you? Why?”
The corners of his mouth drooped, but he didn’t look away from me. “I don’t know, Jackie. To make Finn jealous? To make me deliriously happy? Just for the hell of it? I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. But I’m telling you, she wanted to. It was her idea.”
“Walk me through it. Not the raunchy part, just the lead-up. How did it happen?”
His eyes glazed over. “She came by my house one night at the end of April break. Finn was on vacation. I don’t know where you were. She said she was lonely and would I come over and take a walk with her. I figured there was nobody else around and maybe she was having some trouble with her mom or something and needed to get out of the house.”
That much of the story sounded plausible.
“Once we started walking, she seemed a little bit manic, but, you know, that wasn’t so unusual. All of a sudden she grabbed my hand. I acted like I didn’t think it was weird, but I was totally shocked. The cottages were still closed up, but she pulled me down the path and—”
“Dugan’s Cottages?”
“Yeah.”
I let the pillow drop to the floor. “Wait. You’re telling me you had sex with Lorna in Cabin 5? On that dirty mattress we used to use as a trampoline?”
“Why are you making it sound disgusting? You know how crazy I always was about Lorna, and she totally wanted it. I know you think I’m lying about that, but I’m not. Christ, Jackie, I was a virgin, you know that. She seduced me.”
“Oh, you poor thing!”
But, in fact, Lucas’s use of the word “seduced” had begun to convince me he was telling the truth. Suddenly I could almost see what had happened. Lorna at her most flirtatious, charming Lucas, then pulling away, laughing, taunting, tempting him. I’d seen her do it to Finn lots of times—he’d be practically panting before she gave in and went off alone with him. I used to watch her and wonder when she first realized she had that power. Lucas would have been confused by having that energy turned on him, and Lorna would have been completely in charge of the situation. I remembered how hard it used to be for me to resist Lorna when she really wanted something. And, of course, Lucas didn’t want to resist. This was his miracle.
Lucas’s shoulders sagged and he turned away from me, letting his eyes settle on the bookcase next to him. The shelves were crammed with paperback novels, everything from Judy Blume to Sebastian Junger, but on top there was a simple memorial: a picture of Lorna and a pair of worn-out blue sneakers.
“Her shoes.” Lucas picked them up and wrapped the worn laces around his fingers. His voice thickened. “You kept them.”
“Of course I kept them.” Seeing the effect that Lorna’s wrecked shoes were having on Lucas choked me up too. I cleared my throat. “I couldn’t just throw them in the trash.”
He settled the sneakers carefully in his lap as if they were baby animals, then picked up the photograph and studied it. “Did you take this?”
I nodded. It was the only picture I had of Lorna by herself, without Finn by her side or all four of us crowded in together. She’d never liked having her picture taken, which frustrated me because I longed to take a photograph that would capture what I loved about her—her fearlessness, her spirit, her grace. In this photo she stared, unsmiling, at the camera, her hair flying in the wind, her front foot off the ground. She seemed to be annoyed that her forward motion was being slowed by the camera, by me.
Watching Lucas with the picture and the shoes, it occurred to me that while Finn and I were leaning, sometimes awkwardly, on each other, Lucas had had to do his mourning alone, holding on to terrible secrets. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?
Mesmerized by the photo, Lucas hardly seemed to realize there were tears running down his cheeks. “There’s something we don’t know about that night, Jackie. It drives me crazy. How can we not know? I have to know!”
“Me too.” And just that quickly, I remembered why I’d always liked Lucas—he couldn’t hide his feelings any better than I could. The two of us had always been a pair of exposed nerves, ever alert for joy, but taking every misunderstanding and angry word to heart. Our emotions flashed across our faces and dribbled from our eyes. Before I thought about it too much, I stood up and wordlessly held out my arms.
Lucas was across the room in seconds. “I’m sorry I left,” he said. His voice was muffled against my shoulder, but I could still hear the sob in it.
“I wish you hadn’t.”
“I know, but, Jackie, everything was ruined, and I thought it was my fault.” He still held the blue shoes in one hand and I could feel them knocking into my back.
“It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just the most horrible thing that ever happened to us.”
We held on to each other and cried, and it was all just as fresh as those first days when Finn and I couldn’t stop our tears. The days when Lucas must have cried alone.
We slowly pulled apart, and Lucas ducked his head. “Thanks for forgiving me.”
I grabbed a bunch of tissues from the box by my bed and handed some to him too. “Turns out it wasn’t that hard.”
“You’re not mad at me anymore?”
“Apparently not. Even though you’re stepping all over my photographs.”
Lucas looked down at his feet, horrified, then jumped back. The soles of his fat boots had left a studded outline on several of the pictures. “Oh, Jesus. I forgot they were there!”
“Your feet?” I got down on my knees to examine the damage, but already I liked what I saw. The boot trail went across the water and up into the cloudy sky.
“No! I mean . . .”
“Don’t worry. You did me a favor. The giant footprints give the whole thing a new perspective. Yeah, I can definitely work with this. In fact, here, step on this one too.”
He did and we laughed, but then got quiet again. He sat down on the floor next to me.
“Do you really think Lorna might have killed herself?” I asked him.
Lucas stared at the blue shoes. “I think Lorna might have done anything. But I don’t think she ever expected to die.”
15.
On September 10 I woke up before dawn, just as I had on the tenth of every month since May, no alarm clock needed. In the bathroom mirror my eyes looked red and puffy, as if I’d spent the night before doing something more exciting than re-reading every line of Macbeth three times. I hung my camera around my neck and went downstairs.
Mom was already up and washing out the oatmeal pot. My dad was probably long gone. A fisherman’s day can last twenty-four hours, so he liked to leave the dock early.
“Aren’t you late for work?” I asked Mom.
“Day off,” she said. “How come you’re up so early?”
“Going out for a little while. I’ll be back in time to get ready for school.”
She looked me right in the eyes, then walked away. “It’s starting to rain. Wear something waterproof.”
I’d already layered a sweater over a long-sleeved T-shirt, but I went to the closet for my slicker.
From the pantry Mom said, “Four months today, isn’t it?”
More than most people, Teresa Silva understood the importance of anniversaries. Every November 27, the date of my uncle’s shipwreck, she allowed herself to spend the day in bed, an indulgence she didn’t give in to the other 364 days.
“Yeah.”
“Going down there, aren’t you?” She frowned as she took the top off an old Thermos bottle and snif
fed it.
I nodded.
“Take some coffee along. You’ll get cold. The wind is sharp.”
I watched her fill the Thermos three-quarters full with coffee and then dump in a generous amount of milk before screwing the top back on. When she handed me the bottle her eyes were foggy behind her glasses.
“Thanks, Mom.”
“People used to say you could hear the voices of drowned folks right before a rainstorm, but I never did. It’s just a superstition,” she said, as if she wasn’t a firm believer in dozens of old wives’ tales.
“I’m not expecting to hear her,” I said. I was, however, hoping to feel Lorna. To somehow be with her again.
“Don’t want you to be disappointed.” Mom went back into the pantry, but came right out again as if she’d forgotten why she went in. “Are you walking out on it? The breakwater?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“Be careful. Tide’s going out.”
Which is all she had to say in order for one of her groundless superstitions to wedge itself into my brain. An ebbing tide lures the careless to a watery grave.
• • •
Clouds were thick on the horizon as I approached the breakwater. It looked as if we might get a good soaking before long. The sharp wind didn’t carry Lorna’s voice, but it did make my ears sting, and I was glad to find an old watch cap in the pocket of my slicker. When a thin ray of sun sliced through the gray morning and fell on the rock trail in front of me, I took a picture.
But looking through the viewfinder I noticed something I hadn’t seen with my eyes. There seemed to be someone sitting out on the rocks, maybe a quarter of a mile away. Who’d be out there this early? I framed the figure against the weak, rising sun, and then I knew. Of course.
I had to steel myself to get past those first few boulders, keeping to the center, not looking over the edge to where the surf crashed against the rocks. You used to cross the breakwater all the time, I reminded myself, but still fear choked me and made me stop in my tracks a dozen times. I put down the Thermos and my camera, so I wouldn’t drop them if I stumbled, and forced myself to take one step after the other.
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