We walked into the kitchen again, and I pulled the glass door shut. All outside noises were sucked from the room. The hum of the refrigerator, now, the click of the clock. The slight buzz of the overhead lighting.
Gabe held his hands up like a camper trying to calm a bear.
“If that’s what you think, fine. But I think that, with time, you’ll come to see a picture that’s more complicated.”
“Did you bug the phone, or was it Keller?”
“We did it together.”
“To listen to my conversations with Thom.”
“Partly, yes. We had no way to know what was going on otherwise. We didn’t have anything set up at his place. And then there was the business with Anne.”
“So Anne March is on trial.”
“Of course she’s on trial.”
“She killed her parents, and her sister, too.”
“You know that, Sylvie.”
He was looking at me quizzically, the space between his brows furrowed. I felt reality as a whole slipping away from me like an enormous tide. I had to reconstruct it by hand, to verify the simplest details.
“It isn’t fair.” I felt frail and cold. “You saw sides of me I didn’t see myself.”
“But isn’t that incredible?” His eyes were slick. “We know each other, Sylvie, in ways other couples can only dream of.”
“People shouldn’t know each other this well. You watched me behave like an animal.”
“No,” said Gabe more forcefully, shaking his head. “That’s not true. I saw you behave honestly. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You know me, but I don’t know you.”
“I know it seems that way. But you will, I promise you. Now that you know about all this—and believe me, my God, I’ve wanted you to know so badly—we don’t have to have any more secrets. We can be totally open.”
“And what about Thom?”
“I don’t care about Thom. It was all my fault.”
“But what does he know?”
“I have no idea. I haven’t spoken to him.”
“No? You haven’t filled him in?”
“I told you,” Gabe said. “We had no way to know what happened when you got there. We couldn’t figure out much with the phone bug; whenever you picked up, you seemed to want nothing to do with him. All I could do was take down the time when you got out of bed. Then watch as you walked through the fence.”
“You were pretending to sleep.”
He nodded.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t understand which side you were on.”
“There aren’t sides,” said Gabe. “We’re all on the same side.”
He caught hold of my forearm and tried to draw me to him. But I pulled away, twisting until his arm wrenched behind his back. He let go of me with a gritted noise of anguish. Panting, he dropped forward, his hands meeting his knees.
“Jesus, Sylvie,” he said. “I just wanted to—”
But I barely heard him. I was running for the door, and then I was outside, lurching down the porch steps to the sidewalk. Across the street, a young couple walked two golden retrievers, wheat-gold and wily; the woman spoke sharply as they strained at their collars. Nausea came over me, sudden and boiling. I turned away and retched over a storm drain, vomit tumbling colorfully through the slats. One of the dogs barked, and the woman clicked her tongue, glancing at me with alarm as she ushered them forward. When they turned onto Atwood, the block was empty. I stumbled ahead.
The wire fence that separated the train tracks from our house was overrun with ivy and backed by spindly trees. I stepped around it and began to walk down the length of the tracks, my feet inches from those gleaming steel bars. The air was cool and soft. I walked until I couldn’t see our house anymore; then I hooked my fingers in the open diamonds of the fence, leaned back, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again—how much later, I wasn’t sure—I heard a whinnying noise, grievous and faraway as a ghostly animal. The sound increased in urgency, accompanied by a bellowed horn and the ghastly screech of wheels on steel.
Though I had heard plenty of trains in Madison, I rarely saw one; at home, the dark lacework of the trees blotted the tracks from view. Electricity whipped through the air. As the train came closer, my whole body shook, and I wound my hands deeper into the fence. I pictured the flash of a searchlight, a thunderous rush of air, my body whisked like a leaf. It would be so easy, so quick. The tracks were squealing, now, the ground rumbling with energy. Fear roared inside me, and I tried to yank my hands free. But my knuckles had swollen, and the sharp pull did nothing. The first car loomed into view, round nosed and gleaming, and I screamed.
In one brutal movement, I ripped my hands from the fence and leapt to the other side of the tracks. The first car barreled past me, and the force of its trajectory knocked me to my knees. I crouched in the pebbled dirt—candy wrappers and soda cans, beer bottles rolling in the wind—as the other cars came into view.
I had pictured the majestic ferocity of old freight trains, the coal-black engine and husk of white steam. But this train was ramshackle and tired, with a child’s crude design: blunt wheels, wagons in sallow shades of orange and yellow and brown. The sides were sprayed with graffiti. The train itself seemed to howl in protest, condemned to carry these stories, for how to clean a train—a pressure washer, a sandblaster?—and what would be the point, if the next night someone new came, spray paint in hand, to find the train’s canvas cleaned and ready?
I coughed dust as the last car passed. This was no brick-red caboose: those had been phased out in the 1980s and ’90s to cut costs, Gabe once told me—one of the random bits of knowledge I was no longer surprised he had. The manned caboose and its crew were deemed unnecessary, he said, the rails safe enough. The caboose conductor was replaced by an end-of-train device: a small electronic unit with a flashing red taillight.
But someone stood on the back of this car, his feet on the small aluminum platform, hands gripping the railing. He wore layers of dark clothes and studded boots, a knit cap pulled low; a heavy beard hung down to his shoulders. A train hopper. I had heard they rode in open boxcars or in the wells behind cargo containers. With night falling, the man blended into the charcoal-colored car and the dusky sky. Perhaps this had emboldened him, or maybe he just wanted air. Every few seconds, the flashing red light illuminated his swan-shaped cheekbones and the tube clutched in one hand—a map? A newspaper? I couldn’t tell.
As the engine pulled away, our eyes met, and sparks ran down my spine. He raised a hand in salute, and I did the same. Then the train sank into the darkness, swallowed like a stone in water, and just as unexpectedly as he had appeared, the man was gone.
18
MARTHA’S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS, 2010
The Vineyard feels much more benign than it used to. It’s sunnier than it was in the summer of 2002, the product of a world hell-bent on heat. This year, seventy-degree days have been replaced by scorching stretches of drought, and the fertile plains of the Midwest are unable to bear food. The fog is a relief. Was it ever as foreboding, as secretive, as I once made it out to be? I’m eight years older now than I was that summer—in August, I’ll turn thirty—and my anxiety about the fog, its powers of concealment, has slipped away from me. It’s better that way, though I suppose the world has lost some of its glitter. It’s as though I’ve peeled away some holographic veneer, and the world is stark, actual. Night fits obediently into its little box. And I, perhaps, fit obediently into mine.
It’s been years since I dreamed the way I did in Madison. I don’t walk in my sleep anymore—two nightly medications and four years of careful calibration have seen to that. It’s strange; actually, the medications make my dreams easier to remember. I set up a video camera at the foot of the bed—an extreme measure, I know, which made me feel both protected and marginally insane—and eac
h morning, I reeled through the previous night’s videotape. Aside from the occasional twitch, I was slack as a sack of flour. This calmed me, and soon I came to enjoy my dreams. Other people dropped into a state as blank and idle as a sleeping computer. But every night, I got to go to the movies—my one concession to the way I used to be.
Or maybe that’s just what I tell myself. There’s a crack in that floor, and I stay as far away from it as possible. The truth is that there will always be a fault line in me, and fault lines are never a single, clean fracture; when the surface of your world is displaced, the plates shuffled and broken like china, you can never step as carelessly as you used to. The medications keep me asleep, and trying to find some pleasure in my dreams keeps me from hating them—or the place in me they come from. How can I explain how it feels to be constantly on guard, afraid not of what someone else could do to you but of what you might do to yourself? It’s like owning a rottweiler: no matter how sweet she is at home, she’ll speak for herself once she’s off-leash in the dog park, and there’s not a thing you can do to control the way she tears through the grass, the way she howls like sin; you can only smile with embarrassed apology at the other owners and mutter thinly, “She thinks she’s a wolf.”
Once I got to the Vineyard, I couldn’t resist the urge to drive past the Snake Hollow compound, even though—or perhaps because—I knew it would look nothing like it used to. In the fall of 2008, a developer bought the compound, gutted the insides of the buildings, and began work on a two-year project that turned each one into a cluster of vacation condominiums. He kept the name—Snake Hollow, sure to attract couples in search of a storied, moody island escape—but to me it felt terribly wrong. I pulled smoothly into the driveway, which had been dug out and paved, and there they were: the three original structures, shingles painted the impeccable white of veneers.
Each building was roughly the same shape and size, but there were new appendages here and there: another porch, an extra wing. Each condominium had its own entrance, so that walkways jutted out of the building in various directions, crawling with guests. A family of five emerged from what was once the bunk room, clutching noodles and boogie boards and a giant yellow float in the shape of a slug; a child stood inside one of the windows of the old library, testing the air with her foot before being sucked into the room by an invisible parent. In front of the driveway, on a newly planted stretch of bright green grass, a young couple sat knock-kneed in sunglasses, sharing a peach. They looked at me with casual interest as I reversed out of the driveway.
On the side of the road, stalks of dune grass waved in salute or farewell. Twenty yards away was the beach, where a group of teenage boys stood with fishing poles. I slowed to watch them: their slender, eager bodies, the round whip of the lines. Every so often, a lone holler signaled a tug from the water. I still remember the night Keller returned to the compound from one of his afternoon walks with the gasping, sparkling body of a striped bass. Its jaw gaped, lips wide enough to hold a grapefruit. It wasn’t even bloody. Silver-green, round-bellied and pulsing, the fish was so robustly itself that it was hard to believe it would soon be split, skin slipped off like a dress, and reincarnated on Keller’s floral china plates, the meat buttered and fried to a crisp.
The sunset that night was startlingly neon—searing orange and highlighter pink as Keller paused in front of the French doors and the fish stilled. I wondered why it didn’t resist him. I’d heard about the power of striped bass. They weighed as much as sixty pounds; mature, they had few enemies. But the one in Keller’s hands was docile, resigned. Its eyes—even larger than a human’s, the black irises pits in pools of yellow—stared out at the room with what seemed like attention, as if Keller were offering not death but a privilege. Here, he seemed to say, was life on land.
19
MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2005
My mind wanted to forgive Gabe. But my body couldn’t. I kept expecting to return to bed with him, but as the days passed, the charge around that room only gathered strength. I went upstairs to grab clothes or a book when he was out, and when I returned downstairs, I felt contaminated. Only one thing made me feel better: that Gabe didn’t know—or wasn’t sure about—what had happened at Thom’s. At the time, it was my only, meager stitch of power. That knowledge, knowledge of how far I had gone, was what Keller and Gabe most desperately wanted. It was what they had spent years fishing for, what they were betting their careers on. And in the terrible weeks that followed, weeks I spent in a hazy state of limbo, I guarded it with everything I had left.
I slept on the couch and adopted Meredith Keller’s method of RBD intervention, waking myself with a cell phone alarm before I could sink into REM sleep. It had never been so difficult to deny myself that most basic instinct. I was pulled toward sleep’s depth and what awaited me there. Was Thom expecting me? Twice, the phone rang—once while Gabe was at the lab, and another time when he was home, though it stopped after the first ring—but I never picked up.
My memories of those final weeks are few, but static images, like postcards, surface now and then. Lying on the couch before dawn, half-asleep and wrapped in my coat. Standing before the bathroom mirror in the darkness of very early morning, turning the fluorescent lights on and off so that the bright shock kept me awake. Sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal and Gabe in the chair across, his eyes bleary but focused on me.
“Say something, Sylvie. Anything.”
I didn’t answer. Mostly, he knew enough to let me alone. I made the living room into a haven, for I was afraid to venture very far outside; the thought of seeing Thom was even worse than seeing Gabe. But it was not long before the outside came to me.
It was the beginning of April, one week after I found my file at the lab, and I had spent it indoors. I’d sent Keller a brief e-mail saying that I had come down with the flu to buy time while I thought through what to do—whether and how to confront him, whether and how to leave. But my brain was foggy, and I was spending less and less time conscious. While Gabe was at the lab, I dozed in my coat on the living room couch. My sleep was never deep enough to be satisfying, which made it easy to fall in and out of it. So when I heard a sharp rapping at the door, I rose.
I expected to see Keller, but it was Janna. She stood barefoot on the porch in a pink silk pajama top and what looked like Thom’s jeans. They sank into folds around her knees and ankles. She had dyed her hair an unnatural, all-over red. And she was staring at me expectantly, as if it was I who was on her porch and not the other way around.
“May I come in?” she asked finally.
I nodded. She stepped lightly through the door. I became conscious of the living room and its air of agoraphobia: the windows covered with black sheets, coats crumpled on the couch and floor. In the air was the damp, close smell of bodies. She looked at the video camera I’d set up at the foot of the couch and averted her eyes.
“Can I get you something to drink?” I asked.
“Anything with alcohol.”
Her tone was almost flirtatious. But beneath it was a stale tone of affect, of attempt.
“All right,” I said. I walked to the refrigerator and opened it: eggs, a scattering of leftovers, old cold cuts for lab lunches. Nestled in the back was a half-full bottle of old white wine. I sniffed it and poured a glass.
“Actually,” said Janna, “don’t bother.”
She had seated herself at the kitchen table. Her silk top, oversized, pooled on the chair.
Not knowing what else to do with it, I kept the glass for myself. I sat down across from her. She was silent. Months earlier, I would have tried to make conversation, but now I was exhausted. I stared at my wineglass, fingered the thin flute. Slowly, my nervous system was waking up, pawing its way through the grogginess of afternoon. It was minutes before I noticed Janna staring at me.
“You don’t look well,” she said.
It would have been less painful if
I had detected a tone of insult. But her voice was bare of its playful filigree, its musical lilt. Even the nasal clip of her Finnish accent had softened.
I’m not sure how long we sat like that together. It felt to me like hours, but in reality it must have been no more than a few minutes.
Abruptly, Janna stood. “It smells in here.”
When I call up that memory now, I see her in the loose pajama top, her nostrils flared and her stomach already pushing against the waistband of Thom’s jeans. But I think I’ve added that detail in hindsight; at the time, I later learned, she was no more than four months along.
I followed Janna to the door and out onto the porch. She began to lean toward me, as if to lay her head on my shoulder. Her cheek brushed mine. I don’t know why I didn’t pull away.
“If you come into my house again,” she hissed, “I’ll call the police.”
Without meeting my eyes, she turned toward the screen door. There was a quick flutter of air as it opened and closed, and then she was gone.
• • •
At that time, I could count on one hand the people whose phone numbers I knew and whom I spoke to with any intimacy. I had long since lost touch with any of my college friends. I called my mother.
I still marvel at the speed and efficiency with which she extricated me from life in Madison. I didn’t tell her about my participation in Keller’s experiments, and whatever her suspicions, she took me at my word: it was only a bad breakup. Like most young people, I’d convinced myself that her romantic life had begun and would end with my father. But as we flew from Madison to Cleveland, then from Cleveland to Newark, she resurrected an animated lineup of past boyfriends. During the layover, my mother—my frugal mother, wearing the same faded jeans and clogs she’d had since I was born, with the original suede skinned off the toe—treated me to an epic airport feast: steak frites from the flashiest, most overpriced grill in Cleveland international, topped off with a brownie sundae that was probably illegal in some states. She stopped short of carrying my luggage; I asked at baggage claim, whiny with exhaustion, and she gave me a look equivalent to a sharp kick. At home, she babied me for a few weeks—doing the laundry, making my favorite minestrone soup—before telling me it was time that I decided what to do next, and I better not think about living alone.
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