by North, Will
Tyler Strong jerked from his chair as if he’d been given an electrical shock and stepped to the edge of the porch.
“Pete!” he called. “Where have you and the kids been? I’ve been worried sick! I called the police!”
Pete stared at Tyler as if he were some curiosity in a museum. Finally, she blinked and said, “They found me in the middle of Vashon Highway.”
“What?! Who’s ‘they’?” There was a flash of panic in his eyes.
If she heard him, Pete didn’t acknowledge it. She shifted her gaze to address the officer who stood beside her husband.
“Deputy Chris, hello. I am sorry to call you out on a holiday.”
Chris Christiansen nodded. “My job, Miss Martha.”
“You called him?” Tyler said. “He said I did…”
“Thank you, deputy,” Pete continued. “This man, my husband,” she said, inclining her head momentarily toward Tyler, “and I had a fight last night.”
“It was one of those moments,” Tyler suddenly interjected, “when, after perhaps too much to drink, tempers briefly flare.” His hands were splayed in a gesture that managed simultaneously to suggest the insignificance of the incident and a modicum of regret. It was the first coherent thing Chris Christiansen had heard him say since he’d arrived. And, given that the man had just been in another, different fight, it was simultaneously bizarre.
“During this fight,” Pete continued, “my husband—and let me confess that I, too, was drunk—my husband restrained me and poured gin down my throat. All I remember, officer, was thinking I would drown. After that, nothing.”
She stopped there and looked at Tyler, as if challenging him to correct her account. But Tyler’s gaze was miles away, as if his brain had checked out of his body. “They” found her. What was “they?” She isn’t hurt, so nothing actually happened…did it?
“It would seem that other things happened after that,” Tyler heard his wife continue, “but I have no memory of them. I was unconscious. My friends, here, may be able to help you sort that out.”
As if suddenly drained empty, Pete Petersen Strong sank to one of the porch stairs. Her son joined her, wrapping his skinny arms around his mother’s legs.
“Might I have a word, Chris?” Colin had his hand in the air like a student at school.
“Would you excuse me for a moment, Miss Martha?” the deputy asked. “Perhaps you’d like to step inside out of the sun?”
Pete nodded. She was staring through her husband, as if he were made of tissue, toward the constant, reliable, glittering water beyond.
Justine came to her mother’s side and helped her into the house. Young Adam followed. Tyler sat immobile, his face vacant as an empty room, his eyes focused somewhere in the far distance.
Colin walked across the lawn toward the driveway. Chris Christiansen followed and met him beside the squad car.
“What’s this about ‘attempted murder’?”
“I can’t think of any other explanation,” Colin said.
“Any chance you might start from the beginning?”
“I’m sorry, Chris. Of course.”
Colin described finding Pete on the highway at dawn, her condition, and his decision to have Edwinna look after her.
“Not your smartest move, doc.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Should have taken her to the medical center and called us.”
“Perhaps.”
“The attempted murder?”
“It’s all about the shoes.”
“Excuse me?”
“I would never have noticed.”
“Doc?”
“Sorry. When I found Pete on the highway this morning, she was wearing the same black dress she had on last night—the one she has on still—and there were silver sandals on her feet, okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Edwinna and I, well, we assumed Pete had either decided to commit suicide or was running away from something.” He looked over his shoulder. “Or someone.”
The deputy nodded, “Keep going.”
“To end up where I found her she’d have to have walked the full length of the beach and then another, I don’t know, half mile south along the highway.”
“And?”
“It was young Adam who worked it all out. He’s been reading Sherlock Holmes, you see.”
“Look, Ryan…”
“Sorry, yes. I found her at the bottom of that long hill, right?”
“Right.”
“She’d have to have walked a long way to get there, right?”
“So you said.”
“But the shoes have no sign of wear, Chris.”
“So how’d she get there,” the deputy said, nodding. It wasn’t a question; he’d already got it. He pulled a cell phone from a pouch on his leather belt and punched in a number.
“That kid worked this out?” he said.
Colin nodded.
“Too bad we have child labor laws; I could use him on the force.”
The call connected.
“Give me the supervisor.”
The deputy waited a moment, staring at the Old House and shaking his head. Some kind of morning…
“Sam? Christiansen on Vashon. We need the Major Crimes Unit to send a detective over here a.s.a.p. I know it’s a holiday, Sam. It’s also an emergency. Maybe attempted murder. Marital dispute of some kind. No, I have no direct evidence, but we can hold the guy on an assault charge his wife’s already made to me. Yeah, an official ‘excited utterance,’ with witnesses. No, I didn’t prompt her; she made the statement independently. The judge will buy it.”
Christiansen filled his superior in on what little he knew and was about to ring off when he heard shouting.
“Colin!” It was Justine, screaming from the porch of the Old House. “He’s leaving!”
At almost the same instant both men heard the roar of an outboard.
“Shit!” Christiansen yelled. “Sam! Stay on the line. We’ve got a situation here. Hang on.”
The two men raced across the lawn and reached the lane that ran along the beach just as Tyler Strong gunned his aluminum fishing skiff and pointed the bow south toward the distant harbor’s mouth.
The deputy yelled into his phone, “Sam, get on to the Coast Guard. We’ve got a suspect escaping by boat. South out of Quartermaster Harbor at high speed. No, I don’t have the goddamned registration number. Aluminum skiff, open outboard. Suspect wearing khaki shorts and black T-shirt. No hat. Got that? Good. No, Sam, I didn’t have him in custody; I had nothing to go on, okay?!”
Justine had run into the house and returned with binoculars just as Colin and the deputy climbed down to the beach.
“Son of a bitch,” Christiansen said between breaths as they reached the water. “I’m getting too old for this game.”
“He’s stopped.” Justine said as she reached them.
A quarter mile or so out, in the deepest part of the channel, the outboard’s silvery wake suddenly softened and then vanished. The skiff slowed and, no longer under power, turned slowly on the tide.
“May I have those binoculars, Miss?” Christiansen asked, employing a calmness Colin knew was forced.
Even at this distance, they could see Tyler standing at the skiff’s bow.
thirty-three
WHEN DID EVERYTHING BEGIN BREAKING into shards? Tyler wonders as he stands at the skiff’s gently rocking bow, coiling the anchor rope. Maybe it’s always been in pieces, or maybe prisms, like one of those kaleidoscopes. Yeah, that’s it: Kaleidoscope. And what happens is you paste the shards together so they make some kind of sense, so you can move from one day to the next without getting lost. It’s like landmarks: visions you can hold on to. But if that’s the case, everybody’s reality is different. The landmarks are arbitrary. Illusions.
Only I can see the pieces distinct from one another, keep them in their separate places. That’s why I know the Truth of them. Nobody else sees the Truth but me. They can’t dis
tinguish the pieces within the whole. They’re too busy trying to make an airtight case, or a story, or something—beginning, middle, end. Squeezed between covers, or presented in court, as if that would force them to make sense. That’s why the law is bogus; it’s always about fixing boundaries. And punishing those who cross them. About containing. But there are no boundaries, because the pieces have independent lives. Yeah, like these jellyfish out here in the harbor, each its own independent reality, its own universe. But people can’t leave the jellyfish alone, oh no; they keep trying to make something from them—careers, families, relationships, futures. Fools. It doesn’t work; you can’t hold them. One goes, they all go. Dominoes. Crazy to try to make something of them. Illusion. Illusion.
He looks back at Madrona Beach and sees several figures gathered along the shoreline, like actors at the lip of a stage. This must be a comedy, he thinks, and he starts laughing. He laughs so hard he has to sit down. He laughs so hard the pieces in his head rattle.
A cast of amateurs. That’s what I’ve been cursed with. Idiots! Look at them--Old Adam’s pissed because Pacific fucking Pioneer is a goner. Shit, the company’s like that French character, Camille; it’s been dying for years. Keep it alive? Futile. What a joke. But he’s getting no laughs. His act is a flop. Let it go. What the hell does he care, anyway; he’s a goner soon, too. And Rob’s pissed his wife’s been fucking me. Another comedy. He wants to make it a tragedy, so it’s ‘I raped her.’ He doesn’t get that he’s only ever had a piece of her and I found the rest. Man, it’s every which way with her. Girl never gets enough. Got enough last night, though. Ride of a lifetime. Oh yeah. Audience loved it.
He smiles as he thinks back to that woman on Madrona Bluff. He hums a bawdy song he learned long ago at overnight camp, and rocks the boat from side to side: Roll me over, roll me over and do it again…
Pete’s pissed, too. Thinks I tried to drown her with gin. Already three sheets to the wind, she was; how the hell would she know? Frigid bitch. Partner, partner. Partner in marriage. Partner in a company. Partner in law. Partner in firm. Bit parts, trying to join. More illusions; more jellyfish, trying to be what they can never be, more than they are.
Double yellow stripe on a black dress. Where’s she got to? Where are her shoes?
On the distant shore, he sees another figure, a woman, stepping from a white limousine, and recognizes her immediately: it is the play’s director, his mother Amanda. She watches, expressionless, and he understands this is it, the grand finale. He must soar in his role, he must triumph.
Just watch, he shouts to his mother across the still water. Watch what I can do!
***
“DID YOU HEAR that? That shout?” Justine asks.
“No. Well, maybe.” Colin says. “Something, anyway.”
“He’s standing in the bow again,” Christiansen reports.
“Even we can see that,” Justine says, fear making her voice harsh. “What’s he doing?”
“Nothing. Not a damned thing.”
“This is crazy,” Colin mumbles. He looks back at the house and sees Pete and little Adam standing at the porch rail. Pete has both hands on her head, as if trying to keep it from flying away. To his surprise, he also sees, parked at some distance away along the beachfront lane, Edwinna’s ancient white Cadillac. She is standing by its open driver’s door, but does not move. Off to the east, the blinds are down at Rob and Peggy’s house, their driveway empty. Along the beach to the west, Sylvia Petersen and Old Adam, having noticed the commotion, approach, arm in arm, at roughly the speed of a Dungeness crab crossing the seafloor. In fact, it is as if, here under the hammering noon sun, everything has crawled to a near halt, and the day itself holds its breath.
***
HERE, AT LAST, Tyler rejoices to himself, is the one true symmetry, strands of history knitting together, an eternal reality. This is how the broken drama is completed, how the gap between Papa Richie and sweet Two is closed by Tyler I in the final act. You two should not have had to wait so long, Tyler whispers. Sorry. So sorry. My fault. Always my fault. Never measured up. But I am now. I’m coming now. The director will be amazed. Amanda will cheer.
Tyler Strong balances again at the bow of the skiff and, with the care of a master rigger adjusting the jib sheets on a schooner, wraps three short lengths of anchor line around his waist, taking care to finish with a neat clove hitch, the one knot that only gets tighter the more it’s tugged. Then, with the skiff’s heavy galvanized anchor grasped in his right hand, Tyler Strong lifts a hand to his audience and steps off the bow.
***
“SHIT!” CHRISTIANSEN LET the binoculars drop to his side. It had been in his head from the moment he saw the skiff stop in mid-channel: Why does an escapee cease his escape? Because a superior escape presents itself.
He walked away from the beach and called the sheriff’s office in Burien again. The same supervisor was on duty.
“Christiansen here, Sam. Tell the Coast Guard we need divers. Suspect has entered the water. With an anchor. We’ve got a suicide.”
“What the hell’s going on over there, Christiansen?” the supervisor demanded.
“Sam, I haven’t begun to fill you in. But I will, I will.”
“Damn straight you will, deputy.”
Christiansen looked at the phone for a moment, then returned it to its pouch. He looked out at the harbor. The boat was still adrift. There was nothing else moving, no disturbance on the surface. There were no other boats in sight.
It was, after all, the end of the season.
***
WHAT I DIDN’T understand, you see, Tyler explains to Richie and Two, as the fractured green-blue surface of the outer harbor rises above him, is that the broken pieces only join at the very end. It is only then we become whole. All else is fragments. Bits of dialogue. Rehearsal. Only this is real. Only this...
The breath Tyler had taken on entering the still water begins expanding in his chest even as its benefits collapse. Bigger and bigger his chest seems to grow; thinner and thinner the contents. For a moment, an involuntary moment born of reflex, he struggles with the knot at his waist. He tries to release the anchor, but yanking on the rope only drags him deeper into the cold, green water.
All at once, he ceases struggling. As the darkness thickens, there is a distant sound of welcome, a kind of music that shoves aside the pain of pressure in his ears and on his eyes as he descends. He unclamps his throat and takes in the cool water, salty and sweet as a lover’s skin.
Dad?
It is Two. He hears him. And his heart sings as its pounding ceases.
***
“GOD! DAMNED! SON of a bitch bastard!” Justine cried, hammering Colin’s chest with her fists. “Fucking coward!”
Colin Ryan did not move. He let the young woman’s anger flare and burn out. It didn’t take long. After a few moments she was sobbing in his arms. He looked again at the porch of the Petersen house. Pete had disappeared. Only Young Adam remained.
“Justine,” he said, “we need to look after Adam.”
“Let’s both do it, Justine,” a voice said. Colin turned and it was Patsy. Calm, capable, lovely Patsy. She touched his arm, took Justine’s hand, and the two women walked away just as the deputy returned.
“Any other boats here, Colin?”
“It’s Labor Day, Chris; everyone else is gone. The boats have all been towed or stored.”
“I need to get out there. Coast Guard’s already notified the island’s fire and rescue team. They have a Zodiac, but they’re still twenty minutes out.”
“Chris?”
“What?”
“It’s over.”
“Shit, doc…”
“Yeah. I know.”
Christiansen turned away from the beach, defeated, and walked back toward his squad car.
Colin noticed Edwinna had left her car and was walking toward the Old House. He caught up with her on the lawn.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“That’s not what I mean and you know it. You saw it all, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did.”
“You know what I’m talking about, Edwinna.”
The old woman stopped and looked out toward the water.
“Yes. I did.”
“When?”
“Just after you all left my place in the van. I saw a man jumping into water. I started getting it earlier today, but it wouldn’t come together.”
“And you drove over here.”
“Yes.”
“And did nothing.”
She turned again and looked directly at him, arms crossed at the chest.
“That’s right. I stayed by my car. Now, unless you have any further questions, young man, I’m going inside to see to Pete.”
She did not wait for a reply.
epilogue
“HERE’S WHAT I STILL DON’T GET…” Patsy said.
She and Colin sat side by side on his rear deck high above Tramp Harbor. The small weathered teak table between them held the remains of a Caesar salad and a nearly empty bottle of Palouse “Golden Pearl” Viognier, a gift from one of their clients, who owned a new island winery. The sun had just dipped behind the ridge to the west and while the sky directly above was flushed with fire, the eastern margins of the island below were shifting into shades of violet. Far to the north, near the Canadian border, snow-clad Mount Baker had taken on the antique pink of a fading English rose about to drop its petals. On the south side of Colin’s house, the tomato vines were heavy with fruit.
“…I don’t get him trying to kill her.”
Colin took a sip from his glass and looked out over the water. The wind was shifting from southerly to northerly and the surface of the shipping channel shivered far below. It was the Saturday after Labor Day.
“Humiliation,” he answered. “I talked to Jemma Keating about it.”
“Meaning?”
