After the agony of getting him out of the car, carrying him to the stone beach is easy. He’s taller than she is, but hardly weighs a thing.
When her feet touch the beach with the boy in her arms she feels as if she’s arrived on the shore of a new world where anything is possible.
It’s only when she lays the boy on the rocks and looks into his vacant eyes that she remembers that he’s dead.
His eyes are a shade of blue that is nearly iridescent. The eyes of a doll with a fanciful maker. The boy is dead, but his eyes are still bright. They are so bright that his skin seems transparent in comparison. His left arm is ruined, jagged like a shattered branch.
He’s as dead as the others in the car.
But May wouldn’t give up.
She pushes against his chest, using the CPR training she received when she first volunteered for the Red Cross. After compressions, she puts her lips against his and breathes her breath into his lungs. More compressions, more breaths. The exertions make her light-headed.
But May wouldn’t give up.
Under her lips, the boy twitches. She pulls away from him as he ejects a geyser of water onto the bed of smooth stones.
He lies back, coughing, and it’s like a switch is thrown. Color climbs his cheeks. Pupils constrict to pinpoints in the bright April sun. She thought they’d dazzled before, but now they glow. She’s never seen a boy like this one.
Sirens sound from inland, and she knows not to be here when they arrive. May wouldn’t need praise or newspaper photos or handshakes with the mayor. The Lake has forgotten May, and that’s how May would want to keep it.
She rests a palm on the boy’s head. He is not yet quite returned from where he’s been. She’ll watch from the water until she’s sure he’s safe.
She savors the feel of his thick hair in her fingers. They are bonded now, she knows. They are both on their second lives, and every good thing the boy grows up to accomplish will be more chips against the damage done by the demon June. He’s the answer she’s been waiting for.
“Make it count, my little miracle man,” she whispers to him. She walks backward into the cold water. “Make it matter.”
Eighteen
How Nate found himself free of the wrecked car and on that stony beach had always been a mystery. Finally learning the answer had to mean something. It had to change something.
The woman rolled up the right sleeve of her bathrobe. Strands of a half dozen scars wove the underside of her forearm. Nate understood she’d gotten these from reaching through the Passat’s window to unlock the door and pull him from the lake’s deadly embrace. He had a similar network of marks on his own ruined arm.
He clenched his hands into fists to keep them from trembling. The pain in his bad arm jolted up to his shoulder. All he could see was the glittering water. All he could feel was the lake licking his feet.
Things loosened inside him. Things for which there were no names.
“My brother.” His voice sounded like rusted metal. He remembered Gabe’s grip on his hand. He saw his brother’s lips, opened in a perfect circle of terror as their car crashed through the guardrail.
“I didn’t see him,” the old woman said. “I’ve played it in my mind ten thousand times, and I didn’t see him. The light was bad and when the car tipped, it—” Her voice was different than it had been. More textured, somehow. Her face was changed, too, as if somewhere in her story she’d changed roles.
“Why’s my picture in the middle of this?” Nate pointed to the wall plastered with clippings and laced with string. He realized that he didn’t want to talk about the accident or the lake or his lost family. He couldn’t.
“Look at it,” she said. “Go on.”
The newspaper page detailing the car accident Nate had survived was yellowed after sixteen years. This was the part of the wall where the red string was thickest, centered from a nail pounded into his chest. One string linked Nate’s photo to a clipping about the Deckers’ house burning in the foothills so many years ago.
Nate followed this string onward to an article about the county arson investigators finding the cause of the fire suspicious. Charges weren’t filed, but insurance money was never paid out for the house, which had been a total loss. From there the string continued. Though he was not implicated in the arson, Mr. Decker’s reputation had been damaged, and he’d been unable to secure a loan to sustain his slumping businesses. His local retail chain had to file for bankruptcy, and two of its locations were sold off, causing thirty people to lose their jobs. Their names were listed on a page of legal paper. Notations were written alongside some of them: divorce, bankruptcy, depression.
“What is this?” Nate asked.
“Just look.”
He chose another string. From his face, it connected with a photo of Tom posing in a soccer uniform. Either junior or senior year, Nate guessed. From there he followed it to a pencil-line drawing of a house with a tree collapsed against it. The string flowed from this image to an article about the high school’s soccer coach being pulled over for a DUI. Next was a memo sent to the high school staff about the coach’s termination.
The coach’s last name of Corso. Tom’s former soccer coach and also, surely, the father of Pete Corso, the missing teen. Nate had once directed a Thunder Run against him, which ended with a tree collapsing against his house.
“He’d been sober for ten years before that.” The woman pointed to the drawing. Nate remembered that several windows had shattered, and part of the roof had sheared off. “The stress from the damage knocked him off the wagon. Lost his job. His marriage.”
“You couldn’t possibly know that,” Nate said.
Pete Corso’s photo was the next waypoint on the string. It was a smaller version of the one the chief had shown Nate that morning. Next to it was a sketch of the shattered window at the Union. Maura Jeffers’s face appeared alongside Pete’s. Nate had brought her father’s business down with an insect infestation that had pushed the family finances past the breaking point. This was noted here, too, complete with a notice from the county declaring the infested building unfit for habitation.
The wall held a catalog of Nate’s sins and what the woman judged to be their consequences. The documents and strings that covered the walls were a decades-long narrative in which victims became vandals and the vengeful became the punished. A story of anger and blowback. The saga of the Lake itself.
As Nate examined the wall, he saw suicides, high school dropouts, substance addiction, school suspensions, and dozens of other symptoms of misery. All the teens he’d seen in the Night Ship must have a story like Maura’s and Pete’s. Most of the events on this wall surely had more than a single cause. Still, Nate couldn’t avoid the fact that the Storm King’s malign reign had rippled far and wide. The red lines tracked soaring imbalances in the equations of pain.
If he’d drowned on that April day, the Lake would be a better place.
Bankruptcies and crumbling home lives led to unhappy children who grew up to be angry teens. And anger needed a target. Using the revelation of the Thunder Runs from Lucy’s journals, James had weaponized these teens’ fury against Nate, Nate’s friends, and anyone else who could have played a role in Lucy’s murder.
“You can’t hold me responsible for all this.”
“We’re both responsible,” the woman said. “I saved you. Everything you do, good or bad, is because of me.” She pointed to a single string affixed to the nail set into Nate’s photo. It was at the base of the nail, the first string that had been attached to it. It was different from all the others piled above it in that it was blue. That was that day in April, Nate understood. That was the day he’d been returned to begin his second life.
“I didn’t ask to be saved.” He thought of his family, strapped to their seats beneath the lake. That blade of a teen was still inside him, and he seethed at the idea that this woman thought she’d done him a favor. “Maybe pulling me out of that car was a mistake.” He loath
ed the woman’s judgment as much as he hated her certainty.
“I think about that all the time.”
The thing inside him edged closer to anger.
“I’m not the one who poisoned a bowl of punch and started a riot and fire that killed a dozen people.” He pointed at the collage. “So where’s your wall of sins?”
The woman pointed to the blue string fixed to Nate’s photo. She traced it with her finger diagonally across the wall, under clippings and images and notes. Nate saw where it met the warped ceiling.
“What do you think’s upstairs?” she said. “More space there, but you’ll pass me by soon enough. The new ones have been busy, and they’re not finished.” She turned back to him. Her face was still grim, but something around her mouth loosened. “I was very sorry to hear about Bea.”
The sound of his grandmother’s name gave him a powerful jolt. Indignation, despair, shame—he wasn’t sure what he was feeling, but he knew that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“I’m a surgeon,” he said. He wasn’t a bad man, and he wanted this woman to know it. “I save people’s lives.”
The woman stared at him, then shrugged.
“What do you want from me?” he shouted. “It’s the past. It happened.”
A slash of some gentler emotion broke across her face. “You’re still just a boy, aren’t you?” She reached out to touch the line of his jaw. Her skin was dry but smooth like the stones along the waterline. “It’s never too late to be good.”
Nineteen
It wasn’t until he was back outside, rocked by arias of thunder, that Nate let the things that churned within him break loose.
It was pouring again. The forest shielded him from the worst of the wind, but its treetops shuddered at dangerous angles. The wail of their branches and hiss of their leaves united with the drumming of rain into a wash of noise that made the air itself feel alive. Through its buzz he heard whispers from the dead.
He’d relived his fractured memories of that April day uncounted times. Now he finally had the answer to his impossible survival. He should’ve welcomed the woman’s story. Instead, he felt uncoiled. Inert.
He didn’t know what to do.
A massive tree stood near the foot of the patchy gravel driveway. It reminded Nate of the elm in his grandmother’s backyard. He fitted himself among the nooks of its gnarled roots and hunched his knees into his chest. Curled within his black raincoat and wedged against the tree’s trunk, he felt protected from the storm. In this position he could imagine weathering anything.
Almost anything.
Once the woman explained the basement wall, he’d had to get out of there. A minute more and he’d have suffocated; he would have drowned. All his offenses laid out like a deck of cards. Every hand on display.
Did he have any secrets left? He’d plumbed the chasm at his core but knew he had yet to reach its darkest point. With so many lies folded in upon lies, anything could be there, waiting. It took a great actor to be a good liar, but to be a great actor you had to believe your performance was the truth. After wearing so many masks, could he even remember the shape of his real face?
Nate despised the woman for laying bare so many sins of his youth. He wasn’t sure who she really was, but he believed her story about saving his life sixteen years ago. He should have thanked her; he should have wept into her filthy lap. Fairy godmothers did less for their charges than she’d done for him. But he wasn’t thankful. He was bereft. She was, herself, clearly ambivalent on the subject.
And she wasn’t the only one in town who thought he was a monster.
The compilation of suffering across the cellar wall was reductive, but the truth was inescapable. Nate and his friends had caused pain far worse than the wrongs they’d avenged. Those costs still mounted. In her ICU, Grams was paying for them right now. Maura Jeffers, Pete Corso—they’d all paid.
Nate had to check on Grams, but he didn’t know if any of the phones at the house on Bonaparte Street would work without electricity. The police station would surely have a functional landline, but the idea of seeing Tom or the chief made Nate wish for Medea to sweep him up and whirl him to the farthest edge of her most distant band of cloud.
The worst kind of stranger was the one who used to be a friend, and this town was full of them.
Something in his side twitched. The dumb wedge of his phone gave a cadaveric spasm. He stood and tore open his coat. When he examined it, the device looked utterly lifeless, but Nate tapped its screen and put it to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Nate?”
“Meg.” Hearing her voice was like the flash of the sun after a day spent deep underwater. “My phone got wet. I thought it was dead.”
“I can barely hear you. It sounds like you’re on Mars.”
On Mars only the air and cold will kill you, he thought. She and Livvy were his tethers to the person he was supposed to be. By her voice, he marked how far from that path he’d drifted.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “What’d the doctor say? Did the funeral go all right?”
“Nothing’s all right here. I shouldn’t have come back. Or maybe I shouldn’t have left. I don’t know what to do.”
“I can’t hear you, honey. Can you hear me? I wanted to check on you and tell you Livvy’s much better. The storm surge isn’t as bad as they expected. We lost electricity for a couple hours, but it’s back for the moment.”
“The power here’s gone. Barely after lunch and it’s already dark. The sky’s gray, and the town looks like it’s been abandoned for a thousand years.”
“I can’t understand you, love, but your voice sounds strange.”
“Grams is going to die, Meg. I can feel it. And it’ll be my fault. I never told you why I didn’t want to come back here. I think I even made myself forget some of it. I made mistakes, Meg. Bad ones. And now I’m paying for them. Everyone’s paying for them.”
“Love, I can’t hear you.”
“Tom thought—he thought he killed Lucy. But he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. Not Tom. But that’s why he left NYU. He’s been punishing himself about it for fourteen years. The secret’s been eating him alive, and it isn’t even true. How could Tom think he was a murderer? And how could he keep it a secret for so long? He didn’t tell anyone, not even me. If he had, I’d have told him it was impossible.”
“Honey—”
“But then I think, is it really impossible, Meg? How many things are impossible?” He thought of the things he’d done and the people he’d hurt. He saw the webs of red string lancing the basement wall plastered with his victims. “We’re capable of anything, you know. We’re liars and thieves and arsonists and murderers waiting for that moment when the universe compounds chance upon chance so that the only choices we have left are bad ones. I used to know this. I don’t know how I ever forgot.”
“What’d the doctor say about your head? Dammit, there’s so much static I can’t understand a thing you’re saying. It must be your phone. Or the hurricane. I’ll try the landline at Bea’s house. I love you, Nate. We both do.”
The connection terminated in a flush of noise that shuddered into silence.
“Meg? Meg?”
Nate pulled the phone from his ear, swiped it, pressed it, shook it, and stared at its black screen until he was sure she was gone.
Time passed. He wasn’t sure how much.
He was cold and wet, and knew that he should get out of the storm. He forced himself from the splayed roots and into motion, walking along the shoulder of the Strand as it curved back to town.
Maybe the landline at Grams’s house still worked. If it did, he’d call Meg back. He’d tell her everything. Even the worst things. He’d confess how he broke into a stranger’s house and got into a fight with teens and almost strangled his best friend’s father. He’d beg forgiveness for the way he’d let Grams get hurt and the Union destroyed and Johnny’s leg shattered and Tommy’s dog murdered. He didn’t know how Maura and
Pete fit into all this, but it was somehow part of the same thing. Meg would listen to him and be kind, because that’s how you deal with a hysterical person over the phone.
Nate wouldn’t really know how she took it until he saw her in person. If her eyes slid away from his, if her embrace shuddered with the slightest hint of hesitation, he wouldn’t survive it.
Greystone Lake’s roads were deserted, its houses dark. He wondered if this was what the end of the world would be like. Not devoured by fires or floods, but endless gray clouds a hundred miles thick swaddling the earth like a shroud. Shutting out the sun and cowing the besieged with unceasing volleys of thunder.
He broke inland before he needed to. He didn’t want to walk past the barricade. He’d had enough of the Night Ship and the things it conjured.
There was a police barrier toppled at the base of the street, and Nate stepped right over it. Trees had fallen, power and telephone lines had collapsed, and debris was scattered across the road and lawns.
Storm damage was everywhere. Shingles fluttered from one house, and a tarp had been hastily draped over the windows of another. Shutters were torn loose, and retaining walls had crumbled.
One home situated on a corner stood out to Nate from the others. As he approached the intersection, he saw that a large side window was shattered. Not just the glass, but the grids as well. Sopping curtains flickered in the onslaught of the wind. This might not have troubled Nate but for the fact that this was Owen’s house.
Owen hadn’t made it to Lucy’s funeral, so Nate had guessed he was either still with Johnny at the hospital, or handling whatever chaos Medea wreaked over at the Empire. Nate knew that Owen’s father was dead and that his mother had suffered a stroke and was now an invalid. Mrs. Liffey had been a cruel woman and particularly brutal to her son, so it said a lot about Owen that he’d taken it upon himself to care for her. When Nate wondered what he might have done in Owen’s position, he didn’t like the answer.
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