by Robert Levy
She dressed in a red tank top and chocolate brown balloon shorts and went to the dresser to retrieve her camera, the one Detective Jessed had delivered to her hospital room with a pointed knowingness she couldn’t place. When she drew back the curtains of the pink room, she was surprised to see the clouds had evaporated, the cove bright with sunlight; the rains had ended at last. A moth was pressed to the outside of the window, where it slowly beat its wings against the screen like a black and dying heart. Elisa flicked at it with her finger until it took to begrudging flight.
She spooled a fresh roll of film into the old Konica and headed downstairs. Jason was on the phone with a patient, one of the dozen or more strangers who depended on him. Elisa drank a cup of coffee and eavesdropped on the session, and was struck by Jason’s deliberate and measured tone, the one that said everything was going to be okay. Which of course Jason relished. His clients’ desperate clambering for his reassurances was his own source of relief; he needed to be needed. Which must be why she found herself pathologically denying him of it, especially when she needed him most.
She absently brought a hand to her flat belly, then forced herself to return it to her side. Soon, she would bleed. And then she would bleed again.
Elisa went out to the porch, the door swinging shut behind her. Click-clack. She stopped short on the far side of the threshold. You are safe, she thought, so long as we are here.
Gabe was on the porch swing, hunched over a library book and drinking a beer, his golden hair a corona of bright curls in the late-morning sun. The cover of his book depicted a stone carving of a pagan nature spirit, the primitive sculpture’s chipped and leering face distorted by protective cellophane.
“Hey.” Gabe pointed his chin in her direction. “How are you doing? You need anything?”
“I’m all good, thanks.” She looked out at the cove and its emerald sweep of trees, the sunlight glinting off the misted gray water. The pristine beauty of this place was intoxicating; it was easy to see why people were drawn here, and why they ended up staying. She remembered then how Blue, as a joke, had asked her their first morning whether they were going to stay in the cove forever. How dismissive she’d been, how afraid to so much as imagine such a thing, lest her carefully constructed world come tumbling down. Which of course it did anyway.
Gabe eyed her camera. “Going to take some pictures?”
“Thinking about it.”
“I was just going to take a stroll by the water. Give me a minute to grab my shoes and I’ll go with you.”
She motioned to Jason that they were headed to the beach, and he gave her a little wave before going back to his call. Elisa turned back toward the vista and started to shift into a little pirouette as she did so, but she stopped herself.
You don’t do that. You don’t dance.
But why not?
Because you don’t. Not anymore.
But oh, how she loved to dance; she would never stop, not ever. How could she? Just because she no longer pursued it professionally, that didn’t mean she wasn’t still a dancer at heart. A lifetime spent spinning in studios and on dance floors, in performance spaces and theaters and bars; she would dance in meadows and down country paths, in another place and time. Anything to feel her electrified muscles surging with the life-giving energy that movement provided her. It didn’t matter if no one was paying, or even watching. Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free.
She had thought she was the girl in “The Red Shoes,” that she would dance and dance, maybe even after she died. But then her nemesis, that reliable fiend plantar fasciitis, crept in like Rumpelstiltskin to snatch the temporary gift she’d foolishly considered hers to keep. She should have taken better care of herself, but as was the case with so much in her life, she’d pretended instead that everything was just dandy, that there was no reason she couldn’t keep on dancing forever, without any true cost. Hubris had gotten her in the end. It was a slow enough process, however, that she saw that ending’s arrival long before it came. She’d grown tired of living in an illegal sublet with four other roommates, of the demoralizing and endless audition process, all for projects that only paid half the time, if she was lucky. She began to feel old, and tired, and poor. And suddenly, there was Jason, and she’d, what, chosen him? Or chosen to give something else away?
Gabe returned after a few minutes and they walked down the drive, gravel dust clouding the tips of her ballet flats; Gabe’s sneakers, once vivid green, were now a dullish brown, caked in mud and dirt. “I’ve been spending a lot of time in the woods,” he said, noticing her attention. “There are all sorts of interesting things out there. If you know where to look.”
She pointed the camera at his feet and released the shutter. Click-clack.
As they passed Donald’s cabin, she could hear the subdued sound of a barking dog over the blare of opera music. “Donald’s dog,” she said. “Where was he?”
“I found him two days ago, digging a hole out by the Colony. Going at it like his life depended on it. Took me a half hour just to coax him onto the trail. The poor thing was soaking wet. He was frantic.”
“Maybe he was burying something.” Gabe didn’t reply, only grinned, without showing his teeth.
They walked toward the main road and the rocky beach beyond. She paused at irregular intervals to shoot pictures: two sandpipers on an electrical wire, the sunlit fringe of leaves atop the tree canopy, Maureen and Donald’s place up the hill with the MacLeod house in the background, now some distance away. “I’m glad you found the dog,” Elisa said after a while. “Maureen was worried that something might have happened to him.”
“I was worried too.” Gabe gave her a strange look. “I saw you that night, you know. Last week? Outside Donald’s cabin.”
“Saw me . . . ?”
“With Olivier.” She walked ahead of him without answering. “You were allergic to him,” he went on, unimpeded. “Before.”
“I must have forgotten,” she said; she had no real explanation. She returned the viewfinder to her eye, obscuring her face. “Say cheese.” Click-clack.
They headed down to the dock. Elisa left her shoes on top of one of the wood pilings and lowered herself onto the thin stretch of beach, while Gabe dropped right into the shallows, sneakers and all. “Let’s go this way,” he suggested, and pointed up the shoreline, away from town. “There’s a sandbar about a half mile from here. You can walk on it and see trout and stuff, just hanging out.”
They continued for some time without speaking. She was forced to acknowledge that all they had left to talk about—the only thing they really should be talking about—was Blue. “It’s okay, you know,” she said, breaking the silence. “We can talk about him. If you want.”
“Who?” But Gabe couldn’t sell it, and stared out at the bay. He pulled a candy bar from his pocket and gnawed on it, while she stuck to the shore and her camera. The water was menacing in its placidity, a hostile sheen with murky shadows moving restlessly beneath.
“I’m so alone,” Gabe said then, quite matter-of-factly. He looked at her, his light blue eyes honing in and penetrating, almost fearsome. “Without him, I mean. You know?”
“Yes.” She lowered her camera and shot him from below, allowing him to see her face. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“He was special, wasn’t he? How he made me feel. Made us feel,” Gabe qualified, though still in the past tense. “From the second I met him, I felt caught up in something larger than myself, larger than anything I’d ever known.” Blue had the same effect on her. He had been her grounding wire ever since their clubland days, her port in those hedonistic rough waters. And she needed him still.
“You love him,” Elisa said, and shivered in recognition. She stopped in her tracks, the wet sand cold beneath her bare feet, and took another shot of Gabe’s face.
“Come on,” he mumbled, and turned away. “The sandbar is right around this bend.”
He convinced her to wade beyond the nettle of cre
eping brambles that clung to the shoreline, the frigid water to her waist as they made their way forward. The sandbar came into view: a five-hundred-foot shoal of pebble and silt jutting out into the bay, its sloping mass disappearing into the water like the neck of a diving loon. There was a near vacuum of noise as they approached: no gulls overhead, no rumble of the occasional flatbed truck from the main road. The shoal was isolated from the rest of the cove, the only way back the same way they had come.
“Peaceful,” she said, but didn’t mean it. The stillness and seclusion set her on edge.
They went out on the sandbar, the small rocks pinpricks on the soles of her feet. Ignoring the sting, she photographed the path ahead and the intricate pattern made by mussels alongside the wet polished stone, rendered visible by the receding tide. Gabe kept his attention on the water, his eyes darting back and forth as if in REM sleep, searching something out. There was the faraway sound of a motor as a fishing boat rounded a bend in the cove, its needle-nosed prow a bright lance in the sunlight.
“I like you,” Gabe said, eyes fixed on the boat. He scratched at his arm and a bleeding sore there; bug bites stippled his arms, raised red tracks up the twin burrows of his T-shirt sleeves, along his scar-mottled hand. Now he was the one who seemed nervous.
“Thanks.” She shielded her eyes; the boat was approaching, headed in the direction of the shoal. “I like you too.”
“You said . . .” He coughed and cleared his throat. “You said we were going to find him.”
“I said . . .” The boat continued to race toward them. She looked through her camera’s viewfinder and zoomed the lens; there were two stooped figures onboard, a small bearded man in a fisherman’s cap and someone else. A woman, maybe. “What are they doing?” she whispered.
“At the hospital,” Gabe said, ignoring her. “You said that we were going to find Blue.”
Was that what she had promised? How could she have said that? She couldn’t remember why she’d done such a thing, what had moved her to such certainty. Such a grand declaration, when she no longer felt certain of anything at all.
She lowered the camera and started to back down the sandbar, only to come within inches of colliding with Gabe, who made no attempt to move out of her way. Sweating profusely now, he had a queer expression on his face, obstinate and not a little crazed. “Of course we will,” she said, trying to remain calm. “We’ll find him. We will.”
“I’m really sorry, Elisa.” It was hard to hear him over the mosquito whine of the boat’s engine. “But don’t worry, okay? Nothing bad’s going to happen to you. They promised me.”
“What are you . . .” The boat was less than twenty yards away before it slowed and turned, a wave kicked up by the wake crashing hard against the shoal. It had come for them. For Elisa. She tried once again to get past Gabe but he blocked her; there was no choice but to stand her ground. Either that or run the other way down the sandbar, the boat coming to a stop beside them. Where else could she go? Right into the bay, the water bracing even in September? Like a butterfly beneath a descending net, she could only watch as it fell.
“Get her up here.” The bearded and haggard little man at the wheel reached around the windshield and motioned to Gabe. Closer to the stern was a middle-aged woman, her head obscured by the hood of a yellow rain slicker. She stretched her hand toward Elisa over the side of the boat.
“What the hell is this?” Elisa yelled above the engine. She held herself, the camera strap wound around her arms like tefillin bands. It was an ambush of some kind, though she wasn’t scared so much as astonished.
“She doesn’t know anything,” Gabe said to them. “She doesn’t know what she is.”
“Get in, sweetheart,” the woman said, and this time she thrust her hand out with an unmistakable air of impatience. Now Elisa recognized her: it was their waitress from the other morning at the Lobster Landing, the rude one. She tried to remember the name on her plastic name tag.
“No way.” Elisa shook her head as if attempting to loose it from her neck. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“We can help each other,” the bearded man said, his eyes steely and unreadable. “We can help you figure out where you’ve been. You’ll be safe with us.”
She turned to Gabe, and he gave her an imploring look. They wanted the same thing. If this could help find him, how could she refuse?
“You don’t have to,” Gabe said meekly. “It’s your choice.”
“Some choice.” Elisa unraveled her camera strap, slung it around her neck, and reached for the woman’s hand.
The boat’s guttural engine drowned out any attempt Elisa made to question her unlikely captors. She settled onto a hard bench at the stern and looked out at the water, tried to get her bearings in case she needed to find her way back. No words were exchanged, not until well after the boat was docked on the opposite side of the cove. They walked a single-file line along a thin wooded trail—the bearded man in front, Gabe and the waitress bringing up the rear—to a ramshackle cottage set amid a copse of diseased-looking birch trees.
The little man introduced himself as Fred Cronin, and the cottage as his house. A local ironsmith and newsletter publisher, he was a friend of Maureen and Donald’s; Elisa remembered him now from the ceilidh, and how he’d taken pictures all night, his vintage Leica almost an extension of his long beard. She stroked the lens of her own camera and thought to do the same.
Inside the cottage, the smell of stale cigarette smoke hung like cobwebs from the rafters. The clutter was staggering—newspapers stacked to the ceiling, sagging shelves of books and nautical maps and heavy chunks of crystalline granite, complicated steel contraptions of unknown provenance shoved into every corner. By the door, a half dozen identical hiking packs rested against the wall, each one crowned by a mining helmet and a lengthy coil of what looked to be rope for rock climbing or spelunking.
A jittery woman, bright red hair and about Elisa’s age, jumped up from the floor at the sight of her. “You’re beautiful,” the woman exclaimed, then covered her mouth with one hand, the other fingering a golden angel pendant on a chain around her neck. A skinny teenager with a constellation of acne at the corner of his mouth paced before the shade-drawn windows in a narrow lane cleared of debris. He reminded Elisa of her first boyfriend, but when she gave him a little nod his gaze moved from her face. Beneath one of the windows was a wrynecked boy of five or six, his eyes lost beneath a shaggy tangle of brown bangs. He took no notice of her whatsoever.
Fred directed Elisa to a dilapidated black couch. The pimply young man and the waitress sat on either side of her, Fred in an adjacent plastic chair; Gabe remained standing, while the redhead returned to her spot on the floor. Their host poured what smelled like whisky-spiked tea into a thermos lid and placed it before Elisa. “We were waiting for you to get out of the hospital. But then the rains came,” Fred said in a raw voice, and sipped straight from the thermos, sunken eyes trained upon her. He lit a cigarette with quivering hands, waved out the match and tossed it onto the coffee table’s scratched glass surface, missing an overflowing ashtray. “We have a pretty simple request. We want you to take us to the place where you and your friend were hiding out all this time.”
“I don’t remember where I was,” Elisa said. “But even if I did, I doubt I would tell you. I don’t even know who you people are.”
Fred laughed weakly. “Fair enough. But just so you know, we come in peace. Give us a chance to put your mind at ease.”
He introduced the redhead as Tanya; the Lobster Landing waitress as Patricia; and the young man as Patricia’s son Colin, and now Elisa could see they shared the same equine features. Patricia said the boy by the window was hers as well; he was occupying himself with a set of rusty-bladed safety scissors and a magazine, its pages freshly serrated and foxed with mold. Other than the little boy, they were all staring at her, rapt.
Fred dragged off his cigarette, the smoke corkscrewing heavenward from the ember’s tip. “A
t the end of the day,” he said, “we’re people of like mind and common purpose. I guess you could say that we’re a group of believers.”
“Believers in what?” Elisa said.
“Well, one thing we all believe in is you.”
“What’s to believe in?”
“That remains to be seen.” Fred bent over the side of his seat and rummaged along a low makeshift bookcase of bricks and boards, as Gabe looked on with unease. Eventually he surfaced with a stack of decomposing newspapers, sorted a few from the pile, and handed them to her. “Take a look at these,” he said. “I’m not sure how much you know.”
Beneath the Cape Breton Post nameplate and the edition date of Saturday, October 2, 1981, was the headline LOCAL BOY AND GIRL GO MISSING. Elisa scanned through the papers, then went back to the first article and the photograph of the boy. It was Blue’s five-year-old face beneath a mop of black hair, so young but still utterly, painfully unmistakable. She glanced up at the little boy at the window before she touched her fingers to the faded newsprint and the photo of Blue, his picture printed beside that of a moonfaced girl named Gavina, as well as a detail of the star-shaped birthmark on her shoulder.
“Blue didn’t know any of this,” Elisa said, and shook her head. “He only found out when he was going through his grandmother’s things. That very day, before we were taken.”
“Taken.” Fred smiled, his teeth brown and decayed; one tooth flashed silver, while a few more were missing altogether. “So you do remember something.” He lit another cigarette from the end of the last. “Tell me,” he said, and leaned across the coffee table, close enough that she caught a whiff of his sour breath. “What do you remember about being taken?”
