by Dan Newman
Pip was the first to call out. “Tristan, what did you do? Is he all right?”
“Oh shit,” said Nate, suddenly terrified. He launched himself forward, and raced through the water with Pip right behind him. Richard was floating face down, and Nate seized him by the back of his T-shirt and hauled him upward, flipping him over at the same time. Pip grabbed his arm and the two immediately began dragging him to the shore, calling his name and shaking him as they went.
At the bank, they set him down in the shallows, with his head and shoulders clear of the water, and his hips and legs still submerged. Nate looked up and saw that Tristan had scrambled up the bank, and was now squatting on his haunches, arms wrapped around his shins, watching the boys with a blank, ashen expression.
Pip was shaking Richard, and shaking him harder with each call. “Richard, wake up!”
Nate reached out and firmly pushed him aside: “Pip, stop. You’ll hurt him!” And for a moment all the boys stood motionlessly. Nate’s word’s carried hope.
“What do we do?” asked Pip on the verge of tears. “What do we do?”
Nate squatted down and turned Richard’s face toward him. The boy’s eyes were half closed, and his expression was slack, fully relaxed. “Richard?” he said, gently patting the boy’s face. “Richard, you okay?” With no reaction whatsoever, Nate placed his ear against Richard’s mouth and listened. Beside him Pip was moaning. Nate exploded. “Pip, shut up! I’m trying to listen!”
Pip stifled himself, and bobbed back and forth from one foot to the other in terror. Nate dropped over Richard once more and listened, but there was nothing. He didn’t know what to do. He sat up, took his hands from the boy’s face, and for the first time noticed something odd above Richard’s left ear. It was the wrong shape. The arc of his face was somehow interrupted just over his left ear near the temple. Nate reached down and gently rolled Richard’s head to one side. The boy’s skull seemed dented, like an empty tin can that had been discarded and clipped by someone’s heel. Nate looked closer and could see that there was some blood there, not much, but some, and that the blonde hair was dark and matted in the concave depression. It was about the size of a fist, and pushed into Richard’s skull a full inch at its center.
Nate felt suddenly light and hollowed out, as if his insides had been abruptly snatched away. He stood and looked up the bank. “Tristan,” he said emptily.
The boy at the top of the bank finally unfolded himself. He stood for a moment, watching the scene below him, and then slid down to the water’s edge. His expression was still impassive, his face gray. Finally Tristan spoke, his voice trembling. “He’s…he’s…”
“He’s dead,” said Pip in a whisper.
To his left, Nate stood rooted to the spot, his eyes and face pleated, his chest heaving but finding no air in the tropical humidity.
Tristan stooped beside Richard and shoved his cousin’s shoulder with a tentative, outstretched foot. “Richard, wake up Richard.” But nothing happened, save the gentle lolling of the boy’s head and the vacant expression that hung there. Tristan rose slowly, never moving his eyes from the boy at the water’s edge. “Shit. He’s really dead.” And because Tristan said it, it was finally true.
• • •
“Please don’t be offended, Rachael. I have to go. I have to get back to Ti Fenwe.”
She stopped shuffling the contents of the cupboard and stood still, her back to Nate. “And at what cost?”
Nate scrubbed his face with both hands. He was tired. Between careening off roads and being exorcised, the day had been pretty full. “It’s just something I have to do. I did something stupid here years ago, and I feel like it’s followed me since then. Like my life has taken on a pattern—one I set the day Richard died.”
Rachael turned and faced him at last. She looked tired, too. “Have you ever told anyone? Have you ever told anyone what happened that day out at Ti Fenwe?”
Nate shook his head and marvelled at the truth of it. He had carried that secret a long time. And for most of that time it had remained somewhere in the far, dark reaches of his mind, almost never venturing forward into the light of conscious thought. But it had always been there, he realized. Always informing his decisions. And it had taken years, a lifetime as it had turned out, for the weight of the consequences to slide home.
Rachael continued. “And what do you expect will happen if you do speak to him, to Vincent? What do you want him to say?”
“To say? Jeez, nothing. And there’s nothing I need to say to him. I just have to go back to where it started. There’s baggage I can’t drop anywhere else but there—and I know that sounds stupid, but it’s just what I have to do.” That was it. Nate felt thoroughly exhausted. He needed to sleep, to just close down and fade to black. “I’m sorry Rachael, but I’m beat…”
“You can stay here tonight. Smiley as well. We have lots of room.”
Rachael said goodnight to the two men and disappeared into her room at the other end of the house, leaving Nate and Smiley alone in the living room. They stood looking at each other for a moment, until Nate finally dipped his head forward. “Are you ready for payment?” he asked with a forced smile. “I don’t know what’ll happen tomorrow, but I promised you the exclusive—the full story on what happened to Richard De Villiers.”
Smiley nodded, trying not to let the excitement show through. “Le’ me grab a notepad,” he said.
They spoke in quiet, reverent tones, Nate running unflinchingly through that day at Ti Fenwe, Smiley nodding, asking the odd clarification, and making notes in the pad resting on his knee. For Nate, it was the first real telling of what had happened that day, and breaking thirty years of silence came at a price he hadn’t expected. By the time he was done, Nate was exhausted. The emotions had come thick and fast with the telling of the story, and the sheer effort of holding them in check—of fighting to stay in control in front of Smiley—had taken a heavy toll. But among those emotions, and perhaps tied somehow to each of them, he acknowledged a quiet sense of relief.
An hour later, Nate settled into the soft bed in one of the spare rooms, and buried himself deep beneath the extra blankets Rachael had provided to fight the fever. He fell asleep quickly and found the dream again. It was the same stage, the same theatre, but this time the players had all gone, all except the wet boy sitting with his legs hanging over the edge of the stage. The boy with the wet blonde hair looked over to where Nate sat in the front row, and mouthed words that Nate couldn’t quite catch. He did it again, and again, but still Nate couldn’t quite make it out.
And then someone or something sat heavily beside him. It, too, was wet, and while Nate wanted desperately to turn and see what or who it was, he found he was powerless, unable to move his neck. And so the thing beside him gradually moved into his view, encroaching slowly, very slowly, from the far extremes of his peripheral vision. It crept onward, and soon Nate could see the edge of a face, the hint of an eye, but everything was wrong. It was pallid, wrinkled like bath-time toes and sloughing skin in great sheets, and as it finally moved into view Nate was horrified to see its eyes had been nibbled and clawed away.
Finally, Nate was able to turn and look, and he knew without question it was Pip. And as he looked at the rotting, waterlogged face of the little boy from his youth, it opened its mouth and shouted the words Richard had been mouthing from the stage: That’s two of us!
Nate sat bolt upright as hands seized upon him. It would pull him to some watery grave now, he knew it, and he flailed his arms and legs in a pathetic attempt at resistance.
Stop, Nate, it’s okay! The voice was wrong and it confused him, it didn’t match the voice from Pip. Sweat ran down his face in rivulets, and Rachael dried him with a thick and fresh smelling towel, running it around his forehead and down to his chin in gentle sweeping arcs. Outside, the night seemed to swallow the Caribbean in great swaths of black, while the lights from the pool glowed beneath the surface and cast wobbly, shifting shadows across Nat
e’s ceiling.
When at last he was calm, she spoke. “What happened to you since you left the island, Nate?” she asked tenderly.
Nate shifted uncomfortably, but there was no dodging the question. “You really want to know?”
“If you’re okay telling me.”
“You’re not going to like me much afterwards.”
“Who says I like you now?”
Nate smiled briefly and with it decided that yes, if she wanted to hear his story, he would tell her.
And so, with a deep breath exhaled through puffed cheeks, he began.
He spoke of his marriage, the way it slowly spiralled downward, perhaps even from the beginning. He talked about his career, if that was what you could call it, about the dullness of it, the frustrating monotony of being entirely unremarkable. He told her about his writing, about his shelf full of unpublished, perhaps unpublishable manuscripts, and about the way his world seemed to come undone when his ex-wife took full custody of their son.
He admitted to being entirely bitter about the divorce, the custody hearings, and the whole damn process. “Losing custody of my son was probably a big part of all this,” he began again. “My wife, well, my ex-wife…her lawyers shredded me at the custody hearing. It was humiliating to have my rights—or what I thought were my rights—systematically and legally stripped away from me. Losing custody of Cody was like having my arm amputated with a hammer. And the way I was painted—my limitations, my lack of progress, lack of success—it was like being whipped—and not because they were being mean spirited, but because it was, in part, true.”
And then he told her about Cody, about his little boy who died. And for a brief and stinging moment, thoughts of Richard crept in like some bitter, distant harmony.
He told her how his life was completely disassembled, stripped bare by his son’s death, and that when he walked into his father’s house three months later to find him dead on the floor of his bedroom, he had almost nothing left inside to feel the pain. Instead he wanted only to sleep, to give in to the tiredness, to escape the effort it took to simply be.
And Rachael listened to it. All of it. And when he was done, when he was spent and empty, she simply lay down beside him, pulled him close and ran her hand around the curve of his face. He turned to her, and her hand moved to his chest. She began tracing a line along his body with her fingers; over his chest, his abdomen and finally to a spot deep between his legs.
29
In the morning, Nate slipped quietly from the bed, letting Rachael sleep. He took his clothes and dressed quickly in the hall, then went to the kitchen with the intention of rifling the cupboards until he found a can of instant coffee and maybe a slice of bread to toast.
What he found was Rachael’s housekeeper waving him to the pool deck, where a white tablecloth topped with plump halved grapefruits, flaky croissants, and an urn of fresh coffee awaited. As he looked at the bounty, he realized he was starving. He also realized that he felt much better; the fever seemed to have ebbed, along with the lethargy, and the aches and pains. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself swallowing the antibiotics Rachael had given him the night before, and in the same instant he saw Ma Joop, eyes closed and praying. He wondered whom he had to thank for this morning’s relief.
“We should all live like dis, no?”
Nate turned and saw Smiley stretched out on one of the padded reclining chairs at the pool’s edge. He was hoisting a cup of coffee in salutation.
“Be careful wit those pastries, man,” he said. “If you eat one, you gone have to have more. Lot more!”
“How’s your shoulder this morning?” Nate asked.
“A li’l stiff, but no big ting. And how ’bout you-self?” There was a knowing grin spread liberally on Smiley’s face. “You get through de night aright?”
Nate stalled for time as he grappled with what to say when the glass doors in the house slid open.
“Good morning,” said Rachael. She was dressed in white shorts and a soft blue sleeveless top, and walked toward them with crossed arms and a curt half-smile. Nate immediately regretted the evening before, and felt suddenly selfish and cloying, like some lecherous old man taking advantage of easy pickings. But as Rachael passed him on her way to the coffee urn, she placed her hand on the small of his back for the briefest of moments, and suddenly the mood inside him shifted. The day was perfect once again, like all the others on this tropical jewel, and it held promise.
They ate beneath the fabric of a large, white umbrella framed in the same dark wood tones that accented the rest of the house. Behind them, the sun was already arcing high into the sky, and the blue sea was awash with silver glints and little triangles of white sailcloth. They talked about nothing: the weather, the view, anything but what had brought them all together.
Smiley told a story about a smuggling operation the paper broke last year out on Pigeon Island—the dual-peaked little land mass that they could see just to the south west of Rachael’s house. Once a pirate hideout, the island was connected to the mainland with a causeway, and with Rachael’s binoculars he could see that a new hotel now stood there. “When I was a kid, we would sail to Pigeon Island as part of the Sunday regattas, from the Yacht Club down on Reduit beach. The causeway was just this vast white stretch of crushed up coral with nothing on it.”
Rachael dipped into her grapefruit. “The Yacht Club’s still there, but the old concrete airstrip is gone.” She looked at Nate as she said it. Yes, he remembered.
Nate smiled sheepishly. “I was kind of hoping you’d forgotten that whole thing.”
“What? You mean where my heart was broken for the first time?” She smiled and Nate couldn’t help but laugh.
“Aw, come on,” he said. “That’s not fair! I was just a kid, and it was my first time, you were my first.”
Smiley’s eyebrows migrated sharply toward the top of his head.
“His first kiss, Smiley,” she laughed. “Get your head out of the gutter.”
And as a fragrant warm breeze wafted up from the sparkling sea below them, across the gardens, the infinity pool and the perfectly appointed deck area, they each receded into their own memories. And with each quietly mulling their own worlds, the mood of the small group slowly cooled, leaving all three gazing westward off toward Pigeon Island, toward the distant horizon, each silently but wholly snared in the net of the days that had led up to this one.
It was Nate who finally spoke, and brought them all back to the realities of the moment. “So, can someone take me into town? I need to rent a car.”
Smiley cocked his head sideways. “Man, I would happily lend you one of my two vehicles, but since meeting you, both dun been ruined.”
“Come,” said Rachael. “I’ll take you where you want to go.”
Nate looked at her. “Rachael, where I want to go is to Ti Fenwe.”
“I know,” she said flatly. “I’m ready when you are.”
The glass door at the house slid back and Rachael’s housekeeper stepped out on the deck with a phone in her hand. “Miss Rachael,” she said with an edge of concern in her voice. “Police at the gate. They demandin’ to come inside.” The round woman looked clearly shaken, and then, remembering the phone in her hand, walked stiffly toward Smiley. “And a call for you, Mr. Edwin.”
Smiley put the phone to his hear and listened. “Sure,” he said hollowly. “Mm hmm, I understand.” He pushed the button on the phone to end the call, but remained staring at it, as if the handset was something vile.
Nate asked, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Rachael stood and wrapped an arm around her housekeeper’s shoulders and muttered a few comforting words. The housekeeper smiled meekly and went back into the house.
“What’s going on, Smiley?” Nate asked again.
“Dat was Peter Finch, my editor, also de General Manager—also de owner—of The Word.” Smiley puffed his cheeks and blew a long slow breath of air out, gently shaking his head as he went. “An’ I h
ave been told to stop following dis story. Or any story dat has to do with Nate Mason, Rachael Stanton or events involving de De Villiers family now, three years ago, or back in 1976.”
“Jesus, Smiley,” said Nate.
“Finch say if I don’t walk away right now, it will cost me my employment.”
“This is Vincent’s work,” said Rachael acidly. “And the police at the gate.”
Nate reached out and placed a hand on Smiley’s shoulder. “You gotta go, then. And right now. This will all be over soon and I’ll be heading home, but you have to live here, Smiley.”
Smiley raised his head and nodded. “Nate, de police, dey here to take you for sure. And I cannot intervene.” He shook his head; his frustration was obvious. “Rachael, can you get him out of here? Is there a way out past de police?”
Rachael bit her bottom lip, then, “There’s the boat. Down at the beach there’s a small pier. I have a boat there.”
“Aright…” said Smiley, standing and extending his hand to Nate. “You mus’ leave now. Forget about dis ting with the De Villiers. Dem playin’ for keeps. Take de boat and go. Get to de airport and fly away, man. Jus’ fly away. I’ll go to de gate and keep the jandam occupied for as long as I can.” He clasped both hands around Nate’s. “Use de time well,” he said gravely.
• • •
The Boston Whaler skipped cleanly along the swells, out of the tiny private bay at the foot of the garden pathway, and around the two iconic peaks, one higher than the other, of Pigeon Island. The boat was a fiberglass eighteen-footer, open hulled, and with a fixed helm at its center. Rachael stood behind a Plexiglas shield and controlled the output of the powerful Mercury 300 as it bit deeply into the water behind them. They quickly passed the sugary crescent of Reduit beach, rounded the headland, and pushed south keeping the island to their left. Nate held tight as the boat carved perfect arcs into the blue water beneath them.
