Tighter (21 page)

It was a warning of sorts, but I was just so relieved to see him, I ignored it. “Something’s going on, Sebastian. It’s like everyone—Noogie, Emory, Aidan, Lizbeth, even Connie are all acting so incredibly strange. As if there’s this big joke on me, and they won’t tell me why.”

His head tilted. He didn’t answer.

“You know something about it, don’t you? You have to tell me. Tell me!”

“Listen, Jamie. Mrs. Hubbard called my mom. She might have called other people, too. You know how it is around here. And she thinks you’re acting … not normal.” He stepped forward, found my hand through the dark space and sealed his own over it, as if he’d figured out my desire to break for it.

“What a witch.”

“Listen, she’s not a bad old lady. She’s worried. But Noogie and Lizbeth’s laughing at you might be partly my fault. I was with some friends when your text came in. I told them about you coming with Milo, and kids thought it was a joke, so—” A deafening screech drowned him out. Some sound check guys had arrived onstage and were fiddling with the amplifiers.

“So what’s the joke?” I shouted. “What am I not getting?” I was so confused.

“They’re concerned about you, Jamie. We all are.”

“About what?”

Now Sebastian began to walk into the surf, ankle-deep, then pushing forward as he cupped his hands and raised his voice to a shout above the racket, but I was still having trouble hearing him. “I … I tried to understand and … helping Isa and … gone way past the point of … anything for someone … you think … agrees with me … damaging.”

I seized the word. “Damaging? Me, damaging?” It was outrageous. “What are you talking about? I’ve been a good—no, I’ve been a fantastic babysitter for Isa. Which that spoiled, selfish Jessie Feathering had no idea how to be. She used her job and that house as a place to hang out and party, to invite guys over—she’d lock Isa in her room sometimes, did you know that? She hardly cared about anyone but herself, and nobody called her out on it; you were all way too intimidated. Everyone here is so snobby, they can’t even bring themselves to realize how self-centered she was—I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I’ve always got Isa in my heart, always and always.”
and always and where is the girl who looks after the sheep she’s under the haystack

He’d stopped a few feet from me, and was shaking his head. “Jamie, you don’t understand. That’s not what this is about.”

“Right, I get that now. It’s not just money snobs, it’s Bly snobs. It’s like a law here. The don’t-accept-the-outsider law. But I couldn’t be the first person to realize Pete most likely brought down that plane. There’s got to be some evidence. Nobody’s saying that, though, are they? Even if it’s true, even if he confessed it, nobody here would ever want to get involved with a scandal. Oh no, no. Not on Little Bly.”

But Sebastian hadn’t even let me finish, he’d been talking right back at me, his sentences bitten and spit. I could only hear him in phrases, even as I tried to listen though the chaos of my own emotions and all the noise around us, which seemed expressly generated to confuse and disorient me.

“—and that you set plates and cups … you talk to Milo, both of you, like he’s right there, right in the room! Imagine … poor Mrs. Hubbard … you and Isa both pretending that Milo was a real person … every minute … all day. A game of … really screws up … lot of people, can’t … get it? What’s the matter with you, that you can’t get that?”

He stopped. I stared at him, openmouthed. Then another speaker shorted as an electric-guitar chord whined and died. My ears vibrated; I had to cup my hands over them. Many more people had arrived on the beach, and were congregating, and the space was becoming claustrophobic.

“You’re wrong, he’s not dangerous!” I shouted. “He was a brother for Isa. But he’s more than that now, don’t you see? He’s how Peter opened the door.”

Sebastian sliced his arm through the air as if to amputate my words. He was angry, but I pushed on, I had to. “Listen, please, it’s true, I swear it. Peter’s too close to me. What he did, it haunts him, and he knows I’m receptive, you can’t feel him, not you with your perfect skies and your happy little—”

“Jamie, stop! Please! Stop!” Sebastian placed his hand up to my mouth without touching it. His other arm reached to grip my shoulder. “You need help—you really do, Jamie. And I want to help you.”

“Help me? I can’t even trust you, the way you’re looking at me. Like I’m some kind of maniac.” I wrenched away. “You people are all so suspicious, you’ve been watching me like a pack of weasels since the minute I came here. I don’t know why I thought
you
were so different. You’re just the same as all of them. Worse, even, because you tried so hard to trick me into liking you.”

“Jamie!” he called, but I was running now, as fast as I could to get away from him, dodging through the crowd, looping the long way so he wouldn’t catch me, then doubling back to where the car was parked.

They’d never believe me. None of them. Nobody would ever believe me. I’d always be alone. There was no point in explaining it. There was no point in sticking around.

TWENTY-SIX

The island had too many deer. You could see them rib-thin and mangy, wet warm eyes peering, frightened as Confederate soldiers searching for a route back home. I drove in the dark and I willed them
back, back
and I tried not to listen to the sounds in my ears, the sounds of static, of phones ringing for me
bring, brring
the sounds of dogs barking at me
rough, rough
the sounds that nobody else could hear.

Which way out of this noise?

I imagined myself, breathless as the moon, looking over this world but cradled safe in my dream of it. I imagined myself at peace from imagining, in the place where nothing needed to be compared or considered or valued. Crushed into the infinitesimal thing that I was before I was made to be me. I could get back there. Because I was not caught in the lights. I knew the path, even if I’d never felt so alone going down it.

At some point, I’d messed up the car—not sure how—and I’d punctured a tire. The hill was too steep to attempt with a flat. I wouldn’t be able to manage it, and so I left the car at the bottom of the drive.

Got out and staggered uphill by foot the rest of the way.

The house loomed. I’d never hated it as much as tonight, and I ached with homesickness. I saw myself with the twins, shining flashlights from our backyard tent. There was Mom clapping her hands when I finally braved the slide at the playground. And Dad inventing the lyrics to a holiday carol as we added gumdrops to a kitchen-table gingerbread house.

Those days seemed very far away, and not entirely mine.

Isa was sleeping. Probably Connie, too. Milo was nowhere. I opened the door to his room. The same unused bedroom I’d discovered that first day.

The yellow room, Isa had called it. A nondescript guest room, neat as a pin and minus a guest, and yet Milo did live here, in his own way. He’d been real enough, a terrifyingly intimidating boy who spoke to all my own fears of what those Little Blyers were “really” like. Milo had made perfect sense to me. He’d been easy to control.

Until he had stopped being Milo.

I continued down the hall to my room, where I fell sideways across my bed. Shaking off my shoes, listening to them drop
plop, plop.

How long did I sleep? An hour? I swallowed the last of my own pills and then tiptoed downstairs to Connie’s bathroom. I could hear her coughing through the wall. I scooped handfuls of her drugstore meds and swallowed them dry.

In the study, I closed the door. In another version of tomorrow, there would be a scene. It was unavoidable. The phone call from Miles McRae. Followed by one from Mom and Dad. The indignant thpeeth from Connie. A quick decision, an online ticket, a silent drive to the ferry. I didn’t care. I was so past caring and I didn’t want tomorrow.

So I’d forged another tomorrow. And now I stretched out on the couch, dozing easily, and when I woke up, Peter was waiting for me in a haze and ripple of burning gasoline. I could feel the oil slick on his skin and soaking his clothes. I breathed myself inside his moment, when he’d crashed from one world into another.

Up close, Peter’s pale eyes weren’t particularly kind. But he hadn’t been a particularly kind person. Nor frail and combustive like Hank, nor too frightened of this world, like Uncle Jim. Who were also here, in a sense, though it was only Peter’s presence that counted tonight, as real and true as the moment he’d shifted into the negative, imagined space that had contained Milo.

But Milo had been a story and a secret. A fight in the mirror, a tussle with my insecurities, a scapegoat when I burned the pages of my journal, a reproving smack across my own cheek when my emotions threatened to destabilize me. Whereas Peter’s soul was separate. And now he was here. Now, he had come for me.

I wanted to ask him things, and yet my questions seemed worthless, so I didn’t. I stood and I followed him out of the study, through the front door and onto the porch. My feet were bare, but the sharp driveway pebbles didn’t bother me, nor did the rough grass as we began to climb. I was gliding through a painless void, I’d leaped safely to an in-between place where nothing bothered me, not anymore.

Higher and farther. I knew where we were heading. I’d seen my destiny on my very first afternoon at Skylark. It hadn’t been Jessie and Peter who’d jumped. It had been Peter and me.

The wind seemed to lift me from my toes—I felt as if I were floating. Peter’s rhymes made a song in my head
Peter Peter pumpkin eater had a wife and couldn’t keep her put her in a pumpkin shell and there he kept her very well
 … A pumpkin shell, that didn’t sound all bad … a shell was safe, a quiet place to crawl inside. I’d been looking for one myself.

“Isa,” I murmured. Her falling nightmares had been warnings, and in the sound of my voice, I caught a rough snag of memory that woke me into the freezing gust of ocean spray stinging my face, the scream of nerves in my cut and bleeding feet, the animal fear beating in my chest as I saw that we’d come to a stand high on the outcropping of rock.

I closed my eyes.

A rejection of everything that is known, for an embrace of everything that isn’t.

What a strange trade.

From far away, I thought I heard someone call my name.

TWENTY-SEVEN

I left Little Bly unconscious. Maybe that was the right way to go? Spirited from one underworld and into another. I’d once read that for some of us, all of life is a rehearsal for this instant. For others, it’s pure impulse. No note, no warning. Only the moment.

The last thing I remember thinking, before I jumped, was that now I fully understood both paths.

When I came out of the coma, days later, I was first aware of my two fists, soft and empty, furled and stubborn, as my eyes opened on the green walls of Boston University Hospital, and I was reborn into a pain that screamed its massive appetite into every damaged cell of my body.

Days in, days lost. But eventually I surfaced, more or less, and I learned the nuts and bolts of what I had become. There was an implanted chest tube for my semi-collapsed lung. A steel rod in my femur where I’d fractured it in multiple places. A figure-eight splint around my shoulders to hold in place my snapped collarbone. One arm was encased in plaster and a sling. And as many dings and bruises as there was space on my body to show for them.

In other words, lucky to be alive.

“We’re all going to get through this together, Jamie.” At first, my mother’s voice was my only universe. A familiar whorl of sound days before I could comprehend what she was saying, as I allowed her to creep slowly into my consciousness.

At some point, I also noticed that the ringing in my ears had stopped. It was one of the first questions I’d asked, and it had an answer: the noise had stopped because the medication—the
correct
medication, Dr. Shehadha stressed—was working.

“Auditory delusion is one in a network of controllable symptoms,” she’d explained during one of those early-days rounds. “And it’s easy to treat.” She’d been so easy with the information, as if remarking on my left-handed serve or the chip in my tooth. Just another thing about me.

Shehadha, that was a pretty name, and something lifted in the recesses of my memory. Once I’d read a storybook about an Egyptian girl with that same last name, or similar.

“Egypt?” I hadn’t even thought she’d heard me as I’d stared fuzzily at the letters on her name tag. It was an out-there question, borne on sedation. My thoracotomy tube had been removed earlier that morning, and my throat was a tunnel of sandpaper, my voice a croak of escape from it.

“You mean, as in the origin of my name?” She looked pleased. “Is that what you said, Egypt? You’re right, it’s Egyptian.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

The doctor’s almond eyes sized me up. Mom’s version of what had happened to me was heavy on tender loving care, but light on facts. But now Mom and Dad were downstairs in the cafeteria for lunch. I knew this because Mom had told me so about eleven times.

“We’re going down for a bite to eat, honey. Do you understand, Jamie? Just a hop on over to the hospital cafeteria. To have lunch. We’ll be back. Twenty minutes, tops.”

After they’d left, I’d pressed the call button. I told the nurse I wanted Shehadha back. I needed to ask the kinds of questions that were harder to brave when parents were hanging around on the sidelines.

“I’m taking your curiosity as positive sign. We’ve been reducing the morphine. So you might be feeling less groggy.” Dr. Shehadha had a broad, taut face like a fashion model, without a model’s blank expression of having been recently beamed to earth. A face I could trust.

“I jumped,” I said as the night came back to me in a cold brush.

Her expression neutralized. “You did.”

“I remember,” I told her, “but I can’t remember why, exactly. It was like it happened to a different person.”

“You were very disoriented and confused. Those are symptoms.”