Tighter (15 page)

My hands pummeled him. “Get off me, you loser. I’m not in the mood to deal with any of this.”

“Who’s the loser? I’d be doing you a favor. And you should get in some practice. He’ll smell that inexperience on you.” I could feel the warmth radiating from Milo’s skin as his hand smoothed my hair from my face. “If it’s not me, your next best bet is up in your bedroom, making out with your pillow, am I right?”

I shoved him with my feet, hard, then sat up, breathing out my anger in bursts. “Thanks but no thanks. I think I’ll be just fine without your tutorial.”

The next moment was silence. I waited for him to go first.

“You might need it more than you think.”

I went rigid. Milo’s voice wasn’t his own anymore. It was low, an entirely different cadence and octave. But I couldn’t look at him, I couldn’t even speak. I waited. “After all, we both know you’re the crazy one, Jamie.”

“I’m not crazy,” I whispered. “Stop talking like that.”

“You’re onto what happened here,” he continued in the same hollowed tone that didn’t belong to Milo at all. “How it all went down. They say that the crazy people can always see clear down to the ugliest truth. Problem is, nobody believes ’em. But all you need’s a little proof, right?”

“Stop it.” When I forced myself to glance over, Milo looked exactly the same. It was his expression—his daredevil smirk—that belonged to someone else. “Seriously, stop it, Milo. I know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, really? What am I doing?”

“You know what, it’s like you’re imitating him, you’re allowing him, somehow, you’re letting him into the space—
stop it!
” That smirk! I couldn’t restrain myself; I lunged, my fingertips like pincers digging at Milo’s skin, yanking at his shoulders, his neck like dough
roll it and prick it and mark it and prick it and mark it
as Milo yelped and leaped panther-like out of my grasp, jumping to perch on the armrest on the opposite end of the couch. I was breathing hard; my entire body was shaking with panic.

Get control of yourself, Jamie. Nothing good happens when you lose control of yourself.

I pressed my hands to my blazing cheeks.

“Jeez, Jamie. Way to take a joke.”

“You weren’t …” What had come over me? I’d gone and attacked this kid … he could call his father and report me … worse. “I’m s-sorry,” I stammered. “I’m not … not sure what came over me. For a minute I thought you’d become—that you’d turned—”

“Turned what?” he demanded. Glaring and scornful.

Turned into Peter.
But I couldn’t force myself to say it out loud. “I don’t know. I don’t know what else to say. You scared me. You shouldn’t have talked in that voice. It wasn’t funny. I’m not crazy, but I am sorry.”

He dropped to the seat, exaggeratedly wary, as if I were some attack dog now chained. “Fine. Then I’m sorry, too.”

“Let’s just forget it, then.”

“Sure. Whatever. Already forgotten.” Only his tone told me otherwise as he stood. “I’m going up now. I’m beat.”

But by now I was collecting my thoughts and my reason. This hadn’t been entirely my fault. Milo didn’t see me as all the way “normal” and he took advantage of it, throwing his voice, freaking me out with his singular, menacing ability to channel Peter. This was all an intentional, elaborate invention for Milo, an amateur magician’s game to frighten and destabilize me. Then, as soon as I lost it, all he had to do was pull back and claim innocence.

Uneasily, I picked up the empty dessert plates, and Milo clicked off the television.

We moved clumsily through the next few minutes, excessively polite to each other as we headed upstairs, where I rinsed the dishes and wiped down the counters. But Milo had gone so quiet that new thoughts collided through me. What if Peter actually
had
manifested himself through Milo? What if I’d witnessed something, some kind of split-second transmutation, that even Milo himself wasn’t fully aware of?

Milo wasn’t talking. His silence seemed impenetrable, so I didn’t make an attempt at false conversation. We said goodnights and he left. I was still nervously over-tidying the kitchen when Isa came stumbling in, red-eyed and whining sleepily.

“I went down to your room and you weren’t there. I had another nightmare, that I was falling through the sky and I couldn’t—what’s wrong?” Suddenly she was right up in my face. I blinked. “Jamie, are you in one of your trances again?”

“My trances?”

“Sometimes you go away. You’re here but you’re not here.”

“Very funny.” Except I knew all too well what she meant. How, I wondered stupidly, in the thousandth iteration of this thought, would I ever get off these pills? They were making me see things, they’d turned Milo into Peter, but every time another one wore off, all I could think about was getting the next. It would require some act of extreme will or meditation or—

“LIKE RIGHT NOW!” Isa’s hand was flapping in front of my face. “There’s times like right now,” she repeated, more gently, “when I’ll be talking to you, and I know you haven’t heard what I just said.”

Good Lord, what was my problem?
Focus, focus.
“What did you just say?”

“I asked if you’d make me a milk and honey.”

“Sure.” Capably, my au pair persona re-pinned like a nurse’s hat, I took out a saucepan for the milk. After Isa drank it, I took her upstairs to her bedroom. Although I didn’t want to, I couldn’t leave without checking the fireplace.

More tiles had been chipped out. A few lay broken in the grate. Shivering, I rushed from the room and sped down the hall, nearly tripping over myself, my eyes averted from the portrait of the ghostly children, my hand out to grab the doorknob, not stopping until I’d locked myself safe in my own room.

Where I was too jittery to sleep. I tried a hot shower, my fuzzy socks, the radio tuned softly to classical, and then flipping through my journal, which was an absolute mess. I’d hardly been marking the dates and my thoughts seemed haphazard. My
Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes
was in my top bureau drawer; for the first time, I took it out and flipped through its pages. The illustrations—round-cheeked children in pinafores, with their flower garlands and quaint toys—always used to soothe me, but tonight the words seemed extra ominous.
Pop
—had the weasel exploded? And what had possessed Dumpty, a man made from raw egg, to scale a wall? The three blind mice reminded me of the portrait children outside my door.

With a shiver, I closed the book and shoved it into the nightstand.

Eventually, I picked up
Romeo and Juliet.
Peter’s spidery, over-slanted handwriting marked the play with notes like “joy before death?” “no way out but violence, passion, death.” It was pretty clear that Peter saw himself as a dark Romeo, the reckless romantic.

Midway through the second act, I butterflied the play and crept out of bed to the bookcase. Giving in. Justifying it. My back was still throbbing from the jolt my tailbone had taken, riding on the back of Sebastian’s bike last night.

So what if I needed something? It was just an itty-bitty little something.

I had a good handful of pills left. And then what? Did Connie have a stash? Would over-the-counters work? I couldn’t think that far ahead. I popped one, praying that it was just your basic painkiller.

Crawling to bed, I returned to Peter’s notes in the play, pausing to read the back inside cover.

We live with minimal awareness of why we choose certain paths. We are predetermined but we can’t escape ourselves—our families—our characters—our destiny.

It was a bleak vision, especially as I applied it to myself. What if Uncle Jim’s and Hank’s choices weren’t choices at all? What if they were destined from birth to meet their troubled ends? Did they know my future, my fate, before I did? Was that why they persisted? Would they hunt me down at my most vulnerable moment, the moment before The Moment, forever?

An ornately gilt-framed oil painting hung above the fireplace. I stared at it as I had nearly every night before. A European city street at twilight. Narrow buildings hunkered over the cobblestone. Red flowers on the balcony splashed its only spot of color. I imagined Juliet standing there, delirious with longing and wishing that her beloved wasn’t

The word switched on like the click of a flashlight.

Moments later, swift on my toes, my mouth pressed tense every time the floorboards gave, I found my way into Miles McRae’s darkened den, where I turned on the computer and logged in as
PQUINT.

PASSWORD?

MONTAGUE.

And then, like a key to the treasure room, Peter Quint’s home page opened.

He’d died almost a year ago, but here on his Facebook, he continued to exist in cyberheaven, still visited by loved ones who had plastered his wall with photographs of lilies and wreaths, and notes and passages from the Bible. I skimmed them all, and then clicked into his stash of private messages, over two hundred of them unread. Probably more tributes, so I didn’t bother to read them, but instead scrolled all the way back to the oldest messages, the read messages, from when Peter was alive.

Here was one from Sebastian, referring to an incident where Pete had let his temper get the best of him. Sebastian’s note was characteristically forgiving and teasing:
u CANT be the guy in the bar with the gut throwing punches and busting walls cuz dude we all know that guy and he sux.

Another friend, Greg Doonan, had sent notes on fishing conditions off the Sound. Another guy sent photos of his dog pretending to drink beer. I didn’t know any of these kids. They were Pete’s school friends, his fishing buddies. I began to pick up the messages from Jessie, though there was never anything particularly revealing from her, either. She’d been as caught up as anybody in the day-to-day of life on Bly, though I did sense her daring in the messages, especially the fascination with flying in her father’s prop plane—which, in one message, Jessie had described to Peter as
better than sex, am I rite? jk! kinda!

Of course it was wrong of me to read them. No matter that he had died, I was still intruding in on Peter’s private memories, and his most intimate relationship. My entire body was taut with the transgression, the strange dip-diving fear, absorbing all of this information that didn’t belong to me.

Staring at the albums, I could hear the stick in my own breath, feel the chalky swallow after I’d forgotten to swallow. Jessie loved the camera, she vamped and pouted for it. Her figure was curvier, her hair wilder, her features more lush and ripe than mine. In one picture, she was showing off her silver tongue piercing; in another, I caught a glimpse of a blue butterfly tattoo at her hip bone. But now I could see the resemblance, through the prism of all her angles and expressions. Jessie Feathering looked more like me than my own sister—except that I was the diminished version, the ghost of her.

I clicked open Pete’s last read message, from Jessie, that had been sent the day before the accident.

Way to be a jerk not showing at green hill today. I’m pretty sure we had plans, y? What is it about Pendleton that makes you come back from there being such a tubocharge jackass? gets boring, Chippy & i don’t know what you think you know, or what Isa told you, but take it with a grain of salt. Isa can be freakishly imaginative.

And as for what
She
told you—that’s such a joke I wont even dignify it with a defense.

P: I luv you & I think we’re great together. But not when ur in a mood, not when ur an insecure paranoid. If you want me in ur life, then roll with my choices. What’s left to say? Drop me a line if you feel like it.

I sat there utterly still in the darkness and frowned into the puzzle of the text.

What had Isa said?
Pendleton
, where was that?
She
, who was She?

Too many questions and nowhere to find answers. I opened a new window, typed in a search and got parks, towns, shops and even a racetrack named Pendleton.

When I typed in
JESSIE FEATHERING
, I found the same old AP news brief all about the crash, plus some local coverage of the funerals, and then a tribute site that had been set up at Jessie’s school. A local link went to a photo, a sweetly smiling Jessie, younger than I’d ever seen her, and names—Jessie was the daughter of Patricia and John, Peter was the son of August and Katherine—but I knew most of these details already, from previous searching.

I returned to Jessie’s message. In my original picture of Peter and Jessie, they’d been two star-crossed opposites whose relationship had stirred the conflict between Bly’s lifers and locals. What everyone had seemed to agree on, however, was that the two of them were deeply in love with each other. Or (at the very least) deeply infatuated.

And yet this offhand, prickly, irritated note, written by Jessie only the day before they died, didn’t fit the picture of soul mates. This note spelled trouble between them.

NINETEEN

“I’m biking into town to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy,” I said. “Back in an hour or so. I’ll have my cell.”

Connie and Isa nodded. They were in round six of a Crazy Eights–athon. “And you’ll need to pick up a can of thtainleth thteel thcrubber,” said Connie, who never liked me to go anywhere without carting back a domestic offering.

Not a question = no answer. Please.
Get your own scrubber, Funsicle.

Miles’s Trek bike was in the garage. Why hadn’t I thought to use it before? Before I’d thrown my back, I’d always relied on a long run to unwind whatever pressure had wrung knots in my day. Sweat off my problems, exhaust my mind as I burned out my body. A bike might be easier on me, physically—only how long since I’d taken out a bicycle?

Once upon a time, bikes were Mags and my main escape route: to the movies or Friendly’s or cutting across the highway to Walgreens, where we wasted hours in the Crafts aisle, pondering the purchase of stuff we didn’t need. But those days got junked with our Schwinns the second we passed our driving tests.