Tighter (17 page)

“You could always sell your Lamborghini and upgrade to a house.”

“No.” Isa shook her head with great conviction. “That’s not what M.A.S.H. is. It’s about your final destiny.”

“M.A.S.H. is just a silly game.” I flipped the paper. “Do you want to do mine?”

“The shack wrecked my mood. Let’s go get Milo. He might be downstairs watching movies.”

“You go.” I didn’t want to. Lately, Isa hadn’t been too interested in tagging after Milo, or trying to include him in her entertainments, which was a relief. Milo existed in a neutral background these days—in other words, right where I wanted him.

After I’d settled Isa for the night, supplying her with a mug of honey-sweetened milk and her nature DVDs, and I was in my room getting ready for bed myself, I heard a scrape and thud directly over my head. In moments, I was up on the third floor, in the canopy bedroom. Where the curtains had been drawn—who’d done that?—casting it in near total darkness. The only light source was a blaze in the hearth, and Milo crouched in front of it, prodding it with a fire iron.

“What’s going on here? Did you open the flue?”

“Uh-huh.” He didn’t seem surprised or concerned to see me. The fire’s flames bathed him in a lurid orange half-light. “What’s it look like I’m doing? I’m burning stuff.” He gave a few more turns of the poker.

“What are you burning?” On a glance, just some papers.

“I write in a journal.” He spoke below his breath, so that his words weren’t quite for me. “Because I like to see everything written down. So that I know it really happened. That I wasn’t just making it up. Then I read it and memorize it. And then I have to destroy the hard evidence.”

I thought of my own journal, the muddle of every page. All those unfiltered, lunatic letters to Sean Ryan.

“What is it, exactly, that you need to destroy?”

“Everything that I don’t want to be true.”

“Come downstairs.”

“When the fire’s dead, I will.”

But I waited. It seemed irresponsible to leave Milo here, unattended, while a fire was burning.

“We have more in common than you think, you and I,” he said. The flickering light shadowed his face and shone reddish over his hair while siphoning the color from his eyes, and now he wasn’t exactly Milo anymore. I blinked him back to form.

The ringing in my ears was erratic but at the same time quite painful: in one moment as loud as the clang of church bells and then morphing to a wet but staticky noise like a nature show’s sound track amplified for some inaudible thing—the tunneling earthworm, the hatching larva. I fought a wave of fatigue as I leaned against the doorframe. “I wouldn’t know about that,” I told him. “Since I really don’t know anything about you.”

“But I know so many things about you.” Was the smoke getting thicker? It was too dark to focus. The fire seemed to have raised the temperature of the room. And Milo’s voice had deepened. Another trick, maybe.

“Like what?”

“You can see things that other people can’t see.” No, it was not Milo’s voice. “Isn’t that true? Because I’m always here, always. Even if the others can’t sense me, you can, always.”

“You brought me up to this room on purpose,” I said faintly.

“We used to come here all the time,” said Milo—though he wasn’t Milo, not anymore. He had taken on the shape of Milo, he’d lured me upstairs and into this room as Milo, and now it was too late—he’d drawn me in. And I realized, a cold and sinking knowledge, that I couldn’t consciously control what I saw anymore. Or what I heard.

“And we had a code, remember that?” he said. “She’d tell Isa to go to her room or the lighthouse or her playroom and—”

“You shouldn’t have done that to Isa,” I interrupted.

In profile he looked thoughtful but defiant. “No. Maybe not.”

“You loved Jessie,” I said. “And I do know how it feels to love someone who might not have returned that feeling with the same strength. Someone who maybe thought of you as a diversion, and who began to slip away from you before you were ready to let go. But love makes you stupid, and it was wrong—pointless and wrong—to hold on tighter to someone who was already gone. Gone from you, I mean.”

He didn’t answer. The room was warm, too warm. His skin seemed lit up by the fire—it threw off a radiance, sparks and heat. “And you’re right,” I continued, with as much assurance as I could muster, though I could hardly hear myself over the noise in my own ears. “You’re always here, I sense you always, and there are times when I also see you very clearly, Peter. I wish I didn’t. But you know that, don’t you? You know how much I don’t want to see you.”

“It’s nobody’s choice, Jess,” he said as he turned, and then all at once he’d closed the space between us in waves of heat and burning gasoline, smothering, a nearly unendurable furnace. But I didn’t move to leave or stop him. It almost startled me how easily I closed my eyes, deadened my will, my limbs, and gave into accepting that—if only for the moment—it was all exactly as he said it was. Even as my logical mind struggled to assert that I was witnessing nothing more than persuasive magic of the darkness and my own troubled dream state, of course I knew that it was more.

TWENTY-ONE

How many minutes was I there? When did the fire go out, when did I break free from my vision to find myself alone with my terror? No idea, no idea. All I knew was that then I wrenched free, I became all motion, sprinting manic down the stairs, thudding the runner with my heels to feel the shock vibrate up my spine, humming a pop song to muffle the existing chaos in my ears. Reconnecting with my senses as if released from a spell. Straight to my room, where I locked my doors, locked my bedroom and then locked my bathroom—ridiculous gestures, really—and I showered in the harsh jet of cold water that left a taste of ice and iron in my mouth.

In acknowledging Peter Quint, I’d let him in. He’d used Milo to communicate because he’d sensed an impressionable contact in me. Same as Uncle Jim and Hank. I knew this in capital letters. But now what? Did that mean he would follow me everywhere, always? Did I have to add his restless soul to the burdens I already carried?

I needed to medicate—badly—but I was down to my last handful, a little more than a dozen. Some painkillers, possibly another sleeping pill, some of Mom’s button-cute muscle relaxers and four wimpy blue antihistamines. I popped a couple of the antihistamines anyway, to take the edge off, but they weren’t much help.

Sleepless, I flipped and kicked for hours, and in the sleep-hushed hour before dawn, I finally crept downstairs for a bowl of cereal. Exhaustion unsteadied me, but it was still too dark to go outside, to run or bike or do anything to get out of my head.

Instead, I stole into the den and switched on the computer, fishing up Peter’s Facebook, staring again at his wall and his photos, rereading his mail and looking for another way in. If I could unlock the secret of Peter, maybe then I’d have the key that might release us both from our obsession.

Pendleton. I’d searched for it before. Lots of things were called Pendleton. A men’s discount clothing store in Warwick, Rhode Island. A breeder of King Charles spaniels in Los Angeles. But. The thought sparked. Peter Quint’s Pendleton would likely be in Massachusetts.

My fingers raced to specify
PENDLETON, MA,
and soon I’d hit a home page of sunny skies and gentle faces and testimonials that promised a healthful stay at the Pendleton Mental Health Facility. Was this his Pendleton? Was it worth checking out? It wasn’t a bad wager, and it was only thirty miles away, once I got off the ferry.

Peter had visited someplace called Pendleton one day before the crash. Had he been there to see someone specific? His mother fit this category—the
She
who was near but not visible, alive but not active in Peter’s life. Or that’s what Sebastian had said.

Morning light was creeping through the cracks. As day transformed the sky, I stole back upstairs and fell into bed. My bones were granite—if my bed had been an ocean, I’d have dropped straight to the bottom. Connie would be exasperated if I woke up too late. This was my last thought before sleep rescued me.

When I came to, noon was high and hot, and I was thinly bathed in sweat, the sheet sticking to my body, and when I got up, my hair lay damp on my neck and cheeks. Outside my bathroom window, I spied Isa in her bathing suit, lolling on a deck chair by the pool. She’d even brought out a pitcher plus two glasses of lemonade. As I watched, there was a rippling in the water, and then I saw Sebastian pull himself up to land, swipe a towel off the back of a chair, dry off, then flop down on his stomach on the chair next to Isa.

Sebastian to the rescue. I couldn’t have wished for better.

“ ‘She walks in beauty, like the night,’ ” he said, rolling over, his amber eyes bright with welcome when I came down in my bikini and cutoffs to join them a few minutes later. “That’s what I was planning to quote if you slept all day long.”

“Are you off today? You usually come over after work. I didn’t expect you.”

“Yeah, it’s usually the result of someone dropping by unexpectedly. I’m doing deliveries today, but it got so hot I decided I had to jump in a pool before noon. But dang,
I
should have been an au pair this summer. I could definitely handle the diva hours.”

In his tease, he’d deliberately put me on the hook. “I don’t usually sleep in,” I said, embarrassed. “Tell him, Isa.”

“Hmmm,” she said, “you do kinda, though, Jamie.”

Sebastian unbuckled his watch. “There’s an alarm built into it,” he said. “And it’s waterproof. You’re all set. I’ll take it back at the end of the summer.” He strapped it to my wrist.

“Oh.” The watch had heft, a cobalt face. I’d noticed and liked it before; it looked kind of manly fashionable. “Okay, then. Thanks.” I touched my fingers to Sebastian’s shoulder. He sprang to reaction as if he’d been waiting for it, folding his hand over mine, jumping up and using it as a lever to twist me against his body as he began moving us in locked, mechanical steps toward the pool’s deep end.

“See, we’ll test it. One hundred percent waterproof, promise.”

“Noooo … !” But it was such a delicious thrill, the backs of my legs against the fronts of his legs. I was struggling and laughing, with Isa shyly chiming in as she watched us—until I gave up and Sebastian and I went smashing into the shock of water. By the time I’d pushed and sputtered to surface, he was in a crawl halfway down the length.

I caught up with him in the next lap, and for a few more we kept pace, sinking to turn identical flips against the wall, two, three, four … over and over until I stopped, my lungs burning, to hold the wall, exhausted. I’d really lost ground from my former athletic days. Swimming, that’s what I should have been doing all along, the whole time I was here. I should have been keeping up with my physical-therapy exercises. Taking care of myself in these simple, sensible and obvious ways—why wasn’t it ever a clear choice?

“Are you gonna pull down her top now?”

I blinked the water out of my eyes to see that Isa had come to the edge of the pool. Where she was inspecting us.

“Isa!” I heard my mother’s voice in mine, all puritanical outrage.

“What? That’s what Pete did with Jessie.”

I was mortified, caught off guard, but Sebastian let out a playful growl as he reached one hand up out of the pool to clamp it around Isa’s ankle. Then he pretended to bite it as he launched himself out of the pool, and the whole awkwardness of Isa’s comment melted away into a game of tag.

“You’re not a bad swimmer,” he said to me later, after an exhausted Isa had trotted up to the house for a lemonade refill.

“I was into some sports—I ran track.”

“Why’d you give it up?”

“It gave me up,” I answered, a nonanswer. My coach had thought the injury shouldn’t have stopped me from quitting the team. It seemed so far away, running track. The discipline, the energy, the urge to compete. Like I’d been this whole other person. “I threw out my back,” I added quietly. “It’s an old injury, but it still bothers me.”

“They say swimming’s good for that, right?” Sebastian readjusted the lounge chair so he was parallel to the sun, as he dropped on a pair of sunglasses. “I take pool over beach any day, probably on account of almost drowning in the ocean.”

I stared. “When’d that happen?”

“Eh, long time ago, with my cousins. But if I ever need to access fear for drama class, I just tap into that day.”

“Tap into it now, how about?”

Sebastian smiled, that flash of Movie Star Teeth, and my stomach caved in appreciation. “We were all ten years old and horsing around. No big story there.”

“C’mon, details. Were you in real danger? Did you ever have that moment where you thought … it was over?”

He looked at me curiously. “Details and danger, okay. So they held me in too long, and I lost consciousness. They figured I was playing dead, but when they let me up, there was water in my lungs and I wasn’t breathing. Then Aunt Barb saved my life with chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth.”

“Wow. Hooray for Aunt Barb.”

“No joke. She still talks about it: she says I gave her a good fright.”

“I bet.” In my mind’s eye, I saw him precisely. Flat on the sand, a skinny blue boy with dents beneath his eyes and the agitated hum of the crowd surrounding him, pressing in for a closer look.

“And yeah, to answer your question, I did think it was over. The way a kid thinks those kinda things, a little dislocated from it all—but those last seconds, my body giving up, I remember saying to myself, ‘Bye, world. Hi, forever.’ ”

I closed my eyes. I’d thought that thought, too, in a different context. “It sounds like you were close.”

He nodded. “Funny thing, I’m almost grateful it happened. Every time I jump in the water—even when I go back into ocean—I’m always incredibly humbled at how I got that second chance to live another day.”

“What’s so great about another day?”

Maybe it was my sharp tone. Sebastian checked me over. “Is that a rhetorical question?”

I smiled like it was, but I wanted to know. “More like an essay question.”