Michael
Michael surveyed the library wearily. There were books everywhere—spread open on the large mahogany table he had converted to a desk, arranged in untidy stacks on the floor, relevant pages carefully marked with yellow sticky notes—all needing to be packed and loaded for the drive back to Middlebury. He eyed the pile of scribble-filled legal pads on his chair, thought of the dozens of research files he’d filled. He’d done a lot of work here, good work by both literary and academic standards, and yet he couldn’t muster a sense of anything resembling satisfaction.
How was it possible that he’d spent so much time and energy on a thing he no longer gave a damn about, or more accurately, had never really given a damn about? And how in God’s name was he supposed to go back and finish the thing?
He had purposely waited until Lane went out to the dunes to begin packing up. She was angry, hurt. He didn’t blame her. In Dickens’s day his actions would have earned him the reputation of a cad or bounder. Fair enough. Except he’d never set out to hurt her. What happened between them had simply erupted in the heat of the moment. But even as he formed the thought, he knew it wasn’t true. Their lovemaking might have been spontaneous, but he sure as hell couldn’t say it was unexpected. Not when he’d so thoroughly enjoyed playing house with her, kissing and touching until the lines had blurred and he’d forgotten it was all just a charade. Last night might have been a mistake, but he sure as hell couldn’t call it an accident.
Restless, and not at all motivated to start boxing up his mess, he set down the borrowed volumes of Dickens he’d been about to reshelve. He needed some air, a distraction, maybe another trip down to the lighthouse—alone this time.
He had no desire to run into Lane, or to renew this morning’s discussion, especially when he didn’t trust himself to stand firm. He’d expected her to try to change his mind, to ask him to stay, to give them a chance—but she hadn’t. Maybe he had misjudged her feelings. Or maybe she knew he was right.
Wandering to the kitchen, he considered making coffee, then thought better of it. He was jumpy enough without adding caffeine to the mix. From the window over the sink, he scanned the dunes. No sign of Lane, or of Mary, either, thank heaven. It wasn’t nice, he knew, but the mere thought of the woman, her mismatched clothes and pale, roughly cropped hair, filled him with revulsion, with recognition that wasn’t really recognition but felt too much like it.
His mother had looked like that near the end, medicated to the point of numbness, unkempt and uncaring, so divorced from reality that days often passed without her leaving her room. He’d done his best to look after her, and Peter, too, heating up the casseroles the neighbor women brought by, making her eat when he could, bringing her pills at the appointed times—retrieving them from her various hiding places later on.
The memory still made him shudder, too vivid, too raw. He’d always believed that if he ever managed to spill his guts about the night of the fire, he would somehow feel relieved, released, but he’d been wrong. He’d also believed coming back to Starry Point, seeing the old house, standing in it, would free him from the dreams that had been plaguing him for months. He’d been wrong about that, too. Then again, maybe he simply hadn’t stood in the fire long enough, hadn’t confronted the darkest of his demons, felt what he needed to feel.
Not bothering to grab his coat, he marched through the parlor and stepped out onto the Cloister’s stone porch. He wavered briefly as he eyed his childhood home, staring back at him now with its frowning front porch and blank dark windows, more daunting, somehow, in the cold gray light of day than it had seemed last night in the pitch-dark. He wasn’t a boy anymore, he reminded himself, and forced his feet to move. He needed to do this.
Crossing the street, he slipped around the sagging side porch, then disappeared between the line of overgrown hedges that ran along the north side of the house. Groping blindly along the stone foundation, he located the small wooden door he’d often used as a boy, the one he’d slipped through to visit the greenhouse the night of the fire.
He had expected to find it boarded that first night, then realized it was doubtful anyone even knew the door existed. The latch had rusted through, leaving only a dangling bit of metal that fell away the moment he gave it a tug. The door itself was bowed and swollen, stubbornly refusing to yield to the pressure of his shoulder. Leaning back on his haunches, he aimed his feet squarely and gave the door a solid kick.
The crawl space was tighter than he remembered, but eventually he made his way through the passage and up the narrow flight of steps to the room off the kitchen his mother had used as a pantry. It was bare now, as was the kitchen, the glass-front cabinets emptied of everything but cobwebs and the faded contact paper that still lined the shelves. As he passed through the vacant dining room, he found himself wondering what had happened to his family’s belongings after the fire. Had they gone to neighbors, to auction, to charity? Or had the smoke ruined it all?
He could smell it suddenly, acrid and thick at the back of his throat, boiling down the stairs, filling the parlor. And then, weeks later, when he’d managed to sneak back inside, the sickening stench of cold, wet ash. The damage was still visible, in the water-stained floors and soot-smeared walls, the blackened staircase with its charred and tortured woodwork. That was the physical damage. The other damage—the real damage—was invisible, but much, much too real.
As a boy he had known instinctively that his mother wasn’t like other mothers, that his home life was nothing like that of his friends, where birthday cakes and Christmas trees—the normal childhood things—were taken for granted. It was inevitable, he supposed, the implosion of his family, a thing he now realized on some gut level he’d always been waiting for, some vivid and violent unraveling that seemed always to be looming. And yet when it came, it had still knocked him for a loop.
In the front parlor a feeble, dun-colored light filtered through the grimy windows, lending the room a strange, underwater gloom, decades of ash and dust hazing the quiet air, mingling with the pong of mildew and old smoke. Steeling himself for the worst of it, he forced his eyes to the staircase. It was why he’d come, after all. To face all of this, to stand in the metaphorical fire and make himself remember.
The images came more quickly than he’d expected: his mother on the second-floor landing, eyes wide with panic as the flames licked down the railing, the reek of scotch as he grappled with her, the slow-motion shower of buttons raining onto the carpet as he clutched the front of her robe and dragged her forcibly down the stairs.
He’d found one of the buttons the day he left the burn unit—tiny and pink, like the mints she used to have on the table at luncheons—tucked into the cuff of the pants he’d been wearing the night of the fire. He couldn’t say why he’d never thrown it away, a warped sense of nostalgia perhaps, a twisted need to cling to who he’d been before the Forresters changed his name and made him over into some other boy.
They’d meant well, trying to make him forget. What they never understood was that it hadn’t all been bad, not early on, not before his father died, and that some small part of him needed to remember the mother who told him stories and made wishes on flowers. At the end she’d been an ungodly mess, sick and unhappy and overmedicated, but once, long before that, she had loved him.
Unbidden, thoughts of Mary filled his head. It shamed him to feel revulsion for a woman he’d never actually met. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but a visceral one, carved into his heart at an early age and breathing there still, a shameful echo of what he’d felt for his mother toward the end.
Even now he found it difficult to forgive her for being what she was, though the rational part of him knew she’d had little or no control over her condition. If only he’d realized it then, he might have helped her, reached her somehow. With a fresh pang of shame he thought of Lane and the way she was with Mary. It was hard not to wonder how different his mother’s life might have been if she’d had such a champion.
His father had certainly never been a champion, too busy moving his money around, or seeing to his duties as Starry Point’s mayor. Hannah Rourke had been just one more thing to manage, or rather, to delegate to the doctors, who despite a merry-go-round of prescriptions had failed miserably. She had teetered for a while, hovering on the brink of disaster, reclusive and paranoid, until one day something snapped and she hurtled over the precipice.
She’d gone away after that—to heal, his father explained. The neighbors never knew all the details, but they knew enough to realize the story about a sick aunt didn’t quite pass muster. She was better when she came home, or at least more docile, with a new set of pill bottles to manage her moods. His father didn’t seem to mind, as long as his wife didn’t embarrass him in front of his constituents. So much for happily ever after.
Not that he’d ever really bought in to all of that. His mother had, and look where it got her. And what of his adoptive parents? They were content, comfortable, which he supposed was a kind of happy, though not in any fairy-tale sense. But then, maybe that’s when it worked, when expectations were low and duty took the place of passion, when neither partner was looking for the happy ending.
Lane was, though. Even if she didn’t know it.
She liked to pretend she was battle hardened, her armor free of chinks, but the way she’d looked at him this morning when he told her he was leaving said otherwise. She wouldn’t be happy with scraps, nor did she deserve them. It had sounded cliché, the kind of thing guys say just before they beat a hasty retreat, but he really would end up disappointing her, and he had no intention of letting that happen.
Stepping to the window, he scrubbed a small circle in the grit and peered across the street at the Cloister, enduring and stoic, its stone towers thrusting against the heavy sky. It had been a kind of prison for him once, its upper rooms lined with narrow iron cots, where homeless, loveless boys dreamed each night of belonging somewhere—anywhere. Now, years later, Lane had made it into a kind of fortress, a place to hide from the world, to insulate herself from her memories and her dreams. Because pretending not to want anything felt safer than wanting something you couldn’t have. He got that, and it wasn’t a bad strategy. It was just a damn lonely one.
He lingered awhile at the window, until the shadows began to stretch and a light came on in one of the towers. Lane’s silhouette drifted past, a glimpse of pale blue sweats, a flash of auburn ponytail. He should step away before he was seen, and yet he found himself rooted to the spot, caught unaware by a homing instinct so sudden, so primal, it almost made him forget to breathe. Suddenly, almost desperately, he wanted to be there, near her, with her, where it felt good and right, and where, he realized now, he’d been happier over the last few weeks than he’d been in a very long time.
All the more reason to get out while he could—while they both could.