RONAN
Rain was falling when I left the house, and by the time I got down to the river it had turned to snow. It cast a hush across the city, the river and the valley sitting in silence. At the boat launch I sat on the metal guardrail and watched the water. Most of the boats had already been taken out, dragged to dry dock. Dom’s was still there.
My father hadn’t been in the living room when I left. I knocked on his bedroom door and he didn’t answer. I decided to let him sleep.
I sat for a long time, in the snow. Trains passed, heading north to Canada or south to New York City. On my phone I’d called up the schedule, even selected a ticket on the 5:34 P.M. back to the city. Entered my credit card number. But I couldn’t click Buy. I couldn’t go. Not alone.
Evening; the sky and the water and the Catskills all deep shades of blue slowly blackening. No wind. The snow fell heavy and straight and deliberate. Clump flakes, widely spaced. I wondered which of the sixty words for snow this one was. My father and mother and I used to come here, after going out to eat. We ate out a lot. Most of the restaurants in town bought meat from my dad, and half of them owed him money at any given moment. Business was shit for everyone. My dad made the most of it. And afterward we’d come here, breathe the fresh air, go for a little walk along the edge of the water. For as long as I was small enough, he’d hoist me up onto his shoulders. I could see so much more that way.
They came easier, now. The memories of him. And of my mom.
A truck came, with a flat pronged trailer behind. I knew it would. Who knows how. I knew it would come, and I knew they would both be inside. Maybe that was more of Hudson’s metaphysical caul in action.
“Ronan?” Dom said, getting out once he’d backed the car into place at the water’s edge. The trailer was mostly submerged.
“Hey,” I said.
Attalah exited the car as well, and took his place behind the wheel. “Hello, Ronan,” she said, and then rolled down the window to give Dom a thumbs-up.
I watched them work. They did this together every year. The banal, beautiful details of dry docking. Dom walked down to the boat, got in, started her up. Attalah got out and double-checked the trailer hitch. My throat hurt, watching. Seeing the well-oiled machine that they were. How their love had bonded them into something new.
Love could do that. It always did. It had bonded me and Dom, all those years ago, and we’d rebuilt that bond these last few months, but we’d never achieve something like what they had. What my parents had, down here in this very spot, holding hands and watching me run screaming after seagulls. Give love enough time, and it could weave people into a quilt as big as a city. With a hundred thousand threads. One for each of us.
That’s what the whales had done, here in Hudson. They’d knotted us all up together into something that could keep us safe, even if it also kept us stunted.
The ache in my throat evolved, while I watched. As Dom drove the boat toward the trailer. As it slid neatly into place in the cleft of its prong. As he stepped down into the water, knee-high rubber boots keeping him dry, and began to loop and knot the ropes that bound the boat to the trailer. I realized: I love them. Above all things—above the town, above my pain and hurt over what had been done to it, above my hate, above my need for revenge for the people who’d lost their homes and the people who’d lost their minds. Above my need to punish people for what happened to my mom.
Dom walked out of the water. Went to the driver’s door. Put his hand on the handle to let Attalah out.
I got up. I walked over. The three of us looked at each other without speaking. They were scared of me. I knew that. I was half crazy; I was an addict; I was accountable to nothing but my own savage inexplicable self. I had intruded upon their happiness. I was a threat to them. But I loved them. And I would do anything to keep them safe.
“We have to go,” I said at last.
“Just stop, Ronan,” Attalah said, still sitting behind the wheel.
“I’m serious. We have to leave here. Something really bad is going to happen.”
“Something bad,” Attalah said, and smirked. “What the fuck did you think would happen, when you released all those goddamn naked pictures?”
“That wasn’t me,” I said. “I know it sounds crazy but it wasn’t me.”
“Who was it?”
But I couldn’t say it was Tom Minniq. Dom might be open to seeing the possibility of supernatural intervention here in Hudson, but I knew damn sure Attalah wasn’t.
“I don’t know. I got hacked. I . . .” I let my voice trail off.
Dom’s lips pressed tight together. He was trying not to say something. But I saw it in his eyes. Their fear; their comprehension. Still beautiful; still wide and round and brown-by-gold, but broken now. The tiniest of cracks in his unbreakable confidence in the world’s essential goodness. Dom had come undocked. He knew. He believed. “I think Ronan might be right,” he said, at last. “We have to leave here.”
“I’ve got money,” I said. “Jark’s last check cleared, before they froze his assets. We could get adjoining suites at the fucking Waldorf-Astoria for a goddamn year. Or, you know, if you’d rather, you guys can stay there, and I can go back to my apartment and leave you alone. Whatever you want. But for the next couple of weeks, at least, if not months, I think—”
“Stop,” Attalah said, and I heard an anger there I’d never heard before. By the look on Dom’s face, I doubted he’d heard it too many times himself. “Both of you, just stop. We’re not leaving. You can go if you want to, Ronan—I think it’d be best for all of us if you did. But we’re not.”
My hand moved to my throat, as if she’d punched it. “Please, Attalah. You can’t mean—”
“You’re goddamn right I mean it,” she said, and got out of the truck. Slammed the door. “You’ve done enough damage. I don’t know what kind of hurt feelings or lingering adolescent trauma motivated you to get involved here—and I am grateful to you for your help in getting this all started—but it’s bigger than you, and it’s bigger than me, and I’m not going to let your weakness or your selfishness or whatever—”
“Hey,” Dom said, putting a hand on her arm. “Come on now. There’s no need to get personal. Ronan’s right. Things are happening that are scary as hell, and I’m actually actively frightened. I want us to go. To get the hell out. Before . . . I don’t know. Before things get really ugly.”
She took hold of his hand and lifted it off of her arm. Pushed it back at him, like a gift refused. “You think I don’t know? Are you really that naive?”
“I’m sure you know all about what’s coming,” Dom said. “Because I’m sure you’re involved. Okay? Of course I know that, Attalah. That’s the biggest reason why I want us to get the fuck out of here. I can’t lose y—”
“No, Dom,” she said, and looked from him to me to him to me. “I’m not talking about any of that.”
Dom physically flinched. He got it several milliseconds before I did. “Honey . . .”
“You think I don’t know that you two are fucking?”
Dom took a step back. Like now it was him she’d punched, with words.
Sweet-smelling diesel billowed out of the muffler. In the cab of the truck, the radio was playing. Miss Jackson introduced “One Is the Loneliest Number.”
“Attalah,” I said. “I am so, so sorry.”
She opened the driver’s-side door and got inside. Dom looked at me. He was crying.
I took a step back.
They weren’t mine. I loved them more than anything, but they were theirs. I wasn’t worthy of what they had. There was no place for me. It’d been a mistake to believe there could be. A crime, to try to make one.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Attalah said.
A train whistle sounded, far behind us. The southbound from Albany. The 5:34. I watched it come, a tiny light in the blue distance getting bigger. I watched it wail past us, a clanking metal whale swimming through the dark.