BY THE MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER THE SUN SEEMED to rise and set three times each day. After two weeks of faked indifference, I crawled onto Jamie’s dresser and out the bedroom window. I’d seen him do it ten times by then, an easy and fluid feat. But my knees couldn’t find space on the sill. I scraped my back on the window sash, and tumbled, shoulder first, into darkness.
“That didn’t hurt too much, did it?” Jamie asked. He sat on the flat roof, his back to the house, his legs stretched over the tar and gravel, like a hobo who’d just jumped freight. I picked a piece of gravel from my palm and flicked it at him.
“Oh God, my eye.” He burst out laughing.
“Are you done smoking?” I asked.
“Are you saying you want to join me for some fine tobacco product?”
“Can I?”
The morning had been damp, but the afternoon had sizzled. The tar was still warm. The flat roof lay like an apron over the darkness. Jamie tossed me a pack of Winstons. A match hissed, lighting the freckles around his nose.
“Thanks,” I said. It was more words than we’d spoken since Richard was lost at sea.
That day, the news had raced across our town’s roads and wires. Men in rectangles of yellow light announced the death to dark bars. Women outside storefronts downtown exchanged sighs of grief—or was it relief, this time? The Norths’ phone rattled for hours.
As I walked along the boardwalk that afternoon I passed two police officers, Garrett Lindstrom and another whose last name was Heiner. Both men had once worked for my father. They stood, straddling their bicycles, draped in blue ponchos slick with rain.
“I mean, what was he expecting?” Heiner asked. “I thought he was smarter than that. Not, you know, capable, but smarter than that at least.”
“Cal,” Lindstrom said, grinning when he saw me. “You already heard about Richard, I guess?”
But on Monday nobody mentioned Richard at school. I listened for his name at Belinda’s and didn’t hear it once. It felt as if he’d been erased. No surprise, really. What is there to say about a fire once it’s out?
His death was, for everyone in Loyalty Island, a remarkably fortunate tragedy. As much as Richard was hated, he was also a Gaunt. There had never been a Loyalty Island, Washington, without the Gaunts. Now there was. There simply was no way to express what that felt like to the guy on the next stool, or to the woman behind you in line at Safeway, or to the kid next to you in the bathroom, sneaking a cigarette at lunchtime.
There was only one person in town—that I knew of, at least—who still wanted to talk about Richard, and, unfortunately, I shared a room with him. The morning after we heard the news, Jamie stood silently in the bathroom doorway while I brushed my teeth.
“What,” I asked. “What? What?”
He took a breath. “What is right. Don’t you think—?”
I spit toothpaste on his foot and shut the door.
In those next two weeks AR—After Richard—Jamie never said what he was thinking, but I could see his suspicions twitching at the corners of his mouth. I was sure he had some theory—he always did. On the way to school, I walked two steps ahead. I ate the dinners Betty prepared alone, upstairs. As Jamie had predicted, she didn’t seem to care.
I couldn’t decide what Richard’s death on the boat proved. The details coming in were still sketchy. The season didn’t stop when a man went overboard, even if the man was Richard Gaunt. For a while I told myself that I would know soon enough, that if I could be there when my father returned, if I could find his eyes just as he stepped off the boat, I would catch him off guard and everything would be clear. After a day or two I had to give up that fantasy.
The problem was that my father had never been so alive in my mind as he was once I began to suspect him of murder. I could see each wrinkle around his eyes, the sapling-shaped scar twisting between his upper lip and left nostril. I saw his first full day on the Bering Sea, his first view of the waves that cracked against the boat like chunks of slate. I smelled the green mud the crew rubbed on the back of his slicker—for luck, they said. And I saw him waving away Don and Sam’s cigarette smoke with the back of his hand, so that he could lean in close enough to whisper terrible, murderous things.
My mother was a different story. I’d expected her to call again, but she hadn’t. By the second week I no longer checked the answering machine when I came home from school. Instead, I replayed our last conversation. Sometimes I regretted what I’d said. Sometimes I thought that if I’d acted differently during those brief minutes in my dark bedroom, then everything would be different. My mother would still be in Loyalty Island. Richard Gaunt would still be alive. Sometimes I thought that nothing I’d done had mattered at all.
One night I dreamed I was walking the dim hallways of a hospital. Pools of water slid from the cracks under doors. I opened one of the doors and found my mother in bed, her stomach the size of a tortoise. John Gaunt stood next to her, dressed as a surgeon, clutching her hand with long white fingers. “Cal,” he said, “you’re quite the explorer. Fearless!” Then he plucked out his teeth and placed them on my mother’s head like a tiara.
I woke up wanting to talk to her. It would have been easy enough to find Meg’s number. But when I tried to imagine our conversation I heard only the strum of a guitar, smelled the lye in Meg’s threadbare rugs. So I talked to her in my mind. Again and again I returned to what she’d said that last night in my room. “Your father wouldn’t hurt anyone.” And I returned to my father’s words the morning he’d left. “She hasn’t been all that well. You’ve noticed that, haven’t you?”
What had I seen? It was the question I asked myself nearly every day that September. At the same time, though, the answers seemed distant and only slightly real. It was as if I’d stepped into another life, a life I felt sympathy and concern for, but a life that was not mine to change.
One day after school I passed a lawn where a sprinkler jetted in circles, pointless on the Olympic Peninsula in September. I took a quick step to avoid the spray swinging toward the sidewalk, and my binder slipped from my hand. As I bent down to pick up my World History homework I was nearly leveled by a thought. Where is she? And suddenly I had trouble breathing. I sat on the strip of lawn dividing the street from the sidewalk for probably half an hour as the sprinkler clicked like a toy train.
Later that night I found Jamie on the roof. The cherry of his cigarette glowed. In the darkness it seemed as far away as the blinking light on a jet’s wing. I heard his tennis shoes scrape across the gravel and felt a twitch of breeze.
“Okay, tell me,” I said. “What about Richard, what do you think?”
“I don’t really understand what you mean,” Jamie said. “He’s dead, I guess I know that.”
The shadow thrown by the side of the house blacked out his face. There was no slyness in his voice.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“What’s wrong?”
“I thought that you had some idea,” I said. “Why the hell have you wanted to talk to me if you don’t have an idea? What else is there to talk about?” My voice cracked, and I could say no more. I heard Jamie stand up.
Two hemlocks grew from the ground below to eye level. Jamie reached out and grabbed a handful of flat needles, grinding them between his finger and thumb. He sat back down beside me.
“I love how these smell.” He offered me the pulp of needles. My nose was running. I hoped it was too dark to see my face. He flicked away the hemlock and lit two cigarettes, handing one to me.
“We’re not on a date,” I said.
“You don’t have anyone else to talk to,” he said.
Jamie North. I wasn’t impressed by his intelligence, though it was apparent. I wasn’t impressed by his pretensions either, but I was jealous of him. When his father took us out to play baseball I chewed sunflower seeds and hit line drives. I had to. But Jamie could just wander off into the bleachers, listening for echoes. His problem was he couldn’t see that the rest of us weren’t so lucky.
Jamie’s first crush was a girl named Andrea who moved to Loyalty Island the summer before sixth grade. At twelve she was already beautiful, in the way a woman is beautiful, not a girl. She would have been everybody’s crush, except for one thing. Her right leg was longer than her left by a couple of inches. She did her best to hide it with skirts that dragged on the floor, but once you saw the slight unsteadiness of her walk, the thick sole of her left shoe, it was impossible to unsee.
In Loyalty Island we were used to four-fingered hands and paraplegics, but, for most of us, Andrea’s imperfection was suspicious because it made so little sense. Jamie wasn’t like most of us. He followed her everywhere. They ate lunch together, alone on the stage in the gymnasium. They dissected the same frog in Biology and wrote a one-act play about Neanderthals that ended with Andrea knocking Jamie unconscious and dragging him back to her cave. On Halloween they both went as vampires, and Jamie got to dab fake blood on her lips before the school carnival. “I could have kissed her,” he told me later, “I’m pretty sure I could have kissed her.”
Then that January, a kid in our class named Kinjo called Andrea “Odds” during Geography. Kinjo was a bully, and we all knew that an insult from him was as good as a compliment. Still, in the middle of class, Jamie leaped to his feet. He yelled, not just at Kinjo, but at all of us, saying we were stupid to judge her. Andrea is different, he said, is that such a problem? He spoke as if he’d written the speech out in his mind; he probably had. Our teacher, Mrs. Waltz, stood at the head of the room, beaming.
But Andrea’s features shriveled; her mouth wired shut. If Jamie had just paused to look at her he would have seen the tears under her quivering eyelids, her chin smashed into her shoulder. But he kept on until finally Andrea whispered, “Shut up, Jamie.” Then louder, “Just shut up, please shut up, please, please shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”
The next day Jamie ate alone in the cafeteria and dropped his eyes when Andrea walked past. He seemed to accept that she wouldn’t forgive him, but he clearly didn’t understand what he’d done wrong, that his defense had humiliated her more than Kinjo’s insult ever could. At the time, I was sure that he would never understand. I certainly never would have guessed that, two years later, Jamie would feel like the only person in the world I could talk to, the only person I could trust.
We sat on the roof’s edge, legs dangling into darkness. I could smell the hemlock on my fingers, a smell that reminded me of winter. Wind told the branches to tremble.
“I’d ask you about what’s happening with your folks,” Jamie said, “but you don’t want to talk about it. If you did, though.”
“If I did,” I said, “sure.”
“I’m not messing with you,” he said. “You were right. The other night I was going to say I thought our dads might have something to do with what happened.”
“But now you don’t?”
“Now I think we both just grew up hearing a lot of stories.”
We crawled back through the window and into bed without turning on the light. Jamie was right. Even as I had crept through the hallway on Seachase or listened at the crack beneath my door, I’d been thinking about Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island—trying to live out a story that was no more real than any Robert Louis Stevenson wrote. I felt relieved, but also oddly disappointed. And I realized this disappointment at the thought that my father was not a murderer was all the proof I needed. I’d nearly fallen asleep when Jamie spoke again.
“One thing, though,” he said. “Do you remember who my mother said told her about Richard?”
“Don Brooke,” I said.
“Yeah. Why isn’t he on a boat in Alaska right now?”
MY BICYCLE TIRES CHURNED UP gravel at the foot of the driveway. I’d been back to the house on Seachase only once before, swiping my bike from the garage, pedaling away and puffing quick breaths across the handlebars. This was in the first week after Richard died, when my father’s shadow swayed above me every time I’d stepped into the sun. “You won’t need to come back,” he’d said. But now almost a month had passed, and my father’s words no longer held the same power. Still, I leaned my bike on a bench in Henderson Park and wove through the woods to the backyard.
I rummaged under the gas grill for the key, and let myself in by the back door, quickly and quietly. My father wouldn’t be home for months, but I expected to hear his boots at the door any moment. His tiki chair was behind the house, the cushions spongy with rain, the wood white with mold.
I’d spent every night of the last two weeks on Jamie’s roof, smoking his cigarettes and talking about the girls we knew who were developing breasts, and the guys we knew who were lying about getting hand jobs, and the places in the world we someday hoped to see. We argued about Star Wars, and I listened to Jamie describe the samurai movies on the posters he’d sent away for, Harakiri, The Sword of Doom, Yojimbo; and the movies he’d read about in magazines, Strangers on a Train, Night and the City, The Third Man.
“Have you actually seen any of those movies?” I asked.
“Where would I have seen them?” he asked, impatiently. He explained that it didn’t matter, and maybe it didn’t.
Years later, when I finally saw The Third Man at a student theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan, all I could think of was sitting on the roof with Jamie, talking about what a fuckhead Kinjo was, how if he died tomorrow no one would care. Sitting in the darkness, so many miles and years away from Loyalty Island, I wondered if Jamie ever got around to seeing The Third Man. And I felt incredibly sad because I knew that if I called to ask him he wouldn’t even recognize my voice.
One of the films that Jamie brought up time and time again that fall was Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. I knew it was sitting in a cardboard box next to our VCR, along with about twenty other Japanese movies whose names I couldn’t pronounce. I’d been a jerk since I’d arrived at the Norths’—in fact, being a jerk had been my intention. Now I hoped to make it right by taking the VCR and all of the tapes I could carry back to Jamie. I figured my mother owed me that much.
Inside, I took off my shoes automatically. I expected the sullen odor of trapped air, of basement boxes and yellowed packing tape. Returning home after a week or more away, I’d always noticed the smell first. Is this the way my life smells, I’d think, or is this the smell of my life’s absence? Now the house smelled rainy, as if the windows had been left open. But the windows were closed, and the carpet had a soft, lonely bounce. The kitchen cabinets were closed, the books shelved. Still, instinctively, I looked for signs of life. Was a sponge stuck in the drain of the kitchen sink when I left? Was there a coffee ring on the Formica table? A black smudge on the phone number taped next to the telephone?
When I was still too young to know better, I’d told my father that I missed him when he was away. He’d picked me up and put me on his lap. “You know,” he said, “if you ever need to reach me, it’s possible. It’s not easy, but it’s possible.” He tore a strip from an envelope and wrote out the number of the Pacific Cannery in Dutch Harbor. “They can get me on the radio,” he said. “It might take a while but I’ll get to you.” We pasted it next to the phone in the kitchen, and, even as the tape yellowed and the blue ink faded, the number remained as a reminder that gone didn’t mean gone, it just meant somewhere else.
But as I surveyed these empty rooms, it occurred to me that the people who would return to Loyalty Island in weeks or months wouldn’t be the same people who had left in early September. The man who’d sat at the nook in the kitchen drinking coffee was gone. The woman who’d stood at the stove dropping noodles into boiling water, fanning away the steam, was gone.
I stuck Throne of Blood and as many other movies as I could fit into my backpack. I wrestled with the wires of the VCR, trying not to forget what plugged into what. I crawled behind the TV stand to get a better look and, there, I froze. I crouched, still, for a full minute, trying to keep my breath down, waiting for the illusion to pass.
But it was no illusion. I heard music. I crawled to the vent. The metal was warm against my ear. The heat was on, rumbling under the soft chords of Duke Ellington’s “Lotus Blossom,” a song I’d heard my mother play a thousand times.