IN A STATIC OF WINDOW LIGHT AND DUST I PRESSED my ear to the studio door.
“It’s you, isn’t it, Cal?”
I should have taken some time to make a plan, but I’d torn through the kitchen and down the stairs, slamming the basement door behind me as if for emphasis. After so many weeks, after so many hours spent thinking about this moment while I sat in school or stepped through puddles in the streets, I’d arrived and didn’t have a clue what to do or say.
“Are you dead?” I asked.
“It doesn’t feel like it,” Richard said.
“What are you?” I asked.
“The other option. Look, what’s the point? What are you doing?”
This was a hard question to answer.
“I heard the music,” I said.
“So?”
“I heard the music.”
“Are you complaining?” he asked.
“What?”
“What? What? I’ve been fucked with enough, right? What do you need? What’re you doing here?”
I knew it was the wrong answer, or not an answer at all. I knew it would be better to say nothing than to say again, “I heard the music.”
Richard banged the door, and my breath vanished. My eyes were stinging. I jumped back into a shaft of sunlight.
“Stop saying that,” he yelled, but then his voice thinned. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Tell them I said I’d turn it down. I mean they don’t have to take the record player or anything.”
“Tell who? Who would I tell?”
“What?”
“Who would I tell?”
“Wait, just wait,” he said. “Do me a favor and let me just think.”
“Richard,” I said.
“Let me think.”
So I did. I sat down on the corner of a cardboard box labeled “Halloween Stings” in green marker. I knew we’d decorated the house once on Halloween, but I could hardly remember it. I was very young, three or four probably, but I did remember standing over this very box, my arms tangled in cottony spiderwebs. “I’ve got the Halloween stings,” I’d said. “Things,” my mother had said, laughing.
“How did you know I was here?” Richard asked.
“I heard the music,” I said.
“Shut up about the fucking music.”
“So, that’s it,” I said.
“You didn’t know? Nobody told you?”
“Like who?”
“Fuck. Fuck,” he said. “Open the door, then, Cal. Open the door. Obviously they wouldn’t tell you. Cal, open the door.”
But I was paralyzed. I imagined my father, back home from Alaska, sitting at the kitchen table, nicks on his chin from the last pass of a dull winter razor. “Cal, why the hell didn’t you let him out?” he said. “That’s how you treat someone? That’s what your instinct tells you?” Or, “Cal, how could you let him out? Did you understand what you were doing at all?”
“Cal?” Richard said. “Cal, Cal, Cal?”
“The padlock,” I said.
“What about it? Open the door.”
“There’s no key.” This was true, though the padlock wasn’t large; bolt cutters could’ve sheared it. I could hear the relief in my voice.
Richard smacked the door again, not quite as hard this time, as if he were kissing it good-bye. “You’re fucking with me. Yeah, you are. You are.” I thought about him shouting at the door, his voice crashing into it, dissolving in the wood like foam in sand.
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m not.” And I would have said more except that through the snaking pipes, through the plank floors, through the orange kitchen tiles, I heard the back door swing open and feet shake the floor. Both Richard and I shut up. For a blink, and a blink only, I dreamed that it might be my mother, finally returning home.
You could hear everything down here. The feet stamped, knocking off snow, on the doormat. They crossed over my head. The kitchen tap began to run.
“Cal,” Richard said, “can you hide somewhere? Cal, if you’re not lying, then you should hide.”
The words bounced off his tongue. I was scared of that tone, the panic in Richard’s voice. I stood, frozen in front of the door in a vise of nausea. The footsteps thumped across the orange tiles, a beam creaked, shafts of icy sunlight slashed through the basement from a grimy window that hadn’t been opened in years. I whirled, following the path of sun, and then sprawled on hands and knees in the murk behind the octopus furnace. There was light enough to see the black on my hands. I crouched on a soft flattened box next to a gray tennis ball and a few scattered foam peanuts.
The kitchen tap ran. I could almost see the footsteps, their impressions in the ceiling, circling like birds. The basement door opened, and I stepped backward into the darkness and kept stepping, nearly in time with the thuds on the basement stairs, my hand waving through blackness as I turned, reaching for a barrier. The steps slowed; there was a creak, a pop of old wood. A rustle of frayed runner meeting boot sole and still I walked into blackness, praying that I wouldn’t trip or tumble.
When my fingers finally scratched the back wall it was cold and smelled of sweet grease. The boots smacked concrete through the basement, but not in the direction of the studio. Then nothing. Then a hollow clink of metal. Then boots again, walking the slalom of boxes. The padlock was wrestled off. The studio door finally opened. But I couldn’t see a thing.
Time seemed to stop and start, to flow through space that contracted, bent, and almost burst. Years later, as I sat in a college lecture on Einstein, I’d think of this moment. Space-time, relativity, it seemed only a way to describe the feeling of being afraid in the dark.
Yet, as my eyes began to adjust, I realized that if I could inch forward a foot or two I’d have a view of a good portion of the basement. I remembered Jamie’s story about his mother, and though I was afraid, I didn’t want to be like him, missing everything, left to guess. I crawled through generations of dust and peered around the corner of the furnace in time to glimpse a figure in the studio’s open doorway.
He held a plate of white-bread sandwiches, level with his shoulder, like one of the waiters at Belinda’s. I was breathing through my nose, my lungs aching already, on the verge of a coughing fit, and I could smell, I think, the chemical mint of Ben-Gay. As he stooped to lift a jug of water from the floor, I glimpsed his face: sallow skin, eyes puffy as fried eggs, his lips pressed like he’d just swallowed hard. The waddling dwarf. The villain of my childhood. The greatest storyteller in the world. Don Brooke.
There were icicles in my chest. I remembered Betty North, her head tipped back, a rivulet of white grape juice at the corner of her mouth. “Don Brooke just called,” she said. “Richard went overboard in the Inside Passage.” I thought of Don’s voice coming up the stairway from the kitchen. “Sam, you better slow down,” he’d said. “I still think Richard will understand, if he just sees it,” my father had said.
I didn’t think I’d left tracks. I’d been too excited even to take off my jacket. The ratty cushions were back on the couch. I didn’t imagine Don would notice that they were missing a decade of dust. I could feel the key to the back door outlined in my pocket. I’d locked it when I’d arrived that morning.
The seconds didn’t seem to pass so much as flare up like kernels of popcorn. I listened, straining to keep from coughing, for what Don and Richard said to each other. At some point Don appeared in the doorway again, squinting into the dim basement. Or were his eyes closed? He froze for just a moment, before gently closing the door behind him and slapping the lock back into place.
He’d left the water and sandwiches and picked up a blue bucket with a yellow hoop handle that my mother had bought for me one summer in Santa Cruz. He was just a few feet from me, close enough for me to see the red N on the sneakers he wore (not boots after all), close enough for me to see an unshaven patch on his round chin, and close enough for me to smell the piss sloshing in my old summer bucket. Don crossed to the back half of the basement, the half I couldn’t see from my place behind the furnace. Then he slowly climbed the stairs.
Once I heard the back door clap shut—it was spring-loaded, so it snapped with the crack of wood to wood—I counted out fifteen minutes, one second at a time, before crawling out and taking the stairs two at a time. I ran out the door, down the drive, down Seachase, and halfway back to the Norths’ before I stopped, hands on knees, panting into my shadow.
I needed to think, to get it all straight before I went back. But that night and the next day, I hardly considered what my discovery meant, or what its consequences might be. All I could think was that I knew Richard was alive and no one else did.
Will Percy, who passed in his rusted brown Volkswagen, rolling down the window to let out his pipe smoke, thought Richard was dead. Frank Bender, who sat next to me in school the next day, scribbling lineups for next season’s Mariners on the flap of his chemistry book, thought Richard was dead. Mrs. Lowry, who taught the periodic table in a lime-green pantsuit, thought Richard was dead. Jamie North, who asked nothing but watched me with curious eyes, thought Richard was dead.
I WOULD HAVE SKIPPED school the next day, had planned to, except I realized at some point in the night that I’d never run into Don before because he came when I was at school. Ritual and repetition, to Don, to my father, were gods. Don drank a cup of coffee every morning at 6:35 from the same yellow mug. According to my father, even if Don was in bed, coming off forty straight hours, he’d get up specially to drink that cup of coffee before going back to sleep. If he was coming to feed Richard each day, he’d do it squarely.
By the time school let out, the snow had melted except for a few muddy white patches on the lawns. The cloud-scattered sky mirrored the ground. I rounded the block three times before letting myself in the back door.
The kitchen was warm and reminded me of an old dream I’d had where the neighborhood, the town, the world, had been taken over by witches. In the dream, I’d gone to my friend Paul’s house to find an ally, but two skeletal women with black teeth answered his door. I sprinted home, diving into a kitchen filled with menacing tropical steam.
As I descended the stairs, the cooler air of the basement splashed me awake. I tapped the mint-colored wood with my knuckles.
“Richard,” I said.
“It snowed,” Richard said.
“What?”
“Yesterday. It snowed, didn’t it? Did you bring the police?”
The sunlight had melted with the snow. The basement windows looked sooty-gray. My head felt dirty and hot. I hadn’t considered the police.
“I’m locked in here against my will by men who may kill me.” His voice sounded tired, as if he were obliged to say this but knew it wouldn’t do any good. “Call the police, all right?”
“Let me out and I’ll tell you about it.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can,” he said. “Really, you can.”
“The lock, I mean.”
“Don keeps the key down here. Inside something metal, with a door. Is it in the dryer?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I’d heard him drop it into something metal too. It only took a second to find. I walked to the other end of the basement and opened the dryer. It contained a black sock and a silver key the length of a pinkie.
“It’s there, isn’t it?” Richard called.
I walked back to the door with the key in my pocket. “I don’t see it,” I said.
“Has it been snowing?” Richard asked.
The weather. These last weeks while I’d trudged to school or ridden my bike along the boardwalk smelling pine, salt, and exhaust, what had Richard smelled? Only white-bread sandwiches and his own waste. What had he touched? Only the mohair on the bench and the shag of the rug. What had he heard? Only the ceiling creaking above him. And the records.
“I’ve been thinking about you, Cal,” he said. “I wondered if you’d come back. I thought you would, because that’s what I would have done. And you probably want to do the right thing, but what is that? Right? You don’t know. Because you do know who put me in here. You could let me out. That’s what you should do. But what would happen? You just don’t know, right? So it’s better to do nothing. When in doubt, do nothing. Am I right?”
“No,” I said.
“You found the key.”
“Yes.”
“Two keys?”
“One.”
“That makes it easy for you. I promise you, if you open the door, I’m not going anywhere. They’ve got me chained to the sink. Please. I promise you. Did it snow yesterday? At least tell me that.”
In that moment I would have done anything, would have given up all I’d found, if only I didn’t have to decide whether to open the door. I imagined a blade jabbed in my neck. I saw Richard cowering in a corner, his cheeks shiny with sweat, his leg green with infection. I saw the two of us plunging into a roadside ditch filled with cloudy water, chained together at the ankle.
“Cal, tell me. Did it snow?”
I stabbed the lock with the key.
Inside, Richard lay across the bench seat, his head propped against the wall, one leg on the floor, the other bent at the knee. I’d expected a Ben Gunn sort of beard, but his cheeks showed only a few days’ stubble. Strings of black hair hung over eyes that were alert and bright, light brown, nearly golden. His skin was the dirty white of old snow.
He looked healthy enough, but his expression—mouth half open, eyes half closed—was that of a starving man.
He wasn’t lying about the chain, though I didn’t see it immediately because it was wound around his ankle on the floor. It looped the ankle twice, pinned by another padlock, then snaked the length of the room and looped and was locked again around a pipe under the sink.
“Have you been the one walking around up there?”
My tongue felt too thick to use.
“What did you think was happening down here? Didn’t you want to know?”
The question seemed directed at some other being. What had I thought was happening? I could hardly remember.
“How long have you been here? Since the beginning?” Richard asked.
I couldn’t speak.
“Let me out of here, please.”
Here meant a plate of half-eaten white-bread sandwiches on the floor, two plastic bottles of mayonnaise and mustard, and a plastic butter knife, broken in half. An empty gallon water jug. Two full jugs next to a jar of purple Kool-Aid powder. A mattress flipped on its edge and lined up against the shelf. A path worn into the orange carpet between the far wall and the bench.
“I can’t,” I said.
He sat up, and the chain whispered against the pipe.
I thought of the words I’d exchanged with my father before he’d pushed me into Betty North’s station wagon. Did you really change Richard’s mind? I’d asked. I didn’t have to, he’d said. He’d stared into my eyes. The old rules, the old motors that I’d always felt running under the sidewalks, keeping the world in place, had snapped their belts and were spinning out of sequence.
Richard looked at me. I saw something like pity cloud his eyes. Was it possible that as I stood in the doorway of his cell he actually felt sorry for me?
“Then sit down,” he said. “Don’s already come. He won’t be back until tomorrow.” He licked his dry lips and added, “Please.”
I stayed in the doorway and sized up the chain link by link. Did it have enough slack to wind around my neck? Did the broken knife have enough of an edge to cut my throat? He seemed so tired, though. The flat way he’d asked the question, inserting please after the lapse of a second.
“Did it snow yesterday?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” He looked legitimately relieved. “Don told me it did. But I can never believe what he says.”
“No, I guess not.”
“I could tell him you were here, you know. Do I have anything to lose?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sit down, all right?”
I sat down Indian-style on the floor, close to the doorway. Richard lay back slowly on the bench.
“Okay. Good. Okay, thanks,” he said softly. “There are sandwiches.”
I shook my head. He wore a black hooded sweatshirt; he pulled up the hood now. “Do you want to hear some music?”
“All right,” I said.
“Let’s see, let’s see.” Richard rose from the bench and hobbled a few steps to the shelf. He was wearing baggy black pajama pants, wide enough for the leg to fall over the chain around his ankle. He scanned his finger along the record spines, settling on Ornette Coleman’s This Is Our Music. “I really like this one. You’ve heard it before? Is it too loud?” He crouched next to the record player, the orange from the vacuum tubes glowing on his face. “We can try something else.”
It was the kind of record I always begged my mother to take off: squealing saxophones, a melody like a car crash. All of which made the moment feel even less real.
“Yeah, I like this one a lot,” Richard said, “quite a lot.” He closed the turntable’s plastic hood carefully. Then he darted toward the door, the chain slithering behind him. I scrambled back, hoping to hurl myself out of the room, but my feet refused to unpin. I threw my shoulders back, trying to somersault. My elbow banged the doorjamb and I fell awkwardly to my side.
He knelt, but didn’t go for my throat. Instead, he tapped his hands on my knees to the rhythm of the drums. His crooked mouth hissed with the ride cymbal, tsssst tsst tsst tsssst.
“I’ve never had a lot of time to listen to music until now.” His face was only inches from mine, and I could smell mustard on his breath. I knew I should scramble away. There wasn’t a reason in the world to trust him. But I couldn’t take my eyes off his face, the pale, high-boned cheeks beneath bright, mad eyes.
“I’ve heard you listening,” I said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Upstairs you’ve heard. So you know. Actually it wasn’t like I didn’t have time for music before. Time had nothing to do with it. I just wasn’t interested, you know what I mean?”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“You don’t have to sit on the floor,” he said. He got back on his feet and threw himself onto the bench. “I wish I could have figured it out sooner, because I think I would have liked to be a musician.” He pushed out one palm as if he expected me to object. “Now, I don’t say that like how you normally say it. You know, like when you fly on a plane, of course you’re going to think: I’d like to be a pilot. Or you happen to see some movie with a crane shot or something, and you think: I’d like to be a cinematographer. But I think I would have been good as a musician.”
“Why?” I caught a whiff of urine and spotted the beach pail under the sink.
“I can’t hide anything, which has always made things hard for me. The problem was, I didn’t know there was anything wrong with that for a long time. That’s one of those things that they don’t teach you. You’re not supposed to say what you think. Even after I figured that out I still could hardly ever stop myself. Do you think there’s any pursuit where that’s actually a strength, a good thing? I can’t think of any except music.”
Richard reached for a half-eaten sandwich on the plate at his feet. He grabbed the plastic knife too, but, after smearing mustard across the face of the sandwich, tossed it back. Then he picked up a plastic jar of green olives.
“Where have you been living?” he asked.
I told him.
“What about your mom? Where’s she?”
I told him.
“She just left without saying anything? That’s hard. My mom died a long time ago.”
“I know,” I said.
“My dad also died,” he said.
“I know.”
“Does your mom know that I’m here?”
“I don’t think so.”
“If you told her she’d call the police. That’s all you’d have to do. But,” Richard said, as if it were his decision to make, “then your father would be in a lot of trouble.”
“He put you here,” I said.
“How’s school?” Richard asked.
“How did you get here?”
“You’re wondering why they didn’t just kill me? Do you want me to answer? I’m just asking. People used to say things about my father. About women. Affairs, things like that.” He reached from his place on the bench and jacked the volume on the stereo. He wrapped one finger in the drawstring of his hood. “I hated his guts, and I already knew everything, and it still killed me to hear it, you know?”
A fly was frozen on a crust of the bread. There was mustard on Richard’s lip. I stood up and turned down the volume on the stereo. Richard sank into the corner, tugging the tassels of his hood. He frowned like he’d just bitten his tongue.
“You could have said it was too loud. Didn’t I ask you?”
“My father put you in here,” I said.
“Would you believe me if I said he didn’t? He and Sam and Don came to my house.”
“Then?”
“Then this.” He yanked the drawstrings, and the hood scrunched around his face like an anemone’s mouth. “Not now. Ask me anything else, go ahead.”
“Have you really been in here all this time?”
“Don comes once a day. He brings food. Books, if I want them. What else can I tell you?”
I wanted to know what had happened. I told myself I didn’t care what the truth was, what it broke. I wanted to know. That, I told myself, was my right.
“Are you all right?” I asked instead.
“See that?” he asked. “The ceiling over the sink, there. The water spot.”
There wasn’t much to see. A yellowing of the plaster in the corner of one wall near the ceiling, a faint shape.
“What do you think about it?” he asked. “What does it look like to you?”
“I don’t know. Like a rabbit, maybe?”
He blinked in what appeared to be genuine amazement. “That’s it? That’s all you see?”
“What else is there?”
“A leak.”
“A leak?”
“It doesn’t look like much right now, but sometimes it’s very bad. It’s all the water from the rain. It builds up. It drains down here. Maybe you heard it dripping. No? It does, and a few times it sort of broke like a dam. There’s no warning, really. The water just comes rushing into the room.”
“Really?”
“Really. The room’s small, so it fills up quickly. I stand up on the bench in the corner, but the water’s at my mouth so fast, and there’s just a little bit of time when I can only breathe through my nose. But the water’s over my head soon enough, and all the records have floated off the shelves and out of their jackets, and they look like a school of black fish.
“The door bursts next, and the sink and the chain and everything floods out and the basement is flooded to the ceiling. So I float through it, trying to make it to the stairs. And all those boxes out there, they’re floating, and the water has stripped the tape, so all that stuff you’ve collected is floating around me, and I’m struggling through it, trying to float up the stairs to the door before I run out of air.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Well, I see it like that sometimes, you know?”
THE WEATHER STAYED BAD. The mountains tore strips from passing clouds. The rain stained the windows and soaked the color from the trees. It was, by then, that vicious stretch of November when the sea wound itself around Loyalty Island like a gray snake, squeezing. That night I called down to Jamie from the top bunk. I could tell he was awake, but he didn’t answer. It was just as well. I had no idea what I wanted to say.
I could say it felt like a dream, but it didn’t. Foreign, mysterious, yes. But there was none of the effortlessness of dreams. I’ve always thought that people cherish their dreams because, in them, they act but rarely have to decide how to act.
I could say I felt sick, but that’s not right either. I felt fine. Rather, I felt like I was observing sickness, walking, immune, through a cloud that had descended and would not pass. I walked over sidewalks and across lawns and up the bluff to Seachase feeling the guilt and anxiety of the healthy.
Mostly, though, I felt isolated by what I knew. Under the floor, there was a cowering, half-crazy man. That was the secret, the solution to the mystery. I shouldn’t have been stupid enough to imagine some happy reconciliation, some warm remedy. I should have known that at the root of any mystery that’s all you find: people doing unspeakable harm to other people. What else on this earth is there to hide?
When I returned to the basement the next day, there were pillows on the orange carpet in the spot where I’d sat the day before. The records were back in their jackets, the books stacked next to the bench. The sheet and quilt, which had been thrown over the upturned mattress the day before, were folded. Richard shot from the bench as if he had been coiled there, and greeted me with a grin. He offered me a white-bread sandwich stuffed with inches of yellow turkey.
“Have you ever really heard a harmonica?” he asked.
“You promised to tell me what happened,” I said.
“I will. But if you’ve never heard a harmonica, you need to, immediately.” He spoke in a quaking voice, the voice of a man who hadn’t had a conversation in a month. “Sonny Boy Williamson makes my teeth hurt. You just have to listen.”
When the record ended Richard filled the space with chatter about the novel he was reading, for the third time in two weeks: Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.
The book was mine, taken from the private library my mother had provided. She’d spent more money on books for me than we probably had to spare. She would come home from Seattle with shopping bags full. I’d read a few—Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the rest of Stevenson, Kipling, and Hamilton’s Mythology. But most of them—Silent Spring, Darkness at Noon, Victory—were impossible. My eyes glazed over just reading the back covers.
These are investments, she said when I complained. One summer, the week before the Fourth of July, she demanded I finish one whole book or else I couldn’t watch the fireworks over Greene Harbor. Pick any book off your shelf or mine, she said. There was no getting out of it, but I picked a book from my father’s shelf, from the very top of the cabinet in the living room. Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World. I read it in a day and a half. Afterward, for a few weeks anyway, sailing around the world became my sole ambition. I informed everyone of my plans, to appreciative laughter. I mapped my voyage in my mind—sailing alone around the world—but, though I imagined the Roaring Twenties, the Doldrums, the Horn, and the Loyalty Islands, I mostly thought about the day I’d return home. Stepping off the boat in Greene Harbor to a torrent of applause, whipped by wind and browned under a tropical sun.
“It’s not just about movies, I guess,” I said to Richard. “That book.”
He rolled up the paperback like a newspaper and stung me on the shoulder with it. “Ha!” he said. “Do you want to know what it is about?” He was so eager, so impatient for my response, and this made me sadder than anything else.
“It’s about ‘the sad little happiness of drinks and kisses.’ ” He described the novel almost page for page, talking about the narrator, Binx, as though he were a real person. Binx, pressured by his aunt to become a doctor, instead walks the streets of New Orleans, looking for something, but what? All he has is time to pass, and he passes the time on long drives with his sunburned secretaries, or in suburban theaters where he finds in movies a poignancy not present in his own life. And suddenly Richard was telling me about his own life, about the first year he lived in New York.
“Finally,” he said, “I was living outside of this rainy fucking shadow. But I’d still get these long letters from my father. He’d write to me all about his childhood, his college years, all this stuff he’d never told me.” Richard rose from his place on the bench and began to pace the room, ten and a half steps in either direction, the chain slithering behind. “He wrote letters, but he never called. Never. He said that the time change made him nervous, that he never knew when he might wake me up. I had an apartment on Bleecker next to a Chinese laundry that sold Lucky Strikes and soap powder. Just Lucky Strikes and soap powder. The apartment was shit, but I was hardly there because finally there were people, I mean real people. I lived at the bars. I used to think about how it would be to get my mail there, like how those intellectuals in Paris got their mail at the cafés. They’d sit around the tables, plotting revolutions a thousand miles away. I thought about them all the time. I couldn’t name a single one, but I just had that image in my mind.
“And the girls, Cal, that was something too. I met these wonderful, crazy girls. One time, I was at a bar talking to this very bookish-looking brunette, sexy-librarian, plaid-miniskirt kind of thing. We’d been talking all night, and suddenly I was kissing her. She was kissing me, really. The bathrooms were downstairs, and it was just about bar time. Come downstairs with me, she said. No thanks, I said, my friends are leaving, I have to go with them. Come downstairs with me, she said, or I’m going to stab you in the throat. Stab you in the throat! Oh my God. Heaven.”
“Richard, why are you telling me this?” I really wanted to know. The ugly pride on his face seemed to signify something, but what? I thought the question might offend him, but he laughed.
“I don’t know. You’re right. I don’t know why. I’m just saying I couldn’t believe how fantastic it was. It’s like, if I’d spent my whole fucking life chained up in this room, I probably wouldn’t mind it so much.” He paused. “I think I’ve changed. But I don’t know. What do you think?”
“How have you changed?”
“Like I said, I don’t really know.”
“Well, how do you feel?”
His smile dried up. He tugged the strings on the hood of his sweatshirt.
“I feel afraid,” he said. “I have a question for you, and you have to be honest, right?”
“Right.”
“What do I look like?”
“What?”
“What do I look like? I haven’t seen a mirror in a month.”
Richard wasn’t yet thirty, but he already had the face he deserved. He’d always had that face: A crooked, saber-sharp nose. A gaze that sliced like a dorsal fin through water. I wouldn’t call him handsome, but he was distinctive.
If anything, he’d gained a little weight; his cheekbones didn’t push as much against his skin. He wasn’t asking for that kind of description, though, and the answer was bad news. I could almost see the cloud of fear moving under his skin. The metallic rind on his tongue. He looked poorly made, like he wouldn’t last much longer.
“You’re holding up,” I said.
“Really?”
“Pretty well,” I said.
I stayed another hour, delaying the walk home, the sky dark and dripping cold rain. But finally I couldn’t put it off anymore. When I told Richard I was expected back at the Norths’ he smiled and nodded, silently. I followed his gaze as he scanned the narrow room, as if trying to prepare himself for what it would look like once I left.
I locked the door and returned the key to the dryer. At the top of the stairs I had to fight the urge to go back. No one had ever been that sad to say good-bye to me.
WHEN I RETURNED to the Norths’, Jamie was standing in the kitchen doorway with the phone to his ear. I tried to catch his eye, but he only looked down at his feet. “Sure,” he said. “He’s right here, actually.” I froze in place. Betty glanced up from the kitchen table and smiled at me before returning to her crossword puzzle. As I stood there stupidly, Jamie said only, “Uh-huh. How much are they offering? Mmh-hmmh. Really? How big?” I knew this conversation. I’d had it countless times with my own father.
I went up to our room and waited, but Jamie never appeared. He spent the rest of the evening at the kitchen table with his mother, reading a magazine. I announced that I was going for a walk, but he didn’t offer to join me. When I returned he was in bed with the lights out. I whispered, “Jamie, are you awake?” He didn’t answer, but I knew the faint whistle of his sleeping breath. I knew he was awake.
I climbed out the window. Jamie didn’t follow. Outside, I shivered and smoked until my lips were numb, sure that I’d been betrayed. I could no longer imagine what possible reason I’d had to tell Jamie I’d been going home. I crumpled up the rest of the pack and hurled it into the waving hemlocks.
The next day after school I waited for him, leaning against the flagpole under an iron press of sky. When Jamie pushed through the double doors he looked different; it took me a moment to figure out why. Usually when he saw me he smiled.
We fell into step on the cracked sidewalk and drifted onto the wet road winding up the bluff from town. The rain sputtered on, and we sped up to rain-walking pace.
“Did you tell him?” I asked.
His startled eyes met mine before dropping back to the street. “No,” he said. “No, I didn’t. You thought I did?”
I’d heard somewhere that you could always see a lie on a face. Jamie looked bewildered, hurt—is that what a liar looked like? I didn’t know. The rain picked up. Before I could answer, Jamie broke stride and shouldered off his backpack. He looked at me fiercely as he bent down and pulled out a gray umbrella.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked. I didn’t carry an umbrella; hardly anyone in Loyalty Island did—not the men, anyway.
He looked at me as if he’d been waiting for this question. “What’s your problem? I don’t like getting wet, is that so crazy?” He shook open the umbrella and held it over me. “Try it,” he said. “You might like it.”
And suddenly I was sure that he hadn’t betrayed me, and almost as sure that he never would. We walked silently down the middle of High Street. A green sun beat through the clouds as we slalomed puddles and ascended the bluff into fog.
“Why don’t people use umbrellas, do you think?” Jamie asked.
“I guess it’s a good question,” I said.
“For example, we run into each other downtown, it’s raining, I have an umbrella, you don’t, we’re going the same way.”
“Okay.”
“If I don’t offer to share, it’s rude, right? But if I do offer to share, we have to walk right next to each other and think of something to say. But we can’t say too much, because we might not be going the same place, and then it would be even worse because we’d be stuck breathing into each other’s faces while we finished our conversation. So people figure it’s better just to get wet. That’s what I think.”
He might have been right. Generations of fishermen had shaped the customs and language. I’d noticed it, listening to my father and Don and Sam and John Gaunt around our kitchen table. They’d veer from topic to topic in wide loops. Don might begin a story about a beautiful but far too virtuous Aleut girl he’d met in Dutch Harbor and suddenly drop it; but then the Aleut girl would reappear hours later without any obvious prompt. I thought of it as “long talk.”
I told my father this one night, and he smiled, pleased, almost proud. “I like that,” he said. “I’ll have to tell everyone that. It comes from the work, I guess. You have twenty minutes to eat between strings, and someone starts telling a story, and the work won’t wait for the story to end, so you spend the next eight or twelve hours waiting for that next break. Everyone does. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been or what’s happened. Story has to get finished.”
“What do you think?” Jamie asked. Rain slashed across the street under clouds booming thunder. “What do you think of my theory?” His smile was double-framed by the gray tent of umbrella and the gray tent of sky. I felt both jealousy and pity, as I had so many times before. Jamie didn’t understand a bit of what was happening. He had no idea what people had to do so that he could develop theories about umbrellas and quote dialogue he didn’t understand from movies he hadn’t seen.
He liked to quote a line he’d read in his film magazines from a movie called The Rules of the Game. “The awful thing about life is this,” he would say. “Everyone has his reasons.” Maybe this was true. Richard had his reasons for threatening to sell everything. My father and Jamie’s father and Don Brooke had their reasons for locking Richard in a basement and telling the world he was dead. But what Jamie never realized is that we do all have our reasons, but that isn’t the tragedy. The tragedy is that, except in the rarest cases, we do things—good things, bad things—without ever really knowing why.
“What about that theory?” Jamie asked again. “It checks, right?”
“Maybe,” I said, “but what difference does it make?”
Jamie spit into the gutter, and we continued stride for stride under the umbrella as it drifted past Spring Street and beneath branches draped with leaves like wet rags. The umbrella wound down the bluff, drawing water as Jamie switched it from hand to hand. It passed Spruce and shook in a gust of wind and spat water and righted itself like a channel marker. At the next block the umbrella turned right on Seachase Lane, then cut through the rain into my driveway.
The house’s paint was graying, the gutters pasted with pine needles. Could I pretend that the rain had flooded out the streets, that the current had dropped us there?
“You were mad at me because I made you lie to your father,” I said. We hadn’t spoken in blocks.
“I guess so, yeah.”
“If I show you what’s inside you’ll have to lie more.”
Jamie kept the umbrella level, didn’t move his arm at all, only turned his head to look me in the eyes.
“If you tell him,” I said, “I’ll say you knew the whole time.”
He stepped back, his face blank. “Knew what?”
“I’m about to show you,” I said.
The way Jamie smiled, I almost decided to call it off, to lead him home, to keep him in the dark. Anyway, we stood a few extra moments at the foot of the driveway under the shelter of his umbrella.
AS I UNLOCKED the studio door my guts felt frozen and brittle. I wanted to tell Jamie that he didn’t have to go in, that it wasn’t too late, but I could only jab at the open door with one finger. I hadn’t even knocked. Jamie leaned the umbrella against the wall and stepped into the light.
“Who am I looking at?” I heard Richard ask. Nobody spoke. “Do I know you?” Still no answer. The thought that the moment could last forever forced me to throw myself through the doorway.
Richard was coated in sweat and tugging a white T-shirt on. I just had time to notice the splatter of a yellow-purple bruise on his stomach. The stereo was on low, some piece of piano music.
He went to the sink, panting, and splashed his neck and chin. Even after he turned off the tap he remained with his back to us, bracing the wall with both arms, chest heaving. I hoped Jamie would say something, because I couldn’t.
“Finally, the police,” Richard said.
“He’s not the police,” I said.
“No shit.” He spun around, jerking the chain against the pipe. “This isn’t a fucking zoo.”
The disbelief in his stare was devastating. All I had to do was explain why I’d brought Jamie. But I couldn’t.
“I see a guy could get confused, but it isn’t,” Richard said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I looked at Jamie. His mouth was a line, his arms crossed over his chest as if he’d just stepped into cold weather.
Richard leaned back against the wall, as far from us as he could get, arms outstretched like a scarecrow’s. I thought about cornfields and about how I’d never seen a real scarecrow. I had nothing to say.
“I’m Jamie North,” Jamie said. His voice was quiet, but impressively calm.
“Sam’s?” Richard asked.
“Yeah.”
“Sam North’s?” Richard squeezed shut his eyes.
Jamie wiped his hand on his shirt and extended it to Richard. Richard opened his eyes and burst out laughing. “You’re offering to shake my hand? Are we at a country club? Sorry about the low ceiling and pardon the chain around my ankle.” He turned his eyes to me. “What’s the etiquette here? When introduced to the son of the man who’s chained you to a sink do you shake hands or do you just let him kick you in the balls?”
“Depends who you ask,” Jamie said. “I think Vanderbilt says handshake, but Emily Post says balls.”
“Very good,” Richard said. “I’ve always preferred Vanderbilt. My mother had her book. We kept it on the shelf in the living room after she died.”
“Mine too,” Jamie said. “She isn’t dead, though.”
“That’s wonderful news,” Richard said. “Anyway, we don’t need to shake hands. I’ve met you a hundred times.”
“But not like this.”
“No, not like this.” Richard lay down on the bench. “I guess I shouldn’t even be surprised, the three of us here—the spoiled, lucky victims of Loyalty Island. So, Jamie North. What do you want to know?”
It wasn’t until Jamie took his seat on the floor, just as I had days before, that I realized how afraid I’d been. Afraid that Jamie would cut the chain or slam the door behind him and replace the lock for good. Afraid that, unlike me, he would know what to do. But he was as cautious, as confused, and as paralyzed as I was.
I sat down beside him. I knew what Jamie would ask. They were the same questions I’d asked, and I watched him, his elbows resting on his crossed legs, the lines around his eyes and mouth creasing as he began to understand.
“Tell me what happened,” Jamie said.
“Not now,” Richard said.
“What’s going to happen? Will they let you out?” It was a question I’d asked myself many times. Maybe that was why I’d brought Jamie: I needed him to ask the questions I was afraid to.
“They can’t keep you down here forever,” Jamie continued. “If they wanted to, they wouldn’t have put you down here in the first place.”
“I couldn’t say,” Richard said. “Call your father and ask him.”
“They would’ve already . . . done it,” Jamie said. “They have to let you out.”
Richard sat up. “Maybe it’s not so easy,” he said, “to do that. When they first came for me they meant to do it. I know they did.”
“I don’t believe that,” Jamie said.
“No? Why not?”
Silently I prayed Jamie would have an answer. But Richard answered instead. “Because Sam North could never kill a man? Is that about right?”
“I don’t know,” Jamie said.
“No?” Richard asked. He struggled to his feet and ran his fingers across the records’ spines. “When they first locked me in here I had no watch. That was the worst thing in the beginning. No time. These records were my only way to tell time, to know that it was passing, right? Honestly, I probably never would have turned on this stereo otherwise, but I’d put them on, and I’d know, for example, that ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ lasts five minutes and forty seconds. So I’d know that I’d just experienced the same five minutes with the rest of the world.
“You wouldn’t think it’d be so bad, would you? Not having time, not having it to worry about. But it was bad. You can go months without speaking to another person, without touching another person, but if you’re sharing the same time, if you both know that it’s six o’clock, for example, then that’s something, right? Like those monks who take a vow of silence, they’re always ringing those bells. They never miss a quarter hour.”
Richard paced to the end of the room, pausing with his back to us long enough for Jamie and me to share a look. It was chilling, the intensity on Richard’s face.
“You hear,” he continued, “I used to hear people always complain about the loneliness of the city. If you live in the country, you have the sun and the seasons to keep you in touch, it doesn’t matter if you live miles from your nearest neighbor. You see the sun at the same time, you’re intimate that way.
“But the city has no seasons and no sun. The city has to work so people don’t go fucking mad. They have to manufacture time to fight loneliness. Big clocks on banks and in Times Square, ha, see, yes. Rush hour, lunch hour, happy hour. Why not save us all some trouble by staggering work, why not save the roads? Because we need a schedule so we feel part of the same thing. Can you imagine the desolation of a deserted train ride to work each morning? We want traffic jams. Because you’re frustrated, you’re pissed, but you know that hundreds of people around you are feeling the same way, and there’s a lot of comfort in that.”
He’d been talking to the ceiling, the shelves, the floor. He looked back at us now and sighed. He crumpled onto the bench and pinched his lower lip between his thumb and index finger, as if it had disappointed him.
“All right. Forget that. You’re wondering what this has to do with your question, huh? Your fathers. How many times have you heard them say, ‘Yeah, it’s dangerous, but I could never punch a clock, so it’s all I have’? What are they saying? When they’re working there’s no daytime or nighttime. No mealtime, no sleep time, no work time, no playtime, no quiet time. It’s all one smear. They’ve arm-wrestled it, pretzeled it. But they get to do it together. I think that’s what love really is, this thing that just wrecks time. You don’t need time anymore. So. Do I think they’re capable of doing anything to protect that? Yes.”
JAMIE AND I TRUDGED the crooked streets under a sickly dusk, silent accomplices. I’d half hoped that it was all a dream, that Jamie would open the door to an empty, mildewed room. Now Richard’s kidnapping, his captivity, was real. Did it seem real to Jamie? I wondered. As we passed Spring, Jamie drifted off the sidewalk and into the middle of the street. I had to quicken my steps to keep up.
“Hey,” I said, but he only went faster.
“Jamie,” I said, but he didn’t look back. He lengthened the distance between us, taking long strides under the fir trees on Martin, heavy with rain. I couldn’t blame him for trying, but it was too late to run. He turned once to see me two boat-lengths behind and broke into a run anyway. I let him vanish into the twilight, feeling sorry only for myself. I’d hoped that I wouldn’t have to make this walk alone again. It started to drizzle, but I rounded the Norths’ block four or five times before I went inside.
When I opened the front door, stamping my wet feet on the mat like my father used to, Betty North was standing in the hallway smoking a long cigarette. “Oh, honey,” she said. Her eyes were red and wet. She flicked her cigarette at the ashtray on the side table and bit her bottom lip.
I felt the blood drain from my limbs. “Oh, honey,” she said again, as she put a clumsy arm around my shoulder and pulled me in, “you’re just a few minutes too late.” She looked me in the eyes, smiling. Her teeth were white but outlined in yellow. “Your mother just called. She’s at the hospital now. A girl.”
I was too relieved to speak. In the silence Betty started to cry.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“A healthy girl.” Betty sniffled and ran the back of the hand holding the cigarette under her nose. “I’m sorry. You should really hear that kind of news from your own family, shouldn’t you?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll call her.”
“She didn’t leave a number. She said she’d call back when she got home.”
“She’s coming home?”
“Well, not home,” Betty said. “Wherever she’s staying right now is what I mean. Isn’t it wonderful, though?”
“Has anyone called my father yet?”
Betty shook her head in a cloud of smoke. “I don’t know. I should have asked, but it was such a surprise.”
“What about the name?”
She made a face, defeated. “I don’t think I heard it. I’m so sorry. Really.”
I could suddenly see, in Betty’s every expression and gesture, a bone-deep kindness. And yet she passed through the rooms of her own house like a specter, sadness on tiptoes.
Somehow it was all connected: Jamie’s running away and Richard in the basement and my mother in California and our fathers on the Bering Sea and John Gaunt in his grave and Betty North and I standing a foot apart against either wall of the narrow hallway, talking about joy but absolutely hating ourselves. She stamped out the cigarette and turned back to the mirror.
“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “I like the suspense.”
JAMIE SHOOK me awake in the middle of the night. The radiators were up too high. The sheets were damp. I’d been dreaming I was awake, lying there, thinking about the basement.
“Why did you show me?” he asked.
I flipped toward the wall. “Fuck you,” I said. “I shouldn’t have.”
The bed rail creaked and I felt Jamie’s weight on the mattress.
“I’m sorry about running, but you understand—”
“Not really,” I said. “Get out of my bed.”
“It’s my bed,” he said. “You get out.”
“Or?”
“I’m fine peeing all over my own bed.”
We both started to laugh. Jamie sat up, and I lay on my back, staring at the shadowy poster of Sigourney Weaver.
“Couldn’t you have found a better-looking chick to put above my bed?” I asked.
“She’s a great actress,” Jamie said.
“I have no idea what to do.” It felt good to actually say it, to have someone to say it to.
“I’m glad you showed me,” he said.
“Are you?”
“Aren’t you glad you know?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t.”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re glad or not, I guess.” Jamie climbed out of the bunk and dropped to the floor. I heard him zipping his jacket in the darkness.
“Roof?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
We padded down the living room stairs and out into the street. The clouds were heavy with moonlight, the sidewalks empty all the way down the bluff. Jamie was right. What we had to say didn’t belong on the roof. I wasn’t sure if that was because what we were about to say was too secret even for our sacred place or because it was too horrible. From the Norths’ it was fifteen minutes downtown. We passed the tiny Safeway, dark; the library, dark; Belinda’s, dark; Eric’s Quilt, dark; and the Fisherman’s Memorial, drowning in a pool of streetlight.
The harbor was dotted with boats, but it looked vacant and harmless with the big ships gone for the season. Jamie sat down on the edge of the dock, dangling his feet over the lapping water. He lit a cigarette and leaned back on one hand, blowing thoughtful clouds. He shook another cigarette from the pack and stood it up on its filter. “I feel sick,” he said. “I’ve been feeling sick all day. How are we supposed to solve this? What are we supposed to do?”
I chewed on the tip of the cigarette filter and looked out at the bobbing boats as I auditioned answers.
“We could let him go,” I said.
“We could.”
“But then.”
“But then?”
“They’d put everyone in jail, wouldn’t they?”
“Who’s everyone?”
“Your dad and my dad and Don, at least,” I said.
“What if we made Richard promise not to tell anyone? What if we made him promise not to sell everything?”
“I’ve thought of that,” I said, “but, I mean, he’s dead, isn’t he? He can’t just reappear.”
“No,” Jamie said.
“Anyway,” I said, “he hates them. If he got out, what would he do?”
“But he doesn’t seem to hate us.”
“No.”
In the distance a freighter lumbered through the channel, though it was too dark to see anything but lights on the bow and stern. I’d watched ships like these cruise the channel en route to Seattle from Singapore, Tokyo, or Taiwan all my life. Something about them still made my stomach leap. They spoke of just how giant the world actually was. In comparison to these monsters, the Laurentide was tiny.
Jamie flicked his butt into the water. Everything smelled like early memories of my father, before he quit smoking, when he came home after summer work and stroked my hair with damp yellow fingers.
“Is it right,” Jamie asked, “what they did?”
“What else could they do?” I said. “He was asking for it, wasn’t he?”
“No.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see Jamie shaking his head. “I don’t know. Maybe he was. I always hated him. But today he seemed—”
“I know,” I said. “You know how I found him? He was singing.”
Jamie didn’t answer. The clouds broke and moonlight dropped onto the waves. I thought of all the times as a kid when I’d played on the front lawn and a breeze whipped the ocean smell past our house, of that slight change in temperature, in the elemental composition of the air.
“Jamie?” I said.
“It’s sad. That’s all. It’s sad to think about him in the basement singing by himself.”
“I know.”
“Maybe he’s changed.”
“So what if he has?”
“So what?”
“If we let him out, if we call the police and it’s not the right thing, we can’t undo that.”
“And we know he’s in the basement,” Jamie said. “We can’t undo that either.”
“So, we’ll wait, okay?”
“And go back?”
“I guess we have to.”
We sat in silence until we were both shivering, until the first birds swooped across the bows of the moored trawlers, and, slowly, the night came apart.