AIDAN’S “BORROW” WAS EASIER THAN HE HAD ANTICIPATED.
While they waited out the night watchman, Charles whispered some pointers to Aidan. “Don’t breathe too noisy, or you can’t hear nothin’. In the dark, you gotta be all ears. You listen for any change in The Coffin’s breathin’ or shiftin’ around. You think she’s wakin’ up, you freeze. Don’t turn around and look to see if you been made. Just freeze until she sounds like she’s back asleep. Get the first thing you can, and get outta there.”
“What if she does wake up?”
“Say . . . I dunno, you got lost lookin’ for the toilet, you’re new here, you’re sorry, then run. But that ain’t gonna happen. This is easy.”
They were silent for a while, listening to the night sounds of all the boys around them and the crickets chirping outside. They heard the whinny of a horse in the distance. Eventually they dozed, but their sleep was light and brief, their minds buzzing with the job ahead of them.
“Sully.” Charles was the first to see that the night watchman was gone. He nudged Aidan’s shoulder. “It’s time.”
As soon as he was alone, Charles started to think of all the things that Aidan might do wrong. As the minutes wore on, he became convinced that Aidan was not up to this task, and he strained to hear sounds of running or shouting that would confirm his fears. After what seemed like an unnecessarily long time, Aidan crept back into the dormitory.
“What the hell took you so long?” whispered Charles.
“I thought I heard Quincy roamin’ around.”
Quincy. Charles had forgotten about him. “But he sleeps outside.”
“Yeah, well, we ain’t even been here a week, so for all we know he sleeps inside sometimes.”
“But he wasn’t really there?”
“Naw. At least I didn’t see him.”
Charles wished he could know for sure that Quincy was outside, but there was nothing to be done about it now.
“What did you get?”
Aidan showed Charles a thin book of poetry. “Right off her night table. Turns out The Coffin sleeps like a rock. I tripped over a shoe, and she never moved. Plus her snores were drownin’ out any noise I made.” Aidan slipped the book under their pillow. “Your turn. Watch out for St. Bernards.”
Charles crept down the hallway. Bill had drawn them a map showing the way to the room that each of them needed to find, and Charles made it there quickly. Once inside her room, he was surprised to find it well lit by the moonlight. Thick curtains that would have blocked the light were thrown back, and Charles found it strange that anyone would choose to fall asleep this way when the curtains could have been closed.
On a chest of drawers he could see a comb, a hand mirror, and a silver filigree hairpin. He picked up the hairpin, turning it around in his hand slowly. This would certainly do, he thought.
A little wave of disappointment washed over him. This was likely the only time he would be doing something exciting on the island, and it was turning out to be so easy. Short of running into Quincy on the way back, it felt like taking candy from a baby. There was something about his life of crime that he missed, the way his heart would pound with both the fear of getting caught and the thrill of getting away clean. Well, there’s nothing for it now, he thought with a silent sigh, and he moved toward the door.
Lydia Turner shifted in her bed, rolling over toward the moonlight, and it was then that Charles saw the locket around her neck.
Now that would be a prize, he mused. To be able to tell Bill and Tink that he had taken the necklace from around her neck while she slept, why, that would be legendary. Generations of boys in Laurel would hear the story. And Charles could even see the clasp, lying on her chest exposed, rising and falling with her breathing. This, he knew, was meant to be.
As quiet as a cat, he put down the hairpin and approached her bed. He leaned down, without touching the bed, and reached out. As he gingerly released the clasp, the smell of rosewater wafted up from the bed and made his head feel strangely fuzzy. The clasp came undone, and now came the most difficult part: slipping the chain from the back of her neck. As he patiently and gently pulled on the chain with the locket in the palm of his hand, he noticed her hair, the color of dark, shiny pennies, not pinned back as it was during the day but spread out across the pillow in little waves. Another gentle pull, releasing the chain another inch, and he saw her night clothes, not buttoned to the neck—in fact, not buttoned at all that he could see—and the tiny beads of sweat in the thumbprint shallow at the base of her neck, rising and falling with her breath, breath he could hear now that he was so close. He felt dizzy, forgot what he was doing for a moment, then remembered and resumed, more roughly than before, forgetting that rushing a job like this was the kiss of death. His head swam with the smell of roses and the sight of those tiny beads of sweat, and he had to brace himself on the bed with his other hand, which is when Lydia Turner moaned and turned toward Charles.
What happened next was a moment in Charles’s life that he would replay countless times in his mind, both before and after he became an adult.
Lydia Turner did not open her eyes—at least, not wide enough that Charles could see them—but she reached her hand up and pushed her fingers into the hair behind his ears. Palming the back of his skull, she pulled him toward her and whispered, “Cole . . .” as she brought his face almost to hers. The last few inches between them were bridged as her head came off the pillow and her mouth reached out, parted, to meet his.
It was then that Charles understood.
He understood why Tink and Aidan would pay their last dimes to see Lester’s postcards. He understood why boys in the dormitory would take themselves in their hand at night even though they knew that others could hear them. He understood the first thing on every sailor’s mind when his ship docked in Boston. And it was because this—his lips on Lydia Turner’s mouth, her tiny tongue parting his teeth—was like fire and candy and a soft pillow and a lit fuse, and it was like none of those things because it was like absolutely nothing he’d known before. He wanted to stay like this, to do this and keep doing this, forever.
It was just then that Lydia Turner realized whom she was kissing, or rather, whom she was not kissing.
The hand that had been pulling him toward her reversed course and pushed his face away as the other hand yanked the sheet to her chin with a little yelp. She sat up and backed away to the headboard, and the hand that had pushed him away now covered her mouth in horror.
Charles remained frozen in a stupid half-sitting, half-standing position, his mouth still open, his breathing labored and his sleeping pants tented. Though he had always been quick with a glib line to get himself out of an unexpected situation, he could think of absolutely nothing to say at this moment. He stared at her, his mind an empty bucket.
“Why are you here?” she hissed.
Charles couldn’t remember.
When he would replay this whole experience in his mind periodically throughout his life, this was the part he would edit. Sometimes he would find a way to convince her that he was a better choice than this Cole person, whoever he was, that his charms deserved at least another kiss. Sometimes he appealed to her sense of pity, playing up the orphan angle, convincing her that he just needed to be held. Every once in a while, he would just explain the truth of why he was there, and she would understand, giving him a peck on the cheek as he left that would linger just a little longer than a peck.
But what really happened is: he stumbled out of the room, slightly bent to accommodate his tented pants, and stubbed his toe on the door on his way out.
It was more than a quarter of an hour before Charles returned to the dormitory.
“‘Oh, where were you Sully?’” Aidan minced in a whisper. “‘You took such a long time.’ Where the feck did you get to?”
Charles said nothing as he climbed into bed. He had been surprised to calculate after the fact that he had probably spent no more than a few minutes in Lydia Turner’s room, and that the kiss he would never forget had taken no more than two seconds. The remainder of the time he had spent sitting on the top step of the stairs, trying to sort out in his mind what had just happened as well as willing his private parts to revert to their normal state.
Aidan punched him on the arm. “Hello? Did you hit your head or somethin’?”
“Naw.”
“Well, what happened? Did you get anything?”
Charles opened his hand to reveal the locket. Aidan picked it up. “That’s a beaut. I think I seen her wearin’ that in chapel.” He put it back in Charles’s hand. “Okay, and now you’re gonna tell me what happened that’s makin’ you act so queer, even if we hafta stay up all night.”
“You can’t tell nobody, not Bill or Dec or no one. Understand?” Charles proceeded to tell Aidan the whole story, minus his graceless exit.
Aidan regarded Charles critically. “You ain’t blowing smoke up my arse, are ya? She grabbed you by the hair and stuck her tongue in your mouth?”
“She didn’t think it was me! She thought it was some mug named Cole. Probably dreamin’ about her beau on the mainland.”
Aidan thought about this. “She grabs your head and pulls herself off the pillow? She weren’t sleepin’.”
“What are you sayin’?” Charles was still having trouble thinking straight after his experience.
“She musta thought you were someone named Cole on the island. Someone she was expectin’ tonight.”
“What?!” Charles exclaimed a little too loudly, causing Poole in the next bed to mumble something and turn over. They waited until his wheezy snoring resumed.
“Maybe that does make some kinda sense,” Charles admitted after having a moment to think about it. “Maybe that’s why the curtains weren’t drawn. She weren’t trying to sleep.”
“She wanted to see him. Jaysus.”
They both stared up at the ceiling until Charles broke the silence. “What if she tells someone I been in her room at night?”
“But she’s thinkin’ that you know her secret. She’s gotta be more afraid that you’re gonna tell on her. I don’t think she’s gonna make a peep.”
Of course, Charles thought. He should have figured that out—would have, if his brain weren’t so foggy. “Sully, I gotta get me some shut-eye. Christ, what a night.” He rolled over to face the wall.
After a minute, Aidan said, “Charles?”
“Yeah.”
“What was it like—you know, kissin’ her and all?”
“Well, you know what it’s like to kiss any old girl, right?”
“’Course,” Aidan lied.
Charles turned to face Aidan to make his point. “Well, it weren’t nothin’ like that.” And he rolled back to face the wall again.