I went to the bed, pulled back the covers, and ran my fingers across the sheets. No protective plastic here—the bedding was fancy cotton, soft as suede, or skin. Christine had loved expensive sheets too. She’d tried to buy some for me, but I wouldn’t let her.
“Why?” she demanded. “This is crazy, Cass. Your sheets are like sandpaper! You sleep on nice sheets at my place.”
I hadn’t said anything. She wouldn’t have understood. It was crazy. It was like not having a cell phone or a digital camera. The discomfort, the annoyance, reminded me that I was alive. It kept me from feeling completely numb, even as it kept me detached.
Christine had kept me human, barely. I knew that, and it scared me. Sometimes when she’d touched me I’d felt like I was burning, like her bed was on fire. I still felt like that sometimes when I thought of her.
I picked up one of Gryffin’s pillows and buried my face in it. It smelled of some grassy shampoo, and faintly of male sweat. It had been a long time since I’d been close enough to a man to smell him. I stood for a moment with my face pressed against the pillow. Then I lay on the bed, pillow crushed to me so I could breathe in his scent, and masturbated, thinking of the way he’d looked in the photo, that green-flecked eye.
Afterward I smoothed the coverlet and headed back to my room. I thought about getting my camera, decided to leave it. I hadn’t brought much film with me. I pulled on Toby’s sweater and went downstairs.
The house had a strange, late-afternoon calm. Chilly hallways, dead bluebottles on the windowsills; the dull ache, somewhere between anticipation and disappointment, of knowing night was almost here. In the living room a deerhound curled on the couch like a gigantic dormouse, snoring. No other dogs. No Aphrodite. Not much heat coming from the woodstove, though I could see a dull glow through the soot-covered window.
I found Gryffin at the kitchen table, bent over his laptop. He waved tersely at me without looking up. I crossed to the refrigerator and peered inside.
A container of skim milk, another of V-8 juice; eggs and a bag of coffee. Breakfast wasn’t just the most important meal of the day around here. It was the only meal.
“I’m going to the store,” I announced. “You want anything?”
“Me? Uh, no,” Gryffin said distractedly. “Thanks.”
Outside, chickadees fluttered in the trees. Something rustled in the dead leaves of an oak then made a loud rattling sound as I passed. It didn’t seem as cold, despite looming shadows and a steady wind off the water.
Or maybe it was like my grandmother always said: You can get used to anything, even hanging. I remembered Phil’s words—all that bleak shit you like? Well, this is it.
He was right. It made me feel the way the Lower East Side used to make me feel, before the boutiques and galleries and families moved in and the clubs closed and the place became just another sewage pipe for American currency and overpriced clothes. I loved the way it used to be, loved that edge, the sense that the ground beneath me could give way at any time and I’d go hurtling down into the abyss. I had fallen, more than once, but I’d always caught myself before I smashed against the bottom. Back in the day, of course, I was out there taking pictures of people who weren’t so lucky. It was terrifying, but it was also exhilarating.
Now all that had changed. Now there were clean wide sidewalks over the pit. Making my chump change last from week to week for twenty-odd years was no longer a sign of being a survivor. It was further proof, not that any was needed, that I was a fuckup.
I was still managing to be a fuckup here, of course. But I was starting to like it. It seemed a good place to be, if you needed something to slice through the scar tissue so you could feel your own skin. At the moment, the cold was doing a pretty good job of that. I zipped my jacket and shoved my hands into my pockets, wind at my back. That beer had been good. Some Jack Daniel’s would be better.
I walked through the woods. A small animal burred angrily from a tree. I stopped, thinking of the fisher Toby had mentioned, looked up and saw a red squirrel glaring down at me. I chucked a pine cone at it and went on.
There was no one in the Island Store when I arrived, just the big Newfoundland lying in front of the counter. The air smelled good, garlic and tomatoes cutting through the underlying odors of beer and pizza. Dub music thumped from the kitchen. The dog stood and yawned then followed me as I went to the back room and got another beer from the cooler. When I returned to the counter Suze stood there. She slid a carton of cigarettes behind a Plexiglas window, then locked it.
“Going for another pounder?” She pronounced it poundah. At my blank look she picked up the beer and held it in front of my face. “Sixteen ounces?”
“Yeah. And two pints of Jack Daniel’s.” She raised an eyebrow. “I’m on the South Bend Diet.”
“Too quiet for you here?” She dragged over the ladder and got my bottle from the shelf. “Coming from the big city?”
“Seems busy to me. That girl disappearing. Bodies washing up on the beach.”
“Aw, that happens all the time. The bodies, I mean. Often enough, anyway. The hungry ocean, it’s a dangerous business.” She took my money, put the bottles in a paper bag and pushed it across the counter to me. When I started to remove the beer, she shook her head. “You can’t drink that in here.”
Before I could retort, she motioned behind her. “But you can drink it out here.”
I followed her into the kitchen. She grabbed a coffee mug then kicked open a battered wooden door, letting in a blast of wintry air and revealing a rickety set of steps. One of the rails was broken, and there was only room for two people to stand side by side. But it had a commanding view of a dumpster and a propane tank and, past a ragged scrim of stone buildings and faded clapboard, the harbor. Suze leaned against the intact railing, leaving me to stand with my back to the door.
“Yeah, Mackenzie.” She cupped the mug in her hands. “John Stone called me a little while ago—county sheriff—I guess they’re waiting till tomorrow to officially call it a missing persons case.”
I popped my beer. “Isn’t that kind of a long time to wait? If they’re really worried?”
“That’s what I said.” Suze nodded vehemently. “I asked him why this wasn’t an Amber Alert—they practically shut down 95 and close the Canadian border if that happens—but he said she’s too old. Under fifteen, that’s the cutoff date. Older’n that, you’re screwed. And the local authorities, they don’t have a lot of manpower. So they don’t like going off on a wild-goose chase, which is what John Stone thinks this is.”
She shook her head, disgusted. “This is so messed up, man. You’re from away, so you wouldn’t know, but this kind of shit happens all the fucking time. Kids go missing, no one ever finds them. Or they show up…”
Her husky voice trailed off.
“Dead?” I suggested.
“No,” she said. “A lot of people just never get found. But I think that’s because they don’t want to. The rest, mostly they turn up alive, in Florida or South Carolina or someplace like that. Someplace warm. Kenzie’s mom, she lives around Orlando. Her and Merrill had a really nasty divorce. Kenzie hasn’t seen her mom in two years. I think she headed down there. But in the meantime everyone’s all worked up and the cops are pulling over everyone with a broken headlight. Over there, I mean.”