His voice became a shriek, babbling strings of nonsense. Frantically, he staggered to his feet. Martin seized him, wrestled him back into bed and pinned him there. His skin was slick and soft beneath Martin’s hands, like fallen petals.
“… see them? see them?”
Martin reached with one hand for the night table, knocking aside water bottle and candlesticks. The penicillin went flying before his fingers closed about what he wanted: a Ziploc plastic bag filled with morphine syringes. Without looking, he tugged one free, turned, and plunged it against the boy’s neck. The boy continued to struggle as Martin pulled the needle loose and tossed it onto the floor.
“… where…”
Martin gazed in pity and revulsion at where the young man’s flesh bore fresh abrasions; at his maddened blue eyes and frantic hands. But after several minutes the boy was quieter. His eyes grew calm and his body grew still, no longer rigid with dread. He even smiled, the same soft silly smile Martin knew from tending dying friends. His gaze focused on the older man. The smile became a grin, grotesque in his beautifully ruinous face.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Martin Dionysos.” Martin leaned forward. “I found you on the beach. Yesterday. You were—I thought you were dead, at first. Do you remember what happened to you? Did your boat sink? Can you tell me your name?”
The boy shook his head. “I jumped. I was scared. The bay.” He looked down at his chest, plucked feebly at his breastbone. “I jumped.” His gaze moved distractedly across the room.
“Your name? I want to help you—”
That silly grin. “Don’t you know? I’m not changing it.”
With a sigh Martin turned away. Glancing back at the boy he saw that his eyes had closed. He looked peaceful; Martin knew he was only stoned. He was at the door when the voice came behind him.
“Trip.” The boy’s eyes remained closed. He raised a hand like a bruised iris. “My name is Trip Marlowe.” And slept.
Days passed. Then weeks. You wouldn’t know it from the sky or shrouded sun that skulked across it; but Martin could gauge a sort of summer blooming as the boy’s wounds healed. First his broken skin; then his broken wrist. What next? wondered Martin, who spent a lot of time staring at that gold ring on the third finger of the boy’s right hand. “The nameless finger,” his Swedish grandmother would have called it. To Martin it was infinitely something. He and John had been married by a Universalist minister, exchanging rings that they wore on their right hands. Martin still bore his. So did John, in a San Francisco cemetery two thousand miles away.
“Are you married, Trip? Do you have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend—I could try to contact them—”
Trip said nothing.
“The ring,” urged Martin softly. “Where did the ring come from?”
Trip stared down at it with dull surprise, then shook his head. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “She had one, too…”
Okay, thought Martin, fighting an unreasonable disappointment. “Okay.”
There were no more tussles with morphine, but the sweet smile stayed. Martin wondered if he had suffered brain damage in the wake of his accident, or if he had been simpleminded to begin with. Mrs. Grose had been consulted, and the Graffams, about any foundering boats. And yes, a trawler had gone down in the storm, off the Libby Islands. There was a light there, but it had been unmanned for years; the Graffams knew only that pieces of the trawler had washed up at Bucks Head. No one knew who had died, or how many. The boat had shipped from Cutler, and that was very far away, now. In an old telephone book Martin found only two Marlowes, both in Liberty. He had no listings for anything farther down east than Bar Harbor, and there were no Marlowes there at all.
He was relieved.
Mornings he would prepare breakfast. Oatmeal and raw milk and maple syrup, dark as motor oil and with an ineffably sweet, scorched taste. Sometimes eggs from their neighbor Diana, their shells tea-colored, pale yellow, the soft blue-green of a vein too near the surface of the skin. Martin and Trip would sit at the kitchen table, Trip wearing a loose worn flannel shirt and pajama pants that had belonged to John. Too big by far for his slight frame, but Martin was fearful of fabric catching against the flesh not quite healed, and it was not warm enough to go shirtless. While Trip spooned oatmeal or liquescent yolk Martin would try to engage him in conversation. Where was he from? Where had he grown up?
But Trip never replied. He would talk, uninspired musings on the weather, the eggs, how he had slept; but he would not answer questions, or ask them. At first Martin thought this, too, a manifestation of whatever disaster had befallen him. But as the weeks went by and he came to map the boy as once he had mapped canvas, he started to recognize a certain look that Trip had. Or rather, the absence of a look: a shuttering of his eyes, a retreat that Martin could observe as certainly as he could mark a falling leaf. The boy was not amnesiac, not as simple as Martin suspected. He was reticent, skittish, purposefully shy. He was in hiding.
After breakfast, and everything tidied up, they would walk to the beach. Trip was stronger, now. He could have walked by himself, and though he never said anything, he seemed to welcome Martin’s company. He did not like to be left alone in the bungalow; he did not like to be alone. Nights, sleeping on the couch in the living room, Martin would often be awakened by the boy’s cries. He would go to him, murmuring until Trip fell asleep once more. The boy claimed not to recall his nightmares. Only once, Martin let his fingertips graze Trip’s healed wrist: the boy looked at him and said, “She was already dead.”
Martin nodded, waiting for him to go on; but the boy withdrew his hand and said no more.
“The rest must have drowned,” Martin explained to Mrs. Grose one evening, surrounded by flickering candles in her cozy living room. “He said they went through the holes. He keeps saying something about a dead girl…”
Mrs. Grose sipped her brandy thoughtfully. “His sweetheart, you think?”
“I guess.” Martin stared into his glass. “He wears a wedding ring, but it’s on this finger—like mine.” He turned his hand, so that candlelight slid across the thick gold band. “And some kind of Maltese cross. She must have drowned.”
“Perhaps.” In her lap the pug snorted, and she stroked his head. “Have you tried to find his family?”
Martin shrugged, uncomfortable. “Yes. But how can I? He won’t say anything, I mean he won’t tell me where he’s from, who they are…”
Outside, in the endless shifting twilight, branches tapped against the windows, overgrown lilacs that Mrs. Grose was afraid to prune lest they never grow back. The pug yawned. Mrs. Grose shifted on the couch, cradling her brandy against her chest. “Why are you keeping him, Martin?”
He started to respond testily, but stopped. A candle sputtered, then went out. “Where could he go? If he left here—”
“He is not like you, Martin,” she said gently. “He does not have a disease. He seems strong enough, strong in the body. It would be cruel to keep him here, Martin.”
Martin ran a hand through his long greying hair. He whispered, “I know. I know. But where could he go?”
“It doesn’t matter. Not to us. I know it’s hard, Martin. It’s because you saved him—”
“I didn’t—”
“He would have died there, if not for you.” She stood, the pug tumbling from her lap with an affronted groan, and crossed the room to lay a hand upon his shoulder. “You saved him, Martin. And for some reason he’s still alive. But he has to go…”