Chapter 11
11
NOW
LAST NIGHT, MY EYES FLEW open to a darkness so black I could barely make out the ceiling fan. I was sweating; the sheets stuck to my body like wet bandages. I rolled over and reached for my phone to check the time. Nothing. Dead.
If I had been at my apartment in New York, I would have simply rolled to the dry side of the bed and prayed for sleep to take me. But that night, I couldn’t count on prayers alone. My brother was getting married in three days, and our schedule until then was packed. I needed to sleep.
I decided to try something new. I wrapped the comforter around my shoulders, dragged it across the room, and opened the door to the porch. A gust of dark summer wind met my face. I waddled over to the twin bed pressed against the porch wall and collapsed onto it. My body went limp. Birds called in the trees outside. I shut my eyes and didn’t open them again until the sun rose over the harbor.
—
EVERY DAY UP HERE STARTS with coffee. That’s our ritual: eight a.m., everyone in pajamas, lounging about Sunny Sunday’s many sofas and armchairs. Mugs in hands or atop makeshift coasters—discarded novels with covers decorated by dark overlapping rings. The buzz and drip of our plug-in pot in the corner. It had been the case for as long as I could remember, but in the past three years, coffee took on an enhanced role in my life.
Coffee was my lifeline. Coffee was my fuel. Coffee kept me awake, alive. Pure, dark cold brew was my favorite. No milk. No sugar. No ice. Nothing to taint the jet fuel guzzling into my system. My legs might jiggle ceaselessly, my fingers might drum on the plastic surface of my desk, but I didn’t care. Not if it helped me write.
That morning, I was the first on the island to rise. I took my coffee out onto the porch and set it on the railing. Watched the waves toss about in the lake. Though it was still early, Manuel would be up soon—in the old days, he had always beat me to the morning. Yet another aspect of his effortless diligence. Then the rest of the family would rise. There would be eggs scrambled and bacon fried and endless chatter about the coming nuptials, and Karma would force the eggs and the bacon onto me, and Wendy would have fourteen different things she wanted me to do to help decorate.
Mom had said that, back in Chicago, in the weeks leading up to the wedding, she collected everything we needed to properly celebrate. Some of it was already in storage on the island—foldable chairs, craft supplies, fancy linens and dishware saved for special occasions—but most needed to be brought on the jet. I didn’t see the haul in person, but I could imagine it: crates of champagne, bins full of flowers, long crisp garment bags around suits and dresses. Customs must have had a few questions.
My muscles vibrated with nerves and anticipation. I wanted to run. I wanted to do something .
In New York, everyone has a routine. It’s a necessity. The sheer density of choice packed into that city—of options, of plans, of things to eat or events to attend—is nothing short of eyeball melting. If you try to live without structure, you’ll lose your goddamn mind. For me, I ran the East River every morning to expel the black thoughts that accumulated overnight.
Happiness, to me, isn’t a presence. It’s an absence. The absence of Worry. Of fear. Of sadness. Of the thoughts and compulsions that directed my life for so long. I’d worked hard to get to where I was now. I’d pulled myself out of the chaos of my own mind, and routine was the rope that got me there. Run, work, dinner, TV, bed. Run, work, dinner, TV, bed. That was it. Those were the rituals that checked all the boxes and kept me sane.
When I went back inside to make a second batch of coffee, I heard the door open behind me. I detached the boiling-hot pot and poured a careful mugful. Footsteps approached from behind. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t need to. I would know his long, steady gait anywhere. Hide it inside a chorus of footsteps and I could still pick it out.
“Good morning,” Manuel said.
My back stiffened. In my mind I traveled back to the last day of three summers before, the morning I woke to find my best friend’s arm around me—our first and only spent tucked together in that way. I saw the fluffy white comforter, his tangle of dark curls. Felt our cheeks pressed into bare sheets, the pillows fallen to the floor. Heard him say, soft as the summer breeze, “Good morning.”
I turned around and nearly collided with his chest. My heart seized—probably because I was already sipping my fourth coffee for the day. At that point, I’d surpassed the state in which caffeine gives you energy. I’d transcended it, moving instead to that place beyond caffeination, that cliff’s edge from which you stare down into a never-ending well of panic.
“Um,” I said eloquently. “Hi.”
“May I get a cup of coffee?”
“Coffee. Yes.” My heart was pounding. I stepped out of the way. “Go ahead.”
“So,” he said too casually, pouring his own cup of muddy hot liquid. “Should we talk about what happened last night?”
I shimmied down the cabinets, coffee sloshing back and forth in my mug. “I said everything I needed to.”
“Did you?” Mug filled, Manuel turned around, leaning against the divot in the countertop. “Because I detected many, many holes in that half-assed explanation for why you shut me out of your life.”
“I told you.” I squeezed the counter behind me, its chipped wood digging painfully into my palm. “There are—”
“ Things I don’t understand. I know.” Manuel shook his head. “Fuck if I didn’t stay up all night replaying that conversation until it drove me half-mad.”
My heart stilled within my chest. “You—”
“And after peeling it apart nineteen different ways, I could only reach one conclusion.” He stepped closer. “You’re afraid.”
I swallowed. “Afraid of what?”
“Of me.” He stepped closer again, far too close. Not close enough. “Of us . That’s why you ran three years ago. I got too close, and you panicked, and you ran.”
“I—”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You don’t—”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
By then, Manuel had wrecked the carefully laid distance between us. He crowded me up against the cabinets, just an inch between us, almondine eyes blazing with heated focus. I sucked in a breath—and instantly regretted it, because there it was: coffee and fabric softener, toothpaste and something deep, earthy, inexplicable. The smell of Manuel in the morning.
“You’re wrong,” I whispered.
He cupped his ear. “What was that?”
Louder, I said, “You’re wrong, Manuel.” And then, because it was the truth, and because I owed him at least a slice of the truth, I added, “I was afraid. But not of you.”
He straightened. “You…” All anger slipped from his face, replaced by blank confusion. “What?” He shook his head. “But then…what were you afraid of?”
Me , I thought without hesitation. I was afraid of myself.
But I couldn’t tell him that. Of course not. To tell him that would lead to all variety of questions that I was ill prepared to answer.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter ?” Manuel stared at me incredulously. “How could you say that? If someone scared you enough to run off to New York…”
All at once, realization seemed to settle in his mind. A dark realization. One that made Manuel—my best friend, my quiet, brilliant, even-keeled, snaps-at-no-one best friend—twist his face into a look of such blind, murderous rage that I took a shocked step back.
“Who was he?” Manuel asked, voice deathly quiet.
“Wh-who was who?”
His teeth ground together as tight white fists balled up at his sides. “ Who. Was. He? ”
“I don’t—”
“The guy, the guy,” he said, hand gesturing jerkily, as if he wanted to hit something. “The guy who hurt you. Who was he?” He grabbed my shoulders, looking deep into my eyes. “Who did this to you?”
And that’s when I understood.
“Oh,” I said softly. “Oh, Manny—no. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t…”
Sweet Jesus. This was exactly why I went to New York in the first place. Why I cut Manuel out of my life and my family and anyone else who might care to ask me these sorts of questions. I couldn’t answer them. Not without revealing the ugly truth of myself. All I could do was lie and lie and lie, until the lies wound around my throat, dipped into my mouth, curled around my tongue, gagged me, choked me, left me unable to speak, to eat, to breathe.
“Then what was it?” He shook my shoulders. “Tell me, Beck, please . Why did you run?”
“I…” I swallowed thickly, glancing around the room. “I, um…”
I saw the exact moment that Manuel shut down. Saw his mouth go slack, his eyes close up, his entire being draw protectively around itself, like storm shutters drawn for the winter.
“I see,” he said, dropping his hands from my shoulders. He stepped back. “I see.”
“Manuel—”
“No.” He stepped back again. “Don’t bother. I can tell you don’t feel you owe me an explanation. And it figures, doesn’t it? You were always like that. Always thought you belonged to no one but yourself.”
Then, before I could say anything back, he turned around and walked toward the back porch. I inhaled raggedly. Ducked my head and made for the front door. Pulled it open and slammed it behind me, vanishing into that vast, familiar abyss of questions left unasked.
No , I thought as I emerged into the morning sunlight, tears stinging at my eyes. No, Manuel. I’ve never belonged to myself. I’ve always been yours.
—
OUTSIDE, THE AIR WAS STILL and hot. Muggy. Standard summer weather for New York City, but not for the North Woods. I hopped off the boardwalk. Crunched my way over twigs and peat grass, crossing the short distance to the entrance to the forest.
Once you cross that boundary, leaving the island’s shoreline, you’re swallowed up by its untamed center. Cicadas call. Leftover raindrops drip from pine needles. Thriving colonies of moss stretch from rock to rock in a blanket of vibrant green.
“Never step on moss,” Henry once told me. “That’s where the Moss People live.”
Here’s the thing about losing a brother at age ten: you wobble atop that precarious point, the threshold of lasting memory, when every moment could fall to either side—into the slim collection of images that will one day make up your past, or into the far more extensive chasm of the forgotten, of moments too ordinary or too shameful or too terrifying to keep forever. You might live every moment, but they don’t stay. Not all of them. Most disappear, sucked into that yawning abyss of memory. And those that do remain will be nothing but snippets. Hazy photographs. Paper memories to which you’ll return over and over, running your fingers along their edges until they crinkle.
I walked. Deeper and deeper into the island, farther from civilization, from the boy I most wanted to talk to. The boy I could not, under any circumstance, talk to right now.
Instead, I thought of Henry.
When I thought of my dead brother, a long history of memory didn’t play before my eyes. I wished it did. I saw his face, but was it really his face, or was it the face supplied to me by photographs—the ones Mom had arranged in chronological order, then dropped into a beige storage box? A box she labeled HENRY and shoved onto the highest shelf in the attic.
Sometimes I would dig out one of those old photos and just stare at him. Study him. Separate his face into individual components, working meticulously, as if with tweezers, until each feature floated before me, alone in its own purpose, its own importance. Then I put it all back together. It was the same technique I used when learning how to spell. First understand the letters, then understand the word.
I did it over and over, trying to decide whether the boy in my hands matched the boy in my mind.
—
INSIDE THE ISLAND, NO MATTER how deliberately you steer, fallen trees block your path—trees ripped up by their roots, trees with branches dangling pathetically at their sides, trees cracked right in half by a bolt of lightning, split down the center in a jagged fault line, the top a crown of splintered wood. After a storm, Henry and I used to explore all of that beautiful destruction, in search of whatever we could find. In search, perhaps, of magic.
The year before he died, we found that magic.
The Fort was birthed by wind and lightning. When a big tree falls and drags its entire trunk out of the ground—and I mean really out of the ground, roots and all—it becomes something new. The roots rip from the earth, pulling a mess of mud and moss with them. A few remain burrowed in the soil, but the rest now form a jagged arch around the base of the trunk. Sometimes, if everything bends just so, that arch becomes a cave.
We found our cave towering above a wide clearing. A sturdy wooden wall, roots curved into rafters, mud collapsed into a soft pile on the ground: the perfect hideaway. The skeleton of something wonderful.
It took us three days. Henry stole a thick roll of sandpaper from the boathouse and used it to sand down the inside of the tree, which turned from a muddy, gnarled mess into a smooth ceiling. We dug up the juniper bushes and weeds that clogged the clearing. Once we stripped that circle of forest to be as clear and flat as nature can be, the job became as simple as making the Fort feel like home. We laid tarps atop the mud. Lined the inside with thick blankets and pillows wrapped in flannel. Hung an electric lamp from the ceiling. Stole battery-operated Christmas lights from the craft closet and looped them around the remaining twigs and knobs; when turned on, the lights made a lopsided constellation. As a final touch, we punched ten holes into one side of a tarp and hung it from the wild crown of roots at the top. A front door.
This was it. This was our fortress. Here, we wouldn’t be just the youngest ones on the island. Here, we would have our own voice. Our own life. It was gorgeous. It was hideous. It was a pile of wood and mud and moss and tarp, and it looked like something you could cover in gasoline and set on fire.
I could find the Fort in my sleep. That’s how many times I’ve walked that unmarked trail through the forest. So when I left Sunny Sunday that morning and started walking, I didn’t even choose to head toward the Fort; my legs carried me in that direction automatically. I was almost there—just a few more trees to pass, a few more rock faces to skirt—when I hit a patch of juniper. I could see the entrance to the clearing; it was right there, right on the other side. Rather than double back or skirt around the prickly bushes, I plowed right through.
Three steps in, my legs were already clawed raw. “Damn.” I looked down. Thin red lines blossomed along the pale skin of my shins.
I turned around. As I did, I heard the four ascending trills of a white-throated sparrow. My ears perked up. White-throated sparrows were my favorite bird. Henry’s too. And Dad’s. Speedy was the one who taught my brother and me to identify their call. “They call them the Whistlers of the North,” he said. “If you listen close, you hear them in Chicago, too, but just for a few days. Just as they’re passing through. The North Woods are their true home.”
So we did. Every year, we listened.
Once we started listening, we heard them everywhere. While walking the boardwalk. Winding through the trees to reach the Laundry House. Belly-up in a swing chair on the porch of Chelsea Morning, feet against the wall, toes pressing smooth planks of cedar to push the chair back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. We swung. We listened. We whistled back. We whistled to the Whistlers, mimicking their white throats’ perfect four-note ascension.
In the woods that afternoon, the sparrow called again. Another joined in. I closed my eyes to listen.
A shiver passed across my chest. My eyes popped back open. The treetops were still. No wind. No chill. Flesh raised on my arms. I shivered again. I spun around. Why was I cold? Where was that breeze coming from?
And then I felt it.
The presence. The familiar illusion.
Henry.
I spun around and started to run.
A blind sprint, no destination. Pine needles clawed at my arms and legs. It didn’t matter where I was going; all I wanted was to leave that forest, to find open air. A few minutes later, I pushed through a wall of leaves and burst out into the morning sun. I sprinted down the flowing rock, headed for a long slice of granite that stuck out into the lake, a natural jetty. At its very edge, I stopped. Stripped to nothing and stood naked on the smooth stone. Shivered in the warm summer air.
This had happened periodically, growing up. A tingle at the base of my spine, on the bottoms of my feet. The sense that my dead brother was there, right there . And I don’t mean in a foggy, ethereal way—I mean there . Literally. His ashes. Right where I stood. That, after they were lost, of every place on the island, they ended up below my feet.
I thought I’d grown out of this illusion, the same way I grew out of my Worries.
Apparently not.
My feet ached. I listened to my breath drag in and out of my chest. Just beyond my toes, the rock dropped in a flat wall straight into the water. Straight to the bottom.
I’ve always been yours.
I took one last breath and dove in.
—
IN WINTER, THE NORTH CHANNEL freezes. Not just a partial freeze; the water hits complete subzero, creating one unbroken crust of ice, five or ten feet deep, that stretches over the entire channel like an extra layer of skin. In all of the 162 kilometers that make up Manitoulin Island—the massive stretch of land where Port Windfall is located—there is only one bridge that connects to mainland Canada. In the summer, locals drive fifty miles out of their way just to get off Manitoulin. But in the deepest weeks of winter, when the lake turns to stone, they drive wherever they please. Their pickup trucks plow straight across the water. That’s how strong the lake becomes. That’s how deep its freeze. In spring, the ice melts, and by the time summer begins, the lake is a lake once more. But the ice’s whisper remains.
My body plunged into the water. In seconds I traveled from July to January—down, down, down, right to where the last breaths of winter remained. The cold was worse than I remembered; it stiffened my bare limbs. Sunk straight through skin and muscle, straight to the bone. I recognized the shock but felt no pain. My body reacted instinctively—half somersault, legs down, arms up, kick and kick and kick, eyes squeezed tight, no need to look, could find the surface anywhere. I knew this water. I learned to swim in this water. It couldn’t hurt me if it tried.
I surfaced and gasped in the morning air. Paddled over to the rocks. Pressed my palms to their slick surface and hoisted myself up. I turned over into a seated position and pulled my knees up to my face. Took a few deep breaths. Water lapped at my ankles.
The feeling—the presence of my dead brother—passed. It always does. But the memory of the feeling stayed, and does that really count as relief? Memory of pain is often worse than the pain itself. It drives us. What we do or don’t do, embrace or fear, repeat or avoid at all costs—all of that is dictated by our memory of pain.
I cast my eyes across the lake. As they moved, they spotted a white speck on the horizon, the first sign of an approaching boat. I nearly jumped out of my goose-pimpled skin, grabbing my clothes as I scrambled to cover my naked body. But when I blinked, the speck disappeared or else moved or else had been nothing more than a bird flying low.