Chapter 38
WILLIAM
William had run to the hotel. The last time he’d sprinted that long was in high school, the slow, loping laps they’d take in the high-ceilinged gymnasium, their sneakers occasionally squeaking in protest against the polished wooden floors.
He stopped to catch his breath on the porch, and when he looked behind him, he expected to see the woman tearing through the trees, that she’d been nipping at his heels.
Instead, he found only an aimless buzzing of mosquitoes.
The girl at the front desk was studying her hands splayed beneath a table lamp and did not even look up when he passed.
There was a hickey bruising her neck, ineffectually covered with concealer that was not the color of her skin.
She might be the older sister of one of the teenagers from the field, so perhaps she would hate him by morning, but he couldn’t think about that now.
Seventeen, she had told him yesterday morning. Shay’s room number was seventeen.
The hotel was silent. Most of the guests at the bar had collapsed onto their stiff mattresses that felt as old as the island.
On the second-floor landing, a woman’s abandoned purse flopped across a stair.
William wondered if his mother was awake.
She had insomnia, and mornings, they’d often find the detritus of her second, nocturnal self: pulpy Westerns and half-full glasses of malted milk, things they could never imagine her consuming in daylight.
Shay once said that she’d probably like that mother better.
The sconces in the hallway flickered when he found Shay’s door, rapping his fist against the wood. The woman with the shaved head could be in there now. She could have slipped past the indifferent girl at the front desk and slid beneath Shay’s bed.
The door opened, and William was surprised to find Shay and not the woman he’d feared, not even Andrew, but Joel, sitting in the corner of the room. He and Shay looked grim. The air was agitated.
“Is everything okay?” Shay asked.
“Yeah,” William began, and then reconsidered. “Well, no. . . .”
Shay stepped out into the hallway, closing the heavy door behind her. She was barefoot, and he wondered why Joel was in her bedroom, what had made them seem like they’d gathered for a funeral and not a wedding. Perhaps they already knew why he had come.
“What’s wrong?” Her voice was lowered, so as not to wake anyone.
“I just, well . . .” He tried to think of where to begin. “I found this group of teenagers on my walk. They were setting off fireworks, and I—God, this is stupid—but they were firing bottle rockets at each other—”
“At each other?”
“Like a game.” Shay looked confused. She looked tired. “You’d jump out of the way before it hit you, and they asked me to play.”
“They asked you to shoot a bottle rocket at one of them?”
“Yes, and I did, which I know was really dumb, and the kid, the kid I played against, he—” He heard Bean’s scream when they lifted him, saw the burnt, blistered meat of his shoulder.
“He what?”
“He’ll be okay, we got him to the doctor.”
“William.” Shay covered her eyes with her palms, a gesture of their mother’s he’d never seen her echo before. It made him feel chastised and small.
“But that’s not why—”
“Does he need to go to a hospital?” Here was a glimmer of the Shay he’d wanted before, the one who was always there to help him, but this was not what he needed now. “Should I call—”
“We got him to a doctor. You don’t have to do anything.”
Her hands moved to grip the skin between her neck and shoulders.
He remembered how she’d stood on the balcony at her engagement party, the way that she’d reached for him as he heaved the glass door open.
Even though they were just a few feet away from each other, it still felt like he was on the street below.
“Do you know if anyone from Synanon is on the island?” he asked.
She flinched, taking a step back from him. “No. Of course not.”
“The doctor said that some fishermen saw a woman with a shaved head, and the first morning I was here, I think I saw her too.”
“William.”
“They seem dangerous, and—you can tell me, if you’re still somehow involved, I won’t judge you, but you have to—”
“William.” The name was hard and sharp. He felt it knock against his teeth.
Shay’s face was unreadable, any familiarity from earlier that evening dissolved, her right hand fisting the blue cotton of her dress in frustration or fear—he could not tell.
Maybe she knew the woman was on the island, maybe she’d invited her, or maybe it was a possibility she could not process.
Either way, she would not tell him. Just like his mother—who refused to speak of what actually happened to their father, to admit to the Pruitts that they had no money—Shay was a liar.
All of this time, he’d felt so guilty that he had not called her, that he had not emptied his bank account to fly out and see her after his mother mentioned Synanon for the first time.
It had been his failure, his alone, but maybe Shay wouldn’t have even answered the phone.
Perhaps it was as he feared, even before Synanon, that neither of them had grown up, just apart—the woman in front of him no longer his sister but a stranger.
“I don’t know why you won’t talk to me,” he said. “You’re just like Mom, you won’t even admit—”
“I am talking to you.”
“Are you? Then why’s Joel in there?”
“We’re just . . . talking.” Shay’s voice was defensive, like when their mother would ask where she had been, who she had spent her evening with. Perhaps William was echoing her too. The thought made him feel ill, that each was simply repeating the mistakes of their parents.
“That’s what I thought. Fine, then. Understood.”
“It’s late,” she said. “You should go to bed.”
She turned back to the door, wrapping her fingers around the handle. He did not feel tired, and the idea of taking off his clothes and brushing his teeth—the pedestrian rhythms of any other day—seemed absurd.
“There would be no reason for them to lie,” he said. “The fishermen.”
“There are always reasons. Please, don’t say anything, all right?”
“Okay,” he said, the word instinctual. After she closed the door, he heard the lock click shut behind her.
The rocking chair on the porch was too small for his long legs. He pulled the other one in front of him to act as a footrest, but taken together, the chairs made his body unsteady, though perhaps that was for the best. To keep watch, he needed to stay awake.
Once, on his way to the restaurant, he’d passed a car ablaze in front of the Uptown Theatre.
It looked surreal, like the painting at the Art Institute of a train emerging from a fireplace—some mistake of the universe.
Flames rippled across the hood and consumed the carriage, searing yellow at their center, feathering out to an impossible orange and great billows of black smoke.
But after the shock of it wore off, he realized he still had to get to work.
He passed other pedestrians who mirrored his disbelief, muttering exclamations and shaking their heads, and when he got to the kitchen and told Alejandro, he’d asked if the fire department had come, and William realized he did not know, had not even thought to call.
Not only was he powerless when it came to the wars and famines and hijacked planes, he was powerless when it came to the fires blazing on his own street.
He was not the Good Samaritan. He did not know who he was.
William trusted the fishermen. He was not one for confrontations or battles, for fighting fires, but if the woman approached, whether Shay wanted her or not, he would be there to meet her.