Chapter Twenty-Seven
Nathan won’t be at his apartment. I know that much—it’s the first place Dina would look, which means if he was there, I would
have heard by now.
He won’t go to Provincetown. He’ll go someplace it’s easy to be alone.
Twilight creeps through the trees, sending deep wells of darkness into the potholes on Willet Lane as I turn my car around
the bend and climb the gentle hill.
I was so sure that the reason Professor MacAndrew vanished was because she needed to tell me something. But that’s not it
at all. She didn’t need me. I needed her. Just like I needed Jackson. And it wasn’t even really about my thesis or about the
couch. It was about something I hadn’t seen before. Something I needed to see.
Something I needed to say.
Or scream.
Or let go.
It was always about something I needed to leave behind.
It’s so obvious now that I don’t know how I missed it for so long. Nathan spent a summer working in the little cottage—the
summer after his parents died. And after that . . .
Well, he told me, the first time I met him: he doesn’t do that anymore.
Every time I invited him into the little cottage, he bailed or suggested we go somewhere else. Every time I’ve seen that younger
version of him in the bedroom, he’s been quieter, more distant, as though something is wearing him down, tearing away little
pieces of him, hollowing him out.
After all this time—months of seeing people in the cottage that I knew, people no one else could see—why didn’t it occur to
me that maybe Nathan saw someone too?
I let my foot off the gas as I near the sandy clearing on the side of the road, and sure enough, there’s Nathan’s old Pontiac,
parked crookedly in the middle of it.
Darkness is falling fast now, and I have to switch on my phone’s flashlight just to find the trail leading down to the water.
Through the trees, the pond is a dark mirror, reflecting the deep, clear blue of the sky overhead.
Nathan is sitting at the end of the pier, feet dangling over the side, picking at the label of a bottle with one fingernail,
an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.
I turn off my phone’s flashlight as I step out onto the weathered, creaking boards. With the last of the daylight reflecting
off the water, it’s not so dark here, like twilight is hanging back, lurking on the shore.
Nathan doesn’t move as I sit down next to him, except to reach up and take the cigarette out of his mouth. “I threw away my
lighter,” he says. “On the way to your friends’ place. This is just . . .” But he doesn’t finish the thought. Just tucks the
cigarette behind his ear.
Guilt twists my stomach. “Nathan—”
“Let me guess,” he says. “Dina called you.”
I let my breath out, rubbing at the goose bumps already prickling up my arms. “Sharon, actually.”
“Right.” He goes back to scraping at the label on the hard cider bottle in his hand. “You didn’t need to come find me.”
I look at him, but he’s staring out across the water with such a resigned expression, a sadness in his eyes that’s somehow
simultaneously empty and terrifyingly deep, that my heart twists painfully in my chest. I don’t know what makes me feel worse—that
he never really told me the truth, or that I’m beginning to think he tried to, in bits and pieces, and I just missed every
clue he dropped until now.
I almost reach for him, but I change my mind, too worried he’ll pull away. “I’m sorry for everything I said.”
He only shrugs. “None of it was untrue.”
The ache in my chest drives deeper. “I think I understand now,” I say. “Or at least, I think I’m starting to. Will you please
come back with me?”
He raises the bottle to his lips. “I’m not going back to have some wholesome makeup with Dina.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Harlowe”—he sounds so tired and so worn—“you don’t need to fix us.”
“I know. This isn’t about Dina, this is . . .” About you. But I don’t say it. I swallow, and then I throw every last bit of caution to the wind. “Look, I want to take you somewhere,
and I need you to trust me.”
He finally looks at me, and in the dying light, his eyes have dulled to deep, dark gray. For a moment, I’m sure he’s going
to argue with me, or just refuse. Tell me to leave.
But he runs a hand over his face and sighs and every last piece of tension seems to run out of his body. His shoulders loosen
and he closes his eyes. “Okay. Fine.”
A knot inside me releases and I quickly push myself to my feet, reaching down a hand. He grasps it and I pull him up. We climb
the hillside, back up to the road.
“Let’s just take my car,” I say. “We can come back for yours.”
He shrugs and folds himself into the passenger side of the Honda.
We’re quiet as I drive us back to the cottage. Nathan stares out the window like he’s barely aware of what he’s seeing. It’s
only when I pull into the clearing at the top of Spyglass Beach Way that he seems to rouse himself and realize where we are.
“What are we doing here?” His voice is brittle. “I told you I don’t really want to talk to Dina right now.”
I turn the key, the engine sputtering to silence. “I know. That’s not why we’re here, I promise.” Please don’t run away from me. “Just come with me.”
He lets his breath out, grabbing the cigarette from behind his ear and fiddling with it between his fingers, but he opens
his door. We get out of the car, and he follows me up the brick steps, across Dina’s porch, and then up the flagstone path.
But when I climb the front steps of the little cottage, he stops.
“What is this?” he says, voice rough, rasping, like he’s forgotten how to use it. “What are we doing?”
I hold out my hand. “It’ll be okay. Trust me.”
He shakes his head, shoving the cigarette in his pocket and digging his fingers into his hair. “You don’t know what you’re
asking.”
I take a slow, shuddering breath. “Yes,” I say, “I do.”
His gaze meets mine. He wavers, and once again, I’m afraid he’s going to bolt—actually turn and run. He has a key to Dina’s
house. He could lock himself inside. What would I do then?
But he doesn’t run. He doesn’t turn away. He reaches out and takes my hand. His fingers are cold.
I unlock the front door, and we cross the threshold together. The living room is dark, and I have to let go of his hand so
I can fumble for the lamp by the love seat and switch it on. A soft yellow glow fills the room, and I hear Nathan’s breath
rush out.
The man and woman standing in the living room look, somehow, exactly like I would have expected, even though I’ve never seen pictures of them.
The man has wild dark hair, a deep tan, and familiar bright blue eyes behind a pair of wire-framed glasses.
The woman is smaller, broad-shouldered with blondish-brown hair pulled back in a braid, gray threads running through it.
They’re both wearing jeans and T-shirts, plain and practical.
“Surprise,” the man says, smiling. A crease deepens in his cheek. “Happy birthday.”
He’s looking at Nathan as though I’m not even here. So is the woman.
And Nathan’s looking back at them, pale under his tan, hands loose at his sides, so still I’m not even sure he’s breathing.
“They’re still here,” he says.
The woman gives him a slightly perplexed smile. “Of course we’re here. It’s your birthday! We wouldn’t miss it.”
“It’s not my birthday,” Nathan says. A frown passes across his face, and he looks at me. “Can you see them?”
“Yeah.” I nod. “I can.”
He closes his eyes, takes a breath, and then looks back at the man and woman in front of him. “They were here that summer,”
he tells me. “I didn’t finish college after they died and I wound up here, because . . . we came out here every summer to
visit Dina when I was a kid, so this . . .” He shrugs, as if to say this was the only option. “Dina showed me these things she needed fixed in the house, just to give me something to do. She said she’d pay me. She
wanted to get it spruced up to start renting out. So I . . . I said I’d do it, and then the next day, I came back to start
working, and . . . they were here.”
“And Dina didn’t warn you,” I say. It’s not really a question. I already know the answer.
He lets out a tiny, bitter laugh. “I actually thought they were real for a second. The Coast Guard never found the bodies.”
I look away, down at the coffee table. It’s too much to keep looking at the man and the woman. Too intrusive.
“I tried to tell Dina.” Nathan’s voice catches. “I basically dragged her in here . . . but she didn’t see them. All she said was that whatever I was seeing . . . it wasn’t really real. That convinced me that she knew. She knew I was seeing them, even if she couldn’t.”
I swallow. And that was why she asked him to fix things in the little cottage—he doesn’t say it, but he doesn’t have to.
She knew what might be waiting for him inside.
“At first I thought it was okay,” Nathan says. “They were here. I could see them. I could talk to them. And even if they weren’t
real, it was better than nothing.” A ghost of a smile flickers across his face. “I kept coming back, finding more things to
fix, just so I could talk to them. But it was like . . . like they never quite saw me. Every day, I’d walk in, and they’d just tell me—”
“Tell you happy birthday,” I say.
“They surprised me in college.” He presses his fingers against his eyes, and I see his hands trembling. “They showed up at
this house I was renting with friends and told me they were going to do this dive over the weekend—they were going out to
Buzzards Bay for their dolphin research—”
“You could come with us,” the woman says with a bright smile. “We might even get out past the bay. It would be really great
hands-on experience.”
“Because you were studying marine biology,” I say.
“I wanted to be just like them.” Nathan drops his hand and gives a tiny choked laugh.
“Everything they did, every study, every project, even the way they talked when they took me to the aquarium as a kid . . . I wanted to be just like that. I know it sounds cheesy, to want to be just like your parents, but . . . Every time my mom talked about dolphins, her eyes lit up. Every summer when we came out here to visit Dina, I’d swim out with my dad to these rocks you can only get to at low tide, and he’d show me what lived in all the crevices.
” Nathan lets his breath out, his chest turning concave.
“But that Monday . . . I had a test coming up on that Monday, and I was behind prepping for it.”
Understanding sinks in. “You told them no,” I say.
“We understand,” the man says, although he sounds a little disappointed. “School comes first. And there will be other dives.”
“Maybe you could come with us this summer, after you graduate,” the woman says.
Nathan blinks, his eyes too bright as he looks at her. “You know I still have dreams where dolphins rescue you? Find you.
Push you to the surface. Push you to shore.” He looks at me and that empty, endless sadness is written all over his face.
“They do that, dolphins. They’ve been known to rescue swimmers in distress.”
“You did always love dolphins,” the man says.
Nathan shakes his head again. “It didn’t matter how many times I tried to change the subject,” he says. “They just asked me,
over and over, whether I wanted to go on this dive. I even tried saying yes, just to see what would happen.” His shoulder
twitches. “They were still there the next day, same as always.”
I take a step toward him, but I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to say anything that could ever be enough.
He looks back at the man and woman in front of him. “I went out there looking for you,” he says, offering it desperately,
like maybe this time they’ll be able to hear it. “I got someone to take me out in a boat a week after it happened. I thought
maybe I’d be able to find something the Coast Guard missed. Like there’d be anything to find. But the ocean’s too big.” He
waves a hand, a hopeless, defeated gesture. “The ocean’s just too big.”
A flicker of movement catches my eye from the direction of the hallway. The younger Nathan is standing there, on the edge
of the living room lamplight, watching us.
The Nathan next to me draws a shaky breath. “I wish I’d gone,” he says, his voice breaking. “I really wish I’d gone with you. I really wish I hadn’t told you no. I wish I’d blown off that test . . .”
My heart cracks open. “Nathan—”
“I wish I’d been there . . .”
“We understand,” the man says again.
The woman nods. “School comes first.”
My fingers wrap around Nathan’s arm just as he closes his eyes, and his breath escapes his chest, and he finally starts to
cry. I wrap my arms around him as his knees buckle, but I can’t hold him up, and we both crumple to the floor. Tears slide
down his face and his whole body shakes, his fingers digging into my shirt as sobs tear out of him, like if he doesn’t hold
on to something—to me—he’ll fall some great distance, or get swept out to sea.
In the shadows at the edge of the lamplight, I see the younger Nathan turn, walking back toward the bedroom. And in front
of us, the man and the woman are slowly fading. Just like Jackson, their edges go first, turning blurred, like ripples in
water. The blond bleeds from the woman’s hair. The man’s eyes turn gray. The color fades from their clothes, and they seem
to turn to twilight, as though the light from the lamp can’t reach them anymore.
The man reaches for the woman’s hand. And then they turn to smoke.
And then to haze.
And then they’re gone.