Chapter 20
JOEL
In the morning, Joel laced up his sneakers.
He left Carmen asleep in their bed, unable to press even a brief kiss against her forehead.
On the hotel’s porch, he lifted one knee to his stomach and then the other to stretch, impatient for movement.
A host of sparrows chirped on the grass before him, pecking at the dirt. They scattered as he began to run.
It was warm at this hour, not yet sweltering, but his T-shirt was quickly soaked in sweat, his glasses slipping down his nose.
Drinking always made this worse, his body trying to wring out the alcohol like dirty water from a dish towel.
He turned off the gravel road that led to the hotel in search of shade, drawn by a copse of cottonwoods.
Their branches patterned the path with shadows.
Joel’s father had wanted him to play baseball, to become a Big Red pitcher like him, but the only thing he was good at was sprinting to the bases.
When one of his younger brothers became a star pitcher in elementary school, it gave Joel permission to abandon baseball for track.
It never occurred to him he could give up sports altogether.
In their family of three boys, mealtimes were spent discussing statistics and trades.
The Olympics were as holy as Lent. Still, he knew even this change was a disappointment in a string of so many others, and though he tried to find other ways to make amends, tutoring his brothers in English and waiting at school if their practices ran late, it came to nothing in the end.
To his right, he saw a small white church with a gray shingled roof, and he realized this must be where the wedding would take place.
He veered away from it, overcome with a sudden vertigo, and passed a few houses separated by uneven wooden fences.
The largest had a hand-painted sign nailed to one of the posts advertising it as the Wakefield History Museum, and he slowed his gait.
Its blinds were drawn, and a Virginia state flag hung over one window.
A circle in a sea of primary blue, two figures at its center: a Roman warrior—a woman, he realized, one breast exposed—with a spear in hand, standing atop a slain foe.
A crown had fallen from her victim’s head.
Joel was shocked by the violence of it. Sic semper tyrannis. Thus always to tyrants.
He picked up his pace again, sprinting toward the shore.
A group of boys on bicycles zipped by him, and a few men—fishermen, maybe—in ratty baseball caps raised a hand in greeting that he returned.
He was still unsure what he thought of Wakefield.
Since arriving, he’d been unable to suppress a feeling of menace, like the ground was constantly shifting beneath him, but maybe that was not the island’s fault.
He stopped when he reached the beach, knowing he didn’t have it in him to run across the sand, or maybe he did, if a coach had been there to blow a whistle, to yell in his ear to hustle, man up, but all he could hear was the white noise of the waves, punctured by cries of seagulls. At this hour, no one swam.
He felt better now with his heart hammering in his chest, his calves and thighs molten.
He had tried to convince Shay to take up running late last summer.
Her semester was about to begin, and she’d seemed restless at the bar where they’d met up, alternately overly tired and too awake for the hour.
It was impossible, she said, with her classes, and he told her she always had the evenings.
You think it’s safe for a girl to run alone in New York at night? she had said.
I’ll run with you, he’d offered.
You run in the mornings.
I’ll do both, or I’ll change my routine, he had said.
I could meet you at your apartment. And she’d looked at him, the air between them suddenly heavy with everything they would not say, like the weight of incoming rain—how Andrew would look down at them from her apartment window, the eagerness in Joel’s voice to see her every day—and he had turned back to his beer.
He’d forgotten to put on his watch, but he knew it was time for him to return to the hotel.
Carmen would be awake soon. He lifted the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his glasses, the wind off the water cooling his stomach.
Shielding his eyes from the sun, he looked to see if there was another clear route he could take back.
The restaurant where they’d eaten blue crab on their first night must be near.
There was a path snaking back to the hotel from that point.
When he spotted the restaurant—the small wooden shack painted cerulean, a shade that reminded him of photographs he’d seen of Chefchaouen, a city of blue plaster—he found a figure sitting at one of its picnic tables, even though the restaurant was closed.
A teenage boy in a baseball cap. He held something in his right fist, dragging it across the table.
Joel approached, not quite ready to begin running again, wanting instead to watch him, something magnetic in his presence.
Just like Joel knew that the family at the beach yesterday was not of the island, he could tell the boy was a stranger to this place. The wind blew differently around him.
It was only when Joel was a few yards away that he saw the glint of steel. That what the boy was dragging across the marbled wood was a knife.
Joel stopped short, but the boy was already looking up, his brown eyes narrowing.
“Good morning,” Joel said, feeling like he had to speak. There was a crust of spit at the corner of the boy’s lips, like he’d slept with his mouth open, and a small vinyl duffel at his side. His hand stilled.
The blade was slightly larger than a pocketknife, wavy and polished to a shine, but that no longer caught Joel’s attention.
He was consumed by the boy’s features: his thin eyebrows, the slope of his nose, as if perhaps this was not a boy but a young woman.
His shape was shrouded in a loose, tobacco-colored button-up. No hair peeked out from his cap.
“Do you know how to get back to the hotel?” Joel asked, even though he knew the route.
The boy could tell he’d been staring, and Joel could see his body tense, almost like he was preparing himself, poised to jump over the table and slit Joel’s throat.
There was a look in his eyes—a frenzied exhaustion, a state that meant even the most innocuous of remarks could be interpreted as a threat—that Joel recognized from his visit to Riverside.
For a moment, he considered what it would take for him to wrestle the knife from the boy’s hand.
He was larger, stronger, but the boy seemed unpredictable, which was often the most dangerous element in a fight. It was better not to show suspicion.
“Follow that path.”
The voice was high enough to be a woman’s or a boy’s that had not yet changed. Joel remembered the pressure of the glass shard beneath his heel.
“All right, thanks,” he said.
He took off at a sprint, running so fast he could barely breathe.