Chapter 66
WILLIAM
The morning after Shay’s engagement party, William heard church bells.
He’d stripped off his vomit-stained oxford and thrown it in the trash—though a few blocks later, he regretted this, as it was a nice shirt his mother had bought him from Marshall Field’s, and he had so few items of nice clothing left.
On a crowded New York sidewalk, he tried to find his bearings in his undershirt and suit jacket, which had been mercifully spared from any splatter.
The weather was mild. In the sunshine, he did not feel the previous evening’s brutal cold.
Instead, he felt his hangover’s nausea, a headache that pounded and cracked.
From the numbered street signs, William gathered that he’d wandered fifteen or so blocks from where the party had been.
He remembered ducking into the first bar he’d spotted, down several concrete steps, the lighting diffuse as in a theater before a film began.
He’d ordered the cheapest beer they had, and then another, and then his memory of the evening was no longer linear.
A man with a silver tooth asking where he was from.
The door not shutting properly, everyone in the bar testing the handle and pretending to be handymen, offering their diagnoses.
A vigorous stream of piss, a vodka shot he didn’t pay for.
Trying to find the North Star in the night’s pitch-black sky.
His bag was still at his sister’s, his flight home not for another seven hours.
He didn’t want to see her, and so he just kept walking, trying to decide what to do.
He did not know then that she wouldn’t be at the apartment, that she had gotten up that morning and gone to visit the building on Riverside, that Andrew would be the one to let him in and give him a warm goodbye.
As he crossed another street, church bells rang out their deep note.
He looked up, trying to locate the church in the same way he would instinctually try to find the honking car, the crying child, but it was not in sight.
The sound was not a single, ringing bell, but an overlapping cacophony with no discernible rhythm.
He felt like he was moving toward it, and so at the next intersection, he looked left and right, but still, there was no church.
As he continued to walk, he felt that the sound was somehow behind him, but when he turned his head, it swung ahead of him again.
He stopped in front of a corner store, telling himself it was the alcohol, the poison he’d swallowed by the tumbler and shot glass, but when he took a deep breath and tried to walk toward the sound again, the bells grew louder and then, inexplicably, quieter, and he started to wonder if they were only clanging in his head.
He looked around. No one else—not the tight-faced mother gripping her son’s hand, not the son, not the old man in the yarmulke, not the bleach-haired girl pinching a cigarette between her fingers—was responding to the sound.
William sat down on a stoop, holding his head in his hands, the bells continuing to chime, as if there were dozens of them, hundreds, all of the churches in the city ringing out, and he thought, I am being punished, and then he remembered vague stories of prophetic angels descending into bedrooms, the voice of God booming from a mountaintop, Jesus’s beatific face appearing in the growth rings of trees, burned onto pieces of toast, and the moment he thought perhaps this was something like that, a sign or a message, the bells stopped.
The next day, in Chicago, he went to a church after his shift. There was no service, but he sat in the pews, listening.
In William’s hotel room, Shay gulped water from the sink.
As they’d walked across the island, the power had flared back on, houses lighting their way along now-familiar roads.
His gaze traveled back and forth across lawns and marshes, waiting for the man to emerge from the shadows, to stumble like a bear, unsteady and ocean-soaked, onto their path, but he never appeared. Shay, in contrast, was oddly calm.
“How long had you known they were on the island?” William asked when she emerged from the bathroom.
He was sitting on the rug, not wanting to soil any of the furniture with his dirty clothes.
Shay’s dress was drying in patches, the hem still a damp gray.
The room was too warm, but it felt good after the freezing rain, especially with his twisted arm, so he’d left the windows closed.
The door was locked, his knife slipped back into his pocket.
“Since Thursday,” she said, taking a seat next to him. They both leaned against the bed frame. “I had my suspicions on Wednesday, when they shattered my window, but on Thursday, they left me a note.”
“How did the Pruitts not know?”
“No one on this island talks to the Pruitts.”
“Well, Jesus, you should have told me, or told Andrew.”
“It was my problem to solve. My mess.”
“Come on, that’s not true. You can’t keep thinking like that.”
Shay shook her head, pulling her knees close to her chest. There were scrapes across her calves, from thorns or fingernails, he could not tell, and she told him about how they’d been following her. The dreams she had, where they were moving through the rooms of her apartment at night like ghosts.
She looked ravaged, and he could see now that part of her blankness had been an effort to deny and bury, to keep everything to herself in the ways they’d both been taught.
It was impossible for William to think of what he’d been doing in the months before, while all of this had been happening.
Submerging his hands in a vat of scalding, soapy water, falling asleep on the 81, attending a funeral service for a woman he’d never met.
He rubbed the seam of his pants, ashamed.
The cotton had started to dry, and it had the texture of a crumpled grocery bag.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. Tears tightened his throat.
“For what?”
“For running away from you. On the balcony. For never calling.”
The hotel was quiet. There had been the same girl at the front desk, the one who’d been clipping her nails, but other than that, they were alone. Shay took his hand in her own. “I did the same thing, though. After Dad.”
William flinched. Even now, a part of him did not want to talk about their father.
“I’m just like him, aren’t I?” Her voice was strained. “Unstable and selfish and—”
“No, no, you’re not. You have some of the good in him, that light—”
“I don’t know. I think—I think Synanon was so enthralling to me because they told me I was everything that I feared, and our family—our parents kept so much from us that I couldn’t understand that the people in Synanon, that their cruelty was dishonesty in another form. The pain of it felt honest to me.”
William remembered the Catholic services he’d attended, how he’d been drawn to the idea of original sin.
In certain moments, he found comfort in the belief that he’d been born tainted, that he was capable of evil because there was the seed of evil in him from the moment of conception—it had absolved him of responsibility.
But this was not about him. There would be time for that later.
“You looked after me, you cared for me, in a way I think he wanted to but never really could,” he said.
“Did I? I don’t even know anymore.”
“I do,” he insisted. “I know.”
She closed her eyes. “I think I wanted to hide from the people who really knew me. Strangers felt safer. Until they weren’t.”
He looked at their hands, how their palms pressed together, the mirrored imperfections that made them family—the long ring fingers, the inelegant joints—and he realized that all along, this was what he’d wanted from the fluorescent-lit rooms and cold gray cathedrals he’d visited, the crisp black text of hymns and verse.
It was Shay he’d been looking for. Someone who knew him, who loved him without hesitation or conditions.
“I understand,” he said. “You have no idea.”
She unwove their fingers and lay on the rug, and he followed. The warmth of the room was making him drowsy. He did not know what time it was, or who would be trying to find them.
“Aunt Eleanor died,” he said. “On Wednesday.”
Shay turned toward him, her cheek brushing against the wool. “What?”
“When I went to bring her to the wedding, she’d died in her chair. Lewis was there. I haven’t told anyone. I wanted to tell you, to ask you for help, but I—I didn’t know how to. A part of me just didn’t want to admit that she was gone, like if I didn’t say it, she’d still be here.”
“Jesus, William.”
Shay brought her hand to his shoulder, brushing her thumb against the bone.
By saying it out loud, he had made Eleanor’s loss real, but he’d also released her—her death was no longer wrapped around him like a heavy cloak.
He would no longer see her stiff in one of the Pruitts’ armchairs, but he also wouldn’t see her studying one of her Roman coins, pouring stale coffee into a cup, or placing a chipped saucer of milk in the alley for stray cats.
Their family would be different now. It was a loss, simple and cutting.
A tear trickled into the shell of his ear.
“She left a card for you.” He stood and found it for her, hidden in the top drawer of his dresser. “I’m sorry it’s opened.”
“Did you read it?” Shay asked.
“No, I promise I didn’t.”
He lay back down beside her, the card opened above her face so he could not see its interior. Its front was illustrated with a watercolor bride and groom standing on a bridge, For Your Wedding written above their kissing forms in cloying cursive. After a moment, Shay let out a deep, pained “Ha.”
“What?” he asked, and she passed him the card.
Hearts are not had as a gift, but hearts are earned was written in Eleanor’s rigid script.
“She was always her sharpest at weddings,” she said.
“I guess she was,” he said, though he was not quite sure what the words meant to Shay, certain only that he believed Andrew had never earned hers.
He put the card down on the rug, wishing that he had told her sooner, or that he did not have to tell her at all.
That he would not have to tell their mother.
“We’ll tell Mom together,” Shay said, as if she could hear his thoughts. “Tomorrow.”
William closed his eyes. The room’s current of light and dark became the eddies of ocean water, the waves angered by the storm, and as if he were still standing over the cliff, he tried to see an arm cut through the surf, a head turned toward the sky, gasping for breath, even though he was not sure if that was what he wanted to see.
“Do you think they’ll stop?” he asked. His voice was almost a whisper, and he could hear her throat contract.
“Yes.”
There was a strength in her voice, a certainty—and even if she was still just trying to protect him, it carried him to sleep.