Chapter 33
Tyler
I gasped for air.
I grabbed for something, for some sign of where I was, but everything was hot and wet and dark and . . . I was in bed. I was
in the cottage, and I was clutching my walkie-talkie, and Katie’s voice was changing, and my pulse was banging, and I needed
to breathe. I needed to get out of this place—I needed earth and sky and fresh fucking air.
I crawled out from under the sheets, my shirt drenched and muscles clenched, and reached for the door. That first hit of night,
cool and still and enough to push me farther. Enough for me to keep going—to keep chasing relief from the scraping pangs of
my pounding heart.
I started on the pool deck: a damp plain of rough stone illuminated only by flickering cyan and the humming sconces of Meredith’s
sleeping home. I continued, one step after another, until I was in the garden, until the dew-drenched grass beneath my bare
feet had calmed my breathing and cooled my body. I was pulling back lavender and ivy and all the other lush and unruly things
that grew here, wading deeper and deeper through it, desperate for distraction. Desperate for any scene but the one I’d just
dreamed.
The earth, by now, had changed again. Had given way to hard gravel, to loose dirt, to an endless tangle of wayward roots and cross-eyed branches.
I twisted through a hazy maze of trunks, of cobwebs and moss, of wet and fallen leaves.
Every step forward, hollow. It went on like this for acres: the hard snap of my fists, the soft tread of my feet.
I pulled back branch after branch of forbidden forest. A metallic slice of canopy-cloaked moon, my flashlight.
And then, all at once, I saw it.
Dark shingles.
Crooked shutters.
The glow of a single upstairs window.
My chest was heaving, and my mouth was dry, and there was nothing but the crickets chirping and the ocean churning and my
own stomach turning.
I gripped the twisted trees and breathed.
The carriage house looked just like the main house, but old. So, so old. The window frames, rickety. Their glass panes, not
quite right. On the porch, a hanging swing creaked in the breeze. I toed the line of the clearing, drawn to it—to that stoop,
to that swing, to answers to questions I knew weren’t mine to ask. I wanted to run my fingers across that bench’s wood, to
know how badly it had weathered. To know if its metal chains had turned to salted rust. I took another step. And then another.
More and more detail, mine.
The rotting violets.
The empty bottles.
The handprints—three sets of them, mom and dad and baby, it must’ve been—stamped onto the top step.
I wanted those too. To know them. To explain them. But just when I pressed my palm to the concrete, a gust of sand—a howl
of oak, a rush of blinding ocean air.
I gasped, standing up, lungs shocked from the impossibility of it all, from the sorcery of it all, and I was spinning to find the woods, circles and circles and circles, but it was no use.
The sea smoke had blown in, and there was only gray.
I dropped back onto all fours, zigzagging across the earth, desperate for the braided roots of the forest, desperate for the trail of my own footprints.
Just then, another gust blew through, ripping the glasses from my face so that the dense, viscous nothingness was twice as small.
I cursed, fumbling for the frames, but all I found were clumps of dirt, and I could not tell east from west or up from down.
I closed my eyes and breathed.
The ocean.
The beach.
I kept my eyes shut and located the rush of it, the roar of it, and through the whipping wind, followed it south. From there,
I’d at least have the water, the haze of mansion lights. Enough of a clue to orient myself, to get back to the stairs and
lock the door to my cottage and get my head on straight.
One crawl after another, I chased the sound. Dirt turned to roots turned to sand, and my hands and knees were scraped and
skinned and rubbed raw. I stood, wiping my palms on the cotton of my shirt, moistening my bone-dry throat with a series of
sharp, futile gulps. The fog was even thicker here. The ocean, so loud I could barely hear myself think.
And then, I caught sight of something. The slightest shadow on the shoreline. A blurred suggestion, low and slinking.
The cat.
Pinot.
A shiver ran up my spine, and I wrapped my arms around my body, blinking to beg the scene into focus.
I took a half step closer, careful not to make a sound, only to track him.
His silhouette slithered east along the sand’s milk-hazed edge, a silver swath of silt that must’ve clung to his paws.
I rubbed my eyes. What cat liked water? What cat wandered the beach?
It was then I realized he was not alone. Another figure had emerged on the gusting shore.
A smudge of a woman.
Meredith.
She stood quietly for a minute, her garment—a dress? a nightgown?—flapping in the wind, Pinot seated at her feet. I hugged
my body closer, but I did not dare move. I was only ten feet away. I thought, for a moment, that maybe I should call to her.
A single pivot, and she’d have seen me. I could get out in front of this—I could explain myself. I could tell her that I hadn’t
been able to sleep. That I’d dreamed of Katie getting her neck sucked by a blond-haired douchebag with a job in Big Law and
was simply walking it off. That curiosity had gotten the best of me, but only for a moment, and not before I could open the
carriage house’s front door.
But then I thought better of it.
I stayed perfectly still.
Meredith just stood there, her hands on her head, her eyes tipped to the sky, and then, toward the water. I half-expected
the obvious: the end of a dock, a flickering green light. But no. There was absolutely nothing. It was just fog, and beyond
that, the Atlantic as far as god’s eye could see.
I blinked, testing the theory. Nick Carraway, failed writer next door. Some transient narrator who’d chanced upon a story. Gatsby, right there, counting the heavens and then scouring the shore. But when I opened my eyes to look for Meredith again, expecting her to have vanished, she remained.
She was weeping, I realized. She was weeping, and the water was up to her knees.