Granite Harbor, page 7
Jared held up his phone, and a dim green light illuminated the ground in front of them. “There’s no one here, man. We need to see. It’s like lighting a candle.” He pulled a pack of American Spirit cigarettes and a Bic lighter from his pocket and placed them within the light. “He loved American Spirit. He said the packaging was cool. This’ll get you to Valhalla, dude.”
Ethan placed beside it a key ring holding a bright trinket on a patch of leather.
“What’s that?” asked Jared.
“It’s the EGA. The eagle, globe, anchor. The insignia of the US Marines. He was going to join after high school. He wanted to get out of here.” Ethan’s voice cracked as he rubbed the insignia with his thumb.
“He mentioned it,” said Jared, “but I didn’t think he was serious.”
“Well, now he can.”
Sophie reached out to lay something dark next to the cigarettes and the key chain.
“What’s that?” asked Ethan.
Sophie’s shoulders shook. She was crying. “It’s a brownie. I didn’t know what else to give him. But he liked my brownies.”
Ethan put his arm around her. “You made them?”
“Yes.”
“Sophie, it’s beautiful. He would have loved that.” He held on to Sophie as she shook against him.
Jared turned his phone off. Another light briefly glowed in front of his face, and he passed the vape pen to Ethan. Ethan pulled at it. “Here,” he said to Sophie. She took it, and its light glowed again.
“Shane, man.” Jared released a choked breath. He lay backward on the ground, his arm covering his face. “What the fuck, dude.”
“We’re here for you, always, man.” Ethan lay back beside Jared and pulled Sophie down into the crook of his arm. “We miss you. Like…” He couldn’t speak any more.
“He was the best,” said Sophie.
They looked up at the clouds scudding low overhead.
“And he had the worst shit to put up with,” said Ethan. “It’s not fair.”
“Who’s got the—”
Sophie saw it and screamed before it even happened.
A portion of the sky detached itself, swirled overhead, and dropped on them, heavy, damp, coarse. Ethan tried to sit up, but a great blunt weight hit him and forced him down and knocked the air out of him.
“What the f—” Jared started to say.
As they struggled, moving against each other and trying to push upward, the black overwhelming pressure spread and settled over them, forcing them down and flat. Dull blows hit them repeatedly on their faces, heads, bodies. Sophie screamed again, muffled, and the boys made angry fear-filled noises. They heard grunts above them, men’s snarling tones. More heavy blows, partly absorbed by the heavy suffocating cloth between them and what was pushing them down. Soon they were unable to move and lay pinned and breathless.
A man’s voice barked overhead. “Stop moving!”
“Get off!” shouted Ethan, terror giving strength to his voice.
Another voice came from above. “What are you doing here?”
Both voices seemed familiar to Ethan. His fear that they were about to be killed subsided. “We’re friends of Shane’s.”
“Who is that?”
“Ethan Dorr. My mother works here.”
The weight on them shifted. The heavy canvas that had been flung over them was pulled aside.
Ethan saw the dark shapes of two men. One of them, holding an axe handle, threw it aside.
“Ethan, what are you doing here?”
“Roger?”
“Yes.”
“And who’s that?” Ethan asked.
“Your archnemesis,” said the other man, larger, stockier.
“Chester?”
“None other.”
“Fuck, man!” said Jared. “Why’d you jump on us like that?”
“What do you think, Ethan?” said Roger. “You know what happened here. We didn’t know who you were, or what you were doing. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Chester, get off me, man.” Jared pushed aside the heavy canvas. “What is this?”
“It’s a tarp,” said Chester, getting to his feet and pulling the canvas off them.
“Who’s that with you?” asked Roger.
“Sophie Brangwen,” said Sophie.
“Well, you need to go home, all of you. Are you all right?”
A flashlight beam stabbed through the air.
“My God,” said Roger Priestly. He swung the flashlight across their faces. His own face partly lit up, filled with shock. “What the hell have you done to yourselves?”
14
He picked up the van on Elm Street. Easy to spot, an old Econoline, once white, rust beneath the fenders and quarter panels. And now he noticed the right rear brake light wasn’t working. Better get that fixed, boys, you might get pulled over for that.
He was two cars behind. Then the car in front of him turned right on Belmont Avenue and he was behind the van. It was dark, and even if they were looking, they would only see his headlights, but he hung back, and then slowed to allow a car leaving the post office to enter traffic in front of him.
They weren’t paying attention anyway. The van was moving erratically. Three of them in the front seat. The two boys weren’t old enough for a full license; they could only have learner’s permits, and obviously needed the driving practice.
The van turned up Chestnut Street. Good. Drop the girl off first.
That’s exactly what they did. He stopped a block down the hill and turned his lights off before the van turned into the big house, the mother’s place. He didn’t see the girl get out, but the van reappeared quickly, continuing on up Chestnut.
Where now, boys? Go hang somewhere, play with your phones, smoke some weed? Drop your guard?
A wave of feeling swept over him. It made him think of other feelings. Is it like hunger? Or arousal? No, this was stronger, almost violent. His body shuddered. He had to grip the wheel as it surged through him. It left him with an ache. Was it the coyote’s appetite, the directive now lodged in his blood?
Maybe it would happen now. He was ready. Keep going, boys … keep going …
The van turned onto Jacobs Avenue. So you’re dropping Ethan off. He slowed again before the turn.
Okay then. I am ready for you, Jared.
But Jared didn’t drive home. He drove to the public parking behind the Calder Mill. He jumped out of the van, and before the driver could park or even stop his truck, Jared had skipped across the narrow wooden footbridge over the Meguntic River and disappeared onto Main Street.
He drove the long three blocks up Washington, along Cross, down Mountain—observing the stop signs, he was only two blocks from the police station—and back onto Main Street.
But there was no sign of Jared.
Never mind. It would happen. At the right time.
15
Isabel heard the van pull up on the street. She looked out the mudroom window and saw Ethan get out.
It was all she could do not to shout with fury as he came through the door. “Ethan!” She quivered. “Where have you been?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, I do—”
“Well, I don’t!”
He pushed past her into the kitchen.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! I’m sure!”
A rush of relief, love, gratitude flooded through her. Her anger was gone. He was here. He was home.
“Then we’ll have supper. It’s ready. Sit down, please.”
He sat at the kitchen table.
She scooped his penne into a big white bowl. She brought it to the table and placed it in front of him.
“Remove your hat, please.”
“Mom, it’s freezing in here. You’re wearing a hat.”
“You don’t need a hat, you’ve got hair. Lots of it.”
She brought her own plate to the table and sat down facing him.
“Ethan, take off your hat, please.”
He was already hunched over his bowl. “I want it on.”
She reached her hand across the table and held his. “Ethan. Sweetheart. I’m happy you’re home. I love you. Please don’t argue with me. It’s us. Remove your hat, please.”
With slow deliberation, releasing long strands of curly hair that took flight with static, he pulled it off.
She screamed.
16
She wasn’t physically hurt or Morgana would have told him right away on the phone. She simply said, “You need to come over here—now—and see your daughter.”
Their mother-daughter power struggle had intensified with Sophie’s adolescence. Increasingly, Morgana called Alex saying, “I can’t handle her. I need you to come over here. Now.”
“Morgana,” he’d say, “you both have to work it out. This is your week together.”
But with the onset of Sophie’s teen years, the court-certified custody schedule had broken down. More than once, Morgana’s giant truck had pulled abruptly into his driveway—he heard its powerful snorting from anywhere inside his house—and Sophie, stone-faced, climbed down out of the passenger seat dragging a bulging duffel bag, exiled to stay with her father for an indefinite period. Dad as punishment. Dad as purgatory.
“Morgana,” he said now on the phone, “this is—”
“Someone has done something illegal to our daughter!” An unusual edge of hysteria to her voice.
“What?”
“You need to come and see.”
“Can’t you just tell me?”
“Do you want me to call another policeman?”
He drove past the formal parking area, the front door, circled the fountain, and parked steps from the kitchen door, where he knew she would be. It was after dark. Sure enough, he saw her inside, sitting on a stool at the granite island.
But when Morgana saw him at the kitchen door—her face immediately annoyed—she waved him away, throwing her arm repeatedly toward the front entrance he’d driven past, halfway back through the vast house beyond the kitchen. He turned and walked back along the front of the house.
“I don’t like you coming to my kitchen door,” she said, as he came into the large front foyer. “You’re not a friend. Use the front entrance.”
At the time he met Morgana Claymore in London, Alex had moved south from Manchester to work at the London Review of Books. He’d published two books, was no longer a celebrated British novelist under thirty, but well into his fourth decade and struggling with his third novel. A friend of Morgana’s, an editor at the Smithsonian Magazine, who had commissioned an article from Alex about the industrial waterways of Northern England, gave Morgana, who had come to London to take the Collector’s Art Course at Christie’s auction house, Alex’s phone number. She called. Following a brief phone conversation, they agreed to meet for dinner.
He was living in a small flat in Putney, with a large Conran sofa he’d bought with his first royalty payment, when he’d anticipated literary success and a move to larger digs across the river, but that had never happened. He traveled by 14 bus to South Kensington, where Morgana was renting an entire detached house on Cranley Place. A furiously yapping dachshund launched itself at Alex’s leg as the door opened. Not actually biting him but giving the impression of wanting to.
“Diego, get back in here!” commanded the tall, lustrously dark-haired woman in her … early thirties, he guessed … who must have been out riding somewhere. She was dressed for an equestrian event in breeches and a black velvet hacking jacket. A knee-high black riding boot corralled the dog and maneuvered it back inside. “My guard dog,” she said, opening the door wider. Strong dark eyebrows lifting with amusement over large disarming blue eyes.
He took her to La Bouchée, nearby on Old Brompton Road. “Decent French,” he’d been told by a friend when casting about for where he should take someone to dinner in upmarket South Kensington. When Morgana walked ahead of him for a few paces on a narrow stretch of pavement, he noticed the play of pronounced but firm buttocks beneath the flapping vent of her jacket. At dinner she held her thick dark hair aside to keep it out of the soupe de poisson. At moments when he appeared to be looking thoughtfully away from her compelling eyes, Alex watched a blue vein pulse in her ivory throat.
His dour, mordant Mancunian wit, a staple of the English sensibility that was met by British women with glum acknowledgment, made Morgana hoot loudly, double over in her chair, and slap her thighs. An unrestrained American laugh, as spacious and uninflected as a stretch of prairie. Alex was amazed that he could produce such a reaction. It felt like the sudden acquisition of an undreamed-of talent, as if he were able to let loose a Chopin polonaise. The more she laughed, the funnier he grew. She was strikingly un-English. Her boundless positivity and optimism contrasted with the pinched, self-deprecating qualities of his country’s national character. Two evenings later, he decided that her sexual proficiency must be American too: an acrobatic repertoire wholly alien to the uniformly cerebral English girls he’d known.
By the time the Christie’s course ended six weeks later, Morgana had become “your biggest fan in the world.” They’d been to Paris by Eurostar, first class—she wanted to show Alex the flea markets at St. Ouen—and they’d decided to marry and have children. Morgana had always known, she said, that she would be a mother. There was no reason to delay. She’d sailed in the Mediterranean, spent more than enough time in New York, Santa Fe, Paris, and Rome. She’d always felt herself to be European in culture and sensibility, she said. She loved London, “the best of all worlds,” and was ready to settle down there.
They imagined their life together. Morgana knew Alex would write increasingly successful books that would gain him awards and money. Through Morgana’s eyes, he acquired a new view of himself: a natural wit on the cusp of literary renown. He began to understand how support and belief from the right quarter could be self-fulfilling conditions. She would deal in fine paintings and antiques. Her eye, of which she was no less certain than his literary talent, would leverage her to the status of an important collector. By then it was clear to Alex that Morgana had money, which, with typical British delicacy, he chose not to inquire about. But when they discussed, over dinners, in first-class railway carriages, in bed after lovemaking, what they would be able to give their child—the finest education, trips throughout Europe and the United States, unmatched cultural advantages—he appreciated what Morgana would bring to the table.
They married at Chelsea Old Town Hall. Her mother, Philomene, a Texas gentlewoman, came for a week. She stayed at the Dorchester with Dandie, her small white Coton de Tuléar dog. She was a large woman who moved with the stately grace of an ocean liner, inspecting and touching the furniture alongside her everywhere, in the hotel, in the offices of Chelsea Old Town Hall. Philomene had stayed at the Dorchester on her trip around the world with Morgana’s father, the second of her four husbands, before Morgana was born.
“The world was so nice then, Alex,” she said wistfully. “Before the Arabs bought Harrods.” It sounded like a Noël Coward song.
He was dismayed when, a week before the wedding, in Philomene’s hotel suite, he observed Morgana and her mother screaming at each other like teenage girls over the wedding dress. Morgana had chosen it with great deliberation, had it altered to her satisfaction, but Philomene was dismissive of the dress and its designer.
Alex took Morgana downstairs to tea. He tried to soothe her. “Don’t let her upset you, sweetheart. It’s your dress, your day.”
“She’s part of the reason I want to live in Europe,” Morgana said, her breast heaving with emotion as her Lapsang souchong grew cold.
None of the rest of Morgana’s Texan family was able to make it over for the wedding, though they sent large checks, including several for Alex. Alex’s parents and his sister, Liz, came down from Manchester. His best man, David Burdett, a novelist, from nearby Richmond.
“You’ve got a tiger by the tail, wi’ that one, lad,” his father said cheerfully, quaffing the Ruinart Blanc de Blancs champagne at the wedding lunch in the Dorchester Grill. After lunch his parents caught a train back to Manchester.
“Just get a child, Alex,” Burdett said emphatically. “For your old age.”
To that end, Morgana directed their efforts. They made love every afternoon in the large bedroom overlooking Onslow Gardens. Morgana consulted an ob-gyn, a briskly efficient woman at the Harley Street Clinic, who told her they could increase their chances by less frequent lovemaking to conserve Alex’s sperm. They monitored the growth and production of her eggs with ultrasound. Three months after their wedding the ob-gyn said, after a scan, “Try Thursday.” That Thursday they made love by candlelight through the darkening afternoon and ate dinner again at La Bouchée.
Like making a battery out of two potatoes, it was a home chemistry experiment that worked startlingly well. Morgana was pregnant next time she checked. But her ob-gyn was knocked off her bicycle in Regent’s Park and Morgana did not like her replacement, a man who called her “Dear Girl” and said “prepare for the puncture” before plunging the long amniocentesis hypodermic needle into her belly while looking sideways at the ultrasound monitor, “to avoid stabbing the fetus.” Afterward, at Cranley Place, Alex made her a cup of tea while she cried in bed and said it was the most painful thing that had ever happened to her.
“I want to have my baby at home,” Morgana said.
“Don’t you think a hospital might be safer?” Alex asked, couching the question as tentatively as possible. He’d heard that American women were keen on having babies in bathtubs attended by doulas.
“I mean in America.”
This was so unexpected that Alex was unable to formulate an answer before Morgana went on:
“I don’t like the doctors here.”
“Really? Well, actually, our National Health system—”
“Alex. Your pregnant wife needs to feel comfortable while she’s having her baby.”
