Jerry put a cup of black coffee down near his brother’s elbow. “You want any breakfast?” he asked. There came no answer, but Jerry turned to the refrigerator as if there had been. He took out a bowl of brown eggs, a loaf of bread, and the home-cured bacon he traded firewood for. He fried up the bacon and broke eggs into the sputtering fat, toasted the bread, and laid everything before his brother. He was just thinking apprehensively that Allen looked a little green when the seated man coughed twice, then vomited the contents of his stomach across the table. Not that there was much to vomit, but it smelled vile.
After Jerry had cleaned it up, he made Allen a cup of weak, milk-laced tea and went to the phone.
“Mrs. Weintraub?” he asked the woman who answered. “I wonder if the doctor is still there?”
“He’s just out walking the dog. Is your brother awake?”
“Yes, he’s downstairs. I hate to bother your husband . . .”
“Jerry, he’s happy to feel useful. I’ll have him come over when he gets back.”
“I really appreciate it,” Jerry told her. He meant it.
Jerry went back to the kitchen and toasted another piece of bread, leaving this one naked of butter or jam. The gaunt, ill-shaved stranger at the table seemed not to notice it. Jerry washed up the dishes, and in passing made the suggestion that Allen might try a bite. Thirty seconds later, in a sort of delayed response, Allen obediently picked up the mug of cold tea with both hands and tried a sip. When it didn’t immediately come up again, he took another. And, Jerry was ridiculously pleased to notice when he came through the kitchen a few minutes later, his brother had even nibbled one end of the toast.
A head passed under the window, and Jerry went to let the neighbor in. Weintraub was a vigorous, balding man not yet sixty, betrayed in his profession of vascular surgery by an onset of faint shakiness in his right fingers, turned now to teaching on the mainland two days a week. He set his bag on the table, exchanged some remarks on the weather with Jerry, and accepted a cup of coffee with thanks.
“Glad to see you up,” he said to Allen. Allen seemed mesmerized by a trio of seagulls at the end of the dock, and did not respond. “My name’s Weintraub, in case you don’t remember meeting earlier.”
“He hasn’t said anything,” Jerry informed the older man.
“He’ll talk when he’s ready,” the surgeon said placidly, and pulled a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff out of the bag. He took his various readings in silence, asked Jerry a couple of questions, and then sat down on the chair across the table from Allen, interrupting his gaze out the window. “Allen?” he said. “Allen, would you look at me for a minute, so I know you’re listening to me? Thank you. Young man, you’re in god-awful shape. Your lungs were swimming when you got here, and that slice on your arm should’ve been treated weeks ago. The antibiotics are helping with both those, and it did you a world of good to sleep, but now you really need to eat. You understand me?”
He waited for a response. Jerry thought in despair, He’s not going to answer; he’s like an animal crawling home to die; but in this, his brother surprised him. Allen blinked, looked down at the plate in front of him, then picked up a corner of cold toast. Weintraub took this as answer enough, and gave him another injection of antibiotic before packing up his bag. This time, he left Jerry with a bottle of pills, saying that if Allen wouldn’t take them, or couldn’t keep them down, to give him a ring and he’d come back with the needle.
Allen did not eat the eggs Jerry scrambled him, but he did pick at some poached egg on toast Jerry brought him at noon, and when Jerry walked through the sunroom that afternoon eating a peanut butter sandwich, Allen’s eyes followed it. He ate one of his own, then a bowl of chicken soup at dinner, and Jerry felt like crying in relief.
At Weintraub’s suggestion, Jerry had cleared the house of every drink stronger than beer and every pill more intoxicating than aspirin, but in truth, Allen seemed not to look for chemical escape. He was looking for something, that was obvious, but once on his feet, his search turned out of doors. By week’s end, he’d moved from house to beach, spending hours in a chair whatever the weather, smoking the stale cigarettes he had unearthed in their father’s study and watching the birds and the passing boats, so motionless he might have been asleep but for his eyes. At Weintraub’s suggestion, Jerry made a point of talking to his brother, and although he got scant response, he found he could read his silent companion’s reactions. When he told Allen that their father was away for the summer, the invalid’s subtle relaxation surely indicated relief; and when various family members dropped in at one time or another over the next few days, to see for themselves the disreputable return of the most prodigal of their sons, Allen’s gaze and slight withdrawal seemed to indicate a sort of bemused disinterest, reminding Jerry of a large and patient dog confronted with the antics of a kitten. Eventually the others did as the kitten might, and left Allen alone in his silence. They had, after all, seen him in difficult states before.
Within his silence, Allen was conscious only of a vast and dreary confusion pierced by a tiny spark of life, a nameless identity throbbing stubbornly beneath the wreckage of his life, like some long-buried earthquake survivor. If he was aware of others outside his skin, it was in the sense of mute gratitude engendered by his father’s absence, his family’s general lack of interest, and his brother’s patient and undemanding presence. Most of all, he was abjectly grateful that the people around him didn’t have raw, bleeding hands, and that no rotting children had yet appeared to tug at his shirttails, asking for chocolate bars and bullets.
Then one day, two weeks after Allen’s arrival, Jerry came home from his summer job scrubbing down boats for tourists to find the house empty, the beach unoccupied, and the motor skiff gone from the dock. He spent a tense couple of hours drinking beer on the beach while the sun dropped low on the horizon before he heard the familiar sound of the skiff’s outboard coming across the water. He quickly went back inside to put dinner together, allowing Allen to tie up on his own.
Allen’s attempts at communication (apart from the long mutters and terrible high moans of his nightmares) remained monosyllabic answers to direct questions or the equally brusque request for cigarettes, but once he started going out on the boat, he began to put on weight. Long hours spent on the water turned him brown. His infections healed, his limp seemed less severe, and his hands grew steady enough to shave him without bloodshed. Jerry took a breath of mixed relief and resignation, bracing for the next phase—a restlessness that would end with an abrupt, unannounced departure.
But as June turned to July, Allen gave no signs of leaving. He seemed to be more preoccupied than restless. The inevitable Fourth of July bangs and flashes gave him a hard time, and more than once he retreated to the TV room with the volume cranked high, but even then he didn’t drink more than a couple of beers, and he was still there on the morning of the fifth.
Not, however, on an evening two nights after Jerry’s twenty-first birthday, when Jerry came back late from work to find the skiff missing. And when the stars were out overhead it was still gone, although the tide had been going out for hours, all the waters of the Georgia Strait sweeping around their islands, rushing to sea along with anything that wasn’t anchored down.
Torn between fury and dread, Jerry slapped together some macaroni and cheese for their dinner, ate his in front of the television, and finally pulled on his jacket to go lie on the dock, staring up at the sky, listening to the pat pat of wavelets against the posts, wondering how soon he could call the sheriff’s office without sounding like his brother’s fretful grandmother. Stretched out on the old boards, he searched the heavens for a shooting star, so he might make a wish. That he might miraculously be made older, perhaps, so he’d know what to do about his brother. Or that Dad might come back from Europe early and take over, leaving his latest girlfriend behind. Or that—and then he heard an engine approaching; not the skiff’s uneven outboard, something heavier.
He got to his feet, watching lights from what looked like a fishing boat round the point and turn in his direction. The big motor slowed, grumbling down to a near idle and allowing Jerry to hear a stranger’s voice raised to give orders. A spotlight touched the end of the dock, guiding the boat up to the bumpers, where it came to rest with a touch so light, he barely felt it through the boards. When the boat and the skiff it towed lay alongside the dock, Allen stepped down, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a rope in his hand. The boat’s engines reversed away from the landing, and Allen pulled the rope hand over hand until the skiff was against the side of the dock. He tied it up and turned toward the house, then stopped at the sight of his brother standing before him.
“The motor finally died on you?” Jerry asked.
“Yeah.”
“Who gave you a tow?”
“Ed.”
Ed De la Torre, Jerry identified. An established island character, although he’d only come to the San Juans ten or twelve years before. Ed lived on his boat, a converted trawler called the Orca Queen, and scrounged a living taking tourists out in the summer and making illicit deliveries in the winter. He was a scoundrel and a ladies’ man, living proof that not all of society’s anarchists were under thirty. A nice stable guy for someone in Allen’s condition to make friends with, Jerry thought grimly.
“Where’d he find you?” he asked.
“Folly.”
“That would’ve been quite a row home, all right. You eat yet?”
“No,” Allen said, not sounding too certain. He was in his shirtsleeves, and Jerry thought he must be cold, even with the soft windless night.
“I made a pot of mac and cheese,” Jerry offered. Wordlessly, Allen flicked the burning cigarette stub into the water and walked toward the house. Jerry watched his brother’s retreating figure and glanced up at the stars. I wish I didn’t feel like the parent here.
Although Jerry would not know it for some time, the day had been a turning point for his brother. Since Allen had left the house that morning, two things had shaken his world and stirred through the rubble, two events linked by the otherwise unimportant matter of a dead outboard motor. The events taken separately would have left no dent in the state he’d been in when he left the house that morning; following in such close succession, they set out the first steps of a path leading Allen Carmichael back to the realm of the living.
First of all, that was the day he rediscovered Sanctuary. This was a small, tree-covered, uninhabited island of about a hundred and fifty acres, the last of the San Juan chain before the Canadian border. The natives referred to it as Folly, after an idiosyncratic but long-derelict house that had once stood above its beach; the older Carmichaels tended to still call it Minke, its official name until Allen’s grandfather sold it to a mainlander in the 1920s. Allen had forgotten all about the place until it rose up in front of the skiff’s prow just past the end of San Juan; once he had steered the boat into the island’s small cove—just about the only way onto the steep island—he cut the motor to gaze around him, wondering that anything once so important to him could possibly have slipped his mind. He and Jerry had practically lived out here as children, skinny-dipping, sunbathing, cooking hot dogs over driftwood campfires, staring up at the clouds and inventing elaborate ways of reestablishing Carmichael possession of the island. Sometimes they maneuvered to spend the night there, drinking cocoa under the stars and telling each other about the ghosts (here a faint memory of Vietnam passed over Allen’s skin) that inhabited the weed-shrouded towers marking the demise of the house. Sometimes they had hiked the bald knob of mountain at the island’s north end to survey the watery landscape that was their universe. And now, all those years later, Allen let the boat bump up to the narrow beach, not trusting the ancient dock, to splash ashore with the awe of a New World explorer.
He eyed the path that circled the overgrown remnants of the house and led to the island’s heights, but he knew his legs would never make it all the way up and back. Instead, he set off along the more gentle path toward the island’s once-magical warm springs. All the way there, following the rotting remains of the house’s water system, he warned himself that things changed, that outsiders had no respect for one boy’s memories, and he must brace himself to find the ugly hand of a vandal at the spring’s perfection. But he was astonished to find the water serenely trickling down the rocks and through the summer-lush ferns to the crystal-clear pool. On a cooler morning, he thought, wisps of steam would still rise from the surface.
He followed the stream downhill until he reached the edge of the sheer drop-off, peering cautiously down at the tiny spit of beach and trees far below. As a boy he’d gotten up and down that rock face without too many problems; given his current state, he might make it down without breaking his neck, but he’d never manage the return climb. So he went back to the boat, yanked the reluctant motor into life, and chugged out of the cove and around the western shore of the island.
Allen’s mother had died when he was fourteen and Jerry seven. For reasons Allen had never understood, their father had chosen to split the boys up, taking Allen south and leaving Jerry to join an aunt’s household. But in the summers he’d allowed Allen to come back. During those idyllic two months, he and Jerry would sail all over the islands, ignoring the set boundaries to their explorations. At first they had been in one boat, but in later years they’d had two, and could race.
Then in the first week of the third such summer Jerry, eager to show his superior skills to his exiled older brother, stove in his hull on the treacherous shoals to the west of Folly. In the process of picking his ten-year-old brother off the rocks, Allen had glimpsed what looked like the entrance to a cave, returning to explore it a day or two later, when he was alone: He shared more with his little brother than most kids his age did, but that beckoning darkness in the rocks had all the earmarks of a private space. Besides, he hadn’t wanted the blame when the headstrong kid disappeared into it.
The low cedar branches that had hidden the entrance from public view on his last visit here a decade earlier still did their job—and more, they would conceal a skiff as well. As he pulled the boat into the shallow pool under the branches, he remembered how low the entrance actually was—at high tide a person got soaked; at plus tides, a vigorous wave would brush the entrance roof. Right now the tide was maybe an hour from its highest point, but the hole in the rocks was in no danger of disappearing. He secured the boat to a branch and waded up to the hole between the rocks.
No graffiti, no sign of disturbance. And, damn it, no flashlight. Allen patted his pocket to check that his Zippo lighter was there, then dropped down on all fours in the water. To his satisfaction, the entrance had grown no smaller—even seemed less snug, which surprised him until he remembered himself at eighteen, the same six foot one that he was now but packing a lot more muscle. The length, rise, and twists of the passage were as his body recalled; when he felt the walls fall away, he got to his feet—gingerly, in case the roof had shrunk or grown lumps. When he was upright, he dug out the lighter and snapped it to life.
Exactly the same. It was as astounding as if his mother had appeared before him, still vibrant and thirty years old. None of the strewn garbage and condoms the island’s beach had collected, no spray-painted declarations of love or possession, no smells even, other than sea and rock. After the huge turmoil of the years since he’d last stood here, to find this space timeless and unchanged was deeply disorienting.
By the pale flickering light, Allen picked his way over to the corner where the first cave ended and the next in the series of three began. The cave system reached into the island perhaps seventy yards altogether, and was dry except for the steady trickle of mineral-laden but drinkable water down one wall of the front cave. The air was cool but remarkably fresh, just as it had been all those years before.
It was almost as if the cave had waited for him to return, he thought, and smiled.
Still, he had to make certain that it w
as not a trap.
He ducked back through to the main cavern, walked to the middle of its uneven floor, and deliberately thumbed the cover down over the lighter’s flame.
Darkness snapped down around him; Allen waited, his senses tingling with apprehension, waited for the crawl of danger up the curve of his spine, waited for the ghostly click of a safety being flipped on to fire or the quick tink of a grenade handle snapping open, for the jingle of dog tags or the growing conviction that a blade was closing in on the side of his throat, for the back-of-the-neck certainty that he stood in someone’s crosshairs, that the impenetrable darkness was a jungle that nurtured a platoon of silent assassins. In a minute—less—the stones would begin to whisper like wind through rice, then suddenly ring with the ghost of an agonized shriek; when he snapped the lighter back into life, the childlike deRosa would be dangling before him, raw fingers reaching for his shed skin, and behind him a heap of dead and dying infants and a man with ice blue eyes . . .
And so Allen waited, for the faint rumor of the cavern’s freshwater trickle to transmute into the sound of rustling cloth, for the rhythm of the waves outside the entrance to become the wind’s susurration through elephant grass, for the air moving through his nostrils to stutter to a halt so his ears might strain to hear movement. He waited.
And sounds did emerge from the dark, but they were not those that he had dreaded. Standing blind with the cool air brushing his hair and the darkness pressing close against his skin, his ears began to shape the sounds of children. But the cries and voices his mind summoned were not the usual accompaniment to his nights, those choking screams and sobs of the dying. These ghostly voices were more like playground noises, nonsensical but clearly joyous rhythms: the shouts of a ball game, the cries of recess, the regulated chaos of games.