“You should be sorry,” I say sternly to Tommy, who still looks beaten, standing on the other side of the worn green couch that will be Finn’s bed. And then I hurl the sock back to him.
Pleased to be so easily forgiven, he grins and whips it without pause to Beech, who loses it to the dog. Tommy has no qualms about making a fool of himself, scrabbling after the collie as she leads him on a merry chase, and even Finn’s laughing. I find myself wondering what drives Tommy to leave the island; he doesn’t have the brooding of Gabe or the sulkiness of Beech. I’ve never seen him when he doesn’t seem perfectly content, perfectly a part of island life. On the floor, Tommy snags the sock, finally, and around and around it goes to all of us, even the dog again, until Finn says, “Where’s Gabe?” and we realize that he hasn’t come out of the kitchen.
I start toward the kitchen, but Tommy takes my arm. “I’ll go.”
He peers around the door frame and I can’t hear what he says. Then he turns back to us, and he has a smile pinned on for us. “Good news. Food’s done.” Gabe appears in the doorway beside him and they exchange a look that infuriates me, because it’s yet more of the secret language of men.
Finally, Peg appears and addresses all of us. “If you want it, you have to serve yourself. And if you don’t like it, blame Tom. He did it.”
There’s not much conversation as we eat — maybe, like me, they’re all reimagining the events of the evening. But it’s a quiet without demands. The storm’s not loud enough to make itself known and it’s easy to pretend that we’re just over for a social visit. The only time Peg Gratton addresses me is to tell me that I’m welcome to give Dove more hay if she needs it before the end of the night, before the storm gets bad.
And she’s right about the storm. By the time we go to bed, the wind has become fitful and furious, shaking the windowpanes. The sheets on the bed are clean but the room still smells like Beech, who smells like salt ham. Before we turn off the lights, I see that there are no personal effects in the room, nothing to say that it is Beech’s. Just this bed and an austere desk with an empty vase and some coins on it, and a narrow dresser with well-worn corners. I wonder if there used to be more of Beech here, but he packed it all away to take with him to the mainland.
I consider this as I try to sleep. I lie on one side of the bed and Gabe lies on the other, but it’s a twin bed, so the two sides are really one side, and his elbow is kind of in my ribs and his shoulder is mashed against mine. It’s warmer here, too, than at our house, and having Gabe here makes it warmer still, so I’m not sure how I’ll sleep. Gabe’s breathing doesn’t sound like he’s sleeping, either.
For a long moment we lie there in the dark, listening to the rain on the roof, and I think about the broken fence back home and the last sound I heard out of Puffin and that long, long black face looking into the lean-to.
Because I’m tired, I say exactly what I’m thinking, without a lick of tact to make it go down easier.
“Why did you come back for us?” Even though I’m whispering, my voice is loud in the little bedroom.
Gabe’s reply from the other side of the bed is withering. “Honestly, Puck, why do you think?”
“What does it matter to you?”
Now he’s indignant. “What kind of a question is that?”
“Why are you answering all of my questions with other questions?”
Gabe tries to shift to put space between us, but there’s no more mattress for him to move to. The bed groans and creaks like a ship at sea, only the sea is the bare floor of Beech’s ham-scented room. “I don’t understand what you want me to say.”
I don’t want to be accused of being hysterical, so I measure my words out, careful and slow. “I want to know why you care about us now, when next year you’ll be gone and we could both be eaten in October and you’ll be off on the mainland and never know.”
In the dark, I hear Gabe sigh heavily. “It’s not like I want to leave you two behind.”
I hate myself for the little flutter of hope that I feel when he says it. But it’s true that I imagine him with his arms flung wide, announcing that he’s changed his mind as he embraces Finn and Dove and me at once. I say, “Then don’t. Just stay.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I just can’t.”
It’s the most we’ve spoken in a week and I wonder if I should just let it go at that. I imagine him leaping up, throwing the bedclothes from himself, and bolting from the room to avoid further questioning. Only, if he wanted to escape, he’d have to cross the bodies of Tommy Falk and Beech Gratton on the mattress on the floor and avoid falling over the couch with Finn on it and then sit by himself in the dark kitchen, and I don’t think he’ll do that.
So I say, “That’s not a real reason.”
For long moments, Gabe doesn’t answer, and I just hear him breathing in and out, in and out. Then he says, in a strange, thin voice, “I can’t bear it anymore.”
I’m so strangely grateful for this honesty that I don’t know what to think. I struggle to think of a good question, a question that will keep him talking like this. It’s like the truth is a bird that I’m worried of frightening away. “What can’t you bear?”
“This island,” Gabe says. He breathes a long pause between every word he says. “That house you and Finn are in. People talking. The fish — goddamn fish, I’ll smell like them for the rest of my life. The horses. Everything. I can’t do it anymore.”
He sounds miserable, but he didn’t look miserable earlier, when we were all in the kitchen, when we were perched all over the sitting room eating. I don’t know what to tell him. Everything that he said are things that I love about the island, except for maybe the smell of fish, which I guess might ruin everything else. But I don’t know if that’s a good enough reason to leave everything behind and start over.
It feels like he’s confessed that he’s dying of a disease I’ve never heard of, with symptoms I can’t see. The utter wrongness of it, the way it won’t fit in my head, keeps coming back to me again and again, as if I’ve only just learned about it.
The only concept I can truly understand is that this thing, this strange and incomprehensible and invisible thing, is big enough and strong enough to drive my brother from Thisby. As much of a pull Finn and I might have on him, this has more.
“Puck?” Gabe says, and I start, because his voice sounds like Finn’s for some reason.
“Yes?”
“I’d like to go to sleep now.”
But he doesn’t. He turns onto his side and his breathing stays light and watchful. I’m not sure how long he stays awake, but I know that I fall asleep before he does.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
SEAN
In the early, black morning, the storm wakes me.
The wind roars overhead, an engine, the surf, the howl of a sea creature. My eyes adjust to the darkness and I see lights moving outside. Rain bursts across the glass in waves, furious and then more furious.
Now I hear the horses. They whinny and call and thump the walls. The storm has whipped them to a frenzy, and outside, something is screaming. It’s this scream that’s woken me, not the wind.
I sit up to act without considering, and after I do, I hesitate. Those are my horses down there in this beleaguered stable, out there in that fearful night. But at the same time, they are not mine, too, and I’ve quit, making them even less mine than they were before. I should stay here, doing nothing, letting the night do what it will. Let Malvern survey the havoc in the morning light and decide that I’m invaluable.
I close my eyes, my forehead on my fist, and listen to the wail outside. Even closer, downstairs, I hear a terrified horse kicking its stall wall, smashing either the wall or itself to destruction.
You overestimate your importance to this yard, Mr. Kendrick.
But I haven’t.
I can’t let a single horse die because I am playing games with Malvern.
I shove on my boots and snatch my jacket, and as I reach for the knob of my door, there’s a knock on the wood.
It’s Daly. His hair is plastered wet over his face and there’s blood on his shirtsleeves. He shivers helplessly. “Malvern says to do it without you, but we can’t. He doesn’t have to know. Please.”
I lift my jacket to show him I was already coming, and together we jog down the narrow dark stairs to the stable. Everything smells of rain and the ocean and yet again more rain.
Daly hurries alongside me. “They won’t calm down. There’s a capall uisce somewhere outside and we don’t know if he’s among the horses or — we don’t know who’s hurt, because that sound — you can hear it. They’re all kicking themselves lame. You get one calm and the others drive it crazy again.”
“They won’t be calm with that scream going on,” I say. Every groom and stable boy and rider that Malvern has is in evidence, trying to calm the most precious of the horses. The bulbs overhead sway in wind that’s found its way inside, and the swinging light stripes over me and away, like I am losing consciousness. I pass Mettle in her stall. She keeps rearing and clawing her front hooves against the wall as she comes back down. If she’s not unsound now, she’ll be soon. I hear Corr clucking and singing, driving the horses near him to madness. Somewhere behind me, another horse is slamming a hoof against a wall, rhythmic and senseless. Outside, the screaming continues.
Daly trails me as I go to Corr’s stall. In my pocket, my hand closes around a stone with a hole through it. If Corr were any other water horse, I’d string it onto his halter tonight, to make more noise in his head than the approaching November sea does. But Corr is not any other water horse, and my tricks will only make him more anxious.
I open my hand and leave the stone in my pocket.
“Keep everyone clear,” I snap. “Keep them out of my way.”
I push open Corr’s door and he charges toward the aisle. I press my hand into his chest and then slap it, shoving him back. One of the thoroughbreds whinnies piercingly.
“Keep them clear,” I remind Daly.
He bolts ahead of me to pass this along, and then I let Corr plunge out of his stall and tug me down the aisle toward the door to the yard. It’s closed against the rain and worse.
“Not out there —” Daly protests from behind me. “Malvern’s out there.”
That’s too bad. So Malvern will know that I’m still among his horses. But I can’t stop any of what is going on in here without fixing the problem out there first.
I push through the door, Corr strong and difficult on the other end of my lead line. I’m instantly wet to the skin. There’s water in my ears, my eyes. I’m drinking the sky. I have to swipe the water from my forehead and blink to clear my vision. Shingles from the stable are scattered all across the yard. Every light in the yard is on, and there are waterlogged halos around each of them. Three mares stand at the gate, pressing, desperate to get in — they’re broodmares from some of Malvern’s far-flung pastures on the way to Hastoway. The fact that they’re free means that something bad has happened to their fencing and they came seeking the familiar. One of them limps so badly that my heart sinks. The largest of the mares must recognize something in my walk, because she stops struggling and whinnies to me, long and entreating. Trusting me to rescue her from whatever made her come here.