The Storm King(14)

Could eggs shatter glass? He wanted to string their viscous whites from every wall in her room. He wanted their stench to taint every thread of clothing she owned and infuse every dream she had with specters of sulfur and hellfire.

He pitched the eggs at her bedroom, and each one failed. Johnny moved to other rooms and Tom filled the mailbox with Barbasol, but Nate remained fixated on that single window. The shrapnel of shells and their evicted contents became a slick that ran from gable to gutter, but in the steady light the glass was uncracked. Magical thinking had shadowed Nate since April. As the cartons emptied, each impact’s wet thump stung more than the last. If he broke this window, he’d feel better. If he broke this window, it would have all been a dream. If he broke this window, his family would be alive. Halfway through the last dozen eggs, a wave of emotion crested and threatened to pull him into grief, but he nursed this into a seed of incandescent rage. When Nate stared at the house, he expected to set it aflame with his anger.



Maybe this was how he’d missed the black Mustang creeping toward him down the empty street.

Someone tugged at his sleeve. The distraction sent one of his eggs wide and skittering across the eaves.

“Time to go, dude,” Johnny said. Both he and Tom were next to him. Nate got the sense they’d been there for a while, trying to catch his attention. Time had become an inconstant variable in his universe. Sometimes entire days dissolved to night without him noticing. Then there were eras of glacial ponderousness when every week of junior year became its own lifetime.

Nate finally saw the car. Even if he hadn’t recognized it as belonging to Adam Decker, Lucy’s boyfriend, that its headlights were unlit was reason enough to be suspicious. Now he understood the house’s blazing lights and empty windows. It’d been made to look like a target impossible to resist. An enticement.

A trap.

His friends were right. It was time to go. But as he dropped the last of the eggs, something else caught his attention.

An ember brightened on the far end of the shadowed driveway. A cigarette attached to a hand attached to an arm attached to a girl. She moved closer, and as she did her features took shape between the brightness of the house and the darkness of the street. Her hair hung in soaked mats around her jacket. It looked black in the shadows, but there was a gleam of auburn where the light struck her.

“Come on, Nate,” Tom said. “We’ve got to run.”

But Nate didn’t run. Lucy must have been hidden in wait for him even longer than he’d watched the house for her. She now moved toward him. Her cigarette disappeared in a dance of sparks across the wet asphalt.

Wheels screamed, cutting through the susurrus of the rain as the Mustang came to life. Color blazed back into the world by way of its headlights.



Johnny’s emphatic swearing drew Nate’s gaze to two other figures approaching from the direction opposite the Mustang. Adam Decker’s neolithic friends, Nate assumed. They gunned the engines of their absurd mopeds.

“Street’s blocked!” Johnny said.

Nate returned his attention to Lucy. She’d halted her approach. He took a step toward her, just to see what she’d do. She didn’t budge.

“Guys, we’re dead,” Tom said.

Lately, Nate wondered about this world of the Lake. How he could be in a place, of a place, and yet remain so distinct from it. At parties, his friends could chatter and bob their heads to music, but Nate was sure that his ears heard a different song than everyone else. He might stand in a circle or sit on a ragged basement couch, but he was not there. He was in the lake, far below the frigid waterline where only the fish could breathe.

“Cut through the Cohens’ backyard,” he said. “Head to the Strand. We’ll meet at Johnny’s.”

“What about you?” Tom asked.

Nate had his share of unhealthy habits, but worry was not among them. A boy with nothing to lose had nothing to fear.

“Be right behind you.”

“Dude, I mean—”

“Go,” Nate said, walking toward the girl in the driveway.

It was a small house. The Bennetts’ former home on the Strand had a three-car carriage house of roughly the same dimensions. It took Nate only a few steps until he was face-to-face with Lucy.

Same school, same grade, but Nate couldn’t remember if he’d been this close to her since April. He felt sure that if they’d exchanged a single word since then he’d remember its every inflection. For months they’d orbited each other like binary stars. All motion was dictated by the other without them once coming into direct contact.

But that was ending now. A collision was ahead. A supernova.



Tom’s and Johnny’s footsteps cut across the road for the Cohens’ lawn. They would have debated before fleeing, Nate knew. They were good friends, and good friends didn’t abandon one another lightly. But there was a clock on this action, and its metronome was the roaring of engines.

Nate thought his friends would be safe. The teens on the mopeds and in the car weren’t here for them. Events had escalated between him and Lucy since she’d left the first baseball for him back in August. Each felt they’d been wronged by the other, but Nate knew he had the stronger grievance. When you got down to it, what was his crime? All he’d done was live.

“Are you happy?” Lucy asked. It was shocking to hear her address him directly. Her voice was deeper than he remembered. It rasped like dried leaves caught underfoot.