The Storm King(37)
There are moments when you realize that everything you know about a person barely amounts to the most superficial of impressions. Nate discovered that this dripping girl whom he’d spent hundreds of hours contemplating was a wondrous stranger. What else might be there, just under her lovely skin?
“I don’t get it,” Tom said. He put both his hands on his head and began walking in a circle. “I don’t get what’s happening.”
“What’s happening is that Lucy made an obvious case of arson look a little less deliberate,” Nate said. “Remember, only the Deckers’ prints are in the garage.”
“You’re saying that—”
“The police might blame them.” Nate turned to Lucy. “They wouldn’t be the first people to burn down their own house and do a crappy job of hiding it. If nothing else, it’s enough to confuse everything.”
“Mr. Decker’s been having money problems,” Lucy said. “His stores haven’t been doing well. They might even lose their farm in Gracefield. I overheard a phone call a couple weeks ago.”
“Motive,” Tom said, nodding. “A nice way to get insurance money. And a storm’s a good time to set a fire. All kinds of things can happen in a storm.”
“You might have saved us.” Nate didn’t know if Mr. Decker would really get blamed for setting fire to his own home. He didn’t know if he wanted that to happen in the first place. But maybe Lucy had muddied the waters enough to shift any blame away from them. “Thank you.”
“We’re even now,” Lucy said. She was right in front of him. “I heard you. I know you did it for me.”
Thunder detonated above them. It shook the pier like a quake. Lucy rested her cold palm against his wet face. When she touched him, Nate understood something he’d overlooked in all the months since April. He and Lucy were two halves of the same disaster. They were as conjoined as lightning and thunder.
It was strange to be surprised by something that felt so inevitable.
From the beginning, this was the collision they had been hurtling toward.
She kissed him. On the broken dance floor of the Night Ship, in front of his friends and all the pier’s ghosts. The kiss was only a brush of lips against lips. Less a kiss than a promise. Nate felt this in the voltage that sang through him when the tip of her tongue grazed his mouth and in the way her hand tightened on his bicep.
It was a promise in the way that all beginnings were a promise. Nate found that it was easy to forget himself in the ecstasy of this beginning. In its rush, he could forget that a person was comprised of all of the things that had happened to them, and that life’s equations of pain must find a balance. He could forget how the universe stacked chance upon chance in a way that can turn the smallest of things into the most momentous of events. He could forget that he was hunted by shadows, and that even on its brightest day life was really a storm.
With her lips on his, Nate found that he could even forget that time proved all promises to be lies.
Seven
“But why were you outside to begin with?” Meg asked.
Nate was in the emergency room at the little hospital in Gracefield, one town over from Greystone Lake. They’d checked him over and stitched the cut on the crown of his head. He believed he had only a minor concussion, but the emergency room doctor insisted on a CT scan.
“I was checking for storm damage,” Nate told her. This was essentially true.
“And some kid clocked you?”
“I didn’t get a good look at him. I think he was a kid.”
“You’re lucky Bea heard the commotion. Is she still there?”
“She went to get me some dry clothes.” Nate didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious on the lawn, but it’d been time enough to get soaked through. His phone hadn’t been spared. An ominous discoloration spread across its screen. “I’m really completely fine.”
“A man doesn’t call his wife from the ER at three in the morning to let her know he’s fine. He calls to let her know he isn’t dead. You understand the difference, right?”
Despite Meg’s suggestion to the contrary, Nate knew from experience that she would have been more upset if he’d waited until morning to tell her he’d been hurt.
Soon after they’d begun dating, back when Nate still had a habit of getting into a particular kind of trouble, a minor incident had landed him in the ER. When he’d showed up at Meg’s apartment the next night and startled her with a split lip and two fingers in splints, she’d been furious that she was only then learning of his injuries.
Nate had never seen even a hint of her anger before this. You should have told me the second you had a free hand to dial, she’d shouted at him, I could have helped! He realized that Meg wasn’t upset for being kept in the dark, but because she’d imagined him suffering for a day without her even knowing. This had been a concept long lost to him: that pain could be diminished by being shared. It made him wonder for the first time if this thing between them could be love. A gentler genus of love than what he’d known before, though a species not without its teeth. He felt the sting of its bite now, in this ER at three A.M., in this cold plastic chair not far from his hometown, where lies so often felt like mercy.