The Storm King(7)

“She’s beautiful,” Tom said.



“Thanks, buddy.” Tom had visited them in the city just before Livvy’s birth, but their talk of additional get-togethers never panned out. It occurred to Nate that all his best friend had seen of Livvy came from holiday cards and the occasional texted photo.

They ascended the creaking stairs to Nate’s boyhood bedroom. Inside was a narrow twin bed, rows of thin pine bookcases, a dresser, and a little desk. Horror movie posters covered the walls where books did not. This was nearly a replica of the bedroom he’d had at the house on Great Heron Drive before the accident, before he’d moved in with Grams. Nate had lived here on Bonaparte Street for just over two years, but of all the years of his life, these were the ones that had left the deepest marks.

“Just like you left it, huh?” Tom said. “Good to know that some things don’t—”

Nate turned to his friend. He followed Tom’s gaze to a shattered window by the bed. On the faded blue plaid comforter, he saw a chalk-white ball lipped in red stitching. A baseball.

A baseball.

Nate’s world narrowed to the three-inch sphere.

Behind him, Tom said something. Nate could hardly hear him over the thunder of his pulse crashing inside his ears. He went to the window to peer through its diamond shards.

For an instant he felt one with the window’s jagged edge.

Through that window, beyond the trees, Nate caught the glow of the lake. It occurred to him that the mountains around the town looked like jaws that could slam shut at any time, the lake itself an insatiable maw. For a vertiginous moment, he recognized nothing about this place along the moody plain of deep water.

But this was Greystone Lake. This was home.





Two

Nate held the baseball with the tips of his fingers, as if it might break if he squeezed too hard.

An object indistinguishable from this had once destroyed his world. Nate hadn’t touched one in ages. Like everything else here, it felt smaller than he remembered.

“Kids,” Tom said. “It’s September. Everyone thinks they’re a Yankee.” He said this quickly. “I’ll call Mace Hardware to fix the window.”

Nate scoured the ball for the flat creases of a brake pedal pressing to the floor. He searched its pale skin for half-moon scars left by his mother’s fingernails.

He looked at Tom. “Are we still meeting up with Johnny later?”

Nate’s voice hit all the notes of a man without a worry, but he wanted to ask Tom again about her body. He wanted to hear everything there was to know about it. He wanted to carve every detail into his skin and carry it with him everywhere he went.

“Sure,” Tom said, zipping up his coat. “Drinks at the Empire, around six?”



“Perfect.”

“Got to put in some face time at the Wharf first,” Tom said, checking his phone. “More windows to board, more doors to sandbag. It’s an electrical one, too, like Hurricane Katrina. Gonna be a real show.”

Nate followed him down the stairs. Rattling sounded from other rooms where branches rapped the windows. When Tom opened the front door, cold air flooded the hall like a cresting wave.

“It’s real good to see you,” Tom said. “Back here at the Lake.”

“You, too. But we do have to talk later, Tommy.” Nate lowered the wattage of his smile. “You, me, Johnny.”

Tom offered his hand, which Nate accepted.

He watched his friend cross the lawn and get into his police car. Patience didn’t come naturally to Nate, but it was a virtue he’d cultivated over the years.

First, do no harm.

Once the cruiser was out of sight, he realized that he still held the baseball. He’d clutched it so tightly that the braid of its stitching ran across his palm, as if he himself had been assembled.

He trekked back to his boyhood bedroom, going right for the closet. Brass-buttoned blazers, yellowed shirts, oversized flannels. His old raincoat, dark as funeral garb, hung right where he must have left it fourteen years ago. He poked through the clutter at the base of the closet to uncover a box filled with sweaters. He pulled aside the clothes to reveal a clutch of three baseballs.

The first of these had appeared on the front stoop his first day of junior year. He’d found the second in his locker a few weeks later. The third, just before the Halloween when it all started.

That last one had crashed through the same window as today’s baseball.

Kids, Tom had said when he saw the broken window.

Nate added the new baseball to the others and covered them again with sweaters. Out of sight, at least.

Downstairs, he gravitated to the living room’s shrine of photos. He examined each one carefully, indulging the pain that flowed with the memories they conjured. Mom, Dad, Gabe. His treasured dead.



His eyes rested on the last of the series. Livvy in a Christmas dress, beaming like a cherub among a pile of presents. In three years she’d be the same age as Gabe. In four, she’d be older than him. Nate could hardly make sense of such math.

He swept up the broken glass in his bedroom, then hunted for a piece of cardboard to block the shattered window. He unearthed a cobweb-netted ladder from the garage so that he could check the gutters. Medea was forecast to drop as much as two feet of rain on the North Country over the next three days.