The Storm King(71)
Week by week, strands of anger knotted like a cocoon around him. One morning, one of the Daybreakers said the wrong thing to him while he patrolled the shore. His vision went black streaked with red, and then he was bound to a hospital bed. The man who’d crossed him was also in the hospital, though not in its psych wing.
When he returned to himself, they sent him back to his old therapist, who gave him daily sessions and prescribed a course of medication. He was a few weeks shy of eighteen, a minor with curtailed rights under the close supervision of medical professionals, the police, and everyone else around him. The pills dulled him into a state that he could barely muster the energy to abhor, but they gave him the distance to think. From this vantage, Nate understood that he’d never find Lucy, yet would see her in the Lake’s every buckled curbstone and hear her in each gust that skimmed its pewter waters. Lucy was gone, but Nate was alive. He would continue to live, but only if he left this place.
So he told his psychiatrist and Grams what they wanted to hear. He went through the five stages of grief at a plausible pace. He took his pills like a model patient. He made a tearful apology to the dawn swimmer he’d sent to the ER—a performance convincing enough that the man dropped his crutches and braced his casted arm around Nate to pull him into a cathartic hug. Weeping into the guy’s shoulder, Nate watched the glances of relief exchanged between Grams and his doctor as they stood nearby.
With a promise to continue therapy in New York, Nate made it to Columbia a few weeks into the fall term. A challenging double major in biochemistry and English required a great deal of his time and rigor—a laudable use of his talents and energies, his doctors all agreed. However, his extracurricular regimen wasn’t the kind a therapist or anyone else would have approved of. While he buried himself in coursework during the week, he used the weekends to vent heat from the furnace that seethed inside him. Thunder Runs had once served this purpose, but abandoning them was the last promise Nate had made Lucy. There were other ways.
The city was gentler than its myths led him to expect. He’d hoped for muggers on every street corner and tempers with a hair trigger. The world had softened, but he had not. Some Saturdays he’d work his way through blocks of bars before finding someone too drunk to shrug off his provocations.
Brawling exorcised his rage, because the person Nate most sought to punish was himself. He didn’t know what had happened to Lucy, but he was certain that he bore a measure of responsibility for it. If he hadn’t scared her the night of graduation. If he hadn’t punctuated their time together with such extremes of fury and love. If he’d never dated her in the first place. Any one of a thousand untraveled pasts would have led to a present where Lucy was safe.
Each black eye and split lip helped him pay for this. With the number of injuries he sported in class, his professors must have thought him singularly clumsy.
As with the loss of his family, the wound of Lucy’s absence didn’t heal, but nerve by nerve it numbed. One winter, he met Meg, a 2L at the law school. There’d been other women, but not like her. Like Lucy, Meg was sharp and tough, and Nate could have filled a book trying to describe how kind, gentle, and funny she was. But those were just words. The heart of his love for her was a sensation that hummed from his center and did not falter.
Nate’s passion for Lucy had been real and intense and hungry, but with the distance of time, he began to understand that this was not the kind of love that tended to endure. It had been an unsustainable passion.
Like Nate’s rage, it couldn’t burn forever.
He assembled a new man. One who could live within the rules of this world. A man his parents and grandmother would be proud of. A man who deserved the love of someone like Meg. Nate hadn’t thought those askew equations inside him could ever be balanced, but somehow, variable by variable, they were. Or at least they seemed to be. Anger. Pain. Revenge. Guilt. These belonged to another life. These belonged to another Nate.
He finished his bachelor’s degree early and went right into medical school. There were years of happiness. There was professional success. There was Livvy.
Then they found Lucy’s remains in the headlands.
Nate opened the side door to the church, and a pulse of wind extinguished a cluster of nearby candles.
The church was neo-Gothic with high and narrow stained glass windows, lifeless in the gray day. The building had lost electricity, and promontories of candles assembled around the altar and along the aisles were its only illumination. Islands of light in drifts of shadow.
The congregation was larger than Nate would have guessed from the number of cars outside. Over half the church’s pews were occupied with figures cloaked in black.
Nate spotted Tom seated in one of the rearmost pews.
There was some anonymity in the darkness of the place, but Nate still attracted attention as he walked the side aisle. As faces turned to him, some became strangely lurid in the candlelight. He avoided eye contact, but he recognized former teachers, old friends, and members of Lucy’s extended family. By the time he reached the back of the church, the crowd’s muttering competed with the drumming of rain against the roof and windows.
Nate sat next to Tom, shook out his dripping umbrella, and removed his streaming coat. There was movement in the vestibule behind him. He got his first glimpse of the black box where what remained of Lucy would forevermore reside.