The Storm King(92)
If he’d drowned on that April day, the Lake would be a better place.
Bankruptcies and crumbling home lives led to unhappy children who grew up to be angry teens. And anger needed a target. Using the revelation of the Thunder Runs from Lucy’s journals, James had weaponized these teens’ fury against Nate, Nate’s friends, and anyone else who could have played a role in Lucy’s murder.
“You can’t hold me responsible for all this.”
“We’re both responsible,” the woman said. “I saved you. Everything you do, good or bad, is because of me.” She pointed to a single string affixed to the nail set into Nate’s photo. It was at the base of the nail, the first string that had been attached to it. It was different from all the others piled above it in that it was blue. That was that day in April, Nate understood. That was the day he’d been returned to begin his second life.
“I didn’t ask to be saved.” He thought of his family, strapped to their seats beneath the lake. That blade of a teen was still inside him, and he seethed at the idea that this woman thought she’d done him a favor. “Maybe pulling me out of that car was a mistake.” He loathed the woman’s judgment as much as he hated her certainty.
“I think about that all the time.”
The thing inside him edged closer to anger.
“I’m not the one who poisoned a bowl of punch and started a riot and fire that killed a dozen people.” He pointed at the collage. “So where’s your wall of sins?”
The woman pointed to the blue string fixed to Nate’s photo. She traced it with her finger diagonally across the wall, under clippings and images and notes. Nate saw where it met the warped ceiling.
“What do you think’s upstairs?” she said. “More space there, but you’ll pass me by soon enough. The new ones have been busy, and they’re not finished.” She turned back to him. Her face was still grim, but something around her mouth loosened. “I was very sorry to hear about Bea.”
The sound of his grandmother’s name gave him a powerful jolt. Indignation, despair, shame—he wasn’t sure what he was feeling, but he knew that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“I’m a surgeon,” he said. He wasn’t a bad man, and he wanted this woman to know it. “I save people’s lives.”
The woman stared at him, then shrugged.
“What do you want from me?” he shouted. “It’s the past. It happened.”
A slash of some gentler emotion broke across her face. “You’re still just a boy, aren’t you?” She reached out to touch the line of his jaw. Her skin was dry but smooth like the stones along the waterline. “It’s never too late to be good.”
Nineteen
It wasn’t until he was back outside, rocked by arias of thunder, that Nate let the things that churned within him break loose.
It was pouring again. The forest shielded him from the worst of the wind, but its treetops shuddered at dangerous angles. The wail of their branches and hiss of their leaves united with the drumming of rain into a wash of noise that made the air itself feel alive. Through its buzz he heard whispers from the dead.
He’d relived his fractured memories of that April day uncounted times. Now he finally had the answer to his impossible survival. He should’ve welcomed the woman’s story. Instead, he felt uncoiled. Inert.
He didn’t know what to do.
A massive tree stood near the foot of the patchy gravel driveway. It reminded Nate of the elm in his grandmother’s backyard. He fitted himself among the nooks of its gnarled roots and hunched his knees into his chest. Curled within his black raincoat and wedged against the tree’s trunk, he felt protected from the storm. In this position he could imagine weathering anything.
Almost anything.
Once the woman explained the basement wall, he’d had to get out of there. A minute more and he’d have suffocated; he would have drowned. All his offenses laid out like a deck of cards. Every hand on display.
Did he have any secrets left? He’d plumbed the chasm at his core but knew he had yet to reach its darkest point. With so many lies folded in upon lies, anything could be there, waiting. It took a great actor to be a good liar, but to be a great actor you had to believe your performance was the truth. After wearing so many masks, could he even remember the shape of his real face?
Nate despised the woman for laying bare so many sins of his youth. He wasn’t sure who she really was, but he believed her story about saving his life sixteen years ago. He should have thanked her; he should have wept into her filthy lap. Fairy godmothers did less for their charges than she’d done for him. But he wasn’t thankful. He was bereft. She was, herself, clearly ambivalent on the subject.
And she wasn’t the only one in town who thought he was a monster.
The compilation of suffering across the cellar wall was reductive, but the truth was inescapable. Nate and his friends had caused pain far worse than the wrongs they’d avenged. Those costs still mounted. In her ICU, Grams was paying for them right now. Maura Jeffers, Pete Corso—they’d all paid.
Nate had to check on Grams, but he didn’t know if any of the phones at the house on Bonaparte Street would work without electricity. The police station would surely have a functional landline, but the idea of seeing Tom or the chief made Nate wish for Medea to sweep him up and whirl him to the farthest edge of her most distant band of cloud.