Fortunately he’d already been paid for our passage and didn’t make a fuss about it, just took a couple of bottles of vodka for himself and came and got me that night when it was time to jump ship. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know a single soul in New York.”
“Did anyone ever discover what happened?”
“Yes and no Misha. Since I didn’t weigh them down, the bodies were eventually found floating in the bay. It was in the papers for a couple of weeks. The police were never able to solve what happened. They didn’t have any means of identifying them. We did not officially exist in this country.”
“I think that is why they are mostly angry with you, Mikhail. Even killers want a proper burial, to have their names uttered by the living one last time. You sent them to their graves as ghosts.”
Chapter 28
James grounded the boat onto a pebble beach and they got out. Close to the jetty now, they could have clambered over the stacked boulders to where the tide sucked at the edges of the crusted white, gull-fouled tip. They chose to follow a deer trail that led over a hill of slick dune grass and onto the fog-hidden beach. Not many years ago they’d come here and hid in the clefts of the dunes, away from the prying eyes of town. If it was a warm night, they’d bring sleeping bags and lie on their backs and wait for the Milky Way to appear above them-a ghostly blue peninsula against a sea of dusty black-and think about how all the grains of quartz below them could never equal the swirl of stars.
Ann recalled how in August the sundried seedpods of Scotch Broom would rustle in the breeze like tiny maracas to the distant fluting of a buoy anchored somewhere beyond the jetty. Unaware of how powerful the orbits were that already bound them, their lives back then still felt as vast as deep space, free from the sculpting hand of circumstance. When she was lying next to James, her mind would wander far from Traitor Bay, perhaps even into the future, until the mournful piping of the buoy guided her back to a jealous force that held sway over those born to the salt air.
They headed north, moving parallel to the last high tidal mark-a thick ribbon of torn kelp and jellyfish mixed with smooth-edged pieces of bark and immortal plastic. The fog seemed to be thinning where they walked, but far out on the exposed sand and rock and deep tide pools it remained as thick as paint. Ann knew the area well, the barnacle covered logs and stumps temporarily sunk deep into the sand until the next storm pulled them from their sockets and swept them further south. It was the same beach where she’d found the arm, her first warning that Traitor Bay was in trouble.
It was as if they were a pair of strangers who suddenly find themselves forced to work together, like those true life survival shows where people are trying to get out of a collapsed train tunnel or escape from an unstable hostage taker. She’d tried talking to him in the boat, but he hadn’t stopped being angry over the money. It was clear to her that if she hadn’t moved it, James would have taken it all without telling her.
“When are you going to stop sulking?” she asked. “You should be glad I didn’t run off like I’d wanted too.”
James stopped to light a cigarette while fog drew across his forehead. He raised his dark eyes and stared into her face. She’d become someone he did not know and he was angry she’d dared to change. He’d thought she still might be in his back pocket, that he could return some day and they would get together and this time he’d have the experience under his belt and she’d be almost like he’d left her only needing him more. And yet he knew he’d been fooling himself all along, didn’t understand where such a messed up fantasy had come from and why it had turned into a kind of addiction. What Ann said was usually the truth, and to be around her now felt like standing in a center of grass fire hoping that if you are to be consumed that it would be over fast.
“Maybe you should quit the bullshit now, Ann. I know exactly what you would have done as soon as you got the chance.”
“Listen to yourself. That money was never ours to keep in the first place. If you hadn’t spent so much time hiding somewhere and feeling sorry for yourself, you would have found out that the world changed without you…”
“And what do you know about the world, Ann?” James said, his voice rising. “Do you really think I’m the one who’s delusional? Do you?”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Well fuck me.”
He put his lighter away and they resumed walking. They could hear gulls circling around them in the fog, cawing with excitement over the dead or dying snacks left behind the retreating tide. Back when they were dating they would have made a special trip to the beach just to see what might be found. Sometimes people came upon live fish thrashing in the shallow water and they’d carry them home to their kitchens. James uncle had once come home with a thirty-pound steelhead he’d found gasping on the beach. Other than a hook they’d found buried deep in its stomach, it had baked nicely.
“I wish I knew why you’re acting this way,” Ann said. “I didn’t know a person could change so fast in the wrong direction.”
“You’d be surprised what someone will do if backed into a corner.”
“I’ve been there. Do you really think I planned to still be in Traitor Bay? Maybe I haven’t grown wise to the world like you have, but at least I didn’t throw my conscience down the toilet.”
James shot her a glance but didn’t slow his pace. “Well there’s one thing about you that hasn’t changed, Ann.”
“And what would that be?”
“Your mouth.”
As Ann laughed it off, she felt something inside her break. Before she was aware of what she was doing, she reached out and took hold of his arm and he shrugged her off without looking at her.
“I thought we once loved each other. Doesn’t that still glow in you some place, or has it been completely snuffed it out?”
“It doesn’t matter to me anymore. Nothing does.”
“Seriously? That’s what living on the road did to you?”
“All I know is that when I hit bottom I had to sell everything to get out again. I’ll die before I go back to living that way. As soon as I get my money this place will only be a bad memory and the only hard decision I’ll have to make is deciding what I’m going to drink it off with.”
“And me?”
James stared at maps in the sand, wondering if his life was written there by waves. “It’s what I have to do.”
Ann stopped walking. “Wait.”
“What do you want, Ann? Don’t you understand a thing I’ve said?”
She closed her eyes off from the distraction of the fog. “Stop talking and listen … What do you hear?”
James toed the pulpy remains of a starfish. “I don’t hear anything but the ocean.”
Ann leaned forward. “You’re not listening. It’s a low growl … Like an engine coming closer.”
“There’s no way it could be them.”
Chapter 29
When she opened her eyes she first saw a faint light, a stain on a thick wad of gauze. It reminded of her summers when the fog rolled in unexpectedly and the sun hung in the sky like a red scab. As it floated toward them it intensified and divided into two. A dark shape caused the fog to billow and when it roared closer they saw the chrome bumper of the Russian’s van plowing through.
