never saying a word. But he’d come, and though he didn’t look particularly thrilled to be there, he seemed the sort who never looked particularly thrilled about anything at all. He didn’t speak much either, which only fueled Brigid’s intrigue. He looked like someone who needed someone to talk to, and though he gave no outward indication that Brigid might be that person, his presence at the Dinghy had her feeling buoyed and hopeful.
She lost the game she was playing and retrieved her beer. Gavin hadn’t moved from his corner, where a corona of brightly colored Christmas lights clustered in the fishing net above his head. Brigid went to him. “Come outside and have a smoke, won’t you?” she asked.
Gavin exhaled a cloud of smoke through the side of his mouth.
“Come for a smoke
He smiled slightly, awkwardly, as though his face were unaccustomed to such contortions. Then he shrugged and followed her out the back door.
The deck, too, was lit by Christmas lights: pink, blue, red, yellow, green, strung along the wooden railing, reflected in the water below. Brigid sat and swung her legs over the edge of the dock. Gavin eased himself down beside her and offered a cigarette. She made a show of surprise at his gallantry, and he continued to oblige, making sure hers was lit before his own. Wind ruffled the swamp reeds, and they both looked quickly toward the disturbance as though it might offer a possible conversation topic. A gull flew up toward the moon, half full and ringed with haze. Neither of them thought of anything to say. They sipped their beers. They smoked their cigarettes. You had to be grateful for props at times like this.
Brigid downed her last sip of beer. “Did you love her, then?” she asked. They’d all heard—through a very short and swift grapevine— of Gavin’s decimated relationship with the island girl he’d followed from California. She’d dumped him on arrival.
“I thought so,” he said. The topic ran constantly through his head and needed no intro or segue.
“And now?” she prodded.
“I don’t know.”
He offered nothing more.
“So how long were you two a couple, then?” she tried.
“Since September.”
She nodded, as though she knew what that was like. In truth, Brigid hadn’t had a boyfriend in her life who’d lasted longer than three weeks. Most didn’t last twenty-four hours. She’d slept with three boys and had shared only so much as a postcoital meal with just one of those.
“Yeah,” Gavin said. “Yeah, well, it sucks. Pretty much end of story.” He shrugged again, slapped his palms against his thighs, pulled his legs in and stood. He hovered above her a moment as she gazed up at him.
“Would you be interested at all in getting involved with someone else, then?” she asked. She cocked her head. “Insofar as it might take your mind off things a bit?”
He laughed, a muffled snort, which was dampening but not unkind. When he spoke, it was gratefully. “Thanks, but I don’t think so.”
“You’re sure, are you?”
He laughed again. “No.”
“Well, I suppose that’s something, isn’t it?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s something. I don’t know what it is.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“Yeah well . . .”
“Yeah . . .”
“I’m going to head out, I guess,” he said. “Hey, thanks for the beer.”
“No bother at all.”
“G’night” he told her.
“ ’Night, then,” she repeated, her voice forced and bright.
He turned away, walked down the steps and around the outside of the bar toward the Lodge.
Brigid sat a moment, looking at the water. And then all there was to do was go back inside and order another beer and shoot another game of pool, and so she did.
HOW BLACK THE NIGHT THAT BLINDS OUR HUMAN HEARTS
LORNA SAT ON THE CABIN PORCH, awkward and misplaced in the morning sun. She wished the light were like the stiffness of a new pair of shoes, and she closed her eyes and tried to imagine breaking it in. The sun eddied orange beneath her eyelids. If it were always sunny, maybe she could stay. If the darkness never set in to her again, holding her sure and tight, if she never turned away from the sun, just stayed outside with Squee forever and never went back inside, where blankets were hung over the windows to keep the light from bringing into relief all that was wrong with the way they lived. Squee belonged in the light, an angel child—that blond head of his, that devil’s grin on an angel’s face, her boy. But she could already see how worry wore him down, worry over his mama, shut tight in the dark like her life depended on it. To stay with Squee in the sun she’d have to vow never to take another drink. Never look at Lance again, because Lance
