this. It was not a casual trip down Memory Lane. Yes, something happened out there when he very young. Maybe on the night his mother had disappeared. Perhaps something would come back to him if the projection guys messing around in his hippocampus would play him a recap. Or perhaps not. But at least he’d get the bug out of his belly.
From the upper deck he could make out the water taxi he had taken last August. The captain’s name was Jeff Doughty. A few days after Jack emerged from the coma, he called Jeff to thank him for alerting the Coast Guard and to tell Jeff that he was back from the dead. Jeff was delighted to hear that.
It was a cool, overcast Saturday, so only a handful of people was on the boat. The trip took a little more than an hour, making only one other stop, at Cuttyhunk. Most of the Elizabeth Islands lay low against the sky, and as the boat pulled out of port Homer’s rose like a gentle ruffle on the horizon.
Approaching from the east, Jack could make out a few mansions along the southern ridge, at the end of which sat Vita Nova, the Sherman estate. Only a few cars and a couple of taxis were on the island. Jack hired one to take him along Crest Drive to about a quarter mile short of the property, preferring the exercise of walking and the gradual approach. Along the way, he passed open sweeps of full-ocean views, some woodland stretches, and a few homes perched along the brow.
Vita Nova was a twelve-room structure of weathered clapboards—one of four homes that looked down on Buck’s Cove, a horseshoe anchorage rimmed with white sand, dune grass, and granite outcroppings. From the road one could not see the complex of flower gardens or the flagstone walkways or the brown caretaker’s cottage. Jack had been inside the estate only once or twice when he was a boy, as tagalong when his aunt dropped in to say hello or report a leaky window. Rental issues were handled by mail or phone, and the Shermans did not socialize with the Koryans or come down to the beach. Jack never understood how people who owned one of the most stunning spots on the New England coast never took a swim at their own beach or put a boat in the water. In fact, he almost never saw activity at Vita Nova.
He also never learned how his family was so privileged to rent the cottage. The Shermans surely did not need the money, and Jack couldn’t imagine why they’d welcome strangers with a couple of screaming kids in for two weeks out of the year. According to his aunt, Jack’s mother had befriended Thaddeus Sherman, the patriarch of the estate, who had offered her the use of the place before Jack was born—an agreement that apparently continued on and off for ten years following her death. Since then, Jack had not returned until college, coming out a few times on a friend’s outboard. They’d drop anchor in the cove, watch the sun go down, and under outrageously starry skies get beer-philosophical.
Vita Nova looked lifeless—dark windows, closed garage doors, no gardeners pulling weeds. Adding to the eerie calm was the fact that at this westerly end of the island you almost never saw cars, people walking dogs, or joggers. Except for the wind ruffling a flag, it felt as if he had entered a still-life canvas. And walking by the place he felt as conspicuous as a kangaroo. About fifty yards west of the estate was the beach access, an unmarked set of wooden steps hidden by scrub and dune grass.
From the time he woke up that morning, Jack kept thinking about descending these steps and how the cottage would emerge on the left and in the cove Skull Rock. He did not know how he’d react—if he’d be assaulted with flashback images and freak out. But he doubted that, since for the last week he had been on the new PTSD Whack-a-Mole pills, and they worked. No seizures, no flashbacks. Nothing. But in anticipation, his heart thudded as he made his way down, fixing his eyes on the water that under the bright gray sky looked chrome-plated. A few steps down, he watched the cottage emerge over the boulders, and he half-expected a blast of psychic shrapnel that would send him scrambling up the steps. Instead, all he felt was emotional blankness. Nothing.
But Skull Rock stopped him cold.
At eleven-thirty, the sea was just coming off high tide, so only the black crown cut the surface like some cryptozoic sea demon arising from slumber. Jack looked away and continued to the bottom, feeling the rock tug at him as he crossed the sand to the shelf of grass that aproned the cottage. The place looked the same as it had for decades—a four-room Cape Cod cottage in weathered shingles, echoing the manse above. The roofing had been patched in places, and the window boxes had been recently painted, but the same wicker rocking chair sat on the patio as on Jellyfish Night.
The interior was dark. As he took in the house, he could feel suction at his back—the kind of sensation you get when you know you’re being watched. Skull Rock. He turned, and keeping his eyes low, he walked to the edge of the water, where a dead skate had washed up, its white underbelly torn open by seabirds. Jack took a breath and raised his eyes.
The rock was black against the horizon, maybe a ten-foot arc crowning the surface. As if in tunnel vision, everything else in the cove fuzzed to a blur, but that rock cap—and it came back to him with stereoscopic clarity: the heavy black clouds, the leaden water, the squawking gulls, the deep-bellied rumble of thunder, the flicker of lightning across the horizon. He could feel the cold grip of the barnacles under his feet, wavelets lapping at his ankles, and the apprehension as he estimated the stretch between him and the beach in his standoff before the mad fifty-yard dash into a coma.
He remembered from mythology class that the ancient Greeks had believed that two rivers led to Hades. One was called Lethe; and on the way to the Elysian fields, departed souls would take a drink of it and wash away all memories and sorrows as a condition of reincarnation and return to the upper world. The ancients also believed in recycling, since the other was the River Mnemosyne—one drink and you remember everything. As Jack stood at the edge of the water, he wondered which was the worse curse.
He headed back toward the cottage, wondering if anything had been changed, if the same honey-colored pine walls, stone fireplace, and red furniture still warmed the room. What it would be like to be at that window looking out—if things would click into place and if some little bone of recollection would float up from the gloom.
Of course, the proper thing would be to go back up to the house, introduce himself as someone whose family used to rent the cottage—might even remember him—then ask if he could please take a peek for old time’s sake. It had been a while. But that would mean reclimbing the fifty steps, and if anyone was home try to explain that he came all the way out here with cane in hand—a two-hour car ride from Carleton followed by another hour by ferryboat—on a cold, bleak Tuesday morning for a casual nostalgic hit. Sure, pal, and pigs have wings.
The other option was the truth—
And a police chopper would be out here like that to drop him into the nearest foam room.
He climbed the stairs, feeling his legs throb, stopping every so often to catch his breath and let his heart catch up. By the time he reached the top, his whole body pulsed. And to think that last year at this time he could have gone up and down these stairs ten times.
Jack pressed the bell and could hear a muffled ring from inside. He waited a minute and tried again, but still nobody came to the door or peeked out. Nor could he hear footsteps. The momentary flash of relief was quickly crossed with anxiety—there was no excuse not to break in.
He headed back down to the cottage again. His head ached from the blood booming through his veins. He tried the door, but it was locked, and cool relief flushed through him.
But just as those thoughts passed through his brain, his head snapped to the right—to the window box with the bright ragged geraniums, because under it a plastic key box used to be nailed to the shingles out of view— house rules to lock up when leaving the place, since the cove drew boaters who sometimes came ashore to explore.
Jack walked over to it and stuck his hand below, and like a small electric shock his fingers felt the plastic box. He snapped open the lid and a tarnished brass key tumbled out—the same slightly bent number from twenty years ago, maybe even more. It sat in the palm of his hand, humming like a talisman. With ease it slipped into the tumbler and, with a sticky crack, the door pushed open.
But he did not enter immediately. The blood swelling his head had produced a ten-megaton ache that threatened to split the lobes of his brain.
