CHAPTER 3

  Charlie looked down at the sea. Because he was standing on a rock not twenty feet from shore, he didn’t have to look far. In fact, he had only to look down at his own feet, which were currently covered by water up to the ankles. Then the wave swept back and he was looking at his wet boots.

  He didn’t feel right. Something inside of him was making him sick, like he’d eaten a bad oyster or drunk too much beer. Actually, he had drunk too much beer. But that wasn’t it. Neither was it an oyster churning in his belly. It was something else, something that originated in his blood and poisoned every part of him.

  His head hurt. He thought he might be sick. Looking at the sea moving back and forth, he thought for sure he might be sick. But there was only beer inside of him. Beer and poisoned blood. Nothing to speak of, but enough to kill him, he was sure of that.

  All you gotta do is jump in, he told himself. Just step off.

  He couldn’t swim. He’d tried once, when he was maybe nine or ten. But all he’d done was throw his arms around and make a lot of noise. Water had gone into his mouth and nose, and he’d started to choke. Someone—maybe Pete—had had to run in and pull him out. He remembered the taste of sand when he’d pressed his face into the beach, happy just to be alive.

  Another wave came, covering his shoes again. This time he got wet halfway to his knees. Tide’s comin’ in, he told himself.

  Maybe he didn’t even have to jump in. Maybe he could just stand there til the ocean got high enough that it just opened its mouth and swallowed him up. Like that Jonah in the Bible. Fella’d got swallowed up by a fish. He’d liked that story when he was a kid. His mother had read it to him. He’d pictured old Jonah sittin’ there in the fish’s belly. How’d he breathe in there? he’d asked his mother, and she’d told him it was a sin to question the Good Book.

  His mother was dead now. Heart attack. He remembered her funeral. Lots of flowers, big white ones. They sang “Amazing Grace” and he’d cried.

  Thinking about it, he cried again.

  Hudson set the pages on the tray in front of him and smiled. He checked his watch. Three o’clock. He’d been traveling for—he counted in his head—almost eleven hours. Thirteen, really, since he’d arrived at the airport in New Haven two hours before his seven o’clock flight. The ticket counter hadn’t even been open yet.

  Connections in Philadelphia and San Francisco had brought him, finally, to the last leg of the trip. He’d considered driving from San Francisco, taking Highway 1 down the coast. He’d heard it was a beautiful drive. But it would have extended his journey by several more hours, and he was anxious to get to Monterey. He’d waited long enough.

  He picked up the pages again and neatened them. They were copies, of course. The originals were safely stored in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator in his apartment in New Haven. It was a trick he’d learned his first week in graduate school. Always keep whatever you’re working on in the freezer. It’s the one thing that doesn’t burn in a fire.

  He didn’t know if this was, in fact, true. But everyone did it, and so did he. Even though theses and dissertations could now safely be stored on multiple electronic devices, safe from the possibility of destruction by fire, actual paper was still susceptible. He’d scanned them, of course, and did have them stored on at least four different drives, each in a separate place. But there were still the originals. Those he had to safeguard. And so they sat in the freezer, in a plastic bag next to the ice cubes and the ever-present box of Otter Pops that Marty kept there.

  He would have liked to bring the originals, but that wasn’t possible. Already they were fragile. He’d been lucky to find them in readable condition at all, considering where they’d been stored. They should have been nothing but fragments. He shuddered even thinking about that. If they’d been destroyed ...

  He couldn’t go there. They hadn’t been destroyed; that was all that mattered. He had found them. And now he was going to prove that they were as important as he believed they were.

  The plane lurched slightly, and he grabbed the edge of the tray. Don’t crash, he told the plane. If you do, this all dies with me.

  That wasn’t entirely true. He wasn’t the only one who knew. He’d told a few others. But he was the only one who knew the whole story, or at least as much of it as he’d pieced together. Now, as the plane jolted once more, he wondered if this was a grave error. Being the only one to know posed some problems, his death being the greatest of them.

  He clutched the papers as the plane rumbled and a voice came over the speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, we’ve encountered some turbulence. The captain asks that you please fasten your seat belts.”

  Hudson felt for the belt at his waist, slipping the flat end of the buckle into the metal mouth and feeling it click. The absurdity of the notion that a single piece of fabric would save him in the event that the plane plummeted to the ground was not lost on him, but he brushed it away, preferring to accept that, safely strapped in, he would arrive in Monterey in one piece.

  After a minute the plane settled, and a minute after that the seat belt sign flickered off. Still, he left his on. It might, he told himself, ward off further attacks by the elements.

  Looking out the window, he saw nothing but bright blue sky and the softness of clouds. This did nothing to relax him. He realized that he’d been gripping the pages in his hand. They were wrinkled, creased by the anxious embrace of his fingers. He smoothed them out. Naturally, he had other copies with him. But he would no sooner harm a copy than he would imperil the original.

  He tried to concentrate on Monterey. At twenty-four, he’d never been farther west than Chicago, and then for only a few days at a Faulkner conference, where he’d delivered his paper “The Myth and Mythology of Yoknapatawpha County: The Snopes Trilogy as Greek Tragedy” to a more or less positive reception. (Except, of course, for the woman from Duke who’d suggested that his reading of The Mansion was superficial, but she was a Lacanian, and her behavior typical of the breed. Anyway, he’d later been delighted to hear that she’d been denied tenure and been forced to take a position at a junior college somewhere in Minnesota.)

  His four years at Yale had taken him far from his undistinguished rearing in Edelson, one of Maine’s less-enlightened towns, where his school’s guidance counselor, upon reviewing his performance on a recently administered aptitude test, had helpfully suggested a career in either the fisheries industry or perhaps the United States Navy, where she implied that Hudson might do well in the field of radio operations. Fortunately, the intervention of a teacher had steered him toward college, and a doorway had been opened for him. He’d stepped through gladly, mostly to escape the possibility of ending up like his parents, weary of life and resentful of anyone who wasn’t.

  At the University of Maine he’d read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and developed an instant obsession for the Southern writers. For the next year he’d kept company with Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner, until a professor, tired of reading papers delving into the dreamy minds of authors bred below the Mason–Dixon line, suggested that he try exploring other areas of the American literary landscape. Reluctantly, he’d traveled north, where he’d been relieved to find that the writing, while perhaps not as weirdly intoxicating, was equally invigorating. This had led to journeys west, and by the end of his four years at the university, Hudson found himself making the pilgrimage to Yale in search of advanced degrees.

  Now, having obtained his master’s, he was two years into the doctoral program. And if the papers in his hands turned out to be what he thought they were, he had stumbled on a major find, one that would make his career and practically guarantee him a position of his choosing.

  If they are what I think they are, he reminded himself. There was no guarantee. In fact, if anything, there was nothing but questions. Questions he hoped to find the answers to in Monterey.

  He forced himself to put the papers back into his briefcase. He’d been obsessing over them the whole flight. Well, for much longer than that, of course. But the flight had only heightened his anxiety about them. After all, he was soon to find out whether they were the treasure he believed them to be or simply a dream he would have to exchange for something else.

  He shut his eyes and rubbed them hard, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He recognized it as one of his father’s gestures and pulled his hand away. Lincoln Jones had not been a kind man, and Hudson had not mourned when, the winter of his second year at Yale, his father had been felled by a heart attack while shoveling snow in the driveway. Nor, as far as he could tell, had his mother been terribly upset by the passing of her husband. Taken care of thanks to a surprisingly good insurance policy, Martha Jones now occupied the small, red house on Spruce Lane all by herself, her only companion a fat, orange cat called, predictably, Ginger. Hudson saw her as little as possible, an arrangement that appeared as agreeable to his mother as it was to him.

  The fact that he was manifesting his father’s traits was unsettling. The first time he’d recognized it in himself, he’d spoken to a therapist and had been assured that it was probably just mimicked behavior, unconscious memories burned into his mind in childhood, surfacing now that he was growing older. Still, it was disquieting. His physical resemblance to his father at his age was already too much reminder of their shared genetics; he’d hoped to jettison the more internal similarities by leaving them behind in the bedroom on Spruce Lane along with the other refuse of his childhood.

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  The question roused him from his thoughts. He looked up into the face of the smiling steward.

  “I can’t make you a Cosmo, but how about coffee or a soda?” the flight attendant asked, flashing a smile that Hudson interpreted, correctly, as the recognition of one gay man of another.

  “Tomato juice?” Hudson asked.

  “Regular or spicy?” the steward inquired.

  “Spicy,” Hudson answered.

  “Spicy it is,” the man said, popping open the top of a can and pouring it over ice. “Here you go. One virgin Bloody Mary.”

  He handed Hudson the drink and moved on. Hudson sipped at the juice, enjoying the slight burn on his lips. It vaguely crossed his mind that the steward was cute, in a blond, twinky kind of way. But that had never really been his taste in men. He preferred them more—he hated the description “straight acting,” but that’s what always came to mind. It was, Marty teased him, just his internalized homophobia talking.

  “You try growing up in rural Maine,” Hudson had said once in response. “Up there you’re either normal or a limp-wristed fairy who wants to wear women’s clothes.”

  It was true. The notion of a masculine gay man had yet to penetrate Edelson’s collective consciousness, despite reruns of Will & Grace airing nightly on the Bangor affiliate. Or maybe things had changed since he was a boy there. But probably they hadn’t. Edelson seemed to pride itself on being a good thirty years behind the rest of the country.

  At any rate, it had taken him long enough to admit his own gayness. Well into his third year at the university, in fact. Practically speaking, he was still a gay adolescent, figuring out what he liked and what he needed. That he was doing it at twenty-four was just another resentment to nurse in moments of self-pity.

  He had to admit, too, that it bothered him a little that the flight attendant had pegged him as one of his own. He was horrible at identifying other gay men; inevitably at parties he gravitated to men whose girlfriends or wives showed up moments before he worked up the nerve to ask them out. “What do you expect,” Marty had told him after one such incident. “You didn’t even know you were gay until you woke up in some guy’s bed.”

  This was one of Marty’s favorite stories to tell, usually loudly and to people whom Hudson would rather didn’t hear it, and Hudson frequently regretted ever having told it to him. But that was, more or less, the way it had happened. Because copious quantities of alcohol had been involved, the details were a matter for debate, but what everyone involved could agree on was that Hudson had gone out drinking with some friends one Saturday night and had awakened Sunday morning in an unfamiliar room with a decidedly masculine arm thrown across his torso and a soreness in his nether regions that cause him to recall, dimly and with no small amount of embarrassment, burying his face in a pillow and gritting his teeth. The presence of a condom, clearly used, on the floor beside the bed confirmed his suspicions.

  The man to whom the arm—and the condom—belonged was named Jess. He was a friend of a friend. Hudson had been introduced to him after three beers had already lowered his inhibitions, and when Jess had suggested a walk back to his dorm, Hudson had gone willingly. Whether or not he had been aware of Jess’s intentions when he agreed to this was uncertain, although Jess later claimed that Hudson had kissed him first.

  One thing was clear—waking up in Jess’s bed had forced Hudson to accept his attraction to other men. Not that it had never occurred to him before; it had, in fact, been something that had been with him since adolescence. But Jess confirmed it in the most primitive of ways. Or, as Marty liked to say, “That boy busted your be-hymen wide open, and you haven’t been the same since.”

  He smiled to himself. He was going to miss Marty. His roommate of two years, Marty was another candidate in Yale’s doctoral program. His particular field of interest was mathematics. They’d thought upon meeting that they might be lovers, but their one attempt at sex had been a disaster, and since then they’d cohabitated in chaste domestic bliss. Marty was spending his summer chasing the elusive proof that would be evidence of the potential his professors all insisted he had. The previous night, they’d toasted to their mutual success, each assuring the other that the next few months would find him scaling new heights of academic accomplishment.

  Only Marty knew the extent of Hudson’s hopes for the summer, and even then he didn’t know everything. Hudson had been afraid to fully voice his expectations, lest he doom them to failure by openly speaking of them. Dreams, he believed firmly, were not to be shared. It only invited disappointment. His father had taught him that; it was another inheritance he’d been unable to toss away, but he wasn’t yet convinced that his father wasn’t right about that one thing.

  Still, he did dream. He felt the weight of his hopes in the briefcase, which he continued to hold in his lap. It was as if the pages inside were made of gold, each thin leaf weighing a dozen pounds, the enormity of them threatening to crush the bones of his feet should he let them fall.

  “We’ll be landing in a few minutes, so you’ll need to put your seat in its full and upright position.”

  The steward was once again at his side. He held open a plastic garbage bag. Hudson drained the last drops of his drink, letting the ice cubes slide into his mouth, then dropped the cup into the bag. He avoided looking at the attendant.

  Outside, the ocean was visible. Looking at it, Hudson found himself surprised that it wasn’t a brighter shade of blue. He’d always imagined that the Pacific was somehow lighter than the cold, dull Atlantic. But the water, at least from however high up they were, was as gray as the ocean he’d swum in as a boy.

  He felt the plane slope downward, felt his ears pop as they descended. He tried not to let the momentary disappointment over the Pacific’s blueness grow into something larger. It was, after all, just water. He could not view it as some kind of omen regarding the success of his trip. What he sought was not under the ocean; the proximity of the sea was merely incidental.

  The ground rushed up at them. The landing gear was lowered. Hudson gripped the armrests as lightly as his anxiety would allow. This was it.

  In the moment just before the plane touched down, his heart stopped. It resumed beating only when the plane, rattling ferociously, taxied the length of the runway and came to rest, intact, at its final destination.

  CHAPTER 4

  “There’s your father,” Carol said as Ben opened the door to the house and walked out onto the porch. She sounded to Caddie as if she were identifying for her an unfamiliar animal at the zoo, an okapi, maybe, or a bonobo. “He looks heavier than last time.”

  Caddie didn’t move. On the porch, her father was giving a kind of half wave, his hand moving back and forth in the vicinity of his stomach. He had a strained smile on his face, as if he’d been practicing all morning but hadn’t quite gotten it down yet.

  “I’m going to die,” Caddie said. “Really, I am. You might as well just shoot me right now.”

  Her mother picked up her purse. “If it’s any consolation,” she said, “I’m sure he feels the same way.”

  Carol opened the car door and stepped out. A moment later, Caddie followed her. As she emerged from the air-conditioned cocoon into the afternoon heat, she felt as if she were stepping into hell. She slung her backpack over her shoulder and trudged reluctantly toward the house.

  “Hi,” Ben said. His voice was overly bright. The smile had contorted into a painful expression of fake cheer. “How was the trip?”

  “It was fine,” Carol answered.

  Ben turned to Caddie and opened his arms. Caddie looked at him, not exactly sure what he wanted. She glanced at her mother, who nodded slightly. Caddie stepped forward, and Ben’s arms surrounded her. He squeezed her tightly, so that her face was pressed painfully into his shoulder.

  “How’s my little girl?” Ben asked.

  Caddie pulled away. She was embarrassed for her father. Stepping back, in case he tried to hug her again, she glared stonily at the boards of the porch. The white paint had flaked away in places, showing the older blue paint underneath. One board had been replaced entirely and had yet to be painted at all. It reminded her of a diseased tooth.