The Storm King Read online

  They ascended the creaking stairs to Nate’s boyhood bedroom. Inside was a narrow twin bed, rows of thin pine bookcases, a dresser, and a little desk. Horror movie posters covered the walls where books did not. This was nearly a replica of the bedroom he’d had at the house on Great Heron Drive before the accident, before he’d moved in with Grams. Nate had lived here on Bonaparte Street for just over two years, but of all the years of his life, these were the ones that had left the deepest marks.

  “Just like you left it, huh?” Tom said. “Good to know that some things don’t—”

  Nate turned to his friend. He followed Tom’s gaze to a shattered window by the bed. On the faded blue plaid comforter, he saw a chalk-white ball lipped in red stitching. A baseball.

  A baseball.

  Nate’s world narrowed to the three-inch sphere.

  Behind him, Tom said something. Nate could hardly hear him over the thunder of his pulse crashing inside his ears. He went to the window to peer through its diamond shards.

  For an instant he felt one with the window’s jagged edge.

  Through that window, beyond the trees, Nate caught the glow of the lake. It occurred to him that the mountains around the town looked like jaws that could slam shut at any time, the lake itself an insatiable maw. For a vertiginous moment, he recognized nothing about this place along the moody plain of deep water.

  But this was Greystone Lake. This was home.

  Two

  Nate held the baseball with the tips of his fingers, as if it might break if he squeezed too hard.

  An object indistinguishable from this had once destroyed his world. Nate hadn’t touched one in ages. Like everything else here, it felt smaller than he remembered.

  “Kids,” Tom said. “It’s September. Everyone thinks they’re a Yankee.” He said this quickly. “I’ll call Mace Hardware to fix the window.”

  Nate scoured the ball for the flat creases of a brake pedal pressing to the floor. He searched its pale skin for half-moon scars left by his mother’s fingernails.

  He looked at Tom. “Are we still meeting up with Johnny later?”

  Nate’s voice hit all the notes of a man without a worry, but he wanted to ask Tom again about her body. He wanted to hear everything there was to know about it. He wanted to carve every detail into his skin and carry it with him everywhere he went.

  “Sure,” Tom said, zipping up his coat. “Drinks at the Empire, around six?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Got to put in some face time at the Wharf first,” Tom said, checking his phone. “More windows to board, more doors to sandbag. It’s an electrical one, too, like Hurricane Katrina. Gonna be a real show.”

  Nate followed him down the stairs. Rattling sounded from other rooms where branches rapped the windows. When Tom opened the front door, cold air flooded the hall like a cresting wave.

  “It’s real good to see you,” Tom said. “Back here at the Lake.”

  “You, too. But we do have to talk later, Tommy.” Nate lowered the wattage of his smile. “You, me, Johnny.”

  Tom offered his hand, which Nate accepted.

  He watched his friend cross the lawn and get into his police car. Patience didn’t come naturally to Nate, but it was a virtue he’d cultivated over the years.

  First, do no harm.

  Once the cruiser was out of sight, he realized that he still held the baseball. He’d clutched it so tightly that the braid of its stitching ran across his palm, as if he himself had been assembled.

  He trekked back to his boyhood bedroom, going right for the closet. Brass-buttoned blazers, yellowed shirts, oversized flannels. His old raincoat, dark as funeral garb, hung right where he must have left it fourteen years ago. He poked through the clutter at the base of the closet to uncover a box filled with sweaters. He pulled aside the clothes to reveal a clutch of three baseballs.

  The first of these had appeared on the front stoop his first day of junior year. He’d found the second in his locker a few weeks later. The third, just before the Halloween when it all started.

  That last one had crashed through the same window as today’s baseball.

  Kids, Tom had said when he saw the broken window.

  Nate added the new baseball to the others and covered them again with sweaters. Out of sight, at least.

  Downstairs, he gravitated to the living room’s shrine of photos. He examined each one carefully, indulging the pain that flowed with the memories they conjured. Mom, Dad, Gabe. His treasured dead.

  His eyes rested on the last of the series. Livvy in a Christmas dress, beaming like a cherub among a pile of presents. In three years she’d be the same age as Gabe. In four, she’d be older than him. Nate could hardly make sense of such math.

  He swept up the broken glass in his bedroom, then hunted for a piece of cardboard to block the shattered window. He unearthed a cobweb-netted ladder from the garage so that he could check the gutters. Medea was forecast to drop as much as two feet of rain on the North Country over the next three days.

  The gutters were utterly clogged. So far it had been only drizzling, but the aluminum troughs already brimmed with tannin-stained water. He reached into the downspout and pulled out handfuls of deteriorated leaves and twigs. As if he were disemboweling the carcass of a strange creature, each fistful came out in dripping clumps.

  While he worked, Nate mentally composed how he’d deliver Nia’s pathology results to the Kapurs. She needed more than surgery now. Chemo, radiation, and immunotherapy were the usual options, but these were beyond Nate’s expertise. When he spoke to her parents, he’d give them a short list of good oncologists to take over her treatment. The facts of her condition were clear, but the tone in which he delivered them would be critical. Hope would be an essential element to any future course of treatment, but Nate wouldn’t mislead them on medical realities. He had an obligation both to them and to the truth. There would be more conversations to come, but it was important that he get this first one just right.

  He’d just moved to another corner of the roof when his phone buzzed. He shucked off his work gloves, letting them flutter to the lawn below. When he worked his phone from his pocket, his wife and daughter’s faces grinned from its display. He slid his finger across the screen to answer.

  “Sorry, I meant to call,” he said.

  “Where are you?” Meg asked.

  “On the roof. There’s about a decade’s worth of leaves in these gutters.”

  “Bea didn’t waste any time putting you to work, did she? Always liked the lady’s style.”

  “Was the drive okay?”

  “Some traffic on the bridge. A little more than ninety minutes door to door. Can’t complain. You’re the one with the eight-hour bus ride.”

  “Do you guys have enough groceries?” Disaster preparedness had become competitive sport, and the networks had been hyping Medea even before they knew she’d turn inland. Nate felt a clench of guilt to not be there with them.

  “It’s not like it’s the apocalypse.”

  “It’s probably not the apocalypse,” Nate corrected her.

  “We’ve got enough bread and eggs to survive an asteroid collision and simultaneous zombie invasion.”

  “That’s what I like to hear. How is the monkey?”

  “It’s sad monkey faces all around, I’m afraid.”

  “Are the drops helping?”

  “Who can tell? Dr. Klieg swears she’ll grow out of these. Before she’s thirty, hopefully. How are things there?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Good.”

  “Liar.” Nate could almost see her brush a lock of long dark hair from her face. “You want to tell me about it?”

  Nate’s life with Meg felt so full that it was easy to forget how incomplete a sketch of his youth his wife must carry in her head. Nate imagined that a part of her enjoyed the fantasy that he’d blossomed into true personhood only upon meeting her. That everything before then had been practice, and, in a way, perhaps it had been.
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  He’d told Meg many stories about this town along the shore. But he hadn’t told her everything.

  “Wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Well, let me know when you figure it out. How’s Bea?”

  “Indomitable. I was thinking we could have her down for a week around Thanksgiving.”

  “Livvy would love a turkey day with Grams, wouldn’t you?”

  “Is she there?” He could picture them, snuggled under the yellow bedspread in his in-laws’ guest room, tapping through a game on the iPad as stars from her night-light pinwheeled across the ceiling above them.

  There was a burst of static as the phone changed hands.

  “Daddy?”

  Nate smiled at the rustle of his daughter’s voice. “How are you feeling, monkey?”

  “My head hurts.” Livvy spoke too closely to the receiver, making everything she said sound like a secret.

  “I’m so sorry. Momma’s taking good care of you though, right?”

  “Tell me a story. Tell me about the Night Ship. Momma says you’re there. She says you’re by the lake.”

  “I wish I was with you.” From the top of the ladder, Nate needed only to swivel his head to see the Night Ship’s towers stark as obsidian against the colorless water.

  “Did you go there? Will you take me?”

  “It’s no place for little monkeys.”

  “I like ghosts.”

  Nate had once mentioned the Night Ship in his dramatically censored stories of Greystone Lake. It had latched onto Livvy’s mind. She asked about it before bed and during baths. She drew pictures of it and constructed it from sheets and pillows.

  “You’re a very brave monkey. I’m not as brave as you are.”

  “Some ghosts are nice, I think.”

  Not in the Night Ship, he thought.

  “Did I ever tell you about that time Ronald the Rhinoceros lost his horn, and his friend Bali the Blue Parrot had to help him find it?”

  “Ronald can’t lose his horn!” Livvy giggled. “They don’t come off!”

  “That’s what he thought, too. But one morning he woke up and looked in the mirror to brush his teeth and couldn’t find it anywhere.”

  Nate spun Livvy a story of cozy jungle adventure, but his thoughts wandered into the dark towers behind him. It had been fourteen years since he’d stepped into the Night Ship, but when he closed his eyes he could see its rusted arches of riveted steel, its moss-stained glass ceiling panels, its promenade tapering into impermeable darkness. He could smell its rot and hear the breath of water lapping against weathered pilings.

  Livvy had her usual questions, but they soon faded into murmurs.

  “She’s finally out,” Meg whispered into the phone. “Been trying to get her to nap since we got here, so thanks for the assist.”

  “How come that never works when I’m there in person?” He listened as Meg extricated herself from the bed without waking Livvy. “How’re your parents?”

  “In an uproar. They dug up three old radios. You know, just in case. And you can’t turn a corner without colliding with a pallet of bottled water. Dad spent half the morning rearranging the brickwork off the patio. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Well, at least they’re having fun.”

  “Time of their lives.”

  “And you’re hunkering down until it’s over, right? No driving? No catastrophe tourism?”

  “You know me, Doc.”

  “That’s why I asked.”

  “You be careful, too. Don’t let those ghosts get you.”

  Nate laughed, because Meg had meant it as a joke.

  She told him about the vacation home of one of their acquaintances on the Outer Banks. Yesterday it had been a three-bedroom cottage, and today it was an array of splintered stilts. As Nate listened, he stole another glance at the Night Ship. The trees had begun to sway, and the lake was curdling with whitecaps. Thunder drummed in the distance. The mountains and forests around the town tossed and shook as if waking from a long slumber.

  THE COLD WATERS closed upon her like jaws, and she let them gnaw at her.

  Like any beast, the lake had its moods. To strangers, it seemed calm during silver afternoons and welcoming in a summer gloaming, but to understand the lake was to know that its undercurrent was always the same. Below the skin of its waves, the deep water was hunger itself.

  That’s why she swam it with such ferocity. Each Daybreaker plied the numbing waters for a reason, and she swam them to be erased. She swam for the lake to devour the girl she’d once been.

  Today the whole world felt ravenous. The waves struck rougher. The wind bit harder. The forests quaked under the roiling sky. A hurricane gathered beyond the horizon, and all elements bayed in anticipation.

  Every storm recalls another, and this town along the shore had endured so many.

  Ahead, the black bulk of the Night Ship speared the pallid water like a toppled colossus. The old pier was abandoned and battered and broken, but in some ways not diminished at all. Because a place like this was more than wood and steel and glass.

  She usually gave the edifice of the pier a wide berth, but since the discovery of the body in the headlands, each day had become more uncertain.

  Something was wrong.

  Something was going to happen.

  The lake returns what it takes, and after many years of quiet, the seeds of old sins had floated from its depths to bloom across the shore. As with much of the pain in this town, the Night Ship was the root of this latest trouble. Today, she kicked for where the waves hurled themselves against the pier’s foundations.

  Deep in the Night Ship’s undercroft, a young prostitute had given birth to twin girls and was told to snap their necks the moment they were born. Or so the story goes.

  During Prohibition, three bootlegger brothers were captured by Old Morton Strong and fed to his tropical fish one piece at a time. Or so the story goes.

  A busybody socialite had once threatened ruin upon the nightclub, and so Just June pushed her from the balcony of the Century Room. Or so the story goes.

  The Night Ship had many stories.

  Some of their endings were yet unknown, even to her.

  The current made negotiating the pier’s pilings dangerous. Swimming among the moss-wreathed pillars felt like diving through a sunken temple. She twisted onto her back to watch the black mass of the Night Ship shut out the sky.

  Sometimes she pretended she could hear the screams of the dead ride the gusts that whistled through the pier’s undergirding. She couldn’t imagine their howls were any more terrible than their silence.

  She didn’t believe in ghosts, but that didn’t mean she could not be haunted.

  Once through the pilings, she slid back onto her belly. The Night Ship was no longer above her, but she was always in its shadow.

  The first rumors of thunder rolled from behind the mountains.

  A storm approached, and she knew it was made of more than wind and rain.

  Three

  When Nate finished speaking with Mrs. Kapur, he set aside his phone and massaged his eyes with his fingertips. These calls were never easy, and this one had been harder than most. He knew he’d done all he could for Nia, and now it was someone else’s turn to try. But he bristled at his failure to fix her. Cancer was as senseless a scourge as there was. The war against it had good days and bad, and the bad ones felt very bad indeed.

  He showered before heading to the Empire. It was good to stand under hot water. He was tense from the phone call, stiff from the bus ride, and filthy from the gutters. Once he was clean, he dressed in a trim blue suit.

  It was dusk at the edge of night. Along the wet streets, the town’s lamps blushed with the cold light of small moons. He carried an umbrella, though the wind made this difficult. Stray drops as big as marbles fell as he made his way to the hotel. He’d scrolled through hurricane updates before leaving Grams’s house. A bridge in Virginia washed away. An island in the Chesapeake vanished in
the storm surge. Thousands of flights canceled, and transit systems from Baltimore to Boston closed or scheduled to close.

  The Lake’s shopkeepers had taped or boarded over their storefronts’ glass, and some were now assembling sandbag barriers around their entrances. Gusts from the lake whistled like blades as they cut among the trees and skimmed along gables.

  The townspeople’s preparations meant Nate could walk among them unrecognized. He wielded his umbrella like a mask.

  The town green was deserted. Through shuffling foliage Nate saw the Empire Hotel, its silhouette gothic against the slate sky.

  Nate had done a poor job of keeping up with Tom, and he’d fallen out of touch with Johnny back during their college years. As with a lot of childhood friendships, there was no single moment when it ended. It had simply faded from the foreground to the background before disappearing from the picture altogether.

  Johnny had still invited Nate to his wedding, four years ago, and Nate had sent a gift but skipped the nuptials. Through Tom, he’d heard the reception was lovely, though apparently it was the divorce that had been truly spectacular. Since then, Johnny had inherited the Empire and become one of the Lake’s most prominent citizens. His father, Mr. Vanhouten, died three years ago, having taken what the locals call the long walk off the short pier. In his case, the pier in question had been his own pool’s diving board. While its chlorinated water had drowned him, it was safe to say it’d been the fifth of gin that did him in.

  Above Nate, thick clouds buckled, swirls ribbed with black. The rain was still only a patter, but the wind was full of threats.

  Gaslights flared in white and blue flame on either side of the Empire’s ebony lacquer doors like spirits trapped in glass. A doorman clothed in black and gold opened the door, and two officers stood just inside the entrance.

  The police presence wasn’t the only change about the place. A streak of modern design had brought the Empire into the twenty-first century. The marble floor was as glossy as Nate remembered, but where walls once dripped with impasto paintings of the lake, now antiqued mirrors and panels of embossed leather stretched for the ceiling. Sculpted curves of indigo velvet had replaced the right angles of striped satin couches. Massive wrought iron lighting fixtures flared with blue glass hung where crystal chandeliers had once sparkled. The concierge desk was manned by young people in black suits while tourists and busboys crisscrossed the shining floors.