PUCK

Tommy Falk takes us to the Grattons’ house, which is near Hastoway, though how near I can’t be sure, because everything looks the same in the spitting rain and narrow yellow of the headlights. Beech meets us, his shoulders hunched against the wind, and shows me where I can leave Dove. He swings his torch around to reveal a little four-stall stable with a low ceiling and no electric lights. One of the stalls is occupied by damp goats, another by chickens, and one by a gray cob gelding who stretches his head over the unbarred stall door when Dove comes in. Dove flattens her ears back by way of an ungrateful hello, but I put her in the stall next to him anyway. I want to spend more time with her, but it feels rude to linger while Beech stands there illuminating the stall with the light. So I just pat her neck and tell Beech thank you. He grunts and points back toward the house with his flashlight.

Back in the house, Gabe and Peg Gratton are talking easily while Tommy Falk peers under the lid of a pot on the stove. I don’t see Finn.

The kitchen itself reminds me of the butcher shop, if the butcher shop was made into a house. Despite the dark outside, the kitchen is all bright whitewashed walls and pots and knives hung up on them. The image of clean whiteness isn’t at all diminished by the fact that the floor is filthy with footprints. There are knickknacks on a half-dozen shelves, but they’re entirely different from our sort of knickknacks: crude wooden statues that could be either horses or deer, a broom of grass with a red ribbon tied around it, a piece of limestone with the name PEG written on it. None of the painted glass figurines or charming landscapes dotted with sheep and cheerful women that Mum liked. Stuff but not clutter. The room smells piercingly and wonderfully of whatever is cooking on the stove.

“They’ll have your room,” Peg says to Beech as soon as he comes in. In the light, I can see that Beech has grown into a great, ruddy creature who clearly takes after his father. He looks a little like he’s made of wood, and because wood is fairly inflexible, it takes him awhile to change his expression. When he does, it’s not pleased.

“They never will,” Beech replies.

“And where, then, would you like them to stay?” Peg Gratton asks. It’s strange to see her in this context, not in the butcher’s as someone who will cut your heart out, not in our yard telling me not to race, not in a headdress cutting my finger with a knife. She is smaller, somehow, neater, though her ginger curls are still unruly as ever. I’m bewildered at how easily she and Beech and Gabe go around and around about where we will sleep, and I realize that some of the time that Gabe was gone must have been spent here. Maybe a lot of it. It makes me realize we’ve come here because this is where Gabe feels safe. It makes me feel strange and sad, like we’ve been replaced with another family.

“Where’s Finn?” I break in.

“Washing his hands, of course,” Gabe says. “It may be decades.”

I feel weird about that, too, the rather free admittance of Finn’s foibles, though I’ve always thought it was something private, something only Connollys knew about. Gabe didn’t say it like he was making fun of Finn, but it feels like it.

“Where is the toilet?”

Tommy, not Peg or Beech, gestures toward the stairs on the other side of the kitchen. It’s like it’s everyone’s house, not just the Grattons’. Feeling sulky, I head out of the room. There’s a tiny, dark hallway with three doors off it up at the top of the stairs, but only one of them has light coming from underneath it. I knock. There’s no response until I say Finn’s name and then, after a pause, the door opens. It’s a tiny room, just big enough for a tub and a toilet and a washbasin if they’re very good friends and don’t mind rubbing shoulders, and Finn sits on the toilet with the lid down. There are big manly footprints on the small tiles of the floor.

I shut the door behind me and check to make certain that the tub is dry before stepping into it and sitting down.

“He comes here all the time,” Finn says to me.

“I know,” I reply. “I can tell.”

“This is where he’s been.”

The betrayal sits thick between us. I want to say something to make this better for Finn, who idolizes Gabe, who would do anything for him, but I can’t think of anything.

“Do you think Puffin’s dead?” Finn asks.

“No, she got away,” I say.

He studies his hands. They’re a little chapped on the knuckles from all the washing he’s been up to. “Yes, I thought so, too.”

I look away, to the shiny handles of the bathtub, so shiny that they remind me of the grille of Father Mooneyham’s car. “So,” I say, “one day?”

Finn nods solemnly. “One day. The worst will be early tomorrow morning, I think.”

“Sure, of course. How do you know?”

He looks impatient. “Everything. If people used their eyeballs, everybody would know.”

The door swings open then, without a knock, and Gabe stands in the doorway. He looks in better humor than I’ve seen him for a long time. “Is it a party you’re having in here?”

“Yes,” I say. “It’s started in the tub and then it spread to the loo. All that’s left is the sink if you want it.”

“Well, everyone’s wondering where you are. There’s lamb stew in the works, but only if you come out of the toilet.”

Finn and I exchange a glance. I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking: that Gabe can’t just pretend that there’s no bad feeling, that he hasn’t been gone, that things will just go back the way they were. I thought, before, that a word from him would be enough, but now I know that I want him to court my good graces. If I can’t have a groveling apology, I don’t want anything at all.

As we head down the stairs, Gabe says, “You have the couch, I’m afraid, Finn, because you’re the shortest.”

“Under whose measure!” I say.

Gabe shrugs. “Well, you’re the shortest, technically, but Peg thinks you should be in a room with a door. So we’re in Beech’s room.”

“Where is Beech, then?”

“He and Tommy are on a mattress in the living room. Peg says it’ll work this way.”

Back in the kitchen, the boys are loud and talking over each other. Beech and Tommy have ahold of something and are trying to keep it out of each other’s reach, and a sheepdog’s appeared from nowhere and is trying to get it as well. Peg holds a spoon in one hand and a cat by its scruff in the other. She’s swearing at both of them.

“Put that out,” she says to Gabe, and he takes the cat from her and puts it on the other side of the door. She scowls at me. “I don’t cook. Cats make it worse.”

Before I have a chance to answer, Gabe asks, “Where’s Tom?”

It takes me a moment to realize that he means Thomas Gratton. I’d never considered that Thomas Gratton became Tom under his own roof.

“He went out to see if the Mackies were doing all right. Beech, get out. All of you, out. Go into the living room while I get this done. Out.”

Beech and Tommy obey and take their noise with them, and Finn files after them, interested because of the appearance of the dog.

I turn to go, but in the doorway, I hesitate and look back over my shoulder. Peg Gratton has turned back to the great black range to stir the pot, and Gabe stands just behind her, saying something into her ear. I just catch him saying “strong enough” and —

“Puck, catch it!” Tommy shouts.

I turn my face toward the living room in time to catch a sock full of beans in the mouth.

Beech guffaws but Tommy looks aggrieved and apologizes. The collie is now frolicking around my feet with great friendliness, very eager to have the sock, and I realize that this is what Beech and Tommy were fooling around with earlier.

“You should be sorry,” I say sternly to Tommy, who still looks beaten, standing on the other side of the worn green couch that will be Finn’s bed. And then I hurl the sock back to him.

Pleased to be so easily forgiven, he grins and whips it without pause to Beech, who loses it to the dog. Tommy has no qualms about making a fool of himself, scrabbling after the collie as she leads him on a merry chase, and even Finn’s laughing. I find myself wondering what drives Tommy to leave the island; he doesn’t have the brooding of Gabe or the sulkiness of Beech. I’ve never seen him when he doesn’t seem perfectly content, perfectly a part of island life. On the floor, Tommy snags the sock, finally, and around and around it goes to all of us, even the dog again, until Finn says, “Where’s Gabe?” and we realize that he hasn’t come out of the kitchen.

I start toward the kitchen, but Tommy takes my arm. “I’ll go.”

He peers around the door frame and I can’t hear what he says. Then he turns back to us, and he has a smile pinned on for us. “Good news. Food’s done.” Gabe appears in the doorway beside him and they exchange a look that infuriates me, because it’s yet more of the secret language of men.

Finally, Peg appears and addresses all of us. “If you want it, you have to serve yourself. And if you don’t like it, blame Tom. He did it.”

There’s not much conversation as we eat — maybe, like me, they’re all reimagining the events of the evening. But it’s a quiet without demands. The storm’s not loud enough to make itself known and it’s easy to pretend that we’re just over for a social visit. The only time Peg Gratton addresses me is to tell me that I’m welcome to give Dove more hay if she needs it before the end of the night, before the storm gets bad.

And she’s right about the storm. By the time we go to bed, the wind has become fitful and furious, shaking the windowpanes. The sheets on the bed are clean but the room still smells like Beech, who smells like salt ham. Before we turn off the lights, I see that there are no personal effects in the room, nothing to say that it is Beech’s. Just this bed and an austere desk with an empty vase and some coins on it, and a narrow dresser with well-worn corners. I wonder if there used to be more of Beech here, but he packed it all away to take with him to the mainland.

I consider this as I try to sleep. I lie on one side of the bed and Gabe lies on the other, but it’s a twin bed, so the two sides are really one side, and his elbow is kind of in my ribs and his shoulder is mashed against mine. It’s warmer here, too, than at our house, and having Gabe here makes it warmer still, so I’m not sure how I’ll sleep. Gabe’s breathing doesn’t sound like he’s sleeping, either.

For a long moment we lie there in the dark, listening to the rain on the roof, and I think about the broken fence back home and the last sound I heard out of Puffin and that long, long black face looking into the lean-to.

Because I’m tired, I say exactly what I’m thinking, without a lick of tact to make it go down easier.

“Why did you come back for us?” Even though I’m whispering, my voice is loud in the little bedroom.

Gabe’s reply from the other side of the bed is withering. “Honestly, Puck, why do you think?”

“What does it matter to you?”

Now he’s indignant. “What kind of a question is that?”

“Why are you answering all of my questions with other questions?”

Gabe tries to shift to put space between us, but there’s no more mattress for him to move to. The bed groans and creaks like a ship at sea, only the sea is the bare floor of Beech’s ham-scented room. “I don’t understand what you want me to say.”

I don’t want to be accused of being hysterical, so I measure my words out, careful and slow. “I want to know why you care about us now, when next year you’ll be gone and we could both be eaten in October and you’ll be off on the mainland and never know.”

In the dark, I hear Gabe sigh heavily. “It’s not like I want to leave you two behind.”

I hate myself for the little flutter of hope that I feel when he says it. But it’s true that I imagine him with his arms flung wide, announcing that he’s changed his mind as he embraces Finn and Dove and me at once. I say, “Then don’t. Just stay.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

It’s the most we’ve spoken in a week and I wonder if I should just let it go at that. I imagine him leaping up, throwing the bedclothes from himself, and bolting from the room to avoid further questioning. Only, if he wanted to escape, he’d have to cross the bodies of Tommy Falk and Beech Gratton on the mattress on the floor and avoid falling over the couch with Finn on it and then sit by himself in the dark kitchen, and I don’t think he’ll do that.

So I say, “That’s not a real reason.”

For long moments, Gabe doesn’t answer, and I just hear him breathing in and out, in and out. Then he says, in a strange, thin voice, “I can’t bear it anymore.”

I’m so strangely grateful for this honesty that I don’t know what to think. I struggle to think of a good question, a question that will keep him talking like this. It’s like the truth is a bird that I’m worried of frightening away. “What can’t you bear?”

“This island,” Gabe says. He breathes a long pause between every word he says. “That house you and Finn are in. People talking. The fish — goddamn fish, I’ll smell like them for the rest of my life. The horses. Everything. I can’t do it anymore.”

He sounds miserable, but he didn’t look miserable earlier, when we were all in the kitchen, when we were perched all over the sitting room eating. I don’t know what to tell him. Everything that he said are things that I love about the island, except for maybe the smell of fish, which I guess might ruin everything else. But I don’t know if that’s a good enough reason to leave everything behind and start over.

It feels like he’s confessed that he’s dying of a disease I’ve never heard of, with symptoms I can’t see. The utter wrongness of it, the way it won’t fit in my head, keeps coming back to me again and again, as if I’ve only just learned about it.

The only concept I can truly understand is that this thing, this strange and incomprehensible and invisible thing, is big enough and strong enough to drive my brother from Thisby. As much of a pull Finn and I might have on him, this has more.

“Puck?” Gabe says, and I start, because his voice sounds like Finn’s for some reason.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to go to sleep now.”

But he doesn’t. He turns onto his side and his breathing stays light and watchful. I’m not sure how long he stays awake, but I know that I fall asleep before he does.