I have not ruined my life, he told himself. Then he got up and went back to the kitchen window. He had a very clear memory of his first day at Colgate, his father’s old station wagon pulled up as close as it could get to the door to his dorm, his stuff coming out of the back in boxes. He was not hopeless. He knew enough, just from living on Margaret’s Harbor, to have come in chinos and a polo shirt, and good ones, too. There was still no way to mistake the difference, and not only the difference in cars (that old Ford of his father’s, next to the new Volvos everywhere) or in the way the other fathers looked. It was Jack himself who was insuffcient, and he knew it. He lacked that thing these people had, the ability to be really real all the time, to anybody who saw them. It was the same thing people like Marcey Mandret and Arrow Normand had, although they did not have anything else: the ability to be visible. They would not have it for very long, but as long as they had it they would be worth taking pictures of. They were careful, though. Visible people never took up with other visible people if they could help it. It worked out badly.
Jack went back to the table and began to pick up the pictures, one after another, very carefully. In some of them, everyone was smiling. In others, it was obvious that Arrow and Marcey were drunk beyond belief, and so were Steve and Mark. Kendra Rhode always looked upright and cool. All the interiors were too shiny and garishly colored, as if he’d used cheap film, which he never did. He went back to the first picture and looked at it again. There they were, standing in a semicircle, Kendra in the middle, the men on other side of her, Arrow and Marcey on either side of them. Kendra had told him, that night, that none of the women were wearing underwear. Jack had no idea why she would think this was something he would want to know.
He put the pictures back in their envelope. He put the envelope back in the filing cabinet. He closed the cabinet drawer and listened to the click as the lock snapped into place. It wasn’t much of a lock. Anybody who was determined could destroy it in a second. It was a good thing that nobody he knew would care enough about anything he had to try to steal it.
He went back to the window one more time. He pressed his forehead against the glass. There really were people out there, more than one, but they must have come on foot. There was no car parked on the road that he could see, and he would have been able to see the headlights. The lights were coming from the beach, and some of them were moving around, like flashlights. He felt so enormously sick he wanted to throw up right there, but he knew he wouldn’t. It was part of his pact with the house never to get it certain kinds of dirty. It was part of his pact with life never to ask it for more than simple survival, but that was what was wrong. That was what was killing him.
He had spent every single second of his existence trying to escape from Margaret’s Harbor, and he was absolutely certain that this was his last chance.
9
In the middle of it, plowing through drifting snow in her calf-high black suede L.L. Bean snow boots, Annabeth Falmer began to wonder if she’d been out of her mind. It was one thing to have a sense of responsibility, to feel that it w asn’t right to leave somebody to die in the cold when you had the capacity to see if you could help him. It was another to go blundering around when you had no hope of providing assistance at all. It had been many years since Annabeth had been out in a storm like this. She didn’t like to drive in snow, and wasn’t good at it, so when it got like this at home she always just stayed put with Creamsicle and her tea. She wondered if it was worse here because of the sea. She seemed to remember something about the Gulf Stream, which she was sure didn’t come all the way in to Cape Cod. She wished she’d pulled out a snow hat and made Stewart Gordon put it on his very bald head.
“I can see it,” he shouted back at her.
He wasn’t really very far away. He always stopped and checked to make sure she was coming on. She sped up a little now, still thinking about the hat.
“There it is,” he said when she pulled up next to him. “They must have spun out. It’s pointing the wrong way for this side of the road.”
She followed the line of his outstretched hand and saw it: an enormous pickup truck with oversized wheels, painted a violent and uncompromising purple.
“My God,” she said. “Has somebody been driving that thing around town? You’d think I’d have noticed it.”
“He’s been driving it around some, yes,” Stewart Gordon said. “It’s Mark Anderman’s.”
“Who’s Mark Anderman?”
“I told you, up at the house. Arrow’s latest boyfriend. Not the guy she married, and not the one after that, but a new one. Maybe a couple of weeks old. She met him on the set.”