The Hour Before Dark Douglas Clegg

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CHAPTER SIX

Bruno drew back from me in the boat. He reached for the coffee thermos.

"More?" he asked. I shook my head. "Look, it was just a game." "I know,"

he said. "But it was like that. It's going to be all over the papers-the details-pretty soon. One of the local news crews from the Cape came out, so it'll be on TV tonight. They talked to Minnie Wooten. She told 'em that we were all no good." We both laughed a little at the mention of the name, despite the gruesomeness of the crime. Minnie was nearly a hundred years old and as weathered as the gray, bowed planks on her front porch. She had been known as one of the Women Whom God Forgot-there were four of them on Burnley Island, each more ancient than the other.

Somehow, despite the nasty winters and the isolation, some people seemed to grow old well on Burnley.

"I bet Minnie's famous all over now. She'll probably get her own talk show," I said, managing to laugh, even when something in my mind had begun to shut down. I tried not to imagine my father or what had happened the night before.

I didn't know that we would become famous on the island for all the wrong reasons from that moment on.

The Raglans had what might be called a spotty history of both the good and the bad.

I had been a bad kid in the way that kids who aren't quite demonic are bad, and if you were to ask me, I could not tell you what drove me to badness. I suspect that being born in New England, being Catholic, and being a Raglan, 1 was triply blessed with a sense of Sin with a capital S, GUILT with all capital letters, and atonement, expiation, and possibly redemption all following thereafter. I was bad in the only ways I knew how: I did the things I ought not have done. Harry and I snuck into the movie theater when we were broke at the age of ten. At eleven, we kidnapped the Croder's Maine Coon cat (at Pola Croder's request, I might add, although she denied this later). We took Monster (as we called him, for he attacked and scratched up many a kid-the demon cat's real name was Scooby) to St. Bartholemew's to baptize him in the name of the Holy Ghost because we were sure that animal would go to Hell one day or another. We brought the cat back, but it was soaked and furious, and its talons were

wrapped in bits of white sheet so it wouldn't scratch Harry or me when we dipped it into the baptismal font. Mrs. Croder called the local cop on us and we had a stern talking to and a half hour in the holding cell behind the police station.

Then my misdemeanors increased: borrowed my dad's truck to drive my friends out to Palmerton one night and go skinny dipping with the Evangelical Christian lads, all of whom taught us a thing or two, at fourteen, about human anatomy. Harry and I, altar boys, drank the wine reserved for communion at fifteen, and that was the worst of my church-related crimes. Luckily, the wine had not been blessed, and while my father took me home to be punished, the worst of it was throwing up in the back of the truck on the way home.

I didn't hurt anyone. At least, not directly. I wasn't a bully. I just tended to be in trouble with whatever trouble could be had. If there was a store to be broken into on a weekday night for no reason other than to have someplace to go, I was part of the crew. We never stole anything, nor did we break locks or windows (in the fall, winter, and spring, nobody on Burnley locked doors). If there was a car to be borrowed from Harry's uncle without him knowing about it, you can be sure Harry and I were probably doing the borrowing. If the horses from the stables in The Oaks had been let out to run wild on a soft, summer night, somehow my name was linked to the deed.

I was your basic screw-up, and not cool enough to even be a good one.

Always, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for some reason I never had a good excuse for being there. I always got caught, and being the good Catholics we

were, my father would drag me down to St. Bartholemew's and toss me at the confessional, before dragging me back home. I can guarantee you that being a six-foot-tall sixteen-year-old, it was shameful to have my five-foot-two bull of a father practically pulling me by the ear along the streets in the village. At home, he might use a belt, until I reached high school, and then he just used denial of privileges-no television, no phone, no dinner, and no books, the worst for me. He'd removed every single book from my bedroom once he discovered that I loved reading so much it was really no punishment to just go to my room.

I'd sometimes yell those absurd things that teens do, how he didn't understand me, he didn't love me, he was no kind of father, that he wasn't even trying to be what Mom would be and if I were her, I'd have moved to Brazil, too-and the ugly heads of Sin and GUILT would rise up in me afterward, and I'd meekly apologize and tell him that he was right to punish me and I was rotten to the core.

(I wished I could go back and change those moments. I wish I could go back and tell him how much I loved him and how much he meant to me.) I respected my father enough to let him punish me. It seemed just. He was never more harsh on me than I was on myself. The parish priest ended up being kind toward me in these transgressive periods of my childhood as time went on, and although it was rare for me to see the inside of a church once I went away to college, I had nothing but warm memories of Father Ronnie and St. Bart's church.

Despite what happened with my mother when I was nine, we were not mired in some sense of sorrow. All our

Christmases were brightly lit confections; all our summers were adventures and dares.

Our early history as a family on the island was actually quite good. My great-great-great-everyone were stalwarts. Welshmen, Irishmen, Scots, and some English, a mix of Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Catholics that married out of the island over the years, until my father and his younger brother were the heirs. Then his brother died in the same war in which my father nearly died-but managed, through "the grace of God and a pack of Wrigley's," to survive. The story went that he had exactly one pack of Wrigley's gum with him when he was captured.

He used it as a psychological tool to resist the brainwashing that was done to him over the two years he was held prisoner.

"I chewed that gum over and over again, and each time imagined that the flavor was something I loved and missed from America. The taste of coffee. The sweetness of honey and lemon. Chocolate. Peppermint. It allowed me to get away in my mind to another place. To not listen to the brainwashing. To not be discouraged by the sensory deprivation they put me through. It was my own land of brainwashing. I could chew the gum and close my eyes and just go somewhere else. Believe something else. And gum was easy to hide, virtually invisible."

It became such a famous story that for a while gum companies put it in their advertising. All of that was long before any of us were born, but the stories were legendary.

My mother's mystery and my father's heroism and the house itself: Hawthorn-all had stories attached to them.

Named for the thorny trees that grew wild near the house (although Minnie Wooten was quick to point out whenever she could that in fact they weren't "true hawthorns," whatever that meant), Hawthorn was a rambling old structure-a farmhouse that had grown with a few generation of Raglans, a poor Welsh family turned rich then poor again with my father's generation. Two stories high and simple in one way-for it was as plain as a New England farmhouse could be-it was also eccentric in many ways. It seemed of no particular age or time, for it had elements of various incarnations-from its humble early eighteenth-century beginnings as a stone house of one room right through the creation of its many rooms, and its serpentine curving along the rocky acreage where it grew. The last addition had been the greenhouse, which was under construction for most of my life and still remained unfinished to some extent. It had been intended for my mother.

Then Hawthorn had begun to fall apart, on bad pastureland that had lain fallow for decades, edging deep New England woods, beyond which lay the village of Burnley, known more for what it didn't have than what it did, and beyond this, the sea.

My father's favorite things about the old house, he told us, were the lessons it taught him. "Never let your roof get too leaky, never let the gutters fill with leaves, and always check the gas before you light the pilot." He had once, accidentally, nearly blown up the house because he had not checked the gas first. "Life is like a house. You have to do routine maintenance constantly or else it all just goes down the tubes at once." My main memories of him at home generally were about repairing and fixing things. Or putting up

a diy-wall when the old wall near the front staircase had rotted out-I wasn't much help, even though I tried my best to pitch in. My dad had a temper when he worked on the old house. He'd cuss a blue streak if I so much as held a hammer the wrong way or wasn't sure how to change a drill bit. He worked on the plumbing himself, allowing no one to come in and

"rob us blind just for changing a washer and unscrewing a bolt." He had an ongoing project of tearing down walls, putting in new insulation, putting the walls back up-as if it were his main occupation. About the only thing he allowed me to do was install locks (I could handle this by the time I was fourteen or so) and carry his toolkit for him. He loved that house, and had worked on the ceiling and floors and walls as if he treasured the place.

I had left Hawthorn and hoped to never spend more than a weekend there ever again. Not because of terrificly unhappy memories, or because of something stupid that I took part in just before I headed off for college, but because of something I did that had cut me off from knowing any peace on the island.

I fell in love with a girl who would not love me back.

Between that event-when I was eighteen-and my mother's abandonment of us when I was a little boy, and yes, the arguments with my father, which never seemed to end, I just had no reason to return.

I always told anyone who asked-outside of the village- that my mother had died when I was nine.

I'd make up a story about her awful lingering illness, and how we gathered 'round her bedside, with my sister weeping to 66

bring the angels and my father kissing my mother on the hand. I cribbed the emotion of the scene from the death of Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, and part from the death of Little Eva from Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. These were deaths of absolute purity and saintliness, as befitted a beloved family member. There was an intensity to the innocence of those deaths. I wanted to believe it happened that way, too, with Mother beneath a snow-white comforter, her golden hair falling across the tear-stained pillow, the scent of lavender and bitter herbs in the air, a small red rose of color in her otherwise pale cheek, and a last clasp of her hand as she gave me motherly wisdom and departed to Heaven with one final and wistful sigh.

But that was a lie.

Everyone in Burnley knew the truth. Anyone could tell you-in broad daylight on a Wednesday afternoon, you could walk into what might roughly approximate a village and ask any of the children who had just gotten off the school bus. I'm betting they'd know about the Raglans'

mother. How she had abandoned her husband and family, and was probably very much alive and enjoying a different family somewhere in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My mother was, after all, the most exotic creature that Burnley Island had ever seen after the summer was over.

She ordered perfume from London, from a perfumerie that her grandmother had once run, that her great-grandfather had founded in the South of France, and from which she had been disinherited when she purportedly stole several thousands of dollars from my grandmother's bank account.

(How many times had I been told by people as I grew up that she was a 67

Bad Woman? That I might turn out just like she had, somehow tainted with her blood?) She had been raised in London, Switzerland, and Majorca, gone to college at Columbia. She had met my father in Burnleyside one summer when visiting a college friend's family there, dropped out of college, and went slumming with him until she ended up pregnant and in love. Her family never spoke to her again. And she never spoke to them.

They never spoke to us, the grandchildren, either. They lived in other countries, and were mythological to me-real but not truly to be believed.

My father had his own share of fame, but without the wealth, so he was her equal in many ways, despite his rough-and-tumble upbringing, as opposed to her refined boarding school years. She had been, without question, the most beautiful woman on the island (Brooke and Bruno both got her looks, while I got the more Irish-Welsh looks of my father's side). I remember her looking like a fairy princess-slender, ethereal, with almond-shaped eyes, and a sloping but elegant nose. She had golden hair-not blond or yellow, but a rich autumn gold that might look sandy blond on her worst days, like creamy toffee on others, and spun gold at her best. She always smelled of vanilla and lime and lavender, for she daily dropped the essences of all in her bath water. I would sit with her while she bathed, and she would tell me tales from the Arabian nights or of how she had stowed away once with a friend on a tramp steamer and had gone to Brazil, her favorite country in the entire world. "I was sixteen and running away," she said, "but it was just for the summer. A wonderful summer of romantic suspense," she added, without explaining any details. My mother had many talents: She played music, sketched

on long summer afternoons, read from books, and tried her hand at poetry briefly. I remember her mainly surrounded by candlelight-she was a romantic at heart, and I suppose it's what changed her, that romantic yearning.

She had mischief in her as well. I discovered this early and was charmed by it-by her misadventures in finding ways of getting to Boston faster than anyone could get there, the way she'd spend money cautiously one minute and then as if nothing were more important than something whimsical she'd just seen-and had to have at any cost. My father adored her, and adored the attention men gave her-he told me that he was proud that his wife was such a prize and yet had chosen him.

It all ended one night, years ago. December 19th. A red-letter day.

My mother walked out the door when I was nine years old and told my father that if he loved his kids so much, he could have them. The details: She wore her reddest dress (as small-town minds like to recall), she had one of my father's guns for protection in case he tried to force her to stay, and it was four a.m. The story went that my father sobbed quietly, gave her his blessing, and told her he would be there with the kids when she got tired of this new man in her life.

My father was a good man, so said people in Burnley and everyone who had ever heard of him. He told us that our mother loved us very much and left us only because something inside her head had control of her-but he promised he would be there, to take care of us and keep us safe.

He kept that promise, in his own way.

He even told us he'd take her back, if she wished to return.

"But to stand in the way of someone's happiness," he told me once, "is the crudest of impulses. It's as cruel as killing them, in my opinion.

Real love sometimes means letting love fly."

I had a dream soon after my mother left us. When I spoke about it to my brother and sister, when we were young, they told me they had dreams like it, too. In the dream, our mother came home and took each of us up in her arms, embracing and kissing us all over. In the dream, our father hugged us as well. It's only natural for children to want to see their parents reunited, even if those same children know that it's like wishing there were an Easter Bunny, or that birthday candles release some magic when they're blown out. I sometimes wonder if we don't long for precisely what we know in truth we can never have.

I dreamed about a silver crescent, too, like the moon. Like a crown that our mother would wear when she returned to us from the man she'd run off with so many years ago. The shadow man we'd never known, but who had come into our mother's life and stolen her from us.

My father had been taken by a different kind of shadow man.

Viciously.

"A peculiar ferocity," wrote Harry Withers, who reported for the Burnley Gazette, but whom I knew primarily from the playground of my childhood.

"One does not associate this sort of crime with the peaceful island of Burnley, Massachusetts, known primarily for its plover shelter in the wetlands and its role in the Revolutionary War. The bogs and woods and meadows no longer seem benign. The hunt is on for the person or 70

persons who committed this heinous act upon a war hero, upon a father, upon a man who stood for everything that was good in Burnley."

The first I knew that my father had been tortured in a war was in second grade when that boy I had only just met named Harry Withers taunted me with, "Your daddy's got only one ball! The other got cut off and fed to snakes! Your daddy's a freak!"

It never occurred to me at that age that just because my father had always been missing two fingers on his right hand, he might have had something happen to him that caused it. Or that other parts of him might be missing as well. Since I was only dimly aware of what balls were at the age of six and a half, I wasn't sure if it mattered how many my father possessed.

Harry Withers seemed to think it mattered a hell of a lot. There was something in the nature of both challenge and humiliation for him to say it out on the blacktop during recess.

I ended up in a fistfight, which got me to the principal's office, then to the nurse's office, and then a note to my parents about how I'd nearly bitten Harry's ear off.

I had barely snipped at his ear with my teeth, but it did bleed a lot. I was afraid I'd mutilated Harry, that I'd be thrown in jail for having done it, and that poor one-eared Harry would haunt me forever. As it turned out, Harry's ear would heal within days. Not so my troubled heart. Why did my father have only one ball and eight fingers?

I went home nearly in tears and angry enough to cuss. I asked my mother what this was all about, after she'd given me the disappointed treatment from reading the principal's note.

Modest though she was, she had no problem setting me straight on my father's testicular health. This was followed by a bit of birds-and-bees, and how loving, legally wed people lay very close together and then nearly a year later, a baby would be born. Even with my father's condition, apparently he had no problem fathering three children.

My father, she told me, did indeed have one "testicle, and yes, some bad things happened to him over there," and she took me in the library of our home-a dusty room that had always seemed misshapen to me, packed with shelves and books-and brought down a photo album. She went through my father's childhood, his parents, the war, his capture, the news clippings, and finally said to me, "So two of his fingers are gone, and yes, his testicle was also taken, but it doesn't make him less of a man.

You just remember that. There are many men who walk around in life with no balls whatsoever."

I learned most of what I knew of my father's heroics by the time I was nine.

He had fought in a war before I was born. He'd been taken captive for twenty months, had tried to escape from his captors twice, had lost two fingers on his left hand for reasons of which he never spoke, had been decorated a hero, and had returned to the plow as it were-or in his case, returned to his own father's farm, married, and started a family.

My mother retrieved the articles for me. She substituted them for the comic books I loved to look at. She would show me the old home movies.

Daddy getting a medal. Daddy

standing beside a helicopter. Daddy meeting some news anchorman. Daddy standing in line with others to meet the president. Daddy and Mommy on their wedding day, with swords and guns and soldiers standing in a halo around them. The glow of heroism surrounded him in all these photographs. I felt better about my father. I loved him even more for being not just a hero to me, but to the world.

Sometimes, an old-timer from town would see me at the playground in the park and call me over and tell me that I looked just like my father did when he was my age. "Your grandfather wasn't much good, but he made himself a good man in your daddy," someone might say; once I heard the librarian, Mrs. Pollock, tell me that my father had been the most famous man to ever come out of Burnley, and that no one had expected he'd come back to run Hawthorn again or even try and get along when the money ran out.

"He could've been president or at least a senator, once upon a time,"

she told me. "That's how famous he was after the war. Not famous like movie stars or rock and roll people. Not that vulgar thing. And not rich. I mean to say famous in the ways that count. And just like you, he got in trouble as a boy sometimes. So don't think that it's the end of the world for you. You can be a hero, just like your father."

Or I'd hear the story of how my father had managed to save seven men from certain death, or how my father had piloted a helicopter "without knowing nothin' about helicopters but that they spin. And he bombed the hell out of them. He just dropped it all back down on them. And he got his men out."

My father would rarely speak of the past that existed before 73

meeting my mother, other than to hide the medals of valor in places where my brother and I could not find them. He'd scoff at the idea that he had ever been a hero at all. After my mother ran off, he lived under a terrible burden. He expressed little that wasn't dour or dutiful after that. He gave lessons or lectured; he rarely spoke to me and even more rarely listened. I suppose my mother's abandonment affected all of us, and may have been part of the fog that kept me confused about life and my place in it as I grew into an adult.

I grew up under the burden of his heroism, and I became less than a model son because I knew I was no hero. My impulses were never heroic ones. I began smoking by the time I was twelve, and when I was seventeen, I'd done all the things teenagers do that they will regret in merely a few years, scarred by such foolishness and disregard for any rule in life. I was the embarrassment of the family when I left it.

Yet, I could look back on the love and affection of the household; on the way my father would tell me-even at my worst-that he'd done just such a thing when he'd been my age, and it was wrong, but it was not wicked, merely childish.

His words had the effect of arms around me-it was his way of embracing.

I took his wise words to heart and knew that despite my missteps in life, my father had gone through many more difficulties than I could dream up, and still, he had done good.

My mother had been a slightly different story.

After she left, my father told us that she sometimes called, late at night.

No matter how much he begged, she would not come back to us. He told us that she wanted to see us. He promised that one day she would come for us, would collect us, but that "now" wasn't the time.

She sent letters and postcards, as well, but none of them mentioned our names. Notes like: "I want to keep in touch, but the past is so difficult to mull over. Please don't let's keep in touch. I don't want to cause you more pain." She sent a few of these that I saw.

I assumed my father had been writing her late at night, posting his mail without our knowing, begging her to return.

"She's got a new life," my father would say at times, and begin to brood. "I would love to tell the three of you that she doesn't love you, but I know she does. This is the hardest thing I've ever said. Even in war, nothing was this hard, but I will say it regardless. You must each overcome this. I can't force your mother to come home. I can't go chase her down if she is with this other man and she claims that this brings her happiness. You've been crying since she left, and you haven't eaten enough, and you all have to stop it now. She is not the woman I married.

She's not the mother who brought each of you into this world. She changed. Perhaps she'll change back. But the best we can do is hang tough and get through this. And each of you needs to pitch in and do your share. Accept this, somehow. Accept it now. Life is its own kind of war. You've got to fight it and win it."

As he spoke, I saw his eyes become glassy and distant. I couldn't look at the sadness in his face, but glanced down at my shoes. Somehow, I felt all of us were to blame. I felt that if I had just been nicer to my mother, she would've stayed. If

I hadn't gotten into any trouble, she would've stayed. If I'd said my prayers every morning and night, she probably would still have been with us. I have no doubt that Brooke and Bruno felt the same way.

"None of you deserves this," he said. "Not one of you."

And that was all he really spoke about it.

Now and then, one of us would ask about her. He'd tell us to write a letter and he'd send it. None of us ever wrote a letter, although I started a few, but put them aside. I suppose we accepted the finality on some deep level, regardless of our wants and needs on the surface of things.

Once she wrote to us all and mentioned a new child. She had a new child.

A boy. His name was Steven. That's all she said about him. My father tore the letter up after reading it aloud, tears in his eyes, and held us close. At other times, he went into horrible rages and locked himself in his room for an entire day, screaming, as if at the walls of the house itself.

All this to begin to tell you: Our father was both loved and hated within his own family, he was a hero to the work and to each of us, even though he had his dark periods.

When my father died-was killed-none of it mattered.

My father was butchered. Sliced up. In pieces.

"Man, I'm angry," Bruno said. "Sucker punched. Dazed. That's how I've felt since finding out. I was just talking to him the other day. And now..." This was the most open I'd ever heard my brother be. He never talked about his inner life or feelings that I knew of. He was a mystery to my sister and me in that respect. "Brooke's had the worst of it.

She's been depressed this fall. I don't know why. I know she hasn't been sleeping right since before this. Now, who knows?" He said 78

this with an appealing meekness, as if he needed something from me. Some reassurance about the good in the world.

I did something I've never done before, but I suppose you don't do what you're used to doing until a nasty tragedy has stomped you and your family. I reached over and hugged him to my side. Like the little brother he was to me. He put his head on my shoulder and cried for a little bit. I felt like I was ten and he was five again, after having a bully at school say something mean to him about our mom running off, or about his glasses, or how he couldn't play softball as well as the others.

"They'll get whoever did it," I said, without much confidence. I meant it. If they didn't, I'd make it the quest of my life to hunt down the madman.

I would not stop until the guy was caught.

When we got to the docks, Bruno walked ahead of me, lugging one of my suitcases, while I had the other two. We loaded the back of Brooke's truck and headed out onto the road away from the sea.

The sky, slate gray; the woods, like broomsticks; the air, salt, snow, and that memory-scent of winters past.

Bruno turned down Goose Creek Road with its overhang of gloomy trees.

In the distance, I saw the beginning of the woods that would guide the narrowest of roads up to the house where I'd been born and raised, and where Raglans had lived ever since they'd been in America. We turned up Dunstable Road, and

Hawthorn came into view just over the ridge. There were police cars along the road, and three news vans from the television studios, nearly blocking the driveway. We passed the smokehouse to the left, and I didn't want to look at it, but I couldn't not look. It was surrounded by what looked like a makeshift wire fence, with orange police tape up around it.

"Christ," I said.

"Feeling some Jumblies?"

"Definitely," I said.

"Can I tell you something?"

"Of course."

"I've never really told anyone this. It makes me feel guilty. Right now.

Promise not to hold it against me?"

"Okay."

"I hated him," Bruno said. "I hated Dad. He didn't like me much either.

But I hated him. He drove our mother away. He drove you away. As far as I'm concerned..." Then he stopped himself. A bit more evenly, he added,

"It's terrible this happened. I feel this awful guilt. As if it's my fault."

I wasn't sure how to reply to this. "Bruno," I said, and thought, what the hell do I tell him? It's okay to hate the guy who was just butchered? It's okay to hate the guy who raised and clothed and fed you?

That yes, he drove me away, when in fact I did a damn good job of just driving myself away? That he could not have driven our mother away any faster than she had run herself, out the door with her red dress and her suitcase and all the money she took, and the secret lover she had when she should've kept her love for her young children and her devoted husband? Bruno had, within him. a little of what we all felt-an undercurrent of

anger, directed at our father, but really meant for our mother, who had left us when we were nearly too young to remember. Somehow, we had all blamed the one who had remained behind to some extent.

Now that he'd been murdered, guilt followed these feelings.

"Don't tell Brooke," he said. "Promise me. She idolized him. She'd hate me. Now, I guess, more than ever."

"All right," I said. It was our family sickness, I guess: Don't tell someone else in the family how you really feel. Hide it. Bury it. Make it go away. It had been ingrained in us from an early age. Its origins were as hard to pin down as the fog that surrounded Hawthorn for half the year: Who had made us get that way? Was it something within ourselves? Some organic sense of burying, the way dogs bury bones?

Part of me felt like lashing out at him for being so coldhearted as to talk like this within two days of our father's death. Part of me wanted to understand him as I never had before.

And I hated to admit it, but part of me agreed with Bruno. I couldn't understand it-why had I disliked my father so much? Had I blamed him for things? Had I made him too responsible for the confusion I so often felt?

He had been rough on us, that was the bottom line. And we had rebelled.

That big GUILT I generally felt was going into hyperdrive in me.

I was not looking forward to any aspect of this homecoming.

The old house, on the outside, was still hazard-looking, as it had been ten years before. It was a grandfather of a house. It had even turned a bit gray in the intervening years.

Slowly maneuvering around the vans and cars, Bruno turned down the drive. The gate was closed, of course. I got out of the car, feeling the blast of icy air again, and ran to open it.

Bruno drove through, and I shut the gate to the driveway again. I glanced up at the road. There were people in jackets and trenchcoats up on the roadside, watching.

"Brooke," I said, when my sister met me at the front door. I did everything I could not to imagine her naked in a storm, her fingers reaching down below her flat belly. I regretted Bruno had ever told me that story.

Too late to move out of the way, I was jumped by her two enormous greyhounds, Mab and Madoc, and I went backward onto the porch. A pain in my butt told me I'd landed on part of the flagstone walk. Dog licks covered my face. Despite the pain, I began laughing and shoving the dogs away.

Brooke stood over me, doing her best to pull the dogs away by the collar, but they were out of control.

Then she offered me her hand, helping me up.

My sister Brooke: an unkempt beauty.

Her hair, darker than I'd remembered it, hung down and around her shoulders, somehow framing her face so that her eyes seemed owl-like.

She wore no make-up, looked as if she had just roiled out of bed. She wore a stretched-out gray wool sweater that came down to the ends of her fingers and fell nearly to her knees, baggy khakis. Barefoot on the porch. Oddly, there was the smell of turpentine about her-I noticed what might've been paint on her sleeve. Had she been painting something?

Somehow, she still managed to radiate beauty. Some women have organic beauty-their bodies are formed as if meant to be looked at by men and appreciated. This is simply nature, and no doubt many have had it who were undeserving. Some women have magical beauty-where their features aren't symmetrical, or their face looks slightly off-beat, but they have an aura about them that creates beauty around them. My sister had a bit of both. She had the same beauty our mother had possessed, when I could remember our mother's face. Brooke did whatever she could to hide her looks in sweaters and sweats and a general sloppiness. But it was still there: that touch of our mother.

First thing Brooke did was whisper so softly that I was afraid I wouldn't hear her. "Do I look scared, Nemo?"

She had an air of the bittersweet about her-pale and rosy and golden at the same time, her lips bitten and her eyes lost. Botticelli hair falling around her woolen shoulders-the perfect result of the blending of my mother's Northern European fairness and my father's Welsh darkness. "Do I? I feel scared. But I don't want them to see it. I don't want the world to see it." She pointed to the news van out on the road.

"Goddamn buzzards," she said, her voice rising to its normal tone. "Come on in, Nemo. Good you made it. Carson greet you?" Her New Englandese turned the perv's name into "Cahsehn," and I had to admit I liked hearing it. Carson was known for seducing island sheep and for masturbating from the front seat of his small yellow pickup truck at the harbor as a kind of welcome wagon.

"Nope," I said. "No miraculous vibrating truck."

"Dad called it the 'Burnley Hello,' " she said. "He said it just a week ago. Better than what most men do with those things, I suppose." Then the bravado left her face, a sudden retreat. She whispered, "I don't want them to see me upset. I feel like I'm being watched all the time."

She clapped her hands, and the dogs went running back into the house ahead of us. A loud crash-Brooke swore a blue streak-and when we got to the kitchen, the dogs had already knocked over a small chair by the glass table. Brooke shouted, "Kennels!"

The dogs, finally obedient, ran to their respective, enormous wire crates that edged the living room.

In personality, Brooke was solidly Yankee in a way that neither Bruno nor I had remained. She had the strongest accent, which was vaguely masculine despite her petite softness.

She was a category of woman who lived on Yankee islands, just as there was a category of men who did as well, who had thick hair that always needed cutting, and ruddy complexions from constant movement in the cold, a nearly downcast expression as she spoke, as if gravity were her only make-up; she used profanity as insecure gourmets used spices: as if no sentence were complete without at least a "fuck" or a "goddamn." In this way, she was unlike any of us. She was as Yankee as the low stone walls that had surrounded Hawthorn for more than two centuries. She was like a weathervane on the roof, or the shingles themselves: part of the way things looked in New England, part of its charm, but also part of its expectation. Few on the island could out-island my sister. She had an old soul for the place, as if she were the reincarnation of my great-grandma Cery (pronounced Cherry) Raglan, a salty bitter woman of enormous bosom and the iron will of a mule.

As I held her for a moment, I smelled our mother's scent-particularly the essence of lime-and for a moment, I was truly happy. Happy to be with my sister. Happy to be home again. Happy that at least the three of us would be here for the time being.

Even if for all the wrong reasons.

When I entered Hawthorn again, I felt enveloped in its plain New England arms, its brick and wood and white walls and smell of earth and coffee and winter spice.

Its length seemed less like a serpentine pattern and more like a series of Christmas boxes waiting to be opened.

Why had I hated this place so much?

Why had I left it behind and done everything I could to let work and life get in the way of coming back?

Now it was late in the game. My father, gone. I'd thought I'd have some time later in life to sort out our problems. Maybe in my forties. After I'd somehow established my own territory in the world. Sometime in the future, when he was older and softer and I was wiser and more understanding of my own nature. I had made a huge mistake by running away from my problems.

Despite the length of the house, it wasn't that wide, nor were the ceilings high. It was built for Welshmen and women-my great-greats, none of whom were tall. It wasn't until my father married my mother and produced two sons who had some Norwegian and German in them, that the house seemed smaller and less grand to my dad. He told me that no one should really be taller than five-foot-six anyway.

I could practically feel my father still alive in the entryway-and yes, though my mother was long gone, I felt her there, too, and saw her in my sister's face. I looked for the penknife notchings in the doorframe-and there they were. The notch that was me at four, then at six, then at twelve; and Brooke and Bruno's notches, as well, all of us lined up against the doorframe every few years to check our progress.

I went to hug my sister, and she whispered in my ear, "Good to see you again."

My sister and brother and I had seen each other in the years I'd been gone-but not more than once or twice. I hadn't seen her in nearly six years, though, and we'd been so close growing up, that I felt my eyes tearing up just to be

there, in the house, with both her and Bruno. It was enough for the time being.

Brooke loved the island more than she loved life itself, and Hawthorn was the heart of her love. She had told me as a child that she wanted to grow up to either be a fisherman, or a fisherman's wife, and she had danced along the edge of the shoreline on many summer twilights, stretching her arms up to the pink sky, while her friends gathered around a bonfire that had just been set for the night-but she was separate from them, a nature spirit on the island.

Some heaviness had come into her-not in terms of weight, but an aura, as if remaining on the island had tugged away at her vitality, her ability to dance on the shore or love the smell of the fishing boats as they came into the harbor.

I suspected that, whether she ever married or not, she would always remain in that house, always caring for it and tinkering with its upkeep, and making sure that someone remained to remember the Raglan history. It was as if the doors were not open for her.

Brooke went to flick on the kitchen light, and when her back was turned, Bruno whispered to me, "Sedatives."

"Yes," Brooke said, turning to face him. She shot him a poisonous look.

It nearly scared me, because it didn't seem like the soft gentleness I'd remembered her having. "You drink, and I get a pill now and then."

"I didn't mean it as-" Bruno began, but shut up. "Sorry." Brooke's face smoothed out. Then to me: "Pola and her

little boy came by. Just paying respects. It seems early for it. I didn't run her off, but I have a hard time with the idea of people just popping over the day after this. Harry came by this morning, too, and it's making me angry that everyone has to say something to me. As if it's required." The sorrow in her face nearly astonished me. She needed sleep badly. Sleep and peace. "Just make yourself at home. Your room should be okay. Mab and Madoc seem to like sleeping there some nights.

If they bother you, just shut them out. Don't put up with any crap from them. There's a spot heater in the den you can have if it gets too cold.

I'm not sleeping at night. Don't bother me 'til after seven tonight. I just want to sleep right now. As long as I can." She whistled for her dogs, and they leapt nearly across the living room and ran to her.

And then my sister went down through the living room, out the door that led to the dining room. I heard a series of doors open and shut as she went through twelve rooms, upstairs, to her own room, near the back of the house.

"She was on edge before this," Bruno said. "Either quiet or like a cyclone. She and Dad were fighting all week. Mainly about money."

Within an hour of being home, I got a call from the local police chief.

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