CHAPTER THIRTY

I must have stumbled out of the smokehouse, but I barely remember it. When I came to, Pola and Zack were calling to me from the porch of the house.

When I glanced their way, I thought I felt a pull. A gravitational pull, trying to draw me back into the smokehouse, like invisible fingers, tugging at me.

The sky was heavy with the smoky clouds that generally meant more bad weather-the predictions had been for yet another storm, as we always got on the island in December.

I had the odd sensation that I was dead. Dead and crawling across the ground, but not feeling it. Trying to resist the pull, that force, that magnet, which wanted my body back in the smokehouse.

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I heard Pola's cries, and then a sound like the giant wings of a bird flapping close to my ear-My breath was labored.

I felt as if my lungs were frozen.

I felt hands upon me.

With some effort, I turned slightly to see who had their hands on my shoulders.

As if I saw her at the end of a long dark tunnel, Pola knelt there beside me.

Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear her.

Next to her, standing over the two of us was her son, Zack.

His eyes were wide, as if he were seeing something awful, and he wasn't looking at me. I knew who he saw. I knew he must see her as well.

Not Pola, but the other one.

Then I heard Pola's voice. "Nemo? Nemo, are you all right? Nemo?"

I watched, unable to move or speak, feeling a chilling paralysis in my bones, and saw Zack move away.

As if someone were calling him, and he alone could hear the voice.

Sound returned, and then more clear vision; finally, after a minute or so, I felt the pinpricks along my legs and arms and the soles of my feet. I could sit up, and felt wet in the snow. Pola was nearly in tears, but she fought to keep them back. "Oh, my God," she said. "You frightened me. Are you all right?"

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I said the only thing that came to my mind. "Where's Zack?"

I wiped my eyes, for they stung. And then, with Pola's help, I got up.

"Zack?" Pola glanced around. "Zack?"

Her son stood at the entrance to the smokehouse.

Zack looked back at us.

"I thought I saw something," he said, but then bounded back over to us.

I still felt shaky, and somehow coated with shame, as if the haywire nature of my brain was its own kind of humiliation. I might be losing my mind, the way that Brooke felt she had been losing hers. I might be suffering some nasty posttraumatic bullshit that would require years of medical attention.

But I felt sane. If you can feel sane, and still feel the sputtering of the circuits of your brain, then I knew I was sane.

"Why would I see my mother?" I asked.

I sat on the living room sofa and watched as Zack swung a poker around the logs in the fireplace. Pola struck a match and lit the fire, then came back to sit with me.

"You've been through too much," she said.

"No," I said. "I want to get Harry out here again." I reached for the phone. "You might want to go home."

"Why?"

"I just feel weird about it. I don't want you to worry about 310

anything, and Harry is ..." I held up the phone and began tapping out Harry's number.

"I'm staying here," Pola said. "If you and Harry want to go out there again, you're free to. You're crazy to want to, if it affects you this much. But Zack and I can just stay here by the fire."

"We can't go home now," Zack said, pointing to the window. "It's snowing again."

It was an understatement on Zack's part: Outside the window, the storm clouds were growing, and what came down was less snow than sleet.

Harry picked up the phone on his end, and I said, "Harry, can you come out here? Now?"

After I got off the phone with Harry, I went to go wake up Brooke. Pola offered to come with me, but I asked her to stay in the living room. I had a feeling, something I didn't like having to admit, and it was simply that I didn't want Pola and her son to know about the Dark Game or about what I feared might be all of us cracking up in the wake of our father's death.

I jogged up the front staircase. Unlocking the door to the first room upstairs Locked, just as I had warned Brooke away from doing), I opened it upon a mess. The room I entered, the room that we'd thought of as the sun room, looked like a whirlwind had gone through it. A chair and table had been turned upside down, and papers were scattered all over the floor. As I went from room to room, it was as if someone had 311

been on a tirade, tossing pillows and papers and kicking over trash and pulling drawers completely out of the dressers.

Brooke was not in her bed, but the sheet was half torn off. All the votive candles were left sitting on their shelves, upright, still lit.

There were some on the floor.

I called out to Brooke, to Bruno, but got no response.

Then I thought I heard a woman crying. Was it in my head? Was it in the house? It was the most pitiable sound.

I ran in its direction, regardless. Doors opened and closed, and I felt as if I were running through rooms in someone else's memory, for I saw flashes-moments of my father in a room as he had been when I was a child, or of Bruno as a little boy sitting in his red wagon in the rumpus room, or my mother, writing letters at her desk-it was as if my memories were jumping out at me. Close 'em off. Close 'em off.

I found Brooke in the greenhouse, sitting on the cold floor, surrounded by her paintings.

"The dogs are gone," she said, looking up at me. "They ran off. They haven't come back. Bruno's after them, but I think they're gone for good. I let them out, but they won't come back."

I stood over her, glancing out through the green glass to the snowy fields and woods. "They run sometimes. Don't worry."

"No," she said. "They've been gone all night."

As she told me of her efforts to find them, nearly freezing to death as she went through the woods with a flashlight,

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calling for them, I looked at the canvases that were spread out around her.

Each of the paintings was of our father, dead, bleeding, looking up at someone.

I put Brooke to bed, wrapping her in quilts and comforters to still her chattering.

There was condensation on her window, but no words finger-painted there.

Outside, snow mixed with sleet continued falling.

Then I went to my own room.

My typewriter was on the floor by my bed, as if someone picked it up off my desk and dropped it there.

I retrieved it from the floor, and when I did, I noticed the papers just under the bed. I reached for them, drawing them out.

Someone had been typing.

YOU CAN'T KEEP ME TRAPPED HERE. I AM GOING TO DESTROY YOU.

PLAY THE GAME FOR ME.

PLAY IT.

PLAY IT OR SHE WILL DIE.

JUST LIKE HE DID.

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