Nick knew why his friend would not leave, but he could not shake the nagging unease about what had happened to Mr. Keenan. Ignoring Jack Peter’s insistent stare, he went to the coatrack and dressed to go outdoors. At the entrance to the mudroom, he looked back at Jack Peter, who had not stirred and now slouched in the chair, watching Nick’s every movement. Without another word, Nick left the house and stepped out into the cold.
No one else was out on such a gray day, and the only sign of life was the curl of smoke from the Quigleys’ chimney. He made his way from the mudroom to the tilt of sand that separated the yard from the sea. The insistent waves pulsed along the shore, and he walked out slowly, climbing the rocks as if stepping stones, watchful for any telltale movement, but the entire vista was blank and desolate. In the summertime, there might have been gulls overhead or a person or two sunning themselves or casting a fishing line into the dark waters, but here in the dead winter, such memories flitted briefly in his imagination. He marched on, looking back once at the bay window, half hoping that Jack Peter would be watching at least, but there was no one there. Perhaps he didn’t care, perhaps he wasn’t involved. Fingers of damp iciness reached into the gaps of his jacket, and he zipped himself in up to the throat. When he reached the place where Mr. Keenan had last been seen, Nick crouched to inspect the ground. There was no trace of him, not so much as a footprint in the patches of sand between the clumps of rock. To the south, a few sentinel-like houses clung to the edge of the dunes, and to the north rose Mercy Point and the lighthouse, its rooftop globe clear and unseeing as a glass eye. He called once for Mr. Keenan, though there was no answer, and his own voice sounded small and weak.
If the thing he had been chasing was frightened, it might be running still, like a rabbit escaping a fox, trotting away and hiding and trembling, and then when flushed, dashing off farther, and Mr. Keenan might just have been drawn recklessly into pursuit, and might be miles off now. Or perhaps the creature was some preying beast and had waited in ambush to snatch and carry him to its lair and was only now gnawing on his flesh, and years later, the human bones would turn up when some hiker stumbled upon a cave. Or maybe Mr. Keenan had suffered some accident on the rocks or stumbled into the sea. The body could be any number of places, hidden from view. In the gathering twilight, Nick walked toward the ocean, half expecting to see a corpse bobbing on the water.
Spindrift blew off the waves and foam gathered in clots that rolled along the shore, full of bubbles like scalded milk. Stretched to the far boundaries, the gray-green sea appeared lifeless, though Nick knew below the waves lived fishes and crabs and lobsters scuttling across the sandy bottom. He remembered the day when he and Jack Peter had last been together on this same spot three years ago, and how they had looked out upon this same ocean, and how he wished he had never met such a strange boy. His parents made him play with him, he didn’t want to, he wanted to be normal. Jack Peter had angered him that day with one careless sentence.
If I could run away, he thought, I would. If I could swim across the ocean, I would not stop till I reached the other shore. And I would live there in a cottage on the shore of Ireland or England or France. And I would learn to be someone else and speak the way they do and eat their food and give myself a new name. And though my parents would miss me and my friends would know that I am gone, they would forget about me in time, and I could find somebody new. And I would cut that string. I would be rid of him for good.
There was no body swirling in the waves. Squatting on his haunches, he took off his gloves and put his bare hands on the cold sand, where the ocean would come and cover them in ice water. The sound and motion of the waves matched the rhythm of his breathing until the winter wind and water seeped past his fears. He kept his hands in place until they stung and reddened, but he could not go farther. Shoving them into his pockets, he shivered and stared out at the Atlantic. How long he stood there he did not know. Sometimes when he was alone, Nick felt as if he was the last boy on earth. He moved through the landscape without volition, compelled by an unseen force to be here, a living thing in an artificial world, made to breathe and act and move beyond his own control. The sun at his back slipped down below the tops of the fir trees and cast one brief and final play of light and shadow on the surface of the sea. The shift in temperature awakened him as if from a trance, and he turned and walked back through the lengthening shadows to the darkening house.
Inside, no lamps had been turned on against the dying of the light, and Jack Peter had not moved. He was where Nick had left him, splayed across the easy chair, studying the ceiling as though some picture had been sketched upon the surface. He greeted Nick with a grunt. “What did you find outside?”
“Nothing.”
The news didn’t seem to faze him one way or another. He swung his legs around and sat up straight. “I’m bored. What should we do?”
“Aren’t you worried about what happened to your father? Where’s your mother?”