For a moment Alex is silent, and I think he’s going to chicken out, refuse to tell me anything more. I almost wish he would. I’m desperate to rewind time, go back to the moment before he said my name in that strange tone of voice, go back to the triumphant, surging feeling of beating him to the buoys. We’ll race back to the beach. We’ll meet up tomorrow, try to wheedle some fresh crabs from the fishermen at the dock.
But then he speaks. “I’m not from here,” he says. “I mean, I wasn’t born in Portland. Not exactly.” He’s speaking in the tone of voice that everyone uses when they’re about to break you apart. Gentle—kind, even—like they can make the news sound better just by speaking in a lullaby voice. I’m sorry, Lena, but your mother was a troubled woman. Like you won’t somehow hear the violence underneath.
“Where are you from?” I don’t have to ask. I know already. The realization has broken, spilled, overrun me. But a little part of me believes that as long as he doesn’t say it, it’s not true.
His eyes are steady on mine, but he tilts his head back—back toward the border, beyond the bridge, to that endlessly moving arrangement of branches and leaves and vines and tangled, growing things. “There,” he says, or maybe I just think he says it. His lips barely move. But the meaning is clear.
He comes from the Wilds.
“An Invalid,” I say. The word feels like it’s grating against my throat. “You’re an Invalid.” I’m giving him a final chance to deny it.
But he doesn’t. He just winces slightly and says, “I’ve always hated that word.”
Standing there, I realize something else: that it wasn’t a coincidence whenever Carol made fun of me for still believing in the Invalids, whenever she would shake her head without bothering to look up from her knitting needles—tic, tic, tic, they went together, flashing metal—and say, “I suppose you believe in vampires and werewolves, too?”
Vampires and werewolves and Invalids: things that will rip into you, tear you to shreds. Deadly things.
I’m suddenly so frightened a desperate pressure starts pushing down in the bottom of my stomach and between my legs, and for one wild and ridiculous second I’m positive that I’m about to pee. The lighthouse on Little Diamond Island clicks on, cuts a wide swath across the water, an enormous, accusatory finger: I’m terrified I’ll get caught up in its beam, terrified it will point in my direction and then I’ll hear the whirling of the state helicopters and the megaphone voices of the regulators shouting, “Illegal activity! Illegal activity!” The beach looks hopelessly and impossibly remote. I can’t imagine how we got out so far. My arms feel heavy and useless, and I think of my mother, and her jacket filling slowly with water.
I take deep breaths, trying to keep my mind from spinning, trying to focus. There’s no way for anyone to know that Alex is an Invalid. I didn’t know. He looks normal, has the scar in the right place. There’s no way anyone could have heard us talking.
A wave lifts and breaks against my back. I stumble forward. Alex reaches out and grabs my arm to steady me, but I twist away from him just as a second round of waves surges over us. I get a mouthful of seawater, feel the salt stinging my eyes and am momentarily blinded.
“Don’t,” I stutter. “Don’t you dare touch me.”
“Lena, I swear. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t want to lie to you.”
“Why are you doing this?” I can’t think straight, can hardly even breathe. “What do you want from me?”
“Want . . . ?” Alex shakes his head. He looks genuinely confused—and hurt, too, as though I’m the one who did something wrong. For a second I feel a flash of sympathy for him. Maybe he sees it on my face, that fraction of a second when I let my guard down, because in that moment his expression softens and his eyes go bright as flame and even though I barely see him move, suddenly he has closed the space between us and he’s wrapping his warm hands over my shoulders—fingers so warm and strong I almost cry out—and saying, “Lena. I like you, okay? That’s it. That’s all. I like you.” His voice is so low and hypnotic it reminds me of a song. I think of predators dropping silently from trees: I think of enormous cats with glowing amber eyes, just like his.