“Look, if you want, we’ll turn this boat around right now and take you back. And you can drive to the nearest police station and tell them your story. And if they believe you—and let’s face it, Rachel, your credibility is a little shaky in this town—then, sure, they’ll send some detective out tomorrow or the next day or a week from Tuesday, whenever they get around to it. But by that point, I’ll be smoke. They’ll never find me and you’ll never find me.”
The thought of never seeing him again slid through her intestinal tract like a shiv. Losing Brian—knowing he was out in the world somewhere, yet she would never see him again—would be like losing a kidney. It was a certifiably insane reaction, and yet there it was.
“Why aren’t you already gone?”
“I couldn’t synchronize every part of my timetable as fast as I wanted.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“We don’t have much time,” Brian said.
“For what?”
“For anything but trust.”
She stared across the boat at him. “Trust?”
“I’m afraid so.”
There were probably a thousand things she could have said to the galactic absurdity of his asking her to trust him, but all she managed to say was “Who is she?”
She hated the words as they left her mouth. He’d stripped her of every foundation she’d built the last three years of her life on, and she was coming off like the jealous shrew.
“Who?” he said.
“The pregnant wife you keep in Providence.”
Another smile, bordering on a smirk, as his eyes rose to the starless sky. “She’s an associate.”
“At your mineral company?”
“Well, tangentially, yes.”
She could feel them dropping into the rhythm of all their fights—she typically played offense, he played an evasive defense, which usually made her more and more aggressive, like the dog chasing the rabbit that has no meat under its fur. So before it could deteriorate any further, she asked the real question.
“Who are you?”
“I’m your husband.”
“You’re not my—”
“I’m the man who loves you.”
“You lied to me about everything in our lives. That’s not love. That’s—”
“Look in my eyes. Tell me whether you see love there or not.”
She looked. Sardonically at first, but then with growing fascination. It was there, no question.
But was it? He was, after all, an actor.
“Your version of it,” she said.
“Well, yeah,” he said, “that’s the only version I’d know.”
Caleb cut the engine. They were about two miles out in the bay, the lights of Quincy off to their right, the lights of Boston back and to their left. In front of them, the ink dark was interrupted by the ridges and crags of Thompson Island to their west. Impossible to tell in this dark if it was two hundred yards away or two thousand. There was some kind of youth facility on Thompson, Outward Bound maybe, but whatever the organization, they’d turned in for the night because the island emitted no light whatsoever. Small waves broke softly against the hull. She’d once piloted herself and Sebastian home on a night like this using only their running lights, the two of them chuckling nervously through most of the journey, but Caleb had cut every light but the small bulbs of uplighting on the deck by their feet.
Out there in the impermeable dark on a moonless night, she realized Brian and Caleb could quite easily kill her. In fact, all of this could have been orchestrated to get her to think she was supervising the events that led her to this boat and this bay and this callous dark when in fact it was the other way around.
It suddenly seemed important to ask Brian, “What’s your real name?”
“Alden,” he said to her. “Brian Alden.”
“Are you from a lumber family?”
He shook his head. “Nothing so glamorous.”
“Are you from Canada?”
He shook his head. “I’m from Grafton, Vermont.”
He watched her carefully as he removed a plastic sleeve of peanuts from his pocket, the kind they gave you on planes, and opened it.
“You’re Scott Pfeiffer,” she said.
He nodded.
“But your name isn’t Scott Pfeiffer.”
“No. That’s just the name of some kid I went to high school with, used to make me laugh in Latin class.”
“And your father?”
“Stepfather. Yeah. He was the guy I described. Racist, homophobic, scared the world was run by a large-scale conspiracy to fuck his life up and piss on everything he’d put his faith in. He was also, paradoxically maybe, a nice guy, good neighbor, help you put up a fence or fix a gutter. He keeled over from a heart attack while shoveling a neighbor’s walk. Neighbor’s name was Roy Carrol. Funny thing? Roy was never even nice to him, but my stepfather shoveled his walk because it was the decent thing to do and Roy was too poor to hire anyone to help and he lived on a corner lot. You know what Roy did the day after my father’s funeral?” Brian popped a peanut in his mouth. “Went out and bought himself a three-thousand-dollar snowblower.”
He offered her some peanuts and she shook her head, feeling numb to all of it suddenly, feeling as if she’d stepped into a virtual-reality booth and this was the set onto which she found herself projected.
“And your real father?”
“Never really knew him.” He shrugged. “Something we have in common.”
“How about Brian Delacroix? How’d you come up with that identity?”
“You know, Rachel. You know because I told you.”
And she did. “He went to Brown.”
Brian nodded.
“And you were the pizza delivery guy.”
“Delivered in forty minutes or less or you get it for half price.” He smiled. “Now you know why I drive so fast.” He shook some more peanuts into his hand.
“Why,” she said, “are you sitting there eating peanuts like nothing’s changed?”
“Because I’m hungry.” He popped another one in his mouth. “It was a long flight.”
“There was no flight.” She clenched, then unclenched her teeth.
He cocked an eyebrow at her and she wanted to tear it off his face. She wished she hadn’t drunk so much. She needed to be clearheaded right now and she wasn’t even close. She had wanted to have all her questions lined up in perfect sequence.
“There was no flight,” she said, “because there’s no job and you’re not Brian Delacroix, which means our marriage isn’t even legal and you’ve lied to me about . . .” She stopped. She could feel the dark all around her and all inside of her. “Everything.”
He slapped the peanut dust off his hands and pocketed the empty plastic sleeve.
“Not everything.”
“Really. What’s real?”
He waved his fingers between their chests. “This.”
She mimicked the gesture. “This is bullshit.”
He actually had the temerity to look hurt. The balls. “No. It’s not, Rachel. It’s as real as anything.”
Caleb joined them on the deck. “Tell me about the camera shop, Brian.”
Brian said, “What is this, bad cop/bad cop suddenly? You’re both gonna grill me?”
“Rachel says she followed you to Little Louie’s.”
A heartless cast found Brian’s face. He’d worn the same look when he’d slapped Andrew Gattis, wore it when he’d walked out of the Hancock Tower in the rain, and it had flashed across his face during a fight once, for just a second. “How much did you tell her?”
“I didn’t.”