Orient (26 page)

He tossed a shoe box lid on the floor and leafed through a sheaf of mildewed papers. A copper bullet rolled against the cardboard; Mills shook it out and set it on the floor. He found a copy of Paul’s birth certificate inside an envelope: Paul Andrew Benchley, born at Eastern Long Island Hospital, on November 3, 1966. Mills made a note of the birthday, less than two weeks away. Maybe he’d surprise Paul with a cake. Beth could drive him to a bakery in Greenport and he could have Paul’s name inscribed on the frosting. But just as Mills imagined adding candles and darkening the lights in the dining room, an uninvited question interrupted the festivities. Was the cake an honest gesture? Or was it a means of worming his way deeper into Paul Benchley’s heart?

No foster kid was naïve to the art of manipulation. There was an art to Polaroid day at social services, rehearsed by children and encouraged by the counselors. A blank face. Eyes wide and vaguely watery. An open smile, with the least amount of twist at the creases. Chin up and eyes staring down. Never chin down and eyes up—that
was the face of trouble, and no foster parent wanted trouble sleeping in the bedroom down the hall. On starving black kids in Africa, that expression read as defenseless, wronged, a plea to please send money. On unwanted white kids in America, it read as purse raider, fire starter, mutilator of pets. Even now, when Mills posed for a photograph, he tilted his chin up and dropped his eyes into brimming sunsets. At nineteen, his entire life had been recorded in that same pose, over and over, and collected in his case file.

A small batch of photos was stuck to the bottom of the shoe box. Mills carefully peeled them from the cardboard. One was a shot of Paul at his prom, next to a bony date with streaked and feathered hair. H
APPY
O
RIENT
B
UCKS
read the taxonomic banner over their heads. Paul looked thinner and more vulnerable, with an eruption of pimples on his chin. His date was waxy and romantically sun-damaged. It was the only evidence of Paul’s romantic life that Mills had discovered in his weeks in Orient, besides the Eleanor matchbook. It had surprised Mills how few pictures of Paul as an adult had turned up in his parents’ possessions. There were plenty of photos of him as a child, working out at sea on his father’s boats. But after the age of thirty, there were only four or five pictures to mark his years. It seemed as if he had spent the past two decades avoiding his parents’ camera, or their camera avoiding him, perhaps for his inability to bring home a decent date. Parents did not like to take pictures of their children, year after year, standing alone.

There were three other photographs at the bottom of the box, black-and-white portraits of two dark-haired boys sitting on the porch of the farmhouse inn. The squat boy in overalls with a strong chin and an easy smile was clearly Paul. He was the center of each photograph. On the sidelines was another boy, scrawny, with crooked arms. Paul looked like the picture of health by comparison. The other boy’s lip was split with a cleft, and he had morose, empty eyes that suggested mental impairment.

Mills opened a second shoe box and discovered a supply of safety flares. He considered taking one, in case he and Tommy ever
made another walk to the beach at night. He noticed a glimmer of black metal at the bottom of the box and reached in to pull it out. He found a gun, an old service revolver that must have belonged to Paul’s father. The bullet on the floor must match it. Mills had never held a gun before. His fingers gripped the handle like a confident handshake. Guns were designed to feel natural in the hand, as if the gun were reaching out to greet the open palm. But once gripped, it possessed the dead weight of its purpose, heavy, blunt, and compact. Mills checked that the gun was unloaded and aimed it at the wall. He pulled the trigger, and the cylinder clicked.

Footsteps moved through the back rooms. Mills dropped the gun and bullet into the box of flares and shut the lid. He gathered the photos from the floor.

“Mills?” Paul called as he neared the tiny room, five rooms from the front door and four rooms from the back. It was the appendix of the house, useless except for its need to take up space.

Paul leaned against the doorframe, his hands wedged into his armpits. A smile cut across his face, and it was that smile—unadorned with a mustache—that caused Paul to look naked and strange.

“It’s gone,” Mills said, lifting up from his crouch. “You shaved it.” Mills had never seen Paul without his mustache, and it struck him how different a man could look with one minor revision. Absent his facial hair, Paul was younger, more handsome, more immediate, his round face offering no branch for the eye to settle, no shelter for his expression to hide. Paul had dimples lurking around his mouth, bent shyly at his lips like the legs of a fawn.

“I told you I was old. And it was starting to go gray. I only grew it to look older in the first place. And now that the rest of me caught up, it really wasn’t doing me any favors. I decided after our talk in the car. Do I look like a different person? Less nineteenth century? More twenty-first?”

“Completely,” Mills said. “And you’re right. You do look younger.”

“Don’t worry, that’s the only change. Although I knew a colleague who shaved his beard off and two months later he divorced
his wife and started climbing every mountain in Tibet. He blamed his unhappiness on his facial hair. Said it was holding him back, like a muzzle on a dog.” Paul noticed the photographs in Mills’s hand and nodded at them. “What are those, more photos? They never end, do they? They’re like weeds back here.”

Mills considered making an excuse to avoid handing them over. The visit to the inn had been enough of a trip into the past, and too many memories in too short a time could turn a little wayward water into a flood zone. Mills couldn’t think of a way to hide the photos without drawing more attention to them, so he held up one of the snapshots of the two boys. Paul’s face whitened except for the razor marks above his lip.

“My god,” he said as he reached for it. “Where did you find this?” He took the picture and studied it. “Patrick. My brother. I didn’t know any of these survived.”

“You have a brother?”

Paul took off his glasses and used his wrist to wipe his eyes. His fingers trembled as he returned the frames to his nose.

“
Had
. One year younger. He died when I was six. He was very sickly, right from the start. Scoliosis, anemia, you name it. And he was born with a blockage in his intestines. Surgeries couldn’t fix it. He threw up everything he ate. And that was the end of him, starving and weak, no matter how much food my parents pushed down his throat.” Paul took the other photos and kept shuffling through them, as if there were more than three. “His death destroyed my parents. It got to where they couldn’t bear to see a picture of him. Every time they did, it broke their hearts. I thought they’d thrown them all away. I can’t believe you found these.” Paul stared at him, his teeth making crunching noises in his mouth. “It’s like seeing a ghost.”

Mills placed his hand on Paul’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” Paul said, trying to blink away his tears. “I don’t know why it’s hit me like it has.”

“I’ll leave you—”

“No. No need for that. It was so long ago.” Paul closed his eyes
and tipped his head back. “I haven’t seen a picture of Patrick in more than thirty years.” Paul stacked the photos in his palm. “Life would have been less lonely if he had lived. I used to carry him onto the porch just so he could be out in the sun. He was such a sweet kid. I sometimes think that if he had survived, the burden on me would have been lighter, you know? Like there would have been someone else to share the family with.” Mills handed Paul the snapshot of him at his prom.

“This isn’t a joke,” Paul said, laughing. He seemed relieved for the change of subject. “This is a crime against my better judgment. Look at that tuxedo. All those ruffles. Fashion’s supposed to make you feel good but, looking back, it just makes you feel stupid. I came back from boarding school just to go to her prom.” He sighed. “We’ve all been too many different people in our lives.”

“We were bound to find a few sad reminders back here. Maybe I should have put them in a box and—”

“No,” Paul said. He loosened his shoulders by rowing them back. “It’s just been quite a day. This is why I used to keep my visits to Orient short. You never know when the past is hiding behind a bush, waiting to jump out and bite. No, I’m glad you found them. And I can handle whatever else is back here. It would be a disappointment if it were all so easy to throw away.” He held his stomach and leaned against the wall.

Mills slung his arm around Paul’s shoulder and hugged him, pressing his chin into the pillow of Paul’s neck. Paul stiffened before relaxing in the embrace. “I’m going to finish getting the stuff out of the car,” Mills whispered. He left the room before Paul could call him back.

Mills jumped down
the porch steps and scanned the Muldoons’ lawn for traces of Tommy. Tommy had promised to return Jeff Trader’s journal, but in the past few days every attempt to corner him had been met with annoying evasion, like trying to get a mosquito to
return some blood. Mills had thrown pebbles at Tommy’s window, only to watch the light turn off. He had tried to wave down Tommy’s car in the morning, only to see it speed away. Mills had considered ringing the doorbell, but the sight of Pam Muldoon in the front windows stopped him short. Maybe Tommy had found Jeff Trader’s secrets too enticing to return. Maybe he’d discovered the key to the book’s value, the reason Magdalena Kiefer had been so insistent on obtaining it. Mills tried not to imagine what reckless uses Tommy might be envisioning for this fresh cache of secrets. He dreaded the moment Beth would stop by, today or tomorrow or any moment now, to pick it up.

He opened the back door of the Mercedes and started collecting the small, lopsided pumpkins in the crook of his arm. As he glanced through the back window he saw the rain-blurred silhouette of a young man walking up the street. A ghostly shape marched defiantly through the gray afternoon. He let go of the pumpkins and ducked out of the car.

Tommy strode toward him, his shoulder blades scrunched, his eyes cellophane-white and leaking across his cheeks. Was there anything more beautiful than a young man crying? Anything as rare? His knuckles slashed at his tears.

“I’m done with it,” Tommy said, staring directly at him. “Done trusting people. Done believing in them and acting good for everyone else. Staying in my place. Always in my fucking place,” he sputtered. “Where does it get you? What the fuck difference does it make?”

Mills had no idea what Tommy was talking about, but the knuckles hadn’t stopped the tears. “What’s the matter?” Mills shut the car door and met him halfway down the drive.

“There’s no point if they just disappoint you,” Tommy said through chokes. “What a liar. So pathetic. Nothing ever changes. People turn out to be the worst things you could ever think of them. God. What a fucking embarrassment. I’m not going to end up like that, I’ll tell you that much.”

“What’s wrong?” Mills asked again, reaching his hand out but afraid to make contact with Tommy’s black windbreaker. He held his palm open an inch from Tommy’s arm, as if asking for permission to land. Tommy’s eyes narrowed and he sucked snot into his throat.

“Nothing,” he snapped. “None of it matters anyway.” Tommy’s fingers grabbed at his own windbreaker. “Jesus, all I want to do is get out of here.”
Here
could have been Orient—or, by the way his fingers were grabbing at his chest, his own body. “To not be stuck like this.”

Tommy’s upper lip was shaped like the wheel well of a speeding car, his jawbone pivoting and clenching. Mills felt there was a violence to such beauty, the way it disturbed the air like a rogue frequency scrambling the airwaves. The rest of the world faded around it, dull and overcast and easily forgotten. All of Mills’s vital organs seemed to deactivate in Tommy’s presence.
Say you want to mug me, I will go with you. Tell me to lie down in the middle of the street, I will lie down
. It was torture not to touch it, a bird at sea unable to find a place to land, but he knew that the torture grew worse after beauty departed, leaving the dull stillness of the landscape without its only beacon.

“I need to get that book back from you,” Mills said, his brain still mildly operable. “I promised Beth.”

Tommy spit yellow phlegm on Paul’s dead blueberry bush. “You want to come to my room. That’s what you want. Fine. Let’s go, then.”

Mills followed Tommy through the front door and up the carpeted steps. He heard someone in the laundry room, pressing buttons to bring the dryer to its coughing tumble. That was the order of the world downstairs, and now he and Tommy were on top of that order, quiet as thieves in the second-floor hallway. They reached his bedroom, and Tommy closed the door behind them. Mills saw his own dried blood spots by the foot of the bed. The star-constellation sheets had been removed, replaced by a constellation of NBA logos.
Posters of successful black men—glistening basketball players; hooded, gold-chained rappers—covered the walls. Tommy leaned down and worked the combination on his safe. He took out a room-temperature beer and opened it, gulping down half the can. He pulled his windbreaker off and threw it on the bed.

“You have my flask, don’t you?” he said without turning around.

“Yeah. It’s in my room.”

“It’s not your room. It’s Paul Benchley’s room. You’re just a visitor here. No one knows who you are.” Tommy seemed to make that distinction for his own peace of mind. That fact was worth more to him than it was to Mills.

“So where’s the book?” was all he could think to say.

“Is that what you want?” Tommy turned around and snapped off the can’s metal tab. He pressed his thumb against the broken ring. His face was red from crying, but the tears had stopped. The blood under his skin brought out the yellow of his hair, a cartoonish yellow, a crayon’s idea of blond. Tommy’s eyes fixed on him, their blues as shallow as they had always been but deep enough to accommodate an unspent sorrow. “I know what you want. What you’ve been waiting around for. Mills milling around for scraps. Is that why they named you that? Whoever named you did a good job.” Tommy was too untethered for the insult to sting. He leaned against his desk, curling his fingers behind him on the edge of the wood, as if he were bracing himself against an impending acceleration of the Earth. Mills swore he could feel its rotation shift. He thought of astronauts in retirement jumping around their Florida living rooms, trying to free themselves from gravity again.