Nothing to Devour Read online

  Either way, the reality remained: these were the living things Sophie knew best. Almost the last living things she knew at all. Except, she supposed, for Jess. And Jess hardly seemed a safe friend choice, these days.

  Idly, as she’d watched them pick up that rusting, white van full of their stuff from behind the diner where they both waitressed and earned whatever pathetic money they earned, Sophie had let herself wonder, yet again, whether this would be the night she’d let them see. She wasn’t exactly planning on revealing herself or anything. Her plan, to the extent that she had one, remained the same: to trail along, slip in amongst the surprising crowds, and just be with everyone. She’d bump up against a few unsuspecting concertgoers, flirt, mesmerize a somebody or two if she was in the mood.

  Right before the encore, she’d fade away into the night and head back to the island ahead of the band. Maybe do a bit of Ferry Godmothering. In ways that still surprised her, these evenings had started to feel amazingly like the ones she and Natalie had shared in the years before they’d had children or met the Whistler. There was literally almost no difference. Except for Natalie not being in them.

  Last night, she’d become aware of how closely she was letting herself follow, now. She’d actually stood out in the open across the street from the diner, right in front of the nautical-trinkets-and-taffy shop. Positioning herself just outside the cone of perpetually misty yellow streetlight, Sophie had waited for the van to emerge from its alley. When it had—right after it had turned toward the ferry dock—she’d waved.

  The Stripy One’s window was open, but Sophie hadn’t called out. Not yet. On the day she did, they’d all have a decision to make.

  Why, last night, had she let them go without her? Why had she stayed behind on the island?

  It had taken her hours to work it out. She’d just stood rooted at first, watching the van edge onto the deck. After the ferry had gone, Sophie whiled away the hours lurking in mist that became rain just outside the tavern she had never entered, and the market she had no need to enter. Finally, just after two A.M., when the last ferry of the night docked and disgorged exactly three passengers, none of them Sock Puppet, Sophie had set herself on a bench in the empty parking lot of the post office that connected everyone on this island (except her) to everyone else in the world. And that’s when she’d had her first revelation:

  It wasn’t that she had no one to write to or call or connect with now. It was that she almost never had. Even before the Whistler, if she was going to be brutal and honest with herself, and why not, at this point? Who had there ever been for Sophie?

  There’d been her mom, sometimes. Her mom had taken vacations from heroin, periodically. Some of those had lasted weeks, even months, and during the longer stretches, her mom would get sudden bursts of energy and take her daughter all the way to Southgate mall. Maybe buy her an Orange Julius, if they were splurging, and she could dig enough cash out of the sleeper-couch that took up most of the east wall of their trailer.

  There’d been Elainey, a New Jersey cousin Sophie had met exactly once but emailed and later texted all the way through high school.

  She’d had her share of boys, of course, a few of whom she’d even liked.

  She’d had her Roo. But for so few days. Barely a year. Hardly a lifetime at all.

  Most of all, she’d had Natalie, and yes, godfuckingdamnit, Natalie’s mother, who was marooned on this island, too. And who quite possibly blamed and hated Sophie. Possibly, she’d hated Sophie all along.

  Sitting there in the post office parking lot, as invisible and inanimate as the bench on which she rested—except for her constant, relentless shivering—Sophie brooded deep into the night. Just as she was about to get up, skulk back to the abandoned barracks in the grasslands, Sophie’s second revelation slammed into her:

  Those girls. Women. Sock Puppet. Huddled in their awful van on the loading platform, one of them singing, the other laughing in spite of herself.

  In spite of herself.

  That was the thing that triggered understanding, finally made clear to Sophie what she was still doing here, and why she’d been following those two people for years, now.

  It wasn’t only the late and careening nights, the deafening music and swarming lights in the dumpy clubs where they played, or the wide-open, warehouse-district emptiness of the areas outside those clubs that reminded Sophie of Natalie. Of all her nights with Natalie.

  It wasn’t just the thousand glancing interactions between those women and the people they played for, not one of which bloomed into so much as a conversation, let alone a connection.

  It was the women themselves. Those two: Stripy Laughing Thing and the Little Orphan That Had. They might as well have been Natalie and Sophie. Even the music they made—savage but surprisingly bouncy, something you could sing even as you screamed it—was music she and Natalie might have concocted if their lives had lasted just a little longer, been just a little different. If they’d had more usable time in the time they’d had, a tiny bit more money, access to instruments to learn and play.

  Watching those women—hopping a ride on their lives like a hobo in a boxcar—was like hopping the ghost of her own life as it rocketed away from her. Taking Natalie with it.

  Where are they? Sophie had thought then, shuddering to her feet, rattling in the cold and dark. Why the fuck aren’t they back? She’d been watching the docks since midnight without even realizing what she was doing. And they hadn’t come home.

  Their absence itched her. Chattered in her brain. That wasn’t healthy or helpful. Time to go, Sophie realized.

  Go she had, back up the hill to the dusty, empty barracks where, instead of lying on the pile of sheets she’d stolen and formed into her resting-place nest, she’d spent the whole day pacing.

  She was still pacing now, almost twelve hours later, as the murky, gray daylight leaking through her papered-over windows finally darkened. When it got just a little darker, out she’d burst like a bat from its treetop, and whirl off into the world to get some shit sorted. Get her own shit sorted, because this was not how she planned to spend her eternity of days.

  Ferry Godmother, she thought, and winced. Because really, who had haunted whom? What had she really done for the past five years but trail in thrall behind her own ghosts? The ghosts of herself?

  That’s who those women were, in the end. Right this second, maybe, they’d be stomping down the gangplank exactly the way Natalie and Sophie would have stomped as they returned home. They’d be singing at precisely Natalie-Sophie volume, and wearing the same … well, no. Not even Sophie would have tried rocking those stripes. And Natalie would never have dared a worry-scowl as deep set as the Little Orphan’s, because Sophie would have danced it right off her face.

  Throwing open the door to the barrack, Sophie stared out at the grasslands that swept toward the cliffs. The twilight mist seemed to be lifting rather than thickening, today, leaving just a little too much light for comfort. Just enough to hurt, and Sophie had had quite enough hurting for this particular epoch of her lifetime. So she’d have to stay here a little longer before heading out to discover whether Sock Puppet had come back, and then deciding what to do about that, either way. How to jettison those women once and for all. Because ghosts, like light, fugged up her nights. Also, they hurt.

  All at once, here it was: rock bottom. Not only had she just had her worst thought yet, but quite possibly the worst thought possible: not only would Natalie and Sophie have been these women, if they’d gotten the chance. They would be these women still, right this second and forever, if only Natalie hadn’t gone and gotten herself dead.

  Chosen to get dead, instead of staying with Sophie.

  The coward. The sulking, selfish bitch.

  Sophie’s fury stunned her, almost tipped her right off her perpetually trembling legs into her nest of sheets. Five years it had taken just to acknowledge how angry she really was. Now the words spun in her mind, spattering over memories of the only best f
riend she’d ever had like dirt on a coffin lid. Or, in Natalie’s case, tarp, because that’s what Sophie and Jess had lain her in, under that tree in those Maryland woods, holding Sophie’s murdered son to her breast.

  Sulking coward. Selfish bitch.

  How was it that Natalie—brooding, blazing Nat Queen Cold, the most brilliant and beautiful person Sophie had ever known—had taken the Whistling Shitfuck at his word? How had Natalie actually believed that she would somehow, inevitably, become like him, simply accepted what she’d been told, that the way his life (or not-life) was and felt was the only way hers or Sophie’s could ever be or feel?

  But Natalie had believed it. And so she’d chosen to exit life entirely, with the help of her hypocrite, aren’t-we-brave-now gnome-mom, leaving Sophie marooned and alone in the middle of a million other lives that could never be hers, dangling like a hanged thing from the one question Natalie had left unanswered. Had barely bothered to ask:

  Was the monster right? Was the Whistler’s way the only way there was?

  Dark was crawling in across the cliff tops, slowly, so slowly. But it was coming. Sophie could edge all the way out into the open doorway now, let the last light lap at her feet. Soon, she could go. Stop thinking, start moving. Get the world sorted.

  Was the monster right?

  Looking back over the last few years, Sophie had to admit that there was at least one deceased surgeon, a few unlucky strangers she’d met at precisely the wrong moment (for them) in her travels, and a handful of now-vanished ferry passengers who would no doubt have said yes, assuming they could have said anything, anymore. No doubt, Jess would say so, too, if anyone asked. So, probably, would the Little Orphan That Had, judging by her indiscriminate wielding of shovel.

  So. On Natalie’s side, there was the Whistler, plus everyone Sophie had met since the night they’d met the Whistler, and, if she were honest and weighing clearly, almost everyone she’d met before, in her first life, too.

  And on the other side … somehow … maybe … there was one Sophie. Who remained unconvinced.

  The trembling in her legs had subsided to ordinary, permanent quivers, which always made her feel as though she were a walking sapling. Something new and young. And the sky had darkened enough for Sophie to slip from her doorway. She started across the grass toward the edge of the cliffs. The ferries didn’t come to this side of the island, but sometimes she saw ships out there. Tonight, though, there was nothing but sea spray and whitecaps. As though the world had emptied. As though she were indeed Ferry Godmother, and had gone wherever ferry godmothers go when no one’s wishing.

  Turning away, Sophie lurched along the edge of the cliff toward the path down to the sea cave where she sometimes slept, marked by the tree she’d taken to climbing to wait for Eddie. To play at being Eddie’s Cheshire cat. Usually, she waited until full dark to do this, though almost no one but that kid ever came up here. But tonight, she didn’t care who saw her.

  Her legs seemed to solidify under her feet, and the last fog fled before her. Overhead, stars spilled across the newly dark sky like jacks from a bag. The billion shiny bits and pieces of a whole universe to play with and in, if only she could remember how. Hadn’t that always been the key to days worth having, life worth living? Keeping it all feeling like play?

  Even in her life before—from her first conscious days tossing peanut shells and her mom’s discarded syringes across the floor of their trailer—Sophie had intuited that.

  Natalie hadn’t. But she’d known Sophie did. Natalie had given Sophie meaning, and Sophie had given her joy. And that was why they’d been such good friends.

  By the time she reached the edge of the woods, the mist had cleared entirely. The stars positively billowed in their brightness, and Sophie was practically skipping. Refurbished-Sophie skipping, anyway, an arhythmic hop-stagger-straighten that made movement itself into a never-ending hopscotch game, a series of leaps from point to point. She hadn’t meant to head for the woods, had no conscious intention of skirting so close to Jess’s compound. At least, not so early in the evening, when everyone there would be awake, maybe even outside. In the moment, she barely felt conscious, was simply listening to her own motion, the wind of the world in her ears reminding her she was awake and alive. Only at the last possible second—when it really should have been too late—did she realize she’d been hearing Jess’s voice from the moment she’d entered the forest. She didn’t see Jess until she’d almost plowed straight through her.

  Even more astonishingly, Jess didn’t see Sophie. She was standing between two towering firs just inside the tree line, a few steps past the edge of her yard, her back ramrod straight and her hands near her mouth, like a chattering gopher up on its hind legs. Her scratchy yell poured through those hands, and it sounded so familiar: the same yell that had once unfurled across her trailer park, calling her daughter and Sophie home for dinner.

  Except this time, Jess was yelling a single, stretched-out name.

  “Eddddiiiieeeeeeee…”

  Diving off the path—with that sensation, again, of coming off her legs, though she never actually did—Sophie half fell, half plunged into the brush to Jess’s left and lay still. It was that stillness, most likely, that kept Jess from spotting her. That, and the fact that Jess was focused entirely on finding Eddie, calling him back from the cliffs or coves where she clearly assumed he’d gone.

  One of these nights, instead of calling for him, Jess was going to follow him out there. And if that was one of the increasingly frequent nights when Sophie happened to be there, too …

  That could have happened tonight, she realized. Unless Eddie had been out all day, she must have just missed him. The realization made Sophie’s skin tingle all over.

  Because she was about to see Natalie’s son again? Or because she might finally, finally, get to confront Natalie’s mother again? Or both?

  Who knew? Who cared? The tingle became a shudder. So delicious.

  For what seemed whole minutes, Sophie lay in the dirt and fallen needles, grinning right up to the edge of giggling, as though she and Jess and Eddie were playing Kick the Can, Ghost in the Graveyard. As though Jess were It. And now—same as then, way back when Jess had played those games with Sophie and Natalie, crawling under and behind trailers full of scary or stoned neighbors—Sophie had a sudden and surprising urge. She’d had it five years ago, too, in the New Hampshire woods, crawling across the roof of that tipped-over trailer at the moment she realized she really had done it, rendered herself invisible, so that no one, not the Whistler, not Jess, not even the Little Orphan That Hadn’t Yet, realized she was there:

  She wanted to be found. Right now!

  Staring through a curtain of pine needles at that stunted, sanctimonious little powerhouse of a woman—a piston with nothing left to drive—Sophie almost couldn’t keep from launching to her feet, dropping on Jess like she had in those other woods where each of them had lain the bodies of their children. No doubt that would have earned Sophie one last bath in Jess’s icy eyes, which somehow warmed as they enveloped. Surrounded you like a snowbank.

  Then Sophie would say hello. Because here, incredibly, was another discovery, something that she should have known already and hadn’t, because at the time of their last actual interaction, she just hadn’t lived long or hard enough, yet:

  Jess was as lonely as Sophie. Maybe even lonelier. Maybe—even when she’d had Natalie—she always had been.

  Maybe Sophie really should spring up? Sneak around behind, throw her hands across those ice-eyes and whisper, “Guess who?”

  And after that … what? Did she really imagine Jess would invite her back to the compound? Lecture her over Cheerios while some playoff baseball game played on the radio, the way Jess liked, and Benny, her fuzzy man, baked pies?

  Benny. Who’d actually loved Sophie, in a way, when Sophie was alive. And whom Sophie had loved in a totally different way—or else raped, it depended on perspective, maybe—once she was dead. Different-a
live. Whatever she was.

  Certainly, Benny did not and would not love her now, or ever again.

  Jess, either.

  So. Probably no actual sneaking up behind, then. The urge to get found evaporated like the last of the mist. Jess called, “Eddie, come on,” but not angrily, and then stalked off to her right toward the cliffs.

  She’d sounded much more annoyed than afraid, Sophie decided, sitting up.

  Because she doesn’t know how afraid she should be. Because she doesn’t know I’m here.

  Lurchy legs and all, Sophie sailed to her feet, feeling like one of those giant balloon-phantoms floating up off a lawn. Even as she jerked into motion, she was grinning again, because as usual, Jess had everything just a little bit wrong. She was right about the kid’s intentions, but wrong in the specifics. Yes, he’d headed for the cliffs and coves. But not the ones Jess had headed for.

  Skipping along the path, Sophie checked that Jess was well away to the right, then darted left toward the twisty tree, which had long since become Sophie and Eddie’s meeting place.

  Sure enough, there he was, swinging his stubby legs in his baggy, shiny pajama bottoms. His down coat puffed around him like a floatie, more suited to preventing drowning than freezing. His scrunched little face was aimed toward the Strait and the cove where his beloved killer whales sometimes surfaced. Tonight, though, the cove was silent except for the barely there lap and slap of water on rock. When Sophie got close enough, she saw the boy’s dark hair hanging straight across his own ice-blue eyes.

  This was Natalie’s son, all right. And that made him Natalie and Sophie’s, by right and by design. That was the way they’d always thought of and treated both their kids, when they’d each had one. When Sophie’s Roo and Eddie’s mom were still in the world.