Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,59

But Liz, listen to me. If anybody comes looking for you, get up here as fast as you can. You’ll be safe here.”

I never again heard from Joe Giorno. No one ever came looking or asking questions. He was gone, as if he’d never existed. I stopped hanging out at the Marlin.

Doyle sent me a card on my fortieth birthday, to my mother’s New York City address. By then I’d moved around the city many times. By then I’d also been sober for nine years. The card had a bottle of French wine on the cover and the inside read, You’re just like wine, you get better with time. He’d signed the card, Love, Doyle.

Standing in the Orlando airport waiting for our luggage with the elderly couple from Charlestown who loved Disney World, I considered asking them if they knew the Doyles on Dunstable Street. But there were probably hundreds of Doyles in Charlestown, and I did not remember his parents’ first names, if I’d ever known them at all.

Later, in the rental car driving to Disney World, while our daughter slept sprawled across the backseat, I thought about telling my husband the story. But that girl no longer exists, and my husband has never met her. He’s never seen me drunk. He doesn’t know about Mac, or Bobby huddled in that Cape Cod living room, how close I came to the edge. I am now a mother who takes her daughter to Disney World, married to a man who does the same.

I think of Doyle still, and my heart feels warm as I send good thoughts his way. From time to time I feel him thinking about me, and wonder how he’s faring.

PART III

END OF THE LINE

THE EXCHANGE STUDENT

BY FRED G. LEEBRON

Provincetown

The news started coming down Route 6 early that Saturday morning, a peculiar siren sound like a cross between a busy phone signal and an overworked synthesizer. It blasted into the house at 8:32 a.m. when the exchange student was woken by high-pitched keening from the downstairs kitchen.

His eyes raced around the still strange bedroom. His halffull blue rucksack leaned in a corner, his Danish-English dictionary sat on a dark pine desk. He felt under the bed for his unpacked suitcase. Was it keening or was it wailing? He knew he should stay in his room until it passed. It became guttural, as if the voice were choking, and the only words he could understand were: “Now, now …” Doors were opening and closing all over the house. There was sobbing. He thought hard to the last time he had heard such emotion. There wasn’t a time. The reputation of New Englanders was that they were restrained, deeply reticent, until you got to know them, and that often took a good while. Even then, sometimes, you wouldn’t catch so much as a grin or a tear. He lay in bed. His new watch, waterproof to a depth of fifteen feet, told him that an hour had passed. An hour!

It was only August. He still had eleven months left, if he were counting, which he was not. He was just trying to endure. His American brother frequented the gay discotheques, his American sister thought she must be far prettier than she was, his American father was a gnarled pontificator (about what wasn’t yet clear to the exchange student) missing a thumb—he ran a whale watching company—and his American mother seemed as old and stunted as his grandmother back home. Three weeks ago, when he’d seen this unlikely group at South Station in Boston along with all the other host families, he’d prayed they weren’t his—and he never prayed.

Now it was 10:05 and the house was silent. It was always difficult to know when to appear and when to disappear. His room was tucked away in a far upper corner, and he could be as invisible as they needed him to be. He supposed he could use the bathroom.

His trip took him past his sister’s room, which was empty, and to his brother’s door, which was thrown open to the usual mess of cassettes and records. His brother liked to quiz him on music and was appalled by his limited knowledge.

The bathroom was pleasant and white and warm. It caught the morning sun through a skylight. He wondered where everyone was and what the hell had happened. When he was finished, he went into the hallway and looked out the window onto the driveway. Empty. It was a Sunday morning