And I was different in a way I didn’t yet understand. I was separated from everything and everyone around me, as if I’d brought something back with me from Colin that had changed me. Not from the grave, not from the coffin, or from his body. From somewhere else, wherever death is. I’d brought back a shadow that fit over me, something transparent, undetectable, but there, every inch of me covered by it, like another skin. It wasn’t a mood, an emotion, it was a state of being, and it felt permanent. I was permanently shadowed. I would never be without that shadow.

In the spring I would resod the grave. I would plant different flowers—daffodils and tulips. Until then I would visit the disturbed earth and say comforting things to that littlest of brothers beneath the earth.

When the ferry arrived, Tuck and I stood in line. The planks came down. He held out his hand and I took it. We walked onto the boat.

I remembered the smell of the grave. He was a child and I was a child. I remembered the tomb by the sounding sea. I remembered the dirt under my fingernails. I remembered the terrible days after my mother had died. I remembered my mother weeping in the night.

The ferry whistled. Its motors churned us backward.

Tuck and I stood shoulder to shoulder on the upper deck of the boat. I had nothing with me but my wallet and a wool jacket. I didn’t watch the landing disappear. I looked instead at the wide gray water, the cape getting closer and closer and more and more real.

Chapter 25

25

On Emily’s Bridge, Tuck and I both fell asleep. We’d reached the bridge midafternoon, exhausted from the drive, and we’d sat down on the narrow bridge to wait, and without meaning to, slipped into sleep.

When we woke up, it was very dark, and we couldn’t see anything but each other and the wooden boards we were leaning against. I felt a whirl of confusion, but it settled slowly, and I remembered where I was, and who I was with. I looked at him, messy hair, wide mouth. We scrambled up, since Emily’s Bridge was so narrow there was barely room for a car, let alone two sleeping bodies.

“I’m frozen,” he said. I nodded. I heard wind in the leaves, and cars on the highway far away. I felt stiff with cold.

I’d thought about Emily’s Bridge obsessively for days, the smell of it, the sweet rotten odor of damp wood, and the sound of the river below. In my imagination Cole’s identity was waiting for us here. We’d pluck it down as easily as sliding a jacket off a hanger. We’d go back home with that garment and throw it over the man himself. And he would disappear.