Jake stood still, his eyes locked on the floor, taking mental snapshots of the pattern he saw in the mess. “Sonofabitch,” he said, only the sound was lost in the noise of the storm. He began clearing the room.

He shoveled newspapers aside with his foot, swept chairs into corners, upended the coffee table and flung it aside. Jake grabbed the end of the steel-and-leather sofa, lifted it, and dragged it across the floor. The carpets didn’t bunch up because they had been nailed, screwed, and stapled down by his old man. “Come on,” he ordered Spencer.

Spencer, still stuck on confused, picked up the dragging end. “Where are we taking it?”

Jake nodded at the door and barked, “Outside,” like it was obvious.

Jake swung his end of the sofa around, balanced it on his knee, gripped the knob and pulled the door open. He hadn’t been prepared for the wind and it slammed the door in, nearly tearing it off its hinges. They squeezed the sofa through and Jake dropped his end onto the deck. Spencer lost his grip and the sofa banged down and fell over onto its back. They ran back into the house.

“Come on!” Jake threw a footstool into a bronze bust by Rodin, knocking it over. He dug like a dog, flinging things off the carpet. A vase exploded in sharp colored shards when it hit a bookcase. Paintings toppled.

Jake jammed the piano aside and it brayed like a wounded elephant. Within minutes they had cleared the center of the living room, exposing the dull, paint-splattered quilt-work of carpets.

Jake ran up the stairs and turned back to the living room to take it in. His eyes locked on the clear area excavated amid the garbage and furniture. He sat down.

Spencer stumbled up, turned around, and flopped down beside Jake. “Holy fuck,” he said.

Up close it was just a jumble of color, of overlapped carpets and splatters of paint. But from the staircase, with the benefit of distance and perspective, an unmistakable image was visible in the center of the room, like an X-ray of a coffin. It was a portrait of the same eyeless face Jacob Coleridge had painted on the wall of his hospital room.

“What the fuck is that?” Spencer asked.

Jake thought about Jeremy jumping up and down in the middle of the living room when asked to describe his friend Bud. “The man in the floor.”

53

Frank now understood what Jake had been talking about on the phone yesterday: Jacob was frightened. “What are you talking about?”

Jacob rubbed his face with one of the cocooned insect pincers that had been sewn on. The movement was unselfconscious, feral. “August 1969, Frank.”

Frank pulled a chair over from the window and the plastic on the bottom of its feet sounded like fingernails against the linoleum. He sat down, just beyond Jacob’s reach, and laced his fingers together behind his head. Not that his brother could do much damage with those soft clubs, but Frank was a cautious man, a quality that years of hunting big game had honed to a second-nature status in his library of life skills. “Jacob, whatever you are going to say, whatever has you scared, is not true. Okay? This is me you’re talking to. Whatever you want me to deal with, I will. Okay? I don’t know how much time you have—we have—and I don’t want to piss it away on stupidity. I have things I want to say to you and—”

“Shut up!” The buckles hanging against the bed frame rattled loudly.

Frank recoiled, looked into the fierce black holes of his brother’s eyes. Is this what Jake had been talking about? This background chatter of fear, some sort of subliminal message hidden in the signal of his voice? “Jacob, what are you talking about?”

Jacob was rocking side to side in his bed, something about it disturbing.

“You were there. You know what happened. Mia saw it first. And then she died. And then Jake…began sliding away. I lost him, too, Frank. I promised not to tell anyone. I promised and I kept my word. But I can’t keep a secret like this forever. Not forever. No matter how hard I want to.” His words spilled out like dirty motor oil, flecked with charred bits of his broken brain, and Frank wondered if Jacob had left the room.

“He’s here, Frank.” The black specks of Jacob’s pupils no longer looked focused, or even human; the planes of his eyes had dropped away and he was looking at images inside his head.

“Who is?”

“Him!”

“Jacob, this has nothing to do with the boat. Be rational. How could it?”

Jacob’s eyes came back on like someone had put new batteries into the compartment in the back of his head. “You never went aboard. You didn’t see what happened.” Old ghosts were coming out of the dark now, firing up the fear machine.

“Jacob, what are you talking about?”

The beams of his brother’s eyes crawled across the room and stopped on his face.

Frank wanted to believe that it was Alzheimer’s talking, not a rational human being, but his brother’s voice was calm and even. “Jacob, listen to me. You have to stop talking this shit. Okay? We both know what you’re talking about. We didn’t do anything wrong—you didn’t do anything wrong. There was nothing you could have done differently.”

“We could have left him there.”

Behind the burn marks and stitches and antibiotic ointment Jacob Coleridge looked scared.

Frank shook his head. “He was just a little kid, Jacob. If we would have left him there, he would have died.”

“Better him than all of us.”

54

It was easy to see that the main event was only a few hours off; the world outside looked like it had been scripted for a Hollywood disaster film. By the time Frank pulled into the driveway, Spencer’s cruiser was gone. He ran from the big H1 to the house and the rain clattered against his hood like ball bearings. When he turned the knob the wind ripped the door away from him and slammed it open, sending a pile of mail flapping off into the house like frightened birds.

Jake was suiting up inside the entryway. Beside him, on the Nakashima console—a broad slab of undressed walnut—the weird spherical sculpture of welded steel shafts hummed with the electricity the storm carried, like a static tuning fork. On the floor a little to the left sat Kay’s airline-tag-covered cello case.

“Jake, I gotta talk to you.”

Jake nodded at the door. Or the world beyond. Or maybe at nothing at all—it was hard to tell. “I have to get to Hauser’s. We can talk in the truck.”

Frank pulled the big brass zipper on the Filson rain slicker up to his chin. “Let’s roll, kiddo.”

They ducked out into the storm.

The only sign that life existed anywhere other than the interior of the big metal beast that carried them west was the steady stream of man-made debris that blew over the empty highway and the intermittent flicker of lights in roadside homes. If Jake had been paying attention to these things he would have been surprised that anyone had stayed behind. As things stood, he couldn’t muster up enough interest to notice. The smart ones had left. The rest stayed. That was as far as he got in the equation.

The wind and rain hammered in on a horizontal trajectory and Frank had to continually fight the massive vehicle to keep it on the road. The interior smelled of diesel fuel, shell casings, blood, and wet pencils. Jake unconsciously gripped the handle by the windshield, his mind turning the events of the past few days slowly over.