It’s the only word I’ve been able to think of since we got off the plane yesterday morning, the sky gray with low, tight-packed clouds, the tall evergreens that seem to surround so much of the city, dark green and sagging with moisture. Far off, Mount Rainier looms in the distance, a view you can only see from certain spots in town, and only if the sky lifts itself long enough to let the earth breathe, but somehow you feel its presence anyway.
Maybe another time, I’d appreciate it, find it beautiful. Striking, at the very least.
But it feels all wrong to me right now.
Surely the hotel room I’m in isn’t helping. Heavy like the outside: dark drapes, comforter, carpet. It’s a cheap shock after the unexpected luxury of the rooms we had in New Mexico, but it was the only place we could book with three vacancies. Jess’s room is two floors above me, opposite side, and I hate to think of it: her pulling shut the curtains, her lying beneath this polyester weight.
She won’t come to me, not when it’d take her so far from Tegan.
I roll over, stare at the blocky red-light numbers on an alarm clock the likes of which I haven’t seen since my teen years. Three fifty-eight a.m., exactly seven minutes from the last time I looked.
It’s me, is the thing.I’mthe heavy.
I’m responsible for this, for us being here. For there being only a few hours until this whole thing might be over.
I told Jess to dig deep about her mom. Told her what her interview was missing. I did my job, better than even Salem could’ve predicted, and now here we are.
Because Jess found Charlotte Caulfield.
Salem would object to this claim, I’m sure. After all, she’s the one who spent all day yesterday out, visiting every marina within fifty miles of here in the compact rental we picked up at the airport. Pictures of Charlotte on her phone and a promise to be discreet as she asked around.
“I won’t approach her if I find her,” she told Jess and Tegan, before she left. “I remember the conditions.”
Jess and Tegan couldn’t go, of course. Too risky if anyone saw Jess and recognized Charlotte in her face, too risky if one of these small marinas ended up being home to Charlotte after all. One glance out a small window, maybe, to spot your two daughters, and you’d know someone had finally found you. You’d know someone finally let themselves remember a movie you loved once, how you watched and decided that your dream home, if you could have whatever you want, would be a houseboat.
A dream come true.
Water the landscape.
You might be inclined to leave before they could find you.
I could’ve gone with Salem, I suppose, not that I’m the sort of guy who makes it easy to be discreet. But I could’ve gone. Split the work, ask the sort of questions I knew she’d spend the day asking.
I’m in town looking to rent a houseboat, I could’ve said.Mind if I have a look around?
My aunt has a houseboat here, I could’ve told a passerby, a picture at the ready on my phone.I’m supposed to meet her, but I’m lost trying to find it.
I could’ve done all the things an investigative journalist is supposed to do.
Instead, I acted as if it wasn’t even an option.
I stayed in the hotel all day and waited, same as Jess and Tegan. Sat—a little awkwardly—between them on one of the beds in their room, my laptop warm on my thighs as it played the movie Jess had remembered and that Tegan had never seen.
“Tom Hanks?” Tegan said, a confused expression on her face. “She had a thing for Tom Hanks?”
“She didn’t.” I didn’t need to look over at Jess to know she had the same weary, wary expression she’d had ever since she shared the memory in Santa Fe. First with me, then with Salem and her sister. A memory of her mother that had nothing to do with the men she dated, or the one she eventually left with.
“She had a thing for the houseboat.”
“Weird,” Tegan had answered, a little numbly.
But any time that houseboat was on the screen of my laptop, Tegan seemed to lean forward a little. She thought the Seattle in the movie seemed better than the Olympia we’d shown up in, I could tell, but Salem’s pretty sure she’s solved that particular inconsistency.
Lynton Baltimore ran a con in Seattle once.
He maybe wouldn’t have wanted to go back. Olympia makes a nice substitute, when it comes to Charlotte Caulfield’s dream.
4:01, those red-light numbers blare at me. It’s still nearly five hours before we plan to leave: to pack ourselves into the sedan and drive back to the northwest side of Budd Inlet, where there’s a midsize marina with a good number of liveaboards, where there’s a small, well-tended, pea-green houseboat with—you have to zoom in on the picture Salem took to see it—a wooden sign near its back door.
