The two of them lay together in the breezeless night on the banks of the Arthur Kill, overlooking the dark container ports of New Jersey.
He knew this was the last time they would be together.
This was their spot, on the blighted western shore of Staten Island, beneath the shadowy trusses of the Goethals Bridge and by the chained wire gate of the shuttered-up soap factory that years before had given Port Ivory its name. The ground around them was pocked with deep man-made holes. He’d always been told that the government had dug them, connected to a network of tunnels as part of a defense project during the Second World War. Now they were just the open, unhealed sores on the face of the abandoned landscape that protected him from the outside world.
The dark world that was encroaching on him tonight.
“You don’t have to go,” he said, his voice cracking as he stroked her apricot-smelling, honey-colored hair. His life was as gray and drab as the world around him. She was the only thing that added beauty to it.
“Yes, I do. You know I do. We’ve known that from the start. We both have to get out of here. Next year it’ll be your turn.”
His turn … He was poor; no one in his family had ever gone to college. With his father gone, how would that ever happen now?
“C’mon, you’re smart.” She smiled and stroked his face. “You’ll go far.”
Yes, he would go far. He felt it, no matter how everything seemed stacked against him. “I don’t know.”
And he was smart. Though sometimes he had trouble convincing his teachers, who were really stupid themselves and had no idea what was inside him. In a couple of days she was headed off to Canisius College in Buffalo. He’d known from the start that one day she would leave him behind. But now that the day had come, it felt no different from all the other hurt in his life. She was the first person he had truly known, who saw what was truly inside him. Not just the part he showed to others. Though they kept their time together hidden from everyone else. They made up names—she used his nickname, Streak. In the third grade it was given to him because he ran faster than anyone else. But since then it had morphed into something else, something his stupid younger brother had come up with that he hated.
Mean Streak.
For the kinds of urges that rose up inside him. Things he couldn’t control. Things the family saw. But his brother was a lying little pest who he should have dealt with long ago.
He called her Cordelia, from this play he’d been reading. The most beautiful and truthful. And most loyal. Now he would have only the wincing smell of chemicals and gasoline and these lonely trestles to remind him that she was ever here.
“You know we could go away.” He faced her. “College isn’t so great. We could go out west. My uncle has a ranch out in New Mexico. I was there once. It’s beautiful there. I could get a job. We could—”
“Ssshh …” She placed her finger against his lips. “No, we can’t. We just can’t. This is the way it is. Don’t spoil this. I want to remember things as happy between you and me.”
“You’ll meet someone,” he said. He felt something rise up in his blood. She would. Someone older. Cooler. Nothing will ever be the same.
“No, I won’t.” She giggled and leaned her head against his shoulder. “Not someone like you.”
Yes, you will, he knew, as clear as the lights were bright. Leave. Just like his dad had left. Back when he was six. He barely remembered him now. His mother always called it his fault. That he was just too much to take. Mean Streak.
And then Mike, five years older, who enlisted in the marines and was killed in a copter crash at Camp Lejeune while still in basic training.
Like every person he had ever put his trust in had left him. The night suddenly felt so sticky it seemed to cling to him like cellophane.
Yes, you will, he said to himself, certain. Leave.
He would never let that happen again.
“What?” She cocked her head, fixing on him. “You’re looking at me funny.”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
It was that nothing would ever be the same.
“It’s late,” she finally said. She pulled up her top and arched her back to wiggle up her jeans. “You’re acting so strange tonight. Maybe we should just head back.”
“Just another minute,” he begged. He felt that tingling start to come over him. He willed it to go away. “Please.”
“Okay, just one …” Her eyes lit up mischievously. “But you know what that always leads to, silly …”
He pulled her close, stroking her soft hair over and over, pushing the demons back, back into the hole where they crawled out from, his hand suddenly coming to rest on her shoulder.
A tanker went by, arcing into a wide sweep into Port Elizabeth, a sight they’d watched together surely a hundred times.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I mean, it’s so ugly it’s somehow beautiful. There’s a word for that somewhere. Much