As his frail body settled deeper into the sand, he thought about how he would give up everything just to revisit that moment with Annie. To hold her after she confronted him with the letter and struck him. To rectify the situation, instead of allowing her to walk away.
“Now why the hell are you sitting in the sand like some kind of lizard? Don’t you know there’s a storm coming?”
A shiver ran down Randall’s spine at the sound of that voice. He summoned only an incomplete memory before turning around to face its source, wondering how he’d forgotten the face of the man staring down at him with his hand outstretched.
Chapter Five
The image of the man’s face was blurred by the glare of the sun from behind him, the glow surrounding his features making him look like an angel.
“What are you doing here, Maurice?” Randall asked.
“If the mountain will not come to Mohammed . . .”
Maurice was Randall’s elder brother by four years. As they shook hands, Randall scanned his memories for the last time he’d seen him. However long it had been, the years had been as unkind to Maurice as they had to him. In Maurice, he saw a slightly bulkier version of himself. His eyes even carried the same haunted look, as if they expected something to happen at any second, the skin surrounding them an array of interwoven, haphazard lines and grooves.
Letting go of his brother’s hand, Randall was struck by an unknown fear. Although they were out in the open, he felt trapped, cornered. The sky felt low, as if the clouds were falling toward him.
He stared up at his brother. “How did you find me?” he asked.
“Where else would you be?” Maurice’s eyes scrunched together in concentration, as if he were trying to read Randall’s thoughts.
Maurice was a preacher, or had been. Randall had no way of knowing if that was still true. He couldn’t, for the life of him, remember the last time his brother had entered his thoughts. Certainly not since his release. Even in those indeterminable days in his cell, he couldn’t recall once thinking about the man who was staring back at him now as if he were trying to unravel a particularly tricky puzzle.
“I need to go home,” said Randall, the sense of entrapment yet to dissipate.
“Here, let me help you,” said Maurice, taking him by the elbow after seeing him falter.
The pain in his knee had flared to life, and he grimaced as Maurice hauled him to his feet.
The sky and land could sometimes play tricks on you, and Randall found himself back outside his house as if no time had passed at all.
“After all that happened,” said Maurice, as Randall unlocked the door, “I can’t understand why you would want to return here.”
“It’s my home.”
Inside, Maurice lifted a family picture from the mantelpiece. Wiping dust from the glass, he said, “Does it help you face up to what you did?”
Randall didn’t much care for the way his brother stared at the picture of Annie and David. “It’s my home, right or wrong. It’s where I belong.”
“You’ve done your penance, Frank. There’s no need for you to be living here with these ghosts of what you once were.”
“What would you have me do?” said Randall, heating coffee for them both at the stove.
“That’s why I’m here. I want you to come live with me.”
Randall wound down the window of Maurice’s truck, as the vehicle shook and jarred its way down the path. The sense of claustrophobia had returned, his chest tight as he sucked in the air from outside. He looked behind him to see his duffel bag in the back seat of the car. A fragment of memory came back to him from earlier. Him falling faint, and Maurice handing him some water as he loomed over him. They’d talked but Randall couldn’t recall much about their conversation, though at some point he must have agreed to this journey.
The sky was a rolling canvas of gray and white as they drove along Seawall Boulevard. Randall hadn’t returned here since that first day back on the island. He welcomed his relative solitude in his house, but it was good to see people now and again. As the landscape scrolled by, he snuck glimpses of families strolling across the promenade, lovers hand in hand, a group of young men unloading their jeeps so they could fish on the jetty, and was reminded how he had become an outsider in his own town.
“Remind me where we’re going, Maurice,” he said, as they stopped at a crossing.
“My home,” said Maurice, his eyes not moving away from the pedestrians walking in front of the windshield. “My church.”
Again, Randall was struck by how little he knew about his brother. He recalled he was a preacher, but had no idea where he lived, or even what denomination he was. They had never been a particularly religious family growing up. Their father had been a quiet man who worked offshore for most of the year. Randall recalled going with his mother to a church as a very young boy, though he wasn’t sure he could trust his memories. They were always picture-perfect snapshots. Beautiful, cloudless summer days where everyone was smiling, the men in their pressed suits, the women in their glorious flower-patterned dresses. Without fail, his memories from those formative times were tinged with happiness, even though that had all changed when his mother left.
He didn’t ask for any more details. As Maurice headed over the causeway, Randall’s energy began to fade and the pull of sleep became too much to deny. He closed his eyes and when he awoke an unknown time later, he was disoriented. “Where are we going?” he said, feeling ridiculous for asking such a question.
If Maurice was surprised, he hid it well. His crinkled face kept staring ahead, unblinking gray eyes fixed on the endless highway. “You’re coming to stay with me for a few days, brother.”
Randall had given up drinking long before his stay in prison, but the way he felt now reminded him of the fugue of inebriation. His reality was distorted. A little too real to be dreamlike, but distorted nonetheless. “I can’t stay long,” he told his brother. “I have my delivery soon.”
Maurice nodded and kept driving.
The sky was darkening as they arrived at a small town on the outskirts of Dickinson, Maurice driving his truck up the pathway leading to a wood-paneled church.
“You live in a church?” said Randall, forgetting for a second that his brother was a preacher.
“I might as well. My place is at the back. Welcome to St. Saviour’s.”
Randall opened the truck door and swung his damaged knee down from it with a grimace. He missed his little place more than he’d have imagined he ever could, and searched for the memory telling him how long he’d agreed to stay here.
Maurice carried his bag to the small house to the rear of the church.
“You’re still a preacher.”
“Pastor Randall. Kind of catchy, ain’t it?”
It didn’t sound right to Randall’s ears. Randall had been his only name for all those years on the inside, and it sounded wrong on another man, even if it was his brother.
As Maurice led him inside to the spare bedroom and invited him to freshen up, he recalled a time as children when Maurice had given him a beating for sneaking into his room one summer evening and going through his things.
“You need to do any stretching for that leg of yours?” said Maurice, standing in the doorway as if guarding an exit.