But he still had that dream of being his father, and he’d had it again tonight before the sound he and Marie had heard had woken them both. In the dream, his father is in the hospital bed back in their house in Gastonia, his hands clenched around the sheet where it is pulled up to his chest. Winston is watching his father sleep and drift toward death, his dry tongue occasionally moving across his dry lips. Winston reaches for a cloth on the bedside table and dampens it with water. He passes the wet cloth over his father’s mouth. In the dream, Winston looks down at his own hands and sees his father’s, and then he realizes his hands are closed around the sheet, and he is lying in his father’s sickbed, and he is dying alone.
Would Colleen sit at his bedside like he’d sat at his father’s? Winston wondered if the old man had cared for him as much as Winston cared for his daughter. Surely he did, but it seemed impossible to Winston, impossible that his own father had been interested in or capable of feeling this love that could only be described as debilitating. It embarrassed him to think of his father loving him that much. And why was he thinking of it? What was he afraid of on these nights when he saw his father’s hands as his own? Colleen sitting or not sitting by his bedside, swabbing or not swabbing his chapped lips with cool water? Was he afraid of the hole his passing might leave in her life?
Colleen was just twenty-six, but she had already lost a child, Winston and Marie landing in Dallas too late to even lay eyes on his body. What do they even do with a baby that never drew breath? They hadn’t attended a funeral, and Colleen had never mentioned one. He’d been too afraid to ask her; he didn’t know if Marie had asked her, and he was ashamed of that. He’d spent so many nights since lying in bed, hurting for Colleen and her lost child, his grandson. Now the thought of his or Marie’s passing as compounding that hurt was too much for him, and for a moment he found himself wishing he and Marie had never had Colleen, had not created this life they would hurt for, this life that would hurt for them in return.
Jesus Christ, Winston, he thought, why are you even thinking about this right now? Was it Colleen’s losing the baby? Was it Marie’s being sick again, this time worse than before? Or was it the plane they’d heard—or at least the plane they thought they’d heard? The specter of a fiery crash flashed through Winston’s mind with no sound, only the images of flames and the spinning down of huge engines. But it was just an airplane coming in low, he thought. Or a dream. Maybe he and Marie had dreamed the same thing, and he would arrive at the dark airport and find it just as quiet and empty as his side of the bed back home.
The day before Halloween and not as cold as it would be, but cold enough to send the vacationers scrambling back to work and to school and to their lives somewhere outside Oak Island. Even the soft-spoken, unassuming Canadians—the ones who hadn’t headed as far south as Myrtle Beach, whose wives had combed the autumn beaches in one-piece bathing suits while looking for sand dollars, and whose husbands had kept the municipal golf course open into the middle of the month—had all gone home.
The island, thirteen miles long and four miles wide at its widest and sparsely dotted with old single-family homes, fishing shacks, vacation houses, and trailers, was heavily wooded and quiet. It ran east to west off the southeastern elbow of North Carolina. To people who lived there, it felt like a place that had either gone undiscovered or had been forgotten by the rest of the state, that feeling growing so strong as to be nearly palpable as the island changed seasons and a blanket of unperturbed silence settled over it. As fall turned toward winter, the island always seemed to grow smaller, more remote, more insular.
There was no clock in Marie’s car, and Winston had forgotten his watch where he usually left it beside his wallet and keys on the counter, but it was nearing 4:00 a.m. by the time he headed east down Oak Island Drive. Most of the businesses—a fudge shop, a T-shirt store, a pancake house, all the motels—had been shuttered for the off-season. The few places that had remained open for the winter had been closed for hours. After he and Marie had left Gastonia in 1963 and moved to Oak Island, they had joked that the island rolled up its sidewalks at 6:00 p.m., which was ironic only because there were no sidewalks. Winston thought then and he still thought now that the island would make an ideal place for someone to hide, and perhaps that’s what he’d been doing all these years.
As he drove across the bridge above the waterway, Winston watched the light from the Caswell Beach lighthouse at the far eastern end of the island strafe the waterway in perfect increments. It flashed in his rearview mirror, and for a moment he could both see and feel its light in his eyes. When Marie’s car climbed to the top of the bridge, the beacon light from the tiny airport appeared through the distant trees on his left. He had been at this exact spot on the bridge at night what must have been a million times over the years, and each time he felt like he was leaving the bright gleam of the lighthouse for the tiny spot of the beacon light, a light that was overwhelmed by the darkness of the mainland that waited for him in the woods across the water.
When Colleen was a little girl, both when they reached the apex of this bridge and the even taller and more magnificent drawbridge that spanned the Cape Fear River, her voice would come from the backseat, asking, “What would happen if we fell from here?” and Winston would consider what would cause someone to topple from such a height to the water below. Suicide? A vehicle fire? A bridge collapse? He pictured himself and Colleen holding hands and climbing over the guardrail before leaping into the still waters. No matter how many times she asked, he always answered her question with the same response: “I would save you.”
But as she grew older her questions became more particular: “What would happen if we drove off the bridge?” or “What would happen if our car flipped over the side?” The more questions she asked, the more her fear became corporeal, and she began to construct detailed stories of the tragedies that would await them. Winston always knew the answers to the questions she had, because he had trained—made all his deputies train, as a matter of fact—for water rescues. The county was dotted with water: lakes, canals, creeks, and waterways disguised as rivers. They had encountered submerged vehicles before, and he’d pictured himself seat-belted into the driver’s seat of a car upside down underwater, Colleen in the backseat. There would be about thirty seconds before the interior filled with water. He would remove his seat belt, reach back, and do the same to Colleen’s. He would pull her into the front seat, and, as water poured into the car, he would use the spring-triggered pin on his key chain （he made Marie and all his deputies carry them） to break the window and climb out. He would remind himself to follow the bubbles to the surface, Colleen clutched in his arms, his eyes searching for the light above him while his lungs waited for air.
But he didn’t explain all of this to Colleen when they passed over bridges during her childhood. Instead, he would look at her in the rearview mirror when she was young enough to sit in the backseat, or he would turn his head to look at her when she was old enough to sit beside him, the water through her window stretching out below them beneath the bridge, and he would always say the same thing: “Don’t look down, don’t look back. Just look where we’re going.”