Page 73 of Fated

I pull him down to the sand to sit in the cool, fine grains. He comes softly, settling behind me. When he opens his arms I rest against him.

His heart thuds against my ear and I wait for him to begin. The humid, perfumed air blankets us, the waves and the frogs play our soundtrack, and the breeze drags sand across our bare legs.

McCormick’s hand plays a slow circle over my back.

“You came back to the island when you were seven,” I remind him.

I feel the curve of his lips as he presses his mouth to my temple. And then he begins.

“My parents left because of me, and they came back because of me. I was born here, in Essie’s cottage.”

“Really!”

He laughs, a deep rumble. “You already knew that. You were born down the street.”

I was born in Glastonbury.

“A week later, my parents decided they didn’t want to raise their son on an island with so few opportunities. They wanted a big life for me.”

“Most parents do.”

He nods. “So they packed two suitcases and flew to New York. My dad found work as a porter at a seedy hotel near Times Square. My mom found part-time work at a wash-and-fold laundry and more night work at a garment factory. We were the kind of poor where you know the balance of your bank account down to the last cent and you know you’re not going to have enough money to make it to the end of the week, much less the end of the month. We didn’t buy clothes. I was on the end of a neighborhood hand-me-down chain. All my clothes had been worn by at least five or six kids before I got them. They were frayed and stained, and my shoes had holes and the rubber soles were peeling off. Kids at the playgrounds would point, call me nasty names. My mom always lifted her head when she heard them and said, ‘Don’t you listen to them. You’re a good boy, Aaron. You’re my boy.’”

He looks out over the water, a faraway look in his eyes. I grip the fabric of his T-shirt in my hands. I can picture him, a little dark-haired boy, pale and brown-eyed, standing in ragged clothes while kids pointed and called him names. The kind of poor he’s talking about, I know it too. I can still feel the hunger of a gnawing empty stomach, sleeping on someone else’s floor.

You wouldn’t know it now. No one would, looking at me or reading about my pedigree.

But we’re all a thousand layers making up a single life.

“Your mom loves you,” I tell him, glad she was there to stand up for him.

“She did.” His voice is warm, happy with the memory. Then he shakes his head. “When I was seven I was already smoking joints and drinking liquor. When my mom came home early from work one day—she was sick—she found me and the neighbor kids sharing a forty-ounce.” He laughs then. “I was on a bad road. Fighting, skipping school. Only seven and already cursing, drinking, smoking. Our two suitcases were packed that night. And me, my mom, and my dad were back on the island the very next day.”

I’m stunned. “You were a deviant at age seven.”

He strokes my back. “You liked me. You followed me around for weeks until I finally decided to talk to you.”

I would have liked to have seen that. I imagine he would have fascinated me, a hard seven-year-old from the city, transported to this tiny island. He was a legend, I’m sure.

“And then you decided to stay here forever. Your own tropical paradise.” I lean into him, breathing in the salt and the sand.

He laughs. “Right. Or the opposite.”

“The opposite? Like Amy?”

“Like you,” he says, smiling down at me. “You wanted to live in the big world, and so did I. This island always felt like a prison. One that was impossible to escape.” He tilts his head to the sky. “Whenever I looked up at the stars, all I saw were bars. I wanted to leave in the worst way.”

I think I know exactly how he feels. Because right now I’d like him to leave the island too. I’d like him to step out of this dream and into Geneva. I’d like to see what might happen if he were real.

But he’s right, this island is a prison. The bars are the confines of my dreams.

“I started swimming,” McCormick says. “I took to the water like I’d been born swimming. You couldn’t get me out of it. I’d spend hours in the sea. So much so that Essie’s banana bread was the only thing that could tempt me out.”

I think about the honey taste and the crumbly texture of the banana bread we ate on the hilltop and I wonder if Essie made that. If so, I can see why it pulled him from the water.

“Then, when I was eleven, I terrified my parents and everyone else. One day while swimming I decided I was going to swim around the whole island in one go. So I took off without telling anyone. It’s an eight-mile circumference. When I climbed back on the beach I was grinning from ear to ear, so proud of myself. I got a different reception than I thought I would.”

“I bet they were frantic,” I say, thinking of the scene on the beach tonight.

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