Page 17 of Broken Lines

Cape Harbor, mercifully, isnot.

Population: seven hundred. Grocery stores: one. Liquor stores: two. Local shady wannabe drug dealer who can score me weed, mediocre cocaine, and most prescriptions I could think of: one.

Fucks to give about the enigmatic motherfucker who doesn’t speak and barely even shows his face around town, who lives in the old Fleetwood estate across the bay on Falstaff Island? Aka,me?

Motherfuckingzero.

And that’s exactly how I like it.

The sea wind whips at my shaggy hair, stinging my cheeks above my scruff. I inhale deeply, swallowing the briny air and closing my eyes as I bounce over the slight chop.

Slowly, the general “feeling like ass” sensations from when I woke up fades. And by the time I’m close enough to read the “no wake” sign on the dock at Cape Harbor, I’m feeling fantastic.

This message brought to you by: drugs.

I slide the boat in against the dock and toss a line over the mooring post. I pull the hat down lower, buttoning my sleeves down all the way and up to my neck to hide the ink. Not that half this fucking town isn’t lobstermen and other trade-types covered in ink of their own. But their tattoos haven’t been on billboards selling fucking cologne or on concert posters and album covers.

I pull the slack in and cinch the boat tight before I turn and head up the gangway.

“Afternoon, Robbie.”

I nod wordlessly at Albert; the old dock master whose job mostly consists of sitting under a beach umbrella with a line in the water while he crushes Bud Lights all day.

I’m seriously considering going out for his job when he retires.

“Pretty one out, ayuh?”

I nod, again, wordlessly.

“Ayuh, ayuh,” he nods back, tossing his fishing line back off the side of the dock. “Well, you take care, Robbie.”

I give him a thumbs up and another nod before I head past him up to the main road.

That’s another thing I like about this place. Coastal northern New England isn’t entirely different from Liverpool, in the United Kingdom, where I grew up. It’s got the same gritty, seafaring, salt of the earth type people who know how to fish and know how to keep to themselves.

Which is perfect. The world should be more like this, as a whole.

To them, I’m just the weird fucker who lives alone in a rambling old shipping tycoon’s mansion out on an island without a landline, cell service, or the internet. They can—and do—make up their own conclusions or stories as to how it is a guy who mostly dresses like a hobo managed to buy an island. The top theory I’ve heard whispered behind my back is “failed dot-com tech bro.”

Sure. Let’s go with that.

I come over once every three or four weeks to buy groceries, a lethal amount of alcohol, and sometimes, a felony amount of illicit and prescription drugs.

I pay cash. I usually keep my sunglasses on, and in ten years, I haven’t saidshitto anyone here. And it’s exactly what I want.

Well, notexactly. But it’s close enough to livable, which is more than I can say for whatever my life was before. Before I fucking disappeared. Before I vanished. Before I couldn’t put up the good fight against my demons anymore.

I head to Shoreline Spirits first. I can skip groceries this trip. One, because—annoyingly—I was just fucking over here a week and a half ago. But also, until winter really sets in at least, I grow a lot of my own vegetable in the small plot or the greenhouse next to the garage. And I’ve got a massive freezer in the basement stocked to the gills with frozen meats and other stuff.

But also, even with the coke, weed, and Percs still buzzing through my system, I’ve been awake for almost two hours.

Ineeda fucking drink.

“Mornin’, Rob.”

George, behind the counter of the liquor store, nods absently at me. He only half turns from his Red Sox highlights on ESPN at the sound of the chimes over the door.

“Anything aside from the usual?”

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