The vacant factory, only one of many that littered the city—mementos of an age when the textile industry had sustained it—the same as in Potter’s Cove—loomed beyond the shadows of the lot across the street, the enormous rotting structure blocking much of the moon, the remaining portion masked by spitting bursts of snow.
Because I knew my supervisor wouldn’t be around, I’d brought a six-pack with me. The beer relaxed me, and I hoped it might help me forget all that had happened and much of what Bernard had said on that tape. But even alcohol failed to rid me of the continuous stream of thoughts exploding through my mind, because just like the nightmares, we’d all experienced the tape. Now it was just a matter of deciphering it, and the potential danger therein was different than anything we’d encountered to that point. Different than a dream or a feeling, this was more than real; it was palpable. But were the things he’d hinted at on the tape just more of his stories, more dramatics, or had he spoken the truth down in that cellar?
Think back through the years, fellas. Think about all the times things with me just didn’t add up, how things seemed just a bit off, just a little strange.
I dug a beer from a small cooler at the bottom of the gym bag I brought with me on each job, cracked it open and took a pull.
I wish I could’ve told you the truth about me, about the things I’ve done, but if you’re honest with yourselves and you stop and think long and hard, you’ll realize the answers are right there and have been all along.
Visions of Toni came to me then. She’d been asleep when I left for the shift, curled up and warm in bed. She always looked so beautiful and peaceful when she slept, like she hadn’t a care in the world, and this time had been no exception. When I’d returned home from Rick’s I told her about the tape but left out most of the specifics and downplayed the confessional aspect. She dismissed it as Bernard just being Bernard right to the end and was more concerned with how I was doing. We cuddled in the recliner and watched TV until she went to bed, then I sat with her and ran my fingers through her hair the way she liked until she’d drifted off to sleep. Sitting there on the edge of the bed, I wondered if perhaps part of what Bernard had said was true.
Bet she realizes she should’ve picked someone else to spend her life with.
Maybe that’s why our lovemaking hadn’t been the same in eons. Maybe she loved me but was no longer in love with me—hadn’t been in years. Maybe she was afraid she’d become pregnant and the idea of bringing a child into a marriage such as ours was beyond what even she was prepared to endure. Maybe she was getting it somewhere else. Maybe it was as simple as that. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe we adored each other and simply had problems like any other couple. Maybe as long as we knew the other would always be there, it didn’t really matter.
I killed the beer and tossed the empty into the gym bag.
Think back through the years, fellas…
But for certain specific episodes of importance or particular impact, the years prior to our teens were vague at best. Life in Potter’s Cove was largely uneventful, and things rarely changed. It was a time when a distinction still existed between “school” clothes and “play” clothes, a time before VCRs or video games or cable television, before personal computers, the Internet and e-mail, cell phones and beepers and microwave ovens, and a time when the handheld (wireless) calculator was about as exciting as technology was liable to get. It was a time when kids spent most of their time playing outside, rarely watched what the seven television channels (nine or ten if you counted UHF and had the appropriate antenna) had to offer, and a period that produced the last generation to grow up in a world not quite so jaded and not yet consumed with technology. It was the beginning of the end of an era of innocence to be sure.
In the summer of 1975 we were all in the process of making the awkward transition into our teenage years. At thirteen, we were no longer considered little children per se, but were still far from adulthood, trapped instead for that and a handful of years to come at some unidentifiable point in between.
The year before, President Nixon had resigned, and Patty Hearst had been kidnapped. In January, men who seemed to be on television constantly at hearings none of us paid much attention to—John N. Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman, and John D. Erlichman—were found guilty of the Watergate cover-up and sentenced to jail time ranging from thirty months to eight years. In April, the Vietnam War finally ended as the city of Saigon surrendered and the remaining Americans were evacuated.
Between Vietnam and Watergate, times had changed—even at thirteen you could sense it—both had damaged us as people somehow, and things didn’t feel the same. People had begun to view the world differently, with less trust and higher cynicism. The damage was done, and good, bad or indifferent, the country would never be the same again.
But that summer there were more important things to most thirteen-year-old boys. The Red Sox were tearing it up (and would go on to the World Series, only to lose to Cincinnati in a heartbreaking game-seven). Bernard’s mother had taken us to the R-rated films One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Dog Day Afternoon, but when Jaws hit the theaters it immediately became the coolest and scariest thing any of us had ever been allowed to see. Even in summer hotspots like Potter’s Cove and all throughout Cape Cod, people stayed out of the water in record numbers, constantly on the lookout for killer sharks, seeing fins behind every wave.
Later that year President Ford would survive two assassination attempts in less than seventeen days, then go on to lose to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.
But the summer prior, the summer of 1975, marked the first real memory I had that signaled there was something a bit different about Bernard.
Of the group, Bernard had the youngest mother, and although all our parents knew one another, none of them socialized or could be described as friends. She was the only one who didn’t work. She had injured her back and received disability checks from the government, though she always looked fine to us. She drank a lot and rarely left the house during the day, but despite her problems, she was a very attractive woman, and considered by us to be a “cool” mom. Bernard slept at one of our houses almost every weekend, as his mother “entertained” various men she met at the local taverns she frequented and preferred to be alone with her beaus. This was common knowledge, but something none of us ever talked about, as Bernard seemed fine with it and only became embarrassed or upset if someone outside our group made a comment.
Of course, between her looks and behavior (which included sunbathing in their backyard in a bikini during the summer months) she quickly became a focal point for much of our hormone-crazed pubescent lust, but it was always kept quiet if Bernard was around. Still, he knew we were all drooling over his mother, but he seemed too preoccupied with every other female in town to notice. An interest in women was still relatively new to all of us, and Rick was the only one who’d had sex, having lost his virginity just weeks after his thirteenth birthday to a fifteen-year-old high school cheerleader the rest of us could only dream about even talking to.