Stranger With My Face (3 page)

“See you tomorrow,” I said, and Jeff mumbled something indiscernible, apparently sorry he had devoted so much of his valuable
time to me.

He headed off southward toward the village and I went in the opposite direction toward the point. The first short segment
of the road was cut off from the water by dunes and sea oats, and the air was still and hot as though the remnants of summer
were trapped there waiting for release. When I reached the curve, however, the salt breeze struck me full in the face, and
with it came the smells of seaweed and the surf as it swirled around the rocks. Up ahead, perched precariously on its ledge,
Cliff House was silhouetted against the glare of the afternoon sun. The slanted rays glanced off the windows of my mother’s
studio with such brilliance the whole upper story seemed formed of dancing rainbows. I wondered how she could work, caught
in the turbulence of that many-shafted light. Beneath this sparkling crown, the rest of the house looked like a one-dimensional,
construction-paper cutout glued to the sky.

Suddenly I had the feeling that I was being followed. I glanced quickly behind me. The road was empty. I began to walk a little
faster, aware that I was just being silly. I hadn’t heard or seen anything to make me believe there was anyone anywhere around.
There was nothing on the northern tip of the island except Cliff House, and no one ever came that way unless it was for the
purpose of visiting our family.

“You’re paranoid,” I told myself out loud in disgust. “This business with Gordon and Natalie has gotten to you.”

Still, I quickened my footsteps the way you do when someone is walking too close behind you, and I was almost running by the
time I reached the path that led to the house.

I entered through the kitchen, which was just as it had been when I had left that morning, except that my mother had put the
milk back in the refrigerator and my father had evidently fixed himself some eggs and bacon later in the day. Dad is a night
person and Mom a day one, so their schedules don’t coincide. Mom goes straight to her studio when we leave the house in the
morning, and Dad sleeps late and makes up for it by staying up and working half the night.

Now I could hear the sound of him typing on the computer behind the closed door of his office, and I knew better than to disturb
him.

Instead, I climbed the stairs to the living room. Neal was there, sprawled on his stomach on the rug in the square patch of
light from the west window, sketching.

“Hi,” I said. “What’re you working on?”

“I’m designing a castle.” He was frowning, and his light brows were drawn together in concentration. When Neal draws, he is
totally absorbed. In a moment, though, he lifted his head and looked up at me in surprise. “Did you just come in from outside?”

“Where else?” I said.

“How did you get there? I thought you were upstairs.”

“How could I be upstairs when I’m just getting home from school?” I asked reasonably. “They don’t give half-days to the high
school students, you know.”

“But Dad said you were upstairs. He said you didn’t go to school today.”

“Neal, come on,” I said, “you know perfectly well I went to school. I boarded the ferry when you did. We left the house together.”

“That’s what I told Dad, but he said you must have started feeling sick and come back.”

“Where could he have gotten that idea?” I asked in bewilderment.

“He said he saw you.”

“Hold on—” I began.

“No, really, Laurie, he did. He said he talked to you, and you didn’t answer. You kept on going up the stairs to your room.”

“To my room?” Here was something I could investigate. “There had better not be somebody in my room!” Leaving Neal staring
after me, I hurried out of the living room and headed for the stairs.

The door to my room was closed, just as
I had left it. I turned the knob, shoved it open, and rushed inside.

The room was awash with the golden light pouring in from the sliding glass doors leading out to the balcony. I glanced around
quickly. Everything seemed just as it should be. I pushed the door softly closed behind me, and then it struck me.

Someone had been here only moments before.

How I knew this, I couldn’t have said. It was simply that her presence lingered like the echo of a voice or a perfume too
subtle to be immediately recognized. She had stood, motionless, just as I did now, inspecting the room. My eyes tracked the
route hers must have taken, moving from one of my possessions to another. The silly Sesame Street throw rug, left over from
my early childhood. The environmental posters on the walls—the one of the redwood forest in California—the one of the fuzzy
baby seal staring morosely out to sea. The yellow and green throw pillows. The clutter on my dresser. The jewelry box Gordon
had given me the month before for my birthday—his picture stuck in the border of the mirror—my hair dryer and brush, a tube
of mascara, a bottle of nail polish.

My eyes moved farther, to the desk with my laptop on it, to the shelves along the far wall, lined with books. She had crossed
the room to stand in front of that shelf and read the titles. How did I know this? She had moved from there to the bed and
seated herself on it and reached out her hand to run it over the surface of the pillow. The spread was smooth and taut. There
was no indentation to show that someone had rested there.

But I knew. I
knew
.

Abruptly I flung open the door and lunged back into the hall. There were footsteps on the stairs above me. I caught my breath,
afraid to raise my eyes, and then I looked up.

The familiar figure in jeans and a paint-spattered T-shirt was only my mother.

“Laurie, what’s the matter?” she asked as she caught sight of my face.

“Someone’s been in my room!” I announced, meeting her at the landing. “Someone’s been in there going through my things!”

“Oh, hon, I don’t think so,” Mom said. “Neal doesn’t do things like that, and Meg’s over at the Burbanks’. She called after
school to say she was going to be playing with Kimmie.”

“I didn’t mean to accuse them,” I told her breathlessly. “It was somebody else—somebody who—who—” I let the sentence trail
away, because I didn’t know how to finish it. How could I say the words that had been in my mind:
It was somebody who looks like me?

“Now, dear, you know there’s been nobody here today but Dad and me,” Mom said reasonably. “Mrs. DeWitt doesn’t come to clean
until Thursday. We can ask Neal—”

“It wasn’t Neal.” I followed her down the stairs to the living room and then down the second flight to the kitchen. “I’m sure
it wasn’t Neal.”

“Oh, yuck,” Mom said, glancing around at the remains of breakfast. “I didn’t even rinse out the cereal bowls, did I? I just
hate to waste that good morning light. There’s going to be so little of it from now on with the days getting shorter.” She
plucked the bowls up and put them in the dishwasher. “Your father could at least have cleared the table.”

“Do I hear somebody using my name in vain?” Dad called from the office. At the end of the afternoon he worked with the door
open so he could hear Mom when she came down from the studio. My parents work in separate areas of the house all day without
ever seeing each other, and at the day’s end they always have this big reunion.

“Hi, Jim,” Mom called back, as pleased as though he had just gotten home from a long journey. “How did it go today?”

“Oh, not too bad,” Dad said, emerging from the office hallway. “I managed to get the spaceship landed in Chapter Twelve. Alien
invaders now slither through the back alleys of Chicago, spreading diseases the like of which you’ve never imagined. I stopped
because I ran out of symptoms. I bet this one makes ‘Movie of the Week.’”

“Dad,” I said, “did you see somebody go into my room today?”

“Just you,” Dad said.

“You couldn’t have seen me. I wasn’t here. I felt well enough this morning to go to school, and I only got home about twenty
minutes ago.”

“Really? That’s odd.” He wrinkled his forehead the same way Neal does when he’s perplexed. “Well, if you weren’t here, I couldn’t
have seen you. You’re right about that. It must have been yesterday.”

“Neal said you told him—”

“I was mistaken, I guess. Had my mind on the new book. You know how I am sometimes.” He went over to the refrigerator and
opened the door and got out a bottle of white wine.

“While you’re in there, could you get out the hamburger?” Mom asked. “What I was complaining about was your standing here
this morning, watching your eggs cook, when you could have been rinsing dishes.”

“I wasn’t awake enough to think about that,” Dad said.

He poured the wine into two glasses, and he and Mom sat down together at the kitchen table to talk about the events of the
day, which was something that always bewildered me, because neither of them had been anywhere or seen anybody. I left them
there and went back up to the living room. Neal was still drawing. He had completed the front view of his castle and was working
on a picture of it from another angle.

“I’m putting a dinosaur in the moat,” he told me without looking up.

“That’s a good idea.”

I sat down in a chair by the picture window overlooking the sea. Directly below me the water frothed white around the base
of the rocks. A gull came circling in so close that its wing brushed against the glass, leaving a gray feather pinned there
momentarily by the wind before a shift in air currents allowed it to slip away.

I was scared.

Someone had entered my life, and I didn’t know who. The conclusion I had come to earlier that afternoon after talking with
Jeff now had to be discarded. The fact that my father, too, had seen a girl like me—in a place I had not been—was too much
to be coincidence. Cliff House was not kept locked during the day. It was possible that someone could have entered. The girl
who had been on the beach the night before might have ascended the stairs, moving in and out of my father’s sight as he stood,
lost in his thoughts, planning the scene he was preparing to put on paper.

It could have happened. But—
why
?

If there was such a person—a Laurie Stratton look-alike—what was she doing here on Brighton Island now that most of the summer
people were gone? Why had she come here? When had she discovered her resemblance to me? What did she want from me and from
the people whose lives were a part of mine? Nothing had been removed from my room, I was certain of that. My possessions did
not appear to have been tampered with. It seemed almost as if this person had come visiting out of idle curiosity, to see
where and how I lived.

Neal continued to draw. I sat in silence, struggling with questions that had no answers, while the sun sank lower and lower
in the sky and the clouds began to soften and turn pink. After a while Meg came home. Her chirping voice came up the stairwell,
describing the exciting first-day-in-third-grade events to the audience in the kitchen. Then Mom called Neal and me to the
table, and we sat down to hamburgers and beans and what would have been a salad if Mom had gone down to the grocery store
in the village, but was instead lettuce with some chopped onion sprinkled over it.

“I lost track of time,” she explained, not really apologetically. “One minute it was morning, and the next time I looked the
day was almost over.”

After dinner my family played Monopoly at a card table in the living room. Any other evening I probably would have played
with them, but tonight I was too upset to be able to concentrate. I needed to be alone to think, but I didn’t want to go to
my bedroom.

Megan was in the process of purchasing Boardwalk when I went down the stairs and let myself out the kitchen door into the
night.

Outside it was surprisingly light. The full moon that had lit up the beach for Gordon and Natalie the night before was at
half-mast in the sky. After a moment or two of adjustment, I could see everything distinctly—the bushes, the sea oats, the
sand path leading up from the road. The sound of the surf was very loud. I walked slowly along the side of the house to the
point where the path stopped at the cliff ’s edge. There was no beach in front of Cliff House, just rocks, stair-stepping
down tier by tier to the water. The highest of these were flat and dry and safe to stand on, but the lower ones were slimy
with foam and seaweed. Once when he was very small Neal had slipped on one and taken a bad fall to the tier below. Between
the rocks were crevices that led to hollows and caves where Megan liked to think mermaids lived. I knew better than to risk
slipping down there, so I just stood, quiet, listening to the waves breaking against the base of the cliff. The longer I stood
there, the brighter the moonlight seemed to become. The white, swirling water had a luminescent quality that was hypnotic.
If I gazed at it long enough, I thought, I might actually see a mermaid.

“Laurie?”

The voice spoke directly behind me, and I almost jumped out of my skin. Strong hands closed upon my shoulders. With a gasp
of terror I tore myself free—and spun around to find myself facing Gordon.

“What’s the matter?” he asked me.

“What do you think is the matter? You scared me to death!” My heart was pounding so hard I thought it might burst through
the wall of my chest. “What are you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” Gordon said.

“Then why didn’t you call?”

“I thought you might hang up on me, so I came over instead. I was just headed up the path to the house when I saw you standing
out here on the rocks.” He was staring hard at my face. “Hey, something really is the matter, isn’t it? You’re not usually
jumpy like this.”

“No—really.” I drew a long breath and let it out slowly. “It’s just—well, it’s been a messed-up day.”

“It has,” Gordon agreed. “Laurie, what I came over here to say was—well, I just want to tell you that it’s okay.”

“What’s okay?”

“Whatever it was that you were doing last night. Not that I’m happy about it or anything. I’m jealous as hell. But it was
true, what you said on the boat this afternoon. I don’t have any right to give you a hard time when I was out there with Nat.”

“Are you in love with Nat?” I asked him.

“Of course not! She’s a pretty girl—I’d had a few beers—my girlfriend had stood me up—”

“I didn’t stand you up!” I objected.

“Let’s not fight about it, Laurie. The point is, neither one of us is completely innocent. We were both messing around a little.
It wasn’t anything for me—just a couple of kisses. What about you?”

“It wasn’t even that for me,” I said.

“Who was the guy?”

“I’ve told you over and over. There wasn’t any guy.”

“You want me to believe you were out there alone? That you’d break our date and miss the summer’s best party just to go wandering
the beach by yourself ?”

“I don’t care what you believe,” I said wearily. “You’re the one who said let’s not fight. Did you come over here to make
up or not?”

“I don’t know now. You’re making it so tough.” He put his hand under my chin and tilted my face up toward his. “Do you still
want to be with me, Laurie?”

“I—I guess so,” I said shakily. Jeff ’s words flashed through my mind—
he’s got you on a string
—
he snaps his fingers, and you jump
.

“That’s what I wanted to hear.” He lowered his head, and his mouth came down onto mine, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore
whether he believed me or not, whether he had been with Natalie, whether he was pulling strings and snapping fingers—all that
counted was that this was Gordon, my Gordon, and he was here now with his arms around me, and things between us were all right
again.

We stayed for a long time out there in the moonlight. I didn’t realize how long until I went inside to be greeted by the sound
of my father’s keyboard clicking away on its evening stint. The living room, as I passed it, was dark and empty, the Monopoly
game long over.

I paused at the door to the kids’ bedroom. The moonlight fell across Neal’s pillow, painting his sleeping face with silver.
His lips were parted, and he was breathing through his mouth with a whistling sound. In the bed across from him, Megan was
lying crosswise, her feet thrust out from beneath the covers.

I went in and gently pulled her into a more comfortable position and drew the blanket over her. She came partly awake and
reached up to touch my cheek.

“I saw you there—outside my window,” she murmured sleepily.

“Oh, you did, did you?” I exclaimed, taken aback. “You were spying on me?”

Meg mumbled something indistinguishable and rolled over onto her stomach. Then abruptly she raised her head.

“You were up so high,” she said clearly. “How did you get there?”