“‘Baby B’ was our brother, and he’d been dead all our lives. For a long time I thought I’d see him again, but by the time I was 28, I believed that the dead stay dead.” Thus starts Miciah Bay Gault’s superlative first novel, “Goodnight Stranger.”
Ostensibly, it is a story of triplets and their very complicated, shifting relationship because of one’s death supposedly of pneumonia at 7 weeks old, as well as what shapes the lives of the remaining two siblings, Lydia and Lucas.
What is immediately clear is the nature of the bond between Lydia and her brother. Lucas is almost, as Gault describes it, pathologically shy — and then some, as we soon learn. And while tethered to him through a promise to their dying mother to watch over her fragile sibling, Lydia nonetheless loves him profoundly, saying, “What’s more important than love? … The answer was: the other love, the first love. That’s what’s more important. Family. Brothers. The living and dead. Lucas. Baby B.” And yet, their love simultaneously binds her to a small existence on insular Wolf Island, off Cape Cod. “Lucas and I had been forced to cobble together a life of cleaning and cooking and paying bills and caring for each other, without really knowing how to do it.”
Into this mix, quite literally, walks a stranger. From the first moment on, it’s difficult to pin him down. Is he a good person and just mysterious, or is he dangerous? Lydia deftly keeps us from coming to any definite conclusion for much of the book, although he most definitely makes us uneasy from the very start.
What’s in a name is a central question in the book. The stranger goes by Cole, although Lucas is immediately convinced that he is Baby B — whose name happens to have been Colin. So, is he really a stranger? He inexplicably, perhaps unnervingly, knows intimate details of their lives that a sibling would. Yet, Lydia is not so sure, and certainly has reason to be uneasy with Cole, who is at once seductive, convincing, and creepy. Gault keeps us on the edge of our seats with this mercurial stranger, never knowing what he will say or more important, do. Lydia sets out to discover who Cole truly is, but as she comes to discover, “It turned out a name wasn’t powerful unless you understood how to use it.”
Cole immediately slips seamlessly into the fabric of Lydia’s and Lucas’ daily lives, he is at every meal, “and he had something to do with our walks on the beach, and the way we took care of our house, and the magazine articles we read, and the conversations we had, and our thoughts and dreams.” When Lydia asks Cole how long he’s planning to stay, he replies, “A long time. As long as it takes.” Cole’s presence and Lucas’ conviction that he’s their brother drives a heart-wrenching wedge between the siblings.
As the story goes on, Lydia tries to pinpoint the truth about Cole, but ends up uncovering more mysteries than answers. Not just about Cole and his past and the secrets he holds, but also about the siblings’ mother and her story of Baby B’s death. We come away from “Goodnight Stranger” with the conviction that history and truth are malleable, and definitely in the eyes of the beholder.
Gault’s setting carries the weight of its own character. Placing Wolf Island a stone’s throw away from Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, she masterfully evokes the feel, sounds, smells, and sights of island life, from the hectic summer months to its quieter, insular year-round community. Gault grew up in Falmouth, and tells me, “I’m inspired by the sensory experience of the Cape: the smell of salt on the wind, the sound of ospreys and foghorns, the blue-gray-silver colors.” And with family here on the Island, she says, “When I visit the Vineyard, I’m inspired by a sensory experience that feels both familiar and simultaneously distinct and unique.”
“I read a personal history in the New Yorker about one couple’s struggle with infertility, which has nothing in the world to do with ‘Goodnight Stranger,’” Gault says about her inspiration for the book. “The couple kept losing the pregnancies, over and over. They ended up, after years of hope and heartache, with one daughter, and I found myself wondering — did she, as she got older, think about the brothers and sisters she might have had, did she feel a sense of grief, was she haunted by them? Then I imagined this image: two grown siblings in a doorway, a stranger facing them across the threshold. The air is charged with surprise, with recognition, hope, and danger. One of the siblings says, ‘It’s him.’ From there I had to ask myself all kinds of hard questions to find out what the book was really about.”
“Goodnight Stranger,” by Miciah Bay Gault. Park Row Books, Toronto. Available at Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven. Miciah Bay Gault will speak at the West Tisbury library on August 7 at 7 pm.
