understand exactly what went on at Outerbridge Island the summer I turned eighteen, the 
summer before Jenna Montgomery was to leave me forever.
  They say that people like me can’t experience love, but I find that a ridiculous 
statement. I’m fully capable of giving and receiving love, and it is monstrous to suggest 
otherwise. Even all those years ago, love burned in me just as it did any boy who had 
fallen.
  My mother would take her daily pain pill as I grew up — her pains being life itself and 
even her child — and tell me that there were two kinds of people in this world, the kind 
that give and the kind that take, and I knew I was neither, but somewhere in between the 
rest of the world: I was someone who observed, perhaps too coldly sometimes. I still 
observe, and observation has brought me to this place again.
  Outerbridge Island, with its rocky ledges and glassy sea, the fog that came suddenly, 
the sun that tore through clouds like a nuclear explosion, the summers that went for 
years; the years that passed in a summer.
  The storms that came and stayed and never left.
  4
  Let me turn it all back to the day I was born, since from what I’ve read about 
sociopaths, it’s fairly genetic. My grandmother was probably the carrier of the gene, 
since she went crazy and ended up in what they called a nursing home over in 
Massachusetts, but which I found out — later in life, of course — was an impoverished 
sanitarium, the sort of which nightmares are born. My mother told me that it was my 
grandfather’s fault for driving her to do things — again, not kill, for we have never 
been murderers — just things that caused people to believe my grandmother was insane. 
When I was born, my mother told me when I was eleven or twelve, I was a difficult birth 
and my own umbilical cord practically strangled me as I exited her body. She said I was 
blue in the face for nearly a minute from lack of oxygen before the doctor got 
me coughing. Then, I spent the first two weeks of my life in the hospital, for I was a 
month premature and no one thought I would live.
  Sometimes I think this is why I’m a sociopath. I’ve seen documentaries on PBS about 
baby monkeys who are separated from their mothers for a short time, and this makes them 
seem without conscience (if that is truly what a sociopath is, although I don’t believe 
it). My mother said she didn’t touch me for the first month; she was terrified I’d die, 
and because she had already lost one child — two years earlier — in some kind of crib 
death scenario, she feared holding her first son, me. My father had to do all the 
touching and picking up, and even — my mother told me — when I had to nurse from her 
breast, she was too terrified. Instead, my aunt became my wet nurse — she who had, 
just five months before, given birth to twins and seemed to have milk enough for the 
entire population of the island. There were times, when I was older, that I wished my 
aunt had taken me back with her to her home on the mainland.
  Times when I hated the island. Hated my mother and father. Hated looking at the 
Montgomery house — the Montgomery Mansion, the Montgomery palazzo, the Big Place — 
staring down at us.
  But I suppose all this anger came about because of those first few days of life.
  These things aren’t spoken of much in families — how we each came to be. My mother 
suffered through bouts of depression, particularly in the winter, and she would stand in 
front of her bedroom window, looking out across the Sound, her face a shimmering 
reflection in the thick windowglass, and tell me all about myself.
  She told me that when I was six weeks old, she realized I had never really cried, at 
least not the way babies were supposed to. Instead, I would turn red, and my mouth would 
open, and I’d scream. That’s how she’d know I was hungry or needed changing. Because she 
was so grateful to have a child after she felt God had taken away her first in 
retribution for youthful transgressions, she tried not to think about what my lack of 
tears might mean.
  As she’d tell this kind of story, I’d shift uncomfortably on her bed, wishing she’d 
release me from this kind of intimacy — the closeness of her depression, the morbid way 
her mind would pick over my birth and early years.
  “I’m so sorry that you turned out this way,” she said, once, her hands going up to her 
face. “I’m happy you’re so smart. Not like your father. But this madness that comes over 
you…”
  I remained silent, letting her have her feelings. I didn’t understand then to what she 
referred — I was not mad. I took the ferry to go to school over on the mainland and did 
quite well in school. The ferry takes an hour and a half in the winter, and only runs 
twice a day — for school hours, since Outerbridge had no school of its own. Thus, I spent 
many nights with my Aunt Susan in Rhode Island, and learned more about my mother’s mother 
than I had ever wanted to know. I also managed — through my cousin Davy — to make friends 
off-island, friends who believed I was like them. And I had a lot of friends as a child. 
Although I was not considered handsome at first — at least by my mother who found my hair 
to be too ominous in some way, my eyes too blue and perhaps too sharp, my manner arrogant 
(even as an eight-year-old, she’d called me that) — I began learning the secret of 
athletics early, and applied myself to molding my body the same way I went about molding 
my mind: I studied and read and found the boys who seemed to know what they were doing, 
and I gravitated towards them. I learned what they knew by nature. I was uncoordinated in 
most sports, until I realized that, as in all things, it was about breathing.
  This is one of the secrets of life: it’s all about breathing.
  5
  Voices in the dark:
  “It’s all right, I know you. I know what we both want.”
  “Shut up. Just shut up.”
  “Come here. Come here. Let me help you. It’s all right. It feels good.”
  “No, not like this. No.”
  “I’ve been so lonely.”
  “Oh.”
  “Wanting this.”
  “Oh.”
  “Since the first time I saw you.”
  “Oh.”
  6
  Have you ever felt that you would do anything to be with someone?
  I almost feel sorry for you, if you haven’t.
  7
  The purity of life is in the secrets — they’re simple, they say everything, they are 
there for anyone, but we must wake up to the purity first in order to understand the 
secrets.
  My pursuit of physical excellence began early. I tackled solitary athletics since this 
seemed best for my character. They were also cheaper. My family was poor — have I 
mentioned that? Not poor poor. Not “out in the street with no food” poor, but poor 
nonetheless. My mother’s first husband had been rich, but had been a gambler. My mother — 
I should call her Boston, for that's what my father called her even though her name was 
Helen — had been the fifth daughter in a wealthy family who had married well the first 
time around.