Free The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter Page A

toward the water and his own death, and at that point, Nathaniel, almost without thinking, lunges toward him. With one hand he grabs the back of his coat and with his left arm encircles Coolberg’s waist, pulling him back onto safe ground, while in the distance cloud lightning briefly illuminates the scene.
    “Thank you. I’ve been saved. Your turn,” Coolberg says to Theresa. He turns to Nathaniel. “See? Something happened.
    It’s like a drug that wakes you up.”
    Nathaniel expects Theresa to balk, but she doesn’t. She stands exactly where Coolberg stood, though she does not hold her arms out as he did, in the crucifixion shrug.
    Nathaniel cannot see her face clearly, but he can tell that her eyes are closed.
    “Okay, I’m ready,” she says.
    “I’ll do this,” Nathaniel announces, slipping in behind her.
    With his right arm, he gives her a slight push but with t h e s ou l t h i e f
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    insufficient force to cause her to lose her balance or to fall forward. She does lean over, pantomiming a fall, as his arm clutches her just above the hip as a lover would, whereupon she falls backward into him, as if she knew all along that this stunt was a pretext for some good-natured fun. Somehow both his arms surround her now as if he were embracing her—no, not “as if,” because that’s actually what he’s doing, he realizes, as she squirms. She turns around and lifts her face to kiss him, standing on tiptoes, a quick kiss that he returns. Coolberg is of course watching this.
    “Would you kiss her again?” he asks. “I’d like to see that.”
    “No,” Nathaniel whispers angrily. “For Christ’s sake.”
    “In that case, it’s your turn.”
    Reluctantly, in a kind of dream state, Nathaniel releases Theresa to take his place in front of the embankment. Someone has always saved me, he thinks as he closes his eyes. When his father died and his sister lost her words, and his beautiful mother seemed about to be as unstable as a canoe in white water, his stepfather took over their care and removed the family to New York, to the sunny apartment on West End Avenue, walking distance to the overpraised Zabar’s. Life settled down long enough for him to grow to be a man and for his mother to regain her steady calm heart. For an instant, he remembers the rug in the doorway of his stepfather’s apartment on the eleventh floor of the building, its deep red weave.
    Through his closed eyelids, he stares at the darkness before him. He listens to the water for a five-second eternity. Then two hands push at him, he begins to fall forward, and nothing reaches out at his sweater to pull him back.
    Nothing saves him.

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    Life is a series of anticlimaxes until the last one. Standing in the Niagara River with the water up to his waist, Nathaniel turns to see his friends. They are standing on the bank watching him, and Theresa may be screaming in laughter, but in the onrushing river noise, he can’t hear her; Coolberg continues to stare at him, or so it appears when the lightning illuminates the scene. If he loses his balance now, he’ll be gone forever, of course; he’ll be swept away.
    Why did they think that the river just off Goat Island would be over their heads? It’s nighttime and the water is dirty—
    they couldn’t see.
    Nevertheless, he can’t move.

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    In the car heading back to Buffalo, Nathaniel says nothing. He has no observations to make about how he stepped gingerly back to the island, nothing to comment upon to either Coolberg or Theresa about their inability to reach out for him, no sly remarks about their collective intentions.
    “Okay,” Coolberg says. “If you’re not going to say anything to us, do you mind if we turn on the radio?”
    Theresa twists the knob, and a Buffalo station floats up into the car’s noisy silence. They’re playing the Beach Boys’
    “God Only Knows.”
    The unearthly beauty of the music fills the car. Nathaniel listens: muted horns, strings, tapped blocks, sleigh