Everything That Follows

by Meg Little Reilly

  “But it was an accident,” Kat whispered.

  Hunter shrugged. “Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. Who knows...”

  “We do! We know that it was an accident!”

  “Our version of the story isn’t worth as much as it used to be.”

  Kat shook her head. She couldn’t believe he was doing this. She wanted to hate him for it, but it looked more desperate than diabolical. He was a grown man too scared and sorry to get caught for screwing up again. She hated Hunter for provoking empathy in her, even as he put their lives at risk.

  “No.” She shook her head.

  He stared pleadingly.

  Kat climbed the stairs slowly, waiting for Hunter to change his mind about it all, which he did not. He let her go.

  And Kat didn’t walk toward the police station. She went home instead. She was still sure that telling the police was the right thing to do, but she was too frightened to do it.

  As she walked through the garage studio, Kat could hear her phone ringing upstairs on the kitchen table. Shit, Sean. They were supposed to meet for breakfast, as they always did on Wednesdays. Shit, shit, shit. She knew it was him even before she got to the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Kat, finally. Is everything okay? I’ve been calling for an hour.”

  “Yeah, fine. Sean, I’m so, so sorry for missing breakfast. I feel really sick today and slept right through everything. I guess my phone was off. I’m so sorry.”

  “God, how much did you drink last night? Did you stay out late? I thought you were heading straight home.”

  Kat did a fast scroll through all the faces she’d seen in the last twelve hours, assessing how far she could take this lie. “I was. I went home soon after you. I think I have, like, a cold or something. The tequila shots probably didn’t help. I’m really sorry to miss breakfast.”

  “It’s fine.” Sean seemed annoyed, but satisfied with this response. “Are you working today?”

  In all the confusion, she’d forgotten to open the shop. She and Orla took turns in the off-season. Traffic would be light, but they couldn’t afford to miss even the occasional shoppers who might pass through.

  “Yep, I’m going to open it in just a minute. I’ll take it easy today, try to rest up.”

  “Okay, just stay out of the garage. You don’t need to be sweating in front of an oven if you’ve got a fever.”

  She hadn’t said that she had a fever but that worked nicely.

  “I’ll come by later with a grilled cheese from Stoney’s,” he added.

  “No, don’t bother.” Did she say that too forcefully? She really didn’t want to see him in person. Lying to Sean’s face would be too hard. Best to just avoid him for a while. “I have no appetite right now and I’m no fun. I’ll call you later.”

  Kat and Sean hadn’t spent a full day apart—a day without the briefest check-in or stop by—in longer than she could remember, and this felt like a bad time to start.

  “Okay. I’ve got a couple of big boats to put to bed for the winter, so this will be a long day at the boatyard anyhow. Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  Kat walked to the kitchen sink and drank another sixteen ounces of tap water. She could hear it gurgling through her hollowed insides. She was starving, but couldn’t imagine eating actual food.

  Kat went back down the stairs and out the door. She walked around the house to the oceanfront side, which was now a mere four feet from the edge of the cliff. She stepped over the orange police tape that had been put up after the landslide, and sank into an Adirondack chair. The sun was strong, but through the chair’s old wood she could feel moisture from the previous night’s rain. It must be one of the last things to dry, after the sidewalks and roofs, the towels left hanging on porch railings, and boats left uncovered. All the untreated Adirondack chairs on the island still held the story of the night before.

  She figured it would only take three steps to go over the edge from there. They should get a railing or something. Kat made a mental note to talk to Orla about that. At the very least, they could build a wire fence to warn people of the drop-off. Kids couldn’t be out there anymore. Kat always assumed that one day she and Sean would have kids, and they would hang around the shop after school the way Sean had done with Orla. Was that off the table now? If Kat had maybe killed a person and certainly evaded the authorities, did that disqualify her from being a parent? The implications of the night before kept coming at her, like unexpected punches to the gut.

  Last night had been horrible, but each successive realization at the consequences of last night was worse. Suddenly the entire path of her life was unfolding in Kat’s mind and the sweeping breadth of her one terrible, drunk decision was becoming clear. Why hadn’t she just run to the police station? Why wasn’t she headed there now?

  A willet soared above the shoreline, searching for something to dive at with its needle-sharp bill. It went south for a while, then came back and made a ninety-degree turn toward the shallow water. An unsuspecting fish, murdered. Sean’s daughter knew about all the birds on the island, which meant that Kat and Sean did too. What had she told them about the willet? It often searches the shores for food at night, she’d said. And it sees everything.

  Someone must have seen them out there.

  Chapter 3

  Lying on her back fully dressed in her unmade bed, Kat tossed a tennis ball back and forth between her hands. Left, right, left, right. It made a gentle thud against her palms with each catch, quiet enough not to drown out the sounds of the voices below.

  Through her bedroom window, Kat could hear men talking down on the beach, right in front of the glass shop. She couldn’t discern the words, but the cadence of their conversation was growing familiar to her after two sleepless hours staring at the cracked ceiling above her bed. People had been on that beach, on and off, for the past three days, ever since the landslide. It was an assortment of local cops and municipal employees tasked with “risk assessment,” as they called it. They were taking pictures and measuring cliff moisture. They were trying to figure out where things got away from them, when the threat of catastrophe turned from possible to imminent.

  Kat was doing the same.

  She’d made it through the day. She’d opened the shop, gone through the motions with the four customers who actually bought things and watched the hands of the clock go around. No one had mentioned the disappearance of Kyle Billings. No one had come to arrest her. Nothing was different, and the silence of all that nothing was unbearable.

  Alone in her apartment, Kat was playing the muddled reel of the accident over and over in her head, pausing from time to time, with the tennis ball in hand, to examine and replay the images. She was looking for an explanation for what had become of Kyle, other than the obvious one.

  The whir of car wheels spinning in sand rose up from the beach. There was too much pressure; Kat could tell from her bed. They needed to let more air out of the tires.

  Had that SUV been on the beach last night? She’d seen it come and go, and now she couldn’t remember if it had been left parked on the beach. No, she would have remembered seeing it. Then again, it was pretty far down, and the fog had been thick...maybe it had been there. She wanted them all to leave her beach and the fragile, exposed wall of their cliffs. She wanted everything to be as it was.

  The landslide happened three days before, on the last full day of bustling summer crowds. It felt like a thousand years ago to Kat. She could hardly remember anything before last night. But she remembered the landslide.

  * * *

  They were just finishing an early breakfast. Kat, Sean, Sean’s mother, Orla, and Sean’s daughter, Weeta, were on their last bites at the diner when the parade of sirens went by. They paid their bill and, along with several other patrons at the restaurant, walked out the door to follow the noise. They didn’t kn
ow at the time that the sirens were headed for the doorstep of Island Glass, Orla’s shop.

  By the time they got down to the beach, two dozen people were already there. It was mostly cops, coast guard specialists, scientist-looking types with clipboards milling around and shocked residents still in their pajamas. The officials all wore tall boots for trudging through the loose, wet sand while they cordoned off the area with orange ribbon. The damage stretched from Island Glass down several hundred feet. Every inch of land along the way was now five feet closer to the water’s edge, including Orla Murphy’s glass shop and studio. Where there had been overgrown beach grasses, there was now freshly exposed bluff that seemed still to be in motion, with small pockets of sand tumbling here and there.

  Kat remembered clearly the sound that Orla made as they stepped onto the beach and she sucked in the air around her.

  “Oh Lord,” Orla said.

  Soft waves lapped up around their feet in rhythmic regularity, searching for places to pool on the uneven sand. The delineating line between ocean and turf had disappeared into a mess of crumbled beach wall. It was disorienting.

  Sean placed a firm hand on his mother’s back as they approached a police officer in a raincoat. “Excuse me...was this a landslide?”

  “More of a buckling,” the cop told them, his eyes on the orange-tape operation ten feet away.

  “Is it over?” Kat asked.

  The cop shrugged. “No way to know, really.”

  Unsatisfied, Sean walked past the man. Weeta followed quickly, almost forgetting how the wet sand was ruining her new Converse high-tops. Kat and Orla walked three steps behind.

  A young woman in tall rain boots and a windbreaker jogged toward them from the water. “Excuse me, you can’t be here!”

  They stopped and considered the woman who, despite her authoritative tone, looked barely old enough to drink. She had a long blond ponytail that brushed over a backpack she wore high and tight.

  “The public can’t be out here.”

  Orla pointed up to the street level. “That’s my place.”

  “Oh.”

  All five of them looked up at the raw edge of the bluff twenty-five feet above their heads, where a grassy lawn had broken clean off and fallen to the beach earlier that morning.

  “You live here?” The woman’s clear, smooth forehead wrinkled in concern.

  “No, it’s my business. It’s a glass shop. We make everything in the garage. Can you explain what happened? How bad is this?”

  No one mentioned that Kat did live there, on the second floor. And as of that morning, she could probably see straight down into the water from her bedroom window.

  “I’m so sorry,” the young woman said. “This is pretty bad. The rising tides have been undercutting your cliff for years, basically eroding this coast from the bottom up. This morning the top layer finally gave way. It just slumped and fell.”

  “I know all that,” Orla clipped. “But they said this wouldn’t be a concern for twenty more years. Why is it happening now?”

  The young woman took a long breath. “That’s what we all thought until recently. But then some monster storms have come through in the last few years, and sea levels rose a bit faster than expected... It’s a confluence of things. Usually, there’s a triggering event.”

  “Well what triggered this?”

  “I don’t know.” The woman looked around, apparently hoping to be rescued from this excruciating conversation.

  “And what’s your job here?” Kat asked.

  “I’m a grad student.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Sean stormed away, toward a gaggle of uniformed men. Weeta followed.

  The young woman frowned at Orla and Kat. “I’m finishing my PhD in coastal erosion. I’ve been studying its effects here for two years. I probably know more about it than anyone on this beach.”

  “Sorry, we’re just in shock,” Kat said. “Can you tell us if it’s safe to go back in the house?”

  The woman stared at the wall of the cliff, and they followed her gaze. Kat noticed for the first time the clear lines of fine sand and clay, a layer cake of Vineyard history holding up her life, or not holding it up. That house contained Kat’s whole existence.

  “I don’t know. That’s not my call. You’re probably safe for now because the weak part of the bluff has fallen off. But the erosion will continue. You need to plan for that. The part we don’t know is how waterlogged the clay might be. See those layers? They absorb a lot of moisture and sometimes when the clay can’t hold any more, it just...mobilizes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means a landslide, or an eruption of some sort. One way or another, this house isn’t going to be here in twenty years. It might not be here in five.”

  Orla looked out at the water. She was approaching catatonic. That house was the embodiment of her. It was the business she’d built with her late husband; the place she’d spent thirty years mastering the skills her father taught her and his father taught him. She’d helped her son, Sean, with his homework on the porch after school and mourned the death of her husband by working endless hours in the scalding garage studio. And after his death, she found hope again by teaching her young apprentice—Kat—the craft. Glass working was the thread that connected the Murphys of eighteenth-century Waterford, Ireland, to Orla, Sean and Weeta. It was their story, and that was everything to Orla.

  Kat looked at her watch. It was almost ten. Time to open the shop.

  “Let’s go back,” Orla said.

  The others nodded.

  Orla, Kat, Sean and Weeta walked back along the beach the way they’d come, past the strange new topography of their waterfront, to the warped staircase that led up to the road. No one spoke as they walked along the sidewalk toward the shop.

  All three adults knew that this, or something like this, was always a possibility. Life on the Vineyard was not fixed. Even Weeta knew that things were shifting and eroding imperceptibly all the time. But the Murphys didn’t dwell on the idea because what on earth could be done about it, anyway?

  Movement was the norm, disconcerting as it was. It connected the locals, was something to observe and discuss at the diner. The sands were always shifting in small ways, rearranging the face of their beaches. But the Vineyard also had a fantastical history of large shifts, like when it disconnected from its sister island Chappaquiddick. The two islands spent eight years apart after a major storm destroyed the connective land between them a while back. And then they came together again just a few years after that, and all the islanders just shrugged and went on with their lives. One would think such perpetual motion would prepare its inhabitants for a dramatic change, but man is still more inclined to expect the inertia of sameness despite all evidence to the contrary.

  At the front door of the shop, Kat hesitated.

  “We have to see,” Sean said. He went ahead of her and turned the key in the lock.

  Inside, the sun was blasting through the stained glass windows on the waterfront side, casting a blanket of multicolored shadows over every surface in the room. The open space was sparsely decorated with only smooth cubic furniture that displayed the bowls, vases and glassware. A row of colorful sand dollar ornaments hung along the wall, blending with the rainbow dapples from the windows. It was an extraordinary effect, famous now among locals and tourists. The shop opened every morning at ten and, during the high season, it wasn’t unusual to find a line at the door when they opened. No one was outside on that day.

  “It looks the same,” Weeta said. They had all been expecting something different.

  Orla went to the window and looked out at the breaking waves.

  Sean put his arm around his mother’s shoulders. She wasn’t a small woman, but she looked it then.

  “What are we going to do?” Kat asked their backs.

  “W
e’ll figure something out,” Sean said.

  Orla shook her head. “No, we won’t.”

  “Of course we will, Mom.”

  “I don’t think so. I have no savings and neither do you, Sean. There’s nothing we can do...nothing but wait.”

  “You have insurance,” Kat said.

  Orla turned. “Not for this. No one on the water has that kind of insurance anymore.”

  “We’ll figure something out...” Kat’s voice trailed off as she noticed Weeta standing beside her with wide, frightened eyes.

  Weeta was so tall and thin, with straight black hair that almost hit her waist. It was easy to forget that she was only eleven. She had been with Sean every other weekend ever since he split up with her mother, Beth, when Weeta was just a baby. It was becoming clear to them that any day now she might protest the arrangement, demand to stay back in Boston more often with her mom and all her friends. Sean dreaded that day.

  Weeta was short for Weetamoo, named after her great-grandmother on Beth’s side, the Wampanoag side. This was their island first. Weeta didn’t look a thing like Sean, but they couldn’t have been more alike. Kat used to think it strange, that some unlikely negotiation of dominant and recessive genes produced offspring so physically different. But she’d been wrong; Weeta was Sean’s daughter in every way. Ethical and opinionated, stubbornly righteous, but a friend to everyone. She was, like Sean, a connector of people. He was fully devoted to her. It was one of the things Kat loved most about him.

  “Don’t worry,” Kat assured Weeta. “We’ll figure this out.”

  “Maybe I can help,” she said. “I can get a job or something. I can ask my mom.”

  Sean looked at her. “Don’t do that, honey. We’ll make it right.”

  No one really believed that.

  Just then, three loud knocks startled them as a rotund police officer opened the front door. “Orla,” he boomed.