Everything That Follows

by Meg Little Reilly

  “Hi, Tom,” she sighed.

  Everyone knew Orla and her glass studio.

  Tom the police officer looked sorry for his presence. “Orla, you can’t be here anymore.”

  She put her arms out in defeat. “Well, where can I be, then? Really. What am I supposed to do?”

  He yanked his beige pants up with a hard tug of the belt. “Okay, we’ll keep an eye on your cliff, let you know if it looks like things are changing. I can’t get a straight answer from anyone about what we’re dealing with here. The erosion committee is hiring a full-time person and we’ve got some experts from the city camped out here for a few more weeks. So you can stay for now. But if they say it’s not safe anymore, you gotta go. I’ll drag you out myself if I have to.”

  “Understood.”

  “Stay off the beach, though.”

  “I will.”

  Sean shook the man’s hands and walked him out. No one said a word. When he returned and it was just the four of them again, Orla was fighting back tears. Kat put her arm around Weeta, who was looking down at her dirty high-tops. They would never be white again.

  Orla smiled a sad smile at Sean and adjusted the collar of his jacket. It was a small, involuntary gesture, bursting with pride and ownership. Kat wondered at the time what it was like to experience the feeling of having created another human from your own flesh, how excruciating it must be at times to see them out there in the world, vulnerable to everything. And for a child, how it must feel to be connected to the body that created you, forever tethered by an invisible line of closeness, of dependency.

  Kat had never experienced that magnetism. Biology doesn’t promise a connection, only life—and even that, it hasn’t perfected. For Kat and her mother, the connection stopped at birth.

  Kat lived with her mother for sixteen years in Buffalo, New York. Boyfriends came and went, but it was mostly just the two of them. Her mother wasn’t a bad woman; Kat always considered her more underdeveloped than evil. She had a short attention span and poor impulse control, bouncing around between illegitimate moneymaking schemes and loser guys, dragging her resilient daughter around with her. Kat’s mother always regarded Kat as a means to an end. She made Kat pretend they were sisters in public. She had her shoplift makeup when money was tight. At thirteen, Kat was tasked with driving her mother and her low-life friends home from the bars in the early morning hours. No one in their orbit had real jobs and most had done time. It was a workable, if cold, arrangement in the early years. Then her mom got increasingly depressed and verbally abusive. More than a few of her boyfriends tried to force themselves on Kat. As a result, Kat developed an ability to spot lechers and sadists in an instant. She could see trouble from a mile away. If anything good came from Kat’s childhood, it was a ferocious will to survive. Kat was a survivor.

  Still, she occasionally felt overwhelmed by a desire for more closeness when she was around the Murphys. Kat loved them all so much. They’d taught her how to love. She was so grateful for Orla’s guidance and faith in her; she could hardly believe her luck in finding them all. And she was grateful for Sean, whose love for her seemed proof that Kat hadn’t been permanently damaged by the damaged woman who’d raised her.

  The Murphys knew how much Kat loved them, but they didn’t know how desperately she needed them. She’d only ever shared the rough contours of her past.

  “We’ll figure something out,” Kat said. She’d do anything for these people.

  A muffled trill of a cell phone broke the silence, and everyone’s hand moved to their pockets.

  It was Kat’s. “Hello?”

  “Kat Weber? This is Betsy Klein... I met you at the shop recently.”

  “Of course! Betsy, how are you?” Her heartbeat quickened as she walked through the side entrance door, to the relative privacy of the yard. Betsy Klein liked to buy things, big things.

  “I’m great. Listen, I’ve decided that I’m going to do it. I want The Selkie. I couldn’t get it out of my head since I last saw it at the shop, and Kenneth says he’s given up on trying to regulate my art habit, which is great news for both of us. So anyhow, can you have it here before next Saturday? I’m having a little cocktail thing at the beach house, and I would love to have it here for that. What do you think?”

  Kat’s head was spinning. The Selkie! It had been sitting in the corner of Island Glass for six weeks, inspiring awed comments but not a single offer. Kat wanted to bring it down from its price of fifteen thousand dollars and just get it out of there before she began to really regret having put so much time and effort into it. But Orla wouldn’t let her do it. Orla thought it was extraordinary—it was—and she wouldn’t let her sell it for less than fifteen thousand. The right person will understand it, she’d said. Just wait. Kat didn’t know if she was happier about the vindication of her hard work or the fifteen thousand dollars. She really needed the money. And the meaning of the money...it felt something like being a professional.

  “Yes, yes of course! I can deliver it in the next few days. Let me make a few arrangements and call you back with a time.”

  “Fantastic,” Betsy said. For her, this was as easy as booking a manicure. “I might be in Newport for a few days, but I’ll send you the house code and I’ll leave your check on the kitchen table. You’re the best. Talk soon!”

  The line went dead before Kat could thank the busy lady. She put her phone in her pocket and watched two cars go by. The drivers in each slowed down and strained to see what was going on down by the beach with all the cops. Kat wondered if she was allowed to be overjoyed by the sale of her selkie, in the wake of an avalanche. No, it was just a “buckling.” Maybe she was allowed to be happy in the wake of a buckling.

  “Everything okay?” Sean asked from the doorway.

  She spun around. “I sold The Selkie.”

  He put his arms out and stepped toward her, enveloping her in a bear hug and lifting her feet briefly off the ground. “That’s amazing! For the full fifteen K?”

  “Yup.”

  He lifted her again. “Yay, yay, yay! We should celebrate!”

  “I don’t think today’s the day for that.” Kat pulled away from him and looked back at the house.

  “Yeah, you’re right. But when?”

  “After we deliver it. I’ll feel like celebrating once it’s safely at its new home and the check is cashed.”

  “Good. Okay, then let’s deliver it Tuesday and we’ll celebrate then. I’ll tell everyone to meet us at The Undertow. I don’t know who’s working that night...maybe that new guy, Kyle.” Sean was still grinning. “Man, we needed this today. We really fucking needed this.”

  * * *

  The memory of that call, and the look on Sean’s face, made Kat smile. She tossed the tennis ball from her left to her right hand, and back again, smiling up at the crack on the ceiling. She could still hear the men down on the beach, though it was getting dark.

  Sean was right. They really needed that win—the sale of The Selkie, the fifteen thousand dollars and the celebration that followed. All of those things were good and right. But the celebration had gotten away from them and there was no going back in time. So many things were beyond their control now.

  Kat felt sure she’d never sleep again.

  Chapter 4

  Kat slid her hands as high up the hot iron rod as she could tolerate. She rolled it around and around in the molten glass pool, then pulled the glowing blob from the furnace and twirled slowly. The trick, Orla taught her, is to keep turning if you want something remotely spherical later. If the phone rings and you look away for five seconds, gravity will have its way with your hot glass, and you’ll never get it back to that perfect orb again. She had learned to be faster and smarter than the temperature around her because every second spent away from the heat is a second closer to hard, immovable glass.

  She moved her hands back a few in
ches and inserted the rod into the blazing glory hole. She used to cringe at the name—glory hole—but had mostly forgotten its prurient origins by now. She rather enjoyed the unsubtle reminder that hers was a masculine art. The weight of its tools, the danger it posed and the commanding power of bending glass. It wasn’t for wimps. Orla liked to tell the story of begging her father to teach her the trade. He thought it unseemly for a woman to work glass, but eventually acquiesced and took great pride in her skill. Kat imagined herself as the next installment of this fabled past, in spirit if not genealogy.

  Until she moved to Martha’s Vineyard at twenty-one with the vague idea of being a cocktail waitress, Kat had never considered how something like a water glass came into existence. Glassblowing was never her plan. And art wasn’t even a consideration. She’d known a few artists from her one semester at community college, but they’d faded from her life after she dropped out, and she’d always had a low tolerance for the cultural trappings of art. It seemed to demand more angst than she was capable of producing. The idea that she’d find a way to make a living in a creative pursuit was once unthinkable to her. But Orla needed help and Kat needed direction. She fell in love with the craft first. Then she found herself deeply attached to her mentor. And finally, she fell in love with her mentor’s son, Sean. With the Murphys, and their island, Kat had created a full new life for herself.

  She eased the rod and round ball out of the glory, dipped it in a bin of blue glass shards, and stuck it back in the hole again. The blue shards melted around the clear glass and eventually blended into a uniform periwinkle. She pulled it out, inched her hands to the cool end of the rod and, with one hard puff, sent a blast of breath through the hollow pole to the blue glass ball at the other end. A tiny bubble of her own breath grew slowly inside the ball, expanding it. Kat never stopped turning.

  Orla always said that if you can do all the things at once—the turning and the blowing and the eyebrow-singeing fire time—and still maintain a clear artistic vision, then you can be a glassworker. It was an art, but it was also a muscular trade, and not many people could do both. When Kat accepted the apprenticeship seven years earlier, she suddenly felt an uncanny sureness of her ability to summon immense physical and creative strengths. Glass working was an art that made sense to her—it produced something real—and she was good at it. After one year, Orla entrusted Kat with most of the basic inventory for the shop. After three, she happily admitted that Kat was a better glassblower than she was herself. And after seven, Orla was sure she’d never met anyone so talented. The difference between Kat and the rest of the world, she liked to say, was that Kat needed to wake up each day and mold it to her will. Everyone else just wanted to.

  That was all true, but Kat also liked the way her busy mind quieted before the lethal heat. It demanded every aspect of her physical and intellectual attention. Total immersion.

  It was so consuming that Kat could nearly forget on that night what had happened out on the water with Hunter and Kyle. Not entirely, but nearly. And if she stared long enough into the blazing vat of liquid glass, she could almost scorch the image of those final moments with Kyle from her mind’s eye. She hadn’t heard from him or about him since that night, but she also hadn’t dared go back to The Undertow. She hadn’t really gone anywhere in the two days since the accident.

  When the ball was cool enough to cut from the rod, Kat looked around for the right tool. Where had she left it? Why wasn’t it in its proper place? She’d been out there too long, running on coffee and insomnia. She wasn’t thinking straight anymore.

  Just then, something slammed against the garage door. Kat jumped and drew her arm back, smashing the glass ball into the wall of the oven. It fell and broke; not shattering, but cracking neatly like a hot egg.

  “Kat, are you in there?” It was Sean. He’d been calling her all day. “Kat, open the door!”

  She stepped gingerly over her broken ball and went to the door. When she opened it, Sean was standing in the black night with a six-pack in his hand.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey, why aren’t you answering your phone?”

  “Sorry, I lost track of time. Kind of, um, in the flow with this project.”

  “Huh.” Sean frowned. “All day? What are you working on?”

  Kat didn’t want to talk about what she was working on. She wasn’t working on anything. She’d been hiding in the studio for six straight hours, trying to forget what had happened and trying not to think too hard about why she never went to the police station. She was working to drown out the guilty voices in her head. The problem was that every time she left the garage—to pee or eat or attempt a fitful sleep—she was flooded with worries about what would come next. Did Kyle make it back? Or was his body still out there? Either way, there was still a shoe to drop, another chapter in this story. No one had come to arrest her, but that didn’t mean she and Hunter had gotten away with it. For now, she thought, it was best to stay the course and wait quietly for a sign.

  Kat needed to talk to Hunter. They hadn’t communicated since their argument on the dock. She wanted desperately to be in touch with him, to consider their options and make a plan. But she also worried that contacting him might create a guilty trail if they were ever under suspicion for something. Then again, maybe not talking to him was more suspicious. And maybe he was halfway to Costa Fucking Rica by now, being relocated by his father’s handlers. She was a little worried about him, but mostly she was angry with him. A different person would have blamed Hunter for all of it, but Kat wasn’t one to shirk responsibility. She would own what was hers.

  Sean was still hers and he was standing before her, waiting for an explanation.

  “Sean, I’m sorry. I haven’t been feeling well, but I should have called you.”

  “Yeah, you should have. So I can come in?”

  Kat led him through the garage, over the cooling glass shards, toward the door to the house. “Be careful here.”

  “What happened?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  They went up the stairs to her apartment, where forty-eight hours of clothes and dishes had been left unattended. She was surprised to see that it was almost eleven.

  “Jesus, you must have been sick,” Sean scoffed.

  Kat forced a smile. “Delirious, really. Sorry it’s so gross in here. Can I have one of those?”

  He pulled a beer from its plastic ring and handed it to her. “So you’re better?”

  The feeling she’d been avoiding was pushing up from her stomach now, constricting her windpipe and sending a flood of blood to her face. Kat wanted to fall into Sean. She wanted to just explain it all and unload some of that feeling onto him. She wasn’t better and she needed to tell him so. But that was the weaker option. As soon as he knew, he would have an opinion about how to move forward. He’d be a liability to this secret and a party to it. She pushed the feeling back down with a dry swallow.

  Kat sat on the couch and took two sips of the beer, though she wanted to drink it all at once. It seemed like Sean was observing her as she drank. He was in search of a better answer for what was going on with her. Or maybe he wasn’t at all and she was just paranoid.

  He sat beside her and opened his own beer.

  Kat leaned in toward him. The cold outside air was still on his clothes and face, in his beard, which she liked as much as she could like anything at that moment. She kissed his cheek and he turned for her mouth.

  It didn’t feel right to fake this, but Kat decided that she should probably take off her clothes. That’s what she normally would have done in such a situation, and she needed to behave as normally as possible.

  “You smell like a campfire,” Sean said into her neck. The studio always gave her a whiff of char.

  She smiled and pulled off her shirt. “You smell like you.”

  They both undressed and then moved to the carpeted floor with slow
and synchronized motions, followed by more frenzied ones, as always. Her head wasn’t in it, but nothing about Kat’s physical response to Sean would have indicated that. Everyone hit their marks and had their uncomplicated pleasures. Thank God. Their sex life had always been robust and satisfying; never too adventurous, but a steady and nourishing diet. It was a comfort to know she could get right into it without much trouble. This was all very normal behavior, normal enough to quiet any of Sean’s suspicions. The whole act made her feel like a liar, but she was glad to pull it off.

  When they finished and dressed again, Sean kissed her head and went to the bedroom. Kat could hear him crawl under the down comforter. She would have preferred to be alone on that night, but saying so was not an option, so she joined him.

  Sean murmured an “I love you,” grunted comfortably and fell quickly to sleep beside her.

  Kat liked the warmth of his fuzzy back against hers. That feeling was real. Maybe this could work, she thought. Maybe Kyle’s body had disappeared forever, and she and Hunter could keep this secret, and they could go on with their lives as normal. Sure, there would be news about the disappearance of a local man, probably a search party and some media attention. But what did that have to do with any of them? Nothing at all. They didn’t even know Kyle Billings.

  Kyle Billings. Kyle Billings. Kyle Billings. That was his name. He was a person who had existed and then stopped existing. Everyone on the island would know his name soon. Tragic story, what happened to that kid, they’d say. And Kat would just be one of those people who knew his name because she’d seen it on the news. She would shake her head and think of the family, just like everyone else. Nothing strange about that.

  Kat slid out of bed and walked into the living room. She turned the TV on so low it was almost inaudible, then sat on the edge of the couch with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. When would they find his body? Didn’t Kyle have any friends to report his disappearance? He’d been gone for two days now. Something would have to break soon.