Letitia was a mind reader. I was shaking so hard my teeth chattered. There was a kind of protection I had in my cell that I wouldn’t have once I walked through the prison gate.
“You sign over here, Lockwood.” A man behind the counter handed me a sheet of paper. I didn’t bother reading it. Just scribbled my name. My hand jerked all over the place.
I spotted my mother and Uncle Marcus on the sidewalk leading up to the building. Delia Martinez, my tiny but tough lawyer, was with them, along with two guards, helping them push through the crowd. I reached for the doorknob.
“It’s locked, girl,” Letitia said. “They goin’ buzz ’em through. Just hold on.”
I heard the buzzer. One of the guards opened the door, and Mom and Uncle Marcus burst into the room, Delia behind them.
“Mama!” I said, though I’d never called her “mama” before in my life. We crashed into each other’s arms, and then I started crying for real. I held on to her, sobbing, my eyes squinched shut, and I couldn’t let go. I didn’t care who was watching or if anyone thought I was holding on to her for too long. I didn’t care if I seemed nine instead of nineteen. I didn’t care if Mom had had enough—though I could tell she didn’t care about anything either. It felt awesome, knowing that. Knowing she’d hold me as long as I needed to be held.
Uncle Marcus hugged me when Mom and I finally let go of each other. He smelled so good! If anyone had asked me how Uncle Marcus smelled, I would have said I didn’t have a clue. But now that I could breathe in his aftershave or shampoo or whatever it was, I knew I’d been smelling that scent all my life. His hand squeezed my neck through my hair and he whispered in my ear, “I’m so glad you’re coming home, babe,” which started me crying all over again.
“When we go out there, Maggie,” Delia said when I finally let go of Uncle Marcus, “you don’t say a word. Okay? Eyes straight ahead. No matter what you hear. What anybody says. No matter what questions they throw at you. Not a word. Got it?”
“Got it.” I looked over my shoulder at Letitia, and she gave me her weird sneer.
“Don’t ever wanna see you in here again, hear?” she said.
I nodded.
“Okay,” Delia said. “Let’s go.”
The guards led us out, and the moment my feet hit the sidewalk, the people went crazy. I could see some of the signs now: Life for Lockwood. Murderer Maggie.
“Eyes straight ahead,” Delia repeated, her hand on my elbow.
Mom’s car was parked right outside the gate so I wouldn’t have to walk very far through the crowd. Still, when we got close to the car, the camera crews threw microphones toward us on long poles. They shouted so many questions I couldn’t separate one from another, not that I planned to answer any of them. I nearly dived into the car, Mom right behind me. Delia got in front, and Uncle Marcus jumped in the driver’s seat.
People pressed against the car as Uncle Marcus slowly drove through the crowd. The car swayed and shook, and I pictured the mob of people lifting up one side of it and rolling it over, crushing us. I put my head down on my knees and protected it with my arms—the crash position for flying. I felt Mom lean over me, covering me like a blanket.
“All clear,” Uncle Marcus called as we turned onto the road.
I lifted my head and the angry shouts of the crowd faded away. Would they follow us to our dead-end street in North Topsail? Surround our house? Who would protect me then?
I could hear Delia and Uncle Marcus talking quietly, but not what they were saying. After about a mile, we pulled to the side of the road behind a black Audi.
Delia turned around and reached for my hand. “I’m getting out here,” she said. “Call if you need me. You stay tough.”
“Okay,” I whispered, thinking that I wasn’t the tough one in the car. Delia was, and I owed my puny twelve-month sentence to her. She’d gotten a bunch of charges against me dismissed or reduced. I had mandatory counseling ahead of me, where I guess I was supposed to figure out why I did what I did so I never did it again. The fire had been a one-time deal. No question there. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone about the whole frickin’ mess. I wasn’t sure what I needed, but I knew it had to be some kind of total overhaul, not a few sessions with a shrink. Then I had three hundred hours of community service. No college for me for a while. Restitution to the families, but Mom was managing that by taking money out of my inheritance from Daddy. How did you pay families for their dead kids?
You’d think after a year in prison, we’d have a lot to talk about, but it was quiet in the car. Sometimes there’s so much to say that you don’t know where to begin.
I’d seen my mother and Uncle Marcus a couple of times a month while I was in prison. Each time, they sat closer together on their side of the table. I knew Uncle Marcus had loved my mother for a long time and I was glad she’d stopped with the ice-queen routine. They were probably lovers by now, but I didn’t want to go there. It was strange enough that my mother was dating my father’s brother.
“How’s Andy?” I asked. I saw my brother about once a month, enough to know he’d grown at least an inch this year, which only made him about five-one. He was filling out a little more, though. He was swimming with the Special Olympics team in Wilmington now and he had a girlfriend named Kimmie. I hadn’t met her, but I was nervous about anyone who could possibly hurt my brother, who had fetal alcohol syndrome.
“Actually,” Mom said, “he had a stomach bug all night.”
“Oh, no.” I hated to think of him sick.
“I hope we don’t all catch it now,” Uncle Marcus said. “Especially you, Mags. Nice homecoming that’d be.”
“Is he home alone?” I asked.
“I left him at Sara’s,” Mom said. “We’ll have to stop there and pick him up.”
Could that be any more bizarre? Sara babysitting Andy while Mom picked me up? Mom’s words just hung there in the car. “You and Sara are friends again?” I asked finally.
Mom sighed. “It’s a little better between us,” she said, “though I wouldn’t use the word ‘friends’ to describe our relationship. I couldn’t find anyone else this morning and he was really so sick I didn’t want to leave him alone. Sara wasn’t thrilled about it, but she said yes.”
Mom looked older than I remembered. I hadn’t noticed it during her visits, but now I could see that the skin above her eyes sagged a little. She’d cut her dark hair short, though, and it looked good. Actually kind of cool. Our hair was the same color, but mine was much thicker and wilder, like Daddy’s had been. I had it in a long ponytail, which is how I wore it the whole year in prison.
“I don’t think it’ll ever be the same between Sara and me,” Mom said. “I’ve let it go, though. My end of it.” I knew she meant the part about Sara having an affair with my father while he was married to Mom. It turned out that my father was also Keith’s father. Surprise, surprise. Andy didn’t know that, though.
“But she’s still upset,” Mom said. “You know.”
Yeah, I knew. Upset about Keith getting burned in the fire. I didn’t blame her. I cried every time I thought about how I’d hurt him. “I won’t go in when we stop there. Okay?” I didn’t want to see Sara and I sure didn’t want to see Keith.
“That’s fine.” Mom sounded relieved, or maybe it was just my imagination.
We drove over the swing bridge that crossed the Intracoastal Waterway.
“Oh, the ocean!” I said, looking toward the horizon. The water was a blue-gray, the sky a bit overcast, but it was beautiful. I’d never take living on the island for granted again.
We were practically the only car on the bridge. Although I usually liked September on Topsail, when most of the tourists were gone and it felt more like home, the lack of cars—of people—suddenly made me realize I would stand out. If the summer crowds had still been there, I could blend in with them. Now, I would know everyone and everyone would know me. I felt sick thinking about the girl I’d been a year ago. The girl who hid out in the
Sea Tender and who did crazy things for love. Who led a secret life.
“Mom?” I said.
She rested her hand on mine. “What, sweetie?”
“I’m going to drive you nuts at first,” I said. “I mean, I’m going to tell you everything that I think, okay? I need someone to tell me if I start thinking like a crazy person again.”
“You can tell me anything you like,” she said.
“Remember—” Uncle Marcus looked at me in the rearview mirror “—you’ll have a counselor, too, Mags. You can be completely open with her.”
We pulled into the trailer park and I scrunched down in the seat when Uncle Marcus stopped in front of the Westons’ faded gold double-wide.
“I’ll stay here with Mags,” Uncle Marcus said.
“I’ll just be a minute,” Mom said as she got out of the car.
Uncle Marcus turned in his seat to smile at me. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. His brown hair was really short. Shorter than I’d ever seen it, and he had amazing blue eyes that I’d loved my whole life. He was one of the best people I knew. I could always trust him to be in my corner no matter how I screwed up, and that thought made my eyes prickle.
I bit my lip. “I hope so,” I said.
“Here he comes.”
I sat up to see my brother fly down the steps from the trailer’s small deck and run across the sand. He pulled open the back door and flung himself toward me. I caught him, laughing.
“You’re free!” he said.
“Yup, Panda Bear,” I said. He seemed so much bigger. I brushed his thick hair off his forehead. “Now you’re stuck with me.”
Mom got back in the car, this time in the front passenger seat. “Everything okay with Sara?” Uncle Marcus asked her.
“She wasn’t there,” Mom said.
“She had to go to the store,” Andy said.
“I left a note, thanking her,” Mom said.
No one said it, but I knew why Sara wasn’t there: she didn’t want to see me any more than I wanted to see her.
Chapter Three
Keith
BRIDGET HAMMETT WAS SITTING NEXT TO ME IN ALGEBRA. TO my left. That mattered. I didn’t like anybody sitting on my left side. In most of my classes, I made sure to get the seat next to the window so nobody was on my left, but the first day of algebra, I was late to sixth period and all those seats were taken. So now, Bridget, who was the hottest junior—maybe the hottest girl in all of Douglas High School—was sitting on my left side and texting Sophie Tapper who sat on my right. I knew the text message was about me. It was like I could feel when people were talking about me.
My left arm was killing me and I needed another Percocet. Ten minutes till the bell rang. I needed to get out of there. Not just out of algebra—out of the whole damn school. I came in early today to do this stupid makeup exam, and now I was wiped. I used to leave after seventh period. These days, it was after sixth. Soon it would probably be after fifth. I couldn’t stand being there. Being a fucking junior again. A seventeen-year-old junior. The guy everybody pretended not to stare at. Before the fire, girls were always staring at me. I liked it back then, feeling them watch me in class, knowing they were texting their friends about me. I’d get these e-mails about how they wanted to do it with me. Lots of details in them. Now it was different. I got, like, no e-mails at all. I knew what the girls were saying about me now. How if they looked at me from the right side—as long as they didn’t see my hands and arms—I looked hot. If they looked at me from the left side, I was like something out of a horror flick. There was only so much of that kind of staring I could take before I wanted to toss all the desks out the windows.
The bell finally rang and I was outta there without looking back. I walked straight to my car and got in. Some dealership in Jacksonville donated the car to me after I got out of the hospital. It was a total dork of a car and I wanted to sell it and get a motorcycle, but my mother said that would be an insult and I needed to be grateful and blah blah blah.
I took a Percocet with what was left in a can of Dr Pepper I had stuck in my cup holder that morning. Then I laid rubber pulling out of the parking lot, heading toward the bridge and the beach. I wasn’t going home, though. First, because Mom would be there and I never let her know I was cutting. I didn’t want any grief from her. Second, today, for some total crap reason, Andy was at our house. Today! The day Maggie was getting sprung. The day I’d really like to forget the Lockwood family existed. Mom left a message on my cell about Andy being there, but said he’d be gone by the time I got home. She also said I should come straight home from school, probably because she knew I’d be freaking about Maggie getting out. “If you see any reporters,” she said, “walk right past them. Don’t engage them. You owe them nothing.” Reporters? Shit. They’d better just stay out of my way.
No way was I going home until I was sure Andy was outta there. I wasn’t taking any chances of seeing any Lockwood. Not Andy or Laurel or the bitch who burned my face. It was for her own sake. I might kill her if I saw her. Money could buy you anything, including a get-out-of-jail-free card. She visited me in the hospital before she went to jail and I swear, if I’d known then what I knew now, I would’ve found a way to kill her even with my arms bandaged up to my shoulders. I had this really tasty fantasy of setting her on fire—only someone else would have to light the match. I wasn’t big on flames of any kind these days. But I liked to imagine her getting burned at a stake, like they used to do to witches. She was a witch all right. It was a sick fantasy, but not as sick as burning a church full of kids.
I parked by the pier where the surfers hung out, though the surf was so lame only three other guys were there. I didn’t really know them. The cool thing about surfing was you could be with other people but not really have to be with them. Like talk to them or be close enough so they could stare at your face. The water was still warm enough that I really didn’t need my wet suit, but I put on the top half anyway because I wasn’t supposed to get sun on my arms. I spread sunscreen over my screwed-up face. Then I paddled out and waited for a wave worth riding in. My physical therapist thought surfing was good for me, as long as I could “do it safely.” He meant, as long as I could manage the board with my screwed-up left hand and had enough flexibility in my arms. We worked on that in PT. Talk about pain! But if I skipped the exercises for even one day, I paid big-time.
From the water, I could see our trailer park, though I couldn’t get a good look at our double-wide. It was three back from the road and I could just make out one pale yellow corner of it. Was Andy still there? My half brother? Not that I’d ever let anyone know I was related to that loser.
The three other surfers started talking to each other. Their voices bounced around on the water, but I couldn’t really hear what they said. Then they started paddling toward shore, so I guessed they’d had enough of waiting for a decent wave. I wondered if they’d go somewhere together. Maybe get a burger. Talk about girls. While I just sat alone in the water paddling in place, looking at the corner of our trailer, wishing I had someplace to go myself.
Chapter Four
Sara
The Free Seekers Chapel
1988
THE FIRST THING I NOTICED WAS THE SIMPLE BEAUTY OF THE small, pentagonal building. The scent of wood was so strong, it made me woozy. I felt grounded by it, connected to the earth, as if the smell triggered a primitive memory in me. Through the huge, panoramic windows, I saw the sea surrounding the tiny chapel and I felt as if I were on a five-sided ship, bonded together with twelve fellow sailors.
The second thing I noticed was the man in jeans and a leather jacket. Even though he hadn’t said a word, I could tell he was in charge. Physically, he was imposing in both height and mass, but it was more than that. He was a sorcerer. A magician. Even now, writing about him all these years later, my heart is pounding harder. Without so much as a glance in my direction, he cast a spell over me that was both mystical and intoxicating and—if I’m being
completely honest—sexual. In that moment, I realized I’d been missing two things for a long time: I had nothing in the way of a spiritual life, and nearly as empty a sensual life. And really, when those two things are taken away, what’s left?
I sat with the others in an awed silence; then the man got to his feet. Morning sun spilled from the long window nearest the ocean, pooling on his face and in his dark, gentle eyes. He looked around the room, his gaze moving from person to person, until it landed on me. I couldn’t look away. I didn’t want to. He looked inside me to the vast emptiness of my soul. Fill it for me, I was thinking. Help me.
After a moment, he shifted his gaze away from me and back to the others in the chapel. “Where did you experience God this week?” he asked.
Nowhere, I thought. I wasn’t even sure what he meant. All I knew was that I felt at home for the first time since Steve dragged me from Michigan to Camp Lejeune. I didn’t belong in this little Southern enclave, with its hundreds of churches and its thousands of churchgoers with whom I had nothing in common. I didn’t know a grit from a tomato, a moon pie from a potato chip. I felt completely lost when I tried to connect with the other military wives. They missed their husbands who were on temporary duty assignment, while I guiltily looked forward to Steve’s absences. Many of the women were my age—twenty-one—yet I couldn’t seem to breach the gulf between myself and them as they gushed about their men while shopping for groceries at the commissary. I felt as though something was terribly wrong with me. Terribly lacking. Suddenly, though, there I was in an actual church—of sorts—and I felt at home.
There was a long silence after the man asked the question about God, but it wasn’t at all uncomfortable, at least not to me. Finally, the woman next to him stood up. I saw the glitter of the ring on her left hand and thought: his very lucky wife.
“I was lying on the beach last night,” she said, “and I suddenly felt a sense of peace come over me.”
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