“Too slow,” Clara said. “Stairs.” I followed her around the corner to a metal door, pushed through it, and we plunged down, stumbling into the turns of the staircase, the acoustics of the stairwell magnifying everything so that the sound of our pounding feet boomed around us. We didn’t stop running until we reached the bottom, both of our chests heaving.
“This way,” she said. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears, my breath catching shallow in my chest. It was more than the running—I had the same shaky feeling in my hands as when I had an anxiety attack. No, I thought, please not now. My sense of proportion was off, and the hallway seemed to press in on us, constricting to a pinpoint far, far away. No, I told myself more firmly. You are stronger than that. You don’t have to let this happen. My breathing stayed shallow, but the pounding in my temples eased up, and I followed Clara to the back door near the main lobby.
Then we were outside, near the harbor, and in the soft night air I felt like I could breathe again. A few boats bobbed lazily along the bay, in little halos of light. We walked around to the front of the casino in silence. In the dark, the topiaries loomed, their overgrown shapes looking threatening, wild. Or maybe that was just my mood that turned everything strange. I pulled my phone out of my purse to see I had three new texts from Matthew.
I understand if you’re still mad but I’d really like to talk.
I miss you.
What are you doing right now? Can I call?
I slipped it back into my pocket.
Clara watched me. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I think so.” Between the adrenaline and the night air, I felt sobered. Penitent. I looked up and tried to see the stars through the clouds but could only find a few.
“That was really stupid, Lily. You were too drunk to go anywhere with anyone.”
“You were drinking, too.”
“I had two drinks.”
“Oh, come on. They definitely bought us way more than two.”
“Sam knows to pour me soda water with lime after the second, or Coke with no rum, whatever. It’s part of our deal. He’s never going to serve me more than two drinks even if I beg.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know that?”
“You’re not, that’s what I’m saying. You had no idea what you were getting into.”
“I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
“Sure, Lily. I’m okay.”
“What was that, with the knife? Aren’t you worried they’ll report you?”
“No. They would have to confess to picking up prostitutes first.”
“Well, they didn’t pay us anything so are we technically prostitutes?”
“Who says we didn’t get paid?” Clara pulled a wad of cash from her pocket, counted it, handed half of the bills over to me. One hundred dollars, hardly worth being treated like a toy. I tried to think of a price that felt fair but couldn’t. What I wanted most was the thing I wouldn’t get: the ability to forget about them, to push their leering faces and grasping hands out of my mind.
“How did you pull that off?”
“This? Before we even left the bar. I’m telling you, these visions are scaring me. I’m taking every chance I get to pocket some cash.”
I nodded. I had a new respect for Clara’s stealing. It seemed like another form of magic, another power she had. “Where’d you get that knife?”
“Pawnshop.” She held the blade to the light. There was still blood on it, blood that looked black in the dark.
“Do you want me to drive you home?” I felt sobered up, by everything, by our run through the stairs, the night air, the adrenaline.“Or you can drive us if you want.”
“I can’t drive.” Another bitter little laugh. “Never learned. Des doesn’t have a car.”
“Well, then let me take you. It’s way too late for you to wait for the bus.” I had thought she would demur, slip away like she always did, slide out from under my attention.
“Sure, why not. After all, I did stab a man for you. A ride is the least you could do.” We smiled at one another, tentative smiles, a little shy.
“Okay, I’m not too far. That’s my truck over there.”
“I pictured you as more of a sedan girl.”
“It was my dad’s.” Already, again, a lump in my throat.
She sighed. “You must miss him a lot.”
“Every day,” I said, my voice weak, light. “He used to work here.”
“What happened?”
“You didn’t see that part?” I asked, surprised. “Your visions?”
“It doesn’t work like that. I don’t get to choose. Sometimes if a memory or image is really strong, still really present, it just sort of intrudes upon me. Yours did.” We got in the truck, and I started the engine.
“What was it? What did you see?”
She took a deep breath. I drove to the exit ramp of the lot, stopped, and pressed my employee badge to the window before the booth attendant waved me on. “A woman. Your mother, I’d guess. Sitting on the edge of a bed. A hospital.”
“Just sitting?”
“No. Sitting and—and screaming. Sort of, clawing at herself. A man’s hand on a white sheet.”
Without thinking, I hit the brakes. If there had been room for doubt, her words undid it. That memory played itself in a loop on my worst days. How it had taken me a few minutes to reach for my mother, how we struggled against each other for a moment when I held down her hands.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I asked you to tell me.” But I had only said that because a part of me refused to let myself believe, in what she said she could do and see. I hadn’t been ready, truly ready, to look straight at either of these things: that memory of the hospital room, or the feeling like I had just been shoved into a new reality. That Clara had a talent that defied logic, a talent I couldn’t understand.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like. Loving someone that much.”
“Me neither. I wonder if I ever will.”
“What about whatshisface?” That she pretended not to remember Matthew’s name gave me a small jolt of pleasure, and I felt lighter as I watched the casino recede in the rearview.
“It was never … never like that. I think in a way, that’s what I liked about being with Matthew. I felt safe from that kind of loss. I mean, it still hurt a lot when we broke up. It was humiliating. But I didn’t feel”—I searched for the right word—“despair. I felt like a version of my life was over. But not like, my entire life. My mom? My dad was her entire life.”
“She has you.”
“It didn’t matter. Not in those first few months. She kept threatening to take a bunch of pills. Or to leave the car running in the garage. Drop the hair dryer in the bath. It was like I wasn’t enough to keep her here. I guess that’s why I felt like I could leave. Like there was no real difference.”
“I’m sure there was. I mean, she didn’t do any of those things.”
“I guess so.” The clock on the dash said that it was 2:03 in the morning. The streets were mostly empty, save for a homeless man rummaging through one of the metal trash cans on the corner. I rolled the windows down and felt the stillness, the heaviness of the humid air. We were just a few blocks away from Clara’s shop, but the night still felt incomplete. After all the tumult, it needed some sort of closure. We needed a salve.
“I have an idea. Let’s go down to the beach.”
“Why?”
“Why not? We’ve got the whole town to ourselves.”
“You’re sort of a weirdo sometimes, Lily.”
“We can go for a swim. My dad used to say that nothing helped change your mood like swimming in the ocean. Like it could rinse everything bad away. I don’t think I’ve gone for a swim since I’ve been back.”
“I can’t swim.”
“Now you’re screwing with me. You live right on the beach.”
“No, really. Can you picture Des teaching me? I actually don’t think she can either. I mean
, she grew up in Newark. Where was she going to learn?”
“Well, if it’s calm you should at least wade in. Get your feet wet. It’ll be symbolic.” I guided the truck up to the curb and cut the engine. “Let’s go.”
Clara sat for a moment, but as I crossed the boardwalk toward the bulkhead I heard her door open and slam shut again. The clouds had shifted, and the sand was washed with red, purple, green from the changing, blinking lights of the casinos behind us.
“This is sort of creepy,” Clara called behind me. I pretended not to hear, but I knew what she meant. It was a little unsettling but also very beautiful—or maybe the eeriness was what made it beautiful. It reminded me of Mil’s portraits. How the most absorbing aspect was their suggestion of something sinister, something unsettling, underneath the fabric of our days. There was a challenge underneath it all. You wanted both to look and to look away, break contact. Ahead, I could see the mound of a ruined sandcastle, a forgotten plastic shovel. A sudden sadness gripped me in the ribs, a physical ache for my childhood that nearly made me double over.
When I was out of my shoes, the sand felt soft and cool beneath my feet. The greenish glow of a pair of cat eyes beamed my way from the dunes and disappeared. The waves lapped at the sand in little ruffles of foam, and the ocean was silvered with moon. A few blocks away the Pier, the once-high-end shopping mall, jutted out over the sea like an accusatory finger, its billboards lit with spotlights that glinted off the water. I crunched over the litter of shell fragments that had been pushed into a pile by the tide.
The thrill of the cold water on my feet rushed up my legs. I waded out farther, until I was up to my knees, Clara behind me, tiptoeing into the waves. When the water was at my waist I kicked my feet out and let my body sink under the surface. The tingle of the cold was intimate and intense, cold on my scalp, cold on the back of my neck, cold over my hips, across my stomach. Water in my ears, dulling everything but the steady wash of the waves, I held my breath until I felt it burn in my chest.
When I came up, I heard Clara’s voice, garbled a little by the water in my ears. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
“Don’t worry. It feels good, that’s all. You should try it.”
She crossed her arms close to her chest. “I’m going back.”
“Don’t be such a baby.” I cupped my hand, splashed water in her direction.
“Cut it out!”
“Come on, it’s as calm as can be. Just go under.”
“I don’t want to. This water is freezing.”
“That’s the point. It’s refreshing. What are you so worried about?”
“Drowning. Dying. Getting eaten by sharks.”
I smiled, though the last thing I wanted was Clara to think I was laughing at her.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.” How could I tell her, without offending her—that it was nice to see her talk and act like a kid. Clara inched her way toward me, grimacing. Then I understood. A wave splashed her hands, and it must have stung the burns.
“You need to go see someone about those.”
“I’m fine. It’s just cold.” She pinched her nose and slipped under the surface. I plunged below, too. It was a relief, to shut out the rest of the world, to silence it, to rinse everything I had done from my hair, my eyelashes, every inch of my skin.
We surfaced around the same time. Clara pushed the wet hair from her face. Underneath it she was smiling.
“Nice, right?”
“Not terrible.” The water was like ink. Each time I brought my hands above the surface, a part of me expected them to be stained. I thought of Winslow Homer’s paintings, his seascapes tense with awe and threat. I remembered one of his paintings that I had seen at the Clark. Undertow. Based on a rescue Homer witnessed in Atlantic City, the picture showed a man hauling drowning women from the water, the men looking mighty and muscular and the women looking helpless, spent, pale. A beautiful picture, but a story I was tired of.
Behind Clara, back on the beach, I thought I saw something. A shadow outlined in neon. I tried to tell myself it was just a trick of the light, but already the moment had taken on a different feeling. The calm of the water became menacing. Our isolation became a vulnerability. I spun in a circle, making sure no one had snuck up behind us.
“What?”
“Nothing. I just thought I saw someone. On the shore.”
“It might just be a homeless person. A lot of them sleep under the pier.” But I knew we were thinking the same thing when I saw Clara standing a little straighter, her shoulders high: the men had followed us. To think we had gotten away had been silly, stupid, or that because we had cleared one danger we were protected from others, like the night’s quota had been filled.
“What should we do?”
“Well, we can’t stay out here forever.” Clara’s teeth had started to chatter. I felt goose bumps rise on my arms.
“Let’s head in then. I’m sure we’re fine.” Fine. Was that true? How often had I hid behind that word when I meant its opposite? It was what Steffanie had said when I was able to see her after the attack. Really, Lily, I’m totally fine. We waded back, our wet clothes stuck to our skin. I scanned the beach for the person I thought I’d seen, but I didn’t make out any shapes except for the lifeguard stand, ghostly in the moonlight. Clara and I made our way up the beach slowly, in silence.
At the boardwalk, Clara jerked her head in the direction of her shop. “I’m this way.”
“You sure you’re okay walking by yourself?”
“Do it all the time.”
“Right.” It had been, along with the night of Matthew’s last show, one of the strangest, most disorienting nights of my life. But for Clara, was this normal? The danger? The ugliness? Maybe the only strange thing about it for her had been that I was there to witness, to screw it up. “What are you doing this week?” I asked. “I could teach you to swim. Properly. In daylight, I mean.”
“Sure.” I could tell she thought it was an empty offer, something to patch up the silence. Even I was surprised that I meant it. That something like trust had passed between us, solidified.
“I’m off on Saturday. Want to meet at three o’clock, three-thirty?”
“You can text me if you want. I just added more minutes to my phone.” I wondered if she didn’t have a real phone because she couldn’t afford one, or if that was one more way Des kept Clara cut off, kept her under her thumb.
“Sounds good to me. I’ll see you then.” We stopped in front of the candy shop, where Julie Zale smiled out from a poster on the window. It was hard to look at her face.
“I keep wondering why she left home,” Clara said. “Why she thought she might be happier somewhere else.”
“Maybe everyone thinks they’ll be happier somewhere else.” Had I been happier in New York than I’d been here? Busier, maybe. More distracted. But happier? No.
“Some of us are right.”
“You sure you’re okay?” I asked.
She smiled. “I’m more worried about you.”
“Don’t worry. My car is right there. Get back safe.”
“I will.”
I watched her walk down the boardwalk huddled into herself, looking like a skinny kid, like girls I remembered from elementary school, the ones whose slight size meant they could jump the farthest off of the swings. I wished I had a blanket, a towel—I would run after her and throw it over her shoulders. As I turned away, another cat crossed my path, a brief streak of white-and-gray tail, and my exhaustion caught up with me, weighed on all my limbs. I was so tired of being afraid. And yet, it seemed that was all this summer was: learning all of the ways that dread could creep into my days.
DEBORAH
ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON IN Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, Deborah Willis’s phone rings. She is in the middle of canning the strawberries she’s grown in her garden, stewing jam on the stove. The air in the kitchen is humid, thick with the sweetness of strawberries and sugar. Deborah has pink
stains across the front of her shirt. A mound of stems sits on the counter, and it is their peppery, woody smell that she will come to associate with this day, this call. The way it filled her lungs with something like dirt.
“Hello,” she says, licking strawberry pulp from her thumb. “Hello?” She’s surprised. No one ever calls on the house line anymore. She can smell the jam starting to burn and stretches the cord so she can reach over to the stove and turn the heat down, just a notch. Maybe she was too late to answer. Maybe the caller had hung up already.
She is about to hang the phone back on the hook when a voice says, “Mom?”
She sets her spoon down on the stove, wonders if she conjured the voice: she associates the house phone with Georgia, the vintage blue rotary dial Georgia loved as a girl. “Mom?” the voice asks again. She can’t say anything yet—she knows that she is about to cry and the words will come out wrong, crimped by emotion: anger, gratitude, joy, sorrow, all rolled together. “Mom, are you there?”
“I’m here,” she stammers. I’m always here, she thinks.
“Mom, I … I was wondering if I could come home.”
Deborah grips the curly cord of the phone, as though she could use it to hang on to her daughter, to pull her closer that way. “Of course you can. Are you in trouble? Do you need money? Where are you?”
“Atlantic City,” she says. “I can take a bus tomorrow. I have enough money for the ticket.”
“What time?” Deborah says. She thinks of the last time she saw Georgia, three years ago. The scabs on her cheeks. Her bleeding, bitten-down nails.
“I would get into Scranton at seven.”
“I’ll be there to pick you up. You need anything? You sure you’re not in trouble?” She thinks of Georgia at fifteen, the DUI, the stolen truck. Thinking it was a good idea to let her spend the night in jail. The next morning, the look on her daughter’s face: the betrayal, the rage, the fear. Deborah knew she had made a terrible mistake. But she was a single mother trying to raise a daughter the only way she knew how. Never as straightforward as planting seeds, coaxing fruit from the garden. There was a whole alchemy of love and discipline that she must not have gotten right.
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