“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 INEagles 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 tocry 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.”
