Page 28 of Dead of Summer
“That’s not true,” he interjects. “Geoffrey was married a good ten years to that one, ah, what’s her name?”
“Bethany Shaw? Oh, and look what became of her. Drug addiction! Depression! And then, a sudden disappearance? You’re only proving my point.”
“Oh, come on now,” Henry says. She’s beginning to make him tired. Besides, he knows this timeworn line of conversation all too well. “We don’t know anything about his ex-wife.”
He looks back from the window as Margie throws her hands into the air and turns on her heels back to the kitchen, where she angrily starts cleaning up dinner, banging her plate into the sink and running water in a way that lets him know she is exasperated.
Henry turns back to the telescope in time to watch David Clarke enter the living room alone. His face has transformed from distraught to confident in the walk from his father’s office, and his stooped shoulders have straightened. The woman leaps up off the sofa when she sees him. She greets him with a kiss, which he returns eagerly, a foxlike smile on his lips, his fingers pressing indentations into the bare skin on her back.
Even before the incident, Henry always felt like Margie’s distaste for the entire Clarke family was extreme. After all, why should he have anything against the family personally just because they were wealthy? But now the very thought of the Clarke family sends Henry’s body into revolt. He can feel a version of it starting now, the strange rubbery sensation that takes over his legs and travels up through his body. It forces him to take a step back and sink into his chair before his knees give out.
“We should have known to be afraid of those people is all I’m saying,” Margie calls from the kitchen, pointing the dish sponge angrily. “There is something sick about them.”
Hours later Henry opens his eyes, looking up into the skylight of their little bedroom. The moonlight glows against the beadboard walls. Nature is surprisingly bright on its own, when the stars are out and the moon is nearly full and reflecting off the water like it is tonight. Margie is turned away from him in bed, the lumpy form of her body below the thin quilt unmoving. The old digital alarm clock on the nightstand reads 2 a.m. Henry climbs out of bed and goes to the living room. It isn’t unusual for him to be awake right now. He rarely sleeps more than a few hours at a time these days, often startling awake, with some unnamable dread clawing at his spine.
He read an interesting article once about how wolves who become separated from their packs sleep in fits and starts same as he does. It’s a form of self-protection, a way to stay vigilant when you are isolated and more vulnerable to threats. At least that’s how it feels to Henry. They’d never meant for it to be this way, not permanently at least.
We’ll let the talk die down on the island, Margie had said all those years ago.Then we’ll start going back in.But they never have. Occasionally in the first few years one of them would bring it up, musing about how they could take the boat into Port Mary for dinner or go to one of the town’s parades. But then doubt would cloud the other’s eyes. They had Jean to bring them groceries, after all, and there was no real reason to goback, no one they really wanted to see. Or perhaps more accurately, no one who wanted to see them anymore. It had been painfully clear when no one had stood by them after it came out that Henry was a suspect in the girl’s death. No one wanted to touch the Wrights after that.
It became harder and harder for them to pretend that they were just taking some time away, that the plan was to go back one day. And Henry began to worry that all this time spent hiding in plain sight across the water only made him seem more guilty.
He goes to the main room and turns on the lamp and then pads to the kitchen and pops down the lever on the kettle and prepares a cup of tea. The backs of his eyes ache from lack of sleep as he bends and looks through the telescope.
The beach is empty, eerily lit by the dim glow of a single halogen lamp from the parking lot behind it. Henry takes the telescope on its familiar route starting at the ferry dock. It is quiet. The ferry bobs lonely with its yellowy circles of light reflecting on the water. He moves slowly up Harbor Street, catching the front lights of the Salty Crab going off for the night. He would wait for her to lock up, but he knows that Jean won’t be leaving anytime soon. She’ll still have the till to sort, the floors to scrub. On weekends it’s rare she makes it back home before three in the morning. He often watches her as she locks the front doors and disappears back into the village toward her house on the east side of the island.
Henry stops on a figure stumbling up the road. A man, by the shape of his shoulders. His image goes in and out of focus as he moves toward the edge of town.
At first Henry worries that he’s hurt but then realizes the man is drunk. He stops for a moment and sways. An arm reaches up, tilting back a bottle of something. He’s probably gone out and forgotten where he is staying. Summer often does this sort of thing to people, Henry has observed. He’s watched it before, as though all the nice weather and beach time, the relaxed pace of life here, turns them into idiots, making them do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. Reckless things. Eachsummer there are more of them. The man wavers in the dark, but before Henry can get a better look at him, he disappears behind a thicket of wild rose hips.
Now Henry sees the outline of a woman, her torso bent as she trudges up the hill away from town. He follows her with his telescope, focusing, trying to get a better view. She is young, he guesses, based on the way she walks bent forward like she is carrying a backpack. He sees the flash of a white skirt as she passes under the streetlight before she moves behind the same dense grove. Henry holds his breath, imagining the two of them passing in the night, the drunk man and the young girl. His body starts to thrum nervously as he moves the telescope back and forth, timing the footfall of the girl with the open view of the road past the rose-hip bushes. He shuffles impatiently as the clock ticks behind him on the kitchen wall, staring intently at the empty road until his eyes grow bleary.
But they never emerge.
ORLA
The curtains billow into the living room like the tails of ghosts. Orla closes her eyes, blocking them out. Her heart thrums. Her mind spins in useless circles. All the movement outside, the leaves in the wind, the waves lapping at the dock, has her on edge. It could be that the Xanax is making her paranoid. She’s lost track of the time between doses and taken too much of it. She should know better.
She’s going to need to leave Hadley she decides suddenly. She’ll tell her father she couldn’t do it. She’ll get a job in New York selling tourist crap or waiting tables, she doesn’t care. She just has to finish with the house and then she can leave. She has only to get rid of the furniture now, fill a few nail holes, and tackle the upstairs closet of course. She’ll work all day tomorrow. Then she will get the hell off this island. The plan soothes her enough to lull her into a partial sleep, and a memory of Alice comes to her.
“What about our plan?” Orla had asked quietly when she saw Alice the next time. They were at the lighthouse for a picnic hosted by Orla’s family. It was a yearly tradition, and much like everything it was different that year. Even the weather seemed more volatile. The wind plasteredtheir sundresses against their backs and whipped their hair across their faces.
“I have a new plan,” Alice said, casting her eyes down at the lineup of food on the folding table.
They hadn’t spoken since the bonfire night on the beach. Orla had waited for an apology, but Alice hadn’t offered one. Her bedroom window had been dark the last few days. Orla picked up a hot dog from a tray and dressed it with ketchup. She found herself nervous in her friend’s presence for the first time. Alice pulled out a can of Coke from a cooler.
“What is it?” Orla put her hot dog down and leaned across the picnic table. But Alice had raised her eyebrows, taking a sip of Coke as Orla’s mother ran past them to secure piles of paper plates with rocks.
Alice pulled her hair out of her face. “It’s always so intense up here. Why do we do this every year?”
“Tradition,” Orla said. Alice rolled her eyes. “What’s the plan?”
“It’s something I’ve been working on,” Alice said cryptically. “I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“Promised who?”
Orla’s father came over and interrupted them, all joyful naive dad bluster. “Be sure and get some of that curried chicken salad before it all gets scooped up,” he said. “It’s my new recipe.”
“Looks amazing,” Alice said as she gave him a dazzling smile.
