Page 4 of The Same Backward as Forward
Who are they?I answered my mother’s question. “Hawthornes.”
“At leastshehas a brain.” My mother swiveled her gaze back to Rory. “One Hawthorne, two friends, and the Hawthorne in question would be Tobias Hawthorne the Second. Toby. The only son of one of the country’s richest men. Little bastard might have a death wish, but we won’t be the ones granting it.Will we, Rory?”
“No,” Rory gritted out.
My mother dropped her hand from his face. “You’ll want to fix that last stitch,” she told me, her voice utterly devoid of feeling.
I swallowed back bile as I finished the job. To keep myself steady, I retreated elsewhere in my mind.Tobias Hawthorne the Second. Toby.I thought about the boy with the reddish-brown hair and his emperor-lounging-on-a-litter looseness. He was theHawthorne of the group, I was sure of it, and apparently, I had his overprivileged, trouble-starting ass to thank for tonight, too.
I finished the last stitch. My mother didn’t linger. On her way out, Rory following like a dog on her heels, she paused in the doorway and looked back at me. “You have a steady hand,” she said.
That didn’t sound like a compliment. It sounded like a promise. She would be back.
Chapter 3
I didn’t sleep the rest of the night and left my apartment at sunrise. It was my day off, but I had to dosomething. I needed to clear my head, so I went to the grocery store and then headed to the outskirts of town—farther, even, than my own apartment. I couldn’t afford rent in any of the towns closer to the community college or hospital than Rockaway Watch, but I’d chosen to stick to the very edges. The only thing farther out was an abandoned lighthouse and terrain so inhospitable that no person in their right mind would have tried to live there.
Which is not to say that no one did.
I knew better than to approach Jackson’s shack, so I left the groceries I’d bought on the steps of the lighthouse, which had been built sometime in the eighteen hundreds and looked like it had been battered by saltwater and storm-force gales every day since. The roof had, at one point, been blue, the tower some shade of white, but the whole thing was faded and overgrown now. The beacon hadn’t worked for decades. The stone walls were literally crumbling.
It was my favorite place in Rockaway Watch.
Lighthouses had always felt like something out of a fairy tale to me—a warning not to come closer, a liminal space betweenhere and there. This one wasn’t easy to get to, but I made the climb every two weeks, groceries in hand.
“I oughtta shoot you.”
I turned to face the gruff, copiously bearded fisherman who’d just spoken those words. “Please don’t,” I said calmly.
Jackson Currie wasn’t technically a shut-in. He left his house to go out on his boat and interacted with others when necessary to dispatch his fishing haul, but he loathed people—all people, myself included.
He scowled at the bag I’d left on the lighthouse steps. “I told you to stop doing that.”
“How’s your arthritis?” I asked. He couldn’t have been older than forty or forty-five, but a lifetime of fishing had wreaked havoc on his hands and wrists.
“None of your damn business.”
“About the same, then,” I said as I reached out and took his right hand in mine, gently prodding the joints at the base of his fingers, lightly flexing his wrist, rubbing my thumb over it, then up the adjacent bone. “Do you need any more cream?” I read his answer to that question in his expression:None of my damn business.
I checked his other hand. When I finished, I expected him to storm off—withthe groceries—but he didn’t. He didn’t curse at me or threaten to shoot me again, either.
“Storm’s coming.” Jackson turned toward the ocean. The sky was clear, stretching down to meet the gently rolling blue-green waters of the Pacific. “Gonna be a big one.”
Something in his tone made it hard for me to doubt him, no matter how blue the sky was. “If there’s a storm coming, I’m assuming you’re in for the day?” I said. “Or that you’ll be going out and coming back in before it hits?”
Jackson snorted. He was the type of person who would have arm-wrestled a lightning bolt if he could have. He turned his head to look at me, his brown eyes executing a grid search of my features. “What’s wrong with you today?” he demanded.
Bringing Jackson Currie groceries had never felt like letting the world in, specificallybecausehe hated people, myself included, so much. His question was gruff, but the fact that he’d asked it at all hit me hard.
“Nothing,” I said. If I didn’t think about what had happened the night before, maybe I could pretend it away—for a few hours, at least.
Jackson gave a little nod. “None of my damn business,” he concluded.
Hours later, I drove two towns over to the hospital, even though it was my day off, and even though I’d told myself I wasn’t going to. If I’d been certified, I might have been able to pick up a shift, but instead, I headed to the cafeteria.
Hospitals were an easy place to disappear. Everyone had something else to worry about.
By late afternoon, the sky outside had turned—not just purple but black. It hadn’t started raining yet, but the wind was a feral creature. The hospital was far enough into the mainland that I couldn’t see the ocean, but in my mind’s eyes, I conjured an image of dark waters. Lightning tore across the sky.
