Chapter 23 Lily #4
“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.