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  I squeezed his hand before pulling mine away. “So who is this we’re delivering to?”

  “Ms. Loretta. She’s great, but she doesn’t seem to like leaving this little square.”

  I saw what he meant. Everything about where she lived seemed square—the house, the garden and the two-foot-tall border of white bricks that outlined her property. “Weird.”

  He shrugged. “Not really. She’s not weird at all. That’s the funny part. Come on. I think you’ll like her. Another woman named Rosie used to live here, but Loretta moved in a year or so ago.”

  I jumped from the Jeep and grabbed a bag from the backseat labeled Loretta. Fletch took the other bag and another one from inside a large cooler and carried one under each arm, like I did with the kids when they begged me to bob in the waves. He then stopped to glance over his shoulder at me with such a happy expression, one absent of critical assessment or disappointment. I still stood at the side of the Jeep, my hand resting on the back tire and my other hand holding a grocery bag. My heart tried to get my attention with a little flip.

  Even on the drive here, I’d been thinking about Ryan and what he would and wouldn’t want me to say or do in this situation. About how he was holding Hannah’s hand or looking into her face after making love and telling her how beautiful she was. But when Fletch caught my gaze over his shoulder I didn’t care so much about Hannah or Ryan or whether they were naked on a bed overlooking the Rhine River or wherever the hell her daddy’s money took them next. I only wanted this guy, with grocery bags under his arms, to smile at me.

  He nodded toward the door. “Come on, you. Her ice cream will melt for sure.”

  I followed him along the walkway of broken stone where moss and grass, dandelions and white clover weeds sprouted between the cracks. Fletch stepped onto the porch and knocked on the door. “Ms. Loretta, it’s Fletch.”

  The door opened and I laughed, well, not out loud, but inside for sure. She was so cute. A little woman with springy white hair like corkscrews, which she tried to hold back with a very 1990s hot pink scrunchy. It wasn’t taming her hair very well. She had a big wide smile and the darkest eyes I’d ever seen.

  “Hello, Fletch my dear,” she said and then turned her attention to me. “Well, we have a helper today, do we?”

  I had no idea why this lady needed us to deliver her groceries. She could do anything or go anywhere, as far as I could tell. She was like a little sprite. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Piper.”

  “What a funny name for a girl,” she said and laughed. “But aren’t you just adorable.” She pushed her back against the door to keep it open and nodded for both of us to enter. “Come on in.”

  “A funny name?” I asked and laughed out loud. “Really?”

  “No,” Fletch said. “It’s a perfect name. Ms. Loretta, please don’t scare off my new friend.”

  “Oh, dear, don’t be scared. Sometimes I say things without knowing I said them.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “I do that all the time.”

  Fletch entered and I followed him. Inside, Loretta’s house was as otherworldly as she was. It was all one room—the kitchen, the dining room and the living room—together like best friends. The circular wooden dining table was covered in fabric and buttons and ribbons and thread, its top scarred and scraped. An old-fashioned sewing machine, a Singer, sat in the middle of the table. Everywhere there were nuggets of nature: rocks and feathers, crystals and shells, driftwood and moss. A nest with a cracked-open, empty baby blue eggshell sat on the windowsill in the kitchen.

  Fletch didn’t seem to notice any of it as he placed the bags on the kitchen counter.

  “Are you a vacation girl?” Ms. Loretta asked.

  “A vacation girl?” I stared at a blue crystal that was set on the little window nook over her kitchen sink. I approached it and leaned over to gaze at it, a peephole into another universe. It was spiky and crystallized; small things could live an entire life in between the cracks.

  “Here on vacation,” Ms. Loretta said. “A girl on vacation. And isn’t that beautiful? It’s an amethyst crystal. It clears my space of negative energy.”

  Then I saw that it wasn’t blue, but a purple so deep it had fooled me. “You don’t even have any negative energy to clear,” I said. “And, oh, yes, I guess I’m a vacation girl. But not really, because my mom actually has a place here. I should tell her about your crystal,” I said and then felt stupid. “I mean, just because it seems like a couple bad things happened in the house and . . .” I looked to Fletch for help, but he only smiled.

  Ms. Loretta smiled, too, and began taking things out of the grocery bags, one by one, settling them in very precise places in her cupboards as if everything had a home and just went straight into it. The tea, the canned corn, the noodles, the chicken broth, the tortilla chips, the pecans and cashews.

  “So where is your mom’s place?” she asked.

  I tried to catch Fletch’s eye, but he was organizing other things and putting them away in the freezer and refrigerator, like he and Loretta were an old couple who had unloaded their groceries a hundred times or more together.

  “It’s called the ‘Sea La Vie.’ I think it’s stupid that people name their houses, but . . .”

  She stopped her reach into the cupboard and then turned to me. Her eyes squinted like she was trying to hide them. “Naming things makes them yours.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well, dear,” she said to Fletch, “thanks so much for bringing everything. One day, soon I hope, I’ll stop being such a hermit and putting such egregious demands on you to come all the way out here to me.”

  “It’s not a problem,” he said.

  It wasn’t until we were in the Jeep and on the way to the second house that I noticed we were driving along a beach road. To the left were the trailers and tiny houses, and to the right, over the hill and visible through a pathway in the wildflowers and thickets, was the beach.

  “Stop,” I said.

  He pulled the Jeep to the side of the road. “What?”

  “How can anyone not know about this?” I pointed. “This is, like, prime beach property. No one built here?”

  “It’s a nature preserve,” he said. “Protected land.”

  I unlatched the harness and jumped out of the Jeep. I knew he’d follow, even though we still had one more stop. I ran through the pathway, my high-tops scraping past sandburs and red and yellow Indian blanket. I heard the waves and the secret sound of the place where earth met water. Halfway across the sand, I took off one shoe and then the other and ran to the water. Then into the water. The bathwater warmth of it wrapped around my ankles and then my thighs. Fletch reached me just as the sea came to my waist, soaking through my cutoff jeans shorts and tank top. A wave approached us and I laughed, jumping to let myself lift with it.

  “What are you doing?” Fletch caught me, grabbed me around the waist.

  “You have to jump into the ocean whenever you can,” I said. “Whenever and wherever you can.” The wave caught me in the chest and we both lost our balance and went under.

  I stayed there for as long as I could; I always do. Waiting. Waiting. Until I have to rise. Until my chest burns and there’s nothing to do but come up for air. We were separated by the wave, Fletch and I, and his legs dangled in front of me. Then his face as he dove back under. He grabbed at me and pulled me to the surface. We rose together.

  I took a long fill of air and then said, “I like to stay under as long as I can. Don’t you?”

  He just looked at me, those very, very blue eyes as liquid as the ocean itself. “No.”

  “It’s so peaceful,” I said.

  Our feet touched the sand below when the waves receded, and we stood there, bobbing, sometimes our toes fluttering against the shifting sea-ground and in an instant, for a moment, rising above it.

  “Peaceful
except that you can’t breathe,” he said and he held on to me, facing me, each hand on my waist.

  “Can you imagine a time when we could? Before that first one of us decided to come out of the ocean and walk and breathe out here? To be able to breathe underwater, just in and out, in and out, in and out.”

  “The things you think about,” he said and shook his head. His hair, wet and clumped, dripped into his face, onto his eyelashes.

  “I know.” The buoyancy of the day and the moment fled. I was flat and embarrassed. I realized, with sudden clarity of mind, that I was soaking wet and in the ocean with my clothes on, saying stupid things to a boy I barely knew. This was my problem. This was why I would never be normal. This was why Ryan left me, and why I didn’t get into a sorority and why I would never, not in any way, fit into a life that other people fit into without even trying.

  I took his hands from my waist and separated myself, then dove back under the water, where it didn’t feel so peaceful anymore, where it felt stifling and as depleted of oxygen as it was. I swam toward shore, a smooth breaststroke like the days when I could swim past every kid on the country club swim team and take home my blue first-place ribbon.

  A tug on my leg and then I couldn’t come up for the next breath. I kicked backward and rose to the surface with Fletch still holding on to my foot. I gasped for air and he pulled me back under, face-to-face, inside the bottom of a wave. I blinked, the salt water burning, and he took my face in his and brought his lips to mine and kissed me as the water rose above us. It wasn’t a regular kiss where you could feel each other’s lips and open your mouth to search for how much more of a kiss you wanted. It was an underwater kiss with its own kind of thrill, its own kind of intimacy. I wound my legs around his waist and he pushed off the sand so we broke the surface of the water, and somehow, while still kissing, we took in a long, deep breath together.

  We broke apart as the wave carried us toward shore and, tangled, laughing, we found our way to sit on the sand and face the water. A mutual embarrassment floated around us and I dropped my head onto his shoulder. He placed his hand on top of my head and we sat like that for ten heartbeats—I counted. Then he spoke. “That was the best first kiss of my life.”

  I made a single noise that was supposed to be a laugh but came out more like a sigh.

  “Mr. Seaton is going to be very curious why I’m delivering his groceries soaking wet and covered in sand.”

  “Let him wonder,” I said. “Some of the best things in life we have to wonder about forever.”

  “You are brilliant, Piper.”

  “Oh, yes, I am,” I said. “That’s why I failed out my freshman year.”

  He wound his fingers through my hair and gave a little tug. “There’s more than one way to be brilliant.”

  “My mom says that to me all the time. She’s been saying it to me since my third-grade teacher conference, when they told her that I couldn’t sit in my chair.”

  “Then your mom is right.”

  “She’d love to hear you say that.” I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of the earth, so very many sounds. “Can’t we stay here for a while?”

  “Sure thing.” Fletch placed his finger under my chin and lifted my face to his and kissed me again.

  chapter 21

  LAINEY MCKAY

  Shadows played along the edges of the bedroom ceiling as I lay flat on the cool sheets and stared up. The fan whirred and, outside, Piper’s voice rose above my children’s laughter. I wanted to be there for them every second, but sometimes this wasn’t possible.

  Before I’d had them, I’d had a fantasy of what a mom could be, what kind of mom I wanted to be that was the opposite of what I’d had. To me, the fantasy mom was someone out there ready and waiting for her child to say, “I need . . .” and that mom ran as fast as she could to her child’s side. I played this game a lot after my mom was gone. What would Mom do now? I would ask myself when I was left out of a party or needed a dress hemmed or a boy picked someone else. This dreamy mom always did the right and good thing. Probably none of the things I did now, but I sure as hell was doing my best.

  I stood and stretched, peering out the window. George was on the tire swing and Daisy held a tiny pink fishing pole over the river, wiggling it back and forth. Piper stood between them, her head moving back and forth as if torn over who to pay the most attention to. The doorbell rang. I turned away from the idyllic scene and went out to answer. There on the front porch, a box had been left, the big box that had made it across the country from my little art studio in California.

  The edges were crushed and the top was slightly caved in, as if someone had sat on it while they read the paper during their cigarette break at the warehouse. A little thrill filled me and the lethargy I’d awoken with fell away. I dragged the box into the living room just as Bonny came from a bedroom with a screwdriver in her hand—replacing doorknobs, one by one, in the entire house. She never sat still; her leather binder with marching orders kept her moving. Maybe her way of keeping her mind busy with her body.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “My art supplies. The ones I shipped from home. I thought it would take a couple days, not over a week.” I knelt next to the box and started to tear at the tape. The top of it flapped back and I peered inside. “It’s all here. Now I have no excuse not to work.”

  “Much bigger than that little box you used to carry with you in the summer.”

  “Not much different, though.” I took out a paint palette. “But you’re right—it’s bigger. Like the supplies grew as we did.”

  We laughed and Bonny picked a canvas from inside the box, a square, cream-colored canvas stretched across a plywood frame, two feet by two feet.

  “Where will you set up?” she asked. “You can choose anywhere you want.”

  “Ideally right there,” I said, pointing to the right-hand corner of the living room under the large windows. “But I don’t want my art stuff to hog the house and I don’t want my wild injuns to get into the paint . . .”

  “You know,” Bonny said, “I had an air unit installed in the garage because I was thinking the new owner could make it into a bedroom one day. It’s still raw and unfinished, but you could do what you want.”

  “Are you kidding? The garage has air?”

  “It’s not empty,” Bonny said, “but we could shove most of the stuff to one side.”

  “This is so wonderful.” I hugged her. “Be careful. I might not leave.”

  “That’s my goal,” she said and she squeezed me back, her arms tight around my shoulders. “To keep you here for good and all.”

  “You aren’t staying here for good and all, Bonny. You aren’t stuck.” Her emotions, usually so hidden and camouflaged behind her beautiful smile and inspirational quotes, had been raw and out in the open since the Emory phone call. There was nothing I could say to help, but still I tried.

  “I just meant I love having you here, that’s all.” She stared off toward the river and spoke as if there was another person at the far end of the room. “All my plans, lined like neat little soldiers, decided to mutiny. They’ve headed out to do whatever they please while I’m left standing here. I’m lost.”

  “You haven’t lost everything,” I said.

  “Of course I haven’t.” She turned to me and there was that smile as if it had never left, so practiced. “I’ve just lost my mooring, my imagined future. I don’t feel like I’ve lost everything. Not even close. Just what I wanted and thought I needed. I will go home and try again. Begin again, as they say.” It sounded like she was giving a pep talk to a team about to head out onto the field to win the championship game and they were losing by too many points to win.

  “You do not have to go back to Lucas.”

  “It might be the right thing to do—to try to fix the mess I’ve made.” She shooed her hand through the air like
her feelings were mosquitoes. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She reached into my box to help me unload. Her hands emerged with a shoe box, which she set on the round entry table. “What’s this?”

  “Letters,” I said and lifted the top. “All the ones I’ve written to Mom since the day she left. I stopped keeping a journal after Dad read ours. I could never write in one again. I kept seeing the Girl Detective book in Dad’s hands, the way he read out loud all the things we thought were so private, and I never could get the words to flow again. But then I started writing to Mom and could get my feelings out that way.”

  “That night,” Bonny said. “That horrible night when he read all the things we’d written about your mom out loud, how she hid her pills under the mattress, how she hid the liquor bottles in the fishing box, how she put vodka in her morning orange juice. Hell, if we hadn’t been so nosy, thinking we were real detectives. He used us to shame her . . .” Bonny turned away as if the memory itself was trying to look her in the eyes.

  “I’ve thought about that more times than I can count, but we can’t blame ourselves. That’s what I came to. Dad was going to shame her and say the same things to her even if he hadn’t found our notebook. He was intent on getting her help or having her gone: I’ve never been sure which. But it wasn’t our fault. Even if I felt it was for the remainder of my childhood.”

  I lifted a handful of the letters. Each one folded and inside a sealed envelope with a single handwritten word on the front: Mom. “I don’t read them after I write them. It’s usually when something has gone wrong or right.” The urge to cry began as a weight in my chest and then rose to my throat. Tears puddled and I swiftly wiped them away. “I don’t even know how many are here now. I started the year she left and the last one I wrote was only a year ago, after I promised Tim that I’d quit looking for her. I tried to put it all aside. Let it go.”

  “Oh, how could you do that? All that pain poured out onto paper. All that missing . . . Why did you bring them here?”