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  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “Here,” I said, coming to myself for a moment, remembering we were in the middle of the street in Watersend. And remembering that single word spoken only two hours before. Not here, I’d said. Here, but not here.

  I fell back into my body, a clunky vessel now, with a sinking feeling that there was somewhere I was supposed to be; some catastrophe to avoid; some terrible something that must be stopped. I stepped away from Fletch, and then around the Jeep to the passenger seat. “I need to get home,” I said. “I want to stay with you. I want to hang out longer, but there’s something at the house, and I have to go home.” It hit me how easily I’d come to call that house, Sea La Vie, home.

  “I understand,” he said, and he did that jump he does into the driver’s seat. I climbed into the passenger seat beside him and buckled the harness.

  Fletch started the Jeep and turned the radio on. Bob Marley sang about no woman, no cry, and Fletch smiled at me. “Are you okay?”

  “I wish I could explain,” I said, “I don’t know if I can, but it’s not you.”

  He nodded and we drove in silence for the few blocks to Sea La Vie. He parked in front and I glanced at the house as if it could tell me what I needed to know. Were things the same in there or had something unalterable shifted? Or had I been reading too many dystopian novels where the world ended with a single action?

  Sitting there in Fletch’s Jeep, with my hands folded in my lap, I felt like I was underwater and breathing through a straw. All the lights were on, each window ablaze, except the far right one that belonged to George and Daisy, who must be sleeping soundly. Music, soft, came from the back porch, where I knew Mom and Lainey were talking. Was he there?

  I unhitched my harness and jumped to the soft dirt of the lawn. “Can I call you later? I just need to . . .” I tilted my head toward the house.

  “You can call me anytime,” he said with this little grin.

  I walked around the side of the Jeep and onto the driver’s-side running board to kiss him. “See you tomorrow.”

  He kissed me back. “You are a mystery.”

  “Not really,” I said, “but it’s pretty to think so.”

  “Hemingway,” he blurted out.

  “Last line in The Sun Also Rises,” I said.

  “Wow.” He drew me close again. “You better be careful. You could make a guy fall in love.”

  “With Hemingway?” I asked and kissed him again before I jumped off the sideboard.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.”

  I laughed even though I felt that terrible sinking feeling that something was about to go very wrong. I waved over my shoulder and then jogged around to the back of the house. The women’s voices were lyrical and normal, and I stood in the dark listening. I didn’t need to know what they were saying to know that whatever it was, it wasn’t about Owen and his arrival in Watersend.

  I sank to the picnic table bench and lay flat on it, staring into the sky. It was a crescent moon night without cloud cover. The stars were so plentiful and clear I felt I could reach out and grab one, hide it in my back pocket, save it for the one wish I might want someday. Then one shot across the sky to loop downward and disappear into the dark blue nothingness. It was gone before I remembered to wish. Was it too late when it was gone? I closed my eyes and made a wish.

  “Please let Mom be okay,” I said.

  It was the first time I’d ever wished for anything that wasn’t for me. Or about me. Or of me. Or maybe it was about me because if she wasn’t okay, would I be? I reclined there in the dark thinking of more questions than could ever have answers. How could Lainey have lived all her life without a mom? How could she live without knowing her brother? Should I tell Mom? And mostly, would Owen’s arrival ruin the summer and the quiet beauty we had come to so easily in such a short amount of time?

  My head lolled to the screened-in porch, where candlelight made the world dreamy and malleable. I wanted to stop time for as long as was needed for all of us to be okay, or at least okay enough to handle what Owen brought with him.

  But this wasn’t a book. Time would not stand still. I would not find a superpower to fix it all. And hearts broke all the time. All the time.

  chapter 26

  LAINEY MCKAY

  Piper didn’t know I could see her out there on the picnic bench, but I could. Her hair spread out under the moonlight. If I hadn’t heard the Jeep pull up or the laughter, I probably wouldn’t have noticed her. But I was looking and listening.

  Bonny was curled like a cat on the far end of the couch, staring off into the world, so she startled at the ring of the doorbell.

  “Who could that be?”

  “I got it,” I said.

  What happened next seemed initially like the stuff of my dreams—of opening a door or turning a corner—and seeing his face. My brother was a piece of me that had disappeared and left a gaping hole. When he was near me, I’d find myself centered and calm, a surety in the world that wasn’t there at any other time.

  Here and then gone. Cut and run, Tim said about Owen.

  But there Owen stood on the doorstep as if he knew I needed him more than I ever had, as if he knew to run to me in Watersend.

  I’d tried to describe my brother to people who hadn’t met him, and I never could. I used vague and inadequate words like “rock” or “strength” or “safe,” and I wanted to say that there wasn’t really a word to describe him; it was more of a feeling he gave: a sense of rightness in the world or maybe redemption. But that was also like trying to describe a hurricane as safe. He was so many other things. Wild. Free.

  There he stood. His feet planted wide and his smile broad. He held his hands behind his back and I thought he might have something in them. I said his name in a whisper so he wouldn’t disappear, so the dream wouldn’t fade. “Owen.”

  I threw my arms around him, rested my face on his chest and breathed in the wood smoke aroma of his shirt.

  “Lainey?”

  My name in his voice was exquisite and yet I noticed the question mark at the end; it quivered above us and I pulled back to take him in.

  “Yes, I’m Lainey.” I laughed. “Did you forget my name?” I kissed his rough cheek and brushed back the hair from his forehead in such a mom move that it felt like my own mother had moved my hand. “How did you know I was here? How did you . . . ? Did Tim tell you?”

  He stepped back to look at me under the front lantern light. A breeze moved through the palm fronds in a sound like rain.

  “Tim?” I repeated. “Did he tell you?”

  He shook his head. “You look so great, sis. I’ve been so worried about you.”

  “Me? Seriously? You haven’t answered any calls. I haven’t heard from you. And you worry about me?” I punched him lightly on the arm, a remembered movement from the back of the car or the dinner table.

  “I do. I know I’m a terrible brother,” he said and hugged me again, this time tighter and longer. “I know that. I love you, though. I do.”

  “It’s like you’re a mind reader. You always know just when to show.” I snuck a glance back inside the house and down the hall to see Bonny’s shadowy figure on the porch. “I wanted to come here. I did,” I whispered. “Bonny needed me and the house is so great and I’m working, but . . . it’s full of ghosts, too.”

  “I don’t know why you’d come back here, sis. I really don’t.”

  “Because I love Bonny.”

  “I get that,” he said. He held out his hand for mine and I took it. He closed the front door with his foot and guided me toward the street and a pickup truck parked in the grass.

  “Don’t you want to come in?” I asked. “Bonny will be glad to know you’re here.”

  “Slow down,” he said and dropped his arm over my shoulder. “I’m not going to intrude here.”
>
  “Intrude? Are you kidding? My kids will be so happy to see you—your niece and nephew. Bonny, too. Did you tell her you were coming?”

  Cicadas conversed in their chirpy language; the ocean moved to its nighttime lullaby; the river rose over the marsh grasses with the sound of the wind. One lone frog bellowed out his commands. I would have stayed there forever with the sounds of the night, keeping Owen all to myself.

  “Sis,” he said, “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He didn’t answer and a hot flush of embarrassment and anger flooded me. “You came to see Bonny. Not me.” I took two steps back. “I was so excited you came for me, but it’s not me you came for at all.” He loved Bonny more than he loved me. He always had and always would. These truths hammered at my heart and it broke.

  “Sis, I love you. I’m so happy to see you. I just didn’t know you were here. I came because I thought she was alone with her daughter, and I was worried.”

  A hard knot inside me cracked open and whatever was there spiraled upward: betrayal.

  “Tell me everything. You’ve been with her all these years? Been . . . with her?”

  “No, Lainey. Not like that. I haven’t seen her since her wedding, until the night in the hospital.”

  “Stop saying my name. Stop. Just tell me. I looked to you. You were all that was left of my family and you always ran. I understood, and I gave you that space, but then you had time and energy to call Bonny and confide in her? Talk to her?” All the pent-up anger, all the words I’d never said for fear of pushing him further away, poured out of me.

  With the sound of a slamming screen door we both turned. Bonny stood on the front porch, her silhouette as stark against the house as a cutout. She stepped onto the soft grass and I moved quickly to meet her on the walkway with my hands held out in front of me. I didn’t know what I was trying to stop or push or hold, but there I stood with my hands out and Bonny one step away.

  “Stop,” I said. I didn’t know what I meant; I just spat it out like venom.

  “Huh?” Her gaze met mine and she took my outheld hands. “Are you okay?”

  I wrenched them away. “No, I’m not.”

  “What’s going . . .” Her gaze unlatched from mine and found Owen. I saw the recognition the minute it happened, a widening of her pupils, an openmouthed joy, which she covered with her hand.

  This, surprisingly, was worse than Owen’s betrayal. Because I felt it—she loved him just as much. They loved each other more than they could me, or maybe anyone else.

  “Owen.” She whispered his name in the way of someone who has whispered it a million times, in so many other ways and in so many other places. I backed away from her. It was one thing to know they’d loved each other—she’d always admitted it—and another to see it and hear it. It was a reality that had always felt as foggy and far off as childhood.

  On the way into the house, I slammed the screen door with such force that the door frame rattled. I sat at the edge of the bed, sick and wanting my own home. And in a flood of the past, I wanted my mom, our mom, in that singular, desperate way of childhood when I would imagine her returning, throwing her arms around us and weeping that she’d never really wanted to be away for even one minute.

  I thought of Bonny, of our years of conversations and times spent alone every year or so at each other’s homes. For hours we’d discussed life and family. In our most private moments, even the question of divinity, of something greater than us. Like a replay of a bad movie, I remembered the times I’d cried to her of my worry over him, of how I needed him and couldn’t reach him. I’d talked to her of how he was my only family and the only one who could ever understand the loss we had borne.

  I hated her. I loved her. I wanted to scream and yet couldn’t.

  A memory, like the decay from the bottom of the river, bubbled up.

  SUMMER 1978

  WATERSEND, SOUTH CAROLINA

  The first day of our last summer at Watersend, we went straight to the bookshop. It was exactly the same, as if Ms. Mimi had closed the door when we left the previous year and then waited for us to return before she opened it. I knew this wasn’t true, of course, but it felt like it. Bonny and I entered and Mimi waved from the other side of her counter. “Well, well, look who’s back. Welcome, Summer Girls.”

  “Summer Sisters,” I corrected.

  “Ah, yes,” she said and came around to give us a hug.

  We huddled in our corner, a stack of Nancy Drew books on the little table between us. We knew we couldn’t buy them; neither of us had the money. The library was too far away and we were desperate. So there we sat and there we read, as if it was a library. Mimi never once stopped us.

  “This year,” Bonny said, leaning closer, “let’s solve a really big mystery.”

  “I thought the book stealer was a big one last year,” I said.

  “Oh, it was. But something bigger. Something better.”

  “Deal,” I said. I think I would have agreed with her if she’d suggested we run away or start a fire or steal our own books. I loved her that much.

  Bonny had pulled out her notebook. It was really just a composition book from school, but she’d decorated it with stickers.

  Bonny had always been the keeper of our Girl Detective notebook. It was never a question. She was the leader, without discussion. There were our little notes and drawings. We’d ask a question: Who stole Gone with the Wind from the bookshop? And then we’d list clues: long lists of things that might or might not matter.

  Then there were other questions that weren’t so much crimes as mysteries in our world, things we wanted and needed to know.

  What’s the best-selling candy at the Penny Candy Store? (Pop Rocks)

  How is cotton candy made? (with air and sugar)

  Why does Owen go out on the johnboat alone? (to smoke cigarettes)

  When does Lainey’s mom ever sleep? (during the day, after taking another blue pill)

  We made a game of it all, listing our clues.

  Mimi came and sat to join us. “So how was your school year, girls?”

  “Boring,” I said.

  “Great,” Bonny said.

  “You don’t go to the same school?” Mimi sat back in her chair. She had the longest, prettiest black hair I’d ever seen. I always looked at it instead of her face. It moved and swayed and fell over her shoulders like water.

  “No, ma’am,” Bonny said. “We don’t. We live kind of far away from each other.”

  “Oh, I thought you both lived in Atlanta.”

  “We do,” I said. “But Atlanta is huge.”

  “Yes.” Mimi patted her lap as if a small child sat there. “It is.”

  We whiled away the afternoon reading The Secret of the Old Clock and then wandered to the ice cream store, where we spent our pocket change. By the time we got home, Mrs. Moreland was cooking dinner and the adults were playing gin rummy.

  Owen sat on the front porch staring out toward the beach, which you couldn’t see for the dunes, but we knew it was there waiting. You could hear that ocean right across the street.

  Bonny and I rode our bikes to the porch and he jumped up.

  “Where have you been? I’m so bored.” He sauntered toward us.

  “The bookshop,” I said.

  “Not the bookshop again,” he said. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  My brother picked me up and tossed me over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes. “Stop!” I hollered.

  “Nope,” he said. “We’re going to the beach.”

  “Let’s go out on the boat instead,” Bonny said.

  I was stunned for a minute. Owen’s suggestions were always the best, always the most fun.

  But Bonny continued. “Dad bought a new crab trap. And it’s high tide right now. We could go dr
op it out and maybe tomorrow have tons of crabs.”

  “Good idea.” Owen placed me gently on the ground. “Let’s go.”

  I glanced back and forth between them. Bonny had no idea what she’d just done in a quick second—changed Owen’s mind. No one did that. Not Mom. Not Dad. Not me. Not Polly. When he decided, well, that was just that. Bonny could change his mind. Bonny could make Owen do things I thought he was incapable of doing.

  chapter 27

  BONNY BLANKENSHIP

  “Oh, God, what are you doing here?” I asked Owen.

  He stood in my front yard, with his hands at his sides. An image I’d often dreamed of and dreaded. I took it all in like a photograph on the wall, something I could stare at that wouldn’t change and I had all the time in the world to evaluate. I wanted to run to him, and my feet were already in motion before I stopped myself. I needed to go after Lainey, to explain, if there was any explaining to do. But Owen reached me first.

  “Not the exact greeting I was hoping for,” he said. “I think I just really screwed up, didn’t I?”

  I peered over my shoulder toward the house and then back at him. “Probably.”

  He reached to take me in his arms, where I wanted to be, where I’d always wanted to be, and yet where I could not be. Not right then, not right there. “Don’t,” I said.

  He took two steps back from me. “Why didn’t you tell me Lainey was here?”

  “Why didn’t I tell you? Seriously? Why are you here?”

  “You texted me last night.”

  “No, I didn’t, Owen. Why would I do that?”

  “You said not to answer but just to hurry here. I wouldn’t have just shown up like this.” We both glanced back to the house as if the answer might rest there. He pulled out his phone and showed it to me. “See?”