

Product Description

EARTH AND AIR

By Tara McTiernan

A handsome singing gypsy who has the power to make girls sleep, sometimes forever, decides to rest from his journeys in an old Victorian house in suburbia with two mesmerized sisters. A broken jukebox leads a girl into uncharted territory, a wilderness in the back of a bar where the colorful neon lights of a working jukebox beckon and where she learns terrible things from a dragon-like woman breathing fire in the dark. A thirty-something career woman trying to rediscover her purpose on an island retreat is attacked in the still of the night by a neighbor whose greatest wish is for her to leave.

Tara McTiernan's stories resemble twisted modern fairy tales, full of real-life magic and Grimm-like darkness. Containing three unforgettable short works, Earth and Air, like her novel Barefoot Girls, illuminates and explores the lives of women with rare eloquence, keen insight, and a sharp wit.

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Earth and Air

And Other Stories

TARA MCTIERNAN

Bramblevine Press

Raleigh

Copyright 2012 by Tara McTiernan

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles by Tara McTiernan at Smashwords.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights.

Bramblevine Press

Raleigh, North Carolina

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Cover design by Kate Brown

Cover art by Alexander Kuzmin

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For my wonderful husband, Ash,

my teammate in life.

Table of Contents

Cover

Description

Title and Copyright

Earth and Air

Joan Jett and the Broken Jukebox

Retreat

Barefoot Girls Excerpt

About the Author

Earth and Air

In the dimness of the pantry, everything faded into shades of gray that early October morning. The potatoes in their net bag glowed faintly next to the beets bunched and tied together in a bouquet complete with an old pink silk bow and the preserves she'd put up that were usually jewels in the sunlight hunkered on the shelves looking like jars of mud. Freddie could barely make out the room's contents, yet the bare spot on the white-painted floor where Seth's huge army-green backpack had leaned against the wall all spring and summer was a shout in the silence.

He was gone then. Time to ramble on, he crooned softly to himself from time to time, making electricity spike up Freddie's neck.

No, things were different with them, different from all the other places he'd decided to leave. He loved it here. He said so.

He also said he was a wanderer. At first, she thought he was being romantic, this handsome sloe-eyed man with his infectious smile, shaggy black curling hair, and a penchant for secondhand clothes, mostly remnants from the seventies. He even had one of those feathered roach-clips clamped on one of the loops on his backpack. A gypsy, she'd mused, looking across the table at the restaurant he'd taken her to that first night they met, candlelight and wine making the idea sparkle.

Standing wearing only a light cotton nightgown, she blinked several times staring at the bare spot on the floor, stepped back into the kitchen, and craned her neck to look around for the backpack, hoping he'd simply moved it. It wasn't in sight. Maybe upstairs? He hadn't been in bed this morning, waiting for her to wake, watching her sleep as he usually did. If it had been anyone else watching her sleep, she would've been bothered by it, but Seth was like an elusive bird, non-committal, moving away whenever she tried to pin him down. Opening her eyes to his inspection filled her with hope.

She couldn't take it anymore and did something she hated. "Seth? Seth!"

The round yellow forties farmhouse clock ticked steadily on the wall next to her and one of her three cats, Jojo, appeared, curling his lean black body around the edge of the doorway leading to the living room. "Meow?"

Usually Freddie would meow back, but her throat was closing. Where was he?

She took off, running across the icy kitchen floor in bare feet, her haste when she found him missing that morning making slippers afterthoughts. She climbed the stairs two at a time and then she was in their bedroom. A lone pair of his underwear lay clumped by the bed where he left them the night before, after the party, before the make-up sex. She took a deep breath and sighed, the air shuddering out. It was okay.

Maybe he'd gone for a hike and wanted the extra weight of his pack? He was used to walking with it strapped on his shoulders, had been all over the country that way, by foot and by thumb. Or had he taken her car again for one of his day-long drives, bringing the pack along for some reason? She went to the bedroom window overlooking the driveway where she'd left the car the afternoon before; too busy unloading all the party supplies and then with the other preparations to put it away in the garage. It was parked where she left it.

Then he'd gone for a hike, and he couldn't have picked a worse morning to take off for a little exercise. After her accusation last night, pushing him for something concrete and instead forcing out an explosion of festering disillusionment and disgust. Yes, they had come together afterward, fell together on the bed and made things right. Almost right. Not right enough. Why had he done that last night? After all her confessed fears about Natasha?

No, she needed him reassuringly here, engaged in their Sunday morning routine of coffee and classical music and called-out questions to him about that day's crossword in the paper. He almost always knew the answers. He would clean up the mess from last night, insist on it, and tell her to go and play, which meant the garden. It was her true love, digging and pulling, sowing and reaping. The smell and rough texture of soil on her hands was practically erotic to her.

Downstairs, plastic cups lined up on almost every surface, gluey drops of dried jungle-juice making them stick more often than not. Every garbage can overflowed with crusted paper plates, crumpled napkins. Outside, near the back stairs, she knew there was a scattering of bent crushed cigarette butts.

If the party hadn't been for Natasha, her sixteenth birthday, Freddie would have gone into the next room and dragged her sister out of bed and made her clean up, hung-over or not. Five years of giving up her youth, the wild adventures she should have been having, to stay here tied down by duty had taken their toll.

"What?" Freddie said.

"You were named guardian of your sister. Your parents never spoke to you about their will?"

She looked at their lawyer, Mr. Bobrov, with his rounded gnome-like face and neatly trimmed cottony beard. All he needed was a peaked red hat. When he took her in his office, separating her from Natasha to talk to her alone, she had assumed that maybe their parents had left her something special, something that couldn't be shared between her and her sister. She didn't care about it, whatever it was.

In fact, she felt nothing ever since she got the call from the police. She, a girl consistently described by everyone in grounded words like earthy and down to earth, floated above everything, separated like a lost balloon. Her parents dying together, hit by a drunk driver who ran over the median and plowed into their car, wasn't real. Things like that didn't happen on the way back from a movie, the theater so close to home. They didn't happen to her parents. They couldn't.

"No," Freddie said. But there was no one else. Her father's only sibling was much older than he was and they had been alienated for years. Her mother was an only child. Both sets of grandparents were gone.

She looked past Mr. Bobrov at the window behind him where a blooming cherry tree waved the breeze, lush and pink, the sky beyond impossibly blue. Spring went on blithely. Back at school there would be parties and road trips to that dive bar with the great jukebox and Saturdays spent lying in the grass on bath towels behind the dorm with the other girls, turning when the timer shrilled, the sun beating down overhead. She would never go back.

Freddie stared at her parked car for another minute before she went to the closet and pulled out a pair of jeans and a sweater, to the bureau for socks and underwear. Neither held his clothes and never had. They had remained in his backpack, only venturing out onto his body or into the washing machine before returning.

"I don't unpack. Not my style," he'd said back in May when he moved in, shrugging and smiling. "You know."

It was those last two words that had stopped her argument cold. She'd said she understood the call of the road, the need to be free. Because she did. She dreamed of wandering the world, planned on it. Someday, when she had enough money, when Natasha went off to college, maybe when she finished her own degree. Her thoughts stopped there, the idea of returning to college otherworldly now.

After she finished dressing, she went downstairs – casting an eye on the driveway with the hope of seeing his dark lean figure in it, but finding it empty – and then into the kitchen to start cleaning up. She would surprise him, that's what she would do. When he got back, not only would the house sparkle, she'd make pancakes. He loved her from-scratch buttermilk pancakes, made a show of it with rolling eyes and humming sounds.

She shook open a large white garbage bag and started plucking the plastic cups up with two fingers and dropping them in the open bag while walking from room to room. Some cups were easy, but others were glued to tabletops and windowsills by the fruity concoction they'd stirred up using her memory from the last dorm party she'd helped organize. It had been his answer to her argument.

She had said, "We can't afford a big party. We'll just go out for pizza, have her friends come. I'll get a cake...though she probably won't eat more than one bite. My little piggy's a shrinky-dink now."

He smiled that half-smile of his from where he leaned against the nearby birch tree while she pulled weeds, a notepad resting on his knees filled with song lyrics, pen in hand. "No, but she's turning sixteen. I bet you had a big party for your sixteenth. Your parents probably rented a hall, got the works for you."

She sat back on her heels to rest her lower back which was aching from bending over the flower bed and raised her chin up to the sky, letting a sigh escape. "No, here in our yard. But that was then and this is now. Both of my parents made great money, but they didn't save that much. We just can't afford big parties for Natasha like they could afford for me." Then she blushed, hearing the "we". She kept catching herself talking to him as if he were her husband. And whenever she did, he got up, moved, left the room. Would he leave now?

But he surprised her, putting his notepad and pen aside and leaning forward, elbows on his skinny sexy knees. She looked longingly at his legs in their soft worn jeans, frayed at the bottom, his tapered bare feet brown and elegant. He said, "You went to college, right? Most college kids never have any money, but they manage to party every night. You tell me after going to school for practically three years that you don't know one trick to save a little money?"

In her mind's eye, she saw the brand-new plastic garbage cans filled with red Jungle Juice, the rolled-in kegs, the plastic cups. He was right.

And he'd been right about people coming too, a big crowd. They had called everyone they could think of and then Seth and Natasha had gone into town the Saturday before and invited every acquaintance they ran into. Natasha invited her friends from ballet school, of course, the two regal little skeletons she kept company with most of the time. At least Natasha wasn't that thin. Yet.

Freddie finished picking up the living room, and the bag bulging, carried it through the kitchen and out the back door. As she stepped out on to the stairs leading down the back yard, she saw a twirling movement in the shadows among the apple trees just beyond the small grassy yard, something white and swift. She stopped and looked. Nothing there. Maybe a small deer running through, its white tail flashing, gone now?

But the figure had been twirling, like Natasha last night on the back lawn, showing off for the crowd. It wasn't until she stumbled, fell, and then started laughing and flailing her arms and legs around while lying on the ground with everyone watching her that Freddie knew that, somehow, Natasha was drunk. That had started it and then things went downhill from there.

Freddie had witnessed the dancing and the falling from where she had stepped out onto the back porch, wondering where everyone had gone, looking for Seth, who had been flit-fleeting away from her all night. She would find him engaged in conversation, sidle up to him and take his hand for a moment only, just wanting a little reassurance, and he would squeeze her hand, release it, say he'd be right back. She didn't wait, of course, knowing him well enough now. He was in one of his free-bird moods. She understood. She wanted to.

He'd been clapping when she stepped out onto the porch, creating the rhythm for Natasha's pirouettes. When Natasha fell, he stopped, his hands dropping down by his sides. Freddie couldn't see his face, but she could imagine the expression that came on it when he watched Natasha. It was almost covetous, but there was no lust, no leer. When Freddie saw it, she imagined a sister, a daughter maybe? The one time she'd asked about his past, his family, he'd crumpled his face with disgust before shaking his head and smiling ruefully. "Let's not," he'd said.

A crowd had gathered on the back steps and below on the grass. When Natasha's laughter reached them, they joined in, chuckling and shaking their heads. Freddie, who was now standing on the top step of the stairs and had witnessed the display between two sets of shoulders, began pushing through when the laughter started. By the time she got to the bottom of the stairs, people had noticed her approach and backed up, giving way.

That's when Freddie realized her mistake, the spotlight she'd shed on the problem. Too late, glancing at Seth, who turned away at the moment as she looked at him, she pushed on and then she was crossing the grass to where Natasha lay, pointing her feet in the air and swinging them around, her laughter reduced to a happy private gurgle.

Freddie, her back to the crowd, squatted beside her sister. "Natasha, what are you doing?"

Natasha's eyes widened as she twisted her head to look up at her. "Ooo hoo hoo! I'm in trouble!"

"You've been drinking, haven't you? Just tell me who gave it to you."

"No," Natasha said, her words slow and cumbersome, rolling her head back and forth in the grass and looking up at the darkening purple sky. "I'm not telling you. You'll just get mad."

"That was a condition of this party and you know it. No drinking. You're too young."

Natasha screwed up her face, making its fine delicate features ugly. "You probably drank at your sweet sixteen. Everyone drinks at their sixteenth. What's the big deal?"

"I don't like your tone," Freddie said, grasping at the authority she used to take for granted, before Natasha turned fourteen and it simply vanished.

"I don't like your tone," Natasha imitated in a squished-up nasal voice.

"So you're not going to tell me. Well, I'll find out anyway. Oh, and you're grounded."

"Ah! Tsk? Who cares? I can't go anywhere anyway. You wanna know what? I'm gonna dance. I'm gonna be the greatest dancer ever. And just you wait and see if I talk to you then."

Getting to her feet, unsatisfied and disappointed she had bothered, Freddie turned in time to see Seth inspecting them from across the yard. Suddenly, she knew. He had given the booze to her little sister. In spite of everything she'd said to him, all the worries she confessed to him about Natasha, he'd snuck that little girl a drink anyway. He smiled his half-smile and turned back to the guy he'd been talking to, Jonas from the health store. Freddie wavered for only a minute before deciding. It was time.

Three hours later, she was alone as she waved goodbye to the last car as it backed out of their long gravel driveway, crackling stones giving way to the silence of smooth tarmac on the main road. Natasha was asleep, or passed out, in her bedroom. Seth had disappeared an hour earlier. She hoped it was to their bedroom where she could confront him, now while her conviction was strong.

He was sitting at the small desk in their bedroom, bent over his notepad, when she entered. He looked around at her and then turned back at his pad, scribbling furiously. "Wait a sec. I've just got to get this down."

"No."

"What?"

"No, I'm not going to wait."

Looking pained, he twisted around in his chair. "What? What are you talking about?"

"I've waited long enough."

He shook his head, blinking. "I really don't know what you're talking about."

"You've perched here for a long time. All spring, all summer. Now it's fall."

"Yeah? You invited me. Is that okay? Or do you need me to leave?"

"Did you give Natasha alcohol tonight?"

His face colored. Then he shook his head violently in a short burst. "What's with you? You seemed so cool when I first met you. You got it. You got it. Now it's like you're someone totally different. Who cares about a little drink? She's sixteen, not two. She's going to drink anyway, you know. Don't think you can stop her."

Freddie heard her voice rise, and couldn't stem it. "Well, we don't have to condone it!"

"We? What is with the 'we'?"

"You and me! Are we or are we not going somewhere with this?"

"Going somewhere?"

"Are you just going to echo everything I say?" she screamed, clutching her hands tightly at her sides.

In that moment, he softened. "Oh, look at you. You're all wiggy. It's my fault. We should have just gone for pizza."

She looked at him. Was he talking about the party? But she had liked it. Loved being a hostess, actually - the chattering crowd, the playful banter, pouring drinks for people, handing around the platter of heated-up frozen mini quiches and being treated like a beloved queen. "No! I loved it. I just-"

"You're stressed out. You want to be free, on the road, and you're stuck here taking care of your little sister, stuck in that stupid admin job. I probably make things worse."

"No! No. You make things better."

"I should go," he said, shrugging and half-smiling.

The whole thing was so turned around, all she wanted to do was stop it, this out of control mess she'd made. All she wanted was assurances, a promise, and instead, he was getting ready to leave. She'd crossed the room to him and fell on her knees, gratefully feeling his arms slowly wrap around her.

Freddie walked down the back steps, around back to the large wooden bin that they kept the garbage cans in, and threw away the bag of cups, napkins, and plates. In spite of the crisp morning air, Freddie felt herself grown warm at the memory of what came after, falling into bed, the way they'd clung to each other. No, he'd be back. He loved her. He just didn't say it.

She made three more sweeps with garbage bags, then another with a damp sponge and paper towels. She dry-mopped the wooden floors and shook out the rugs. She cracked open the kitchen window to clear the muggy beer-scented air that lingered and pulled out the ingredients, electric griddle, and bowl for pancakes. She'd make them once he got back. There was no movement upstairs in Natasha's room yet, thankfully. They could all have pancakes together later, one big happy gypsy family.

Sitting at the dining room table, mug of coffee in hand, she read the paper. Emblazoned across the top half of the page was a large picture of a teenage girl. Maybe fifteen? Dark haired and slim like the others, serious looking even while she smiled for the camera, her eyes sober and considering. Freddie read the story. This girl lived in Bankville. The neighboring towns with the missing girls were adding up, the swath of fear spreading.

Natasha was right, being grounded meant nothing. She couldn't go anywhere anyway. Not since Riverside's own Jessica Webb, two years younger than Natasha, went missing in the spring. It was just school and ballet class for the most part these days, unless Natasha was visiting one of her friends, Morgan and Kate. Thank goodness both of them were picked up by Morgan's father before that whole scene on the lawn. Freddie briefly imagined those haughty assessing girls stumbling and giggling and red-mouthed from Jungle Juice before shuddering and forcing her mind away. There were small mercies after all.

She tilted the mug and poured the last of the hot coffee down her throat, enjoying the mild burning sensation, before refolding the paper and standing. Upstairs there was a creaking noise. Natasha was up. There would have to be some real punishment for last night and there was only one thing that Freddie could take away that would matter: ballet class. She would tell her now: no ballet for two weeks. Let Natasha scream and moan without Seth around as a sympathetic audience.

At the first shallow landing on the stairs, Freddie peered out the window again at the driveway and front yard. No sign of him yet. Good. Get this over with.

She climbed the stairs and walked down the hall toward Natasha's room at the end. The door, previously almost shut, was cracked wider now and light spilled onto the polished wooden floor from Natasha's window. Yes, she was up. Her sister always slept with both the shades drawn and curtains pulled.

At Natasha's door, she stopped and rapped on the door lightly. "Tash? Are you awake?"

There was no answer. Freddie pushed the door open. The room was empty and the bed made. Pumpkin, their elderly tabby, was curled up next to the pillow on the purple and white flowered coverlet. Pumpkin lifted his thick head and looked at her with round amber eyes before resting his chin back on his paws. The only disarray in the room was in the corner where two rejected dresses lay on the chair.

Freddie turned around and headed to the hallway bathroom, but this door was all the way open, exposing a Natasha-free interior. Where was she? The creak Freddie had heard? Oh, it must have been Pumpkin, nosing open Natasha's door.

Thundering down, Freddie felt rage surge through her head and down into her chest. How dare she? Natasha wasn't allowed to leave the house unsupervised – and she was grounded!

Freddie stalked into her and Seth's bedroom, pawed through her purse and found her cell. Now Natasha really was in trouble. Two weeks without class? How about two months? That little girl was endangering herself right now, and to prove what? That Freddie wasn't her mother? Enough.

Freddie dialed and lifted the phone to her ear just as the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from The Nutcracker started tinkling away in her sister's room. Freddie put her phone on the bed and followed the song to Natasha's small vanity table and her little purse which leaned next to it, gaping wide. Freddie snatched the purse up. The phone gave a last ding and went to voicemail.

Inside the purse there was not only Natasha's cell, but her wallet, makeup, and her house keys. Freddie stared blankly at contents of the purse. It didn't add up. Natasha wasn't here. But she wouldn't leave without her keys, her wallet, her precious cell phone that she'd begged and begged for. Her whole life was spent constantly texting Morgan and Kate about who-knows-what.

Then she hadn't left. But where?

She set the purse gently down on the vanity table's spindly wooden chair and went downstairs. At the bottom landing of the stairs, she paused again at the window there, looking at the empty driveway. Maybe Natasha went jogging. She occasionally went for a run, usually if she ate something she considered "bad". Sweets were "bad", as were carbs of any kind and anything with a drop of fat in it. The booze last night – probably a glass of sugary Jungle Juice – that had to be it. But such a long jog! She should be coming down the street right now.

Freddie opened the front door and stepped onto the porch, feeling the cold air slap her again, this time more solidly, unprotected by warm in-bed thoughts. A car passed on the street. What if Natasha was hurt? Hit by a car? Freddie started walking up the driveway. Normally, she'd be worried about Seth seeing her searching and think she was trying to pin him down, but now nothing mattered but seeing her sister jog into view, her long auburn hair flipping back and forth, flying high in a ponytail.

Freddie walked to the end of the driveway and then to the top of their street, looking both ways down the sidewalk, but it was empty in both directions save for a woman pushing a stroller, heading away from Freddie toward town. Had Natasha gone into town? No, she would have brought her wallet, and other than jogging for exercise, she didn't like to use her limbs for locomotion, preferring cars to get where she wanted to go. And Freddie always drove her, always sighed and consented to her sister's demands. She felt a nudging guilt and turned away from it. She did what she had to do.

She had been giving in again that day in May when she took Natasha to go to a reading at The Book Nook. It was a reading of one of those young-adult books, the writer prolific and consistently sentimental. When Freddie noticed Seth there, lingering near the back of the crowd, she'd assumed he had brought his daughter. She recognized him, having seen him only yesterday, passing on their street with a backpack that towered high above his head in spite of his height.

It wasn't unusual to see hikers passing – a well-trodden path to Hopkins Nature Preserve was at the end of their street. He was noticeable only because of the long time he paused in front of their house, drinking from his canteen and looking at the handsome Victorian house that Freddie and Natasha's parents had left them along with a condo in Florida, long ago sold in order to be able to keep the house. Freddie had noticed his inspection from the garden where she'd been planting some annuals. She'd almost taken off her gloves and gotten up to approach him, but then he turned, hoisted the backpack onto his shoulders, and headed up the street toward the main road.

Seeing him again and feeling the same pull of attraction, she slipped out of her folded plastic seat next to Natasha, giving a little wave and mouthing 'bathroom' to her sister's wide-eyed glance. When Freddie finally snaked her way through the crowd and stood beside him, she felt a tickling shyness come over her and stood mute, making a show of listening to the reading.

The writer finished the chapter with a cliffhanger that was ridiculous, yet evidently plausible to the youthful crowd judging from the many little moans of disappointment that rose up as the woman closed the book in her lap and creased her lips in a self-satisfied smirk.

"Horrible."

She looked up at the man beside her with surprise, letting out a trilling giggle before she could stop herself. "Yes, it was. But your daughter must love it."

His eyebrows rose up over his huge green eyes. He reminded her of a frog – a very handsome sexy frog. "Daughter?"

"Oh, uh, I assumed. This really isn't for our crowd, just the young'uns," she said, raising her voice above the growing clamor of the crowd, now standing and forming a line to have their books signed.

His eyebrows went higher. "You're a pretty young yourself to be using that phrase. What are you, twenty one, twenty two?"

She smiled and shook her head. He was flattering her. She was old. She felt ancient, worn out, dream-free. A mortgage, responsible for a teenage child, a dead-end job. The light at the end of the tunnel was barely a pinprick. "No, twenty six. I'm an old lady."

"Ha! You're funny. No, old age is far off for you. So, who are you here with? I somehow doubt you're here for the reading."

"No, it's my sister. She loves Wren Simmons. We have nothing in common." She laughed. "And you? Who are you here with?"

He twisted his mouth into the rueful half-smile that she would grow to love, crave its appearance, and said, "Me? I don't know a soul around here. Just passing through on the road to nowhere in particular."

And that had tipped the conversation from polite to fascinating – so much so that when Natasha came up to them where they stood talking about his adventures, Freddie did something unheard of: she waved her sister away. She didn't even notice her sister's reaction at the time, her shock followed by sulking anger. Even when they were in the car on the way back to the house to drop Natasha off before heading back to meet him for dinner at Emilio's, Freddie was elsewhere, skipping ahead. She didn't hear her sister's purposeful silence.

A large green and white Mayflower moving truck shook the air and ground as it passed by Freddie where she stood on the sidewalk, waking her from her staring reverie in the direction of town. Blinking, she saw a man walking a golden retriever in her direction, but still no Natasha. She looked one last time in the other direction and her heart jumped into her throat at the distant image of a bouncing jogger before actually seeing the older woman as she approached, her short blond hair, her wide hips. Freddie turned and headed back toward their house.

Maybe it was Freddie's flipping wave of dismissal in the bookstore or maybe it was the fact of Seth at all that had bothered Natasha, at least at first. It definitely had a lot to do with Freddie's decision to invite Seth to stay with them without consulting her sister first. That heady moment of decision felt so right while sitting across from Seth at Emilio's, the candlelight and the wine and the gorgeous tapestry Seth wove with words entrancing her. All at once, that distant pinprick at the end of the tunnel looked closer and brighter.

But the next morning, when she sang out good morning to Natasha, who was standing at the island in the kitchen cutting up an apple for her usual breakfast of an apple and a small low-fat yogurt, her voice sounded off-tune, weak. Upstairs, Seth slumbered in the spare bedroom where he would sleep for two weeks before moving into Freddie's room, the backpack moving to the pantry floor near the back door as if poised for a getaway.

Natasha slapped the knife down on the cutting board and turned around, her rounded lips thin and tight. "Is there someone in our guest bedroom? The door's shut. Please don't tell me it's that guy."

"As a matter of fact, it is him. Seth. From the bookstore? He had nowhere to stay, and I thought-"

"You invited some stranger to stay in our house?" Natasha bugged her eyes out and looked around, as if seeking contradiction from the floor and the walls.

"He's not a stranger. I got to know him very well last night."

"You just met him! He could be...a maniac, a...killer!"

"Stop screaming, Natasha. You'll wake him. And that's crazy talk. I have excellent instincts; I'd know if he was a dangerous person. He is not. He is, however, smart and funny and fascinating. Wait 'til you get to know him. You'll think he's just as great as I do, trust me. And he's staying for a while, too. For as long as he wants. We need a little male influence around here. It'll be good for us."

"What!"

"Stop that shrieking."

"No! If you let him stay here, I swear I will never speak to you again. I'm serious."

"Don't threaten me. It won't change a thing. I've made my decision: he's staying."

Natasha kept her promise for two weeks, during which she wouldn't utter a word to Freddie or even look in her direction. Still on speaking terms with their guest, Natasha slowly melted under Seth's kind teasing and casual flattery, finally becoming almost as fascinated with him as Freddie was. One morning, without remark, she started speaking to Freddie again.

Taking the steps of the house at a run and crossing the deep wrap-around porch, Freddie pushed the front door open forcefully; wishing pressure alone would make Seth and Natasha materialize. In the grand foyer she faltered, listening. Nothing. And that was a word that encompassed everything about Seth, the way you reached for him and grabbed air. Yet there he was...and wasn't.

What did she know about Seth? His first and last name verbally, but never in print. No ID lined his narrow worn brown leather wallet, nor were there any of the glittering holograms and colorful banners of credit cards. He only carried cash. He ducked out of photos and out of any dig-deep conversation.

She knew nothing about him except his tales of travel: the lonely places and wild scenes, the time this or that happened, the crazy fascinating people he'd met like caravans of families who lived on the road year-round as he did, the latest generation of patchouli-scented hippies following Phish and Grateful Dead tribute bands who were the most likely people to give him a ride when he hitched, the blind bartender who could recognize people by their individual scent and poured perfect cocktails by feel alone. She had nothing in the end, just a lone pair of cotton underwear upstairs. No way to track him down, no ties she could yank on. If he was gone, he truly was.

Freddie walked into the kitchen and picked up the cordless phone to call the police about Natasha. At that moment she glanced out the kitchen window that overlooked the back lawn and the orchard beyond and a movement among the squat gnarled old apple trees caught her eye. She paused, the phone halfway to her ear. She had seen a movement earlier there, twirling and swift, and had dismissed it as the fleeting white tail of a deer.

Was Natasha down in the orchard, taking herself there early this morning to nurse her hangover away from her sister's condemnation? Maybe she had even left last night. Seth, too, had been wandering late last night, edging quietly out of their bed just as Freddie was falling asleep. Freddie had resisted the pull to follow him, feeling how delicate things were between them now and wanting them to heal.

Perhaps they were both in the orchard, a part of the property Freddie almost never visited, the flower beds in the front of the yard and the enormous vegetable and herb garden on the sunny side of the house taking up all of her time. She could imagine Seth consoling Natasha, sympathetically listening to her complaints.

She hung up the phone. Should she go out there? Well, of course. She needed to know they were okay. If Natasha was going to give her the silent treatment again, fine. But she had to know.

Freddie walked out the back door and down the steps slowly. Better to approach calmly, speak to them both. Let them know she was making pancakes for breakfast. That would bring Seth back at least. Natasha could sit out there all day if she wanted to: as long as Freddie knew where she was, safely pouting.

Crossing the grass, Freddie noted a few stray plastic cups here and there that would need to be picked up, a crumpled napkin rolling then stopping, pushed by a cold breeze that came in puffs. She reached the orchard still seeking the two forms that she'd expected to see leaning against the old trees, but the orchard was empty; whatever had moved there moments before was gone.

Just beyond the orchard was a small narrow field of wildflowers and rooting saplings bordered by a line of trees that marked the property line. Freddie continued through the orchard hoping that they had left the shelter of the orchard to sit and be warmed by the sun that had risen overhead. She was scanning the meadow when she saw the lump of dark earth. She walked over to it.

About five feet long, the oblong mounded earth was clearly moist, freshly turned. Had someone been planting something here? Seeds or bulbs? But it was mounded strangely. Lifting her head, she saw another mound, about ten feet away, deeper into the field. Even from a distance, she could see the soil had dried to a lighter color of brown. She started to walk into the field and saw another. Then another. And another. Seven mounds in all, some old enough to have weeds starting to grow on them, beginning to cover them.

Looking at the last mound, she felt a cold electric shock run up through her feet and down her arms. Seven mounds. Six girls Natasha's age, all gone missing. Natasha missing.

She spun around and, tripping a little over a knee-high maple sapling, she ran to where the fresh mound was and fell to her knees. With her bare hands she dug, finding feet with toes like small bruised fingerling potatoes, beaten and disfigured by pointe ballet shoes, the nail polish purple, Natasha's favorite color. The same color of her sister's dress last night, twirling on the lawn, Seth watching, the mystery of his odd stare solved.

Joan Jett and the Broken Jukebox

When the hostess in her Pepto-Bismol-pink uniform gestured at the booth where they could sit, Lily gave a little start of surprise before recovering and sitting down.

Her oldest daughter, Kathryn, hadn't noticed her reaction and slid into the seat opposite her smiling her tooth-and-gums grin and craning her neck to look all around. It was just the two of them, out for lunch after a morning check-up at the doctor's for Kathryn before the new school year started. Paul was working from home today, so he keeping an eye on Morgan and Joshua.

"Look, Mom," Kathryn said. "They even have old-time jukeboxes. I love this place!"

Lily raised her eyebrows and tried to smile naturally while she nodded. "Yes, it's something."

"Can we play a song?"

She blinked before nodding and pawing through her purse for change, finding a handful of quarters and other coins that had accumulated on the bottom along with small balls of lint and the curled clear plastic wrappers of her favorite mints. She handed the quarters over to her daughter and tried not to look at the jukebox directly. It was exactly the same kind. They still made them. She couldn't believe it. She prayed that there were no Joan Jett songs in it. It would be too much.

Spanky's, the newest restaurant in Middleton, had everybody in town talking due to its reportedly faithful rendition of a fifties diner. New dining establishments were rare in their small town, so it was no surprise to Lily when her daughter had begged to go there for lunch today. After all the hoopla, Lily was surprised at how cartoonish the place was.

Yes, it was shiny and clean and colorful, but the staff's costumes were over the top – the soda jerks even wore those little round paper hats! - and the loud fifties music attacked you as soon as you got out of your car, speakers shouting into the parking lot from the eaves of the building. Why bother with the jukeboxes anyway? You couldn't hear them over the staccato clatter of silverware against china, the rumbling and chirping of excited voices, and the hysterical rock-and-roll that filled every room.

Luckily, her daughter was a fan of Lady Gaga and found a song of hers right away, pushing the coins in the slot to play it. Lily sighed. No Joan Jett at least. Kathryn was still scrolling through the flipping cards inside the machine, though, so no guarantee. She looked at her daughter's sweet oval face, the feathery tufts of hair around her hairline. She would be twelve too soon. The same age Lily had been when things changed.

"Isn't it great?" Kathryn said, turning to smile at her mother again, her shoulders rising up around her ears with excitement.

Lily smiled faintly and nodded, but Kathryn had already turned back, searching the cards. Lily couldn't stand to look at the machine another minute. She picked up the huge laminated menu that was like a book with multiple pages and opened it looking for the salads section. She wished she could be excited about things like jukeboxes and ridiculous restaurants. She used to be. She remembered that blue world of innocent belief, how her mother had walked in that brilliant place before a jukebox exactly like the one in this booth changed everything.

That Wednesday afternoon in early October, Lily had been sitting in their cramped dining room re-reading the section in her math textbook about integers, trying to figure out the answer to one of her homework problems, and feeling as if her brain was supposed to perform some impossible contortion. It was giving her a headache.

The phone rang in the kitchen and Lily looked up, hoping it was one of her friends and she could take a break, winding the curly plastic telephone cord around her fingers and up around her arm as she paced the short length of their galley kitchen and talking about all things fun and interesting and definitely not math. She heard her mother shut off the water at the sink where she was washing dishes and her slippers whispering on the linoleum floor as she crossed to answer it.

"Hello?"

Lily held her breath, waiting.

"Oh, Bev, hi. Are you on your way?"

Lily breathed out a disappointed puff of air, slumping in her chair. She looked back down at her textbook.

".....oh, no, poor guy. Will he be okay?" The stool by the phone scraped against the floor, her mother leaning back on it. A minute passed, her mother listening and making an occasional sympathetic noise.

"Well, keep us posted. I guess Lily will have to come with me for the next couple of days. Thanks for calling....sure, of course....don't worry about it! Truly, not a problem. Listen, you have bigger things to worry about. Okay...okay....talk to you soon and take care. We'll be praying for him. Bye."

There was the thunk of the receiver being replaced. A loud put-out sigh followed. Then her mother walked over to the doorway to the dining room. Her hair was up in rollers, big purple ones, with a filmy white scarf tied over them to keep out the humidity, and she was wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt on her slim frame. Even with the ugly run-down clothes and the rollers, her mother was beautiful. Not just beautiful due to the love Lily felt for her, but because she was truly a beauty, having a face of symmetry and balance and exquisite bone structure that was lit from within by a fiery vitality.

Her mother had put on her brave-face. "Well, kiddo, you're doing your homework and having dinner at O'Reilly's tonight. Poor Sam had a heart attack and he's in the hospital. No, honey, it's okay. The doctors say he'll be fine. They put some stents in. But Bev's going to be with him for a little while, next couple days, maybe more."

"Poor Sam," Lily said, feeling sad and excited at the same time.

She loved Sam, loved Bev. They were like grandparents to her, more so than her real grandparents who lived in Illinois. Bev had watched Lily in the afternoons after school for years, ever since she and her mom moved from the apartment across town into the tiny house on Shady Brook Lane. Sometimes Bev came over and stayed with Lily. Sometimes, especially if her mother wasn't going to be back from her shift until late, Lily would go to their little house next door. The whole street had little houses, each almost identical house placed in the center of its rectangle-shaped property. They were what her mother called "boomer houses", built after the last World War. She thought of Sam, how tall and skinny he was, and was surprised he had heart trouble. She thought only fat people had heart attacks. She couldn't imagine losing him, his favorite green-plaid-upholstered recliner empty, the news unwatched, uncommented upon.

The excitement tingled through her anyway, a part of her certain Sam would never die, or wouldn't for a very long time, and O'Reilly's was fun and loud, particularly as the night went on. She would sit in her favorite booth and play the little jukebox and enjoy the attention of the regulars. She would have French Fries and a juicy cheeseburger instead of the two-day-old chicken, broccoli, and rice casserole that sat covered with tinfoil in the fridge, growing harder and drier by the minute. She tried not to smile, forcing her lips downward.

Her mother leaned against the doorframe, putting her hand on her hip. "I don't know. I don't like you being in a bar, even if it claims to be a restaurant. I don't like all the regulars bothering you. I wish there was some other thing." She looked down, biting her lip and thinking.

"No!" Lily said, straightening up. "Please? I'll be good. I'll just do my homework and be quiet."

Her mother looked up with surprise that was replaced by a knowing look. "Uh, huh. And play the jukebox, huh? Well, your favorite jukebox is broken and that's the only booth I want you sitting in. I need to be able to see you. Plus, it's in my section. So, yes, you will be doing your homework and being quiet. Make sure to bring something to read after you finish. I don't want you wandering around. You know the rules: the bathroom and the booth, that's it. Understood?"

Lily nodded, afraid to say anything that would break the spell. Her mother was a worrier and it didn't take much to get that ball rolling.

"Good. Well, pack up. We'll be leaving in a half hour once I finish prettifying."

O'Reilly's was quiet when they entered just before four o'clock, cool blue light from the fading day pouring in the windows and over the dark wood tables and booths. Somehow, rather than illuminating the bar, the light was sucked up, swallowed by the darkness. A few regulars cuddled up to their drinks at the far end of the bar. The bartender, Jimmy, was cutting up fruit for the night, yellow and green and orange citrus squares and triangles piling up, the sweet scent of them adding a badly-needed dose of freshness to the disinfectant-spiked musty funk of the bar.

Jimmy looked up when they entered through the back door. "Hey, Diane. Oh, you got Lily today, huh? Hey, Lily."

"Hi, Jimmy!" Lily said, unable to contain her enthusiasm.

Her mother, wearing a black leather jacket over her uniform of a white button-down shirt and a black dress skirt, her long hair held back in the requisite ponytail, pointed at the booth closest to the waitress station at the end of the bar. "Right there, young lady," she said before turning back to Jimmy. "Yeah. I hope Pat's going to be cool with it. Poor Sam had a heart attack."

"Sam? Are you kidding? Is he going to be okay?"

Her mother shrugged and nodded. "Sounds like it. They had to put some stents in."

Jimmy shook his head and turned back to his fruit. "Damn. I hate that shit."

"Jimmy, come on!"

Jimmy looked up, glanced at Lily, and reddened. "Sorry. I'll keep it clean. You know she's going to hear worse than that tonight, though," he said and waved his hand around.

Her mother sighed and said, "Well, let's not make things worse. Lily? Homework. I'll get you dinner in a little bit. And now...the gallows."

"Ha," Jimmy said, bent over his lemons. "Like you have anything to worry about."

"He doesn't like it."

Jimmy looked up at her, his gaze deliberately traveling up and down her mother's willowy form. "We're talking about you here, right?"

"Pssh," she said, flapping a hand at him and heading back toward the restaurant's office.

Contrary to her mother's professed fears, Pat O'Reilly, the bar's owner, not only didn't mind Lily being there, he came out and sat down with her, asking her about school and cheerfully recollecting learning integers, as if it was a hobby rather than a sentence. When she suggested it was hard, he laughed and patted her arm dismissively before grunting and dragging his girth out of the booth to go over to the bar.

Maybe that was why she didn't like him, the way he made of light of everything, even things that were serious, even real problems, but made a big deal out of her mother bringing her in when she couldn't get a sitter. Lily was never sure why she took an instant dislike to the bar's owner the first time she'd met him when she was little, maybe five, hiding behind her mother's legs while he cajoled her and reached for her with his thick white hairy hands.

He had never done anything more than say that her mother should get a babysitter, that a bar was no place for a child. It was a reasonable stand to take, one that couldn't be faulted, perhaps admired. But there was something about him; something that reminded her of the sideshow-barker she'd seen once when her mother and her Aunt Jennifer took her to a traveling circus years ago. That short black-eyed man with his tuxedo jacket with the glittering lapels looked nothing like Patrick O'Reilly. Mr. O'Reilly was like a caricature of an Irishman with curly strawberry hair circling the bald spot on his head, improbably blue eyes and a small bulbous nose. Appearances aside, though, he was just like that barker, a big grand show up front, with something darker underneath that peeked out at her from behind his costume.

Lily did as she was told that day, stayed in the booth, taking breaks from filling out her math worksheet to gaze at the broken jukebox balefully and wish that it worked. She wanted to listen to, "I Love Rock N' Roll" by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. It was her favorite, making her think of the times she and her friends went to Benny's Arcade and flirted with boys. Well, they didn't really flirt, they just looked at the cute boys from a distance and giggled, thrills running up and down Lily's spine at the sheer proximity of them. She wanted nothing more than to be cool like Joan Jett, swagger into that arcade with the same tough insouciance. The jukebox at her booth at O'Reilly's had both that song and "Crimson and Clover" which was her second favorite song by Joan Jett, but a distant second. No, the best song was all about Rock and Roll and putting another dime in the jukebox, baby. And she couldn't listen to it, not even once. If only they could afford a record player, one of her own, but she never got it, no matter how many times she asked.

She was distracted by the arrival of her dinner and dug into her cheeseburger and fries with enthusiasm, eating every last fry, even the burnt ones, dragging them through puddles of ketchup and brown burger-drippings. She completed the math homework, knowing that she had gotten some of the answers wrong but tired of trying, and then finished the assigned chapter in her history book. She had to recreate the periodic table and do a report for science by Friday, but she put it off, certain she could do it on Thursday night. Instead she alternated between watching the action in the bar and poring over her most recent copy of Seventeen magazine, the subscription a Christmas gift from her grandparents.

The bar's regulars were there as usual: Henry and Barbara, the older couple who showed up every afternoon for a "drinkie-winkie" and stayed until closing, a rotating handful of men that came every night and usually quietly argued together about various items being covered in the news or sports on the television overhead, and a blowzy older bleach-blonde, Phyllis, who might have once been beautiful, but who had lost her looks to Jack Daniel's and cigarettes. She didn't seem to know it, though, wearing low cut tops and short skirts and flirtatiously flipping her crisp blonde hair around. Henry and Barbara and Phyllis all stopped by to say hello to her, holding their drinks with both hands as they leaned over the booth, but it was a quiet night in general, subdued almost, and her mother closed out early and was able to get Lily home in time for her bedtime at ten.

Thursday night was different. The bar was already rowdy when they entered, a crowd of men in work clothes roaring at the baseball game on the television. This time Pat didn't stop by the booth or even acknowledge Lily. It was a different bartender, too. Unlike Jimmy and most of the staff at the bar who joked around and teased each other mercilessly, Tammy was colder, businesslike. Her mother and Tammy worked perfectly well together, but their exchanges were brisk, sticking to what was needed in the moment and offering nothing more.

After Lily finished her dinner, this time one of the little pizzas the bar prided itself in, the bar filled up more and more until there was a wall of people, their backs to Lily, blocking her in. Her mother had squeezed through to tell her she couldn't leave early and that she would drive Lily to school the next day so she could sleep in later. She also reported that she was checking with the other waitresses, that she might have a lead on a babysitter for tomorrow night. Her mother's perfectly hair-sprayed coiffure, a neat chignon, had disassembled and pieces of hair were sticking out in frizzy curls around her sweat-shiny face. Her mother looked panicked, eyes darting around as she spoke. Lily reached for her mother's hand, to touch it and try to reassure her, but her mother slapped the table once and told her to stay put before pulling it away. Had Mr. O'Reilly gotten mad at her mother after all?

As she sat watching the crowd balloon she realized it would probably be late before they could go home, very late. On nights like this the kitchen stayed open until ten, sometimes even eleven, to feed and profit off of the appetites stimulated by plenty of booze. Her mother, no matter how worried she was about her daughter getting to school on time the next day or even having a decent night's sleep, was also always worried about money. There was never enough. She cycled the bills that needed to be paid so that payment would just barely reach the creditor or utility in time before things were shut off. Lily's clothes were darned and mended over and over, new items rarely added, clothes worn to the shredded edge. Her mother rinsed and reused coffee filters, tin foil, paper bags. They needed the tips that would accumulate on a night like tonight, a flurry of bills flying at her mother that she had to run to catch.

The wall of backs made it hard to see anything and no one was paying any attention to her. Her mother probably wouldn't even be able to visit her; all her tables would be full, so it was just her and her homework until they went home, hours from now. She looked at the half-finished periodic table with disgust. It was boring, looking each item up and writing the details about each chemical element on a separate sheet of paper, checking the table in her workbook again and again, her eyes crossing looking at the tiny letters, the bright colors of the table laughing at her as they falsely advertised fun.

Just then she heard the jukebox in the next booth turn on. Tinny and faint, she could just make out the song. It was Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger". She leaned across the table, straining to listen. The crowd roared at something on the television, men pumping their fists, shouting and drowning out the song.

She fell back against the wooden wall of the booth. It wasn't fair. If the jukebox in her booth worked, she could take breaks from her homework to listen. She had plenty of quarters in her knapsack, collected there from her mother's tips for when they went to the Laundromat on Saturdays, to put in the slots and slide in before sitting again on the hard bench that ran down the center of the room and doing her homework among the sloshing and thudding machines. The jukebox at O'Reilly's was one of the few extravagances her mother never gave her a hard time about, feeling guilty about having to bring Lily there from time to time and expose her daughter to what she considered a questionable environment for a young girl.

Then Lily thought of it. That corner booth in the back room. It had a jukebox, too – one that probably worked. Even if it didn't have Joan Jett, though she hoped it did, it would have other songs. Maybe "Eye of the Tiger". No one would be back there now, it was a room favored by the few families that dined at O'Reilly's, the farthest room from the bar. And that booth was perfect in another way: her mother would never see her there, would never have any reason to go back there. If her mother stopped by their usual booth and didn't find Lily, she would assume her daughter was either in the bathroom or in transit, pushing through the thick crowd, too hard to find, stop by again later.

Lily decided. Just a quick break – a breather from the boring chart. She got up on her knees on the seat of the booth and tried to look over the shoulders of the people blocking her view. She couldn't see her mother anywhere. Quickly grabbing four quarters from her knapsack with one hand, she threw the knapsack in the corner and turned to tap the shoulder of one of the men who stood with his back to the booth. He jerked a little and turned around, his eyes widening and red wet mouth slackening a little with surprise, not realizing that she had been sitting there.

"Excuse me," Lily said. "I just want to get out for a second."

He nodded and stepped back to let her by, stepping on someone's foot in the process. "Hey!" Another man protested.

"Just letting the kid out. Sorry."

"Watch it, man."

Lily slid out of the booth and started tunneling through the crowd, squeezing behind and between people. Some of them carried on as if she wasn't there, others exclaimed, "Hey, it's a little girl. Hey little girl."

"That's Lily, Diane's girl," a woman said.

"No! She has a kid?"

"Hey, where you goin'?"

She pushed through the last clump of people near the back door and headed down the empty back hallway where the doors to the kitchen and office were, hoping she wouldn't run in to her mother. If she did, she would just tell her she was going to the bathroom. Just as she expected, as she passed the doorway leading to the dining room closest to the bar where most of her mother's tables were, she saw that the room was full of patrons. She kept moving. Then she passed the bathroom door in the long hallway and she was out of bounds. She darted through the last doorway and entered the back dining room.

This dining room was the bar's stab at being a real restaurant and not just a bar that served food. The room had been done up to look like a country kitchen, a look that juxtaposed wildly with the seedy appearance of the bar area. Quaint framed paintings of farms and barnyard animals dominated the walls. A decorative floral design was stenciled at intervals near the ceiling and there was an old fashioned wooden baker's rack placed against one wall and decorated with pieces of lace and vintage bric-a-brac. The booths, wooden with maroon leather cushions, were in far better shape here, practically new. It smelled better back here, too, though there was also the piercing scent of disinfectant coming from the utility closet in the corner.

Lily slid into the last booth, ducked down to keep her head out of view, and pushed the coins that had grown hot and moist in her hands into the slot of the brightly lit mini-jukebox. A dollar got her three songs. She pushed the button on the side to scroll through the pages of songs, searching. There, Joan Jett!

She depressing the plastic letter and number associated with the song, and leaned back to listen. The song started and she nodded her head to the beat and sang along, the first lyrics about a seventeen year old guy standing by a record player, appealing, mysterious. Lily closed her eyes and imagined her favorite boy from Benny's, a tall blond boy a few years older with round luscious lips she fantasized about tasting, imagining them sweet or salty depending on her mood. She saw him, felt herself pressing against him, arms winding-

There was a creaking sound by the door, and not remembering she was trying to hide, her eyes flew open and she jumped up out of the booth as if scalded, feeling her face heat up from what she'd been thinking, hoping no one could tell.

A man stood unsteadily in the doorway, peering into the room. It was one of the regulars, an older balding sad-faced man with a comb-over that would never cooperate, long dark hairs sticking straight up on one side of his head. The sadness his face implied was mostly due to the drooping jowls he had that seemed to drag the sides of his eyes down with the rest of his face. He was one of the regulars that showed up mid-afternoon most days, saying he would just have one, but would end up staying until either the bar closed or the bartender cut him off. Lily tried to remember his name, but wasn't sure. Andy? Arlo? Something with an "a".

His mournful face lifted, lips tugging up, when he saw her. "Hey. I know you. You're Diane's girl. Watcha doing back here?"

Lily glanced over at the booth and then back at him. "Just listening to the jukebox. The one where I sit doesn't work anymore." She felt a coldness. She was too alone back here with this man, regular or not. "I should probably go back and do my homework." She wanted to simply walk out, but he was blocking the door.

He stepped into the room and then wobbled a bit and steadied himself against the wall with two fingers. "What are you listening to? Wait...I know that song. It's that dyke song."

"Dyke song. What's that?"

He jerked his head a little and then smirked at her. "I shouldn't tell you stuff like that. So, you like this song? I bet you don't even know what it's about."

Lily stood up straighter. Of course she knew. "It's about music. Rock and Roll. And boys and stuff."

The man threw back his head and chuckled, but it wasn't a laugh of mirth. It was a mean sneering laugh. "Yeah, yeah. Sure, kid."

Lily shivered. The bar and the safety of her booth and the crowd where everyone knew her – it was all too far away, down that long shadowy hallway. She wished she was back there right now, filling in her boring chart. There was a click behind her. The song had ended. She hadn't even had a chance to listen to it. "I should go back. My mom's probably wondering where I am."

The man lowered his head and looked at her through his eyebrows. "Your mom's busy making a living, young lady. You should be grateful."

She looked at him. Of course she was grateful. Her mother was all she had. Her kind beautiful endlessly-sacrificing mother – well, okay, sometimes she didn't appreciate her mother. Like all the rules and her ridiculous curfew, a whole hour before any of her friends! But still, who was this man telling her about her mother?

"I am."

His expression didn't change. "Good. Kids should appreciate all their parents do. And they don't. They don't!" He raised his chin and his voice at the last, looking directly at her with furious dark green eyes.

"Hey, hey, hey!" A woman's voice came from behind the man. Lily took a long shuddering breath. Thank God.

The man jerked and turned, his whole hand braced on the wall now. "Wha-... Tammy. Oh...okay, I know...I'm going, I am. I just heard music... and look who I found here. It's Diane's little girl, playing back here."

Lily straightened. Tammy? She might tell. And she hadn't been playing; she was just taking a break from her homework. He made it sound like she was running around back here, making a mess or something. "I was just taking a break from my homework."

Tammy, who had stepped into the room, smiled and lifted her chin at Lily and then turned to the man. "Al, what are you pestering Lily for? Didn't I tell you to go home? Please don't tell me you left that cab waiting outside."

The puffed-up bluster from a moment before had deflated and he stuck his lip out like a child. "I didn't."

"Well, then. You better hurry, before they leave. I don't want to have to call you another one."

His head went down as he turned to face Tammy squarely, looking up at her in supplication with one hand still gripping the wall. "Ah, come on. Just one more. I feel fine, I really do."

Tammy took his free arm. "Let's go, Al. I'll help you out."

He looked down at her hand on his arm and then shook it off. "Nah. I don't need any help. See you tomorrow," he said in a barely audible voice. He pushed off from the wall, teetered past Tammy, grabbing at the doorframe as he passed and then he disappeared out of sight.

Tammy stood in the doorway, watching him head down the hall for a minute before turning back to Lily. "Sorry he was bothering you. Poor kid, you must have been freaked. Trust me, he's harmless. At least if he's not behind the wheel, anyway. So, what are you doing back here? "

Lily looked at her, wondering if Tammy was going to tell on her. Well, she was caught already. "I...I was taking a break from my homework. The jukebox in my booth doesn't work anymore, so I thought I'd just..." She shrugged her shoulders and glanced behind her at the booth where she'd been sitting.

Tammy's red-lipsticked smile grew wider and her drawn-on eyebrows lifted. "Taking a break from your mother's rules, too, huh? Well, I won't tell on you. You can stay here as long as you want, I don't care. These lights have got to go, though. I need to cool my jets and these fluorescents give me a headache," she said and reached over to flick the light switch off. The room plunged into darkness with the exception of the small glowing pastel lights of the jukeboxes at every booth that made half-circles of pink and purple on the glossy tabletops.

Her silhouetted form crossed the room and fell into the booth directly across the aisle from the booth where Lily had been sitting. She let out a rasping sigh. "God, my legs are killing me. One of these days I've got to get a desk job. Heh. With your mom's help, it'll be sooner than one of these days. Mind if I smoke?"

Lily started to respond, to say you couldn't smoke in here, that it was a no-smoking restaurant, that it was the law, but then she heard the low leafy crackling of cellophane. It wasn't a question. Lily sat back down and was very still, pinned by their secret. Punishment for leaving the booth for anything other than the bathroom was a week's grounding. No movie and dinner at Georgio's with Shari and her parents on Saturday, no church picnic on Sunday afternoon where Kevin Teigs, her church crush with the adorable lopsided smile, would be. She would lose TV privileges, too.

A match flared bright in the booth across the aisle, lighting up Tammy's face. In the soft light of the match, it was suddenly easy to see that Tammy had once been pretty. She lit the cigarette and then waved the match out, the smell of sulfur reaching Lily. The tip glowed brightly in front of Tammy's darkened face, only her shoulder and the side of her head clearly visible in the glow from the jukebox at her side.

"Ahhh," Tammy sighed again. "What a night. Well, I guess I should be grateful right now."

Lily waited, but Tammy didn't elaborate. Instead, it seemed that she, too, was waiting. "Grateful for what?" Lily finally asked.

"I can rest for a change. Pat's decided that your mom's going to be a bartender. Isn't that cozy? He's back there right now, showing her the ropes. All the regulars are wild about the idea. Diane, our own personal beauty queen, behind the bar. What a day. La-dee-da." She stopped again, sucking on her cigarette and making the tip brighten to a fiery cherry red.

Lily tried to think of excuses to leave, but each had the same result when she imagined saying them. The problem was that Tammy was angry, had been angry before she walked in here. Lily saw that now. She decided the best course of action was to be quiet, say nothing. Tammy would have her pissed-off cigarette and then go back to the bar and that would be the end of it. Lily would sneak back to her booth while her mother was still behind the bar.

The silence stretched, the glowing coal of Tammy's cigarette traveling back and forth from her mouth to where she rested her hand on the table, tapping her ashes right on the surface, not even trying to protect it.

"You're awfully quiet," Tammy said, finally. "You're not like your mom, huh? Not Miss Popularity, Miss Laugh-a-Minute. Just a quiet little mouse. Squeak, squeak?"

Lily opened her mouth and realized how dry it had become, her throat closing. She tried to swallow, feeling the sandpaper that had formed in her mouth rubbing together. Tammy was acting scary. What was she supposed to do? She closed her eyes and prayed. Please, please..., something.

"Squeak?"

"Please, can I go?" Lily said, her voice squeaking and confirming that she was, indeed, a mouse.

"No. No, you can't. I've got something to say, and you're going to listen."

Lily sat in the half-lit darkness and waited.

Tammy cleared her throat. Then she said, "Ever close your eyes to see pictures in your head?"

Lily straightened up and nodded, wondering if Tammy could see her, but afraid to open her mouth and squeak again.

Tammy continued, "I used to. I used to dream. Dream big - big wild fancy things. Everything was possible. But you know what happens? One day you close your eyes and all you see is black. The pictures, the you that you were gonna be, it's all gone. Just black. "

The cigarette traveled to her mouth and she took a long drag, the coal brightening again. Then she exhaled loudly, a hollow dragon-like sound. The small round lit coal lifted and then plunged down, and Tammy was crushing the cigarette out right on the table. The putrid burning smell of the destroyed plastic-coated countertop hitting Lily, making her cringe back in the booth while she watched Tammy grind the butt in as if she wanted to punch a hole through the table.

Tammy finally dropped the butt and flicked it on the floor. She sat back, her profile to Lily. "Then all you can see is how messed up this world is. I can see your mother, the real one, the one behind the pretty face, the one that takes and takes. I see her loud and clear. I may not see much with my eyes closed anymore, but when my eyes are open, oh, how much I can see. And I can see things that aren't so convenient for Diane Lawson. I'm not just going to sit back anymore. Not after tonight. Not now, when it's my job on the line. She screwed those other girls, but she ain't gonna screw me."

Tammy turned to peer at Lily, who had shrunk down in the seat of the booth. "Hey, girl. When was your birthday? A couple weeks ago, right? I got a little present for ya. A little something, just for you."

Lily was so cold her hands had gone numb, clutched on her thighs. She jerked and cringed when Tammy started to move toward her, sliding out of the booth's seat and standing over her, her face a pale oval looking down at her, her features blurred by the shadows.

"Ah, don't worry. I won't tell. Listen to your music. Enjoy the pictures in your head while you can." Tammy's voice was sad at the last, but then hardened. "You'll hear from me soon. A little something for you. Heh. See ya." Then she walked out.

Lily waited until she was sure Tammy was all the way gone and bolted for her booth, running down the hall past a couple clasped in an embrace against the wall next to the pay telephone, past a woman presumably making her way toward the bathroom who gave a little yelp of surprise as Lily ran by. Lily slowed as she reached the doorway to the bar. Her mother was standing over the booth with her hands on her hips and the crowd was dissipating, spaces appearing between people, empty seats now at the bar.

"Where were you?"

"The bathroom?"

Her mother tilted her head. "Yeah? That was a long time in the ladies room. Are you okay?"

Lily felt her lips tremble and pressed them together. Her mother looked so concerned, so loving, so different from the woman Tammy had referred to. "Yeah, fine. I'm okay."

The feeling didn't come back into her fingers for almost an hour. She didn't finish her periodic table. That night, instead of falling asleep, she lay awake and pieced and re-pieced together the fragments of the night, floating red coals appearing behind her eyelids whenever she started to drift off.

The next night Lily was left with another waitress, one with two little kids, in a small cluttered house that smelled of baby powder and Pine Sol. The night after that Bev and Sam were home again and Lily went back to her usual schedule. She let herself forget and pretend until the card came a week later.

It was in the mailbox when she got home from school the next Tuesday. She had stayed late after school to try out for a part in the school play. They were doing West Side Story this year and she decided to take a chance for a change, reminding herself that most of the girls in last year's play couldn't sing either. When she got home it was already getting dark, the heavy gray clouds that had hung overhead all day pushing the darkness down swiftly. She grabbed the wad of letters and catalogs in the mailbox and went inside to drop them off on their dining room table before going over to Bev and Sam's. She picked through the pile and found the card in a crisp embossed Hallmark envelope, her name and address written in a pretty cursive.

The photo dropped on the table before she even read the card, and so she saw it first. It was a grainy color photo, the light bad. A flash hadn't been used. But she could see it was her mother and Pat O'Reilly with their arms wrapped around each other. Mr. O'Reilly's hands were on her mother's rear end, clutching it through the black fabric of her skirt. It looked like the restaurant's kitchen, empty and clean. It had to be either very early in the day or after closing: the kitchen was a mess the rest of the time. Her mother looked tiny in Pat's arms, like a little helpless doll. Except she seemed to be participating.

Lily read the card. It was a belated birthday card with an illustration of a turtle wearing a purple party hat on it, the greeting "Better late than never...Happy Birthday!" Below that was the handwritten message.

Dear Lily:

I took this photo the other night. This is your first lesson in Life 101. I wish someone taught me. Lesson one: there are takers and there are taken-from. Study the takers in the picture. Look at how their hands grab.

I wonder if your mother still sees things when she closes her eyes? Or does she just see dollar signs?

You know who

Lily wanted to rip the photo and the card into tiny pieces, throw them out, but fascination stopped her. Instead she hid both in the back of a drawer in her desk in her bedroom, occasionally taking out the photo to stare at it. Her mother was a different person in that photograph, clawing, grabbing, eyes closed.

That new person appeared in flashes to Lily after that, occasionally arriving home with shiny paper bags from the department store filled with new clothes for herself while Lily still wore clothes bought at the corner thrift store, getting her hair done at the salon down the street while Lily sat among the shaking and thudding washers and dryers in the Laundromat, taking an expensive cruise with a friend the following winter and leaving Lily with Bev and Sam. She had never noticed the late nights before, the soft click of the front door closing long after her mother's shift would have ended.

Lily told herself that her mother was only human, had needs like anyone. She told herself that it was Tammy's derisive voice that she heard in her mind, not her own. She waited for more from Tammy, but she never saw her again; the bartender had been let go from O'Reilly's and disappeared into the world a few weeks later. She was sure she and her mother would have a heart-to-heart eventually and, with all the answers in place, everything would go back to the way it had been before.

Instead Lily was still glancing at everything sideways two years later when her mother's car was t-boned at an intersection on the way home from work and she died on impact, her hair neat in a chignon, her pink lipstick still perfectly applied when Lily went to identify her body.

Kathryn was starting to look a little green as she pushed the rest of her banana split around in its narrow glass bowl. After watching her daughter consume a cheeseburger, a mound of fries, and most of a gigantic sundae, Lily wasn't surprised. Still she had let Kathryn have the over-the-top dessert for two, have whatever she wanted. Her daughter wore mostly designer clothes these days, insisting it was what everyone else wore. Her clothes were more expensive and chic than Lily's. Lily knew it was wrong to always give in to her children's whims, but it felt so good, she couldn't help it. Giving, giving, giving – never taken from.

"It's okay, honey. You don't have to finish it. Look, I'm not even going to finish my salad," Lily said, putting down her fork on the still-full platter of leaves, carrot slices, and cherry tomatoes that glistened with vinaigrette. She had barely managed a few bites with the now-quiet jukebox squatting next to her.

She watched her daughter slump and grin at her, a brightness in her face that hurt Lily to see, one of hope and boundless belief and dreams achieved simply by closing your eyes.

Retreat

"Oh, my God!" It sounded like Tyler, Joe's oldest.

I burrowed further under my covers and wrapped my head with my pillow to block the sounds emanating from the kitchen below my bedroom.

"Holy crap!" That was definitely Liam, Joe's youngest and the most opinionated five year old I'd ever met. Even deep within my blanket-and-pillow cave, the bright morning sunshine penetrated, glaring through the flimsy white curtains that did little more than decorate my bedroom window.

"What is that?" That was Joe, my cousin, his voice rough from yelling at his kids all day yesterday and far too much tequila the night before.

I knew that my cousin and his three little monsters were performing these loud histrionics in the kitchen of my poorly insulated beach house rental as an obvious ploy to get me down there to start my short-order cook duties of the day. God forbid they poured themselves a bowl of cereal. It was my fault for inviting them. In fact, what exactly had happened to my brilliant idea of retreating to an isolated island for a summer of wildly creative and introspective weekends?

The decision I'd made, one miserable March morning over a tall vanilla latte while sitting and staring out through the coffee shop's window at a world that had been consistently gray for too long, was that I was going to retreat each weekend that summer and find my inner artist. I'd seen the ad for the house cruising on the internet that morning, its glorious photo of a Martha-Stewart-perfect summer house beckoning, and the wheels in my head started to turn.

The solution to my doldrums and current lack of a boyfriend was obvious all at once in that coffee shop: I was going to Reed Island. I was going to paint and sculpt and write poetry on my back porch overlooking a sea of tall, gold-tasseled grasses. I was going to drink wine and eat clams on the half-shell with ketchup and horseradish while watching the sun slide into the ocean and be ambushed by amazing ideas for novels, which I would work on all night by gaslight.

But I'd made a terrible mistake. I'd rented a house with multiple bedrooms.

So, what I ended up with was a retreat-slash-getaway-home full of friends, relatives, and pushy acquaintances with small children who pounded down my wraparound porch chasing their vociferous golden retrievers and screeching like banshees. My pristine electricity-free house that was meant to be candlelit and silent except for the sound of the wind hooting around the eaves became cluttered with colorful plastic toys, coolers full of beer, and portable radios equipped with batteries to drown out any remnant of peace.

It's not that I don't understand the word no. I can even say it usually to all sorts of alluring invitations and every telemarketer that calls with a special offer. I've said no to marriage and no to free puppies and no to drugs. It seemed that all of my ability to say no disappeared at the start of that summer. The allure on my visitors' part was clear: the extra bedrooms were just sitting there unused (wasted!) in a beach house on a charming island in one of the bays on Long Island only an hour and half outside of Manhattan. If only I had rented a shack like the one next door with its Tower of Pisa brick chimney. There couldn't be more than two rooms to the whole place.

I had seen the short old bald man that lived there. He was a strange looking person with an improbably long brown hillbilly beard streaked with silver, and a bright red face. When I first arrived and set up house alone, the only weekend I spent alone in the house it turned out, I saw him fishing off of his dock with a can of beer at his hip late in the afternoon each day. As the summer progressed, the only time I saw him was when he was heading off at dawn in his little rowboat covered with faded decals, pulling at the oars, his face bunched up in a snarl of effort. We acknowledged each other once when I caught him watching me early one morning from one of his little windows. I was out on my back porch looking at the green wall of reeds behind my house and trying to drink my seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time green tea that I'd packed instead of my French press and Starbucks House Blend. When I waved at him, he almost smiled, and then shook his head and snapped the window shade down.

My other neighbors also kept to themselves, sitting on their screened porches and talking in low muffled tones while watching the boats on the bay. I found myself marveling at the perfection of my retreat that wasn't. Except for the occasional rumbling of a passing motorboat, the thump of the waves against the dock, the rushing sound of the wind in the reeds, and the call of gulls, it was incredibly quiet. My house had shelves of books to read if only there had been a moment to read them and a long sunroom lined with windows that were perfect for sketching the many vistas the island provided.

Instead, there was shopping to do for the meals my guests required, long heart-to-hearts that I was dragged into with my relatives, and jaunts across the bay to play miniature golf or see a matinee on a gray day. On sunny days we raced the two Sunfish sailboats that came with the house around the island or watched the kids splash in the warm shallow water next to the beach from our folding lawn chairs set up on the dock. From the minute I woke up until the end of the day, there was noise and activity and a constant thrumming energy saying go, go, go.

My getaway weekends were exhausting me, leaving me listless and angry with the guests I had invited so foolishly days before. The few times I tried to sneak in some quiet moments at dawn to paint and sketch in the faintly lit sunroom, there had been the shuffle of feet in the doorway and someone's swollen eyes regarding me before I made more than a few marks on the white expanse of my artist's pad. For some reason I was compelled in those moments to hide what I was doing, say no, let me make us some coffee - I'd given in after that first failed green tea weekend - and we'll have that talk finally. Tell me all about it. My hands would shake while I twittered and laughed with my guest, but that was the only sign that irritation was bubbling and burning through me like acid.

What puzzled me about this irritation was that the one time my guests didn't come out to the island with me on Friday, but arrived Saturday afternoon, I felt strangely anxious in the empty house that I had so yearned for. All the jabs I made at writing stories or painting that Saturday morning ended up torn to shreds in the trash, and I found myself sighing with relief when they finally arrived around noon. I would paint and write and sculpt later, and it would be better then, more fluid.

I pushed my ambitions away with both hands and flew across the bay in my boat to pick them up with my hair whipping in the wind, feeling a raw desperate pleasure at the sight of my little crew of guests waiting on the dock. What frightened me in its perversity was that later that afternoon, once my guests settled in and were outside enjoying themselves, I stepped inside the house to get some sun block and found myself watching them through the window, feeling disconnected. It was as if I was watching some sitcom on television about a beach house peopled by attractive thirty-something's who spouted clever and witty lines sans the laugh track.

Squeezing my eyes shut and burrowing even deeper under the covers, I wondered to myself how it was already the third Saturday of July. Where had the summer gone? Just then, I heard my best friend, Sally, who was also staying for the weekend, come out on the landing outside of my door.

Her early-morning raspy voice called out, "Oh, my God, phew! What the hell?" I heard her bare feet patter down the stairs.

I threw the blankets aside and sighed. Forcing myself up and out of bed, I threw on my robe, and went down the stairs, assaulted in degrees as I descended by an overpoweringly unpleasant odor. Sitting in the center of the kitchen, surrounded by Joe, his kids, and Sally, who were all standing around it and sneering with disgust, was a galvanized steel pail filled with what looked like rotting fish guts. What had given my guests pause in their removal of the offending pail was its mysterious arrival and what was written on the side of the pail in black marker:

Welcome to Reed Island. You stink, like fish and guests. Please leave.

Realizing that I was immobilized by the message on the pail because I was trying to figure out which neighbor I'd seen would have done this, all the while breathing through my mouth, I forced myself into action.

"Okay! Out it goes!" I announced, grabbing the handle of the pail and taking it out of the house through the screen door that led to the porch. I hurried down the back stairs, not caring who saw me in my slip of a nightgown that was showing most of my legs as my robe flew open in my haste.

I crossed the tiny yard where the clothesline hung decorated with colorful scraps of bikinis and banner-like beach towels carrying the pail as far away from myself as possible. Heading down the path beaten between the reeds toward where the compost pile was supposed to be according to my rental paperwork, I contemplated the dreaded task of keeping the compost pile organic as instructed in the Care of Your House sheet. It would mean emptying the pail and then bringing the stinking thing back into the kitchen to be scrubbed. It would mean bringing that pail across the water to the mainland tonight on my way home, taking up precious cargo space on the small dingy on our return trip across the water, and stopping to dispose of it in a dumpster somewhere along the way. That damn pail wouldn't go without a fight, and even if it were scrubbed, the filmy coating of its intention would stay on me, settling in more deeply every time I caught a glimpse of it for the rest of the day.

By the time I reached the compost pile, I was running, and I threw the pail at it, yelling, "Ha!" It flipped over, its slick bloody scaled contents splashing over the squat, sunburned heap. I would have the damned last laugh. If I heard about it from Fun and Sun, Inc., I'd claim ignorance. What pail?

"Ha!" I said again, hands on hips, not caring how crazy I sounded. Whoever had done this was crazier, so they would understand the call of their own kind. Maybe it would draw them out of the bush. I glanced around the clearing, and then headed back to the kitchen to fumigate the odor and dismiss all concerns, including my own. We were all having a hearty, if forced, laugh at the island "looooonatic" by the time we locked up and headed back that night.

I was breathless crossing the bay to my house the following Friday with my mother and her boyfriend, but the house was the same as we left it. Each time my mother entered a room and loudly exclaimed over its charm, I wound up tighter as I waited for her to start shouting in dismay. By the end of her explorations, I couldn't breathe without whistling.

I sat up in bed that night, watching the moonlit boardwalk that led up to my house, waiting. Finally, before dawn, I fell asleep. At nine in the morning, with a roar of his twin-engine powerboat, my older brother arrived with his wife and their two rambunctious boys, and then it was just like every other weekend. Music blasted from my brother's boat's stereo system, the barbeque was hauled out, and my brother insisted on getting me drunk. The boys managed to tear a huge hole in the hammock I'd hung on the porch, and my mother and her boyfriend got in a screaming fight over dinner. At ten o'clock that night, grinning and wobbling, I locked every door in the house, went to bed, and slept like the dead on Quaaludes. There were no messages or smelly calling cards deposited inside or outside the house on Sunday and I returned to my apartment that night feeling like a conqueror.

On the next Friday, heading across the bay in the motorboat that came with the house, the boat filled with old high-school buddies who had reappeared in my life shortly after I secured the rental of the house, I was oddly surprised to see the banner reading "Go Home Poopheads" that was hung from my front porch.

"Ha! Ha! Ha! Whose house is that?" Judy asked, pointing a scarlet-painted talon.

I suddenly remembered that I never liked Judy. My eyes started to smart. "Oh, that's the house you'll be staying in this weekend, Judy. Guess they knew you were coming."

Chuck and Andy laughed, knee slapping, their boyish faces slightly puffy with the extra weight they had put on since high school. Their laughter slowed down and stopped when I tied up at the dock. Chuck's eyes widened and blinked. "You're serious?"

"Har, har, har. Of course, I'm serious. This is the place. I just have some wack-a-doodle for a neighbor or it's some kid or something. Be glad you missed the fish."

I told them the whole story as we unloaded the boat, and the more I told, the more I wished I had kept quiet. It was their eyes, staring at me, glancing at each other, which pushed me on with too many explanations, too many jokes at my own expense that belly-flopped in the silence. Even after we'd taken down the sign, which had been printed neatly in cherry red paint on an old bed sheet, I could still see its silhouette against the house. The rest of the evening we acted like reprimanded children, going through the motions of having fun with too much thoughtfulness, on the lookout for a stern parent.

Luckily, things were back to the usual pattern on Saturday, with Chuck and Andy using sailing as an excuse to water-wrestle, Judy prancing around in a black string bikini that was far too small for her saggy stretch-mark-striated butt, and the arrival of the only couple from high-school who had stayed together and gotten married, Sam and Viv. They had been a blond and beautiful couple then, and hadn't changed except for a few charming laugh lines around their cerulean eyes. They brought their two tow-headed daughters, ages three and five, and a paper shopping bag filled to the top with Barbies, which they dumped on the beach in a pile of platinum hair and impossibly-shaped pink plastic bodies. The two girls were strangely quiet and played with the dolls in the sand all day, only stopping to eat their peanut butter and Fluff sandwiches at lunchtime and go into the house periodically to use the bathroom. They were so good that they made me think of Village of the Damned. It was the adults who made all the trouble.

I don't know if it was being around each other that made us act like that, but it was just like when we were in high school. We set up a semi-circle of beach chairs on a sandy patch below the house where we were hidden from our neighbors, but could still see the girls playing on the beach. Andy mixed up a batch of his "killer" margaritas, forcing the first glass on everyone. After the first, no one argued; they refilled their glasses themselves. Judy brought out her waterproof boom box and put on one of her famous compilation CD's and all of us were soon singing and wiggling in our chairs to War's "Low Rider." As the day progressed, I found myself talking louder and louder in defiance. I hollered out the lyrics of the songs. I turned up the volume on Judy's boom box. I poured another margarita down my throat. Who was calling who a Poophead? And what kind of ridiculous name was that to call me? It had to be some kid doing this stuff.

Although both Chuck and Andy gallantly offered to share Judy's or my bed and give up their own, Sam, Viv, and their two girls headed home at sunset. I felt weepy, partly from the booze, partly from my stop-sign-red shoulders, and partly because I knew the first departure always triggers the end of a small party, and I had wanted this high school regression to continue for the rest of the evening.

There was something so comfortable about it, like old ratty washer-softened sweatpants with holes in them that you know it's time to throw out, but won't. High school had retreated a nightmare, been gilded by memory, and had returned in my early thirties as a dream of ease and safety where difficult decisions and fears of my purpose in life hadn't existed. All I could remember was that a huge sweeping sea of time had once spread out ahead of me, and all of my failures had once only been stumbling blocks, not life sentences. Lately, every birthday or New Year's meant taking stock and finding my life fell far below my expectations. Even this summer had stumbled and fallen from its noble aims, and I had only myself to blame.

By the time I got back to the house after dropping Sam, Viv, and the girls off at the island's parking lot, Judy was wrapped up in a beach towel and asleep in the torn hammock, the guys were quietly playing checkers in the sunroom, and the party was officially over. I stowed the beach chairs and rafts under the house in the crawl space and brought in the radio. We ended up having a spaghetti dinner and going to bed early.

Chuck was mumbling in his sleep in the room next door as I lay looking up at the bubbles in the paint on the ceiling, still unable to get past my disappointment. What was wrong with me? If only I'd been alone, I would be asleep by now after a long day of artistic discovery, the fruits of my labor solidifying where I'd left them.

I sprawled flat on my back for a while, and then tried curling up in a ball on my side, but it didn't help. I started to turn over again when I heard a slow soft tread in the grass outside the house and then a light thump against the house, followed by another. My eyes snapped open.

Thump!

I sat up.

Thump!

I jumped out of bed, opened my door, and ran out of my room and down the stairs, going as quietly as I could. I'd catch that brat! Out the kitchen door, down the back stairs, and around the side of the house I ran, the grasses slicing my bare feet. The kid wasn't there. In his place was the wiry old man from next door, pulling back to throw like a baseball pitcher, his long beard white in the moonlight.

"Hey!"

My yell threw him off, and he lobbed a white thing into the grass, where it made a crunching sound. I glanced at the house, at the long smeary splotches on it flecked with white. Eggs, the idiot was throwing eggs at my house.

"What is wrong with you?" I shouted.

The old man squinted at me. I realized I was wearing a very short nightgown better suited for seduction than a showdown with an insane neighbor. He flapped his hand at me in dismissal, shook his head, and bent to pick up another egg from the carton at his feet.

His voice was different from what I expected, deeper, richer. "What's wrong with me, she asks?" He straightened up and prepared to pitch another egg at the house.

"Hey! Stop that!" I ran across the grass at him, but he threw before I reached him and the egg splattered against one of the sunroom's windows.

I stopped in front of him, panting. "Will you stop? That's my house you're decorating with eggs."

He looked at me, his eyes hard and dark. "They're rotten eggs, and I know it's your house."

"You're crazy."

"You're a nuisance. Maybe I can make you leave."

My breath caught in my throat. What was with this guy? I put my hands on my hips. I wasn't going to take this.

"Maybe not. Maybe you can throw all the eggs and dump all the rotten fish you want. I'm not leaving, especially not because of some nutcase who lives next door."

He'd been reaching down for another egg, but now he stopped and straightened. He put his hands on his hips, and stuck his chin out with his long beard trailing. "All right, then. What's it going to take? There's got to be some way to get you out of here."

"I don't understand. What problem do you have with me? I haven't done anything to you."

He smiled, but it was without humor. "I'll tell you. You're loud. There's screaming and music and kids running around at all hours."

"It's a summer house, this is a summer vacation. Noise happens."

"Not here. Everyone who comes to Reed Island knows that. We come here for some peace. I, for example, come here to write. I've written every novel except two on this island, and every one of them sold well enough to support me and pay for this house every summer plus my condo. But, you see, I can't write a thing lately. I've got this pretty little thing from who-knows-where who thinks she's out at the Hampton's. I complained to those rental folks, but they said you said you wanted a quiet getaway, and that's why they rented to you. Why you would lie about that, I have no idea, but here I am, and every one of your neighbors, putting up with you. Any suggestions?"

I stared at him and felt that little thing that had been knocking loose around my mind and keeping me up at night, fall into place. The gentle sounds of the island uninterrupted unless the stereo was playing at my house, the irritated glances I'd received from the few neighbors I'd seen, the woman who set up an easel and painted at the end of her dock each day four houses down, all clicking neatly together now.

"I, I, I just." I stopped and took a deep breath. "I did come here for the quiet. I really did. Stop shaking your head. I wanted to have a retreat and do artistic stuff, the things I loved doing when I was a kid: painting, writing stories, pressing flowers, things like that."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, why? I like that stuff."

"You need to rent a house on this island to press flowers? You can do that anywhere. Sounds like you're just trying to make something up so you can cover your butt."

"No, I'm not making it up. I don't have to make up lies for you. You don't understand. I go out, I do my job, I go on dates, I join clubs, I take evening classes, blah, blah, blah, but there's, like..., this big black hole, and I can feed it and feed it and it's still empty. I need something more. I thought, maybe, if I spent a summer, the weekends anyway, alone on an island pursuing the things I loved as a kid and getting some time to think, that maybe I'd figure it out. I really don't know why I'm telling you all this."

"Ah, but the crack in your story is that you're not alone. You haven't had a weekend alone once, except for that first weekend you came out here, and it's already the beginning of August. Yup, it's the beginning of August. Usually right about now, my first draft would be completed and I'd be sticking my feet up on my porch rail, sucking on a Cuban and guzzling some Dom. And if you had spent the summer as you say you wanted to, I would be doing that, maybe even tonight, instead of pitching rotten eggs at your house."

"It's not a crack in my story. It's just that, I, I couldn't say no when they asked. I haven't been able to this summer for some crazy reason."

"Well, no, the reason is pretty clear and it's not crazy."

"What?"

"You're afraid."

"Of what? I'm not afraid." I snickered to show him I wasn't.

"Afraid of being alone, that's you."

"That's stupid, that's what I came here for."

"Doesn't matter. You're still afraid of it. Afraid of finding out what you're made of. Afraid of what some people might say. People called me a crazy hermit until I sold my first book, then I was a crazy published hermit, but I got a little respect. Not that I needed their approval. People who come out here, we're okay with ourselves, not looking for noise to hide behind. Some of these folks are artists, writers, like me. Some are just people who like the peace." He looked at me hard, and then shook his head. "The truth is you're scared to death of what actually being alone might be like. You might have to look at yourself in the eye and see who you really are."

I found that I couldn't look at him anymore. I gazed out across the alien gray landscape created by the moonlight, at the sullen dark water licking the beach. Something was ringing in me. When I breathed in through my nose, the air felt too sharp. I stood taller.

I looked back at him, the netted face, the dark sparkling eyes, the floating ghost of a beard, and wanted to punch his red nose and kiss his crumpled cheek at the same time. Instead I said, "You're right."

"What?"

"You're right."

"I don't think a woman's ever said that to me."

I laughed and said, "Now one has."

"So you're leaving?"

"No."'

"Oh, come on!"

"No, I'm taking your advice. Or try to."

"Oh, my God," the man said, his red face fading to a pink. "This is unbelievable. You said I'm right....and now you're going to take my advice. Mind if I run get my tape recorder? I need proof."

"Sure," I said and laughed again, feeling scared and high at the same time, watching him eyeball me to see if I was serious and then scurry away toward his house. As he went inside and his screen door snapped shut behind him the wind came up and ran wildly through the tall grasses all around me whispering "Shh! Shhhhhhhh!"

A Sneak Peek at Tara McTiernan's Novel

Barefoot Girls

Copyright 2011 by Tara McTiernan

Prologue

Hannah woke with a jolt. What was that? Opening her eyes hurt, they were so swollen from crying they stung.

The air had changed; the electricity that pinged through it when her mother was around was back. Dark blue light flooded around the drawn shades on her open bedroom windows and the oven-blast heat of the day before had left finally, leaving the cooling air settling like dust. Night insects chorused outside in the trees and a car passed the house slowly, headlights briefly piercing in wedges past the curtains and shades.

She listened for the sounds of her mother. Could her mommy-sense be right – had she come back? Was Hannah finally forgiven? If only she knew what she had done wrong. She slid her blue-pajamaed legs out over the edge of the bed and leapt to the floor, careful to land quietly in case her mother was home and had gone to sleep.

She picked up and pulled on her pajama top that she had torn off earlier and tiptoed to her door to open it and peer down the hall towards her mother's room.

The door was shut!

Mommy was home!

Hannah started to do her happy dance and then stopped. Don't wake her, whatever you do. She looked back at the bed and then down the hall. She couldn't go back to bed. She was too excited - it was singing through her.

She thought of all the quiet activities she usually turned to when her mother was sleeping or just locked up in her room. Reading, coloring, Barbies: these were good. TV, games that made noises or played songs: these were bad.

But the good quiet things weren't going to release this building pressure, this need to run around and jump for joy. Her mother hadn't been home for two days. Hannah had eaten all the bread and peanut butter and raisins and applesauce and had even found a bag of stale Mint Milano's on her mother's bedside table which she had finally eaten in desperation, knowing her mother would be mad at her for eating her favorite treat.

Then there was no more food except things like bags of flour and boxes of baking soda. What was worse, the house's shifting quiet had started to scare her. When she went to sleep the night before, she felt such a deep hopelessness it was a like a black tarry thing living in her chest, eating her insides and hollowing her out.

But Mommy was home! Hannah was forgiven! No, she needed to do something special to celebrate. Hannah squeezed past through the cracked-open door to her room, knowing that the door squeaked loudly when opened all the way, and tiptoed down the carpeted hall and then down the stairs, picking her way carefully through the downhill squeak-minefield that was the stairs of the old house.

She walked through the hallway and kitchen and out the back door, stepping onto the cool flagstone patio and then gently shutting the screen door behind her. The patio was just as Mommy and the Barefooters left it two days ago – metal chairs pulled away from the table as if those sitting in them had to jump up and run, four loungers all lined up from when they had been sunbathing earlier in the day, the card table they used as their cocktail buffet still set up between the two groupings of chairs and covered with crumpled cocktail napkins, dried-up lemon wedges, half-filled tumblers, and a pitcher holding the remains of their margaritas and a lot of black bugs that had found manna before floating lifeless on top of the pale green liquid.

On the table, among the dirty dishes and empty wine glasses, was a narrow box. "Hannah's Magic Wands" was written on the paper that had been wrapped around the original packaging of the box and glitter had been sprinkled liberally on the paper. The front featured Aunt Amy's perfectly-drawn cartoon of Tinker Bell.

Hannah had asked Santa for a magic wand last Christmas on her handwritten up-the-chimney list and had given it to her mother to prepare it for their annual ceremony with the Barefooters that involved a big fire in the fireplace, lots of toasted marshmallows, Aunt Pam's funny rendition of "The Night Before Christmas" read entirely in the voice of Sesame Street's Grover, and the grand finale of placing Hannah's wish list in the fire to send it to Santa.

Her mother would rub Hannah's list with all of her lucky charms for good luck, especially the soft blue artificial rabbit's foot Hannah coveted, and say a prayer for what she called a "windfall" – something about money. The afternoon her mother had taken the list for Santa from Hannah to work her magic on it, she found Hannah playing with marbles on the kitchen floor and making up stories about their marble-lives. Her mother hunkered down on the floor next to where Hannah sat, her beautiful fairy-princess face inches away from Hannah's and said, "Hey, ladybug. Watcha doin'?"

Hannah looked up from her game. Her mommy, Keeley Morgan O'Brien, was the most wonderful person ever. Full of magic and excitement and what she called "high hilarity", Mommy had the ability to make anything fun. To top it off, when Keeley focused her morning-glory-blue eyes on her daughter, asking questions and listening seriously to her answers, she made Hannah feel important, deeply loved and remarkable. Hannah was her special wonderful, a gift from God. Her mother always had time for Hannah, that is, unless she was sick in her room and didn't want to talk to anyone, not even the Barefooters.

Not wanting to talk to the Barefooters was the bottom of the barrel and when that happened Hannah's world became black and brown for days. The Barefooters would babysit Hannah in turns, pretending the closed door at the top of the stairs wasn't there and sleeping on the pull-out sofa, trying to make things okay. This would go on until one morning when Keeley would open her bedroom door, call for Hannah, and sweep her daughter up into her arms to hug her and kiss every inch of her face. Then life would be wonderful again.

Hannah answered her mother's question honestly, knowing her mother loved to hear all about the stories that her daughter told herself. "Well, the blues have taken over the world and live in this castle over here, see? And the browns are the bad guys and they're going to get the blues and they're making a plot."

Keeley widened her eyes, "Ooooh, what's the plot?"

"They're planning it now! It's going to be terrible!" Hannah felt her pulse quicken.

"What are the blues going to do?" Keeley asked, her eyes even bigger.

Now Hannah was blissfully terrified. "I don't know!"

Keeley pouted her lips thoughtfully for a moment, considering. "Wait, I know!" Keeley said, lowering her voice to a gravelly low pitch, "They will invoke the magical spell of Ooboo Dooboo and create an invisible force-field around their castle. Only the blues know the spell of Ooboo Dooboo!"

"That's it!" Hannah shrieked. She put her hand on top of the blue marbles and started rolling them in a circle wildly. "Ooboo! Dooboo! Ooboo Dooboo!"

"Ooboo Dooboo!" Keeley yelped at the ceiling.

"Done!" Hannah said, and threw her arms over her head, palms of her hands outward.

Keeley lifted Hannah up and they marched around the house in victory, Hannah's arms over her head, grinning. Keeley sang the victory song "We Are the Champions" that talked about no time for losers. After a full circuit of the house, Keeley walked them over to their favorite talking-place, the yellow mushy pillow-strewn sofa in the kitchen next to the window that looked out on the garden, where they collapsed in satisfaction.

"So, kiddo, I got a question for ya," Keeley said, wiggling Hannah's folded Christmas wish list out of her jeans pocket.

"Did you rub it with the blue foot yet, Mom?"

"Of course I did, and my four-leaf-clover and the piece of the pyramid, and your baby-Boo," Keeley said, referring to Hannah's favorite stuffed animal that once was a white fluffy lamb and now looked like a rolled-up nubby brown sweater with no sign of facial features, ears, or even legs.

"Good, 'cause I have to get everything this year, Mommy. I've been so good!"

Keeley reached over and ran her hand over her daughter's silky chocolate-brown waves that were so rich in color compared to her own pale blond hair. "You have been the best girl in the entire universe, there is no doubt. Santa just might have a question about one of the things on the list and I wanted to be able to answer his questions in case he asks me."

"What?"

"This magic wand you wanted-"

"Oh, yes, that's the most important! A real one!"

"Hannah, he might not be able to get you a magic wand, even if you are the best girl in the world, even in the entire universe."

Hannah blinked. "But Santa can do anything."

"Well, he can do most anything. But he can't do everything." Keeley took one of Hannah's small hands in her own. "He would if he could, though."

"But," Hannah said, her voice growing very small, "How did Tinker Bell get hers?"

"Well, as you know, Tinker Bell is a fairy and she was born with hers in the heart of a pure-white rose. It's all part of being a fairy."

Hannah's brow knitted as she thought about this.

"Mom?"

"Yes?"

"What if Santa could get Tinker Bell just to lended it to me for Christmas?"

Keeley's eyebrows went up. "Well, I hadn't thought about that. That might be a tall order. Maybe Tinker Bell might do that."

Keeley was quiet then, looking out the window at the birds clinging to the bird-feeder and making it sway. She turned back to Hannah. "How about this: we don't know when Tinker Bell has a vacation and can lend us her wand, so Christmas may be out. So let's take it off of the list. But I'll talk personally with Santa to see if he can talk to Tinker Bell."

Hannah clapped her hands together. "Yay!"

"Now, no promises."

But, of course, her mother had come through. Not on Christmas but six months later on a balmy Sunday evening in June with the Barefooters.

There had been the wands – they reminded Hannah of the sparklers from Fourth of July. There had been dancing around the yard in the softening twilight with all of the Barefooters waving their sparkling wands in circles and figure-eights and leaving miniature white starbursts in their wake. There had been a big ice-cream cake with Tinker Bell on it and extra "crunchies" in the middle from Carvel. There had even been presents from each of the Barefooters. There was a beautiful pink fairy dress from Aunt Amy, sparkly wings from Aunt Pam, and fairy dust - a bag of gold glitter that Hannah could only use outside - from Aunt Zo.

It had been a golden evening, pure magic glimmering in the gentle June air and laughter bubbling out of the beautiful mouths of her mother and her mother's best friends. The drinks flowed, as usual, and the Barefooters had talked for hours while Hannah danced around the patio and yard in her fairy dress and wings. Then it was late and each of the Barefooters had to go home finally. Each had a very big day the next day.

Aunt Amy had her first day at a new job as an office manager at a local insurance company. She said looked like it might be a decent job this time, with good pay and benefits and everything. Aunt Pam had an appointment at the bank to get a business loan to start her own public relations company. Hannah had never seen her down-to-earth Aunt Pam as childishly giddy as she was that night, thrilled to finally be her own boss. Aunt Zo had an appointment at a very high-end wedding dress store in New York City where you had to book six months in advance to even look at the dresses. Zo had said to the others that afternoon, "It's a good thing Phillip is willing to wait or I'd be wearing off-the-rack!"

So finally it was just Hannah and Keeley lying on their backs on a blanket in the yard counting shooting stars when the phone rang inside the house. Keeley had gotten up unsteadily, stumbled a bit and giggled before running for the house. The screen door slammed behind her and Hannah heard the distant "Heyah!" Keeley called out, assuming it was one of the Barefooters calling to talk some more.

The yard was quiet except for the peepers that lived in the small marshy area at the bottom of the yard and the occasional swoosh of a passing car from the street. Hannah's eyes were growing heavy. They kept closing even though she wanted them to stay open. She reached up and held them open with her fingers.

Another shooting star flew across the deep blue sky. "Twelve!" Hannah yelled in the direction of the house, proud she could count that high.

The house was quiet. Too quiet. She couldn't hear her mother at all. When one of the Barefooters called, her mother's voice always lifted higher and louder, their conversation broken by intermittent bursts of laughter.

Whoever had called was not one of the Barefooters.

Hannah's eyes were getting even heavier, too heavy for even her fingers. She let them shut. A single early cricket started singing nearby in the grass. The back screen door opened with a squeak and then slammed shut. Hannah rolled over and sat up, rubbing her pesky sleepy eyes hard to make them wake up. "Momma?"

Her mothers' shuffling feet grew closer. Hannah finally got her eyes to open. Sitting up helped. When she looked up at her mother who was approaching the blanket, she was completely different.

Before her mother had been jubilant, nearly dancing on her toes all day, a wide grin never far from her lips. She had those she loved most, her best friends and her beautiful baby girl, and she had been able to answer a magical wish, one involving Tinker Bell's help. Add to that wine and margaritas and the Amaretto Sours she and the Barefooters drank after dessert, and she was feeling more than fine.

This new mother's hair stood up in chunks, as if she'd been pulling it. Even in the dark, Hannah could see something was different about her mother's beautiful face, something askew. Keeley was walking like one of those zombies in the movie on television Aunt Pam let Hannah watch one time when she was babysitting while Keeley was out on a date with another maybe-father.

"Baby?" Keeley's voice wobbled.

Who had been on the phone? What happened?

"What, Mommy?" Hannah asked, and then heard the wiggly fear in her own voice.

"Baby, honey baby..., I have to go out for a little while. I'll be back real quick, I promise. I just need to try to talk to your grandma and...oh, God. I just need to try to – I'll try. And if she sees you, that'll be it. Game over. I lose. Again. Can you...can you take care of yourself for a little bit? Oh!"

Then Keeley broke and bent over, huge sobs bursting out and making her whole body convulse.

Hannah jumped up and ran to her mother, wrapping her arms around her legs. "It's okay, Mommy! I'll be okay! You can go." She twisted her neck to look up at her mother. "All my Aunties and my babysitters do is play with me when they watch me and... and we watch TV, that's all. And if I get hungry, there's SpaghettiOs and bread and peanut butter and lots of stuff. I can do it. I can!" She wasn't really sure about the SpaghettiOs – in fact she was sure she had already eaten them earlier that week as a snack – and the Barefooters and her babysitters did more to take care of Hannah than just play with her and watch TV, but she knew what her mother needed to hear.

Keeley stumbled away from her daughter's embrace and over to the buffet, still crying. She picked up the bottle of Amaretto, twisted off the top, and took long swigs between gasping sobs. Then she looked up at the starry sky and said, "Oh, Daddy. Why did you have to die? Why? You were a piss-poor father most of the time...but at least you helped us, paid for stuff. Why you? Why not her? What're we going to do?" She moaned the last words.

Keeley sat down at the patio table, holding on to the bottle with both hands. Hannah went over and sat down on the ground next to her and put her head on her mother's knee. "Mommy? I'll be okay, I promise! Memember Pippi? I'll be like Pippi," Hannah said, referring to their latest bedtime story of Pippi Longstocking, one Hannah adored for its feisty independent main character.

Finally, after staring off into space for a while, her mother nodded slowly and looked down at Hannah. "Well, we're putting you to bed right now. When you get up tomorrow, if I'm not home, have some cereal and watch TV, okay? Okay?"

They went inside and upstairs and Keeley tucked her daughter into bed, letting her sleep in her fairy dress from Aunt Amy, but making her take off her wings. "You'll crush 'em, sweetie," she slurred.

Then her mother covered her with a light blanket, kissed her and left the room. A few minutes later their old Volkswagen Jetta clattered to life in the driveway, and her mother backed the car out and drove off, the chattering and grinding of the car ricocheting off the houses as it went down the street. The empty house the next morning was fine, because Hannah almost-knew that her mom would be back. She was a little afraid because Keeley had disappeared before and had also acted in ways from time to time that had scared Hannah, so there was that mom, the one she didn't like to think about.

But Keeley wasn't gone for one morning or even one day, she was gone for two. And Hannah knew where her mother had gone: to her grandparent's house. Her mother said her grandfather had died. Hannah didn't know what that meant, but she did know that when they went to Keeley's parents' house something usually went wrong, especially when her grandfather was away when they arrived. It was like Grandma hated Mommy. The hard way Grandma looked at her daughter, assuming she would look at her at all, was scary. Many times when they went to visit, Grandma shut the door in their face after seeing it was them. Grandma never touched, acknowledged, or even looked at Hannah, only glancing down at her and then looking away as fast as she could.

Grandpa was different. He was the reason they visited. Grandpa picked Hannah up and hugged her tight when he saw her, smelling of sharp whisky and lime-scented cologne, saying, "Who is this little girl? Who is this sweet girl? Is this my granddaughter? Is this my Hannah?"

After he put her back down, they'd get in his car and go to the High Ridge Country Club and have lunch or dinner, depending on the time of day, usually going to the bar there first. He was clearly well-known there, everyone waving and smiling and nodding. He'd lift Hannah up and put her on a stool at the bar and tell Frank the bartender his granddaughter wanted a "Shirley Temple straight up, heavy on the cherries." Keeley and he would have drinks too, sitting on either side of Hannah and talking over her. After they went to the dining room and had their meal, he'd pull out his checkbook and say, "Okay, Keeley, how much do you need?" with his pen poised. Her mother would lower her head and say a number and he would scribble it out, signing his name with a flick of his wrist.

Something bad must have happened at Grandma and Grandpa's. That must have been it. But what? And what was dying, exactly? Was it like the coyote in Road Runner? Was Grandpa all black and smoking, blown away by dynamite? Hannah waited and wandered the house, looking out the windows facing the driveway, waiting to see the Jetta pull in. And it kept not happening, making her cry with fear, a little hiccup-y sobbing that trembled in her throat.

But Mommy was home now. That was all that mattered.

Hannah stood in the cooling darkness looking over the scene of the party of two nights before. The ghost-town empty-echoing feeling that had plagued her yesterday was gone. Hannah closed her hot swollen eyes, tears refilling them, and said softly, "Thank you, God. Thank you for bringing my mommy home." She put her palms together and looked up at the sky. There were no stars tonight.

She had to celebrate and show God her thanks, so that He would really know.

Hannah ran over to the cluttered patio table where the magic-wands lay next to a pack of matches. Hannah pulled a wand out and lit it with a match. The lit wand scattered off sparks right away, suddenly a live thing in her hot and very sticky hand that still had jelly on it from the day before.

She ran in circles around the yard holding it, scattering sparks and thanking God as hard as she could, her heart feeling like, if it burst, it would shoot white burning stars into the night.

Chapter 1

Hannah sat at one of the tables in the back room of the restaurant doing her least favorite side job at Bella Via: prying the bases of melted candles out of the votives that sat on every table using a butter knife. She'd chop at the wax and try to wiggle the knife along the edge the way that Jennifer, her waitressing idol, had shown her, but she could never achieve that easy pop that she had seen Jennifer perform with the knife, the disk of wax coming out neatly in one piece.

As she worked, her mind returned again to the conversation she'd had with her landlord, Mr. Harris, that morning. She still couldn't believe it. She felt as if she had been slapped, a hand flying at her face out of the blue.

He called her and that had been the first clue that something was up, as he usually walked across the lawn from the big house where he and Mrs. Harris lived, stopping by for a quick visit about some small favor they needed or to let her know about something that was going on at their house, a party or a group of workmen who would be on the property doing renovations. Often, it was to see what new improvement she had made on the old carriage house that she rented from them on their property in Greenwich, Connecticut.

"Hello, Hannah! How are you doing? Well?" Mr. Harris's voice took a minute to recognize over the phone.

"Uh, oh! Great! Thanks! And you?"

"Fantastic! We're very excited. Ginny is graduating from Colgate – a little behind schedule, but with honors. We're very proud of her."

Hannah had heard occasionally of their youngest daughter, Ginny, a child that had come late to the couple when they were well into their mid-forties. While their youngest was just finishing college, their two much older sons were married with school-age children and settled in Boston, Massachusetts and Boulder, Colorado respectively. She had often seen Ginny in passing when she was home for a visit, roaring by in her Jeep on the road near the house, straight brown hair flying. They had been formally introduced at the Harris's Christmas open house this last December, Ginny smiling dutifully while Mrs. Harris rhapsodized about the improvements Hannah had made on the carriage house.

"That's wonderful! Congratulations!" Hannah said into the phone while turning and walking to a window to look at her garden. Once a thicket of weeds and brambles, the area was now a carefully tended cottage garden filled with colorful flowers and enclosed by a new white-painted picket fence.

What favor would it be this time? Watch the house and feed their cat while they went away? Babysit for the grandchildren while the family was in town to celebrate Ginny's graduation? Whatever it was, it would be worth it. The Harris's charged her a very low rent in return for an on-site all-around helper who also happened to be willing to fix up their little outbuilding which had been literally disintegrating when Hannah moved in, the roof bowed, the walls falling in.

"Thank you! We're going to have a big celebration, and of course, we'd love to have you join us. Nan was thinking of a big barbecue here at the house."

"Sounds great! I'd love to come," Hannah said, waiting.

Mr. Harris paused and said, "There's something else I've been wanting to talk to you about. Do you have a minute?"

"Of course! What's up?"

He cleared his throat and said, "Well, we were thinking. Now that you're engaged, you're probably planning on moving in with your fiancé, correct?"

Fiancé. Would she ever get used to the idea? She glanced at the 2-carat emerald cut diamond on her left hand and then looked away. "Moving in? Ah, I wasn't really thinking about it yet. You know, we haven't even set a date, and-"

"Oh, but we thought most engaged couples lived together these days?"

Living with Daniel? In the city? And leaving her precious little house? She'd worked so hard on it...and, oh, it was weird to even think about not being alone, having to be with someone all the time. All that forced conversation and togetherness. God! "I'm probably going to stay here, for now anyway. Daniel and I haven't even talked about where we'd live when we do get married. Who knows what we're doing? Ha! Maybe we'll live here!"

There was a pause, and then Mr. Harris said, "There, in that little place? The two of you?"

No, she couldn't imagine that either. She didn't want to think about it right now. "Yeah, you're right. It's too small. Well, we'll figure it out when the time comes."

Mr. Harris sighed. "That's the thing. We...ah, Ginny was planning on coming back home, but we already made her bedroom into a guest room. She kept talking about living in the city when she graduated, so we were sure we lost her for good. Anyway, we were thinking...maybe the carriage house might be available, since you're getting married and everything. It would be perfect for Ginny. Close enough so we can know she's safe, far enough so she feels independent. You know how hard it is for parents to let go of their little girl."

No, she didn't. The door had practically slammed on her butt on the way out when she left home at eighteen. And her little house! The pile of rubble she'd turned into a home! Hours of work: replacing the peeling linoleum in the kitchen with tiles, sanding and painting the new walls, putting fresh shingles on the roof herself after the roofer had handled the structural work. She made nice with a general contractor in New Canaan who let her scavenge at his construction sites, and found many things including a beautiful mahogany front door was well as a pretty pale blue porcelain pedestal sink, all tossed aside at the multiple construction sites in the area where they were doing a tear-downs in order to build more McMansions.

What was the worst was that Mr. Harris knew exactly how much hard work and tender care she'd put into the house. Her life was that little house and her writing. How could he? But the carriage house was his, it was on his property, and it was his daughter, so what was Hannah supposed to say?

"I...I wish I knew what my plans were. Um, can I get back to you?" Hannah had said finally after she realized how long the silence had stretched out, and got off the phone as quickly as she could. Now, she wished she had been more firm. No! If it wasn't for her, that house wouldn't even be livable, just a pile of rotten wood. They wouldn't even be considering letting their darling oh-so-perfect daughter live there! Hannah jabbed at the wax in the votive she was cleaning, her lips clenched in a tight line.

Her tips from the lunch shift had been awful. Between it being a slow lunch in late August when every self-respecting Greenwichite was in Nantucket or the Hamptons or abroad and the fact that the few tables she had gotten were tightwad types who gave exactly fifteen percent to the penny on a lunch bill that wasn't much to start with as they had been drinking water and hadn't ordered appetizers or dessert, she had made less than $15. To top off her bad day, she had an Advil-resistant headache that meant her period was coming and, even worse, her least-favorite manager, Josephine, was working.

Josephine hated Hannah on sight. In fact, if Hannah had walked into Bella Via two years before looking for waitressing work when Josephine was on duty, Hannah wouldn't have gotten the job. Hannah didn't understand why Josephine harbored such an instant and endless animosity toward her, but it was there.

Luckily, Hannah had walked in when the owner, Manuel, was there and he had the opposite reaction to her. He had the pure red hots for her, so instead she had been hired on the spot and had gotten almost all of the good high-paying dinner shifts – rarely working the poor-paying lunch shifts and managing to wiggle out of the slave-labor runner shifts by begging Manny to take them off of her schedule.

"Do you know how rare it is to have blue eyes and dark hair?" he had asked the first time he met her, his eyes sweeping over her again and again.

Hannah had noticed since she'd hit puberty when her figure started filling out, that suddenly the pairing of her blue eyes and dark brown hair was something men commented on. It was a look that was subtle and seemed to appeal mostly to men with brown eyes. Sometimes she liked the attention, but other times men like Manny made her feel alarmed, protective of herself.

Hannah put down the knife and rubbed fingers that were aching from clutching the butter knife so hard and was jarred, once again, by her ring. Her beautiful engagement ring from Daniel. It was perfect. It was terrifying.

She had analyzed this mixed feeling of wonder and fear since she first felt it immediately after Daniel slipped the ring on her finger out on his sailboat one beautiful early summer evening in the beginning of June, the first truly warm day after a very cool and wet spring. They had moored in a little cove and were sipping champagne out of plastic wineglasses – that should have been a clue, the minute he produced that bottle out of the cooler her antennae had gone up – and then he had gotten this strange strained expression on his face right before he'd gotten down in front of her.

She examined the ring, its brilliant rainbows shooting into her eyes. This wonderful perfect man, this man she had trouble believing was her boyfriend, wanted to be her husband? And what was a husband supposed to be like? She had never witnessed husbandly love up close at home, only the celluloid version on TV and in movies. Her mother hadn't married until three years ago at the age of thirty-eight, a year after Hannah had moved out.

All of the Barefooters, her mother's closest friends who had functioned in Hannah's life as both aunts and godmothers, had many bad experiences with men. Aunt Amy had a series of emotionally abusive boyfriends who had played endless games with her head before finally meeting Uncle Gus and finding real love. Aunt Pam had never married again after her first marriage at age twenty nine, which had only lasted two years and produced one child, Jacob, who was shuttled between the warring exes for his entire childhood. Whenever Hannah tried to find out what had gone wrong with the marriage, or why they still hated each other so vehemently, Auntie Pam said, shaking her head, "You don't want to go there, honey."

Even the slim, chic, and ridiculously wealthy Aunt Zo, Zooey Walker Delaney to outsiders, had been through two husbands and was on her third. The third marriage had failed to be the charmed one she'd hoped for and the lit-up way she used to talk about love had left her. The only time she glowed these days was when she returned filled with enthusiasm from her travels to yet another exotic place, when she was with the Barefooters at any of their innumerable parties, and when they all went back to Captain's Island every August, kicked off their shoes and were the Barefoot Girls again.

Hannah stared at her ring and the scattering of reflected light it created on the tablecloth. Her life was scaring her. Her fiancé was too perfect for her. The novel she had labored over for a full year in what used to be the potting shed of the carriage house, freezing in the winter with a space heater burning her ankles and sweating in the summer with a fan whipping her hair into her eyes, had actually been sold to Knopf a year ago and had finally hit store bookshelves two weeks before. Her mother and all the Barefooters had gotten advance copies from Hannah, of course.

But she wouldn't let herself think about the book at work as a rule, because all she wanted to do was write, not wait tables or scrape wax candle nubs out of votive holders. The clash of her dream and her daily reality became painful if she thought about it on the job. She picked up the butter knife and resumed scraping and chopping at the next votive holder.

At that moment, Josephine walked into the room. She stopped and made a loud tsking sound before walking over to where Hannah sat. "You shouldn't be doing that on a tablecloth. You'll ruin it."

Hannah looked at the tablecloth with its wine stain and chocolate smears. "What do you mean? It's dirty."

"I mean that the wax could get into the fibers and you can't get that out."

Everyone that was stuck with this job did it at a table with a dirty tablecloth and Josephine never said a thing. Except when it was Hannah.

"Fine, I'll roll it back." Hannah moved the votives to a chair and stood up to roll back the linen tablecloth and expose the cheap wooden table underneath.

Josephine smiled her non-smile and reached into her shirt pocket, pulling out a folded piece of paper. "Hey, I heard about your book. Congrats. Thought you might find this interesting. It's a review by your hometown newspaper. Fairfield, right? Seems they're interested in anything if it's about a hometown girl. Really fascinating review. I clipped it for you." She put the newspaper clipping on the table.

Hannah looked at it and knew immediately it was bad. She looked up in time to see the small mean smile play across Josephine's lips, and forced herself to smile nonchalantly. "Thanks."

Josephine stood a moment, waiting for Hannah to pick up the clipping, read it. Hannah picked up the butter knife and a votive and started digging at it, ignoring Josephine.

Josephine waited a beat longer. Then she turned to go before turning back. "Now, don't forget about the tablecloth again."

Hannah didn't look up. "I won't."

After finishing up with the votives, Hannah stuffed the review in her apron pocket, carried her cleaned votives in to the dishwasher and cashed out.

Hannah had intended to read the review in her car, but then she saw Josephine in the parking lot talking to one of the waiters and decided it would have to wait until she got home, even though she was dying to know what it said. She just couldn't take the chance of Josephine seeing her read it, give her the satisfaction of seeing her reaction.

How would she react? What did it say? On the way home each red light seemed unusually long, each driver in front of her an obstacle. She thought of taking it out to read at one of the lights but knew that once she started reading, she wouldn't be able to stop.

Pulling into her cottage's driveway that ran alongside the original estate, a narrow old dirt and gravel road that was merely flecked with gravel now as no one bothered to refresh it over the years, her heart beat faster and she had to control her urge to speed up which would only make her car's wheels dig up soil and gravel and make ruts in the driveway that would turn into holes in the rain. She let the car roll through the tunnel of greenery that led to her house and drew to a stop in front of it. She glanced at the little house, which seemed to perk up and smile at her through the climbing roses that arched over the front door on a trellis she had recently installed.

Now she could read it. She wiggled it out of her apron pocket, lifting her butt off of the car seat in order to get her hand deep enough to get at it, and unfolded it.

Her cell played "Under the Boardwalk", her mother's programmed song, the song of the Barefooters and Captain's Island, her childhood summer home.

Answer it? Read? It was close to five, so her mother would have already had her first drink. The first drink was okay, it was the one that made her mother cheerful, not maudlin or paranoid as the subsequent ones sometimes did.

She flipped open her phone. "Hi Mom!"

"How could you?" The voice on the other end was not the cheerful and still-sensible voice of one drink. It was sloppy and loose with lots of expensive wine, the kind her stepfather Ben kept in large supply for his beautiful and volatile younger shiksa wife. Ben's response to any criticism of his wife's drinking was, "She's an artist of life - she feels! What does it matter if she needs a drink or two?" He drank, too, but in moderation.

"How could you?" her mother repeated. "The first time I read the review, I thought, I must be going crazy. I'm imagining things." Keeley paused. "I just couldn't believe it. You know why? It's my daughter this stupid bitch is talking about, and my daughter would never do something like that to me. My daughter loves me. She wouldn't betray me like that."

"Mom, what? What are-"

"Be quiet! I don't want to hear it. You've done enough talking, enough spreading lies about me all over town. Do you know what? I can't go back to Fairfield now. My life is over. I might as well climb under my bed and just live there! How could you? How could you do this to me? I admit I made mistakes, but telling lies! You're a big liar!"

Hannah felt cold then, something shifted inside with a thud. "I did not lie about anything, what do you mean?"

Keeley made an impatient sound and took a loud slurping sip of her chardonnay. "I did not neglect you! I admit I went on a lot of dates, but you always had some kid from the neighborhood or one of the Barefooters watching you. You had more love in one day than most kids get in a year. And I did not ever ever in your life abandon you!"

Colder, shrinking sensation. How could she forget? "Oh, Mommy, but you did."

A gasp on the other end of the line. "I...oh! How dare you!" Another smaller gasp. "How dare you? You're..., horrible horrible! I, I, can't even talk to you! Apologies, now that's what I expected...but this! What? I, I can't even talk to you. How could my own daughter, who I gave up everything for, treat me this way?"

There was a click. Hannah looked at her phone and saw the call had been ended. Her mother had hung up on her.

She put down the phone slowly, feeling the old familiar ache in her heart, one she had felt for most of her life. It was the feeling of being consciously loved and unconsciously hated in equal measure by the one person in life who is supposed to only feel a total and encompassing love for you. A mother's love, that holier than holy love.

Hannah sat and stared at nothing, her eyes unfocused, feeling the pain throb in her chest. Minutes went by. A fly flew in through the open car window, waking Hannah from her stupor.

She opened the folded piece of newspaper in her lap and read.

It was a glowing review, speaking of Hannah's beautifully crafted prose and the perfect pacing of her story. Beth Hiller, the reviewer, called Hannah's Wait Another Day a "moving novel that offers deep insights into the dark side of the mother-daughter relationship".

That was bad, "dark side". Then she saw the last paragraph.

However talented a wordsmith, this reviewer calls into question how a child of twenty could write so astutely without plundering her own memory stores. It seems likely that the writer's rumored childhood as a neglected and often abandoned daughter of an alcoholic parent is still a sore point, one she is working out using the medium of fiction to seek resolution. That is the novel's ultimate weakness in the end as it never truly leaps into the realm of fiction. It would have been a better book, a great book, if Ms. O'Brien had been honest with herself and her readers and written it as a memoir.

"Oh, no," Hannah said, her voice low and gravelly with a new stabbing pain that clenched at her throat. "Oh, Mom."

Tears filling her eyes, she picked up her cell and dialed her mother's number. The phone rang twice and was picked up.

"Mom, I'm-"

Click. The connection was broken.

Hannah dialed again. Again, when the receiver was picked up, it was put back down as soon as Hannah started to speak. She tried two more times and then simply sat, the clipping in her lap, the phone in her hand, tears rolling and dripping on her shirt and into her mouth, feeling an exhaustion so deep she couldn't find the energy to weep aloud.

The late summer evening wound down around her, the locust ratcheting chatter giving over to the gentler chorus of crickets. Then darkness settled. Hannah stirred, climbed out of her car, and went into the house. Upstairs in the bedroom, she crawled on top of her still-made bed, and fell asleep in her uniform, curled up on her side with her phone still in her hand and the clipping on the bed next to her.

Two hours later her cell rang. It wasn't her mother's ring, but Daniel's – Al Green's "Here I Am (Come and Take Me)."

Hannah moaned and scrambled looking for it, running her hands over the bed's quilt, as it had fallen out of her hand in her sleep. She found its cool smooth shape.

"Hey," she said, her voice hoarse from sleep and tears, pulling herself up to a sitting position.

"Hey sweetheart! Did I wake you up? What time is it?" Daniel said, who never knew the time, was always turned around from his flight schedule as an airline pilot. A pilot! When Hannah had first started dating Daniel, she thought it was a romantic career. Now that she knew the truth of their crazy hours and stressful lifestyle, she wondered how anyone could see it as a fun or glamorous.

"It's," Hannah looked over at her bedside table. "Nine-eighteen. It's early. I'm, I... I had a really bad fight with my mom. I just had to lie down."

"Oh, no. What happened?"

Hannah sat up a little straighter. "You read my book, right?"

"Of course."

"Would you say it's a work of fiction, or a memoir?"

"Well, um..., no, it's a novel. You've told me some stuff about your childhood, and, yeah, a little could have ended up in it. But it's a novel. Why?"

"There was this book review in the Fairfield Tribune and the woman who wrote the review implied that it was a true story."

"Balls! What did it say?"

Hannah lay back on her bed, leaning against the pile of decorative pillows she hadn't removed earlier, "Oh, it was very flattering until the last paragraph. My head grew two sizes before being shrunk to the size of a peanut. She said that the book was obviously a memoir and it should have been one outright. The worst is really in one sentence; uh, let me find it." She reached over and turned on the bedside lamp and looked all over her bed before spying the folded clipping on the floor where it had fallen. Picking it up and unfolding it, she read, "'It seems likely that the writer's rumored childhood as a neglected and often abandoned daughter of an alcoholic parent is still a sore point, one she is working out using the medium of fiction to seek resolution'."

There was a pause at the other end of the line. "Whoa."

"That's what my mother said. And then some."

"Well, it's easy to understand why she's upset."

"Hey! Whose side are you on?" Tears started to prick at her eyes again. What was this? Couldn't she just stop crying?

"Yours, Hannah. Always yours," Daniel said. "No, I meant upset with that book critic. She should sue. You could sue."

Hannah put down the clipping and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. "But Mom's upset with me. Not the critic." She shook her head and said, "She won't even talk to me. She just keeps hanging up."

"Crazy mothers. She's probably freaking out..."

"What am I going to do?"

"She won't talk to you, huh? Wait; why not write her a letter?"

"Do you think she'll read it?"

Daniel laughed. "From you? Yes! She loves you. She's just upset, justifiably upset. She's not justified in blaming her daughter, but her being pissed off is totally normal. I'd be ballistic if someone questioned how we raised our children. When we raise them."

Hannah gasped, remembering. "Oh, honey. She did abandon me, though. I wasn't writing about her, but she did. I told you. The thing is, oh, it's amazing. It's crazy."

"What?"

The ache was back in Hannah's throat. "She doesn't remember."

AVAILABLE NOW IN STORES
About the Author

Tara McTiernan is the author of the novel, Barefoot Girls, as well as multiple short stories published as ebooks and in literary magazines including Eureka Literary Magazine and Ultimate Writer. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut and spent most of her childhood summers on an island in the Great South Bay on Long Island, New York - both of which are the settings for her novel and short stories. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, Ash. Visit the author's blog at http://taramctiernanfiction.blogspot.com/.

Also by Tara McTiernan:

Girl-Shaped Shadows - A Short Story

Eleven-year old Isobel and her guardian and aunt, Marmalee, do everything they can to avoid the sunlight – fearful of skin cancer and suntans – yet they find themselves unavoidably drawn to the beach near their home in Connecticut one sunny June day by the very people they abhor most: the Normals. The lure? The gorgeous Mrs. Johnson, her aunt's new love-interest. The problem? Isobel's nemesis and object of obsession: Mrs. Johnson's daughter Chloe.

Things take a surprising turn on this brilliant burning day by the sea when Chloe abandons her best friend, Hilary, for Isobel, her new best friend. Are things what they seem? Could Isobel's wildest fantasy be coming true? Or is some darker truth about to be revealed?

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