Useless Bay(41)

Joyce was flailing, grabbing for anything. There was terror in her eyes. Whether she saw what was behind her, I don’t know.

But I do know what happened next: The troll reached a gelatinous hand inside, grabbed her, brought her up to his barnacle teeth, and crunched her neatly in half.

She didn’t make a sound but flopped like a doll in his mouth.

I would’ve thought, after all he’d been through, he would’ve wanted her to suffer more, to take her apart one piece at a time. But no. With one clean snap, he was done.

Then those black eyes fastened on me.

I held tighter to Henry.

Stay. Good girl, he growled. And, with pieces of Joyce still in his mouth, he inched his way back out of the wreckage of the seaward doors.

As the salty water washed over us again and again, slightly lower each time, I finally understood.

The troll had never been coming for me. He had merely been issuing a command, the way he did to all animals and people when he was alive.

His prey was someone else entirely. Someone who wasn’t content to be a dog trainer’s wife or a nanny or even an assistant. She wanted signs on buildings that read THE RUPERT AND JOYCE SHEPHERD FOUNDATION. And she went about it the only way she knew how: manipulating other people. And when that didn’t work, she resorted to strangulation. Anything to get her way.

All over with one quick snap.

As I clung there to Henry, something amazing happened.

I was wrapped around him so close I could feel the beat of his heart. I felt a soft tap, and then a lotus-shaped light lifted up from Henry’s heart, hung in the air for a second, and floated out to the bay.

Henry didn’t seem to notice it, but I did.

I listened closer to his heart. It was still beating solidly. Pa-pum. Pa-pum. So death hadn’t come for him, but something else had.

I looked at his expression. All the intensity seemed to have gone out of him. It was as though he’d let go of whatever drove him to pound Joyce before the seaward doors gave way.

And I wondered if it was at that exact moment that he chose to forgive himself.

When the water reached our waists, Henry tentatively let go of the wall hook and lowered me to the floor. “You okay?” he said.

I nodded. My face smarted from where an oar had hit me, and blood trickled down my arm from where Joyce had got off a wild shot with her gun.

But I was in one piece.

“You?”

He didn’t say anything but sloshed to the Lexus. “Sammy? Mere?”

No response.

“Everyone okay over there?” I called.

Silence.

“Sammy! Meredith!”

We heaved ourselves through the salt water, which was still up to our knees, to the other side of the Lexus. Meredith was on her hands and knees, feeling around for something. Sammy was crouched and looking, too. They were acting as though Meredith had lost an earring.

And then I saw Sammy’s right hand, which was a gory mess. In his left hand he was clutching something about the size of a breakfast sausage. “Hey, Pix, could you get a flashlight? We need help finding my other fingers.”





EPILOGUE


For the last time, it is not ‘awesome,’” Mom says, waving a carving fork at Sammy. If she’s not careful, she’ll slice off his middle finger, so carefully sewn on, one of the few he has left. His trigger finger was found too late on the beach and sits in a jar of formaldehyde on a bookshelf in the bunk room. His ring finger is gone, although a bone from the tip was found a month later in an owl pellet.

“You think you’ve done everything you can to get your kids to adulthood whole,” she says, and in that moment, my tough mother looks like she needs more than just comfort. She looks like she could use one heaping bowl of religion. Which she would never do, because around here (according to her) religion comes with potlucks and heaps of judgment—especially for single mothers.

She wipes something from her eye and goes off to assemble more panini.

Ellen and Hannah don’t trust her to make the bread, but she wanted to do something for us kids during our last weekend of summer, so they let her assemble the sandwiches.

I don’t know how my brothers feel about the “adulthood whole” comment, but I want to go easy on Mom for a while. I keep forgetting there are five of us and one of her. Most of the time she acts as though she can take it, but there has to be a price. I know we have a reputation for being tough, but do we have to be so tough? All those visits to the ER, all those resuscitations, broken bones, missing fingers. She’s never asked for help with us. She’s never asked for backup or a day off. She’s a foot shorter than we are but mightier than us all.

At my feet there is an aroo! I’ve stepped on Calamity’s ear again.

I spent most of the media frenzy that followed Joyce’s death and Grant’s homecoming from Hannah’s wai po’s farm by Henry’s side, holding his hand. The media didn’t seem particularly interested in what I had to say. I was just window dressing. The only thing I was asked about was when I was getting another dog to replace the one Joyce slaughtered.

I said not anytime soon, that it had been too hard burying the last one. Then the search-and-rescue people heard my story. The bloodhound people heard my story.

Suddenly everyone knew a guy who had a litter. Everyone wanted to help. They wanted me to have the best bloodhound in the state.