The Last House Guest(12)

I’d known every facet of this place, lived a life in each different quarter. Had believed at one time, wholeheartedly, in its magic.

I stopped running when I hit the sandy strip of Breaker Beach. Hands on knees, catching my breath, sneakers sinking into the sand. Later in the day, the tourists would gather here, soaking up the sun. Kids building sandcastles or running from the tide—the water was too cold, even in the heat of summer.

But for now, I was the only one here.

The sand was damp from the storm last night, and I could see one other set of footprints crossing the beach, ending here, just before the parking lot. I walked across the sand, toward the edge of the cliffs and the rocky steps built in to the side of the bluffs. Here, the footsteps stopped abruptly, as if someone had headed down this path in the other direction, leaving from the house.

I stopped, hand on the cold rocks, a chill rising. Looking at the dunes behind me and imagining someone else there. These prints were recent, not yet washed away by the encroaching tide. That feeling, once more, that I was not alone here.

The power outage last night, the noises in the dark, the footprints this morning.

I shook it off—I always did this, went three steps too far, trying to map things forward and back, so I could see something coming this time. A habit from a time when I could trust only myself and the things I knew to be true.

It was probably Parker out for a run earlier. The call about the second break-in shaking me. The unsteady dream of the sea lingering—the memory of my mother’s words in my ear as she worked, telling me to look again, to tell her what I saw, even though it always looked exactly the same to me.

It was this place and everything that had happened here—always making me look for something that didn’t exist.

This was where Sadie had been found. A call to the police around 10:45 p.m. from a man walking his dog that night. A local who knew the shape of the place. Who saw something in the shadows, a shimmer of blue in the moonlight.

Her leg, caught on the rocks at low tide. The ocean forgetting her in its retreat.





CHAPTER 4


Bay Street meant trying hard without looking like you were trying at all. I pieced through my closet, a collection of my own items and Sadie’s hand-me-downs, imagining Sadie taking out an outfit at random, holding it up to my shoulders, the feel of her fingers at my collarbone as she twisted me back and forth, deciding.

At the end of each season, she’d leave me some dresses, or shirts, or bags. Everything thrown on my bed in a heap. Most of it wound up being either too tight or too short, which she declared perfect but also kept me from truly blending in to her circle. Their world was old money that said you didn’t have to show it to prove it. The clothes didn’t matter; it was the details, the way you carried it, and I could never get it just right.

Even when she dressed like me, she commanded attention.



* * *




THE WEEKEND AFTER SHE’D found me hiding out in her bathroom, she remembered me. A bonfire and a couple of cars hidden behind the dunes of Breaker Beach at night, the rest of us arriving on foot. Boat coolers repurposed for cheap beer. Matches taken to a pile of rotting driftwood.

It was the silence that made me turn around and see her. A presence I could feel rather than hear. “Hi there,” she said, like she’d been waiting for me to notice her. There was a group of us gathered around the fire, but she was speaking just to me. She was shorter than I remembered, or maybe it was because she was barefoot. Her flip-flops hung from her left hand; she wore loose jean shorts fraying at the hem, a hooded sweatshirt zipped up against the night chill. “No tetanus, I see? Or sepsis? Man, I’m good.”

I held up my hand to her. “Apparently, I’ll live.”

She smiled her face-splitting smile, all straight white teeth shining in the moonlight. The light from the flames moved like shadows over her face. “Sadie Loman,” she said, holding out her hand.

I half laughed. “I know. I’m Avery.”

She looked around, lowered her voice. “I saw the smoke from my backyard and got curious. I’m never invited to these things.”

“You’re really not missing anything,” I said, but that was kind of a lie. These nights on the beach were a freedom for us. A way to claim something. I’d shown up out of habit but immediately regretted it. Everyone was celebrating—graduation, a new life—and for the first time, I had started to wonder what I was doing here. What had brought me here and now what was keeping me here. Beyond the boundaries of this town, there was a directionless, limitless wild, but anywhere might as well have been nowhere to someone like me.

My dad had grown up in Littleport—after attending a local college, he’d come back with his teaching degree, as he’d always known he would. My mother had found herself here by accident. She’d driven through on her way up the coast, the backseat of her secondhand car stuffed full of luggage and supplies, everything she owned in the world.

She said there was something about this place that had stopped her. That she was drawn in by something she couldn’t let go, something she was chasing. Something I later saw in draft after draft in her studio, hidden away in stacks. I could see it in her face as she was working, shifting her angle, her perspective, and looking again. Like there was some intangible element she couldn’t quite grasp.

The beauty of her finished pieces was that you could see not only the image but her intention. This feeling that something was missing, and it pulled you closer, thinking you might be the one to uncover it.