The Mystery of Hollow Places(3)

So he called the school while I dressed, a little dazed. It wasn’t normal, but I wasn’t about to turn down a day off. Maybe because it was the last school week before February break, and he’d caught the same bug us students had.

As it happened, Dad had a plan. We got on I-95 North and after forty-something miles of Bob Dylan and CCR on Boston’s oldies station we took the off-ramp toward Newbury. By that time I’d figured out where we were headed: Victory Island.

There are dozens and dozens of beachy day-trip towns in Massachusetts, and countless more along the East Coast, but Victory Island is ours. Brick-laid walking paths wind between candle shops, toy shops, cheese shops. Fish and Chips is scrawled on the chalkboard menus of every bar and restaurant. Then there’s the water. Cleaner than Revere and far less crowded than the Nantucket beaches, Victory Island Beach is sandy and sloping. The water is cold even in the haziest, hottest summer, and almost impossible to ease into. Ten feet from the shore and you’re up to your shoulders.

Dad parked in the sandy lot down the street. There wasn’t a parking attendant, and there wouldn’t be for months yet. Obviously we hadn’t bothered with swimsuits or towels—according to the little electric thermometer on the rearview mirror, it was hovering below fifty—so I didn’t have much baggage. Just my sunglasses and coat and a book I’d snatched from my nightstand, rushing so Dad wouldn’t change his mind. Dad rummaged in the trunk and came up with the ragged quilt he kept for roadside emergencies.

We crossed one of the boardwalks between dunes furred with beach grass and turned left down the rockier stretch of sand. Dad laid out the quilt and I huddled down on it in my jacket. It was a glassy, just-thawed kind of cold. Brisk wind stirred grit over the blanket, into our laps, and between my teeth when I talked. At least it was too early for the mosquitoes and greenhead flies that plagued the beach in summer. The water spread out in front of us, a flat bruise-blue. I snuck down to the wet sand and stuck a finger in the shallows and shrieked despite myself. The cold of it was like fire.

Back at the blanket, I crossed my arms over my growling stomach. It’s a long drive from Sugarbrook, and it was lunchtime already. “Did we bring any food or anything?” I asked, though one look around and you could see Dad hadn’t. Not even a Ziploc bag of Lucky Charms in his pocket, his usual breakfast.

“Oops, no. I guess it slipped my mind. We’ll grab something in town later, huh?”

While Dad sat with his arms around his knees, I hunkered down against the blanket and tried to read my book. Tried to reread it, actually. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, is one of my all-time beloved darling favorites. You know how there are precious books you hold like eggs or something, and you only read them in special places when you want to feel like a grown-up, and you wash your hands so you won’t blotch them with your terrible human fingers? Rebecca isn’t one of those. It’s stained with Pepsi and pen ink and makeup from rattling around the bottom of every backpack I’ve owned. The spine is cracked from me falling asleep on it. The fifth chapter has fallen out all apiece, so I use an alligator clip to keep it in the book when I’m not reading. My love is killing it. It’s so good that even people who look down their noses at genre stuff still call it a “modern classic.” But really it’s just an awesome mystery. It’s about a girl who goes to work in Monte Carlo and is wooed by Maximilian de Winter, a handsome, super-rich Englishman who marries her after two weeks (the thirties were a different time). They move to his giant mansion in Manderley, where the girl meets the housekeeper, who turns out to be horrible, a shrew who’s obsessed with Mr. de Winter’s dead wife, Rebecca. She convinces the girl that Rebecca was perfect, beautiful, that the husband will never love her the way he did his first wife. It’s all Rebecca, Rebecca, Rebecca. The housekeeper even convinces the girl she should just give up and jump out a window, and then—

“Good book?” Dad interrupted.

Irritated, I refused to take my eyes off the page. “It’s not No Shirt, No Pulse, No Problem.”

“You know you’re not supposed to read my stuff. All those corpses, they’ll give you nightmares.”

I could’ve reminded him of my long-retired bedtime story, but instead I huffed, “I’m seventeen. Not seven.”

He sighed. “So you are. Sometimes, Immy, I wish I could go back. Be your age again.”

“Cool. You can go to high school tomorrow, and I’ll sit around in my underwear and write all day.”

Dad laughed dryly. “Someday you’ll appreciate it. You’ll look back and remember when all these doors were open to you. You just wait and see. You get older, and you make your choices, and one by one the doors shut.”

I closed Rebecca. Dad didn’t usually talk this way. I rolled away on my side, awkward, and cramped from reading on my stomach, and annoyed. I couldn’t see what was so great about being my age anyway. I spent every morning in the bathroom cataloguing what I didn’t like about myself, I had crushes on boys who had no use for me, and I had friends I wasn’t even sure I liked half the time. “Why did you really let me skip today?”

I felt him stand, sand shifting beneath the blanket to fill the empty space he’d left behind. “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes I just . . . wish we had more time.”

I craned my neck over my shoulder to watch him walk down the beach, his sneakers crunching shells and seaweed strands, his head down against the wind.