Duma Key(205)

Might as well go, the shells said as I stood in the moonlight, now less than twenty yards from my house. Wipe the blackboard clean it can be done, no one knows it better than you and just sail away. Leave this sadness behind. If you want to play you gotta pay. And the best part?

"The best part is I don't have to go alone," I said.

The wind gusted. The shells murmured. And from the blackness under the house, where that bony bed lay six feet deep, a darker shadow slipped free and stepped into the moonlight. It stood bent over for a moment, as if considering, and then began to come toward me.

She began to come toward me. But not Perse; Perse had been drowned to sleep.

Ilse.

v

She didn't walk; I didn't expect her to walk. She shambled. It was a miracle a black one that she could move at all.

After that last phone call with Pam (you couldn't call it a conversation, exactly), I'd gone out Big Pink's back door and snapped the handle off the broom I used to sweep sand from the walk leading to the mailbox. Then I'd gone around to the beach, down to where the sand was wet and shining. I hadn't remembered what came after that, because I didn't want to. Obviously. Only now I did, now I had to, because now my handiwork was standing in front of me. It was Ilse, yet not Ilse. Her face was there, then it blurred and it wasn't. Her form was there, then it slipped toward shapelessness before firming up again. Little pieces of dead sea oats and bits of shell dropped from her cheeks and chest and hips and legs as she moved. The moonlight picked out an eye that was heartbreakingly clear, heartbreakingly hers, and then it was gone, only to reappear again, shining in the moonlight.

The Ilse shambling toward me was made of sand.

"Daddy," she said. Her voice was dry, with a grating undertone as if there were shells caught in there somewhere. I supposed there were.

You will want to, but you mustn't, Elizabeth had said... but sometimes we can't help ourselves.

The sand- girl held out her arm. The wind gusted and the fingers at the end of the hand blurred as fine grains blew off them and thinned them to bones. More sand skirled up from around her and the hand fattened again. Her features shifted like a landscape under rapidly passing summer clouds. It was fascinating... hypnotic.

"Give me the flashlight," she said. "Then we'll go on board together. On the ship I can be the way you remember me. Or... you don't have to remember anything."

The waves were on the march. Under the stars they roared in, one after the other. Under the moon. Under Big Pink, the shells spoke loudly: my voice, arguing with itself. Bring the buddy. I win. Sit in the chum. You win. Here in front of me stood Ilse made of sand, a shifting houri by the light of a three-quarter moon, her features never the same from one second to the next. Now she was Illy at nine; now she was Illy at fifteen, headed out on her first real date; now she was Illy as she'd looked getting off the plane in December, Illy the college girl with an engagement ring on her finger. Here stood the one I'd always loved the best wasn't that why Perse had killed her? with her hand held out for the flashlight. The flashlight was my boarding pass for a long cruise on forgetful seas. Of course that part might be a lie... but sometimes we have to take a chance. And usually we do. As Wireman says, we fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.

"Mary brought salt with her," I said. "Bags and bags of salt. She put it in the tub. The police want to know why. But they'd never believe the truth, would they?"

She stood before me with the thundering, incoming waves behind her. She stood there blowing away and re-forming from the sand beneath her, around her. She stood there and said nothing, only holding her arm outstretched to take what she had come for.

"Drawing you in the sand wasn't enough. Even Mary drowning you wasn't enough. She had to drown you in salt water." I glanced down at the flashlight. "Perse told her just what to do. From my picture."

"Give it to me, Daddy," the shifting sand-girl said. Her hand was still held out. Only with the wind blowing, sometimes it was a claw. Even with sand feeding up from the beach to keep it plump, sometimes it was a claw. "Give it to me and we can go."

I sighed. Some things were inevitable, after all. "All right." I took a step toward her. Another of Wireman's sayings occurred to me: In the end we wear out our worries. "All right, Miss Cookie. But it'll cost you."

"Cost me what?" Her voice was the sound of sand against a window. The grating sound of the shells. But it was also Ilse's voice. My If-So-Girl.

"Just a kiss," I said, "while I'm still alive to feel it." I smiled. I couldn't feel my lips they were numb but I could feel the muscles around them stretching. Just a little. "I suppose it will be a sandy one, but I'll pretend you've been playing on the beach. Making castles."

"All right, Daddy."

She came closer, moving in a queer shamble-drift that wasn't walking, and up close the illusion collapsed entirely. It was like bringing a painting close to your eyes and watching as the scene portrait, landscape, still life collapses into nothing but strokes of color, most with the marks of the brush still embedded in them. Ilse's features disappeared. What I saw where they had been was nothing but a furious cyclone of sand and tiny bits of shell. What I smelled wasn't skin and hair but only salt water.

Pallid arms reached for me. Membranes of sand smoked off them in the wind. The moon shone through them. I held up the flashlight. It was short. And its barrel was plastic rather than stainless steel.