On the beach, she sometimes saw volunteers from Turtle Watch, and soon came to hail them by name. They would give her a "Yo, Em!" in return as she ran past. There was rarely anyone else, although once a helicopter buzzed her. The passenger-a young man-leaned out and waved. Em waved back, her face safely masked by the shadow of her FSU 'Noles cap.
She shopped at the Publix five miles north on U.S. 41. Often on her ride home, she would stop at Bobby Trickett's Used Books, which was far bigger than her dad's little retreat but still your basic conch shack. There she bought old paperback mysteries by Raymond Chandler and Ed McBain, their pages dark brown at the edges and yellow inside, their smell sweet and as nostalgic as the old Ford woody station wagon she sighted one day tooling down 41 with two lawn chairs strapped to the roof and a beat-to-shit surfboard sticking out the back. There was no need to buy any John D. MacDonalds; her father had the whole set packed into his orange-crate bookcases.
By the end of July she was running six and sometimes seven miles a day, her boobs no more than nubs, her butt mostly nonexistent, and she had lined two of her dad's empty shelves with books that had titles like Dead City and Six Bad Things. The TV never went on at night, not even for the weather. Her father's old PC stayed dark. She never bought a newspaper.
Her father called her every second day, but stopped asking if she wanted him to "yank free" and come on down after she told him that when she was ready to see him, she'd tell him so. In the meantime, she said, she wasn't suicidal (true), not even depressed (not true), and she was eating. That was good enough for Rusty. They had always been straight up with each other. She also knew that summer was a busy time for him-everything that couldn't be done when kids were crawling all over the campus (which he always called the plant) had to be done between June 15 and September 15, when there was nobody around but summer students and whatever academic conferences the administration could pull in.
Also, he had a lady friend. Melody, her name was. Em didn't like to go there-it made her feel funny-but she knew Melody made her dad happy, so she always asked after her. Fine, her dad invariably replied. Mel's as dandy as a peach.
Once she called Henry, and once Henry called her. The night he called her, Em was pretty sure he was drunk. He asked her again if they were over, and she told him again that she didn't know, but that was a lie. Probably a lie.
Nights, she slept like a woman in a coma. At first she had bad dreams-reliving the morning they had found Amy dead over and over again. In some of the dreams, her baby had turned as black as a rotten strawberry. In others-these were worse-she found Amy struggling for breath and saved her by administering mouth-to-mouth. They were worse because she woke to the realization that Amy was actually the same old dead. She came from one of these latter dreams during a thunderstorm and slid naked from the bed to the floor, crying with her elbows propped on her knees and her palms pushing her cheeks up in a smile while lightning flashed over the Gulf and made momentary blue patterns on the wall.
As she extended herself-exploring those fabled limits of endurance-the dreams either ceased or played themselves out far below the eye of her memory. She began to awaken feeling not so much refreshed as unwound all the way to the core of herself. And although each day was essentially the same as the day before, each began to seem like a new thing-its own thing-instead of an extension of the old thing. One day she woke realizing that Amy's death had begun to be something that had happened instead of something that was happening.
She decided she would ask her father to come down-and bring Melody if he wanted to. She would give them a nice dinner. They could stay over (what the hell, it was his house). And then she'd start thinking about what she wanted to do with her real life, the one she would soon resume on the other side of the drawbridge: what she wanted to keep and what she wanted to cast away.
She would make that call soon, she thought. In a week. Two, at the most. It wasn't quite time yet, but almost. Almost.
4. Not a very nice man.
One afternoon not long after July became August, Deke Hollis told her she had company on the island. He called it the island, never the key.
Deke was a weathered fifty, or maybe seventy. He was tall and rangy and wore a battered old straw hat that looked like an inverted soup bowl. From seven in the morning until seven at night, he ran the drawbridge between Vermillion and the mainland. This was Monday to Friday. On weekends, "the kid" took over (said kid being about thirty). Some days when Em ran up to the drawbridge and saw the kid instead of Deke in the old cane chair outside the gatehouse, reading Maxim or Popular Mechanics rather than The New York Times, she was startled to realize that Saturday had come around again.
This afternoon, though, it was Deke. The channel between Vermillion and the mainland-which Deke called the thrut (throat, she assumed)-was deserted and dark under a dark sky. A heron stood on the drawbridge's Gulf-side rail, either meditating or looking for fish.