“Um. I don’t know. It was a nice day?”
My first half truth. Wednesday was sunny but cold, capped by a brilliant blue sky that never lived up to its promise. That morning I crawled from bed, prepared as always to spend half an hour bullying my straight, dark hair into almost-waves; to make a desperate swipe at eye makeup only to rub it all off self-consciously; to shun whatever outfit had seemed cool the night before and rummage hopelessly through my closet; to sprint out the door with a granola bar between my teeth and homework and car keys trailing behind me; to sputter into Sugarbrook High’s senior parking lot in my unreliable little Civic with three minutes to spare. Except before all of that, Dad headed me off at the pass. When I slumped out into the hall on my way to the bathroom, he was waiting.
“How are you feeling today, Immy?” he asked.
I blinked. While Lindy was usually out the door for work by the time I’d punched the snooze button, it was rare to find Dad awake before I left for school. Stranger still, he was dressed, with his glasses on, furrows from the comb’s teeth still fresh in his smoothed-back hair. His eyes, very dark and shaped like Ma Ma Scott’s, like mine, were bright and alert.
“Hummuh?” I groaned.
“I’m just checking, because you don’t look well.”
“Grur,” I wheezed.
“What I’m saying is, if you weren’t feeling up to school, I’d sympathize. I don’t want you going in sick.”
“Are you . . . saying I don’t have to go to school?”
Dad shrugged and stared out the window, where the sky was flushing pink in the east. “It’s supposed to be a great day. The first nice day in months. I was just thinking it’d be a shame to waste it. Unless you’ve got a test or something?”
I shook my head. Dad had never made an offer like this. He was a big one for education. I knew he’d worked through four years of premed, four years of med school, four years of clinical training and residency, and all this before I was born. I don’t even remember his long days in the lab at Good Shepherd, before he gave it up. Staying home sick was hard enough—even if he was out of practice, he could still sniff out a fake flu in the time it took me to blow my nose. And staying home just because? Unheard of.
I asked, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Always. I just, you know, I thought we could spend some time together. Catch up.”
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.