“Nobody,” she said.
Loo went into the bathroom and shut the door. She didn’t know why she was angry. The game had started full of possibility, but in the end it was as if she were surrounded by empty spaces, taking step after step to nowhere. She brushed her teeth and looked at her mother’s things. She spit and leaned closer to a photo strip of her parents taped to the left of the sink, next to the mirror. They were pressed close together in some roadside carnival booth—four pictures snapped in sequence, her mother making faces, her father edging out of the frame. They looked like they were sharing a wonderful secret that Loo would never know.
When she came out of the bathroom the TV was off and the game had been folded up and put away. Hawley had fixed her bed and turned down the covers, as he always did, no matter where they were sleeping, even if it was in the back of the truck. Loo got under the blankets and he tucked her in.
“I know where we’re going next,” he said.
“Where?” Loo asked.
“Someplace you won’t have to play alone.”
“But I like being alone.”
“I know,” said Hawley. “But you shouldn’t.”
—
THE FOLLOWING JUNE they arrived in Olympus, Massachusetts. Hawley told her it was her mother’s hometown. Lily had grown up in the ice-cold Atlantic waters, and Loo should have the same experience, ride the waves and hike to the lighthouse, canoe down the Megara River and sail from the Point to Tire Island. A normal life, Hawley said. With a real house and a neighborhood and friends her own age and a school where she could find a place to belong.
They checked into a motel right on the water and went to the beach. Loo made a giant sandcastle, poking windows in the towers with her finger and dripping wet sand to seal the cracks, while Hawley built a wall to hold back the rising tide and then dug a moat so deep that the ocean seeped up and filled the channel. They used mussel shells for the doors and draped seaweed over the ramparts. Then they ate hot dogs and watched the sun go down and when it started to get cold they pretended they were monsters and smashed the castle to pieces, roaring and stomping and crushing the kings and queens and villagers beneath their feet.
The next morning Hawley drove Loo over to meet Mabel Ridge. She was Loo’s mother’s mother, which meant that she was Loo’s grandmother. Hawley was nervous and wore his best shirt. He even made Loo put on a dress and brush her hair, something she rarely did. It had taken nearly an hour to get all the snarls out. The ones she couldn’t she cut with scissors, until her hair was chopped and uneven, like an animal had chewed one side.
Mabel’s house was near a five-mile stretch of hard rocky woodland called Dogtown, set between Olympus, Gloucester and Rockport. Hawley told Loo that no one lived in Dogtown anymore, but three hundred years ago it had housed Puritan farmers and then fishing widows, freed slaves, outcasts and packs of abandoned, feral dogs that gave the place its name. Now the land was mostly a bird sanctuary, held in trust and crisscrossed with hiking trails, but the dug-out cellars of the old stone houses were still there and drifters still passed through and people still occasionally got stabbed or robbed in the woods.
“So you shouldn’t go in there,” Hawley said. “I want you to promise.”
Loo promised. “How do you know all this?”
“Your mother.” Hawley pulled the truck over and parked in front of a run-down house, with slanted stairs and peeling paint and a rusted Pontiac in the driveway.
“Is this where she grew up?”
Hawley nodded and Loo pressed her face against the window. There was an old brass knocker on the door in the shape of a pineapple.
“Your grandmother and I need to talk about some things,” said Hawley. “So I want you to stay in the car for now.”
“I want to go inside.”
“You will,” said Hawley. “But we need to be invited first.”
Her father got out of the truck and shuffled up the porch steps. He carefully lifted the brass pineapple hanging on the door and let it drop. The knocker seemed familiar to Loo, like something out of a half-remembered dream—the crown of leaves spread out like a flower, the golden color gleaming in the sun.
An older woman opened the door, wearing goggles and wiping her hands on the front of her shirt. She did not seem like the grandmothers from Loo’s storybooks. She looked like the kind of woman who could field-dress a deer.
Hawley said a few words. Mabel Ridge said a few words back. Her hand went to the doorknob, but Hawley said something else and it stopped her. She bent and peered around him. The girl and the woman locked eyes for a moment. Then Loo touched her chewed-up hair, and Mabel Ridge slammed the door. When Hawley got back to the truck he punched the dashboard and broke the radio. Loo was too afraid to ask what had happened and they rode back to the motel in silence, Hawley’s knuckles bleeding into the cuffs of his shirt.
Back in their room, Loo took off her dress and put her jeans back on and Hawley pulled his bloody shirt over his head and threw it in the corner. They went down to the boardwalk and got some ice cream and sat on the beach in the same spot where they’d knocked down their castle the day before. The tide had washed over everything but there were bits and pieces of shells left behind and the moat was still full of water.
“Do you like this place?” her father asked.
“Sure,” said Loo.
“Because we can leave if you want.”
“We just got here.”
“I know.”
Loo watched her father’s torn knuckles bend and bleed as he licked his cone. She took another bite of ice cream, and let the chocolate melt on her tongue.
“Let’s stay,” she said. “Screw that old bag.”
“You shouldn’t say that,” Hawley said, laughing. “Your mother wouldn’t approve.”
The next morning they started looking for a place to live, and instead of signing a short-term lease, her father used cash from a safe-deposit box in Boston to buy the old Henderson place by the water. The property circled out to the edge of the bay and covered five acres. It was the first time they had lived in a house with stairs. Loo’s bedroom was on the second floor, and had two windows and a small roof outside that she could climb out onto. Her father’s room was at the end of the hall. At first she had trouble falling asleep with all that quiet, tucked into her new bed, the bearskin pulled across her shoulders. The only thing that helped was listening to Hawley walking around the house at night. A sliver of light cut through the room as he checked on her. She closed her eyes. She tried to look peaceful.
“Faker,” her father said.