“Hang tight,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
The water was alive, tugging on me, but Henry held tight to that wall-mounted oar hook, and I held tight to Henry. A wave came over our heads, but we didn’t let go. I should’ve known. Rupert didn’t make anything flimsy, and that included sons.
When I was able to get a gulp of air, I looked toward the ruin of the seaward doors.
And there he was, gnashing, barnacle teeth and all.
He was even uglier than I’d imagined him, with bulb kelp for hair and the flesh of his face half eaten away by crustaceans, which were crawling in and out of the holes they’d created. Things scuttled through his black eyes, doing their black business.
The phrase better with animals than with people ran through my mind.
The worst part was the sheer scale of him. His face alone took up the entire breadth of the garage, and his nose was bulbous and as long as an SUV.
I spat seawater out of my mouth and tried to get a breath. It was no use screaming now.
Joyce was flailing, grabbing for anything. There was terror in her eyes. Whether she saw what was behind her, I don’t know.
But I do know what happened next: The troll reached a gelatinous hand inside, grabbed her, brought her up to his barnacle teeth, and crunched her neatly in half.
She didn’t make a sound but flopped like a doll in his mouth.
I would’ve thought, after all he’d been through, he would’ve wanted her to suffer more, to take her apart one piece at a time. But no. With one clean snap, he was done.
Then those black eyes fastened on me.
I held tighter to Henry.
Stay. Good girl, he growled. And, with pieces of Joyce still in his mouth, he inched his way back out of the wreckage of the seaward doors.
As the salty water washed over us again and again, slightly lower each time, I finally understood.
The troll had never been coming for me. He had merely been issuing a command, the way he did to all animals and people when he was alive.
His prey was someone else entirely. Someone who wasn’t content to be a dog trainer’s wife or a nanny or even an assistant. She wanted signs on buildings that read THE RUPERT AND JOYCE SHEPHERD FOUNDATION. And she went about it the only way she knew how: manipulating other people. And when that didn’t work, she resorted to strangulation. Anything to get her way.
All over with one quick snap.
As I clung there to Henry, something amazing happened.
I was wrapped around him so close I could feel the beat of his heart. I felt a soft tap, and then a lotus-shaped light lifted up from Henry’s heart, hung in the air for a second, and floated out to the bay.
Henry didn’t seem to notice it, but I did.
I listened closer to his heart. It was still beating solidly. Pa-pum. Pa-pum. So death hadn’t come for him, but something else had.
I looked at his expression. All the intensity seemed to have gone out of him. It was as though he’d let go of whatever drove him to pound Joyce before the seaward doors gave way.
And I wondered if it was at that exact moment that he chose to forgive himself.
When the water reached our waists, Henry tentatively let go of the wall hook and lowered me to the floor. “You okay?” he said.
I nodded. My face smarted from where an oar had hit me, and blood trickled down my arm from where Joyce had got off a wild shot with her gun.
But I was in one piece.
“You?”
He didn’t say anything but sloshed to the Lexus. “Sammy? Mere?”
No response.
“Everyone okay over there?” I called.
Silence.
“Sammy! Meredith!”
We heaved ourselves through the salt water, which was still up to our knees, to the other side of the Lexus. Meredith was on her hands and knees, feeling around for something. Sammy was crouched and looking, too. They were acting as though Meredith had lost an earring.
And then I saw Sammy’s right hand, which was a gory mess. In his left hand he was clutching something about the size of a breakfast sausage. “Hey, Pix, could you get a flashlight? We need help finding my other fingers.”
EPILOGUE
For the last time, it is not ‘awesome,’” Mom says, waving a carving fork at Sammy. If she’s not careful, she’ll slice off his middle finger, so carefully sewn on, one of the few he has left. His trigger finger was found too late on the beach and sits in a jar of formaldehyde on a bookshelf in the bunk room. His ring finger is gone, although a bone from the tip was found a month later in an owl pellet.
“You think you’ve done everything you can to get your kids to adulthood whole,” she says, and in that moment, my tough mother looks like she needs more than just comfort. She looks like she could use one heaping bowl of religion. Which she would never do, because around here (according to her) religion comes with potlucks and heaps of judgment—especially for single mothers.