Here at the bay, safe with us, Grant can still be excited by things. “Can I see? Can I see?” he asks Sammy now. We are in the middle of the dike path, halfway between our house and his.
“Sure, spud,” Sammy says, and unwinds the layers and layers of packing around his right hand. Even after two and a half months, his hand looks like something out of Frankenstein. His stumps are red and uneven. His middle finger sticks up, but the skin around the base is raised and jagged.
“Does it hurt?” Grant asks.
Sammy allows him to feel the edges of his scars and gives him a grown-up answer: “You get used to the pain.”
Grant reaches out with his whole little-boy fingers and traces the outlines of what’s left of Sammy’s hand. I can almost hear him thinking: Where does it hurt when someone cuts away your mother?
Henry isn’t far behind his little brother.
I want to say I don’t get the same lurch of sensation I used to get seeing those auburn curls coming at me over the beach grass, but I do. And the lopsided grin that’s finally directed at me: I hoard it like found treasure. “Well, look who’s here. If it isn’t the shortest Gray. She’s my favorite,” he says, and he kisses me on the lips. These days his kisses don’t feel like desperation. They feel like they should—a day at the beach, grass waving, and the promise of volleyball and good food and the only worry being whether Mom burned the panini.
I wonder if his kisses will always be beach kisses.
He takes my hand in his and clutches me a little too hard. After the incident in the garage, sometimes we are both afraid that the other will be washed away.
He also has a bad hand. But, unlike Sammy’s, his will get better. He doesn’t have to keep his scars in a jar on the bookshelf. In fact, the one that was so bad, the one on the valley between his thumb and trigger finger that he kept picking at? It’s smooth now. We’ve decided it’s been downgraded, like Pluto, to dwarf-planet status.
He squats and whistles. “Hey, Calamity Jane,” he says softly to my puppy, and waits for her to come to him. Calamity is afraid of tall men, so she lives in constant fear of my brothers, but not of Grant, and she tolerates Henry as long as he doesn’t talk too loud and bends low. I don’t know how I’m going to train her to do anything.
She creeps out from behind my legs and tentatively allows herself to be petted by the one boy in my life who doesn’t think mortal injury is a competition.
Today is supposed to be a special day in the Shepherd family. It’s the groundbreaking of “the Herons.” The damage to the garage was so extensive that Mr. Shepherd tore it down and is building a new one. And while he was at it, he tore down the Breakers, too. No one wanted to sleep in a place where Lyudmila had been strangled.
This new guest cottage is just for Ellen, Henry and Meredith’s mother. Instead of calling it Ellen’s cottage, she’s decided to call it the Herons.
Ellen gets everything she wants. I’ve met her a handful of times, and I like her. She’s got a shy expression that hides how she’s quickly sizing someone up, and you can see how she and Mr. Shepherd once fell in love. After her experience and long absence, she’s tentative around her kids, afraid they could be taken away from her again at any moment. She starts every conversation haltingly, as though thinking, “Is this how parents talk to their teenagers these days?” But all that matters is that Henry knows that she loves him so much he never even needed to be forgiven.
After the extent of Joyce’s influence was exposed and Henry told everyone that he had lied about at whose hands he had suffered the abuse, Mr. Shepherd did everything he could to make reparations to his ex-wife. Luckily, Ellen isn’t the litigious type. She just wants to be around her children as much as possible, tentatively or not. Since she’s a caterer, she tries to smooth things over by making them goose liver paté and duck confit.
Hannah tells her to ease off—snickerdoodles work just fine.
It was Ellen’s idea to call the new cottage the Herons after the birds in the lagoon. She thought it was appropriate because she loves the slow-motion way they walk on the sand searching for fish, so slow you’d think they won’t get anything, then, after what seems a lifetime, they do.
Henry and I make our way to the end of the trail, Grant following behind carrying Calamity and swinging her around. Calamity tolerates this. Barely. My brothers are setting up the volleyball net. Ellen is on the beach, applying sunscreen to Meredith’s back. Meredith’s too old to be treated like a child of three, but she seems to be enjoying it. They’re both eager to make up for lost time—that touch of skin on skin, the reassurance of someone physically loving you without demand or reservation. I see Sammy watching them, a smile on his face.