To Betsy—

  Contents

  Chapter 1: A House full of Strangers

  Chapter 2: He Could see Himself Floating

  Chapter 3: You Can’t Always Get What you Want

  Chapter 4: One of These very Yellow Guys

  Chapter 5: A Perfect Day for Flying

  Chapter 6: Ain’t Nobody’s Business

  Chapter 7: A Common Shell, and Broken

  Chapter 8: And Margaret

  Chapter 9: The Center Cannot Hold

  Chapter 10: One Real Thing, not Magic

  Chapter 11: Where The sad Music Played

  Chapter 12: And the Angel Came

  You can’t always get what you want

  But if you try sometimes,

  You just might find

  You get what you need.

  —The Rolling Stones

  The girl had no memory no real memory The girl had no real memory of how she came to this place. It was a dream

  Except for the dream which was so real it felt like a memory

  The dream of having a family once and losing them.

  The girl had no real memory of how she came to this place, except for the dream which felt so real it might have been a memory. The dream of having a family once and losing them. Had there been a shipwreck? Is that how she and her family came to be came to be washed ashore and separated?

  What did it matter if it was real or a dream? The fact is that the girl had lived all her life all the life she could remember on this island where no one lived where no one else lived that she knew of except for the beast who kept her captive

  and the and the

  doll?

  and the enchanted doll.

  a house full of strangers

  The bitter taste of lead brought her to her senses. How long had she been sitting there, lost in thought? She lowered the pencil, tucked it into the small notebook on her lap, and in its place drew in an oily strand of hair, which she sucked and nibbled like a hungry little mouse.

  It was the first day. Miraculously, they had allowed her to go out by herself, and she had almost at once found this safe place, this spot at the top of the stairs where she could sit and watch the others on the beach. It was early yet, and a weekday, so the beach was nearly empty.

  She was glad for that. It made it easier to believe she was invisible when there were fewer eyes to see her. What would they have seen, anyway? A bony girl with loose brown hair falling across her face and shoulders. A baggy T-shirt and pink and powder-blue flip-flops, one of which was held together with packing tape. That’s all. Just her body, just her clothes. They would not have seen her. No.

  Her parents had never rented a house at the beach before. The fact that they had done so for an entire month filled her with feelings so unfamiliar she had no names for them. Still, it was good to be filled with something, even feelings without names. It was, she imagined, a little like having a birthday party—something she had never actually had—and all the guests being strangers. A house full of strangers, but a full house.

  It did not occur to her to sit on the beach. She hadn’t brought a towel to sit on, for one thing. She wasn’t even wearing a bathing suit under her T-shirt, just shorts. It didn’t matter. She was content to be where she was, slightly above, at a little distance from, the people and the sand and the sea that stretched out forever. From where she sat she could watch the children on their pudgy legs run to the water’s edge and fill their buckets, then scamper back to the safety of their mothers, shrieking and laughing as the waves rolled up behind them, nipping at their heels: tag, you’re it. She could almost smell the lotion the mothers squeezed out of tubes into the palms of their hands and rubbed lovingly over their little sons’ and daughters’ browning bellies and fiery backs. She could watch umbrellas pop open like bright flowers bursting into bloom, and these made her think of the clusters of crocuses that appeared in her backyard each spring, always catching her by surprise, bringing with them as they did the memory of hope.

  But what she watched most intently were the families—not pieces of families with only a mother or a nanny, but what she thought of as complete families with two parents and at least two children, preferably a girl and a boy.

  There was only one such family on the beach that morning, and she found it not only complete but nearly perfect. It was the little girl who had caught her eye, but it was the girl’s brother who held it. He appeared to be about thirteen, her age, although he might have been a little older. He was a good deal older than his sister, that much was clear. He had a long, thin body, the kind she had once read described as “lanky.” It wasn’t his body that interested her, though, but his manner—the way, for instance, he dug a long trough in the sand for his sister to sit in, then knelt before her, listening patiently to all her instructions before beginning the elaborate sand fin that would turn her into a mermaid. It seemed, as far as she could tell from where she sat, that the boy had real artistic talent. She wondered if his father was an artist, because she noticed that he sat sketching his children as they played together.

  She expected the boy to run off at some point, to join friends and leave his sister behind. But he never did. He seemed to enjoy being with her, and when he took her hand at one point, it was such a natural gesture that she felt certain he’d done it many times before. And when, later in the day, after she had been watching the family for a long time, she saw the boy bend down and kiss, actually kiss, the top of his sister’s head, she became so dizzy she was forced to drop her head to her knees and think of other things until the dizziness went away.

  She turned her attention to the others on the beach. It was getting late. People were packing up and leaving. The only new arrivals were some boys carrying surfboards. She cringed when they charged down the steps past her; she found their buzz-saw voices and masculine posturing repulsive.

  It was then that she realized how much she’d been watching someone else that day, someone other than the family. Mostly she had watched the back of his shoulders and neck and head, all golden and bronze, because that was all she could see when he was sitting, which he was most of the day. But from time to time he had stood up, to blow his whistle or wave his arms or stretch. And on occasion he had jumped down to run into the water and pull out a floundering swimmer or go for a swim himself; those were the times she liked watching him most.

  When he walked past her to leave or return to the beach, he did not speak to her or acknowledge her in any way. Which of course made sense because he could not see her. She was invisible.

  But she saw him, and though she did not understand it—how different could he be, after all, from those rowdy boys with their surfboards; a little older, perhaps, but cut from the same mold—she thought him beautiful. More beautiful than anyone she had ever seen.

  If it had happened somewhere else, she might have found this unlikely response of hers more disturbing than exciting, but here—in this magical place that was so like the crocuses in spring—it was just the opposite. Here, she thought, here she could live in a house full of strangers and feel at home.

  •

  How could the girl have known there was an angel?

  She had always been a prisoner. She had seen nothing of the island but what the beast had allowed her to see.

  Then one day while the enchanted doll sang her sad song a key fell from her pocket. The girl quickly grabbed it up before the doll could notice.

  For when the doll was under the spell of the music she saw and heard nothing. And so the girl was able to unlock the door and slip away. The beast was sleeping in the shade of a tree. He was in a stupor. All around him were the bones of his last meal. The girl shivered. The beast ate animals without killing them first.

  Scarcely daring to breathe, the girl tiptoed past the beast until she reached the gate and was free.

  In the distance, she could hear the steady roar of the ocean. She ran along strange paths, past wild blueberry bushes and tall reeds whispering reeds

  wild blueberries and whispering reeds

  until she came to the dunes and then she ran across those and at last she came to the ocean.

  Her heart was happy and sad at the same time.

  Happy because the ocean went on forever and promised freedom.

  Sad because the ocean surrounded her little island and meant prison.

  The girl began to cry.

  Then she heard the fluttering of wings.

  And there,

  There, standing atop a wooden tower at the ocean’s edge, she beheld an angel folding his cloud-white wings close against his golden body.

  He was gazing out at the ocean, his head held high and proud. He did not see the girl.

  Where had he come from? Why was he there?

  Perhaps the girl had prayed without knowing, and the angel was the answer to her prayer.

  he could see himself floating

  Chris Powell was distracted. His partner had asked him twice if he wanted a stick of gum, and both times he’d said no without knowing what he’d been asked. It wasn’t like Chris to be distracted; he wasn’t what you’d call a thinker. The whole business was making him downright uncomfortable, if you want to know the truth.

  “You feeling all right?” Jenny asked.

  “No,” Chris said, without looking at her. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  It wasn’t that Chris didn’t feel like talking to Jenny, he just didn’t feel like talking. Something was trying to work its way up inside his brain to where he could grab hold of it, and until it got there he had t o keep the pathways clear. The problem was, he didn’t have much experience with this sort of thing. With all these thoughts drifting in and out of his head like so much flotsam and jetsam, how was he supposed to know which was the one distracting him?

  “Chris, wake up!” Jenny snapped. “Didn’t you hear me say I’m going in? I got a kid in trouble here. Come on, get with the program!”

  He watched Jenny run down the beach to pull a winded toddler out of the surf. From the look of it, the kid had been caught in a backwash. Where the hell were the parents, anyway? He imagined the mother looking up from some trashy paperback she was probably reading and running to wrap herself around her bawling kid. My poor baby, are you all right? Mommy’s here now, don’t cry, don’t cry . . .

  Don’t cry, shit. Lucky for you, lady . . .

  Chris reminded himself to turn his attention back to the ocean. Why was he having so much trouble keeping his mind on the job today? Hey, it wasn’t just today. Lately, there had been times he found himself getting lost out there, when he could see himself, honest-to-God see himself, floating in the air out there, hovering over the ocean like one of those blimps advertising sunblock or some crazy thing. No, more like a pelican on the lookout for a tasty fish, gliding, drifting, riding the wind until it swooped down and nabbed that sucker up in its beak. Only, Chris didn’t swoop. He just floated, drifted, looking, not knowing what he was looking for.

  And all the time that he was out there floating he never moved from his seat atop the lifeguard stand, elbows propped on knees, the cord of his whistle always in motion, twirling clockwise around the index finger of his left hand, then counterclockwise, then clockwise. Tick. Tock.

  Jenny climbed back up the stand, the smell of the surf clinging to her wet skin.

  “Nice save,” Chris said evenly.

  “Tweren’t nothin’,” chirped Jenny, which Chris knew basically to be true. Lifeguards made this kind of save every day. As far as he was concerned, you could hardly even call it a save when all you did was pull somebody out of water you could stand in. Even in deeper water, a rescue wasn’t usually a matter of life and death, although he knew—because he’d heard it about a million times in training—any trouble in any water had the potential of being life or death.

  Still, he’d never saved anybody from drowning— not the real life-or-death thing, anyway. Sometimes, when he was hanging out with the other guards, Chris would let on that he couldn’t wait for the chance to be a big hero. But the truth was—and nobody knew this, nobody—he was scared he’d blow it and instead of being a hero . . .

  The movement of Jenny’s arm as she slicked her lips with gloss caught Chris’s eye. He moved his head a few degrees past her to see if he could get a glimpse of the girl on the steps.

  He didn’t know how he knew she was watching only him and not them. He could just feel it. Every day, usually an hour or so after he came on duty, he’d sense that she was there. He never saw her arrive.

  He’d just turn his head and there she’d be: sitting on the same top step, leaning her shoulder against the same two-by-four upright, holding him with her gaze as if it were a microscope and he a measly amoeba.

  She was, what, twelve maybe. At first, Chris had been sure she was just another lifeguard groupie. They came with the job, and Chris wouldn’t say he minded, even if most of them weren’t ripe for the picking, so to speak, so the most you’d better play with were your eyes and keep your hands to your-self. But there were a couple of things wrong with this one. She never came over to the stand, for one thing, never approached him or said hi if he happened to pass within twenty feet. She never smiled. And she was always alone.

  And, always, it seemed to Chris, watching him.

  It was a few days after he’d first noticed her that he’d started feeling distracted. It was like being with somebody who drops some tiny object on the ground, a contact lens or an earring, and you spend an hour trying to help them find it, and pretty soon it becomes an obsession, you have to find it, you keep looking, maybe the person who lost it isn’t even there anymore, maybe you’ve even forgotten what it is you’re looking for, but you keep looking because you have to, because suddenly your whole life is about looking, and you realize that you’ve never really looked for anything before, not really.

  Chris shook his head, half expecting it to rattle, wondering what the hell was making him think this kind of shit.

  “Look,” he heard Jenny say.

  He turned to his left. A girl (seven? eight? Chris had this need to guess kids’ ages. He wasn’t all that good at it, wasn’t even all that interested, just needed to do it for some reason) was being turned into a sand mermaid by an older boy (fourteen? fifteen?).

  “I like how he did the scales,” Jenny said.

  Chris lifted his mirrored sunglasses and squinted to get a better view. Grunting, he lowered the glasses as the boy said something and the girl laughed. He watched the boy run to fetch the parents who put down their books and came to see. They patted the boy on the shoulders. The father ran back to get a camera.

  “Nice family,” Jenny commented.

  Chris shrugged. “All families look nice on the beach,” he said.

  “Gee, that wasn’t too cynical,” said Jenny. “What’s your family like? Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  He shrugged a second time. “I’m an only child.”

  “Callie!” he heard the boy calling. “Come swim with me!”

  He watched the boy pull the girl out of her mermaid cast, then grab a Boogie board and run to the water.

  “Wait, Evan!” the girl called after him. “Wait for me!”

  “What is it with her, anyway?” Chris asked.

  “Her?” Jenny said. “She likes mermaids, I guess.”

  “Not her,” said Chris. “The one back there on the steps. The one who watches me all the time.#8221;

  Jenny glanced over her shoulder.

  “Oh, her,” she said. “I wouldn’t get all paranoid, Chris. She’s probably just terminally shy. Besides, aren’t you used to being gawked at? I thought you hunky guys actually liked being sex objects.”

  “She doesn’t look at me that way,” said Chris. “She looks at me like she wants something.”

  “So why don’t you ask her what she wants?”

  Chris snorted. “Right,” he said.

  Turning his gaze back to the ocean, he began thinking about the previous summer when he’d been a guard on the other side of the island. He’d spent the whole time, practically, staring out over the bay at the sliver of New York in the distance, just wishing it could be a year later so he’d be finished with high school, working the beach side, and looking ahead to the rest of his life. Now here he was, and the rest of his life was as blank as the horizon.

  Well, maybe not totally blank. He did have this plan. Right after Labor Day, he was going to start driving cross-country and not stop until he reached Malibu. He didn’t know why Malibu, exactly, except he’d heard the surf was awesome. And it was three thousand miles away, a major point in its favor.

  Destiny. That was the word for his plan. “California is my destiny,” he liked to tell people. One time this girl said to him, “Don’t you mean it’s your destination?” That had really thrown him off, because destination made it all seem so small and unimportant. Hell, a destination was what you had when you went out for a six-pack or a pint of ice cream. But then he got destiny back in his head and his plan seemed big again.

  After that, he was careful who he talked to about it. He knew the minute he’d met Jenny, who was in her third year at some fancy college majoring in psychology, of all things, that she was definitely not a likely candidate for this particular conversation, not if he didn’t want to have his head messed with. Problem was, he seemed to be doing a fine job messing with his own head these days, didn’t need Jenny or anybody else to do it for him.

  One thing. He was glad to be away from home. No more having to listen to his mother getting on his case about not going to college or his old man saying, “Get off the kid’s back. He’s had his glory years. If I’ve told him once I’ve told him a hundred times, high school is as good as it gets.”

  Chris didn’t like saying it, but his father was an asshole. Once, after they’d both knocked down a few brews (otherwise, he never would have had the guts), Chris asked his father, “What about Mom and me? Aren’t we as good as it gets?” The old man hadn’t answered, just muttered something Chris couldn’t hear, not that he expected it amounted to much. Later on, his father had put his arm around Chris’s shoulders and told him in this hot, slurry voice, “It’s not that I don’t love you and your mother.” After his father pulled his arm away, Chris had stood there, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to imprint the moment on his memory because he was pretty sure he’d come about as close as he would ever get to hearing his father tell him he loved him. It would never get any better than that.

 

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