feel like you despise me.” When a second or two passed without any response, he left the room.
Lindsey considered calling after him but instead only listened to his heavy footsteps on the stairs and along the hall to their bedroom. She knew he was angry and she knew she should be concerned—but she wasn’t. If he wanted to run away, fine. Had he stayed, she might have gotten around to explaining that a woman doesn’t like to be left alone on a Saturday night while her husband watches a football game. But he hadn’t, so the hell with him. Let him be all hurt. Like she’s not really here. Well, who would want to be, with him plastered to the television set watching some idiot game like it mattered? Meanwhile she had to worry that Ronnie was going to get himself killed being where there was no reason in the world he should be. Like she’s not really here. Because it sure as hell felt like she was here. It felt like she was right smack-dab here in the middle of Salem, Virginia, U.S.A.
Still. It would have been nicer had he comforted her and held her in his arms. Which was what she really needed.
She pushed herself up off the couch and draped the throw over one shoulder like a toga. She heard Hank’s footsteps again as he crossed the bedroom floor to the bathroom, where he would brush his teeth and take his Prilosec before curling up on his side of the bed the way he did, like a little boy, folding his hands between his knees, which struck her alternately as cute and ridiculous for such a big guy.
Lindsey clicked off the lamp by the La-Z-Boy after a bug flew into its halogen bulb and the acrid smell of its bit of existence burning up began to saturate the room. She waited in the stinking dark while she listened to Hank push the medicine cabinet closed a little too hard and swing open the bathroom door with a little too much force before crossing the hall with long, angry strides, closing the bedroom door behind him, and getting under the covers, the metal bed frame creaking under his weight. Through the rec room’s single porthole window, only an inch or so above ground level, a tributary of moonlight trickled down the wall and along the carpet. For several minutes Lindsey waited in silence, hoping that Hank, given some time to get over being angry, might come back and they might pick up the argument where it had left off and then eventually get around to the part where he comforted her and the good stuff started up. Part of her expected it. It was like Hank to get angry and walk away, but it was also like him to come back when he calmed down and was ready once again to talk. Part of her thought, Not tonight, not likely. For months now she had ignored the looks, the expressions of dismay, as he let her know he was not happy about how much she was drinking. At what point does your drinking become a problem? How about maybe drinking isn’t the problem? How about maybe the problem’s something else and drinking at least takes the damn edge off? That might be a place to start talking. That might actually do some good, Hank, trying to talk about that. Because what is the problem, really? Ronnie. Dad. You. Me. Lindsey. Is Lindsey the problem?
Who was Lindsey in this dark, in this little trickle of light? Who would Lindsey be when the lights went out at last altogether in her father’s mind? Who did Lindsey become once she was no longer any living man’s daughter? Who would she be without her brother?
Lindsey said aloud, to the dark, “Why shouldn’t I drink?” She locked the back door and then went through the house turning off lights on the way to the patio, where she considered taking one last drink and then thought better of it and left the Bacardi in the moonlight under the wood swing. She turned off the last of the lights and felt her way along the hall to her bedroom door and then hesitated. She almost knocked. The idea amused her sufficiently that she held it in serious consideration long enough to actually make a fist and lift her arm before dropping the notion when it suddenly no longer seemed like a funny thing to do. She touched her forehead silently to the door and leaned into it with her eyes closed, the darkness slowly revolving around her as if she were the nucleus of some really really slow-spinning atom. A delicious tiredness descended on her. She might crumble at the door and sleep in the hall, a dog snuggling up as close as possible to its master. No. No. Nor would she crawl into bed beside him, where they might sleep back to back like a couple of stones. Or put her arm around him—because she didn’t want to put her arm around Hank.
The knot at her neck came loose and the red throw dropped to the floor, and at the same moment she heard a small cry from Keith’s room, a nighttime sound, nothing unusual, but it pulled Lindsey out of her drowsy, drink-stunned world and she opened the bedroom door and walked through the room without so much as a glance at Hank. She found a cotton nightgown in her dresser and went back down the hall to Keith’s room, where he was sleeping, just like his daddy, with his hands pressed together between his legs. He had kicked his blanket off and his tiny moonlit body was dark and wiry, a shadow on the white sheets—except for the brightly colored Superman briefs that covered his little butt. Lindsey reached across Keith for the blanket and pulled it over both of them as she lay down beside him. She wrapped her arms around him and held him tightly to her breast and he didn’t so much as stir. Outside, where Keith played all day, it was still summer and hot, and the dank musty odor of things growing wild seemed to have seeped into his blood so that she could smell it now in his hair, in his sweat. She laid her head down on his bright yellow pillow cover, the top of his head pressed into her neck, her chin touching his forehead, their bodies fitted together like puzzle pieces. For a while she watched the trees through his window. A breeze had come up and leaves were fluttering like birds’ wings, like a forest of birds, going where? All the small dark birds flying in the moonlight nowhere.
A watery rumbling in Avery’s belly woke her, and when she sat up in bed the headache she had been dully aware of in her restless sleep expanded suddenly, as if unseen hands had yanked a too-small hat down over the back of her head. She gritted her teeth against the pain and lay back down, keeping as still as possible while she waited for the throbbing to stop. She had been dreaming about a lake . . . and a boat . . . a dark lake, a small boat. Her father was on the shore. She was in the boat. It was night and the lake was still, a dark glassy surface, and the boat was floating away, but . . . a strand of her hair connected her to the shore. Her father was holding the other end of the strand, and she was leaning toward him . . . then the hair snapped and she watched it dent the water’s surface in a long straight line to the shore where her father was a shadow that grew smaller as the boat kept drifting away.
When the throbbing finally let up and Avery opened her eyes again, the memory of the dream settled over her like a heavy blanket. Her father had died the summer after her high school graduation, suddenly, of a cerebral aneurism, in his sleep. She dreamed of him regularly, and often the dreams were comforting. He’d hug her, or give her a kiss on the forehead the way he used to. But sometimes the dreams were like this one, and she’d wake up feeling heavy and slow, as if the air around her were so dense she could barely move.
Zach rolled over and put his hand on Avery’s knee, and she looked down at him as if she were annoyed at discovering someone else in her bed. He asked if she was okay in a voice that sounded impossibly gentle given the hulking mass of body out of which it issued. She told him to go back to sleep, which he did instantly, closing his eyes and snuggling his forehead against her thigh. She was fully awake then, lying in bed next to a football player she had met only a few hours earlier—and as the events of the night came rolling back through her sober memory, she groaned and checked the alarm on her night table. It was a little after three in the morning. She had been in school all of one full week, this her senior year. Her room was dark, but there was enough light from her various electronic devices to see the mess of clothes scattered over the floor and the disorderly array of cosmetics covering the top of her dresser. In the pulsing white light of her sleeping iBook, the rose-colored walls lightened and darkened as if breathing peacefully. On the wall opposite her bed, the muted greens in a poster-sized photograph of the Folly Beach pier echoed the steady green light of her recharging cell phone. She had bought the framed picture for ten dollars at a yard sale in Salem, where an elderly man had held it up and pitched the value of the frame—but she had bought it for the picture, which captured the elaborate crisscross of mossy pilings beneath the pier as they narrowed in diminishing perspective to a flash of bright light where the pier ended and frothy ocean waves surged. That flash of white light in the distance looked to Avery like a cathedral door, like an opening into another, utterly different world.
In this world, her head