There was a car accident on Surfside; some gigantic SUV had tried to turn onto a narrow, sandbanked side street and turned over. The drivers were okay, but their beached whale of a car blocked off traffic from end to end. Annoyed as she was, Helen knew she couldn’t even pedal past the boneheaded off islanders without losing her checkers. She decided to take the long way home. She turned around and headed back toward the center of town, passing the movie theater, the ferry, and the library, which, with its Greek temple architecture, stuck out like a sore thumb in a town that otherwise was an ode to four-hundred-year-old Puritan architecture. And maybe that’s why Helen loved it. The Atheneum was a gleaming white beacon of strange smack-dab in the middle of forget-me-now drab, and somehow, Helen identified with both of those things. Half of her was no-nonsense Nantucket through and through, and the other half was marble columns and grand stairs that just didn’t belong where they had been built. Biking past, Helen looked up at the Atheneum and smiled. It was consoling for her to know that she might stick out, but at least she didn’t stick out that much.
When she got home, she tried to pull herself together, taking a freezing-cold shower before calling Claire to apologize. Claire didn’t pick up. Helen left her a long apology blaming hormones, the heat, stress, anything and everything she could think of, though she knew in her heart that none of those things was the real reason she had flipped out. She’d been so irritable all day.
The air outside was heavy and still. Helen opened all the windows in the two-story Shaker-style house, but no breeze blew through them. What was with the weird weather? Still air was practically unheard of in Nantucket—living so close to the ocean there was always wind. Helen pulled on a thin tank top and a pair of her shortest shorts. Since she was too modest to go anywhere dressed so scantily, she decided to cook dinner. It was still her father’s week as kitchen slave and technically he was responsible for all the shopping, meals, and dishes for a few days yet, but she needed something to do with her hands or she’d use them to climb the walls.
Pasta in general was Helen’s comfort food, and lasagna was the queen of pasta. If she made the noodles from scratch, she’d be occupied for hours, just like she wanted, so she pulled out the flour and eggs and got to work.
When Jerry came home the second thing he noticed, after the amazing smell, was that the house was swelteringly hot. He found Helen sitting at the kitchen table, flour stuck to her sweaty face and arms, worrying the heart-shaped necklace, which her mother had given her as a baby, between her thumb and forefinger. He looked around with tense shoulders and wide eyes.
“Made dinner,” Helen told him in a flat voice.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked tentatively.
“Of course not. Why would you ask that when I just cooked you dinner?”
“Because usually when a woman spends hours cooking a complicated meal and then just sits at the table with a pissed-off look on her face, that means some guy somewhere did something really stupid,” he said, still on edge. “I have had other women in my life besides you, you know.”
“Are you hungry or not?” Helen asked with a smile, trying to shake off her ugly mood.
Hunger won out. Jerry shut his mouth and went to wash his hands. Helen hadn’t eaten since breakfast and should have been starved. When she tasted the first forkful she realized she wouldn’t be able to eat. She listened as best as she could while she pushed bits of her favorite food around her plate and Jerry devoured two pieces. He asked her questions about her day while he tried to sneak a little more salt onto his food. Helen blocked his attempts like she always did, but she didn’t have the energy to give him more than monosyllabic answers.
Even though she went to bed at nine, leaving her dad watching the Red Sox on TV, she was still lying awake at midnight when she heard the game finally end and her father come upstairs. She was tired enough to sleep, but every time she started to drift off she would hear whispering.
At first she thought that it had to be real, that someone was outside playing a trick on her. She went up to the widow’s walk on the roof above her bedroom and tried to see as far as she could into the dark. Everything was still—not even a puff of air to stir the rosebushes around the house. She sat down for a spell, staring out at the fat, black slick of the ocean beyond the neighbors’ lights.
She hadn’t been up there in a while, but it still gave her a romantic thrill to think about how women in the olden days would pine away on their widow’s walks as they searched for the masts of their husbands’ ships. When she was really young, Helen used to pretend that her mother would be on one of those ships, coming back to her after being taken captive by pirates or Captain Ahab or something just as all-powerful. Helen had spent hours on the widow’s walk, scanning the horizon for a ship she later realized would never sail into Nantucket Harbor.
Helen shifted uncomfortably on the wooden floor and then remembered that she still had her stash up there. For years, her dad had insisted she was going to fall to her death and had forbidden her from going up to the widow’s walk alone, but no matter how many times he punished her, she would eventually sneak back up there to eat granola bars and daydream. After a few months of dealing with Helen’s uncharacteristic disobedience, Jerry finally caved and gave her permission, as long as she didn’t lean out over the railing. He’d even built her a waterproof chest to store things in.
She opened the chest and dug out the sleeping bag she kept in there, spreading it out along the wood planks of the walk. There were boats far out on the water, boats she shouldn’t be able to hear or see from such a distance, but she could. Helen closed her eyes and allowed herself the pleasure of hearing one little skiff as its canvas sails flapped and its teak planks creaked, way out on the gently lapping swells. Alone and unwatched, she could be herself for a moment and truly let go. When her head finally started to nod she went down to bed to give sleep another shot.
She was standing on rocky, hilly terrain, blasted so hard by the sun that the bone-dry air wriggled and shook in streaks, as if parts of the sky were melting. The rocks were pale yellow and sharp, and here and there were angry little bushes, low to the ground and lousy with thorns. A single twisted tree grew out of the next slope.
Helen was alone. And then she wasn’t.
Under the stunted tree’s crippled limbs three figures appeared. They were so slender and small Helen thought at first they must be little girls, but there was something about the way the muscles in their gaunt forearms wove around their bones like rope that made Helen realize that they were also very old. All three of them had their heads bent, and their faces were completely covered by sheets of long, matted, black hair. They wore tattered white slips, and they were covered in gray-white dust down to their lower legs. From the knees down, their skin grew dark with streaks of dirt and blackening blood from feet worn raw with wandering in this barren wilderness.
Helen felt clear, bright fear. She backed away from them compulsively, cutting her bare feet on the rocks and scratching her legs on the thorns. The three abominations took a step toward her, and their shoulders began to shake with silent sobs. Drops of blood fell from under the skeins of rank hair and ran down the fronts of their dresses. They whispered names while they cried their gory tears.