Chapter 12

Gloria Winchell lived in the oldest part of town, where the first residents of Gull Island had built cottages for fishing. The kids at school who came from Fishtown, as it was known, were always made fun of for being poor and smelling like fish. Since Alicia Hauptman had lived in Fishtown and her lips had the puckered shape of a fish’s, the other kids had called her “Fishgirl.” Max had never joined in on the name-calling, but he had never stepped in to defend her either. A needle of guilt pricked him as he wondered again what had happened to Alicia. Maybe she still lived in Fishtown. He tried to imagine a scenario where he bumped into her, but in his mind Alicia looked too much like Sarah.

“We’re here,” the cab driver said. Max reached into his wallet and paid the fare. He would have taken the bus, but he didn’t want to end up getting lost in Fishtown after dark. His parents had always warned him to stay away from there at night; murderers and drug dealers walked the streets after the sun went down. How could Sarah have lived in such a place?

He felt around the front door for a bell, but could only find a knocker in the shape of a seashell. He ran his hands over the clothes Lindsey had bought him from Wal-Mart. When he had emerged from his room at Midway House in the outfit, Mrs. Garnett had squealed, thinking he was going on a date. Max did nothing to dissuade her, figuring the lie better than trying to explain the real reason he was going to visit Sarah’s neighbor.

He wondered if he should have brought flowers or some kind of gift to thank Sarah’s neighbor for her help. Too late now, he told himself. He flinched as a car alarm went off nearby and wondered why she hadn’t answered the door. He reached up to knock again when the door finally opened. “Hello, you must be Max. You’re early. Oh, you look so adorable. I should set you up with my daughter.” Gloria Winchell’s laugh sounded like an old witch’s cackle and Max shivered at the thought of what her daughter must be like. “Well, are you going to stand there all night? Come in, come in.”

Only when he stepped through the doorway did she seem to notice he was blind. Her already loud voice went up further as if she thought being blind somehow made him deaf too. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. You poor man. Here, let me show you inside.” She grabbed his arm and tugged him through the room. “You sit down here and I’ll be right back with some lemon bars and milk.”

Max sat down in an easy chair and felt tape along the arms. The room smelled like a mixture of cat droppings, kitty litter, and potpourri. A long-haired cat dropped into his lap and began to lick his fingers. He stroked the cat’s fur and wondered how many more of them lived in the house; one cat could not be responsible for that smell. “Buster, get off his lap!” Mrs. Winchell said. The cat’s claws dug into Max’s lap before it jumped to the floor. “That cat, he just makes himself at home.”

“It’s all right,” Max said.

“I’ve tried to train him, but he just won’t learn. Here you go,” she said, pressing a plate into his hands. “I’m going to put the milk right here on the table next to you.”

Max bit into the lemon bar and knew immediately Lucille had not been exaggerating. The citrus flavor made his entire face pucker and he reached for the milk glass to drown out the taste. “You like them? I can get you the recipe. I suppose it might be hard for you to read it, though. I don’t have a Braille machine or anything, although my sister is legally blind. She lost her driver’s license last year. I’m already up to bifocals, so I suppose it won’t be much longer before they take my license too.”

“That’s too bad,” Max said after swallowing half a glass of sour milk.

She sat down across from Max and said, “Are you comfortable in that chair? I found it in Mrs. Florentine’s trash about three months ago. Good as new after I fixed up the arms. The cats love sitting there. It’s like their throne. One of them will get up there and another will come along to knock her off.”

“It’s fine.”

“Good. So you wanted to ask me about Sarah? That was terrible what happened to her. The house was a total loss, which is too bad, because it had been here longer than I have. I visited her once in the hospital, but I really can’t stand hospitals. My mother was stuck in one for two years. It got to the point where I couldn’t get through the front doors without having to run to the bathroom to throw up. Oh, what a terrible thing to say when you’re eating. I’m sorry.”

He hadn’t touched the awful lemon bars again, nor the sour milk. He needed to get her mind focused on Sarah again. “I was wondering about Sarah’s parents. Did she talk about them much?”

“Not a whole lot. Her father was a cardiologist or something like that. Her mom was a politician of some kind. In the state senate I think, back in North Carolina. That’s where Sarah grew up. She moved to Miami for college, the University of Miami. My daughter wanted to go there, but I told her over my dead body she was going to sit on some beach instead of concentrating on her studies. I said, ‘I didn’t work two jobs for the last twenty years so you could fritter all my money away to work on your tan.’ I sent her to Washington State instead. She went into criminal justice. She’s going to be a policewoman someday. I told her not to write her old mom up for any parking tickets.” She unleashed another cackle that made Max flinch. He faked a chuckle, wondering if this woman was senile or just scatterbrained.

“About Sarah—”

“Right, Sarah. She was a good girl. Drank a little too much sometimes. Like my husband. He never laid a hand on me in seven years of marriage. When he’d come home all liquored up, I told him to lay right down on the couch until he sobered. Then the night before Christmas he didn’t come home. It was the worst snowstorm ever. They didn’t find Darren’s body until the spring thaw. All winter I thought he’d come walking through the door at any moment.”

“I’m sorry,” Max said.

“You’re such a sweet boy. How long have you known Sarah?”

“I knew her in college. Back in Miami.”

“Oh, really? She was a beautiful child. I went over to her house one night to give her some lemon bars and saw a picture album. Her whole family was like something you’d see on TV. The Cleavers or the Bradys. Not my family. We were more like the Munsters.” Max steeled himself against another horrible cackle and faked another chuckle. “I never understood why she lived alone all the time. A girl that pretty should have been able to find someone.”

“She never married?”

“Not even a serious boyfriend, she told me once. The longest was something like three months, if you can imagine it. Not me. Darren and I started seeing each other in junior high. Twelve years we were together. I didn’t have anyone else before or since. Just didn’t have the time to look, having to raise Cindy and all.”

“What happened to her parents? And her brother?”

“Well, for the longest time she wouldn’t talk about them, especially her little brother. Then last Halloween I hear a knock at the door. I go out there with my candy dish, thinking its some trick-or-treaters and then I see Sarah on my porch, naked as the day she was born and stinking like she’d bathed in Jack Daniels.” She paused to cackle again, but this time Max was too shocked to even fake a chuckle. “I brought her right in before anyone else saw her. I said, ‘Sarah, what are you doing out there with no clothes? You’ll catch a cold.’ And before I even get her to the couch she starts crying.”

“I asked her what was wrong and she kept going on about her brother. It was all her fault that he died. She knew he and some buddies were throwing a Halloween party on the beach, but she didn’t tell her parents, even though the weathermen were calling for a big storm that night. Well, I guess he and his friends were on the beach, carrying on and having a good time until a big wave came up and swept him right into the ocean. They never did find the body. Poor girl.”

Max thought of Sarah’s first nightmare. It made sense now. The picture of her brother’s graduation and the wave carrying her into the ocean symbolized her guilt at doing nothing to prevent his death. His thoughts turned to his parents and the nightmares haunting him, how powerless and guilty he felt for their deaths. But Sarah had not started the party or created the wave. “Is that what killed her parents?”

“Oh, no, they didn’t die until almost five years later. They both got cancer around the same time. She had it in the breast and he had it in the prostate. I think the mother died first. They went only a few months apart. Kind of romantic in a way, isn’t it?”

“I guess. What happened that night she came here? Did she say anything else?”

“No, after that I gave her a little warm milk and put her in my daughter’s bed. Even loaned her some of Cindy’s clothes. They didn’t fit very well, but they covered the important parts. Sarah is a lot taller than Cindy. Cindy took after me in that way.” Max considered asking about the exact clothes, but decided not to make it an issue. That must have been where the ill-fitting pink T-shirt and sweatpants had come from.

“How long has she lived next door to you?”

“About three years. She is such a lovely girl. Sometimes in winter after it snowed she’d come by and shovel the walk for me. Whenever Cindy was home, the two of them would go out at night. Like peas in a pod those two were. Of course Sarah was much prettier, but don’t tell Cindy I told you.”

“Is Cindy at school now?”

“No, she should be back in a few hours. She’s working part-time at the Wal-Mart until school begins. A little extra pocket money and she gets an employee discount on everything. Do you want to meet her?”

“That’s all right, I—”

The floorboards creaked as Mrs. Winchell stood up. Then Max felt a picture frame shoved into his hands. “I know you can’t see her, but she is pretty in her own way. Got her mother’s stocky figure, but she got her father’s lovely dark hair. I keep telling her she needs to let it grow out, but she won’t let it go any farther than her chin. Such a waste I tell her, but she doesn’t listen to her old mother.”

“If it’s all right, I should get going.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Do you need a ride? I can’t drive so well at night anymore, but as long as we go slow, it should be fine.” Max envisioned them running off the road and falling into the ocean while she kept chattering the whole way down.

“No thanks. Can I use your phone?”

He called for a taxi to pick him up and then went outside, rejecting Mrs. Winchell’s offer of a few lemon bars for the road. He stood outside on the curb and then out of curiosity made his way next door to where Sarah’s house had once stood. The smell of ash and smoke still hung in the air, reminding him of her nightmares.

He touched a line of police tape and didn’t venture any farther, but he could imagine the piles of burnt wood and scorched metal. All her pictures and relics from the past were gone, erased by the fire. When she awoke from the coma, she would have nothing but her memories.

As the taxi sounded its horn from Mrs. Winchell’s curb, Max smiled. Yes, of course. She would wake from the coma with nothing to remind her of her old life.