Ten-year-old Liza was dreaming her favorite dream, the one about the day when she was six years old, and she and Daddy were at the beach, in New Jersey, at Spring Lake. They’d been in the water, holding hands and jumping together whenever a wave broke near them. Then a much bigger wave suddenly rushed in and began to break right over them, and Daddy grabbed her. “Hang on, Liza,” he yelled, and the next minute they were tumbling under water and being thrown around by the wave. Liza had been so scared.
She could still feel her forehead slamming into the sand when the wave crashed them onto the shore. She had swallowed water and was coughing and her eyes were stinging and she was crying but then Daddy pulled her onto his lap. “Now that was a wave!” he said, as he brushed the sand from her face, “but we rode it out together, didn’t we, Liza?”
That was the best part of the dream—having Daddy’s arms around her and feeling so safe.
Before the next summer came around, Daddy had died. After that she’d never really felt safe again. Now she was always afraid, because Mom had made Ted, her stepfather, move out of the house. Ted didn’t want a divorce, and he kept pestering Mom, wanting her to let him come back. Liza knew she wasn’t the only one afraid; Mom was afraid, too.
Liza tried not to listen. She wanted to go back into the dream of being in Daddy’s arms, but the voices kept waking her up.
Someone was crying and yelling. Did she hear Mom calling Daddy’s name? What was she saying? Liza sat up and slid out of bed.
Mom always left the door to Liza’s bedroom open just a little so that she could see the light in the hall. And until she married Ted last year, she had always told Liza that if she woke up and felt sad, she could come into her room and sleep with her. Once Ted moved in, she’d never gotten in bed with her mother again.
It was Ted’s voice she heard now. He was yelling at Mom, and Mom was screaming. “Let go of me!”
Liza knew that Mom was so afraid of Ted, and that since he’d moved out she even kept Daddy’s gun in the drawer of her night table. Liza rushed down the hall, her feet moving noiselessly along the padded carpet. The door of Mom’s sitting room was open and inside she could see that Ted had Mom pinned against the wall and was shaking her. Liza ran past the sitting room and went directly into her mother’s bedroom. She hurried around the bed and yanked open the night table drawer. Trembling, she grabbed the gun and ran back to the sitting room.
Standing in the doorway, she pointed the gun at Ted and screamed, “Let go of my mother!”
Ted spun around, still holding on to Mom, his eyes wide and angry. The veins in his forehead were sticking out. Liza could see the tears streaming down her mother’s cheeks.
“Sure,” he yelled. With a violent thrust, he shoved Liza’s mother at her. When she crashed into Liza, the gun went off. Then Liza heard a funny little gurgle and Mom crumpled to the floor. Liza looked down at her mother, then up at Ted. He began to lunge toward her, and Liza pointed the gun at him and pulled the trigger. She pulled it again and again, until he fell down and then began crawling across the room and tried to grab the gun from her. When it wouldn’t fire anymore, she dropped the gun and got down on the floor and put her arms around her mother. There was no sound, and she knew her mother was dead.
After that Liza had only a hazy memory of what happened. She remembered Ted’s voice on the phone, the police coming, someone pulling her arms from her mother’s neck.