Meredith
Present Day
The peninsula curved like a crooked finger, beckoning ships and people with its siren song of safe harbor. From atop the bridge, Meredith could just make out the mouth of the Columbia River, the place they called the Graveyard of the Pacific, where the remains of dozens of ships littered the brackish floor. Beyond the mouth of the river, hidden along the coast behind a bluff, was Dead Man’s Cove, nestled just inside Cape Disappointment’s town limit. Farther, just visible in the distance, was the lighthouse, standing sentry against the too-bright autumn sky. On the other side of the lighthouse, down the hill barely half a mile, was her mother’s house.
In the backseat, her seven-year-old daughter, Alice, pressed her face to the window, half a Kit Kat congealing in her fist. Her hair was a nest of tangles, and her too-small nightgown pinched her upper arms.
She still hadn’t asked where they were going, why Mama Kristin wasn’t with them, and Meredith wasn’t offering any answers. Kids are resilient, she told herself. Alice will be fine.
She almost believed it.
The last time Meredith had come back to Cape Disappointment, it’d been to bury her stepdad. It had been September, a little over five years ago, after Alice was born and after her courtroom marriage to Kristin. She’d had to explain to her mother, to friends, why they hadn’t been invited. We didn’t want to jinx it, she’d said, as though they could lock their marriage in a secret cabinet, safe. Hidden. Preserved. Guarded as it was, the marriage was doomed to break. How were they supposed to know it’d be them that did the breaking?
When she and Alice showed up at her front door, Meredith’s mother, Judith, looked both sad and surprised to see her, ushering them through the door with the resignation of a woman with a death sentence getting her first look at the firing squad.
“You’re back,” she said.
“I’m back,” Meredith said.
Judith sighed, walking deeper into the house with Alice at her heels. “That’s that, then.”
They followed Alice as she ducked in and out of rooms, a one-sided game of hide-and-seek, before finding themselves all together in the kitchen. Meredith should have felt at ease moving through her childhood home, plucking sugary-sweet memories from the air like candy, but the longer she’d been away, the more foreign the place felt. Like seeing the place through different eyes, she saw the flaws—in the house, in her mother, in herself.
“Kristin and I are separating,” Meredith blurted after the silence between them had gotten too long, too awkward. She’d been battling the entire way how to tell her mother, mind bending in complicated word gymnastics as she tried to phrase it in a way that didn’t make it sound like a failure, but from the moment she’d walked through the door, her head was a blank.
“Divorce isn’t the end of the world,” Judith said as she dug through the junk drawer in the kitchen. “Keys got to be here somewhere.”
“We’re not divorced. We’re separated,” Meredith said.
“Same thing.”
“No. It isn’t.”
They’d only just arrived and already Meredith and her mother were fighting. A new record.
Judith sighed, still digging. She pulled out a flashlight, the warranty for a microwave she no longer had, a sandwich bag of batteries. Alice grabbed the flashlight and flicked the switch on and off, growing frustrated when nothing happened.
“It’s dead, darlin’,” Judith said. Then, glancing up at Meredith, “She looks good.”
“Of course she does.” Meredith snatched a lock of black hair and tugged. Alice yelped, then laughed. “She’s mine.”
Judith didn’t respond. Up to her elbow in the drawer now, she closed her eyes, focusing. “Aha!” She pulled out her hand and held up a set of keys that hung on a small metal ring, behind a cartoon frog key chain. She handed them to Meredith.
“What’s this?”
“Light room keys.”
“And I need them because…?”
“With Alice here”—Judith snatched a glance at Alice, who still hadn’t given up on the flashlight, banging it on the floor—“someone needs to keep the light on.”
“I thought it was automatic.”
“Mostly. It might break down.”
“Okay, but I don’t get why—”
“It’s not that much to ask is it? You show up with Alice and a couple of suitcases expecting me to take you in…all I ask is that you keep the light on. It’s important.”
Meredith clenched her fist around the keys. The teeth dug into her palm. “I didn’t expect anything, Mom. I just wanted…” Somewhere safe? “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.” Alice looked up at her, a frown forming that would no doubt turn to tears if this kept up. She smiled at Alice, then turned back to her mother, smile straining. “We can leave if you want. Get a hotel or something.”
And eat up what little savings she had separate from their joint accounts. She was terrified to touch anything in them, worried it’d send some kind of signal to Kristin. If a hotel bill showed up on the credit card statement, what would that say to her? Separation’s great, look what fun I’m having? Or I’m so desperate and alone without you?
Judith ignored her. “It’s for Alice. We have to keep her safe. You know what would happen if—”
“Mom.” Meredith lowered her voice. The last thing she needed was Alice to get all worked up over something hiding in the dark, waiting to get her. So far, she’d handled everything with more grace than Meredith, nodding with sage understanding as Meredith finally explained that they were going on a little vacation without Mama Kristin, and not to worry, they would be back, and did she want to get a new stuffed penguin or dinosaur? “Nothing is going to happen. Okay?”
“You don’t know that.”
“Mom, please. I’m begging you. Don’t do this right now. I need you—”
“Mom?” Alice had abandoned the flashlight and was looking up at Meredith with a pained expression.
All the fight went out of her at the sight of her daughter, little wrinkles between her eyebrows and her mouth twisted with concern. Alice had witnessed almost every fight between Meredith and Kristin over these last few months, and she could only imagine how it had affected her. But how could she have protected Alice from them when she couldn’t protect herself? The fights came out of nowhere, a series of sharp, lethal bites. She could never come up with the right things to say to fix it, so she eventually stopped saying anything at all. Then Kristin accused her of being complacent. She said Meredith wasn’t trying. But what was Meredith supposed to do when her partner of ten years came to her claiming to be unhappy and then refused to say another word on the matter?
Meredith’s parents had never argued much; it was always Meredith and her mother. She’d promised herself that coming out here would spare Alice the brunt of the inevitable collapse of her relationship with Kristin, but being around her mother brought out a juvenile combativeness she’d thought she’d left behind.
She hoped bringing Alice to the cape, getting them both away from everything, would, if not fix things, at least make them tolerable. It was easier to look at her problems from a distance, through the wrong end of a telescope, making them smaller, more manageable. Years away from the cape, though, had blurred the memory of this place, leaving visible only the beatific and obscuring that which had given her nightmares.
Nightmares fueled by her mother’s paranoia.
“You know why we have to do this,” Judith said, almost under her breath.
Meredith sighed. Twisted a bit of Alice’s hair around her finger again. “Okay, Mom. I’ll go up and look around. I’m sure it won’t be hard to figure out.”
“Thank you,” Judith said.
“I want to go to the beach,” Alice chirped.
“Grandma will take you.”
Judith started to protest, but Meredith shot her a look.
“Mom. Don’t. Please. Just take her to the beach. I’ll be half an hour at the most. You guys can look for shells.”
“Wouldn’t you rather go get ice cream?” Judith asked Alice. “Or see the fountain?”
Alice shook her head. “Beach.”
Judith knelt down to Alice’s level, taking her face in her hands. “We can’t go to the beach, honey. It’s not safe there. Just because your mommy is okay risking your life for the sake of a few shells—”
“Stop it,” Meredith ordered through clenched teeth. “Don’t you dare.”
“I’m trying to protect her.”
“And I’m not?”
Alice pulled away from Judith, and when Meredith tried to reach out to comfort her, she flinched. This was a mistake. They shouldn’t have come here.
“Please, Grandma,” Alice said. “I just want to see the water.”
Meredith was all ready for Judith to argue further, but even she softened under Alice’s big brown eyes.
“Fine. Thirty minutes. That’s all.”
Alice fist-pumped, making both women laugh. Meredith tried to catch her mother’s gaze, to share a smile, but Judith avoided her, letting Alice drag her out the door, toward the beach.
***
She could’ve driven, but she preferred to walk. It was less than a mile from her mother’s house to the lighthouse, and it felt good to have her face and neck warmed by the sun, a rarity in this part of the country. She smelled the salt water even before she saw it. It was one of her favorite smells, next to freshly ground coffee and the Thalias her mother still grew in the bathroom sink. It was why she’d moved from one coast to the other; she’d hoped to at least have that scent of home with her. But the Atlantic Ocean had never smelled right. A little too crisp, too bright. The ocean surrounding the cape was heavy and dense. It had substance. A person could float halfway across the world on the Pacific, but Meredith had never set foot in the Atlantic because an irrational part of her worried she’d sink straight to the bottom.
She didn’t intend to stop at the museum, but a memory hit like a squall and she couldn’t fight the pull of it.
Tell me something interesting about yourself.
She’d met Kristin at a bar in Arlington. After a long day of job interviews, she was three sheets to the wind when Kristin approached wearing a wry smile.
Desperate to impress but unable to think of anything clever, she replied, “There’s a curse on my family.”
She regretted it the moment it came out. It sounded like someone making light of a tragedy. It made her sound damaged, which in a way, she was. It just wasn’t something she’d wanted Kristin to know. At least, not then.
And it wasn’t as if she actually believed it. Maybe when she was Alice’s age, when she accepted everything her mother told her with the kind of religious faith all kids had in their parents. It wasn’t just the belief in her mother, though. The curse, in a way, had made a young Meredith feel almost special. But as she got older, she started to see her mother’s fear and constant warnings for what they were: trauma-induced paranoia. Yes, terrible things had happened to her family. To her. But that didn’t mean they were cursed. By the time Meredith hit high school, she had made a conscious decision not to get wrapped up in the stories, seeing them as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. She wouldn’t let it rule her life. Or Alice’s.
And while her mother tunneled deeper into her fear and Meredith tried to claw her way out of it, her stepdad, a man with more entrepreneurial spirit than skill, had used the story of the curse to make money by creating the Cape Disappointment Mermaid Museum.
Lemons into lemonade, as he would have said.
Dozens of tourists used to claim to see the famous Cape Disappointment mermaid every year and would be asked to spend several minutes describing it to Belinda, the resident cartoonist, who would draw a rough facsimile and then charge the sap twenty dollars for the picture. They always paid—it was proof, they said, that she was real. Meredith’s stepdad had been the start of it, the first to “see” the Cape Disappointment mermaid up close and survive to tell the tale. A lie, of course.
Still, it didn’t take long for mermaid fever to catch. Her stepdad fed the fire, cobbling together a kind of museum that charged five dollars a head to look at old seaweed (mermaid hair), shells (mermaid gifts), and photographs of the “mermaid herself.” When upkeep for the lighthouse became too expensive to maintain on his own, he managed to raise the money to build a fountain in the town square, almost half as wide as the street, with a stone mermaid perched demurely on a boulder at the center. People who visited the cape could toss in their coins and make a wish, then the money would be collected and used to keep the lighthouse lit. It worked for a while. The wishes dried up about the same time the mermaid sightings dwindled. No mermaid, no wishes, no light.
Mom hated the legend. Called it trash, even as it fed her bank account and kept her precious light lit. “Putting a pretty face on it won’t change what happened,” she’d said. “You can’t fix it. This place is cursed.”
The museum hadn’t been open since her stepdad got sick. When he was too weak to get out of bed anymore, Judith had hidden the key. Probably would have burned the place down if she’d thought she could get away with it.
Silly as it was, the museum had been her stepdad’s baby. And now that he was gone, it was a kind of monument to his memory. Meredith wished she knew why her mother hated it so much.
It was little more than a double-wide trailer disguised behind poorly constructed driftwood walls. Sea-glass wind chimes hung inert from the gutter, lopsided and dim. Part of her hoped the key wouldn’t be on the set her mother had given her, but the door unlocked on the first try. The building shared electrical wiring with the lighthouse, just up the bluff from where the museum was built; when she hit the switch, a single fluorescent tube blinked to life.
Dust coated the vinyl floor like a carpet, and most of the plastic exhibit cases were so caked it was all but impossible to see what was inside. She took one of the novelty T-shirts from behind the desk at the front and wiped down some of the cases. No one had replaced the “mermaid hair,” so the bottom of that particular display was covered in dry, cracked seaweed. In the display of mermaid “gifts,” she found a dozen shells that’d lost their sheen. The comb was just a comb, and the “pearls” had molded, the cheap plastic bending with the force of the bacteria.
On the other side of the museum was the only display that had nothing to do with the mermaid. A small glass case held a laminated business card from the Holm Fishing Company, founded by her great-great-great-grandfather, and a silver hand mirror and brush supposedly owned by his wife, Regina. Part of her was surprised the mirror hadn’t been stolen by now. It was real silver, probably worth a little bit of money. But the idea of the curse didn’t just have its tentacles in her mother. Anyone over fifty who’d lived here most of their lives wouldn’t admit to believing in anything as pagan as a curse, but they’d tell you something wasn’t right with Meredith’s family. She figured they’d all rather have their hands cut off than handle anything touched by Regina, the woman who, most of the stories claimed, the curse started with.
Meredith walked through the whole museum, wiping down displays and studying what they held, feeling an odd relief at their contents. It was the same feeling she got when she walked into her apartment in Arlington alone, in the dark, flipping on lights and looking behind doors to reassure herself that no one was there, that her fear was all in her head.
She came back to the mirror and pulled it carefully out of the display. It was heavier than it looked, but delicate, the intricate carving along the handle already beginning to wear away. An odd fear kept her from looking directly at her reflection, like maybe it wouldn’t be her face she saw looking back. It made her think of sleepovers in middle school, her friends spinning deliriously in the dark on full-sugar pop and gummy bears in front of the bathroom mirror, a low chorus of Bloody Mary on their lips.
The story behind Regina’s disappearance was a mystery, but at the end of it, she was still just a woman. Not a monster or a witch or whatever the stories deemed her.
Still, Meredith set the mirror back in the cabinet facedown and made sure to lock the display.
She dumped the T-shirt in the garbage on top of other ancient trash, then picked up the whole can, thinking she remembered seeing a dumpster somewhere outside. As she carried it, she let her mind play out a fantasy of moving back, of picking up where her stepdad left off. Alice would love the museum, and Meredith could almost picture herself behind the counter, selling cheap magnets and ceramic figurines to tourists. A brand-new start. But the fantasy fell apart just as it began to take shape. She couldn’t live here again, no matter how the sound of the water just on the other side of the wall stirred her soul.
She found the dumpster at the edge of the lot. Judging by the smell, it hadn’t been picked up in a while. She shoved the lid open with her elbow and held her breath as she emptied the can. Just as the last of it fell in, she felt eyes on her.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Meredith jumped, ramming her elbow into the corner of the dumpster.
“I’m talking to you!” the voice said.
Heart pumping, Meredith turned.
The lot was empty. Above her, behind the bluff that separated the lot from the street, she saw heads bobbing up and down, but none of them turned toward her. A flash of red streaked through the corner of her eye. Someone laughed—a woman—muffled but sharp.
“Hello?” Meredith called.
The first voice was back. “You know you can’t be here.”
Meredith ventured up a few steps toward the street and saw a box-shaped man with slicked-back black hair marching away from the bluff. It was clear he hadn’t been talking to her; he was still shouting but hadn’t looked back once. Several feet ahead of him, a group of people shot concerned glances over their shoulders. A girl with bright-red hair walked ahead, pointedly ignoring him. When she did finally turn, her gaze skipped over the man and landed on Meredith, staring her down as if she’d known she was there all along. She smirked, teeth flashing bright.
Startled, Meredith jumped down a step, then walked quickly back toward the museum, where she dumped the garbage can back behind the desk, knocking over a stool in the process. She left it, eager to get out of the museum and away from the bluff. Meredith didn’t like the way the girl had looked at her. Like she knew her. Ridiculous, of course. Still, something about the girl pricked at her.
She brushed the feeling away. She was oversensitive, emotions still raw from her last fight with Kristin. Get a grip, she thought, as she slammed the museum door and shakily turned the lock.
***
The lighthouse stood on a small hill in the center of the peninsula. It wasn’t much to look at; the navy-blue paint had worn away in chunks, and rust coated the rails of the catwalk. Small windows dotted the side to light up the stairwell, but the glass was foggy, stained with salt. It was a steep climb up the side of the small hill, all chipped concrete stairs with no rail. Meredith hunched forward and focused on each step as it came, fighting back the vertigo. She broke her arm once falling down these stairs before there were chunks missing. No matter how much her daughter begged—and Meredith knew she would—there was no way Alice was coming up here.
“Meredith!”
She turned to look for the direction of the voice and misstepped, her toe hitting the next stair. She went flying forward and caught herself on her forearms on the edge of the concrete. Pain rocketed up her arms, knocking the wind out of her.
“Oh, shit. Hold on!”
She was halfway to standing when an arm looped under hers, pulling her the rest of the way up.
“Careful, now,” he said. “Are you okay?”
She smiled when she realized it was Art. Mom’s cousin and probably the only family member Meredith had always gotten along with, apart from her stepdad. His hair was much grayer than the last time she’d seen him, and deep creases lined his cheeks and forehead. He was only a few years older than her mother, but he looked twice that.
“When did you get old?” she asked.
“About the same time you did.”
She slapped his shoulder and winced at the pain. Her forearms were scraped up good, and blood wept from the wounds, dusty with gravel. She sucked in a breath as she tried to clear the biggest pieces.
Art nodded at the lighthouse. “Come on. I’m pretty sure there’s a first aid kit in there somewhere.”
They finished the climb arm in arm, though after a few more steps, it was Meredith doing the guiding. Art’s knees popped with each step up, which he tried to cover with conversation. But that ended quickly; neither of them was in the best shape, and it took all of their breath to make it to the top. Finally at the door, Meredith went through three keys before finding the right one, and even that took some finesse to turn.
The door creaked open, and a dank, animal odor washed over them.
Meredith gagged.
“Something probably got in and couldn’t find its way out,” Art said.
“Great.”
They went inside, propping the door open with a folding chair. A thin layer of dust covered the desk. The room was like a cave, swallowing whatever light managed to get through the door. On the stairs, ghosts of footprints traveled all the way up in the dust.
“Does no one ever come up here?” Meredith asked. With how adamant her mother was that she be responsible for the light, she figured someone had to have been climbing the stairs and winding the mechanism.
Art shook his head as he started opening desk drawers. “The day you went off to college, Judith locked the door and that was that.” He peered into the drawers. Closed them again. “Why she suddenly decided it needed to be up and working is beyond me. Boats don’t come this way anymore. Not if they can help it.”
Now that Alice is here…
“She thinks it’ll keep Alice ‘safe,’” Meredith said, throwing air quotes around safe. “She used to talk about the red light warding off evil.”
Art made a noncommittal noise.
“I know. But going along with it is easier than arguing with her.”
He snorted. “That, I believe. Oh, here we go.” He pulled a small metal box from one of the drawers and opened it on the desk.
There weren’t any bandages, but there was gauze and alcohol wipes, which she was pretty sure couldn’t expire. She cleaned out the dirt and managed to stop the bleeding, but the cuts stung and moving her arms made them stretch, sending up little shards of pain. The only thing distracting her from it was the smell. The sooner she found whatever had died and got rid of it, the better.
With few places an animal could get stuck, they searched the bottom floor in no time. Art managed to pop open the small window above the desk, and a cross breeze took out some of the odor. Meredith rifled through the desk but only found a twelve-year-old sports page, some junk mail, and paperwork related to the lighthouse’s upkeep. Someone had gotten a stack of quotes on painting the place but apparently never followed through.
Meredith followed Art upstairs, tracing her fingers along the wall, pausing about halfway up to admire her thirteen-year-old self’s handiwork. Carved in the wall at about chest level, no bigger than her palm: Judith Strand is a BITCH. She remembered doing it, remembered cutting herself with the kitchen knife she used to carve the words, but couldn’t remember why. Could’ve been any number of things. Meredith and her mother could never be in the same room for more than a few minutes without biting each other’s heads off. Her stepdad tried to tell her it was because they were alike; Meredith figured it was because her mother hated her. As a teenager, the lighthouse was where she came to cool off. Minor vandalism was sometimes part of the process.
The smell got worse the farther they climbed. Meredith slipped her collar over her nose, her eyes watering with the dust and the stink. The hall curved at the top of the stairs, leading to the light room. Beer bottles lined the far wall next to a pile of clothes and blanket that, until she kicked it, she thought might have been a person. The kick shuffled the pile, and a new burp of rot wafted up from it.
Meredith breathed into her elbow to keep from puking.
Art’s nose twitched, but he kept his composure. As a taxidermist, he’d probably smelled worse. “I knew kids would get in here. I fuckin’ told her…” Using his foot, he shifted the rest of the pile out of the way to reveal a mound of fish carcasses, some half-decomposed, others little more than skeletons.
It was a sludgy, putrefied mess that squelched as Art moved the clothing, making Meredith’s stomach turn and her head spin. She bolted for the nearest window, broke a nail sliding it open, and stuck her head outside, sucking in deep breaths of fresh air. She heard Art circling the room, mumbling, sliding open the rest of the windows. Once her vision righted itself and she felt mostly confident she wouldn’t throw up, she went back to the pile and noticed stubs of cheap candles and wax drippings all over the floor. A half-rotted Ouija board stuck out from beneath one of the blankets.
Old shame bubbled in her guts.
“I thought all this ended when I was in high school,” she said.
“All what ended? Juvenile delinquency?” Art laughed. “Trust me, doll, you were an angel compared to the little shits I’m chasing away from my shop every Friday night.”
“No. The Fish Lady crap.”
Fish Lady. Fish Witch. They’d never been very creative with their taunts. Some of the kids she went to school with had taken the legends of her family, of the tragedies that plagued them, and twisted them into something they could use to taunt and demean. They told stories about her mother, that she was a witch or communed with witches. Her obsession with the danger in the ocean spawned rumors that a sacrifice of fish would grant you wishes. None of it ever made any sense to Meredith, but it didn’t have to. It was a small town, and the kids were bored. Meredith and her mother were convenient targets. She knew that now, but back then it was the final nail in the coffin of what was left of their relationship.
“Just some kids being stupid,” Art said, as though it wiped everything away.
Not for the first time, Meredith wondered if coming home had been a good idea.
With his face turned away from the mess, Art gathered the blankets back over the fish mess and scooped it all into a bundle, wafting the stench further. “I’ll see if I can’t get most of this out of here. You try to find some bleach or something.”
She clapped one hand over her nose and mouth and gave him a thumbs-up with the other.
While he carried the bulk of the pile downstairs, she rifled through the cabinets beneath the light itself, a fourth-order Fresnel lens that’d somehow withstood a steady stream of teenage partiers. In the first couple of cabinets, she found a pile of books she recognized as keeper logbooks, along with a few other journals and stacks of paper. She’d been through these before, a long time ago, and remembered one of them had belonged to a relative of hers—Grace—from when she was the keeper. Her stepdad had shown it to her when she was in high school, at a time when the strain between Meredith and her mother was at an all-time peak. Meredith had accused Judith of not being her mother, a claim made out of anger but no actual proof, and Judith hadn’t contradicted her. But her stepdad told her there was a lot in Grace that he saw in Meredith. Other women in the family too. He said it was impossible for her not to be blood of their blood, and offered the books as proof. All Meredith had ever taken from the logs and journals was that there was something wrong with their family, and not in the way her mother meant. They weren’t cursed. They were mentally ill. Afraid. Angry.
She absently flipped through one of the books now. Dried flower petals—Thalias, she thought—rained from between the pages. Through the windows, the sound of the ocean filled her ears, and if she closed her eyes, it was like being cradled in the sound. She had missed this. More than she thought. Her skin ached for the water. Setting the book down, she glanced longingly through the window to the ocean below. She could almost feel the rush of the foam over her body.
Jump.
The thought was like a knife, in and out before she could stop it. She looked down to her feet and went cold. She’d taken a step toward the window without realizing, and even as she came back into herself, she was already leaning forward into a second step.
She shook her head, rubbing her arms against the chill. It was nothing. She’d had intrusive thoughts before. Just brush them aside. It’s fine.
To distract herself, she continued exploring. The next cabinet was empty save for an impressive spiderweb, but in the third she found several mason jars full of murky water. At the bottoms of the jars were an inch or so of sediment—sand and tiny shells and bits of wood and seaweed. She frowned, thinking, Kids, but as she picked up one of the jars, the sound of the waves seemed to grow louder and it was hard to think anything at all.
There was a drain in the floor near the far window, meant to let out any rain that got in before it had time to flood and damage the lens. Meredith grabbed two of the jars from the cabinet and, opening the first, strew the water over the fish sludge to try to nudge it toward the drain. It didn’t move much, but at least now the muck was diluted. She opened the second jar. A thin scum rested on top of the water, which she scooped out with her fingers. The moment her skin touched the water, the room seemed to fall away. The scent of the sea made her salivate. A sudden, desperate desire for the water made her bring the jar to her lips and, before she could stop herself, she tipped a tiny splash of water into her mouth. Grit rubbed against her teeth as she swallowed. She continued to drink even as a small voice in the back of her head ordered her to stop, drowned out by the roar of the ocean in her ears. For an agonizing minute, it was like her body wasn’t her own.
Meredith finally pulled the jar away from her mouth, and it was like coming out of a fog. She breathed against the tremble in her hands as she dumped the rest of the water down the drain. Intrusive thoughts, she told herself. That’s it. She knew coming back here would be hard, that she’d struggle mentally. But if she kept her head up, focused on herself and Alice, everything would be okay.
She licked her lips. Swallowed. She could still taste the water. It tasted like midnight. Like the foam that brushes the curl of a fast-moving wave. Bitter, like patience growing thin. Like desire. Like someone watching. Waiting.