CLARA LAY IN BED, staring up at the ceiling. The bed still rocked occasionally with the slow, up-and-down movements of the waves. She found herself holding onto the sides.

“How about some soup?” Delores asked from the doorway. Clara shook her head and Delores smiled. “I know you are worn out with being offered food, but we’re so glad to have you back that we want to do something for you. You hardly ate any shrimp.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Even John D, who never does anything for anybody, volunteered to make you a milk shake.”

Clara shook her head.

“Well, call if you want anything.”

“I will.”

Delores went back into the living room. Clara watched the shadows on the ceiling, the faint light from the lighthouse. She listened to the distant pounding of the surf. The threat of a storm had passed, but the surf was still high and boomed against the shore.

She closed her eyes. When Clara was little, she had had wonderful dreams about disasters. When a tornado was in the news, she dreamed of being whisked away to a land of little people. When a volcano erupted, she dreamed of going to the center of the earth. It was the way everyone wanted to get away, she imagined, off to something different and interesting and exciting. In reality—

“Are you all right? Tell me the truth,” Deanie asked.

Clara opened her eyes. “Yes.”

Deanie came into the room and sat on the bed. “Weren’t you terrified?” she asked, crossing her legs yoga-style.

“Yes.”

“I would have died. I really don’t believe I could have held on all that time. I would have been so scared.”

“You would have held on.”

“I don’t know. I’m not like you. I panic. I remember I was in the pool one time with Marcia’s brother—he thinks he’s so funny—and he was pulling us under by our legs, and I was just desperate. I was like our cat. Remember when Moonie fell in the pool? I was like Moonie.” She made a cat face and some hand movements under her chin. Then she sat up straighter and said, “Didn’t you worry about sharks?”

“No.”

“That’s all I would have thought about.”

“After a while you don’t even think.”

“Anyway, when you go back to school this fall and Yogurt McCalley asks you to write a theme about something that happened on your vacation, you’ll have something to write.”

“Teachers don’t do that anymore.”

“‘My Sea Adventure,’ by Clara.”

Clara shook her head. “It wasn’t like that.”

“What?”

“An adventure. You make it sound like getting on the wrong bus or something.”

“No, that’s what an adventure is—being in danger and getting saved.”

Clara sighed. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Anyway, you would not believe how sickening John D was after you got swept out to sea. He said to me, ‘You should have kept an eye on her,’ like you were a baby! And then he said, ‘Your sister was in a very miserable state of mind.’”

“He said that?”

“Yes, he made it sound like you let yourself be swept away. I wanted to throw sand in his eyes. He brings out the two-year-old in me.”

“I didn’t let it happen.”

“Of course not.”

Still, it seemed to Clara that everything was somehow tied together. She closed her eyes. Life wasn’t a series of unrelated things, one event after another, like television. It joined together. It overlapped. And what happened in one hour, one day, affected what happened the next.

“Don’t go to sleep,” Deanie said, “because I have something important to tell you. This is why I came in. It is up to you whether we go home or not.”

“What?”

“It’s up to you whether we go home or finish out the two weeks.”

“Who says?”

“Dad and Delores. They don’t want you to be permanently scarred. So when they ask you, say you want to go home. Look, I have already started to peel. I want people to see me before I look like a pinto bean.”

“I don’t know whether I want to go right home,” Clara said slowly.

“Clara, that’s stupid!” Deanie struck her fists on the bed.

“It isn’t.”

“It’s like going on the Space Cyclone and making yourself sick. It’s stupid, stupid, stupid!” Grains of sand flew up from the bedspread as Deanie struck it three more times.

“It isn’t the same at all.”

“Well, would you explain it to me? I thought you would be delighted to go home. I thought you would leap up and start packing.”

“I can’t explain it,” Clara said. “It’s just that if I go home now, well, it’s like I’m running away.”

“But, Clara, you always run away! It wouldn’t be you if you didn’t run away.”

“But this time I’m not. I don’t want to go home with this as The Terrible Thing That Broke Up the Vacation.”

“It was terrible—”

“But it won’t be as terrible if I stay.”

“That makes no sense to me at all.” Deanie stood up. “If you want to go home, you should go home. That’s what I’d do.”

She paused in the lamplight, watching to see if Clara was going to change her mind. “You know what we’re going to do if we stay, don’t you? Tomorrow we’re going crabbing. And tomorrow night we’re going on some sort of patrol to watch sea turtles laying eggs on the beach.” She waited, then sighed. “Well, I’ll go tell the others the wonderful news.”

Deanie went into the living room. “I bring you Clara’s decision,” she announced. “She wants to stay.”

“Good,” someone answered.

It sounded to Clara like John D’s voice, but she did not think that was possible. She was mixed up in a lot of ways about John D. She could not imagine him being the one to discover her missing. She could not imagine him saying, “Clara was in a very miserable state of mind.” And what was the other thing he had said to Deanie? “You should have kept an eye on her.” She smiled. She felt as strange as if the President or the Pope had noticed her.

“Now, Deanie, you didn’t pressure her to stay, did you?” her father asked in the living room.

“I pressured her to go! Look at these arms! I want to get home before I’m a complete eyesore.”

“You’ve got time to get another tan,” Delores said.

Clara closed her eyes. The bed was no longer rising and falling like the sea. The sound of the surf no longer beat in her brain. Her fingers relaxed their grip on the sides of the bed.

“I think I’ll see if Clara would like some hot tea,” Delores said. She smiled. “I know I am being ridiculous, but as the only mother present, I—”

“I’ll do it,” John D said. He got quickly to his feet.

“Thank you, John D.”

John D went and stood in the doorway and looked at Clara with his pale eyes. She was back, safe and unharmed, shaken—and yet somehow she seemed more secure. He, on the other hand, was not. His emotions, new and crude and oversize as the beginning of a carving, made a lump in his chest.

He could have written a chapter about it, he thought. “Ways to Avoid Misery.” And the first rule would be “Don’t care about anybody.” But for some reason his book no longer seemed important. He doubted he would finish it.

He put his hands in his pockets, cleared his throat, and said, “Clara, Mom wants to know if you’d like some hot tea.”

There was no answer.

“Clara?”

He hesitated to make sure she was asleep. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, as if he were making a date. Then, with an embarrassed smile to the empty hall, he returned to the living room.

“Clara’s asleep,” he said.