She’ll figure everything out. Apparently my mother’s a superhero.”
Fee shook her head a few times. “It feels like a dream. Doesn’t it? I mean, we’re here, which is better than the shed, but we’re still nowhere, and I’m still pregnant, Rory. And I’m afraid. I’m really afraid.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Me too,” Paula added, and got up to go stand at the window.
“Fee? I know you don’t wanna talk about it, just, you should talk to my mom, and yours, before you make any decisions.”
Paula stepped back from where she was standing at the window just now and said, “It’s people out there.”
I got up to look, but I don’t see anyone. We’re all a little tense. Fleeing for your life’ll do that to a person.
But wait. Holy shit.
There are people on the beach. I just saw them. Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I fucked up.
I mean, if we’re found here, because of what I just did, I won’t ever forgive myself.
So those people on the beach? There were two shadowy figures trudging through the sand parallel to the row of beachfront homes. So we watched, thinking maybe they’re bounty hunters, or cops, maybe coast guards—we couldn’t really see them well. Then two little figures come scampering up behind them. As they got closer, we saw that it was a family of homeless, a mother and father who looked not that much older than us, and two little girls, barefoot, but dressed in layers of coats and ragged sweatpants. They were all, even the little ones, carrying backpacks and empty trash bags, their eyes on the ground, scavenging, the way they do. The mother had a plush beach towel slung around her neck, no doubt snatched after it was left to dry on a fence or forgotten at the surf. The father was tall and pin thin. They stopped on the other side of the Plexiglas, staring into the Masons’ yard. We stepped back from the windows.
Fee goes, “Why are they stopping here?”
I saw one of the little girls pointing to the big grapefruits left hanging on the tree. The father picked her up and lifted her as high as he could as she strained her little arm, trying to reach the fruit. Just as she was about to grab the grapefruit, the wind shook the branch and her prize dropped to the ground behind the Plexiglas wall.
The father set the little girl down. She took her younger sister by the hand and the two pressed their faces against the glass wall, staring at the fallen grapefruit like candy in a case.
“That is so sad,” Fee said.
The little girl started crying. A high-pitched wail that carried through the windows. I wondered if old Monty’d shuffle out to his back deck and try to shoo them away with the broom.
Maybe it was that—the thought of the neighbors shooing these people away…Don’t know what made me do it. Didn’t give it much thought, I guess. I ran to the pantry, stuffed some boxes of cereal and granola bars into a bag I found on the back of the door, then grabbed an armful of cold waters from the fridge and put them in another bag.
Paula and Fee were going, “What are you doing? Where are you going?”
I didn’t answer.
When I opened the sliding door to the sea breeze, the little girl stopped crying and the family froze. When I took a step off the deck, they started to skitter through the sand toward the ocean. I called out in a whisper, “Wait! Don’t go!”
I held up the grocery bags. They stopped.
The father started back first, cautious, followed by the mother and the scared little girls. They waited on the other side of the glass as I checked the sky. There was a copter heading our way, but I thought I had a sec, so I picked a fat, oily fruit from a low-hanging branch on the grapefruit tree and tossed it to the little girl, who caught it and smiled, and immediately handed it to her little sister. I picked another fruit, which she also caught, and immediately began to peel with hungry hands. Then I hoisted the bags with water and food over to the mother and the father.
The guy looked at me weird, and I wondered if he’d recognized me as one of the fugitive girls from TV, but then I realized it wasn’t that. To them I was just the rich girl who lived in this fab house and gave