It was hard to swallow, my throat raw like I’d been crying. I touched my fingers to my neck. The skin was tender, hot.
I looked at the uncle to see if he had noticed, but he was staring out the window. At the empty boardwalk, maybe, or the seagulls swooping out over the beach. The feeling was gone as quickly as it had come. I didn’t really believe in spirits, in signs. But that feeling seemed like an omen. I didn’t need to be a psychic to know that something bad had happened to Julie Zale.
JANES 1 AND 2
THE WOMEN PASS THE LONG days and nights working the past over, studying the mistakes they made, the bad luck that reached in like a hand and turned them away from the lives they should have had.
Both Jane #1 and Jane #2 are Jersey Girls. Not just Jersey Girls, but South Jersey Girls. It’s a small state, but any Jersey Girl will tell you there is no comparing a girl from Cherry Hill to a girl from Ramsey to a girl from Sea Isle City. Local girls are known for the snap of their gum, the way their skin is always slick with coconut-scented tanning oil. They call water wooder and don’t mind the grit of sand in their bedsheets. Jane #2 is old enough to be Jane #1’s mother: forty-eight years to her eighteen. But they were the same in the ways that count: They’re from here, shaped by this place. They both had jobs on the boardwalk when they were young. Jane #2 sold ride tickets down at Steel Pier. Jane #1 worked at the caramel corn stand and would snack on the hot popcorn all day until she was dizzy with sugar and the caramel left a tacky mass on her back teeth. They both loved driving along the back bays with the windows rolled down, and when a Springsteen song came on they cranked the volume as loud as it would go. Bruce sang about girls just like them. Girls whose beauty was too outsized for their dingy hometowns, whose passions were too big for their tiny little lives.
Jane Doe #2 is newer—she’s only been in the marsh for two days. If you got close enough you might still be able to smell the traces of her perfume on her skin or the scent of the last cigarette she smoked lingering in her hair. She is still that close to life, like a door she could almost walk back through. Jane Doe #1 has been here for two weeks now. She is breaking down; her skin no longer holds her in. The mud beneath her is dense and cold, like pudding. When the tide pulls the water back, there is a thick, scatological stink as the sulfur at the bottom is exposed. As the casino junket buses pass by, the passengers will frown, scowl in the direction of the restroom, look around at one another to detect a glimmer of guilt on someone’s face. The old women press their handkerchiefs over their noses, trying to stifle the gag that rises in their throats. But the smell is everywhere, impossible to escape.
Jane #1 had loved school, even though classes bored her. A straight C kind of girl who doodled on the backs of her hands during class. Her teachers sensed some intelligence, ambition, coiled deep in her and were always prodding her to try harder, but she figured there would always be time for seriousness, for duty, later on in her life. And she thrived in other ways. Homecoming court, winner of the Best Wardrobe award her senior year, Prom Queen. She had a smile that even the strictest teachers couldn’t resist, a quick, crackling wit that made her a good flirt. She spent those four years feeling like the bright shining thing that other people orbited around.
The summer after she graduated was when the malaise crept in, when everything became blunted, gray. When the beers didn’t seem to be as cold, the parties as fun, the songs as moving, the sun as hot. It was as though there were some kind of screen between her and the rest of the world, dimming the thing that made every moment pulse with energy, sparkle with promise and light. And then the kids she dismissed as losers, nerds, moved away for college. One of them even went to Yale, and the idea that something so monumental could happen to someone whom