beach when he pressed her on Tom. “I don’t know . . . it would hurt her.”
Pearl raised her eyebrows knowingly and made a high “hm” sound with her throat. “It’s amazing what people will do for the ones they love.”
Love? Anders’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull. He opened his mouth to protest, but Pearl suddenly looked past his shoulder out the front window.
“Oh, goodnightinthemorning,” she said under her breath, and then took off for the front door. Unsure what was happening, Anders stood up and followed her, as Pearl opened the front door and stepped out into the night.
“Arlene,” she hissed. “Stop right there.”
Over Pearl’s shoulder, Anders spotted an old woman in a long nightgown, hair shining white in the moonlight. She stopped as directed, turned, and spotted Pearl, then shouted, “No!” and began shuffling her slippered feet faster away from them.
Pearl exhaled a great sigh and walked down the steps and out into the street. She easily caught up to the woman and put her arm around her, talking in a hushed voice, when suddenly the woman’s face twisted up in anguish and she let out an ear-piercing shriek so loud, Anders had to cover his ears. It took him a second to realize two things: He’d heard that shriek before. But this time, the shriek sounded a lot like the name “Tom.” A light flew on upstairs, and Harold came plodding down in his nightshirt, wearily brushing past Anders on the stoop and heading out toward the two women.
“I’ve got her, Pearl,” he said gently, once the shrieking had subsided. He slid his arm around the woman’s frail shoulders. “Come on, Arlene. Let’s get you home.”
He escorted her slowly back up the street and Pearl returned to the porch and Anders, who was standing there with his mouth open big enough to fit the baby sea turtle he’d seen on the beach.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“That’s Arlene. Tom’s mother.”
“His mother?” Anders’s eyebrows shot up even higher, if that was possible. The woman, with her streaked white hair and frail frame, looked old enough to be his grandmother.
“She had Tom . . . later in life. She was forty-eight, forty-nine maybe? She and Tom Senior had accepted long before that having children wasn’t in the cards for them, and then surprise!” Pearl smiled at the memory. “That was a happy day. Anyway, you should have seen her ten years ago—so energetic, full of life. But after her husband died, and then her son, well—the years have not been kind.”
“I’ve heard that sound before,” Anders said. “At night. I always thought it was some kind of wild bird.”
“Yep,” Pearl said, wiping her house shoes off on the porch mat and crossing the threshold back into the house. “She likes to wander at night. Hates when someone finds her and we make her go back home. We’d let her be if it wasn’t for that time we found her waist-deep in the water, like she was trying to drown herself.” She said it as easily as if she’d come upon the woman eating an ice cream cone.
“She tried to kill herself?”
“I don’t think so. That was probably just the dementia. That’s Dr. Khari’s best guess.”
“The dentist.”
“Mm-hm. Piper and Tom tried to take her to a doctor on the mainland once. That didn’t . . . go well. Anyway, Dr. Khari keeps her in Valium, which is the only thing that seems to help calm her, though Piper and Tom were never thrilled with that. Said it made her sleepy and slur her words.” Her brow crinkled. “I don’t think that’s the Valium, though.”
“What is it?”
Pearl looked at him then, as if she just realized he was standing there and she was not, in fact, talking to an empty room. “Well, that’s none of your business, is it? I’m no two-bit gossip.” With one last stern look and a huff for good measure, she bid him good night for the second time that evening.
But Anders did not go to bed. When Harold got home from walking Arlene back to hers—giving her one of her pills with a glass of water to wash it down, staying on until he made sure she was good and asleep—he found Anders sitting at the dining room table, staring at the floral chains of roses on the wallpaper. Harold paused and thought about speaking, but then remembered the anguish of being a young man in love. And wanting nothing to do with that, he