her mother had given her as a baby, between her thumb and forefinger. He looked around with tense shoulders and wide eyes.
“Made dinner,” Helen told him in a flat voice.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked tentatively.
“Of course not. Why would you ask that when I just cooked you dinner?”
“Because usually when a woman spends hours cooking a complicated meal and then just sits at the table with a pissed-off look on her face, that means some guy somewhere did something really stupid,” he said, still on edge. “I have had other women in my life besides you, you know.”
“Are you hungry or not?” Helen asked with a smile, trying to shake off her ugly mood.
Hunger won out. Jerry shut his mouth and went to wash his hands. Helen hadn’t eaten since breakfast and should have been starved. When she tasted the first forkful she realized she wouldn’t be able to eat. She listened as best as she could while she pushed bits of her favorite food around her plate and Jerry devoured two pieces. He asked her questions about her day while he tried to sneak a little more salt onto his food. Helen blocked his attempts like she always did, but she didn’t have the energy to give him more than monosyllabic answers.
Even though she went to bed at nine, leaving her dad watching the Red Sox on TV, she was still lying awake at midnight when she heard the game finally end and her father come upstairs. She was tired enough to sleep, but every time she started to drift off she would hear whispering.
At first she thought that it had to be real, that someone was outside playing a trick on her. She went up to the widow’s walk on the roof above her bedroom and tried to see as far as she could into the dark. Everything was still—not even a puff of air to stir the rosebushes around the house. She sat down for a spell, staring out at the fat, black slick of the ocean beyond the neighbors’ lights.
She hadn’t been up there in a while, but it still gave her a romantic thrill to think about how women in the olden days would pine away on their widow’s walks as they searched for the masts of their husbands’ ships. When she was really young, Helen used to pretend that her mother would be on one of those ships, coming back to her after being taken captive by pirates or Captain Ahab or something just as all-powerful. Helen had spent hours on the widow’s walk, scanning the horizon for a ship she later realized would never sail into Nantucket Harbor.
Helen shifted uncomfortably on the wooden floor and then remembered that she still had her stash up there. For years, her dad had insisted she was going to fall to her death and had forbidden her from going up to the widow’s walk alone, but no matter how many times he punished her, she would eventually sneak back up there to eat granola bars and daydream. After a few months of dealing with Helen’s uncharacteristic disobedience, Jerry finally caved and gave her permission, as long as she didn’t lean out over the railing. He’d even built her a waterproof chest to store things in.
She opened the chest and dug out the sleeping bag she kept in there, spreading it out along the wood planks of the walk. There were boats far out on the water, boats she shouldn’t be able to hear or see from such a distance, but she could. Helen closed her eyes and allowed herself the pleasure of hearing one little skiff as its canvas sails flapped and its teak planks creaked, way out on the gently lapping swells. Alone and unwatched, she could be herself for a moment and truly let go. When her head finally started to nod she went down to bed to give sleep another shot.
She was standing on rocky, hilly terrain, blasted so hard by the sun that the bone-dry air wriggled and shook in streaks, as if parts of the sky were melting. The rocks were pale yellow and sharp, and here and there were angry little bushes, low to the ground and lousy with thorns. A single twisted tree grew out of the next slope.
Helen was alone. And then she wasn’t.
Under the stunted tree’s crippled limbs three figures appeared. They were so slender and small Helen thought at first they must be little girls,