But before that, when they still hoped, the family drove to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and they sat on the sand. Mr. Shepherd walked to the pier and looked at the rising dark and listened to the waves break.
Flickers of ocean air in morning light. A girl was on the beach, out on the shore playing in the surf. Tall stalks of grass topped the sandy banks and the wind spoke through them. Years later, in bed in the apartment complex, with her window open and listening to the breeze breathing through the new leaves on the nearby trees, Leah remembered the voice of the wind in the tall grass on the dunes and she wondered if it was the same voice, saying the same thing. It had been her family’s first beach trip without her brother. Her mother sat inside with a book, but didn’t read, her eyes sat on the words and waited. They kept saying that this trip was just what they needed. Her father walked along the shore alone, trying to get to the distant pier, but always turning around before he reached it. “It never seems to get closer.”
She thought of the wind in the tall grass, there in the full-size bed in the one-bedroom apartment of her adulthood, and she thought about the girl playing, wet red hair, skin was already burning — pale flesh sprinkled with cinnamon. Mirrors rimmed in rope, dried starfish and scallop shell. She walked down to the water and saw the girl was sitting right at the edge, tossing her head to the side as the waves broke on her body. Her oval face covered in freckles. An upside-down mouth. Her father asked her to walk with him and she watched as their footprints faded behind them with each tongue of water, watched the pier resist their advance, and when they returned, the girl was gone.
One night, she walked with her father to the pier. There was an arcade on the boardwalk and Mr. Shepherd gave Leah some quarters and left her at the bright door as he walked down the pier alone. Inside, the light was plagued by flapping wings and the air swirled with the sounds of failed levels and a group of boys in shorts, without shirts, began to hoot at her. One leaned in and began to sniff her hair while his friends howled. “I’d fuck her,” and then laughter and, “You’re sick, man.” Leah became afraid to be alone in that noisy room, even though there were dozens and dozens of children and teenagers milling around, leaning into the electric boxes, watching one another play, and she ran out and down the pier looking for her father. The pier was dark, illuminated only by a few lamps on high poles. There were a few people on the wet wood hunched over their tackle boxes or buckets of fish guts, cleaning up and getting ready to go home. She kept seeing men standing in the shadows and thinking they were her father only to find, just as she was close to them, that they were strangers, leaning on the railings, looking at the stars above or back at the glowing windows of the condos on the shore. At the very end she found her father and as she ran to him, she realized he was making a strange sound and she stopped. He heard her approach and turned to the sound, unsure who was running up to him, and he saw his daughter. She could not see the look on his face. She could not tell what he was doing. “Honey, why are you—” but he stopped and seeing that she was crying, he leaned down and hugged her, though she was getting close to being as tall as he was at this point, and in the faint light she could see his wet face and realized he’d been crying as well. He held his daughter and Leah realized that in all those years, she’d never seen her father cry for Jacob. The weight of the loss had been written on him daily, but she’d never seen him lose control and as he held her, she also realized that he must think that she was crying for the same reason and she felt a quiver of guilt that she’d found something else to cry about.
In her office, a gap in the old window whistled with cold gusts and she listened, trying to understand what it was whispering.
She pulled the chain on the light, casting bolts of darkness across the room. The blood ran in her. She stood at the window, and the softly lit parking lot danced in vague patterns. The trees were rattling and there was nothing in Heaven or Hell that could change that.
The slap of her shoes across the wet parking lot. The roar of rain waking her at some point in the well of night. A sound in the hall — her mother? Her father? The old creature with long claws she used to threaten Jacob with to make him settle down and let her sleep? The girl, having slipped out and crossed the cemetery? And then dawn.
Her first summer job, the pool snack bar. The little room was filled with the scent of searing meat in swirling spires and the buzz of black flies busying themselves along the grease-grimed screen. Drinks bubbled in styrofoam cups and ice melted on tongues and napes. Leah caught sight of Jacob out of the corner of her eye, running across the hot cement, yelling with the other boys, still five. She stopped, looked back, but it was only some other child, ruddy and wet and keening for his mother because he fell down and had cherries on his knees. Her heart raced. She glared at him and hoped he hurt.
That evening, she heard her mother in the hall and pretended to be asleep.
That summer, the summer when she was sixteen, Leah Shepherd made a friend, a girl visiting her grandparents in Crow Station for the summer, lying out by the pool as Leah sweated in the small room, swatting flies and giving golfers watered down sweet tea.
At night, a thin cacophony of the dark rustles in through the windows. Sheets of cloud pass across the illuminated night sky and make the dim light in the room shift. The dark bloom of night sounds. She called and they talked on the telephone. One weekend, they drove to Cave City to see Kentucky’s oldest wax museum. On the side of the roads were shacks with card tables of geodes for their consideration. In the 3D Haunted Maze, they clung together and minnowed. In the grass beyond the crumbling parking lot sat a discarded sink with green blades growing in its white bowl. They sat next to it as the sun set. The girl drove a Rabbit with ripped seats and a cassette caught in the player, the wheels ever whining. A sudden downpour caught them. An evening purple amongst monuments. The girl didn’t know Jacob or Leah or her family. They didn’t talk about anything important. Leah listened to the girl tell stories about her home in Pennsylvania. An evening darting in the pooling shadows of faraway firs. In the distance, the girl’s house flickered where her mother and father and sisters slept. She looked at the girl and the pooling shadows and the long purple stains cast by statues in security lights. Plastic flowers foxtrot in the wind. Silk petals rub and rasp.
The screen displayed a gray and black image, dimly lit and impenetrable for a moment, a complex harmony of flickering shadow resisting resolution into anything specific until her eyes were able to decipher the shapes into something meaningful. Static like mist along low grass, along blacktop, black fading into black, the back of the school, a long brick wall, dusty windows, a short cement step and an alcove for a door, dark with security light pooling around. The television makes only one sound, the soft hum of light. Nothing for a moment, then light rising against the wall, the wall washing out, and then cutting off, a car arriving just out of the frame and then two figures slowly, idly approaching the alcove, sitting on the cement step, half in and half out of the darkness…it is summer, the summer passed, the girls, the two pairs of legs in jeans cut off at the knee and pegged, the loose t-shirts, one with hair pulled back in a ponytail, the other with hair cropped short, it is days before one would move away with her sisters, a warm summer night, a night still hot no matter how dark, it is summer and them sitting in and out of the dark, moving further back in the alcove, into the dark, but never disappearing, it is summer and in oceans children call names and cough water and in woods they mark trees to return home and at night they move silent through backyards, leaping from shadow to shadow, seeking to be shadows, nothing more, the parts of the Earth cut from the dominion of light, it is summer and the girls move in to each other, blending and joining, moving hands out of sight, only the tangle of tones of gray, the film silent and gray and black and jittering and then stopped.