The girls are waiting for the ferry, dangling their legs out the side of the van, popsicle juice dripping down their chins. Four girls: Trina, Tricia, Grace, and Allie. Tricia and Trina, the blond twins. Grace Hobel, the quiet one, their best friend. And Allie, kicking Grace in the shins gleefully. She wants the twins for her very own. They are beautiful, those two, and Allie wants to enter their twin world, to learn their twinspeak, to braid their matching white-blond hair. The twins’ mother is from Sweden. Allie loves her icewater eyes, her high cheekbones. She wears sunglasses and drinks throughout the day, but in a way that makes her seem slightly mussed, and not soused. Allie wants those twins for sleepovers. They smell like Ivory soap, those two. Even on the beach, after days of swimming in the ocean, they smell sweetly of summer. Not Grace. Grace is getting breasts and has already started her period. She has a body odor problem.
So these girls, setting off on their weekend with a mother the other mothers like because she is pretty and rich, know they will run on the beach, build sand castles, and stand around a bonfire with boys. They lick sticky fingers and sing a song about a smashed bumblebee.
At first, they don’t notice the man who is behind them, watching, although if they did it would give them a kick; they like it when people watch them, especially together.
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back.
She cannot read, read, read
She cannot write, write, write
But she can smoke, smoke, smoke
Her father’s pipe, pipe, pipe.
Then Grace sees the man and covers her mouth. She jabs Tricia’s ribs.
“He likes your creamy thighs,” Allie says, just to see if Grace will hide behind her fingers. She does.
“He looks like Kenny Rogers,” Trina says, and he does.
“Maybe he is Kenny Rogers,” Allie says. It’s possible. His snow-white beard is very well groomed. His nose is red and a little bulbous.
They sing “The Gambler” and point and laugh. He squints his eyes. They slam the door. The ferry has arrived.
Melanie, the twins’ mother, puts out her cigarette. They are listening to Neil Diamond. Even Neil Diamond has a kind of soulful glamour when Melanie Parks listens to him.
This all happened years ago, in the summer of 1982.
The girls stand on the ferry, throwing day-old bread at the seagulls. Grace stands at the prow, looking down, waiting to be splashed. She turns green yet will not back away. She is prone to seasickness. But she never backs out of a dare. The girls have to admire her for that.
They feed the gulls, then run to the back of the boat when the birds dive down. Grace tells a story about mean boys who throw Pop Rocks at the gulls.
“That is just so sad,” the twins say.
“Did you think of that together?” Allie asks.
“What?” they say together.
“When you talk together like that. Like you have the same thoughts. It’s cool,” Allie says.
“We are nothing alike,” Tricia says.
Grace smiles, a close-lipped smile. Allie wonders if she does that because of her overbite. It’s a cute overbite. Allie likes her again. She has velvety hair and she is good at anything school-related, as long as it doesn’t involve athletics. Grace and Allie are the A students; the twins, they are B-plus with an occasional A.
“I’m going inside,” Tricia says, and this disappoints Allie. She likes it out on the boat. She sniffs the air; it smells briney, with a hint of dirty bathroom. She would like to stay to see if any dolphins follow the ferry, but she won’t be separated from her twins. Once inside, they play Go Fish until the boat docks.
The house is on Crystal Beach. The twins have spent their summers here since they were tots, running up and down the stairs in matching T-shirts. There are only a few rules at the beach: take off your flip-flops on the balcony before you go inside, so that you don’t track sand in everywhere; and be sure to check in before sundown with Melanie.
Inside, the house is all one big room, with a little harvestgold kitchenette and a claw-footed bathtub behind the sink. The house is furnished with rattan and wicker, and there are four big beds. But the girls will sleep out on the balcony on cots, facing the sea.
Maybe on Saturday Melanie will take them back on the ferry to Galveston, where they can eat shrimp in little glass bowls with red cocktail sauce and bottomless glasses of Coke. Melanie is prone to sudden bursts of happiness, and the girls love her for it. Sometimes on these trips she takes them all to get their toenails painted. Or she’ll take them to Murdoch’s to buy matching sunglasses and netted bags of shells.
At Crystal Beach they can run as far as they want. At night the girls will find older boys. One boy, Murph, drives a Jeep and they all pile in and scream and he speeds through the water, splashing. “Ah, naw,” he says, when Tricia kisses the back of his neck. “He tasted like man-sweat,” she whispers to them later. They sing him songs. Say Say my playmate, come out and play with me. And then the rhymes get dirtier. But it’s Grace that whispers the spookiest:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
She has a knife, knife, knife
Stuck in her back, back, back.
She cannot breathe, breathe, breathe
She cannot cry, cry, cry …
There’s a teenager at the beach when they get there. Her name is Sylvia, and she is some distant relation to the twins and Melanie. She and Melanie make daiquiris and sleep on the balcony, slathered in coconut oil. The girls agree that Sylvia is not nearly so beautiful as Melanie, although she is sixteen, the age of beauty. The girls—it was Tricia or Trina who came to this conclusion, Allie can’t remember which—all agree. Sixteen is the age; the age that it is appropriate to lose your virginity, to have a boyfriend, to wear a miniskirt.
More interesting than the teenager, there is a girl across the dunes. This girl introduces herself on the second day. Her name is Brandy. Her voice is rich and throaty, like a smoker’s.
“It’s sort of beautiful,” Grace says.
“But too old for her body,” Allie declares.
She is a pleasant combination of warm golden hues, honey skin and hair, light amber eyes, jeans cut off before her buttocks end. She lives there. She’s a townie. Her house is lit up at night, every night, all night. One of the windows is busted.
“Is that her room? How does she sleep at night?” But once Allie thinks about it, she decides she would like to sleep in a room with the ocean right outside, every night, whistling into the hole in her windowpane.
“It’s a bullet hole,” Grace says.
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” Allie tells her. “Whoever lives there, her single mom or whatever, can’t afford to fix it. That’s all.”
Tricia glances over at Grace, casting her pale lashes down. She agrees, she agrees with Allie. Grace can be such a child.
Allie’s mom is a single mom. She can afford to fix broken windows, but she can’t afford add-a-bead necklaces or adoptive Cabbage Patch dolls. Allie’s mother often reminds her that there are children who don’t have enough money for band instruments or three square meals. There are children who run wild and don’t know their times tables because there is nobody looking out for them, aiming for a better quality of life. Allie isn’t sure what she means by better quality of life. When Allie visits the twins, Melanie isn’t around much. She imagines it would be very lonely to live that way without a twin. The twins have each other though. And there is little doubt, when she watches them in their matching bunny-fur coats and freshly curled wings, singing the winter holiday program or twirling their batons in unison at the football game, that those two have achieved a finer quality of life. Last winter, when the other girls in the program snuck makeup on in the bathroom, Trina and Tricia wore nothing more than Vaseline on their brow bones and bow-shaped lips. When they throw the batons up high, they spin in unison, and there is never any question that they will catch the batons at the exact same moment. Every time they spin down. Every time.
Many years later, one of the girls will be a woman.
She comes here with her husband and her daughter, they take the ferry out to Crystal Beach.
There isn’t any parking, and the husband says, “Goddamnit, why didn’t you tell me?” when the state trooper tickets them for expired registration.
“Forgot about that,” Tricia says. When their child falls asleep in the back, she reaches over. This trip is about him, how he says he feels no love for her anymore. She climbs over the seat, in the daylight, thinking, This will do it, this has to do it. Her long pale hair in his face, her mother’s blue eyes, the lashes darkened now. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” she says, and when his arm fumbles and he pushes her off, she’ll think, Fuck it. You fucker.
He doesn’t push her off, he is soft there, holding his head back from her face.
“There are worse things in life than a job you don’t like and a wife who leaves you cold,” she says. “You could have a knife in your back.”
“I don’t want to talk about that. You aren’t thinking about it anyway,” he says.
And he is right, until she seats herself again and looks back at her daughter.
“Don’t make yourself cry for my benefit,” he says.
“Man, it’s really changed,” she says aloud on the drive back. She’d imagined walking along the beach, their girl on his shoulders, her hand inside his. She would point to the dunes, And there it is, that’s it, that’s where… and he would put his hand on the small of her back, guiding her away. Or no, he would rest it on the nape of her neck, cradling.
There is a coffee shop with free wi-fi, and they pass gift shops, even a couple of hotels. “It wasn’t like this back then. It was just houses and a corner store. We used to go crabbing, did I tell you that? Mom would cook them for us, if we cleaned them and pulled them apart. We did it when they were alive. It didn’t bother us. Grace said they had no nerves. One time, I was about to gut one of them and it started eating its brains out. Autocannibalism, Allie said. She was the smart one. We thought it was funny. And we ate mussels too. Trina and I, we brought the traps in every morning, We woke up at the same time. Trina said the same sound woke us, but I don’t remember. I don’t know. Maybe I never heard the sound.”
He is smoking, window down. She would like to think that he is afraid of his own love for her, but the way he’s looking at the windshield, she’s thinking maybe not. They’ve been married for eleven years. When she met him, he was a skinny studio art major at a state college. Now he’s grown more handsome. And glib.
In the backseat, her baby girl gurgles. Two years old, fingers in her mouth. Her hair is black like her daddy’s, cut straight across her cheeks. Her eyes are blue like her mother’s, like her grandmother’s, like Trina’s.
The girls sleep out on the balcony, listening to Judy Collins tapes. She sounds so otherworldly. There is a song with whales calling, and a song about eyes like isinglass windows. The girls don’t know what isinglass is, but it sounds like something from old ships or lighthouses. Then Allie puts in Stevie Nicks. Sylvia and Melanie are dancing in the field. They wear black bathing suits and sarongs. Melanie unties her sarong, letting it float up, up, and away. It’s a warm and breezy night. Across the way, at that girl’s house, men whoop and holler.
“I want to call my mom,” Grace says. “Your mom drinks too much.”
“Oh, go inside and call her then,” Trina says. Allie and Tricia smile.
Grace falls asleep with her glasses on, her arm thrown over her face.
Allie, Tricia, and Trina watch as Melanie and Sylvia walk off past the dunes.
“She’ll find a bonfire,” Trina says.
“Will she come back?” Allie says, then thinks about how that sounds.
“She always does,” the twins say.
Allie whispers, making her voice low, husky. Like the girl’s. “I don’t think she’s a girl,” Allie says. “She’s a spook. She’s a ghost. She’s a demon inside a girl’s body.”
And then she hisses:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
With silver buttons, buttons, buttons
All down her back, back, back.
She cannot read, read, read
She cannot write, write, write
But she can smoke, smoke, smoke
Her father’s pipe, pipe, pipe.
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents
To see the elephants, elephants, elephants
Jump over the fence, fence, fence.
They jumped so high, high, high
They reached the sky, sky, sky
And they didn’t come back, back, back
Till the Fourth of July, ly, ly!
July can’t walk, walk, walk
July can’t talk, talk, talk
July can’t eat, eat, eat
With a knife and fork, fork, fork!
She went upstairs, stairs, stairs
To say her prayers, prayers, prayers
And bumped her head, head, head
And now she’s dead, dead, dead!
In the mornings the twins carry in the crab traps. They wake up at the same moment, and leave Grace and Allie asleep on the balcony. They walk in their pajamas, and wear flip-flops to protect their calloused feet from the sticker burrs.
July Fourth, firecrackers and watermelon. Melanie sips a mint julep from a tall blue glass. The girls sip from the bottom of the tumblers. Their father is there, for this celebration, an arm thrown over his wife’s shoulders. They are surprisingly broad for such a petite woman. Allie approves of the exposed freckles, the blood-red stone dipping in between her breasts. The only makeup she wears is dark lipstick, and her toenails match. Her skin is dead-girl white. Tricia and Trina are wearing batiked sarongs like their mother’s. Allie would have said, On the beach a woman should be golden, but Melanie’s skin is right, it’s unexpected. Her husband has the kind of muted, rumpled handsomeness that complements a great beauty. Everyone wants to touch her, just for a moment. Tricia and Trina watch her from a distance, that woman they might become. She is drunk, but not slurry drunk. Women lean in toward her; men brush her arm as they walk by. The girls run up to her with plates of oysters and shrimp, offerings. She rests her hand on Allie’s shoulder for a moment and says, “This is my girl. These are all my girls.”
The girls stay downstairs in the junk room, sipping lukewarm Lone Stars. That’s when they see the neighbor girl across the field, dancing with a sparkler. She moves in waves, making ribbons with the sparks. Allie is the one who stands up and calls to her.
“Brandy, Brandy! Come here. We have beer!”
Brandy motions for them to come to her, waving that sparkler around and around.
The way Melanie taught them in the car, it goes like this:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
All dressed in black, black, black
She has a knife, knife, knife
Stuck in her back, back, back.
She cannot breathe, breathe, breathe
She cannot cry, cry, cry
That’s why she begs, begs, begs
She begs to die, die, die.
They are clapping, laughing. Tricia loves the way her mother takes to the freeways, speeding, passing, changing lanes with ease. She never curses at the other drivers, and she talks her way out of tickets. One trip, she’d blinked her eyes and said, “My little girl is sick.” Trina leaned over the seat and shivered. That officer wanted to give them a police escort to the hospital. Later, they’d laughed, and Melanie bought them all—what were they called back then? Blizzards?—at the DQ. She’d dared Grace to finish it, knowing full well she would. The things they got her to do, just to see if she would. It seems wrong, now, looking back on that, a grown woman getting a little girl to guzzle down something so big and sweet it made her puke.
The two weeks they spent on Crystal Beach in the summer of 1982 are broken bits in Tricia’s head.
When they get to Galveston, David asks, “Why are there all these motels without windows?”
“Oh,” Tricia answers, happy he is talking, “it’s because of the storms. It’s cheaper.”
“Why would you come to a beach and stay in a motel without windows?”
“Well, but you could spend a lot of time outside. And like I said, it’s cheaper.”
Murdoch’s is still there. Audrey is awake, and her father carries her on his shoulders out to the pier and back. They build a castle; well, Audrey and Tricia build it. They search for shells and bits of broken glass. It isn’t safe for a three-year-old to carry broken beer bottles but Tricia wants to show her how to make a castle sparkle. “Don’t pick up the glass yourself. Just show Mommy when you find one.” Tricia’s lost track of the years it’s been since she’s seen a beach, any beach. Everything feels high and bright and washed out. Audrey grows bored with the castles and wants to swim. “Not today,” Tricia tells her. She thought that the ocean might frighten Audrey, but as soon as she saw it, her girl wanted to cross it. The ships, bigger than castles, the way the sky seems so much higher than it does at home—it’s Tricia that feels small and afraid.
Allie Saenz was a tall, leggy girl. Her neck seemed long for her body, but she might have grown up to become a great beauty. It was always women who had something unexpected—Audrey Hepburn’s long neck, for example, or Angelina Jolie’s big, soft lips—that were so beautiful they unnerved. Allie would have been an imposing woman. Not like Melanie, who was soft and white, and she could wear anything and seem naked. There was nothing predatory about Melanie’s prettiness.
The strange new girl, Brandy, takes them behind the dunes and whispers stories. “Your mother likes to fuck,” she says. The way she says fuck, it sounds really bad, like something luscious but wrong. “Fuck,” she says. Grace gets up and walks away. “You want to see her do it? Wait till her man leaves. That your daddy?”
“Yes,” the twins answer together.
“She’ll do anything.”
“It’s a lie,” Allie says. Trina is crying. But Grace is very still, alert. When they walk back, Allie whispers, “She’s like a cat in the dark, your mother.”
And they listen to the Fleetwood Mac song on the boom box, out on the balcony.
She is like a cat in the dark
And then she is the darkness
She rules her life like a fine skylark
And when the sky is starless
All your life you’ve never seen
A woman taken by the wind …
The adults are going to be up all night, out by the bonfire, drinking, dancing. People spill over from the broken house and the girls watch them. These are guys who get their muscles from working, not working out. Brandy is with them, and the way she stands in the firelight, she seems older. Maybe she’s a teenager like Sylvia. She is wearing cutoffs and cowgirl boots, her long hair gathered up at her neck in a banana clip.
“Look at her,” Grace whispers, “I think she’s sixteen.”
Brandy and Melanie dance together in the firelight, one shimmery and white, the other all golden, glinting lights. Melanie’s small hand rests gently in the curve of the younger woman’s—girl’s—waist, and for a few moments the laughter is muffled. Everyone is watching.
It’s their father who ends it, laughing, calling them all to come inside.
Sunday, the men go back to their jobs, and Sylvia leaves. Melanie makes daiquiris and lies out on the balcony, sleeping, while the girls dig a hole behind the dunes. “Just one thing, girls,” she says. “Stay away from that girl.”
“You mean Brandy?”
“Yes, that one.”
“Why?” Trina asks.
“Well, she’s kind of trashy. I know that’s not a nice thing to say. But I don’t think she even goes to school.”
“You were dancing with her,” Allie says, and catches her eye.
“Oh, that …” Melanie’s voice trails off. “Well, I’m a grown-up. You girls have fun.”
A few minutes later, the girls all sit with Brandy beneath her shanty house, looking out at the bright water. It’s noon, and the sand is a bright white, bright enough to make Allie close her eyes against it. Brandy’s house is right up on the beach.
“Don’t you worry it’ll get destroyed in one of the storms?” Trina asks.
Brandy shrugs. She’s back to looking like one of them, a girl.
“Our mother says we shouldn’t play with you,” Tricia says.
“Why?”
“Well … because.”
“That don’t make sense. She brought Allie here, and Allie’s a Mexican, right Alejandra?” She says the j with a puff.
“She thinks you’re trash,” Allie says.
“She don’t want to get caught, that’s all,” Brandy says.
The girls lie on their backs, looking up at the broken beams under the stilts.
“Where’s your family?” Tricia asks.
“Oh, my Uncle Cody? He’s gone on his errands.”
“Was he out there last night?” the girls want to know.
“Cody? I have a lot of uncles. They all like Melanie. Everyone likes Melanie.”
Tricia’s father died a few summers later. Or was he their father? He worked a lot. When he was home, his soft eyes were on Melanie, always. He was a tall man, gray hair, gray eyes, cuff links. His heart gave out, and when he was gone, the summer after, her mother brought them to Corpus Christi, to a different beach, and her skin was tanned this time, her hair in blond cornrows. There was a different man and a different party.
“Husband?” Tricia says, thinking he will not answer to anything now. Their daughter is sleeping on the king bed beside them, bottom up in the air, legs tucked under.
“I don’t want to talk.”
“But I want to know. What made you love me? Something, right? Maybe you can just remember that moment and it will help.” But he is already turned away. There is sand in the bed. The sheets smell funky, as if they’ve been sprayed with air freshener but left unwashed. She won’t sleep. She walks out onto the balcony. The hotel doesn’t face the ocean; it faces a water park. Beyond the water park is the ocean, but she can’t see it, not from here.
When it started, maybe the fourth day? Or the fifth. She remembers her mother’s warm breath on their faces.
Melanie, they call her, when they are at the beach. “Girls,” she whispers, “my girls …” Trina turns around, grabbing Tricia’s elbow. Grace and Allie are fast asleep.
“Oh, don’t bother,” Melanie says. “They won’t wake up. I took care of that. This is just for you, for my kittens.”
And she takes them out to the sea, one pretty daughter on either side, and they seem to glide with her. She whispers to them, and sings, and she tells them what happens at night is different. “We don’t talk about what happens at night in the daytime.” They walk and walk until they find a bonfire. “Come on, my kittens.” Melanie smiles and everyone smiles back, men who aren’t teenagers but not really men, college boys mainly, and a few women in shorts and Rockets T-shirts. Trina takes her mother’s hand, and Tricia rolls her pajama bottoms up over her calves, walking into the water. She doesn’t know where to go, what to do. Her mother was kissing those men last night, and when she glanced over her shoulder, Trina was too. Tricia puts her head under the water, wishing it were colder. When she looks back everything gleams.
Were things really brighter then, or are they just more vivid in childhood?
She remembers moonlit foam, the waves splashing … The women were gone, it was only Melanie and Trina who remained, and Melanie was on top of one of the men, leaning back, digging her hands into the sand, smiling upside down. Tricia was too far to see her mother’s face, but she knew she was smiling like a little girl hanging from monkey bars. Melanie’s body was bobbing back and forth, all her pale hair spilling on the ground. Trina was on another man, kissing.
“You are both cats,” their mother tells them, giggling, as they walk back. “Like your momma. Meow, meow.”
Tricia is silent, and Trina runs ahead, her arms open wide. Once they’re on the cots out on the balcony, she whispers, “I could taste melted marshmallow on his tongue. It was sweet. He sucked on my tongue hard and then he let it go. It almost hurt, but it felt good.”
“I don’t want to hear. That’s slutty,” Tricia tells her.
“No. We’re cats. In the morning we’ll be different people. Like Melanie said.”
They wake at sunrise, and Trina touches her elbow, and they walk out into the ocean to bring in the traps, not speaking. Tricia thinks maybe it was something like a dream.
At home, they live in a long ranch house. Sometimes they turn off the hallway lights and play ghost. Their mother takes many naps during the day, but she is more like a mother there than she is on the beach. She pours them Count Chocula cereal in the morning, she talks about report cards, she makes them grilled cheese sandwiches. She even watches television with them sometimes. It’s entirely possible, when they come out here, Tricia thinks, that their mother is some sort of cat lady.
Audrey came out with a head full of dark hair. Then her dark hair fell out and was replaced by still darker, plumier hair. From the beginning, she latched without difficulty. Tricia held her whenever she cried. She remained toothless until she was a year old, and then they all came in at once. Audrey was up all night, feverish, and Tricia would stick her index finger over the sore gums as her baby clamped down. “Go ahead,” she’d whisper, “bite Mommy. It’s okay.” Audrey was colicky too; Tricia held her in the steamy bathroom and rubbed her back as her little one cried and gasped. Sometimes it was Tricia’s body Audrey wanted, and the baby would touch her mother’s face and turn it away as she took the nipple into her mouth. She twirled her fingers, closed her eyes. Tricia misses that sometimes. How just the breast could soothe her daughter into a trance. Nothing seems to have replaced that kind of content.
Tricia called her mother once, during a particularly difficult day of colick.
“Oh, I wouldn’t know, sweetheart,” Melanie said. “I didn’t nurse you two. Why don’t you get someone in to help? Where’s the little shit?” That’s what she calls David, Tricia’s husband.
Her mother is not so very far away now. She lives with another husband, in Dallas. But Tricia has not seen her in almost ten years. She hasn’t seen her sister either. It wasn’t a big deal, they said. They talk about it, about meeting for something, for a holiday. But there are always islands to visit, things to be done.
Her husband is gone; he is here but he is already gone. Tricia is a woman, not a cat. She can’t keep him, nor dispose of him. She loves him, or at least she wants him back so that she can try to love him.
There’s something, something that may have happened, or maybe didn’t. Not at the beach, but at the house on Albans Lane.
It was a late night, some night outside of time; she can’t remember her age. And she can’t remember if it was before, or after, the summer Allie and Grace disappeared. Tricia woke to a sound, a low hum. She walked into the living room. Candles flickered. The light was warm and bright, unlike any light she had seen before. The table was set with the green glass plates. Everything seemed burnished, as if someone had polished the air. Her mother was there, leaning back in her chair, white shirtsleeves rolled up to her elbows, a bloodstone dangling where the buttons began. And across from her was Trina. Her hair was brushed clean and pulled back off her neck with a black velvet ribbon. She wore a red dress, white lace tights, and patent leather Mary Janes. She nibbled a big slice of white cake and swung her stockinged legs under the table.
They were more beautiful than any two people Tricia had ever seen. She rubbed the crust from her eyes and watched. Melanie was laughing, and Trina kicked the table leg and looked right back at her.
Watching them together was almost like looking into one of those little plastic snow globes her mother put out at Christmastime. Another world, lovelier and smaller than this one. If it could come outside and into this world, it wouldn’t be so magical. But you wanted to get inside it just the same.
The night it happened, the moon was murderously bright.
That’s what Melanie says when she wakes them: “Wake up, wake up, my girls, The moon is murderously bright!” And this night, she wakes them all, Grace and Allie, Tricia and Trina. “Wipe the sleepy dirt from your eyes. This night is enchanted. It will last for a hundred years.”
The air itself feels charged. Allie and Grace stand up, wobbling, rubbing their eyes. They would follow Melanie anywhere.
The house flickers in the distance. That broken house seems to come alive at night and die every morning.
And Tricia remembers, yes—before that summer, it was an empty, abandoned shack, the stilts sinking into the sand, the windows boarded up. Tricia and Trina would go there, find things that had washed up. A glass disc full of colored blue water and pale sand. There were old shoes, baby bottles, fish skeletons. Once, a ring they thought was diamond, but when they brought it to Melanie, she told them it was cubic zirconia. Oh, and a coral necklace. That had been a treat, how they rinsed it and handed it to their mother. It was their greatest find.
But this night, there are men around and inside it. The women who are there are there for the men. There is a woman with stiff breasts and boots that go way up past her knees, walking toward the water. She looks painted onto the landscape. “It’s a stripper,” Grace whispers, and Trina says, “Be quiet.” The girls run beneath the house, looking for something. They whisper, wonder if they’ve walked into a ghost story. It’s very dark beneath, and there’s a sliver of light where the stilts rise to their highest, where the light from the windows and the moonlit ocean cut through.
“Do you think Brandy is here tonight?” one of the girls, probably Allie, whispers. Grace is scared. Allie takes her hand.
Upstairs, Melanie’s laughter, ice giggling inside a tumbler, war whoops.
A man jumps from the deck to the sand. When he sees them down there he squats, smiles. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
He’s reaching for Grace, and she begins to cry. She’s still in her pink pajamas, the ones with daisies all over them. Allie wraps an arm around her and so she feels the bottoms dampen. Grace has wet herself. It’s just a party. That’s when they hear Melanie say, “Come on, Grace, it’s all right. Come on out.”
“It’s okay,” the twins whisper. “It’s Melanie.”
It’s Mother’s Day. There are no Mother’s Day gifts; David didn’t come up with anything and Audrey’s too young to have done anything on her own. They sit in the lobby, eating their free continental breakfasts. Tricia peels a bruised orange for Audrey, and then they make waffles. Audrey is fascinated by the waffle maker. She sticks her fingers into the syrupy cherry sauce. “Oh, sorry, Mommy,” she says, “not sanitary.”
David looks awful. Like his eyes are just holes punched into his face. He hasn’t even bothered to shave. “Why would you, for this grand occasion?” she says, and too late she realizes she said it aloud. But he just nods.
And that’s when she squints, blurring his features a bit. Men, for her mother, were interchangeable. She liked to have sex with them, and she liked to look at them. She liked them to look at her. But beyond that, they didn’t interest her. And so, for Tricia, her father had been a scent, a cigar, cuff links, a nice leather chair. Those men on the beach, they were bar boys or college boys, or working men in soiled shirts and Stetsons. Her father wore boots with his suit. He liked to call them his girls.
She squints at David, and sees him … tries to make him flat. Isn’t that what he’s done to her? She is nothing, he says, it’s nothing, it’s never been any good, it’s no use … For a moment, he’s a loser with a five o’clock shadow. And then he gets up for more coffee and he’s back to being David again.
“Well,” she says when he comes back, “can we go out? For crab maybe? I’d like to do that.”
When David and Tricia were first married, they lived in Austin, down the street from UT. They walked their dog to the Crown and Anchor once a week for beer and soggy fries, and she liked to sit out on the lawn and listen to the football games. She liked the roar of the crowd, which carried like voices over water down Duval Street. The announcer’s voice was masculine, rich, slow and easy, like her father’s. After the game, if they’d won, kids would drive down the roads yehawing, whooping. She reminds herself that they were innocent whoops of joy. Or probably. Or most likely. But maybe there was a fine line. Something David said to her, tonelessly, once, as he was throwing out platitudes in that dim voice he used lately, was, “There’s a fine line between love and hate.”
That wasn’t it, though, for Melanie. She didn’t hate anyone, really. Some people were beneath her, that’s all. She liked fun.
David won’t go out, and so it’s Audrey and her mommy, facing the seawall. Audrey has pineapple juice and a sunfish bib. Tricia orders king crab, and then another. She can’t remember ever feeling so hungry.
“It’s all right, it’s Melanie,” they tell Grace. There’s that windchime laugh, and Melanie’s voice, saying sweetly, “That one’s the plain one.” Then the sounds settle, as if something thick has descended on them all. Upstairs there’s moaning and sighs, and something warm and rich, a cawing, a mewing. Tricia and Allie crawl under the floorboards of the deck and look up through the slats. Grace is whimpering, and those moans, they seem to come from a creature buried for centuries, but they’re coming from Melanie. She’s straddling one of the men. Her body moves up and down, riding waves. Brandy’s there too. She looks like a boy, standing in the doorway in a man’s shirt, a pipe in her mouth. Tricia and Trina climb from under the deck and their mother looks over the man’s shoulder and smiles.
Grace is in laps, hands around and inside her, the pink pajamas in a soiled heap, flung across the deck. Tricia chews the back of her hand, then bites her tongue and tries to taste. She turns away, crawls back under. And Trina stays.
Tricia and Allie lie there, thinking. Tricia holds Allie’s hand, then puts her head against her chest, listening. Allie is still, but for her heartbeat.
Even now that she’s grown, she believes in this, that Allie heard her thoughts.
They know you are here. You have to run.
I’m afraid. We have to do it together.
No. They won’t hurt me. I’m her kitten.
They took Allie down though. Tricia’s eyes were closed, her hands digging deep, deep into the sand, pushing deeper, to where the sand was damp. So she didn’t see it, but she knows Allie fought. She wasn’t even looking for Melanie, but Melanie was watching, Tricia knew she was watching. Allie screamed and flailed, fighting with her nails and teeth. The men were different than they were with Grace, they weren’t thick and private. They whooped and laughed. What must it have sounded like? There were still people out there, in their vacation homes. But later, in the morning, when the patrol cars came, people said they only heard a party.
Tricia never dreams of that night. Instead, she dreams of a dark room and sounds: a rooster crowing, wind chimes tinkling, men whooping, a woman moaning, giggling, tearing, screaming. Sometimes there are people there with her, in the black. Sometimes an alarm clock interrupts, and sometimes the other sounds overwhelm.
In the morning, her girls stood behind her. Melanie’s eyes were red-rimmed, and she pushed her sunglasses up her nose. The policeman spoke to them separately. “No, we were sleeping. They must have dared one another to go exploring,” Melanie told the men. “Those girls were always fascinated with that house.”
Allie’s mother, a nurse at Texas Children’s, moved away to somewhere in Virginia, and then to someplace in the Midwest, and then she moved again and again, from hospital to hospital. She felt no anger toward Melanie. She wrote letters, asking again and again what the girls did that day. And Melanie sang her the songs they sang, told her about the virgin daiquiris she made them. “I feel close to you, Melanie,” Allie’s mother said.
“I know. I do too. I know how lucky I am. I’m surprised you don’t hate me, with my two still here.”
“I don’t have many girlfriends,” Melanie said to her twins when she hung up. “I’m glad she feels she can talk to me.”
After a while the phone calls stopped. Allie’s mom never came back to Texas.
On that drive back, they returned early. The sky was damp and close. It was the kind of muggy Houston weather that felt as wet as rain, but the rain wouldn’t come.
“The clouds look like smashed brains,” Tricia said.
“It’s a hard day, I know, kittens,” Melanie said. She turned on the radio and rolled the windows down. She sniffled, wiping her nose with her wrist, and lit a cigarette. In that moment, Tricia believed her mother was as close to sad as she could ever be.
She and Trina weren’t really twins, after that.
Someday, when David is gone—and he will be gone, Tricia is sure of that now—she’ll bring Audrey back to the beach. They’ll buy matching skull shirts on the Strand and have their pictures taken together in a booth. They’ll come here in the winter and search for sand dollars, and dip their ankles into the surf. It’s not so crowded in the wintertime. Tricia will raise her hand up to the sky and sprinkle the shimmers all over the water, just as her mother used to do. She’ll laugh and tickle her black-haired daughter. “I come from a long line of witches,” she’ll say. “My grandmother was a witch, and her daughter was a witch, and I am a witch, and you!” She’ll jab Audrey in the ribs until she giggles. “But not for real. Just for pretend.”
“That’s right,” Tricia will cackle, “we’re good witches. And just for pretend.”
What she remembers that day as they drive back, David silent as she points out the freighters and the gulls to Audrey, what she remembers on that very bright day is how, after the men had gone away in their trucks, her mother carried the naked bodies out into the sea.
It wasn’t ceremonious; it wasn’t unkind either. The bodies looked like bodies, not Allie, not Grace. Legs and arms and necks in the moonlight. They were lovely the way a wet, dead fish shining in the dark is lustrous before it splits open and begins to rot.