“Are you listening to me?”

“Of course I’m listening.”

“So you’ll be coming by the house, then?”

I thought we were talking about what I should wear…Sarah scrambled to figure out what her mother had been saying.

“You mean bring him by?” she finally asked.

“I’m sure your father would like to meet him.”

“Well… I don’t know if we’ll have time.”

“But you just said that you weren’t even sure of what you were going to do yet.” “We’ll see, Mom. But don’t make any special plans, because I can’t guarantee it.”

There was a long pause on the other end. “Oh,” she said. Then, trying another tack: “I was just thinking that I’d like to at least have a chance to say hello.”

Sarah began sorting through the mail again. “I can’t guarantee anything. Like you said, I’d hate to ruin anything he might have planned. You can understand that, right?”

“Oh, I suppose,” she said, obviously disappointed. “But even if you can’t make it, you’ll call me to let me know how it went, right?”

“Yes, Mom, I’ll call.”

“And I hope you have a good time.”

“I will.”

“But nottoo good a time-”

“I understand,” Sarah said cutting her off.

“I mean, it is yourfirst date-”

“I understand, Mom,” Sarah said, more forcefully this time. “Well… all right, then.” She sounded almost relieved. “I guess I’ll let you go, then. Unless there’s something else you’d like to talk about.” “No, I think we’ve covered most everything.”

Somehow, even after that, the conversation lasted for another ten minutes.

Later that night, after Jonah had gone to sleep, Miles popped an old videotape into the VCR and settled back, watching Missy and Jonah frolic in the surf near Fort Macon. Jonah was still a toddler then, no older than three, and he loved nothing more than to play with his trucks on the makeshift roads that Missy smoothed with her hands. Missy was twenty-six years old-in her blue bikini, she looked more like a college student than the mother she was. In the film, she motioned for Miles to put aside the videocamera and come play with them, but on that morning, he remembered he was more interested in simply observing. He liked to watch them together; he liked the way it made him feel, knowing that Missy loved Jonah in a way that he had never experienced. His own parents hadn’t been so affectionate. They weren’t bad people, they just weren’t comfortable expressing emotion, even to their own child; and with his mother deceased and his father off traveling, he felt almost as if he’d never known them at all. Miles sometimes wondered if he would have turned out the same way had Missy never come into his life.

Missy began digging a hole with a small plastic shovel a few feet from the water’s edge, then started using her hands to speed things up. On her knees, she was the same height as Jonah, and when he saw what she was doing, he stood alongside her, motioning and pointing, like an architect in the early stages of building. Missy smiled and talked to him-the sound, however, was muffled by the endless roar of the waves-and Miles couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other. The sand came out in clumps, piled around her as she dug deeper, and after a while she motioned for Jonah to get in the hole. With his knees pulled up to his chest, he fit-just barely, but enough-and Missy started filling in the sand, pushing and leveling it around Jonah’s small body. Within minutes he was covered up to his neck: a sand turtle with a little boy’s head poking out the top.

Missy added more sand here and there, covering his arms and fingers. Jonah wiggled his fingers, causing some sand to fall away, and Missy tried again. As she was putting the final handfuls in place, Jonah did the same thing, and Missy laughed. She put a clump of wet sand on his head and he stopped moving. She leaned in and kissed him, and Miles watched his lips form the words: “I love you, Mommy.”

“I love you, too,” she mouthed in return. Knowing Jonah would sit quietly for a few minutes, Missy turned her attention to Miles.

He’d said something to her, and she smiled-again, the words were lost. In the background, over her shoulder, there were only a few other people in view. It was only May, a week before the crowds arrived in full force, and a weekday, if he remembered correctly. Missy glanced from side to side and stood. She put one hand on her hip, the other behind her head, looking at him through half-open eyes, sultry and lascivious. Then she dropped the pose, laughed again as if embarrassed, and came toward him. She kissed the camera lens. The tape ended there.

These tapes were precious to Miles. He kept them in a fireproof box he’d bought after the funeral; he’d watched them all a dozen times. In them, Missy was alive again; he could see her moving, he could listen to the sound of her voice. He could hear her laugh again.

Jonah didn’t watch the tapes and never had. Miles doubted he even knew about them, since he’d been so young when most of them were made. Miles had stopped filming after Missy had died, for the same reason he’d stopped doing other things. The effort was too much. He didn’t want to remember anything from the period of his life immediately following her death.

He wasn’t sure why he’d felt the urge to watch the tapes this evening. It might have been because of Jonah’s comment earlier, it might have had to do with the fact that tomorrow would bring something new into his life for the first time in what seemed like forever. No matter what happened with Sarah in the future, things were changing. He was changing.

Why, though, did it seem so frightening?

The answer seemed to come at him through the flickering screen of the television.

Maybe, it seemed to be saying, it was because he’d never found out what had really happened to Missy.

Chapter 10

Missy Ryan’s funeral was held on a Wednesday morning at the Episcopal church in downtown New Bern. The church could seat nearly five hundred people, but it wasn’t large enough. People were standing and some had crowded around the outside doors, paying their respects from the nearest spot they could. I remember that it had begun to rain that morning. It wasn’t a hard rain, but it was steady, the kind of late summer rain that cools the earth and breaks the humidity. Mist floated just above the ground, ethereal and ghostlike; small puddles formed in the street. I watched as a parade of black umbrellas, held by people dressed in black, slowly moved forward, as if the mourners were walking in the snow.

I saw Miles Ryan sitting erect in the front row of the church. He was holding Jonah’s hand. Jonah was only five at the time, old enough to understand that his mother had died, but not quite old enough to understand that he would never see her again. He looked more confused than sad. His father sat tight-lipped and pale as one person after another came up to him, offering a hand or a hug. Though he seemed to have difficulty looking directly at people, he neither cried nor shook. I turned away and made my way to the back of the church. I said nothing to him.

I’ll never forget the smell, the odor of old wood and burning candles, as I sat in the back row. Someone played softly on a guitar near the altar. A lady sat beside me, followed a moment later by her husband. In her hand she held a wad of tissues, which she used to dab at the corners of her eyes. Her husband rested his hand on her knee, his mouth set in a straight line. Unlike the vestibule, where people were still coming in, in the church it was silent, except for the sounds of people sniffling. No one spoke; no one seemed to know what to say. It was then that I felt as if I were going to vomit.