Five Days in Summer

found where she could leave Daisy’s bracelet. No, someone else’s bracelet. That was the whole point. Even though Daisy had tried to goad her into keeping it, it was a matter of principle to return it.
    The Mute Swan had a healthy lunch crowd for a Thursday, but there were a few empty tables at the back of the restaurant. Luckily they wouldn’t have to wait for a table at the front counter, with its glass display of scrimshaw knickknacks, Beanie Babies and homemade fudge — Daisy magnets. They’d avoided the trappings of the civilized world on Martha’s Vineyard for a blissful three days and Marian was not ready to start shopping for stuff they didn’t need.
    Daisy’s white shorts were already cloudy at the bottom, and Marian winced to see her daughter skip through the restaurant to their table in the far corner.The purple halter top needed to be retied at the neck before it slipped down the girl’s reedy body. It was a beautiful sight, this child who loved every inch of herself. Marian wondered if she could keep that fire burning all through Daisy’s teens. She swallowed that every-mother’s-dread of seeing her child’s innocence lost to the wiles of time, and sat down at the table, facing a window with a glimpse of the bay. Ted sat next to her.
    “Daisy!” His firm voice pushed her down into a chair. But not for long; she bounced back up like a rubber ball.
    “I’m going to look at those Beanie Babies up front.”
    “Oh, you are?” Marian cocked her head at her daughter.
    Daisy planted her hands on her hips and sugared her voice. “Please oh please. I just want to look.”
    Ted couldn’t curb his smile, and then it drew out Marian’s, and they were lost to their daughter’s considerable charm.
    “Two minutes,” Marian said. “And don’t leave that counter. If you can’t see us, we can’t see you.”
    Daisy skipped away before her mother finished talking.
    Someone had left a copy of the Cape Cod Times folded on the chair next to Marian. She picked it up, fanned it open and handed a section to Ted.
    “We probably haven’t missed much,” she said, and began to read.

Chapter 29
    The corn man gave Emily another shot in her arm and just like the other times her body went instantly numb. Then for the first time he came behind her and tugged at the blindfold. It slipped off. Total darkness. She could not open her eyes. Then she heard a sound. Her baby’s first cry at birth, an echo that resonated with everything she knew, a sound edged in certainty. The corn man’s fingertips pressed her eyelids open like sliding doors.
    Darkness was cut with diamond-bright flecks of light. She couldn’t close her eyes against the shock; they stayed open, and she felt the sharp pins of light. And then as her vision pulled into focus she saw her Sammie in front of her and her soul leapt out of her body toward him. But her body stayed as inert as wax.
    Sammie was all tied up, his legs bound tightly together with clean white rope, his hands cinched behind him. A piece of black electrical tape sealed his mouth.He was lying on the floor, on his back, right in front of her. His head was turned to her and his wide-open eyes were drinking her in. Seeing her and finding her and pleading mommy mommy mommy . His eyes demanded that she cross the few feet between them and do her job and save him.
    She watched him. Even her lids couldn’t move, nothing about her was pliable except her brain, which saw and heard and felt everything.
    She stared at her Sammie like an observer, a cool observer, he must have thought, passionless, uncaring, not the same mother whose need to help him would have been stronger than any rope. She was the same mother, that very mother, and she needed to help her son at that exact moment. Need. She was an open well of need. She sat propped against the curved inner wall of the reeking boat. She sat and she watched. Her body didn’t flinch toward her son.
    Sam’s body twitched on the floor. Something else was wrong. Had the corn man given him some kind of shot too?
    She heard the footsteps but this time they weren’t coming for her. They were going to Sam. Her blood rushed to her heart and it engorged as fast as a helium-pumped balloon, about to burst out of her body. A pair of men’s boat shoes, white, stood behind Sammie. The white pants began to bend and the knees appeared in her vision. The corn man sat himself down, cross-legged, right behind Sam.
    And for the first time since she had