Intensity

was behind him and his face was shadowed but for a dark glitter in his eyes. He smiled at her and said, "How's the birthday girl?" Chyna was unable to speak or move, and she half believed that the wetness in her hand was a bloody hunk of chum. She knew that Woltz would chop her up for having heard him with her mother, chop her to pieces and put her in bait buckets and take her out to sea for the sharks. Instead, he'd gotten out of bed and-from her perspective once more just a pair of feet-he had squirmed into his jeans, put on his sandals, and left the room.
        In Edgler Vess's cellar, thousands of miles and eighteen years from that night in Key West, Chyna saw that Ariel at last seemed to be staring at the power drill rather than through it.
        "I don't know how long I stayed under the bed," she continued. "Maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour. I heard him and my mother in the kitchen again, getting another bottle of beer, fixing another vodka with lemonade for her, talking and laughing. And there was something in her laugh-a dirty little snicker… I'm not sure-but something that made me think she knew I'd been hiding under there, knew it but went along with Woltz when he unbuttoned her blouse."
        She stared at her cuffed hands on the workbench.
        She could feel the beetle's ichor as if it were even now oozing between her fingers. When she had crushed the insect, she had also crushed what remained of her own fragile innocence and all hope of being a daughter to her mother; though after that night, she had still needed years to understand as much.
        "I've no memory at all of how I left the cottage, maybe through the front door, maybe through a window, but the next thing I knew, I was on the beach in the storm. I went to the edge of the water and washed my hands in the surf. The breakers weren't huge. They seldom are, there, except in a hurricane, and this was only a tropical storm, almost windless, the heavy rain coming straight down. Still, the waves were bigger than usual, and I thought about swimming out into the black water until I found an undertow. I tried to persuade myself that it would be all right, just swimming in the dark until I got tired, told myself I would just be going to God."
        Ariel's hands appeared to tighten on the drill.
        "But for the first time in my life, I was afraid of the sea-of how the breaking waves sounded like a giant heart, of how the nearby water was as shiny black as a beetle's shell and seemed to curve up, in the near distance, to meet a black sky that didn't shine at all. It was the endlessness and seamlessness of the dark that scared me-the continuity -although that wasn't a word I knew back then. So I stretched out on the beach, flat on my back in the sand, with the rain beating down on me so hard that I couldn't keep my eyes open. Even behind my eyelids, I could see the lightning, a bright ghost of it, and because I was too scared to swim out to God, I waited for God to come to me, blazing bright. But He didn't come, didn't come, and eventually I fell asleep. Shortly after dawn, when I woke, the storm had passed. The sky was red in the east, sapphire in the west, the ocean flat and green. I went inside, and Anne and Woltz were still asleep in his room. My birthday cake was on the kitchen table where it had been the night before. The pink and white icing was soft and beaded with yellowish oil in the heat, and the eight candles were all cockeyed. No one had cut a slice from it, and I didn't touch it either… Two days later, my mother pulled up stakes and carted me off to Tupelo, Mississippi, or Santa Fe, or maybe Boston. I don't remember where, exactly, but I was relieved to be leaving-and afraid of who we would settle in with next. Happy only in the traveling, gone from one thing but not yet arrived at the next, the peace of the road or the rails. I could have traveled forever without a destination."
        Above them, the house of Edgler Vess remained silent.
        A spiky shadow moved across the cellar floor.
        Looking up, Chyna saw a busy spider spinning a web between one of the ceiling joists and one of the lighting fixtures.
        Maybe she'd have to deal with the Dobermans while handcuffed. Time was running out.
        Ariel picked up the power drill.
        Chyna opened her mouth to speak a few words of encouragement but then was afraid that she might say the wrong thing and send the girl deeper into her