That Old Cape Magic

Good Lord, he thought, was she going to punch him, too? He barely knew her. “Superfluous,” he said, the word he’d needed earlier suddenly coming to him.
    “Why don’t you just …”
    When she paused, Griffin’s mind raced ahead, supplying the words
fuck off
, though of course women in their late sixties didn’t say that.
    “… fuck off,” she concluded, and strode away in the general direction of the parking lot.
    He watched her go, then glanced at the spot where she’d been sitting, trying to decide if the woman had really been there, if the conversation had actually taken place. A couple minutes later his daughter, looking exhausted and despondent, sank down next to him on the bench and rested her head on his shoulder. Which was nice. “Where’s Andy?” he said, hoping that wherever he was he’d stay there for a while.
    “He’s gone to get the car,” she told him, or at least that’s what he thought she said. She was sitting right next to him, but he could barely hear her. “You ready to go?”
    “Where?”
    She lifted her head to regard him. “The hospital?”
    “Shouldn’t we wait until they extra … extratake …”
    “Extricate?”
    “… Harve from the hedge?”
    “Dad,” she said, her mother’s sternness creeping into her voice, “we’ve already had this conversation.”
    “When?”
    “Ten minutes ago. You were supposed to wait for me by the tree.”
    He was?
    “Look at me,” she said, taking him by the chin. The sensation wasn’t nearly as pleasurable as having her rest her head on his shoulder. “Your eyes are dilated. Did you land on your head?”
    He had no memory of landing at all, but the last thing he wanted was for her to be worried about him. “I’m fine,” he assured her. “People need to quit punching me and telling me to fuck off, but otherwise …” Unable to complete the sentence, he considered the word count impressive, nonetheless.
    Behind them a chain saw roared to life, and its sheer volume reconnected something in Griffin’s cranial circuitry. The world’smany varied sounds were again playing at their normal volume. Also, the earlier conversation with his daughter, the one in which he’d promised to wait by the tree, was suddenly there in its entirety. It was she and Andy who’d pulled him from beneath the hedge, he now recalled.
    “I must be allergic to yew,” Laura said, scratching at her forearms.
    “To me?”
    She stopped scratching and looked at him.
    “Oh.
Yew
. Gotcha.” Now that he looked at them, her arms were grotesquely swollen.
    “You’re definitely coming to the hospital,” she said. “You’re concussed.”
    “They’ll have Benadryl,” he assured her, still a beat behind but catching up fast.
    “Yeah, right,” she said with a sweeping gesture that took in the whole resort. “Benadryl’s going to make all this fine.”
    “Hey, it could’ve been worse,” he said.
    She waited patiently for him to explain how, which took a minute. Then another. Among the crowd at the hedge was a pregnant young woman. He knew her, just not her name. Then suddenly that was there, too. “Kelsey could have fallen in with the others,” he said, pleased with himself for saying something that might, if closely examined, actually be valid. “The shock could’ve sent her into labor.”
    “You know, I never thought of that,” his daughter said in a golly-gee voice.
“Or
a disgruntled hotel employee could’ve laced our dinners with arsenic, in which case we’d all be dead instead of just hideously maimed.”
    “Sorry,” he said. “I was trying to cheer you up.”
    Staring at her Popeye forearms, he finally realized she was weeping.
    “Dad,” she said, “tomorrow’s my wedding day, and I’m going to be ugly.”
    Over at the hedge, the chain saw sputtered and died. Taking advantage of the silence, he quietly said, “No, you’re going to be beautiful. Everything’s going to be fine.”
    Andy pulled up then, and they climbed in, Laura next to her fiancé, Griffin into the back. The car was identical to his rental, right down to the color and features. It even had a copy of the same literary magazine on the dash. He patted his pants pocket, but felt no keys. Unless that was them dangling in the ignition. “So this is my car?” he asked, and they both turned around to stare at him.
    “Yes, Dad. This is your car. You gave Andy the keys. You’re scaring me.”
    Before driving off, they were treated to one last bizarre