The Summer Girls (37 page)

The floating dock was rickety, bobbing in the small waves. Carson stepped carefully on the creaking wood. She’d been drinking all afternoon, knew she’d had too much and it was not a good idea to be on a floating piece of wood when you’d had a few too many.

She sat in a gloomy funk and let her legs dangle in the water. She heard a fish jump and swung her head around,
instinctively searching for Delphine. The black water of the cove was bleak and empty.

“Delphine!” she cried out.

Tired, woozy, she laid her head on her arms, awash in loneliness. She longed to hear Delphine’s nasal whistle, to see her sweet face. Carson turned her head and stared out at the water with longing. How was she? What was she doing now? When was Blake going to call and tell her the status?

Carson dragged herself back to sitting position, cradling the bottle of Southern Comfort in her arms. She brought the bottle to her lips and drank. She had no idea what time it was. It had to be at least nine o’clock, because the sun had set and the sky was turning that deep purplish gray that heralded night. The current was running with the tide, churning the mud and water into a brackish brew. In the far distance she could make out the small, twinkling lights on the bridge that joined Mt. Pleasant to Charleston. Carson wished she were a kid again, swimming with her sisters, innocent and full of hope for the future, rather than sitting on a dock with a bottle of Southern Comfort, a bitter old woman at only thirty-four, trying to make sense of how it all went wrong. She took another sip of SoCo. Could she ever forgive Dora for flinging those hateful words at her like stones—
husband-stealing drunken suicide.

She lay on her back and stared up at the stars, as yet faint in the periwinkle sky but still pulsing. She’d known that her mother had died in the horrible fire that destroyed the small house they’d rented on Sullivan’s Island. She’d accepted the fact that her mother died in a fire the same as if she’d died of cancer or a car accident. The salient point
to a child was that her mother was gone, not how she left. Tonight, however, she was haunted less by Dora’s words and more by Mamaw’s. They floated in her mind, creating macabre images.
I pray to God she died quickly
.

Carson closed her eyes and brought her arm up over them, shuddering. Death by fire had to be one of the worst possible ways to die. She felt physically sick as she thought about the unspeakable terror of being burned alive. Carson shivered in the night, feeling a fine sweat break out on her skin. She closed her eyes and somewhere in that blackness a memory hovered close. She could almost grasp it, like a hand in the thick smoke. She was groping for it like a frightened child. It was so close. If she could only reach it.

“Dad!” she cried aloud.

The smells were bad. And there was a hissing sound and loud noises that woke her. Carson was only four years old. She didn’t know what the noises came from, but even with her head under the sheet, the bad smells made her cough. They made her afraid. She pushed off the sheet from her face.

“Mama!” she cried. “Daddy!”

When no one answered her, Carson climbed from her bed to go to their room. Everything felt hot, the floors, the air, the door handle. It burned her hand when she touched it. A mean gray smoke was sneaking in from under the door and it frightened her. It was not supposed to be there. She ran back to her bed and pulled her blanket over her head.
She heard glass breaking, like her mama might have been in a bad mood and breaking something.

“Carson!” It was her father’s voice.

“Daddy!” she cried, and her heart leaped with joy in her chest. “Daddy!” She pulled off the blanket again and hurried to the door. This time she opened it, burning her hand as she turned the knob. But she had to get to her daddy.

Smoke poured into the room. It was thick and black and it burned when she breathed and made her eyes burn. She coughed and rubbed her eyes but that only made them worse. Crying now, she knew she had to get to her parents’ room, where it was safe. She groped her way down the hall, her palms flat against the wall. Even the walls felt hot to the touch.

Then she saw him, standing in front of his bedroom. He wasn’t moving. She wanted to cry that she was so glad to see him, knowing soon she’d be safe in his arms.

“Daddy!” she cried, her voice cracking in the dry heat. She stumbled toward him. He turned but she could barely see him through the smoke. She reached out to him.

Instead of grabbing her hand, he turned in the opposite direction and fled. Carson’s last vision of him was his back disappearing in the smoke as he ran down the stairs.

She dropped to her knees, crying and coughing. She couldn’t call his name; her throat was too raw. All she could think to do was to follow him. She crawled to the stairs. Sparks were flying everywhere. It hurt so bad when they burned her skin, like sharp teeth biting her. She crawled as fast as she could to the stairs. At last she saw that the front door was open. A man in a big hat was standing there.

“Daddy,” she cried, but it came out more as a cough. But
the man in the big hat heard her and ran up the stairs and scooped her up in his arms. She buried her face against his rubbery coat as he carried her outdoors.

Suddenly the air was cooler and didn’t burn her skin, though it still hurt to breathe. She coughed again and blinked open her eyes. A lady took her from the big man’s arms and was carrying her to a red truck. She smiled at her, but Carson was afraid and cried for her father.

“He’s all right,” the nice lady told her. “He’s right over there. See him?”

Carson looked to where the woman pointed. She saw him kneeling on the grass. He was all dirty and his body was bent, with his face in his hands like he was praying. Only he wasn’t praying. He was crying.

She reached for him.
Here I am, Daddy,
she wanted to tell him.
Don’t worry about me, I’m here
. But her throat hurt too badly to talk and the nurse was carrying her farther away from him into the little red truck. The nice lady laid her on a cot with clean white paper on it and she was saying things like how everything was going to be all right.

“I want my mommy,” Carson croaked.

The nurse’s face stilled and she had that
uh-oh
look in her eyes that told Carson something bad had happened. Then she put a plastic cup over Carson’s mouth and told her it would help her to breathe.

“You just rest, sweetheart,” the woman told her. “I’m going to take good care of you. Don’t you worry. Everything’s going to be all right.”

But Carson didn’t feel like everything was going to be all right. She felt a terror engulfing her, squeezing her heart,
that was worse than the evil smoke in the house. And she was afraid.

Carson coughed and gasped for air, opening her eyes and staring wildly into the night while her heart beat hard in her chest. For a frightening moment she didn’t know where she was. Then, as her heart rate settled, she heard the lapping of the water and felt the rocking of the dock and remembered she was outdoors, at Sea Breeze, on the floating dock.

She struggled to sit up, her head reeling, and wiped her face with her palms. She felt hot and afraid, like she was still trapped in the blinding smoke. She’d remembered that terrible night of the fire—remembered it like it was yesterday. It was so vivid, she could almost feel the burning of the heat and sparks on her skin. Had she tucked it far into some dark corner so she’d never have to face it again? Why had she blocked out that memory?

Then, with a sudden chill, she knew why. She closed her eyes and saw again her father’s back running down the stairs. He’d left her there, in the fire. He abandoned his child to die, just so he could make it out of the house faster, saving himself. What kind of father did that? What kind of a man? Carson felt a fierce stab of betrayal. Throughout her childhood she’d stuck by his side. Every day, he’d told her that he loved her.

It was all just lies. How could he have loved her if he’d abandoned her to burn to death? Then, with a bitter twist
of the knife, she realized that abandonment was what he’d practiced all his life.

Carson struggled to her feet. Her whole body felt hot, as though she were back in the fire. She picked at her sweaty clothes. They were soaked and sticky. She needed to cool down. The lights appeared a little more blurry, and the dock seemed to rock a bit more strongly. She slipped off her T-shirt and unzipped her shorts and kicked them off beside her flip-flops. Teetering at the edge of the dock, she stared into the water. The blackness called to her. With a push, she dove in.

The water was blessedly cold. She kicked her legs and pulled her sopping hair back. She felt oddly weak, so she did the breaststroke, flexing her legs like a frog. She trusted her swimming, always strong and sure, and started off toward the next closest dock. There weren’t boats cruising by this late at night, and it felt safe to stretch her arms and swim farther out.

After several strokes, she noticed that the next dock was farther away, not closer. She’d gone too far out. The current was carrying her in the wrong direction. Turning her head from left to right, she focused on her own dock and stroked toward home. But the current was a steady and powerful force. She told herself not to panic. She knew this patch of water like the back of her hand. But she also knew she’d been stupid to come out here alone. At night. Especially after drinking.

Focus,
she ordered herself, and pushed to stroke harder. But her arms felt so weak and, gasping, she swallowed a mouthful of water. She had to stop, dog-paddling as she
choked and spat out water, trying to catch a breath. Oh, God, now she was in trouble. She could feel her heart begin to race and she started stroking again, this time without precision. She wasn’t trying to get back to the dock anymore. She just wanted to make it to the muddy hammock so she could climb out. She stroked as hard as she could but she couldn’t make any headway. She was like a piece of driftwood in the mighty current, being dragged to the open harbor.

Dora stood on the back porch and sipped her coffee as she looked out at the cove. It was an inky night. Moving clouds were obscuring the moon and stars.
What a night,
she thought, yawning. It had taken hours to get Nate to sleep. He’d been withdrawn all day, the poor little guy. He wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t leave his room. Dora didn’t know what could have compelled Carson to grab him like that. Hadn’t she told her that Nate didn’t like to be touched? With all that had happened to that darn dolphin, he was beside himself. She wished that dolphin had never come to the dock. They had enough family issues to deal with without adding a wild dolphin to the mix.

Though, she thought with a pang of guilt, she shouldn’t have said what she did to Carson. That was mean and thoughtless. Mamaw was upset, Lucille had given her the evil eye, and Harper wouldn’t talk to her. Dora hadn’t meant to be cruel. She’d blurted it out without thinking. She’d been so mad, she’d seen red. Like Carson had been.
She’d wanted to hurt Carson the way Carson had hurt her son.

A shadowy figure out on the dock caught her attention. It was a woman. Peering out, Dora recognized Carson. So that’s where she was. She’d gone off to work around noon and no one had seen her since.