a son, that’s you. And then it rained and my umbrella was in the car, but that’s life, Carl said.”

She sipped my apple juice as the nurse left the room, then told me about her wisdom teeth and the chocolate cake on her thirtieth birthday.

It wasn’t everything, but it was a start.

.     .     .     .     .

Oddly it was Clyde who drove me home.

Someone (Uncle Dan? Amy?) had dropped off dry clothes while I’d slept, and after I signed the discharge sheet and headed for the exit, I saw him waiting by the door in his policeman blues.

“Come on, I’ll give you a lift,” he said.

“You’re working for Uber now?”

He ignored me as I followed him into the parking lot, his cop cruiser double-parked in a handicapped spot. I waited for his big hand to clamp on my head and shove me in back behind the safety glass, but he spared me the indignity and opened the passenger door.

“Wow, shotgun. Who’s Starsky and who’s Hutch?”

He flipped me the bird and sat behind the wheel.

“While you were lying in the ER thinking up stupid shit to say, I was doing police work. Real work that makes a difference.” He started the engine but didn’t pull away. Instead he reached across the console, grabbed a tablet, and started swiping. “I know who slit your tires.”

In the fog of almost drowning, I’d forgotten about it, but it came back fast and hard, a nervous flutter circling my gut.

“So now we know who the stalker is,” he said. “You thought those cameras were a dumb idea, and honestly, I thought it was all in Amy’s head, but she was right. Take a look.”

He showed me the screen, grainy night footage of Amy’s house, a ground-level point of view of a dark figure moving up the driveway, the rental car’s tires about to meet their fate. For a moment all I thought was, Captain Sick! He’s real!

“Recognize her?”

“Her?”

He tapped the screen until a different angle appeared, the dark figure kneeling by the back fender, screwdriver in hand. The scraggly blonde hair seemed familiar, but the image was too blurred until Clyde zoomed in, and I spotted the tattoo on the back of her neck: a black crow with an arrow through its heart.

“Jesus.”

“She’s about as far from Jesus as you can get,” Clyde said.

I stared at the screen, watching Laura Carpenter puncture the back tires, the screwdriver jabbing into the rubber like a prison-yard shank.

“I tracked her down, scared the living crap out of her,” Clyde said. “She lives in Long Branch now, shares a house with three other women. She wasn’t drunk, but I could see it in her eyes. Opioids. It’s a lot worse down here than people think. Do you want to press charges?”

The idea seemed ludicrous, considering my narcolepsy had cost her daughter her life.

“Of course not.”

“Good answer,” Clyde said. “Here’s what we’ll do. You’ll write her a check for a thousand bucks and give it to me. I’ll dummy up a restraining order and drop it off along with the check. That’ll keep her away. And this is something we never tell Amy.”

I could have fought him on the thousand bucks but was grateful that he’d taken charge. She’d probably endorse it with her standard fuck you, but wasn’t it deserved?

“Did she say anything about why? Or at least why now?”

“She said she was doing okay until she saw Amy at the mall, and everything came back, hit her hard. If she bought her goddamn panties at Wal-Mart instead of going to Victoria’s Secret the whole damn thing could have been avoided. But she saw Amy behind the register and flipped; she said it felt like twenty years ago, like her baby had just drowned. She gave some jumbled explanation about the stalking, but it didn’t make sense. And then she saw you show up. Too many ghosts, that’s my guess. Sometimes people snap …it happens more than you think. If New Jersey Beach Patrol ever gets on the air, we’ll never run out of story ideas, that’s for goddamn sure.”

He shut down the tablet, Laura’s image disappearing as the screen turned black. For a moment it felt like I was underwater again, the tide pulling me down.

“The sooner I get her that check, the faster this thing ends. Let’s get you back to the hotel.”

He put the car in drive and rolled toward the exit. “Remember, we never tell Amy about this. Right?”

I nodded. “Thanks for taking care of this, Clyde.”

“Serve and protect,” he said, and shook his head. “This whole thing …what a goddamn shame.”

Though I’d once written a play about it that had earned Frank Rich’s raves in The New York Times, Clyde had captured it best in his four simple words: what a goddamn shame.

There was nothing else to say. We drove back to town in silence.

-22-

Two days later, I was alone at the Jaybird making a few pies before opening when I heard a knock on the front glass.

My instincts said ignore it, but after two more knocks I heard my name, a familiar voice calling from the sidewalk, and when I left the kitchen to check it out, I saw Kelly standing by the entrance, a small backpack slung over her shoulder as she peered through the glass.

I blinked, made sure I wasn’t imagining it, then unlocked the door.

“Really, Donnie? You leave me a message that you lost your phone, but you don’t mention that you almost drowned?”

Even under the stark lighting of the Jaybird she looked beautiful, her hair tied back, her skin glowing, her lips curled in that playful Kelly smile. She put down her bag and pecked my cheek.

“It was only twelve seconds,” I said. “You need to hit thirty to earn your drowning badge.” My fingers were sticky with mozzarella, and I grabbed a towel and rubbed them clean. “Who told you?”

“Your uncle called. He made it sound really bad.”

“He’ll do that when he wants you

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