Just After Sunset by Stephen King

Her father called her every second day, but stopped asking if she wanted him to “yank free” and come on down after she told him that when she was ready to see him, she’d tell him so. In the meantime, she said, she wasn’t suicidal (true), not even depressed (not true), and she was eating. That was good enough for Rusty. They had always been straight up with each other. She also knew that summer was a busy time for him—everything that couldn’t be done when kids were crawling all over the campus (which he always called the plant) had to be done between June 15 and September 15, when there was nobody around but summer students and whatever academic conferences the administration could pull in.

Also, he had a lady friend. Melody, her name was. Em didn’t like to go there—it made her feel funny—but she knew Melody made her dad happy, so she always asked after her. Fine, her dad invariably replied. Mel’s as dandy as a peach.

Once she called Henry, and once Henry called her. The night he called her, Em was pretty sure he was drunk. He asked her again if they were over, and she told him again that she didn’t know, but that was a lie. Probably a lie.

Nights, she slept like a woman in a coma. At first she had bad dreams—reliving the morning they had found Amy dead over and over again. In some of the dreams, her baby had turned as black as a rotten strawberry. In others—these were worse—she found Amy struggling for breath and saved her by administering mouth-to-mouth. They were worse because she woke to the realization that Amy was actually the same old dead. She came from one of these latter dreams during a thunderstorm and slid naked from the bed to the floor, crying with her elbows propped on her knees and her palms pushing her cheeks up in a smile while lightning flashed over the Gulf and made momentary blue patterns on the wall.

As she extended herself—exploring those fabled limits of endurance—the dreams either ceased or played themselves out far below the eye of her memory. She began to awaken feeling not so much refreshed as unwound all the way to the core of herself. And although each day was essentially the same as the day before, each began to seem like a new thing—its own thing—instead of an extension of the old thing. One day she woke realizing that Amy’s death had begun to be something that had happened instead of something that was happening.

She decided she would ask her father to come down—and bring Melody if he wanted to. She would give them a nice dinner. They could stay over (what the hell, it was his house). And then she’d start thinking about what she wanted to do with her real life, the one she would soon resume on the other side of the drawbridge: what she wanted to keep and what she wanted to cast away.

She would make that call soon, she thought. In a week. Two, at the most. It wasn’t quite time yet, but almost. Almost.

–4–

Not a very nice man.

One afternoon not long after July became August, Deke Hollis told her she had company on the island. He called it the island, never the key.

Deke was a weathered fifty, or maybe seventy. He was tall and rangy and wore a battered old straw hat that looked like an inverted soup bowl. From seven in the morning until seven at night, he ran the drawbridge between Vermillion and the mainland. This was Monday to Friday. On weekends, “the kid” took over (said kid being about thirty). Some days when Em ran up to the drawbridge and saw the kid instead of Deke in the old cane chair outside the gatehouse, reading Maxim or Popular Mechanics rather than The New York Times, she was startled to realize that Saturday had come around again.

This afternoon, though, it was Deke. The channel between Vermillion and the mainland—which Deke called the thrut (throat, she assumed)—was deserted and dark under a dark sky. A heron stood on the drawbridge’s Gulf-side rail, either meditating or looking for fish.

“Company?” Em said. “I don’t have any company.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Pickering’s back. At 366? Brought one of his ‘nieces.’” The punctuation for nieces was provided by a roll of Deke’s eyes, of a blue so faded they were nearly colorless.

“I didn’t see anyone,” Em said.

“No,” he agreed. “Crossed over in that big red M’cedes of his about an hour ago, while you were probably still lacin’ up your tennies.” He leaned forward over his newspaper; it crackled against his flat belly. She saw he had the crossword about half completed. “Different niece every summer. Always young.” He paused. “Sometimes two nieces, one in August and one in September.”

“I don’t know him,” Em said. “And I didn’t see any red Mercedes.” Nor did she know which house belonged to 366. She noticed the houses themselves, but rarely paid attention to the mailboxes. Except, of course, for 219. That was the one with the little line of carved birds on top of it. (The house behind it was, of course, Birdland.)

“Just as well,” Deke said. This time instead of rolling his eyes, he twitched down the corners of his mouth, as if he had something bad tasting in there. “He brings ’em down in the M’cedes, then takes ’em back to St. Petersburg in his boat. Big white yacht. The Playpen. Went through this morning.” The corners of his mouth did that thing again. In the far distance, thunder mumbled. “So the nieces get a tour of the house, then a nice little cruise up the coast, and we don’t see Pickering again until January, when it gets cold up in Chicagoland.”

Em thought she might have seen a moored white pleasure craft on her morning beach run but wasn’t sure.

“Day or two from now—maybe a week—he’ll send out a couple of fellas, and one will drive the M’cedes back to wherever he keeps it stored away. Near the private airport in Naples, I imagine.”

“He must be very rich,” Em said. This was the longest conversation she’d ever had with Deke, and it was interesting, but she started jogging in place just the same. Partly because she didn’t want to stiffen up, mostly because her body was calling on her to run.

“Rich as Scrooge McDuck, but I got an idea Pickering actually spends his. Probably in ways Uncle Scrooge never imagined. Made it off some kind of computer thing, I heard.” The eye roll. “Don’t they all?”

“I guess,” she said, still jogging in place. The thunder cleared its throat with a little more authority this time.

“I know you’re anxious to be off, but I’m talking to you for a reason,” Deke said. He folded up his newspaper, put it beside the old cane chair, and stuck his coffee cup on top of it as a paperweight. “I don’t ordinarily talk out of school about folks on the island—a lot of ’em’s rich and I wouldn’t last long if I did—but I like you, Emmy. You keep yourself to yourself, but you ain’t a bit snooty. Also, I like your father. Him and me’s lifted a beer, time to time.”

“Thanks,” she said. She was touched. And as a thought occurred to her, she smiled. “Did my dad ask you to keep an eye on me?”

Deke shook his head. “Never did. Never would. Not R. J.’s style. He’d tell you the same as I am, though—Jim Pickering’s not a very nice man. I’d steer clear of him. If he invites you in for a drink or even just a cup of coffee with him and his new ‘niece,’ I’d say no. And if he were to ask you to go cruising with him, I would definitely say no.”

“I have no interest in cruising anywhere,” she said. What she was interested in was finishing her work on Vermillion Key. She felt it was almost done. “And I better get back before the rain starts.”

“Don’t think it’s coming until five, at least,” Deke said. “Although if I’m wrong, I think you’ll still be okay.”

She smiled again. “Me too. Contrary to popular opinion, women don’t melt in the rain. I’ll tell my dad you said hello.”

“You do that.” He bent down to get his paper, then paused, looking at her from beneath that ridiculous hat. “How’re you doing, anyway?”

“Better,” she said. “Better every day.” She turned and began her road run back to the Little Grass Shack. She raised her hand as she went, and as she did, the heron that had been perched on the drawbridge rail flapped past her with a fish in its long bill.

Three sixty-six turned out to be the Pillbox, and for the first time since she’d come to Vermillion, the gate was standing ajar. Or had it been ajar when she ran past it toward the bridge? She couldn’t remember—but of course she had taken up wearing a watch, a clunky thing with a big digital readout, so she could time herself. She had probably been looking at that when she went by.