Vacations from Hell

The sea at night is black as ink. If I were a ghost flying over it, I wonder, could I see my face in its mirrored surface? It pounds onto the beach, sending up white froths of spray, as I slip through the gate of Mrs. Palmer’s house and into the garden.



Everywhere the shards of glass slice up out of the sand like shark fins slicing through water. The air here by the ocean is thick and hot to breathe. I raise the nine-iron in my hand; it feels heavy and solid. I bring it down hard against the nearest shard, half expecting the club to bounce off it. But the glass shatters, spiderwebbing out into a million cracks. A white puff of smoke rises from it, like an exhalation of cigarette smoke, and dissipates into the night air.



I stand there breathing hard, holding the club. And then I swing again, and again. The air is full of the lovely, silvery sound of shattering glass. A light goes on suddenly—the porch light of the house—stabbing into my eyes, but I keep swinging, bashing glass after glass after glass, until something seizes the other end of the nine-iron and it’s wrenched viciously out of my hand.



Mrs. Palmer is standing in front of me. She no longer looks perfectly put-together; her hair is damp and tangled, her eyes wide and wild. She’s wearing a long black dress, cap-sleeved, old-fashioned. She really does look like a witch. “What do you think you’re doing?” she half screams. “This is private property, my property—”



“These don’t belong to you,” I tell her. My voice is steady, but I can’t help backing up a step or two; my flip-flops crunch on the ground. “They’re souls.”



She gapes at me. “Souls?”



“Whatever you want to call them. The lives you’ve stolen. You put them in the mirrors. That’s where you keep them.”



Her voice is a snarl. “You’re crazy.”



“I saw you do it,” I tell her. “I saw what you did to Evan. I was looking through the window.”



Her mouth opens, and then I see her eyes go to the key in my left hand. “Damaris,” she says. “That woman is a meddler. She never knows when to stay out of other people’s business.”



“I want you to leave my stepbrother alone,” I tell her. “I want you to let Evan go.”



Despite her anger her red lips curl into a smile. “Damaris must have told you it’s not that easy.”



“If you don’t let him go, I’ll come back—I’ll smash the rest of these—I’ll tell everyone where you’re keeping the souls, and then everyone will know—”



“Your stepbrother,” she says. “He used to talk about you. He knew you had a crush on him. He said he found it amusing.” The anger is gone from her voice now; it has a lilt to it, the way she’d talked to Evan when she offered him the bottle of juice. “You were a joke to him, Violet. So why are you putting so much of your energy into saving him now?”



It hurts, what she says. I tell myself she’s lying, but it hurts anyway, a sharp sting, like getting lemon juice in a shallow cut. I take a breath. “I love him. Damaris said he could only be helped by someone who loves him—”



“But he doesn’t love you,” she says. “That is how men are. They take the love you give them and they twist it until it becomes a stick to beat you with.” She glances at the club in her hand; her look is vicious. “Tell me I have no right to even the score, Violet. Tell me you wouldn’t do the same in my place. Men are a curse on women’s lives and you know it.”



In my mind I see Phillip and my mother at his feet, picking fruit off the ground with bleeding fingers. “I don’t know what I think about men,” I say. “But Evan is only a boy. He isn’t good or evil or anything else yet. He shouldn’t be punished.”



“He will grow up to be like the rest of them,” says Mrs. Palmer, who murdered her husband in his own bed. In a distant sort of voice, she continues, “They all do. That is why I will not give him up.”



I think of Anne Palmer’s husband, the man with the stick. “Damaris said you wouldn’t give Evan up for nothing,” I say. “But he’s young and weak. What if I could find you something even better?”



Against the darkness, like the sudden, startling gleam of a firefly’s light, I see Anne Palmer’s smile. “Tell me,” she says.



I wake in the morning to bright sunlight and the sound of birds. I lie in my netted bed for a long series of moments. It would be easy to think that last night never happened, any of it, but when I turn my head, I see the plastic bottle sitting on my bedside table next to the alarm clock. The pale liquid inside it shines with a rainbow slipperiness, like an oil slick.