The Fires Beneath the Sea (A Novel)

Chapter 2

 2.  

Cara woke up as dawn was breaking, a faint light leaking through her window blinds. It felt quiet and let down, the way it always did after a big rain, with the slow drip-drip-drip of water off branches and leaves.

She crossed the cool bedroom floor in her bare feet. Her room was at the back of the house, on the bay side, which meant she had a view—over the porch roof that sloped down beneath her window, through some feathery branches—of the water and the sky across Cape Cod Bay. If you flew straight inland, her mother had once told her, you would see Plymouth Rock and the fake Mayflower ship they kept moored there for tourons.

Max’s room faced south and Jax’s north; her parents used to sleep in the big single room of the attic, right under the sloped roof, with a big glass skylight overhead. Her mother liked to lie in bed and look up at the stars.

She walked lightly down the stairs. Rufus was curled up on the runner in the front hall; he’d kept a vigil there every night since her mother had disappeared.

“Come on, Roof,” she said. She snapped on his leash and slipped into her flip-flops.

They walked along the pretty residential streets bordering the marshes till they got to a lonely sand road that wound past a small, reedy shellfish cove. The ground was covered with tiny fiddler crabs that skittered into their holes in great waves. She and her mother used to walk Rufus here together; her mother had pointed out those tiny crabs, as well as the big osprey nests on their manmade posts rising out of the wetlands.

There was no one around, and the sand was wet from the rain. She listened to the crunch, crunch, crunch of her sneakers across its grainy surface.

“OK, Rufus,” she said finally, and unclipped the leash. At the end of the road, sticking up on the other side of a dune, was a modern-looking beach house that was all glass and sharp angles. It was a rental property, and outside the high season it was mostly empty. “Run!”

In the cool of the morning she watched him go—further and further away, till he rounded the bend of the dune and was lost to view.

Then she started walking after him, her mind wandering. Her dad had said hurricanes to the south were bringing the storms, and this was hurricane season. He said the hurricanes were getting bigger these days than they used to be, growing more powerful and coming more often.

She felt a shiver of foreboding.

“Rufus!” she called.

The sun slanted off the roof of the big modern house as she shaded her eyes to squint at it. Maybe, she thought, he’d found something at the waterline, a fish to gnaw or a crab to paw.

But then he reappeared, running. Nearer, nearer, nearer, and she saw he was wagging his tail. He looked happier than he had the whole summer. And just as she’d thought, he was carrying some kind of bone in his mouth.

“Hi again, boy,” she said, and rubbed behind his ears.

Instead of worrying the bone, he dropped it in front of her. It was actually a piece of wet driftwood.

“I don’t want that, Roof,” she said. “I don’t chew on sticks like you do. Remember?”

He nosed it toward her feet and knelt, paws together, in front of it. Tail still wagging, tongue out.

“You want me to throw it?”

She picked it up and tossed; he wheeled and fetched it.

“Let’s keep walking,” she said. “We can play fetch when we get home.”