The Art of Floating by Kristin Bair O’Keeffe Page B

tremor in her middle. “Make them go away,” she’d whisper to Jilly.
    But if Jilly managed to shoo them off for a bit, they’d return within hours.
    stare
    wonder
    whisper
    Wind, critters, and teenagers kicked up gravel from the driveway, littering the sidewalk, and a couple of slats on the white fence busted from the weight of too many men leaning on them as they pontificated about what Odyssia Dane could be doing in there that she couldn’t come out and take proper care of things.
    stare
    wonder
    whisper
    Though the women got it right away and (mostly) forgave Sia for the neglect, the men couldn’t/wouldn’t/and-damn-it-shouldn’t-have-to tolerate sloth, even sloth induced by tragedy.
    stare
    wonder
    whisper
    Even Nils and Henry took a break from the search for their buddy to corner Jillian in the grocery store.
    â€œWhat the hell is happening in that house?” Nils asked.
    â€œIt’s crumbling,” Henry added.
    Unable to explain, Jillian just wagged her head at them, threw some money at the cashier who’d been eavesdropping from the canned soup aisle, and ran.
    stare
    wonder
    whisper
    When a storm gnawed a few shingles off the roof and spit them onto the road, Joe Laslow organized a coalition to do a little fix-it work on the house. “Enough is enough,” he told his wife, and then followed up with some cockamamie story about how mending the outside could somehow mend the inside, too, but his wife used the good common horse sense she’d been born with and stopped her husband and his cohorts just moments before they fired up the lawn mowers and uncapped the paint cans.
    â€œJoseph Michael Laslow,” Mimi said with ice in her voice, “you get your bossy ass home. There’ll be time for fixing this place up. If Odyssia Dane needs to fall apart, Odyssia Dane needs to fall apart. If her house has to fall with her, her house has to fall with her. There’s nothing you and these boys can do to prevent it.” And though Joe and the others didn’t quite understand how allowing something to fall down might in the end help to make it stronger, they gathered up their scythes and brushes and headed back toward town.
    After that, they went back to doing the only thing they could do:
    staring
    wondering
    whispering

CHAPTER 14
    As soon as Jilly’s car was out of sight, Sia stepped into her flip-flops and headed for the spot where she’d found Toad. She left a note on the counter that read,
Gone to beach. Back soon.
She didn’t know if he would be able to read it—maybe he only read German or Spanish or a dialect spoken only in three small villages in northern Slovenia that had only recently been preserved as a written language—but she didn’t know what else to do.
    The sun was higher now, pressed like a disk against a flat metallic sky. Though it was still quiet on the bay side, Sia knew that if she rounded the bend to the ocean side, moms and their little ones would be scattered here and there, splayed out under umbrellas with blankets, buckets, shovels, and coolers of juice drinks. The sand had already absorbed the day’s heat and was regurgitating it in heavy waves that threatened to swallow her, but she had to see if she’d missed anything, and she had to check before the tide came in. Maybe Toad had left something behind, something she hadn’t seen in the confusion of discovering him. That moment, and the minutes following it, had been simultaneously focused and blurred. She remembered every moment precisely but still, whenever she thought of it, the fish in her middle started twittering and she felt as if she were looking at the whole thing through a gauzy shroud.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    At the teepee, which marked the midway point between her house and the clam shack, Sia paused and poked her head inside. Clearly it had been built by older kids, strong kids who must have hauled the biggest logs from