There is something engrossing in watching a beautiful woman eat ferociously—wolflike—salami grease and peach juice on her chin. I hadn’t seen her really eat in days, I realized. It was a relief. We all tried to conceal our interest, looking up to catch glimpses of her gluttony only every third time we desired to do so. I thought about her watching me eat in the Adirondacks—the journal entry about it, how that had been enjoyable for her. I didn’t know where she’d keep the journal at this new house, or if she’d brought it at all, and I felt lost without it. I longed to be let back into her mind.

William, stripped down to his diaper, fell asleep soon after lunch. We’d forgotten the beach umbrella and I couldn’t leave him out in the noonday sun, so I gathered four sun-bleached sticks and, twisting them down into the sand around his towel, tied Lonnie’s dress to their tops, making a shady canopy above his little form.

Carlow lit a thick joint and we all passed around Lonnie’s iced thermos of Pimm’s. Lonnie fell back on her towel, exhaling smoke. James and Carlow sat cross-legged on either side of her. No one moved for a long time. I watched the men. The weed was making it hard for me to see them as their proper ages. I watched them oscillate between two young children, shirtless and barefoot, dressed in navy shorts, and two half-naked feeble old men. I looked down at my own skinny legs, dotted with swollen mosquito bites, and realized this same dichotomy was true of myself as well. We were all lacking the center of our lives.

Though no one spoke, I also had the sensation we were sharing feelings, as if the location had transformed the three of us into some sort of hive mind. I could sense their lust and frustration. They had been distant with each other for a while now. I never saw them talk when Lonnie wasn’t around. I could feel their growing mistrust. There was a constant churning introspection in my brain, but also a sense of vacuity, like the process of melding our thoughts together slowed down the machinery. Only Lonnie was separate from this evolution, still singular and unparalleled, as esoteric as she’d been in the city.

Slowly, I stood and walked to the water, the sand hot on the arches of my feet. I imagined James and Carlow could feel the heat too. I was conscious of the untruth of this fantasy in surges, doubt drifting across my mind like the waves engulfing my feet at the shoreline and then receding. Each retreat filled me with dread. The ocean sucked back its water and took fragments of myself with it.

“Don’t leave me with these people,” I murmured when the tide returned. “I’m not like them.”