Home, which has nothing to do with Suzanna, or with this version of yourself you’ve been experimenting with. Home, where you climb underneath the gingham coverlet and sleep.

JANES 1, 2, 3, AND 4

IT IS NEARING THE END of July and there has been no break in the heat. The women remember a time when heat like this was related to desire, a ripening of hunger, of want. The kind of heat that made you crave wet, juicy foods. Peaches whose juices dribbled down your forearms; cool, crisp watermelon; cherries that turned your mouth a sultry purple. Desire for feeling, too, to wear tank tops without a bra so that the fabric skimmed your nipples. For the cool water of the ocean sluiced between your legs, the shimmer of sweat collecting between the jut of your hip bones, the reassuring weight of a damp towel over your shoulders, like an embrace.

There is a sisterhood among them, these women in the marsh. Each time he brings another one, they understand what she has seen. His hatred of them, which he had once masked to look like love, or desire, or sometimes something they interpreted as fear. The way the pill he gave them made the edges of their vision go blurry and a strange halo of light appear around his head, so that he looked like an angel or a saint cast in stained glass. How they only saw him grit his teeth with the effort of it at the end, glance at the blocky sports watch on his wrist as though to count the seconds they had left, as their lungs burned and their limbs became so heavy and their thoughts were reduced to single words that filled their whole bodies: NO or OH or PLEASE. And then the blind, mute pain, the state beyond language, and after that there was only darkness left.

Fireworks have exploded over them, trails of sparks streaking through the sky. Then there was a memorial service for a young man who drowned in a boating accident, and his family carried candles and white carnations in the sea. For a moment the white heads of the flowers bobbed on the surface of the water. The next morning many of them washed up, a mess of wrecked petals or woody green stems stripped bare. The women shivered with jealousy. All of those footprints in the sand, those hands cupped protectively around flames.

The indifferent orange neon VACANCY sign of the Sunset Motel blinks weakly through the dark. The building is one of seven squat structures still standing along the Black Horse Pike. They were erected in a strip in the 1950s to accommodate the overflow of tourists pouring into the city on Eisenhower’s new highways, cheap and cheerful alternatives to the big hotels along the boardwalk. Pictures of these motels looking bright and sweet were stamped on postcards, sent to Grandma back in Allentown or Binghamton or Rego Park. Greetings from the Gateway to Atlantic City.