I watched her walk down the boardwalk huddled into herself, looking like a skinny kid, like girls I remembered from elementary school, the ones whose slight size meant they could jump the farthest off of the swings. I wished I had a blanket, a towel—I would run after her and throw it over her shoulders. As I turned away, another cat crossed my path, a brief streak of white-and-gray tail, and my exhaustion caught up with me, weighed on all my limbs. I was so tired of being afraid. And yet, it seemed that was all this summer was: learning all of the ways that dread could creep into my days.

DEBORAH

ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON IN Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, Deborah Willis’s phone rings. She is in the middle of canning the strawberries she’s grown in her garden, stewing jam on the stove. The air in the kitchen is humid, thick with the sweetness of strawberries and sugar. Deborah has pink stains across the front of her shirt. A mound of stems sits on the counter, and it is their peppery, woody smell that she will come to associate with this day, this call. The way it filled her lungs with something like dirt.

“Hello,” she says, licking strawberry pulp from her thumb. “Hello?” She’s surprised. No one ever calls on the house line anymore. She can smell the jam starting to burn and stretches the cord so she can reach over to the stove and turn the heat down, just a notch. Maybe she was too late to answer. Maybe the caller had hung up already.

She is about to hang the phone back on the hook when a voice says, “Mom?”

She sets her spoon down on the stove, wonders if she conjured the voice: she associates the house phone with Georgia, the vintage blue rotary dial Georgia loved as a girl. “Mom?” the voice asks again. She can’t say anything yet—she knows that she is about to cry and the words will come out wrong, crimped by emotion: anger, gratitude, joy, sorrow, all rolled together. “Mom, are you there?”

“I’m here,” she stammers. I’m always here, she thinks.

“Mom, I … I was wondering if I could come home.”

Deborah grips the curly cord of the phone, as though she could use it to hang on to her daughter, to pull her closer that way. “Of course you can. Are you in trouble? Do you need money? Where are you?”

“Atlantic City,” she says. “I can take a bus tomorrow. I have enough money for the ticket.”

“What time?” Deborah says. She thinks of the last time she saw Georgia, three years ago. The scabs on her cheeks. Her bleeding, bitten-down nails.

“I would get into Scranton at seven.”