I closed my eyes again and worked the bandana between the tips of my fingers. I was buying time, trying to decide what I would tell this man and how. It was true that I could see things sometimes. Glimpses of a life, under the right conditions. But mostly I felt afraid for him. He would get bad news, a phone call in the middle of the night. A police officer on his porch, his hat in his hands. A feeling crept into my throat, a fullness, a pressure, like I had eaten too much too soon. It was hard to swallow, my throat raw like I’d been crying. I touched my fingers to my neck. The skin was tender, hot.

I looked at the uncle to see if he had noticed, but he was staring out the window. At the empty boardwalk, maybe, or the seagulls swooping out over the beach. The feeling was gone as quickly as it had come. I didn’t really believe in spirits, in signs. But that feeling seemed like an omen. I didn’t need to be a psychic to know that something bad had happened to Julie Zale.

JANES 1 AND 2

THE WOMEN PASS THE LONG days and nights working the past over, studying the mistakes they made, the bad luck that reached in like a hand and turned them away from the lives they should have had.

Both Jane #1 and Jane #2 are Jersey Girls. Not just Jersey Girls, but South Jersey Girls. It’s a small state, but any Jersey Girl will tell you there is no comparing a girl from Cherry Hill to a girl from Ramsey to a girl from Sea Isle City. Local girls are known for the snap of their gum, the way their skin is always slick with coconut-scented tanning oil. They call water wooder and don’t mind the grit of sand in their bedsheets. Jane #2 is old enough to be Jane #1’s mother: forty-eight years to her eighteen. But they were the same in the ways that count: They’re from here, shaped by this place. They both had jobs on the boardwalk when they were young. Jane #2 sold ride tickets down at Steel Pier. Jane #1 worked at the caramel corn stand and would snack on the hot popcorn all day until she was dizzy with sugar and the caramel left a tacky mass on her back teeth. They both loved driving along the back bays with the windows rolled down, and when a Springsteen song came on they cranked the volume as loud as it would go. Bruce sang about girls just like them. Girls whose beauty was too outsized for their dingy hometowns, whose passions were too big for their tiny little lives.