Val and Danny were gone, and night descended. Sherri had strange dreams that she was in Arthur’s cottage with Johnnie and Ron. Arthur was outside, but she wouldn’t let him in. He knocked on the doors and banged on the windows. “Let me help you,” he said. He even tried climbing down through the chimney and up through the crawl space. She awoke to the sound of Val banging on their door because in her rush to leave she’d forgotten her keys.

“Look,” she said, excited. She turned in to the hall and pushed something big and heavy into their room. “It’s too bad you missed the event. Bob Hope gave us mopeds! We each got one. Ryan O’Neal was there! Oh, and these came for you. I told Ola I’d deliver them.”

Val set a bouquet of flowers on Sherri’s bed like a consolation prize. The overpowering scent of white lilies cut through Sherri’s fogginess. Arthur had inadvertently bookended her whole experience with the “photographers.” She pulled the note card off the stem:

All being like the moonflower is dissatisfied

For the dark kiss that the night only gives,

And night gives only to the soul that waits in longing

And in that only lives.

—F. T. Prince.

My soul (and the rest of me) waits in longing. Remember me. Remember us. Soon.

—Arthur

The sentiment of the poem combined with the sweet odor of the lilies brought Sherri back to herself, rescued her from a bitterness so tangible she knew it might otherwise stick with her forever. She hated knowing that she was an easy mark and that she meant nothing to those men. She meant something to Arthur. She couldn’t shake the spooky feeling that he was tuned in to her on a cosmic wavelength. Even from a distant continent he’d somehow sensed that, more than ever, she needed to know that she mattered.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It was the last week of August, and Arthur was due back after a summer that had surely been more refined than her own. Sherri imagined that he’d spent his months away in museums and cathedrals, while she’d shot like a metal ball rolling through the playfield in the pinball machine, wildly careening off the bumpers. While Arthur sipped expensive wine in vineyards, Sherri worked as many shifts as Gloria would give her. When she wasn’t working, she partied, throwing back shots of Rumple Minze and Jägermeister. After her incident with that awful Mr. Saito she did her best to lose herself, and to never, ever be alone.