Angie’s bare left foot, finally warm, trailed in the tea-brown water of Toms River, which had borne the ocean’s cold through Barnegat Bay. She grasped with studied care the weathered gray plank on which she sat, the wood deceptively smooth but full of splinters, as she’d discovered too often before learning to beware. Evening tide was rising to her left. Tips of waves burped through a rotted hole in the bulkhead and pooled over smooth gray pebbles in a sand sinkhole to her right. She dipped the big toe of her right foot into the clear pool, and her foot tensed and jerked, toes white and curled under from the cold. Left foot warm in three feet of brown river; right foot cold in a puddle of clear river—same water; weird, she thought. Gusts of saltwater breeze teased the cilia in her nose and swept her purple bangs into her eyes. Facing the lowering sun, she sneezed.
::
On the front porch, Deirdre was fighting to beat her own Hearts record—thirty-five straight wins—and crapped out on twenty-nine. Where was Angie this time? Too worried and pissed to pass time with FreeCell, Deirdre cast about for something else to do. She really should tweak her article, “Loving Your Teen,” due next Friday to a popular psychology magazine, but she moved the laptop to the side table with finality. At her feet, their fluffy American Eskimo puppy raised its head expectantly. Leaning back into the tall rocking chair, Deirdre scanned the panorama of and through the three walls of floor-to-ceiling screens: sparse clouds over the river a block away, which Victorians and Eastern pines blocked from view, but no Angie, no pink bike. Nobody in sight. Deirdre rocked and waited and feared and fumed.
::
The SUV driver faced upriver, the better to observe the purple-haired girl. Salty sweat, which soon stung his steel-gray eyes too much to ignore, ran from his stubby white crew-cut down behind the binoculars. He rubbed his eyes hard, blinked, rubbed them again, smoothed his scraggly wild eyebrows, and wiped the sweat onto navy twill pants, caked with dried dirt from baggy knees down to muddy Dockers boat shoes. He zoomed in on the girl’s tan face with its glowing skin, perfect but for a zit on her chin, her innocent eyes and moving lips lost in what could only be a love song. Zoomed closer, down—slender, a blossoming child, so near the cusp of virginity lost.
::
The screen door whined and slammed behind her. Deirdre knelt painfully to plant the cheery orange Gerbera daisies in the garden bordering the walk and wraparound front porch. She shifted her weight to her right rump, legs askew behind, and reached for a pot. Her limbs recognized their position before her brain did. The memory surfaced and popped like a champagne bubble; her body was mimicking the lame young woman in Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. She shifted her legs out of Christina’s pose and pulled her hair back—into Christina’s windswept, ponytail style.
The high wind on the river a block away swayed the tops of oaks but diffused past pines and summer homes into a gentle breeze that rustled leaves of the Andromeda bush between Deirdre and the porch steps. God knows how it thrived, their “miracle bush.” It had sprouted from the low stump of a dead Eastern pine when she was Angie’s age. What was the Andromeda myth? Something about a princess chained to a rock. She couldn’t remember why just then because her body superheated. Hot-flash sweat dripped from hairline to chin and off, down to her green T-shirt now dotting with wet. In the winter, she’d rush outside. In the summer, she’d flee inside to ceiling fans and air conditioning. She rocked hard twice for momentum to rise, butt in air, no grace at all, and limped up the steps through the screen door, all to fight with the door between porch and living room. The bottom half, wood swollen with humidity, demanded a hard shove, which shot pain through Deirdre’s arthritic left hip. Damn door, damn hip, damn sweat. TV blare assaulted her ears, and AC spilled past, cooling the air quicker than her body. Damn Angie and her disappearing acts. Deirdre wished she could stop caring because the love led to worry, then anger, even seconds of hate, and she didn’t want to hate or feel angry with Angie.
::
He zoomed in even closer with the binoculars, down to the gardenia henna tattoo above the teal tube top swaddling her small right breast, to the nub of her nipple, down to the khakis cut to booty-short length, so short their fringe must surely merge with stray strands of muff. A mink mound. Mount. Mother, may I, he asked, looking up and inward, hoping for permission before his crotch grew untoward and revealed his sin.
::
The wind picked up with the rising tide and swept strands of Angie’s long purple hair into her eyes, which indoors looked brown but here in sunlight sparkled with peridot facets in a sea of moss green. The curled end of her ponytail, bound high on her crown, tickled the tanned nape of her neck. She studied the waves. From upriver, crests collided in a rhythmic slap-smack this side of the channel marker—not the pounding crash of ocean surf, but a slap-smack like drunken applause catching on from the shore along the stretch of sandbar, known in town as the Point, marked fifty feet out into the river by a bobbing orange buoy.
::
The blaring TV hurt Deirdre’s ears, but her mother couldn’t hear much over the air conditioner, whose frosty air began to soothe Deirdre’s skin. The news anchorman announced yet another beheading of a kidnapped hostage and another American soldier blown to dismembered shreds in Afghanistan. And what the hell for, thought Deirdre. So their mothers can shrivel up like old corn husks, their freedom to love rammed down their throats by a plunger run amok. The hot flash waned, and she shivered. Where the hell was Angie this time? Deirdre made herself acknowledge that she wouldn’t be angry if she didn’t love Angie so much. Deirdre knew, of course, that she’d always feel warped by her own rape decades ago, and she hated the uncountable fears that resulted from that trauma, hated that no parents could ever completely protect their children, hated fearing that her fears for Angie could exploit her tortured imagination and transform into a tangible nightmare of a pedophile, a self-fulfilling prophecy. She must stop worrying. She must let go.
::
Mother, may I, please, he asked again, anxious now, a twill tent above his crotch. Begin, rasped the voice, so gravelly it conjured the image of a crone, complete with cast iron pot over sparking, spitting fire. Begin, my son. With his left hand holding the binoculars, his right reached to unzip, and he coaxed and rubbed and tugged as though his manhood could sprout to the cave of his open mouth. His buttocks tensed, and a spring in the seat whined with his violent motion.
::
The water, though shallow, was brown as strong tea, too dark to see much through. Below her left foot, shadows darted. Could be crabs hunting for a succulent toe snack. Angie lifted her foot from the river, watched the drips fall and ripple in the waves and dapple the gray plank on which she stretched, felt the warm air cool on her wet skin. Then she grabbed her sneakers and scanned the pebbly sand and grass as she hip-hopped around discarded crab pincers and holly leaves toward the lone picnic table on the secluded public lawn.
::
“Mom, have you seen Angie?” Deirdre called over the loquacious anchorman to her mother, Lavinia, a gray–haired woman whose legs lay crossed on the recliner’s footrest—legs streaked with lavender varicose veins. Wasted again, in more ways than one, Deirdre noted—the booze was now swallowed by a shrunken version of the image in memory from a year ago still dressed in pink shorts and piqué polo top. Lavinia didn’t stir. “Mom! Have You Seen Angie?” Deirdre’s anger with Angie shrank to make room for the old drunken shrew from whose womb she’d sprung, Mom, an image of decay and what Deirdre feared becoming.
::
Two-point penalty, pausing. He dropped the binoculars to the passenger seat and began anew. His power engorged. To spill thy seed is blasphemy—the shrew voice screeched, which clawed at his scabs, threatening new wounds. Gasping, he stopped and looked up at the purple-haired girl, who was distant unmagnified yet next now and soon.
::
At the picnic bench, Angie faced the sparkling bay but with peripheral vision saw sun glint off something amidst the trees. It was probably cellophane litter, but she pretended it was an admirer with a camera. She’d learned to entertain lenses two years ago, to play right to them yet tune people out and focus on counts of Color Guard routines—the thrill of saber, rifle, and flag tosses, pliés, sotés, and jazz runs through rows of marching band members. But such thoughts linked with her sweet Jono, so far away, and she forced herself to live in the moment, to concentrate on the thrill of cumulus clouds racing through blue sky to hover briefly between her and the sun until its beams broke through and warmed her world again.
::
Lavinia strained to clear her throat in the familiar, drawn-out, drowning gurgle. Her eyes remained lost in her crossword puzzle, but she acknowledged Deirdre’s question with one of her own. “Is she in her room?” She ignored the booming cable news channel. Over the years, she’d perfected her method by combining mental stimulation and sensory shutdown—the news worked; reruns of Get Smart did not. Now, oblivious to the noise, Lavinia could lose herself in the puzzle, rise to its challenge, master it, float above her species and the bed it had made, above the image of throwing her first baby and dislocating its hips, above the limp that Deirdre could have conquered if she’d truly tried, above the maternal instinct that now drove Deirdre’s concern, beyond thinking the unthinkable, out to where she, Lavinia, controlled the world—a world where she and she alone glowed without guilt. She reached for the whiskey, shining amber, ochre, and sienna in facets of cut glass. The ice cubes tinkled, but the TV drowned them out.
::
Angie lifted her acorn-tan legs under the picnic table and rested her heels on the opposite bench. Pressing her knees down to counts of thirty, she stretched her hamstrings to shape up for band camp, just two weeks away, then junior year and the All-States Championship at Giants Stadium. For the newspaper photographers, band parents, admirers, for the judges in the sky, she arched her spine, shoulders back, boobs out, flashed a confident smile, and exuded proper performance “-tude.”
::
In the beginning, the hag’s voice had preached, just like his mother, who in life had bound him to her like a goddess in her pulpit, in death like her mindless Zombie slave. He groaned as he climbed over the seat, bracing with his right elbow, still working his left hand and swelling into his power. With his right, he reached into the back cargo area for the loop of rope. His mind leapt ahead. In the tussle, strands of the girl’s purple hair would mat, and he’d sweep them back along her head like an angel’s wing. He raised his eyes to window level to spy on the girl, who thrust her chest out—right at him. He opened his mouth to tongue and suck her nipples, and his fluid surged. All things in MY time, the crone warned with dictatorial authority. Obedient, he turned back to his mission.
::
Angie’s third varsity letter, SATs, the prom, Jono with his shy smile, the protective feel of his big, gentle hand cupping her shoulder. Jono, a head taller than she, always stood to her right, the better to see her with his good eye. Angie swore both his eyes, darkest brown like rich earth, could see inside her. In her backyard last year, she was helping him with his counts so he wouldn’t collide with other band members on the field. The crackle of crisp, autumn leaves released a musty spice as they side-stepped through them with precision; their flexed left legs with pointed toes crossed in front of their right legs in fluid motion. The ripple and snap of her saffron silk flag, his awesome sax solo, their simultaneous “shiz”—their euphemism for “shit”—when she missed catching a quad, the rifle smashing through leaves and thumping butt-first into a pile of puppy poop, her “gak,” his “gross,” his deep rumble of laugh, the hunt for the pooper-scooper that ended in the garage, where dust motes swirled around his haloed head; his lips sought hers, and desire dampened her panties for the very first time.
::
Enter, the voice commanded. Afire with his foreplay, he yanked the pink-flowered panties in his mind to her knees and thrust himself in lest he spill his seed.
::
“She could have gone to the Bay Beach, but without a tag, I can’t imagine the lifeguard would let her stay. Unless the lifeguard’s a he, and he likes purple hair.” Deirdre waited for a response. Stupid move that—there wouldn’t be one—and when would she learn. Her mother’s pinched lips and furrowed brow whenever her granddaughter entered the room spoke well enough her opinion of purple hair, tube tops, and a mother who would permit such immorality—a mother who, at Angie’s age, rebelled passively and changed each morning into miniskirts stored in her locker at school. But what kind of a grandmother felt disdain for her granddaughter, her own children for that matter? Deirdre watched Lavinia swirl her third whiskey of the day, the cut glass reflecting the khaki light on the TV news screen. Watched her sip once, twice, and return the glass to the wet cork coaster.
::
This one would fight him, hard—all the better, all the more fun, his scrotum slamming between her thighs—but she would succumb like the rest, flushed and wet with sweat, to his power.
::
They’d practice again this fall, sweet Jono and her. But it was summer still, and Angie was passing time during the family’s annual shore trip, glowing warm in memories, anticipation, and sun. “In your gaze, I lost my place,” she half-hummed, half-sang, pining for Jono, who was off in Colorado at computer camp on some mountain where his cell phone wouldn’t work.
::
Deirdre sighed, bemoaning her fate as daughter to a lush, and winced upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Angie. The mussed sheets of Angie’s bed lay twisted but flat, not molded to svelte limbs of a sprawled teenager. Her husband’s mid-nap, air-grasping snore exploded from the adjacent room and ricocheted down the hall. Why Clark refused to get tested for sleep apnea once loomed as enigma, but she’d given up trying to understand and given up worrying that he’d stop breathing in his sleep. Given up long ago, before the Mideast mess, before their arrangement of separate sleeping quarters, before his guarded footfalls woke her in the night when he left Angie’s room. Did he think she wouldn’t hear? Did Angie love him too much to tell? Angie’s awakening face happy as she sang, hummed, each day into being. Could a mere child deceive so well? Or was it all nothing more than Deirdre’s morbid imagination? Did Clark only watch with love as their daughter slept, just as Deirdre had watched over the crib, pondering in joyful wonder her reason for living? Of course that was it. She wished she weren’t so suspicious and paranoid. The TV announcer boomed, but Deirdre couldn’t hear words clearly over Clark’s sucking gasp and the retort of old bedsprings when he lurched awake and fell back heavy into his nap. It sounded like the announcer said “Amber Alert.” Good God, not another.
::
The hag croaked the syllables like an ancient language: A-noin-teth. His seed exploded into the girl in his mind, not one drop spilt. No one could ever say he broke the rules.
::
Why couldn’t Angie come home before worry wrecked the day? Was it really too much to ask? Deirdre’s concern swelled into black clouds of anger, which she feared as much as her fear of her fears. Could her anger function as a beacon for evil, materializing itself into a physical body, committing travesties she’d never have been able to imagine if not for her rape and the court trial, their details as vivid as yesterday, which were bad enough without unexpected flares of horror on TV that further poisoned her mind before she could flail for the remote?
::
His hands sagged. He stretched and thudded his forehead into the metal door handle. The pen in his shirt pocket fell and rolled between the seats. This, the seventh day, he hungered to save another. He raised his eyes again to window level and the purple-haired girl at the lone picnic table and the curve of her thighs and the oh-so-narrow strip of fringed fabric at her crotch and the cave of anointing and the burst of his seed, no not yet, and the plan maybe puppies this time and the victory over flailing arms and legs you must make them angels in spite of themselves and the flimsy veil at her cave and the rip through protest and flesh and the rapture sucks his seed in surging ocean swells you are blessed and, no not yet, and the plan maybe candy this time suck me purple. Mother, may I again, he croaked. The girl’s perfect teeth would ring his pride like pearls.
::
“In your gaze, I lost my place,” Angie sang as she lost her place in the clouds, which stretched to mountains in Colorado and Jono and love.
::
Clark rolled over on the lumpy old mattress and sank again toward an elusive winged mermaid, ever out of reach, whose purple tail swished through wispy clouds, soared to stratosphere and stars.
::
From the head of the stairs, Deirdre called down to Lavinia, “Where is the Amber Alert? Does the pedophile behead his victims?”
Lavinia’s hazel eyes, diluted with age and the fluid hue of her whiskey sours, glanced up, startled, and returned to the printed cells of her crossword page. “What Amber Alert?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Deirdre swore under her breath at the foot of the stairs. She limped to the remote on her mother’s armrest and clicked the TV off. “I’m going out to look for her.”
Lavinia grabbed the remote and clicked the TV back on. “Aha!” She penciled letters into her crossword puzzle with a girlish glee, incongruous with her bony, age-spotted years yet oddly in harmony with her prissy-pink piqué.
“Bye,” Deirdre said.
“Um-hmm,” her mother mumbled, baffled already by the D joining 3-ACROSS and 6-DOWN.
::
He came in his mind, but his body still craved. Through the window, he ogled the old lady dressed in pink at the picnic table and her Hitlerian love and the lash of her forked tongue.
::
With the puppy as her shadow, Deirdre gathered her keys, glasses, and purse from the lace runner on the buffet. She glanced up at the mirror that spanned the wall and did her usual double take—shock at the mirror’s misportrayal. Her hair was white, still, and she’d forgotten to shave her brunette chin hairs this morning. Why did she feel thirty-five inside, an image visible only deep in the blue of her eyes, where her inner child was conspicuously missing today. Gone AWOL with Angie? Gone forever? Reaching for her white linen jacket draped on a dining chair, she changed her mind and left it. Had to get away from sordid news, the image in the mirror, her drunken mother, snoring Clark. Had to find Angie. Had to restore her inner child. Was she running away or running to? Both? And does a single soul give a crap? Surely not Clark, who she’d vowed to stand by in sickness and in health, in poverty and pride, in lust and limpness—vows she sorely regretted, yet she’d do it all again for sweet Angie.
::
He came in his mind, but his body still craved. Through the window, he craved culpable Clark, who flopped on the picnic table like a fish out of water and fluttered limp after purple tail.
::
Wanting no distractions, Deirdre left the puppy forlorn inside the back screen door. She backed out the driveway, past where the honeysuckle and sassafras used to grow, and mapped her circular itinerary: playground, gazebo, Bay Beach, library, marinas, Pavilion, deli, Point Beach, home. Not really home. The family shore house was a home away from home, but if ever given the option to click ruby heels, she would fly home to here, where peace always reigned, or used to anyway, back when she was thirty-five, pre-marriage, pre-child, when all seemed as it should be, the good old days, except for her mother.
::
He came in his mind, but his body still craved. Through the window, he craved angry Deirdre, who flailed at clouds of worry and hate that threatened to consume her, the picnic table, and the whole Point Beach.
::
Deirdre minded the speed limit rather than test her guardian angel like she’d done on 9/11, when she’d topped 85 speeding down Garden State Parkway from work to Angie’s school, too frantic to notice the clouds of dark smoke roiling and spewing on the eastern horizon. Today, though, she knew she was over-reacting in yet another manifestation of separation anxiety, which even Angie had mastered the first day of kindergarten. By contrast, Lavinia loved having the house to herself when the kids were in school, back in the Leave it to Beaver days, and she’d told them just that, often. How the hell did she think that made them feel, Deirdre wondered for the millionth time, and for the millionth time tossed the thought and 9/11 to the Garbage Bag of Crap in the back of her brain that leached down to her stomach and colon.
::
Neither Angie nor Jono told their parents of their dream: to provide humanitarian aid in the Mideast next summer. One person can make a difference, and two, so much more.
::
Annointeth my angels, my son, came the answer, her voice a whisper that ricocheted off crusted razors. He drooled in anticipation of foreplay and climax and all the wet, like at Massah and Meribah, the place of testing and quarreling, where Moses struck the rock at Horeb and water flowed for God’s chosen.
::
Deirdre cased the town. No luck at the playground, gazebo, or Bay Beach. Not a hint of pink bike or purple hair.
::
Angie wouldn’t tell because of her mother’s recurring nightmare. When she was four, she’d lain on the floor in the dark hallway, face pressed into carpet, to see her parents’ feet on either side of the corner of the bed that was closest to the door. Her mother was telling her father about Angie’s severed head lobbing from the nursery down the hall like a lopsided bowling ball bleeding on and careening off walls until it thudded into the corner by the hall closet door. Her mother’s sobbing. Her father’s comforting shushing. The whooshing of blood in her scarlet ears. She never told them she’d heard. She wouldn’t tell now.
::
His mind eclipsed with the sun as it lowered toward the tree-lined horizon. The girl with the purple hair was still there, her long neck ripe as prey.
::
On the straightaway toward the library, a dead bird lay in the road. Deirdre aligned the car so the tires wouldn’t squish it, but the gray dove, not dead, blinked awake from its sunny nap on the warm macadam. Too late to brake—STAY DOWN!—the dreaded thump. In the rearview mirror, downy under-feathers swirled like a mini-blizzard in August. A dove, of all creatures. Surely a sign, a bad omen. Where was Angie? Gone forever, the old fear fulfilled? The rerun of an empty future surged anew and as tangible as the library now passing on her right, where the absence of a pink Schwinn in the bicycle rack struck her as more real than the weathered siding of the building’s cedar-shake exterior. She would take a sabbatical at work for a while, or forever. Retire from life, wander disembodied in search of what was lost—from curtained window to curtained window to Angie’s marine-blue bedroom and its familiar and soothing visual pollution. Stuffed animals galore. Dusty puppets hanging from hooks in the ceiling awash with pastel, adhesive-backed, glow-in-the-dark stars. CDs strewn across the carpet coated with lint and dog fur. The puppy dreaming, paws jerking, in a sunspot on the unmade bed. Used tissues stuffed between the bed and wall. Wads of gum-wrapper foil behind the door. Sickeningly sweet incense lying heavy in the air and masking the rot of hidden fruit even the puppy couldn’t find. Forgotten dirty laundry crammed under the bed and host to tiny, crescent-shaped worms, some dead, some not.
Love your teen, my ass—the thought squeezed out before she could stop it. She slowed at every side street to scan both ways for an abandoned pink bike. Get a grip, Deirdre argued with herself, Angie has done this a million times before, and all worry is energy wasted. Yet this could be the time, she knew, and how could she live with the guilt if she didn’t worry, as though worry were a daily tithe, which if withheld exacted the ultimate price. She followed the bends of Ocean Avenue homeward through town toward the Point, no longer a swimming beach due to the annual cost of trucking in sand by the ton only for the river to steal it again. Deirdre braked hard at the sight of what might be purple hair beyond dune grass waving in the wind.
::
Muddy Dockers boat shoes approached Angie from behind, slow, measured, quiet save for the barely audible, locust-crisp crunch of parched grass in August lawn.
::
Angie jumped at the shadow emerging from behind her, birthing from the shoulder of her own shadow, a darker shade of brown than the August lawn. A halo of blinding sun obscured the face, and Angie stared at the feet, the dirty Dockers boat shoes, the navy twill pants sloughing puffs of silt like a dandelion shedding seeds on the breeze, like a whirr of downy feathers from a sacrificial dove.
“Hi, Mom,” Angie said. “How’d you get so filthy?”
“Hi, lovey. Just gardening,” Deirdre said, glancing down with alarm at the dirty figure she cut. She swatted dried dirt clods and dust from her pants and sat on the bench, neither too near nor too far from her daughter, who, true teen, had forbidden public displays of affection.
Angie tapped her palms and fingertips on the picnic table planks, worn gray and cracked by the damp salty air. Deirdre didn’t recognize the tune.
“Is it true that God loved us first so that we could love?” Angie asked, thinking this a good prelude to the postponable yet inevitable discussion of next summer’s plans.
From the mouths of babes, Deirdre thought, but she said only, “Yes,” not adding what she’d read in the latest issue of the psychology magazine—that hate can never exceed one’s capacity for love.
“Can we go to Seaside tonight?” Angie asked.
Deirdre watched the muscles in Angie’s forehead hover in anticipation between joy and scowl. The raucous noise of the amusement park and its flashing neon lights no longer appealed to Deirdre, but she didn’t want scowls to mar her daughter’s face. “We’ll see if your Daddy is up for a jaunt. We missed our annual carousel ride last year. I’d hate to miss it again.”
Angie smiled—whether because she knew she could wheedle her father into most anything or because she also loved the merry-go-round, Deirdre couldn’t be sure. She imagined stroking her daughter’s head, finger-combing her hair, plaiting her full purple mane into six braids, which she knew was the traditional ’do for brides in ancient Rome. “You’re the picture of peace.”
“This place is peace.” Angie squinted, pointed inland. “Look, Mom. The sun looks like an egg yolk.”
Shielding her eyes with one hand, Deirdre peered into the brilliance, west, upriver. The sun was falling on the Pine Barrens, its horizon so distant, the trees billowed like smoke. Closer, burnt black in silhouette, the tallest Loblolly treetop pierced the gold sac, which dribbled and deflated and purified the now steel-gray river with fire. A weight fell from her chest, yet all was not well—she still felt the absence of her inner child. Deirdre didn’t know whether to mourn. Trembling, she reached to stroke her daughter’s hair, which gleamed magenta in the setting sun.
—A previous version of this story is published in The Fifth Eye (Serving House Books, November 2016); author’s modified version appears here with her permission.
is the author of The Fifth Eye: A Collection of Fiction and Creative Nonfiction. She received her MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her work has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, and was a semifinalist for The Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction (Nimrod/Hardman).
McLean’s fiction appears in Perigee: Publication for the Arts, Fiction Week Literary Review, Serving House: A Journal of Literary Arts, and Pithead Chapel: An Online Journal of Gutsy Narratives, and is forthcoming in the inaugural issue of the FDU MFA Alumni Anthology. Her creative nonfiction appears in Winter Tales II: Women on the Art of Aging, in OH SANDY! A Humorous Anthology with a Serious Purpose (all profits of which benefit survivors of Hurricane Sandy), and in Runnin’ Around: The Serving House Book of Infidelity. Her interviews with ex-pat author Thomas E. Kennedy appear in The McNeese Review and Ecotone.