Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 125117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
But Truman knew Ash could do it, and he was here to help. The fact filled him with a deep and thrilling sense of satisfaction. He was excited to start. And beneath his anxieties, Ash seemed excited too. His eyes were lit with purpose, and he’d seemed to genuinely enjoy teasing Truman about his handwriting. (He’d called it a font.)
“I’ve gotta start cleaning up,” Ash said. “I need to stop at the store for some groceries before I go to my mom’s.”
“Do you cook for her every night?”
“Most nights. Well, lots of times she cooks, but I go over there and I bring the groceries.”
And just like that, the life drained out of Ash’s eyes, excitement and teasing replaced with his habitual weariness.
“Do you want some help?” Truman offered. “Or company?”
Ash looked pained.
“Never mind,” Truman said quickly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“It’s not that. It’s…she’s worse in the evenings, and sometimes she gets confused about who people are. It just might be disorienting.”
“I totally understand,” Truman said. Then he had an awful thought. “Does she know who you are in the evenings?”
“Sometimes.”
“Who does she think you are when she doesn’t know?”
“Um. Sometimes my dad. Sometimes her friend Mark. Sometimes she doesn’t know who I am and she tells me to get out of the house.”
Ash’s low voice got tight at the end of his sentence. Truman couldn’t imagine how painful it would be for your own mother to think you were a stranger.
Ash obviously took amazing care of his mother. Truman wondered if anyone ever took care of him.
Chapter 14
Truman
“I asked my mom if she remembered an unfriendly recluse who lived on the island.”
Ash and Truman were in Thorn, hanging flowers up to dry that were on the edge of being unsalable.
“Oh yeah?”
Ash gave a snort of laughter. “Yeah, and she looked me in the face and said, ‘You?’”
Truman laughed.
“I’ll try her during the day when she’s more herself and see.”
“Thanks. I’ve been rereading the series, right, and now that I’m here, I’m noticing all these things that feel so familiar to the books. Like, there’s this cave in book 3 that Clarion has to sleep in to stay protected from a magic storm, and the description is of this place that’s a hole in the rock of the world, a maw with jutting teeth and the drool of the ocean draining from it as the tide goes out. It reminds me so much of what a cave on these shores would be like.”
Ash was making a strange expression. “There is a cave like that. On the other side of the island from where we sat.”
Truman’s heart soared. “For real?!”
Ash nodded. “I can show you if you want?”
“Um, yes, I want!” He pulled out his phone but decided to wait and send Germaine and Charlotte pictures instead. “When?”
“Uh, now?”
Truman tried to make himself say no, but between running the shop and caring for his mom, Ash didn’t seem to have any downtime.
“We can talk about shop plans on the way,” Truman promised.
They got in the van, Bruce choosing Truman’s lap as the place he’d like to ride and licking the window until Truman rolled it down. It was cold, but Bruce helped keep him warm as they drove. Ash stopped at a kind of turnaround dead end.
“This is the north point of the island. It’s rocky enough that no one lives over here. The road doesn’t go any farther, but we can walk.”
Bruce, thrilled to be outside and seemingly impervious to the wind whipping off the ocean and finding its way into collars and sleeves, barreled out of the car and began sniffing wildly.
Ash clipped on his leash and gave him a hearty pat, then began picking his way over boulders.
“Try and step where I step,” he called over his shoulder.
Truman did as instructed gladly, since some of the boulders seemed more like seesaws if you stepped in the wrong place.
“This is safe?” Truman called, imagining his foot sliding off a slick rock and his leg lodging in a crevice between them.
“Ya know. Don’t try this when they’re covered with snow. But yeah, it should be okay.”
“Not comforting,” Truman muttered.
It should be okay was what Ramona had told him when she took him to the gator preserve, and three minutes after that, a gator had almost snapped his face off. Truman redoubled his efforts to step where Ash stepped, even though he was fairly sure there weren’t alligators this far north. Once you’ve seen them in the water, you never forgot it.
They rounded a curve in the coastline, and then it came into view.
“Oh my god,” Truman breathed. “This is it.”
It was just as Agatha Tark described it in The Heart Stops. From the outside, it looked like a head rising from the ocean—oops, the bay—gaping maw dripping with saline froth. Inside, the light narrowed to a triangle that drew you in. At the bottom, jagged rocks jutted up like teeth, rimed white with salt.