Free The Season of Open Water by Dawn Tripp

in on its hinges, and they can see the hulking gleam of the new-style Ford pickup in the dark.
    Bridge slips into the cab, into the driver’s seat, pulls the brake and sets the truck in neutral while Luce pushes them out into the road. They roll over the bridge and turn left past the green. Luce gets in. “Come on,” he says, “move over.”
    She shakes her head. “Let me drive.” And he smiles and he lets her, she puts the truck in gear, pops the clutch, the engine starts, they drive without lights the rest of the way out of the village. She heads down Drift Road, past the orchards and the icehouse. They take the hill that runs past Howland’s farm and the black rolling shadows of cows clustered in the darkness.
    She turns left onto Hix Bridge Road.
    â€œI thought we were going to the Point,” Luce says.
    â€œNo, let’s go around to the beach instead.”
    They pass the clambake pavilion and the teahouse. She lifts her foot off the pedal as they cross the bridge and pass over the river, thick bands of light flushing underneath them. They drive through the quiet village of South Westport, and she takes the sharp right turn onto Horseneck Road. The telephone poles set by the road seem to move alongside them, a small trail of staggering crosses through the night.
    They come down onto East Beach and drive along the warped arm of the Let. She starts to tap her fingers on the wheel, then catches herself doing it. She holds her hand still. They pass the new church, the second pavilion, its windows boarded closed for the winter. Just before the causeway, she slows and looks down West Beach Road. All the cottages are dark except for one—the third cottage in. Henry Vonniker’s house, she thinks. It must be his house. She feels a quiver in her stomach, a light flutter. There is a hedge out front, and above it, she can just see the top of his car in the driveway.
    â€œWhat are you looking at?” Luce says.
    â€œWho lives there, in that cottage, the one lit up?”
    â€œHow the hell should I know?”
    And she smiles to herself. She keeps driving. They cross the causeway to Gooseberry Neck and park the truck at the end. They take the rods and the pail of baitfish and walk the footpath through the bittersweet and false heather, the sea-myrtle and the pepper-bush, the beach pea scrub gone by.
    Once, as the path rises, Bridge glances behind them, across the water toward West Beach. On the bottom floor of the third cottage, she can see the glow of a lit window.
    â€œAre you coming, or what?” Luce calls back to her. She follows him. They walk past the kettlepond and then cross down over the windrows of mussel shells that lie crushed, blue-black and iridescent in the moon. They leave their boots in the sand, roll their pants up past the knee, and walk through the shoal water pools between the narrow strip of beach and the rocks that lie like sleeping lions in the low tide.
    Bridge can smell the reek of dead fish and rockweed, busted clams and cold wet sand. They cross the bar and walk through the rocks along the tip of the island, casting out into the shallows. Luce pulls in a fish on his first cast—a schoolie. He knifes it in the gills and hooks it to his belt. He rebaits his hook and, as they go on walking, he tells her, as he has told her a thousand times before, that someday he will make a good dollar, enough to leave this scab of a town. He will set miles, he says, between himself and this place. His voice is a cool whisper through the pull of water over the stones. He will take the train to California, then a ketch to the island, Noel’s island, Kauai. Bridge smiles in the darkness. It is always the same ragged dream. She stops listening. She thinks of Henry Vonniker in his house. She wonders why he is awake—it must be close on midnight—she wonders if he always keeps late hours—if he is up reading or writing a letter. Did he hear the truck as