pieces. He asked her questions about her day while he tried to
sneak a little more salt onto his food. Helen blocked his attempts
like she always did, but she didn?t have the energy to give him
more than monosyllabic answers.
Even though she went to bed at nine, leaving her dad watching
the Red Sox on TV, she was still lying awake at midnight when she
heard the game finally end and her father come upstairs. She was
tired enough to sleep, but every time she started to drift off she
would hear whispering.
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At first she thought that it had to be real, that someone was outside
playing a trick on her. She went up to the widow?s walk on the
roof above her bedroom and tried to see as far as she could into the
dark. Everything was still?not even a puff of air to stir the rosebushes
around the house. She sat down for a spell, staring out at
the fat, black slick of the ocean beyond the neighbor?s lights.
She hadn?t been up there in a while, but it still gave her a romantic
thrill to think about how women in the olden days would
pine away on their widow?s walks as they searched for the masts of
their husbands? ships. When she was really young, Helen used to
pretend that her mother would be on one of those ships, coming
back to her after being taken captive by pirates or Captain Ahab or
something just as all-powerful. Helen had spent hours on the widow?s
walk, scanning the horizon for a ship she later realized would
never sail into Nantucket Harbor.
Helen shifted uncomfortably on the wooden floor and then remembered
that she still had her stash up there. For years, her dad
had insisted she was going to fall to her death and forbidden her
from going up to the widow?s walk alone, but no matter how many
times he punished her, she would eventually sneak back up there