The stairs to it were narrow and steep, more like a ladder, and she took them one at a time with her hand on the rail and Zinnia behind her saying, "You got it, Grandma, you got it," in the voice of a person coaching someone across a tightrope. At the top was a small square room with windows on all four sides, still warm from the day, with two plastic chairs and a pair of binoculars on a hook.
And there it was. On one side the Atlantic, black and enormous, breathing against the beach with a sound like someone sleeping in the next room. On the other side the sound, flat and silver under a half moon, with the lights of a few boats on it, red and green and white, sliding very slowly along. Both waters at once. Just as she had pictured it at her kitchen table in March, with her coffee going cold and her mother's glasses on.
Except that in the picture, she had been the one who brought him.
Zinnia stood beside her with her shoulder against her grandmother's arm and counted boat lights out loud, under her breath. Below them, through the oaks, Gussie could see the small yellow square of the Sandpiper's porch light, and in it, if she squinted, two shapes on the porch steps, one big and one small, Lysander and Tadeo, and a third shape on the step below them, sitting with her knees drawn up, that she knew without the binoculars was her daughter. She could not hear what they were saying. She did not try.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. It was a text from a 252 number.
Just confirming, Mrs. Bennet. How many am I putting down?
Gussie looked at it for a long time. She looked at the yellow square in the oaks, and at the dark house beneath her full of sleeping and not-yet-sleeping people, and at her granddaughter's lips moving as she counted the lights on the water.
Tuesday was three days away. Tadeo's mother would need him home by Wednesday, and Lysander had said, at dinner, that he would drive the boy back himself, and then he had looked down the table at Gussie as if there were a question in it, and she had not answered, because she did not yet know the answer. There was a bed in the Sandpiper and six steps. There was a long drive to Asheville and a longer one back to Ohio. There was an omelet in the morning that would probably be terrible. There were a great many things she would have to decide, one at a time, at her own speed, and she found, standing in the warm little room at the top of the house with both waters around her, that she was not afraid of any of them.
She typed with one finger.
Six in the house, she wrote. One out back. Put all seven down as family. We're still working out the count.
Then she put the phone in her pocket and stood beside her granddaughter, and together they counted the lights.