Last Summer at Mars Hill Read Online Free PDF Page A

get groceries and stuff?” He sighed and scrambled to his feet. “There’s only two of them, maybe they pay someone to bring stuff in. I know Gary goes to the Beach Store sometimes. It’s not like they’re under house arrest. Why?”
    Moony shrugged. In the twilight she looked spooky, more like a witch than her mother or Diana or any of those other wannabes. Long dark hair and those enormous pale gray eyes, face like the face of the cat who’d been turned into a woman in a fairy tale his father had read him once. Jason grinned, thinking of Moony jumping on a mouse. No way. But hey, even if she did, it would take more than that to turn him off.
    “You thinking of staying here?” he asked slyly. He slipped an arm around her shoulders. “’Cause, like, I could keep you company or something. I hear Maine gets cold in the winter.”
    “No.” Moony shrugged off his arm and started walking toward the water: no longer exasperated, more like she was distracted. “My mother is.”
    “Your mother ?”
    He followed her until she stopped at the edge of a gravel beach. The evening sky was clear. On the opposite shore, a few lights glimmered in Dark Harbor, reflections of the first stars overhead. From somewhere up along the coast, Bayside or Nagaseek or one of the other summer colonies, the sounds of laughter and skirling music echoed very faintly over the water, like a song heard on some distant station very late at night. But it wasn’t late, not yet even nine o’clock. In summers past, that had been early for Moony and Jason, who would often stay up with the adults talking and poring over cards and runes until the night grew cold and spent.
    But tonight for some reason the night already felt old. Jason shivered and kicked at the pebbly beach. The last pale light of sunset cast an antique glow upon stones and touched the edge of the water with gold. As he watched, the light withdrew, a gauzy veil drawn back teasingly until the shore shimmered with afterglow, like blue glass.
    “I heard her talking with Diana,” Moony said. Her voice was unsettlingly loud and clear in the still air. “She was saying she might stay on, after I go off to school. I mean, she was talking like she wasn’t going back at all, I mean not back to Kamensic. Like she might just stay here and never leave again.” Her voice cracked on the words never leave again and she shuddered, hugging herself.
    “Hey,” said Jason. He walked over and put his arms around her, her dark hair a perfumed net that drew him in until he felt dizzy and had to draw back, gasping a little, the smell of her nearly overwhelming that of rugosa roses and the sea. “Hey, it’s okay, Moony, really it’s okay.”
    Moony’s voice sounded explosive, as though she had been holding her breath. “I just can’t believe she’s giving up like this. I mean, no doctors, nothing. She’s just going to stay here and die.”
    “She might not die,” said Jason, his own voice a little desperate. “I mean, look at Adele. A century and counting. The best is yet to come.”
    Moony laughed brokenly. She leaned forward so that her hair once again spilled over him, her wet cheek resting on his shoulder. “Oh, Jason. If it weren’t for you I’d go crazy, you know that? I’d just go fucking nuts.”
    Nuts, thought Jason. His arms tightened around her, the cool air and faraway music nearly drowning him as he stroked her head and breathed her in. Crazy, oh, yes. And they stood there until the moon showed over Dark Harbor, and all that far-off music turned to silvery light above the Bay.
    Two days later Ariel and Moony went to see the doctor in Bangor. Moony drove, an hour’s trip inland, up along the old road that ran beside the Penobscot River, through failed stonebound farms and past trailer encampments like sad rusted toys, until finally they reached the sprawl around the city, the kingdom of car lots and franchises and shopping plazas.
    The hospital was an old brick building with a