Love Anthony Read Online Free PDF Page A

with the headlights of her Jeep on and the windshield wipers flapping as fast as they can, Olivia is having a hard time seeing where she’s going. She drives slowly, carefully. She’s in no hurry.
    The Wauwinet Gatehouse is empty. She parks the Jeep, gets out, and releases air from all four tires to 12 psi. She climbs back in and continues, the road changing now from pavement to sand. The sand turns soft, and her Jeep dips, bounces, and sways as she inches along. The fog is even thicker here. She can see nothing to either side and only a few feet in front of her.
    Maybe a little over four miles into this drive—she can’t be sure, not having seen any landmarks along the way—the path is blocked by fencing. Vehicles are restricted from further progress down the beach, an effort to protect the endangered pipingplovers who might unwittingly nest in the tire tracks. She parks her Jeep at the fence and gets out.
    She hikes through deep, smooth, wind-caressed sand along the ocean that she can hear and smell but not see, the fog still obscuring everything. It can’t be far now. She pulls a flashlight from her coat pocket and aims it in front of her, but the beam of light scatters, diffusing among the water molecules suspended in the air, proving useless. She presses on. She knows where she’s going.
    When the soft give of the sand changes to firm ground, wet from an earlier high tide, she exhales with relief. Each step is finally easy to take. Despite the cold, she’s sweating, and her leg muscles burn. She licks her lips, enjoying the taste of sea salt. Still unable to see the water, she knows it’s directly in front of her now and is disappointed that she can’t see the lighthouse, which must be only a few feet from her path, hidden behind the wall of fog.
    Great Point Light has been destroyed twice, once by fire and once by storm, rebuilt both times. A seventy-foot, cylindrical tower of white stone, it stands resilient and majestic on this fragile pile of sand, where the Atlantic Ocean meets Nantucket Sound, its existence continually threatened by erosion and gale-force winds. Surviving.
    Aside from the gulls and maybe a few piping plovers, she expects to be alone here. From May to September, she imagines this seven-mile stretch of beach is probably crawling with four-wheel-drive vehicles, hikers, families led on natural-history tours, people on vacation. But on March seventeenth, no one is here. She’s alone, thirty miles of water separating her from Cape Cod to the north and about thirty-five hundred miles of ocean between where she stands and Spain to the east. It’s the closest place to nowhere that she can think of. And nowhere is exactly where she wants to be today.
    In the past, not that long ago, being this far away from anyoneor anything else would not have been appealing to her. More than that, it would’ve scared her. A woman alone on a secluded beach, miles from anyone who might hear her if she needed help—like most girls, she’d been taught to avoid this kind of situation. But now, she’s not only unafraid, she prefers it. She’s not worried for a second about being raped or murdered out here alone on Great Point. Walking through safe, suburban Hingham, surrounded by ordinary people doing everyday things—that was what had been killing her.
    The chips-and-snacks aisle in the grocery store. A Little League baseball game in progress. St. Christopher’s Church. Escalators at the mall. Her old friends blessed with typical children, one innocently bragging about her daughter in the school play, another unassumingly complaining that third-grade math isn’t challenging enough for her son. She avoids them all.
    All of those places and people and things are charged, filled with memories of Anthony or the Anthony she prayed for or the Anthony that might have been. And they all have the potential to turn her inside out in an instant, to make her cry, hide, scream, curse God, stop breathing, go insane. Any