Monstrous Beauty Read Online Free PDF

narrow spit of sand still showing along the bluff glistened black and spongy.
    Peter caught up to her. “Listen to me,” he said quietly, putting his hand on her shoulder until she turned to look at him. “What I should have said the other night is that you can talk to me about anything.”
    “Thanks. I know.” She could hardly concentrate on what he was saying. “Look—it’s high tide. There goes our walk.”
    “Technically we’re in flood tide. High tide will be at 5:05 today. And we can wade.”
    “You know when the tide comes in and out?”
    He looked at her over his glasses. “I work on a boat, remember?”
    “But you didn’t today.”
    He shrugged, starting down the steps. “The chart is on our fridge.”
    At the bottom of the flight Peter took off his shoes and rolled up his pants while Hester unclasped her sandals. Peter opened the gate, and they waded into the cool water up to their knees. The wavelets lapped the shore, rhythmically but without urgency. The resistance of the water made Hester’s steps sweeping and unhurried. She began to feel calm. Sandpipers followed the leading edge of the waves with staccato steps, probing the wet sand near the bluff with their beaks.
    “The tides are roughly on a twelve-and-a-half-hour cycle,” Peter said. “Which makes them move around the clock over a period of fourteen or fifteen days. It’s pretty complicated—it depends on the earth’s rotation, the gravity of the moon and the sun … even the shape of the bottom of the near shore. A tide calendar is the only way to get it right.”
    Hester looked ahead to where the riprap began. The cave should be a little ways beyond that, but everything looked the same when the water was high.
    “Is the hangout cave submerged now?” she asked.
    “Mm-hm.”
    “Have you ever gone inside?”
    “Sure. I was sailing the pumpkinseed and the tide was going out, so I brought her ashore and poked around a little. How about you? Have you been?”
    “Me? No.” She shook her head.
    “I’m not sure what the attraction is. It was pretty dark in there, and kind of slimy. A couple of kids were smoking weed—I could hardly breathe…”
    Hester had stopped listening. She was taken aback by her own response to Peter. Why had she lied about going in the cave? The sound of the stranger’s voice played back in her mind—expressive and intelligent. She remembered how irritated she was at first that he seemed so callous, but how quickly his manner had softened. By the time she left for home she had the distinct sensation that he didn’t want their conversation to end. And more: if she hadn’t been so rattled by the party and Joey’s aggressive advances and the fact of the voice belonging to a stranger, she might have been oddly tempted to stay longer to talk to him .
    She looked out over the water. It wasn’t the first thing she had ever hidden from Peter. She had never been able to confide in him about her family history, and her private worry that she had a medical problem lurking in her genes. He knew that her mother had died after she was born, and that the doctors had never found a cause, but that was all.
    Their families had been close, even before Susan’s death. After she was gone, Peter’s parents had been there—not only for Hester’s father, Malcolm, but for Hester’s late grandfather, who had lost his daughter in the same awful way that he had lost his wife. Grief had weakened him, allowing his leukemia to take over. The Angelns had helped care for them all, including Hester. Two years later Dave had been the best man when Malcolm married Nancy, Hester’s stepmom. A year after that they had welcomed baby Sam into the world, and little Hester had stuck by Nancy’s side for weeks, making sure she wouldn’t die.
    But it had taken until high school for Hester to worry for herself. It had taken the possibility of falling in love. Love. A new and different feeling—initially pleasing, full of hope and desire.