Serpents in the Cold by Thomas O'Malley Read Free Book Online Page A

he put on the indicator, downshifted, and turned the car toward the Neponset off-ramp. Dante patted down his coat for his pack of smokes and Cal pushed in the cigarette lighter.
    The outsized blank screen of the Neponset Drive-In rose up on their left and then fell away behind them as the ramp corkscrewed back to earth. They were passing beneath the Neponset overpass, and as Dante held the red coils of the lighter to his cigarette, the triple-deckers of Port Norfolk rose up before them. “This is where they found her?” he asked.
    Cal nodded grimly, rolled down the windows to clear the glass. The smell of the sea came in to them, and they could see the small spit of sand with its frothy gray shore and the city beyond: the beach of their childhood.

10
    _________________________
    Tenean Beach, Dorchester
    CAL AND DANTE stood out as black silhouettes upon the frozen beach, looking as if they’d been cut from hard angles of metal, and stared at the white, untouched expanse of snow. Even the track of the coroner’s wagon and the familiar tread of cops’ boots had been covered by the previous night’s storm.
    Dante flicked his cigarette toward a clump of frozen seaweed but the wind returned it at his feet. “Hard to believe this is the same place we used to come as kids,” he said, turning to his left, where the small shuttered shower stalls and snack shack stood in stark relief against the ashen sky.
    “I’m going to check the bathrooms,” Dante said as he began his walk toward the building, his coat whipping off his legs. Cal watched him and tried to suppress his suspicion. He shook his head. “Don’t you go fucking up before we even get started.”
      
    THE FIRST DOOR that Dante checked was padlocked. The other, facing the ocean, appeared to be locked from the inside, but he stepped back and kicked it open. Cautiously, he stood before the darkness. It felt like looking into a mausoleum.
    His mother had taken him and Claudia here all the time, June to September. His family—and Cal’s, too—didn’t have the money to vacation on the Cape, on one of the islands, or up north on some quaint little lake. This was all they’d had.
    He turned and looked at the ocean and saw himself as a young boy swimming in the brownish harbor waves, all the way out to the piers where older boys dove in headfirst from twenty feet above. He saw his sister, all skin and bones, wearing a pink bathing cap. She was at the scummed shoreline with a stick, prodding a jellyfish that lay cooking in the sun. He saw his mother sitting cross-legged on a blanket, wearing that black bathing suit that was far too tight on her thick frame, accenting the rolls on her back and stomach, and him sitting next to her eating sandwiches hot from the sun. And then when the light of day began to soften, and the traffic of cars behind them became louder with the commute home, he remembered that sharp sense of melancholia as he watched families roll up their blankets and pack up their books and baskets and gather their children together, fearing that soon his mother would do the same. Thankfully, she always liked those moments at the end of the day when the beach was deserted and she could have a clear view of the harbor without anybody getting in the way. He and his sister would play by themselves, chasing gulls or playing in the dirty sand until the sun dipped toward the horizon and their mother called out to them, telling them it was time to pack up and head home to Fields Corner, where later in the evening he had a piano lesson with Mrs. Gilchrist, an old widow with severe rheumatoid arthritis whose hands stank of camphor and eucalyptus, and who, when he made a mistake, pinched him hard in the soft part of his upper arm until he got it right. He could see his mother standing in the sunset, hands cupped around her mouth as she called out in Italian and then even louder in English. And him sprinting the length of the beach toward the small peninsula covered