Chapter 32: The Lake

The judge was a tired man with half-glasses and a stack of files a foot high.

He looked at Nessa over the top of them.

She was sitting beside me in a new blue dress she hated, swinging her feet.

"You asked for Ms. Devlin," he said. "Twice. Why?"

Nessa thought about it.

"She taught me to count," she said. "And she came back. Nobody comes back."

The judge looked at me for a long moment.

Then he signed something.

In July we went up to the lake.

Nessa had her own room now, in a second-floor flat in Bridgeport three blocks from Dez's mother's.

She'd picked a birthday, since nobody knew hers.

The day the judge signed.

"Because that's when I got born here," she said, and that was the end of the discussion.

The Lake Forest house had a lawn that ran down to a beach and a wooden dock that went out into the water.

I'd never been down to it.

Now it was July, and the whole lawn was full.

Mom and Dad sat in the shade under a striped umbrella.

Dad had his reading glasses on and a library book about horses, because Nessa had told him to.

Dez's mother had come up on the train with two of his sisters and all five nieces.

She'd brought a cooler of sandwiches, because she didn't trust rich people to feed children.

Brendan was in the lake up to his waist, teaching Nessa to swim.

It was his twenty-ninth Sunday in a row.

Nessa swam, fast and furious, with too many legs.

"Kick from your hips," Brendan said.

"I AM kicking from my hips."

"You're kicking from your elbows."

"You're kicking from your face."

He went under laughing.

I sat on the end of the dock in shorts with my legs on.

The sun was on my arms.

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