“Rest for a few minutes,” said their mom, who wasn’t out of breath at all. “Then we’ll start back.”
Sarah felt, before she saw, that there was someone watching them. She looked past her mother’s head and she saw a boy on the shore. He seemed to be about her age. He was barefoot, dressed in faded blue swim trunks and nothing else. His skin was deeply tanned. His hair was dark brown, almost black, and he was staring at them. No—he was scowling at them.
“Good morning!” her mother called, her voice loud and cheerful as she waved hello. The boy’s scowl didn’t change. “This is private property!” he called, in a carrying voice. Behind her, Sam was paddling noisily, breathing hard, as the screen door slammed and a woman’s voice called, “Owen? Is someone there?”
Beside her, Sarah’s mother rolled her eyes. “Are you ready?”
Sarah wasn’t actually ready, and her mom ended up towing her and her brother the final two hundred yards or so back to the public beach. After she’d dried off, and her brother was flopped, facedown and panting, on a towel in the sun, Sarah asked her mom, “Why did that boy say it was private property?”
“It’s not,” her mother said absently. She was sitting in her folding chair, in her wide-brimmed sunhat and her big sunglasses, already engrossed in her book. “The shoreline might be, but the water itself isn’t anyone’s property.”
“So why’d that boy say it was?”
“He’s been misinformed,” her mother said. She closed her book, her finger marking her place. Sam didn’t lift his head, but Sarah could tell that he was listening. “Bottom line is, you’re allowed to swim in any part of the pond you want to. It isn’t theirs, no matter what they say.”
The next time Sarah saw the boy was later that summer, in Wellfleet, at an ice-cream parlor in the center of town. This was their Sunday-night tradition: they’d go out to dinner somewhere （Moby Dick’s or PJ’s, if the kids prevailed; Ciro & Sal’s or the Abbey in Provincetown, if Ronnie and Lee had their way）， and they’d always stop somewhere for a cone for dessert. Sarah and Sam had just joined the line when Sarah spotted the boy, almost at the window, standing with a slender woman dressed in an oversized men’s shirt, the sleeves rolled up, tied at the waist above a pair of white jeans. The woman’s hair was streaky blonde, twisted in a knot at the nape of her neck. She wore sunglasses, even though the sun was almost down, and a swipe of bright-pink lipstick, which caught Sarah’s eye. Her mother never wore makeup in the summertime. There was an older girl, too, who seemed to be maybe eleven or twelve, with dark hair in a ponytail, shoulders hunched in a forest-green sweatshirt. Sarah recognized the boy’s scowl. When she got close enough to see his face, Sarah added to her impression brilliant blue eyes, a color between azure and turquoise, the bluest eyes she’d ever seen.
“Three skinny cones,” the woman said to the girl behind the counter, in a husky smoker’s voice. Her lipstick, Sarah saw, matched the rubber thong of her flip-flops.
“Can I get a sundae?” asked the girl.
“You don’t need hot fudge,” said the woman, without looking at her daughter. “What does Mere always say? One minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips?”
Sarah could feel her own mother’s disapproval as the girl stared down at the ground, chewing on her bottom lip. Once they were at the front of the line, Sarah’s mother said, in a voice louder than was necessary, “Sam and Sarah, you can get anything you want.”
Sam’s eyes were wide. Before their mom could change her mind, he ordered a hot-fudge sundae, and Sarah got a black-and-white frappe with whipped cream and a cherry, which she drank so fast she ended up with an ice-cream headache, her stomach unsettled from all the sugar. She’d looked for the boy at the metal tables where people sat with their desserts, and on Main Street, and in the parking lot, but he and his family were gone.
Sarah didn’t see the boy again that summer, although sometimes, on her trips across the pond, she’d see other people around the red house with the peeling paint. She spotted the woman and the girl, once, on the porch. Another time she saw the woman and a man her father’s age. The woman’s hair was loose, and she was smoking a cigarette, gesturing with her free hand. The man stood in front of her, his body menacingly close. Sarah could tell, without hearing a word, that they were fighting, and she wondered where the boy was and if he was listening.